Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County School Board, School Board Retreat, Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 5h 53m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/1227257661?rel=0
BoardDocs (School Board): https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/loudoun/Board.nsf/Public

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 2026-10-09. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:21] - Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here today. I'm happy to call to order our school board retreat this Tuesday, September 15th. We will start this morning with disclosures and as usual protocol, I will go first.

[00:00:38] As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with an item on today's agenda regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:00:55] Specifically, as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may also be affected, of which I am included.

[00:01:11] I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. Mrs. Griffiths, I'll ask you to go next. Thank you, Madam Chair. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:01:39] Specifically as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in the access of the statutory three employees whose interests may be affected, of which I am included. I can and will participate fairly objectively and in the public's interest.

[00:01:58] This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. LaBelle. Thank you, Madam Chair. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on today's agenda regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees. Specifically, as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance

[00:02:34] and related benefits as an LCPS employee. In addition, as a former LCPS employee, I as well as my spouse receive Medicare Advantage Insurance benefits through LCPS. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may be affected, of which my spouse and I are included.

[00:02:58] I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the Clerk of the School Board for five years. Thank you. Ms. Riccardi?

[00:03:13] Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chair. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on this morning's agenda regarding the budget and our health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:03:33] Specifically, as a school board member, I'm eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in access of the statutory three employees whose interests may also be affected of which I am included I can and will participate fairly objectively and in the public interest this disclosure will reflect will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years thank you miss Chernoff thank you madam chair as a member of the Loudoun County School Board I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on today's agenda regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:04:12] Specifically as a school board member, I'm eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees while in the excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may also be affected, of which I am included. I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public interest.

[00:04:28] This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. - All right, thank you everyone. I just wanted to take a moment to sort of kick us off. The majority of the time that we'll spend together today will be focused on an eye towards the fiscal year 28 budget.

[00:04:46] This retreat really is meant to provide us with a focused time to discuss our budget priorities and financial considerations that will ultimately inform the process that will begin starting really now. So with that, I will pass the floor over to Ms. Willoughby.

[00:05:03] Thank you and good morning. Yes, we do have a full agenda scheduled for this morning and into the early afternoon. You will hear from a team of presenters, to include myself, Mr. Casey Jones from Budget and Financial Analytics, Ms. Kimberly Brown from Human Resources and Talent Development, and then also we have our two consultants from Baker Tilly, Mr. Matt Bubnis, and also Mr. Jay Staley.

[00:05:30] They have been instrumental in helping us craft the agenda for today. We've been working on this for the past couple of months. In crafting the agenda for the budget portion of the retreat, we were keeping in mind that several board members are in their first year still, and also an opportunity to refresh returning board members on how to develop a budget and what the challenges are, what best practices are, and also information related to what the core building blocks are in building a balanced budget.

[00:06:02] That will really be the focus of the morning of the K through 12 budgeting section, as well as, you know, talking just briefly on enrollment and also an update on compensation and benefits. Then we will break for lunch. And then in the afternoon, we will be more focused on LCPS of hearing how we have been implementing the AIM budget strategy that we introduced to the board earlier this spring, as well as obtaining specific feedback on priorities from the board.

[00:06:34] Throughout the agenda all day, there will be opportunities for school board feedback, discussion, and activities. You have a binder in front of you that includes the presentation along with some other tabs that will be referenced throughout the day.

[00:06:50] You also have four dots, and I would just say hold on to those. You only get four for the day, so we'll walk you through when you have the opportunity to use those as well. I will also just point out throughout the room, throughout the table, we have cabinet available.

[00:07:08] We really are focused on the discussion of the board, but they are available if there is perhaps a one-off question or something to help support the conversation. But again, this retreat is really focused on the board to receive information and have discussion related to the budget.

[00:07:24] And so with that before I turn it over to mr. Bubnus and mr. Staley again in developing the agenda for today We was really looking at wanting to present budget development information They will also work to facilitate the conversation of the board members and then also they will Engage the board with the activities to obtain feedback on a variety of topics that will be shared with you And with that I will turn it over to them. Sure. Good morning everyone. Thanks, Sharon

[00:07:59] I'm glad she mentioned the serious nature of the dots too right at the top of that so we got that out of the way So that's great Like Sharon said, my name is Matt Bubniss. I'm with Baker Tilly. We are a National accounting and consulting firm. We have a dedicated public sector practice. We are a national practice We work with school districts and other local governments coast to coast within the United States Specifically Jay and I focus more on the financial forecasting budgeting strategic planning alignment side of the house really relevant to the nature of the conversation today. A little bit about, sorry, is that just, hopefully that's just not my ears ringing.

[00:08:37] Good. I just need confirmation sometimes. But a little bit about my background, about 25 years in the business overall, all working with or for local governments. I've been with Baker Tilly about five years prior to that. I worked for the Government Finance Officers Association, their professional organization, Helping to develop best practices around a whole host of financial management topics for local governments I specifically led a lot of their budgeting best practice Redevelopment and development specifically related to budget monitoring Long-term planning and then specifically I led engagements with k-12 school districts throughout the country

[00:09:14] To improve overall budgeting and really strategic alignment as well And also I worked for Chicago Public Schools for a number of years as well Mostly in budgeting then I also I led their financial opera and operations for special education So with that, I'll turn it over to my colleague Jay Staley Good morning appreciate the opportunity to be able to be here this morning. So as Matt mentioned I've been with Baker Tilly also a similar timeline about five years or just shy of Prior to that I spent 26 years in public ed. So my path was a little different where Matt's was more budget

[00:09:50] I came through as a teacher building level administrator and then moved to central office where I was an assistant superintendent of finance and operations so mine is kind of having sat in the seat a bit from a from a school perspective similar to matt had the opportunity to work kind of coast to coast with various school districts working through their budget processes much of the conversation that we have today is just centered around foundational pieces things that you certainly already have in place but how can we work to improve those perhaps or how can we just look to see what that transition looks like in the next step based on what your current conditions are and

[00:10:27] so looking forward to today's conversation and as we as we go through please whatever questions you may have please ask so i think with that we're going to kind of kick off so things from us today so we are here to guide the conversation so as it's been stated i mean this is for the board we want to receive information from you as well as interact with you throughout this we will lead activities so you'll receive information both from us kind of talking about you know here's what we see from a national level in various pieces but then from members of the own team

[00:11:02] just diving into what does that mean locally here within your school district and then what decisions perhaps are coming down the road to be able to look at we'll share some of those best practices that we have experienced so to say we have whatever that is 56 years of experience just means we're old and we've been in the business for a while so we've seen this that and a little bit of everything else as we've kind of gone around the around the country working with with other schools and we want to just be a resource for you and kind of guide and be that resource guide as we walk through today as participants a couple things that we ask is

[00:11:37] just that try to be as present as much as possible this is your your retreat and so i know that we're all kind of tethered to our phones and our devices etc we had talked about you know do we do some of this with poll everywhere or some type of information gathering software we elected to kind of go old school and do paper pencil and so we're just going to have some of those conversations so if you can just be present i know school finance is just something everybody loves to talk about first thing in the morning it's just going to be the the best thing ever and we're all all fired up about it. But in all seriousness, just leaning into the conversation because that's

[00:12:14] what it's here. It's here for you for taking the time to be able to be here. A lot of resources went into planning today, and so I hope you're able to take advantage of those. The other thing that we would just ask is be open-minded. We may throw out some things that are going to challenge where you think you might want to go, where you are, or, you know, is this something that we really should consider? So just be open-minded to those conversations, not just things that we interject, but from others as well and so we want to create that safe space in order to be able to have that conversation and dialogue so that you can do what's best for your school community which ultimately at the end of the day was what your goal is so kind of with that anything else from mr. bubness as we

[00:12:51] transition on here no I think you summed it up well okay I mean and the other thing is too as long as time allows since we have a packed agenda we're open to having questions asked you know neither Jay or I are shy as you might have gathered in the first five tens of 10 minutes of meeting us so if you have a question please interject or please approach us during one of the breaks or whatever we're happy to answer whatever we can and really be here as a resource for you so um with that uh wanted to have a brief activity here um this is is this in the packet as well yes there's uh in the back of your packet there's a sheet that you can jot this down on um so if you can take just a oh there's a

[00:13:30] post-it note oh no oh yeah that sheet yeah yeah we have the sheet on that one um so it's in the back of your binder if you can take a minute or two of reflection and then we'll share out briefly as well to stay on agenda what are two specific accomplishments you want to achieve today out of this budget retreat and then what are two things you want to learn more about today in terms of the content provided and the information provided so again take just about a minute or two just to think about that and then we'll jot down some of those on the whiteboard behind us as we share out just for us to keep in mind and then also at the end to see whether or not we came close to hitting that target in terms of things that you were trying to accomplish today

[00:14:10] or learn more about today. Yeah, and if you're still looking for it, there should be a tab that says Goals and Objectives, and you'll see a handout that looks like this with a couple of little bulleted items that you can jot those down on. Thanks, Jay.

[00:14:55] I see folks writing still, so we'll take a little bit more time.

[00:15:51] All right, if you want to wrap up maybe that last thought or two, and then we can start to share out a little bit, and Jay will jot down a few of these.

[00:16:11] So let's start off with the first question here. What are one of the specific accomplishments you want to achieve today? Any volunteers or someone willing to go first? Ms. LeBell? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so used to doing so more informally, so I apologize.

[00:16:30] I'm sure between the two of us, we'll figure it out. Yes, yes, for sure. Thank you, gentlemen and Chair Chandler. I hope at the end of the day that we manage to achieve a balanced budget that supports academic instruction, teacher hiring and retention, and staff benefits. Those are three big important things to me. So a balanced budget with key priorities. Great.

[00:16:56] Anybody else? Ms. Chernoff. Thank you Madam Chair. I echo my colleague. I'm looking forward to sort of sharing priorities and hearing from my colleagues so we can sort of begin to prioritize what all of us want to bring to the table and also hear hopefully a little bit from staff as that relates to their various departments but I'm also looking to learn you know from your experience what are some ways that we've always done things and what are some ways that we can innovate going forward I think we're at a unique turning point here in Loudoun County with the enrollment situation and just some of the status of federal funding and we're in it we're in a new place and so really

[00:17:35] looking to lean into the conversation about where there can be innovation and creativity about how we approach the process and make it more accessible not only for us as board members but for our public so collaboration innovation and learning so yeah dr. Rasheed thank you chair and thank you for this and you're right early in the morning it's it is a little tough but yes I was looking more for increased funding for our special programs and in terms of if we could expand it even more to other schools I know that a lot of students are saying you know we want more funding for programs so that we can open them up in

[00:18:11] East for example and another one is for our school improvements I don't know if the term is logistics wise but increased funding for in terms of like improvements for the current schools that are in need of anything that are breaking down or where that would fall into okay so alternative funding sources and capital funding mr. pepper thank you good morning everybody I'm sorry you saw me rip the page and I'm left-handed so I can't write with the little things in the middle of the in the margins very frustrating I applaud you for taking it of the binder as opposed to just ripping it yeah thank you it's the teacher in me um i'm gonna say

[00:18:50] understanding as well we're kind of entering uncharted territory and i'm sure that's why you're here but understanding where we can maybe move money around i don't like the word cut but we really need to kind of look at if we want to do the expansion of some things there's some other things we're gonna have to sacrifice so figuring out what we're willing to sacrifice to get what we want great so shifting realignment those are the words we usually use as budget folks to avoid using the word cut so mr. Carty thank you madam chair I would I

[00:19:29] would say there's two things for me the one is really how are we going to kind of rethink enrollment numbers so that we're getting we're already hitting our 2030 enrollment estimates now so we've got to kind of rethink the enrollment number of calculations and how we're figuring this out so I think that's one because that's a basis a huge basis for our budget obviously and kind of similar to a couple of my colleagues is you know we're transitioning from a surplus budget extra money get being given lots of money by our county which has been

[00:20:08] really great but now we're gonna most likely want it being in a deficit budget so we've got it really cut back so I feel like we really need kind of a framework for figuring out and kind of re-educating not only just us but even the in the division but the public as well about what that is going to look like going forward and starting to set some early expectations and how to communicate that out effectively and how we can all then kind of recalibrate our own mindset and how we're going to realign that so hard look at enrollment numbers and then a framework for possible reductions so mr. Svinson thank

[00:20:47] you madam chair and thank you both for the intro to the presentation looking forward to today echoing what my colleagues have said this is more in the learning side of today I'm looking forward to developing a collective understanding of the constraints that enrollment and compensation trends will have on the budget going forward and also we've discussed a lot as a board what level of financial detail and information will allow us to do our jobs effectively and I want to have a better shared understanding of what that level of information is that it allows us to exercise our oversight and develop priorities but also empower staff to do their jobs and make sure that we have the appropriate balance there

[00:21:26] so key constraints uh in terms of of the revenue or expense side and then also the importance for uh level of detail in terms of governance so anybody else mrs griffiths Thank you, Madam Chair.

[00:21:47] Retention and enrollment is big for me, but I'm more looking forward to hearing how you had success in Chicago. You have a lot of experience there, so I'd like to know your experiences there, how we can implement what you may have put through in Chicago here.

[00:22:09] So what successes have you had there, and if you could share them with us, I'd appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. I guess I'll go now. So ultimately, I'm very heartened to hear that some of the things that are on my mind are also on my colleagues' mind.

[00:22:25] I'm very interested to dig into enrollment with an eye towards staffing, but understanding that that really is an issue of also taking into account the alignment of the entire budget, understanding that we are probably approaching a period of tightening and a need to be more strategic with our spending.

[00:22:47] But I do say that with a mind, too. There are communities that could use some additional resourcing, and that's a conversation that I'm open to have. For me personally, I bring to the table a desire to understand how my colleagues on the board feel about further expansion of language programs.

[00:23:09] We have committed to dual language immersion and have programs at the elementary school level, and I continue to hear from families that they would like us to plan out how that can continue as their students progress through the upper grades. And I have also been approached by other communities that are interested in having languages that aren't typically included in our curriculum and having some of those expanded like to meal so I'm curious to have that discussion with the board I do want us to remain committed to providing the best

[00:23:46] opportunities for our students in Loudoun County and so ultimately I'm excited today to learn about what my colleagues prioritized for the fiscal year 28 budget and certainly to look learn more about the aim budget strategy so thank you I guess that's that's it for all the members that are in there and just a recap I don't want to negate the one board members comment about sharing our past experiences if Jay didn't capture it already and then the board chairs comments on budget alignment and then also looking at English language learner program as well expansion of that in addition just a hearing general

[00:24:23] sense of her fellow board members as well so thank you so I don't if we covered the what are two things we want to learn more to about today I think we kind of did we blend those a little bit do we have consensus on that I think or if there's anything else that that you want to share from that second bullet be happy to entertain that but I think we kind of mesh those two so to say which is probably best in interest of time to keep on moving with the agenda too so so thank you for all that we'll revisit those like I said at the top of it at the end of the day to to see how well we did in terms of fostering some of that

[00:25:01] and developing some of that kind of shared understanding in terms of being able to move forward through your budget process as well and learning more about some of the challenges you all might be facing in terms of kind of making this shift from years of growth on the enrollment side to things where things are plateauing and leveling and even declining a little bit and have the different mindset that might take to overcome that so with that said moving on to k-12 budgeting so jay and i are going to take the next about five ten minutes or so or maybe ten minutes to walk through a little bit more of the theory and some kind of the higher level

[00:25:39] framework in terms of things that we've used at baker tilly over the last five years but then also too a lot of this is leveraged from the work that i led when i was with the government finance officers association in terms of talking more about the strategic alignment and budgeting and how well and how interconnected they should be ideally in terms of developing your budget really setting your priorities really putting your money where your mouth is so to speak to put it a little more bluntly but before really diving a little bit more of the framework just kind of want to set up a little bit to talk more about roles in the budget process in particular in terms of kind of

[00:26:17] that delineation which i think was already mentioned a little bit from our little bit of back and forth about goals and objectives of the meeting overall so the one thing that kind of is overarching here that you all know and live on a day-to-day basis is the is the fact that the school district is a component unit or a jurisdiction of the county you don't have your own taxing authority so that's really why we've added that County Board of Supervisors role within the kind of lanes within the budget process as well really there's only one function essentially one function in terms of the budget process overall to

[00:26:54] think about in terms of where they're involved it's really the setting and approving of the funding level since that comprises the bulk of where your funding comes from or a huge chunk of where your funding comes from that's a key part of the process obviously as well and it really kind of sets the tone in terms of what direction you're able to go or have to rethink things possibly in terms of the budget the next part is thinking more about what your role as school board members is and I mean to not go into each bullet may be fully in detail or do a paragraph soliloquy on each one of them think about more in

[00:27:32] terms of a kind of the analogy of the forest for the trees that's really your job is to look at it more from that 50,000 foot level and the one thing we'll reinforce and it's on the next slide as well just by the sheer magnitude and size of the school uh division uh two billion dollar plus plus budget 14 000 employees it's really hard to focus on individual trees unless there is a need to focus on an individual tree for a very specific reason right and with the budget you have what hundreds of thousands of budget lines in order to classify and categorize the budget in order to comply with state requirements

[00:28:09] financial reporting requirements and the like it's really hard to get into that level of detail And even when I worked at Chicago, it was hard for me as an administrator in terms of the specific budget I controlled for me to get in that level of detail as well. So there needs to be varying levels of authority in terms of kind of where your focus and attention should be paid.

[00:28:27] Because if you don't kind of maintain that delineation, you run the risk of losing sight of what the ultimate kind of goal is or what that guiding light is that we're trying to do in terms of providing kids with the best education and services and supports possible. So that's really the reason why we need to have a more rigid governance structure in terms of thinking of this.

[00:28:48] And this applies even to school districts that may say only have a million dollar budget as well. You need to have that oversight body to help keep things on path and have that accountability and oversight. So that's what we talk about in terms of the bullets listed for the school board up there in terms of establishing priorities.

[00:29:03] What's the direction that we're looking for in terms of you all as being the liaisons back to the community as well in terms of expectations? what's approving who's approving the policies you know the formal policies that really guide what what the expectations are in terms of the budget itself you know whether it's approving a policy on a structurally balanced budget a certain reserve level what's your grant policies and a whole other host of policies that would inform the budget in particular in addition to all the other policies that you need to have as a school district in terms of conduct compensation and all the other kind of fun stuff as well and then obviously the approval of

[00:29:42] the budget as well in terms of what's brought to you from the superintendent with the support of the cfo and budget director as well to really help provide that final stamp and that final level of oversight over that the next thing is the final thing is to maintain the oversight and account accountability as well in terms of what are your expectations in terms of how often should we have conversations about the budget the performance of the budget what a budget to actuals look like what other things do we need to consider when we're talking about budget actuals as well they're looking at staffing levels looking at key KPI metrics or the like as well how do we make those connections back to not

[00:30:19] only talking about the financial performance but what does this mean in terms of actually achieving the goals and objectives of the school division which is really the main focus for the organization it's not about the bottom line necessarily it's about whether or not we're actually achieving our goals in terms of providing that best education to kids so um and then finally with administration here thinking more about kind of the nitty-gritty in terms of you know the production of the more detailed analysis in terms of deep dives in terms of knowing what's going on with specific programs going on with specific expenditures as well making those recommendations for your consideration your

[00:30:58] input and ultimately your approval in terms of the budget and things like the strategic priorities as well and then implementation in the day-to-day management that's really the key driver and responsibility of the administration in terms of governance overall so the next slide here just want to spend just a minute just thinking about how this is particularly applicable for larger school districts as well as I already mentioned a little bit about that so I don't want to necessarily beat the dead horse on this but I mean again given the size of the budget for the organization of two billion dollars really the need to focus more at that 50,000 foot level is very key because again if you get stuck in the minutiae we're

[00:31:37] going to lose sight of what the ultimate goals and mission of the organization are in terms of providing the best education to kids if we stay in that two months minutiae so yeah i'm sorry to interrupt you i just wanted to ask you if you could move your mic a little bit closer oh i'm sorry i could hear you a little bit better move around and uh yeah my maybe even just pulling it closer to you would help thank you these are new for all of us we're we're learning sure is that that better okay good um sorry i tend to be able to pace around and move around a little bit when i talk so i apologize um and then again just thinking more about that adherence to the roles in terms of large school as well and then also thinking about the the role creep too in terms

[00:32:16] of what your responsibilities are versus the administration roles as well again it's really important to try to maintain as much delineation as possible between those lanes to really focus on that that that goal that you have as that oversight and really that governing body in terms of maintaining the focus on uh really the mission of the organization to educate kids uh again you know trying to not lose focus on what the bigger picture is is really the big thing so so now with that want to flip over a little bit more of the theory um you know this is something that i've been talking about for at least the last decade if not a dozen years uh going back to when i was

[00:32:53] GFOA you know how does this all fit together in terms of how we think about the budget process I often refer to the budget as having fiscal year blinders you know when we're having conversations about that budget we're only really talking about July 1 to June 30th of the subsequent year right but there's so much more that goes into it and if we only talk about the budget in terms of that one year fiscal year snapshot we run the risk of losing so much more in in terms of conversations that we need to be having in terms of affecting, say, if you're having a program at pre-K level that's meant to impact third-grade reading proficiency,

[00:33:29] it's not going to be, what, four or five years until you see actual outcomes from funding that program. So if we say, well, that program's not working, we only funded it for one year and we need to throw it out now, it's like, well, what happens if now if we see results in four or five years from now and we already cut funding from the program?

[00:33:45] Again, a very simple example, but it's things that we need to keep in mind when we think about the budget versus what are the other things that are really important and really driving that process. So that's really why we talk more about this graphic in terms of the strategic plan, the financial forecast, the CIP, facility study, and then demographic study or enrollment study as well. Because these are really the big things that are looking out 5, 10, even 15, 20 years from now to understand better as to things that are going to be impacting the budget in that subsequent fiscal year or even the budget in subsequent fiscal years beyond the one

[00:34:22] conversation that we might be having about the budget for FY28 as well. So again, just thinking in mind in terms of what's guiding us in terms of those more overarching plans that are for decades or 5 to 10 to 15 years versus the budget for this year in terms of what we need to do to balance the operations and fund the programming for the subsequent fiscal year. But then finally to thinking more about whether or not those dollars are actually achieving what we want them to in terms of results outcomes and services that's why i mentioned kpis initially as well and the big thing to keep in mind is this is a continuous improvement cycle as well you know

[00:34:57] we should be rethinking and discussing things that were funded in the budget to see whether or not they're making progress towards accomplishing what we wanted them to you know we might not have specific results going back to the example i offered but we should be able to have some kind of progress indicators as to whether or not those programs are being implemented well and we see some initial success possibly with some initial kind of kpis too as well in terms of that so anything i missed there jay no i think yeah it kind of fits into kind of the next pieces of information here and so matt kind of hit on these a little bit as we talk through there so you know

[00:35:35] where are you headed you know what's guiding those decisions so just trying to figure out where where are we what is our path what does it look like and what information do we need to gather matt kind of walk through some of those items of being able to figure out what that trajectory looks like over the next 5 10 15 20 years but i think the next questions is where we start to figure out you know where do we want to go do we like the path that that's showing and can we start developing a plan to be able to get there and so is the current path we're on going to take us to where we want to go or do we need to deviate in some way shape or form and

[00:36:08] And so trying to identify what those particular pathways are and then identifying paths that we can elect to choose to be able to get there. Another one is, you know, how are your resources aligned with your current strategic plan? And so do we, if we have the opportunity that we want to offer special programming to various groups, are our resources geared to be able to generate that?

[00:36:35] Or is that something we need to revisit? Is that in our strategic plan and do we need to add it? And so to me, I think assessing those pieces of information of, you know, what's in our strategic plan, are we accomplishing what's in it? If we're not, why? If we are, why? Do we need to repurpose some resources in order to generate some things that we're not being able to affect the outcome as much as we would like?

[00:36:58] And so that's certainly a very broad conversation, but it's something, it's the place to start to be able to figure out kind of where we'd like to see some of those additional realignments. And I think the last piece of this, and we'll talk more in detail as we go through, is developing that sustainability system.

[00:37:16] So once we put these things in place, what's the sustainability system look like? How do we make sure we get there and that we stay there? And so to Matt's point earlier, it's not just a one and done thing. So we don't just have this one conversation today and then all of a sudden we're done, right? So it's going to be a continual every year process that you work that is just kind of that feedback loop.

[00:37:38] We're implementing, we're gathering information, we're making decisions, and we're just restarting that process. And so identifying what that process looks like for you, certainly you have one in place now, but are there adjustments that you would like to make that may be able to improve that process and certainly address some of the the changes that you are facing as you continue to move forward anything you're in nope we're gonna keep going all right so a couple of thoughts here so we talked a little bit about moving from reactive to proactive and I'm not sure if anybody feels like that at times it's just all the everything we're doing is in a reactive mode so how do we get out

[00:38:17] of that and get ourselves to this proactive approach and so a couple of of thoughts, or I don't know if anybody has felt this. Has anybody thought, you know, I answered that question, why does somebody keep coming back to me with that? Has anybody ever been there? Or is that just kind of one of those things that's just been me? So as I was reading this book, Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands, so Lessons in Non-Linear Leadership, Nancy Orberg, the author, had this statement that was in there, and it said, is this a problem to solve or a tension to manage?

[00:38:46] And for me, it was kind of like this aha moment, right? And I think back to back when I was in the, in our school district. And it felt like every month at our cabinet meeting, I was having a conversation with our director of special ed regarding staffing. And it's like, I thought we put systems in place to manage this. But it wasn't a problem. I was trying to solve a problem, but it was a tension that we needed to manage. It was always going to be there because those needs never quit happening. They just changed. And it was the kind of that push and pull piece. And so it kind of goes to the next book. If you haven't read Atomic Habits by James Clear,

[00:39:24] great book regarding those, how you can set daily habits and improve. But he mentioned something in there that says, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. And I think that's truly in place. And so we think about kind of emergency type when it's that fight and flight type situation, when things just keep coming at you. If you have a system in place, if we have a a book a binder a manual whatever it is that we can go follow that we put in place when we had time to think develop and now it's the implementation phase we do much better than

[00:39:59] trying to make all these decisions on the fly and so how do we develop that system that simply helps us to be able to walk along that path and so i think that's the that's the challenge certainly you have systems in place i think the question you're going to have to try to balance at this place is managing change. I think that's kind of where you're at at this point in time, is we've heard about, you know, we've had growth over a period of time. We've been able to add programming as needed. Funding has been, I don't want to say abundant, but has been enough that we've been able to do what we would like to do. And so now becomes the question of, okay, if resources are a little

[00:40:38] more scarce, if we're not seeing the growth, or now is it going to be stable? I mean, stable is a little easier to deal with than rapid decline or just decline in general from an enrollment perspective and so what does that change have to look like and how do we manage that change because certainly managing growth looks a little different than managing the opposite side of the equation and so conversations like today is a great starting point to be able to just to identify what are those priorities where do we want to start and start getting some of those out because I think that'll be the way that you kind of figure out which ones to navigate and how to navigate as

[00:41:18] you go along. No, I think the first step is realizing that, you know, there is a need to change, and I think that's really, you know, why this conversation, like Jay said, is crucially important, so. All right, so kind of continuing on, I think I skipped over one. All right, so one of the models that we work with when we talk with schools, or the model, I guess, whenever we talk to schools, we refer to it as kind of our foresight framework, so kind of tying all this together.

[00:41:43] Hindsight, right, first place. You know, the ability to reflect and learn from the past. So where have we been answering that conversation? And so that can be from a revenue standpoint. What's revenue look like? Has it trended the way we thought? Are we getting more dollars than we had budgeted? What does that process typically look like and how have we been trending?

[00:42:01] Expenditure side, have we been coming in within a certain percentage of those expenditures? Is one area higher than the other? So just kind of figuring out the nitty-gritty of what's going on with those revenue expenditures. we've been operating in a surplus which it sounds like in years perhaps we have are we operating in a deficit and it sounds like maybe that's the trajectory that we may be on enrollment how has enrollment looked did was it whenever we modeled it were we consistent with with that modeling as far as what actually came in can we fine-tune those kind of pieces and building usage so as we start looking at one of those investment pieces within our within our school division it is

[00:42:39] certainly the capital expense that we have for facilities and so what's the usage what's the capacity the utilization capacity of buildings are we utilizing them to capacity do we need more buildings do we need less buildings so we start having those conversations do we have too many classrooms and being able to look from a hindsight perspective that answering those where have we been kind of questions foresight where are we headed and so when you think about driving down the road we have a windshield that we're looking out which is a much bigger view than what the rear view mirror is that's looking behind us so hopefully we take that hindsight within that rear

[00:43:15] view mirror and we're able to look at that information but what's ahead of us from a foresight perspective what's out in front of us and i think that's where we start again looking at how we'll be projecting revenue expenditures enrollment capital needs so those are all the things you You kind of mentioned earlier back on the board here as far as trying to identify as you go through this process.

[00:43:38] And then as we look at those hindsights and foresights, we start gathering what we just call insights, right? What are the pieces of information that we've learned along the way? How do we analyze that data and what is it telling us? What is that data telling us? So then from the last perspective of this, that oversight, now what oversights can we put in place?

[00:43:59] What's the board's oversights that they're responsible for? What's the administration's oversight that they're going to be responsible for? And how do we make sure that we're managing this to the best of our ability to be able to provide the best school community that we can for our staff and students? And so certainly we monitor those, make changes as we can, again, for that betterment.

[00:44:22] So the next slide I just want to kind of briefly touch on. It summarizes a little bit of what Jay just mentioned in terms of the foresight framework. So this talks about the base kind of fiscal assessment, understand what your actuals have been, what your performance has been in the past, what your revenues and expenditures have looked like, because chances are you're going to be able to better understand in terms of what might be happening in the future as well, or at least be able to maybe have some better predictions in terms of what the future looks like as well.

[00:44:48] And then that moves into more of the customized financial planning as well. Again, the forecasting aspect, strategic planning aspect as well. And then that really leads into the next stage, too, in terms of is there alignment between that financial plan, that financial forecast, and that strategic plan.

[00:45:04] You know, when we were having conversations with Sharon and Casey with the redevelopment of the strategic plan that's currently in the works, that really puts you kind of in that level three right now since you're kind of revisiting and revising what that strategic plan looks like. And now having more conversations, too, about what does it mean to really help better align the financial side of that as well.

[00:45:24] Now that things are going to look maybe a little bit different in the out years in terms of what do you have to do in terms of having conversations, again, to be more proactive about that in terms of taking additional steps, having already taken this first step to be more proactive in terms of having this conversation.

[00:45:40] And the last thing, too, I mean, again, I think it resonates in the quote that Jay shared in terms of this is a problem to solve or attention to manage. You know, having to do things like this is never going to completely go away. You know, that's why financial folks exist. This is why oversight bodies exist as well.

[00:45:58] We need to continuously have these conversations to either get ourselves back on track or to talk about whether or not we're actually on track as well. You know, that's just part of the continuous improvement cycle, right? You might be perfectly on track, but you still need to have that conversation so we have some kind of consensus or agreement as to whether or not we truly are on track, right?

[00:46:18] And if we are off track, then we need to figure out what we need to do now in order to get back to where we need to be. So it's really all about what we have been preaching for years in terms of financial sustainability or financial resiliency, really, as I think is probably a better term for it as well.

[00:46:37] So part of the framework that we've been talking more with folks about is a fiscal sustainability plan. In order to kind of stay a little bit more on track, I don't want to go in-depth in terms of every bullet here since we're going to show this a number of different ways as well. But really what we mean by a fiscal sustainability plan is a set of fiscal policies and action steps is really the key part of this.

[00:46:57] It's not only just talking about the policy, not only talking about what cuts we might be making or reductions or changes in services we might be making, but how do we actually make sure that we implement those as well. Implementing with fidelity is a term and phrase that Jay and I use often in terms of either making recommendations or talking with school districts as well or from our own experiences.

[00:47:19] You can talk until you're blue in the face about it unless we actually have a plan as to how we're going to implement it and stick to that plan. It really doesn't matter what the conversations were about. The other thing is here, it's not a one-size-fits-all type of solution. Every school district, every school division has its unique needs, priorities in terms of things that they want to do, need to do, and also different demographics as well.

[00:47:42] So we need to make sure we take that into account. There's a reason why local school districts exist as opposed to state level or federal level type of oversight when it comes to education, at least in terms of nuts and bolts providing services. And again, the big thing is that in-depth analysis of strategies as well, which we're going to talk about more this afternoon in terms of the AIM strategies that were already mentioned as well.

[00:48:04] Again, you've already taken some of the steps to do some of this. We're going to help provide some additional framework and kind of context to you in terms of moving forward with some of that. And then talking to you more about the feasibility and implementation, like I just mentioned, we'll talk more about feasibility here in a minute as well. We have some kind of steps in terms of how we provide recommendations in the path that I think are cross applicable regardless of what the school district you might be.

[00:48:29] Next one here is just a little bit more of a graphical representation as well. We really think of this as kind of a, I don't know if it's a continuity or kind of a levels of reductions or kind of how to prioritize or think about these. you look on the right hand side of the graphic it talks about maintaining service levels or reducing service levels is the last option there and these are kind of ranked in level of priority in terms of how palatable they might be for maybe not palatable maybe achievable i think it's probably the better word for that revenue enhancements generally for school districts this one is a little more constrained particularly for your case as a component unit it's even more constrained

[00:49:08] since you rely on the county for your funding some school districts do have their own taxing authority which you do not so again that makes it a little more challenging you're kind of pre-given the box that you must operate within as opposed to having more of a flexibility to modify the size of that box if that's an analogy that resonates at all next here is talking about expenditure controls and cost shifts what can you do to be more efficient and more effective in terms of the services that you already are providing? Are there efficiencies to be gained from doing deep dives in certain areas? Probably, given the size and magnitude of the organization,

[00:49:43] as with any larger organization, there's always room for improvement, room for efficiencies. Next thing is thinking about service delivery changes, whether that's just a different way of doing how we've provided the service before. Again, to be more efficient in how that service is provided. Are there opportunities to have discussions about outsourcing of services as well?

[00:50:02] again that's a little more difficult one not always as palatable that's why it's put a little bit maybe further down the rank here on the last one is talking more about service level reductions uh okay you know maybe this doesn't align as well with our strategic priorities as maybe other programs so maybe we need to have more difficult conversations about this and again this will speak to a analogy that jay uses a lot uh must must-haves versus nice to have Sorry, Jay, I didn't mean to steal your thunder, but we'll talk more about that.

[00:50:32] We'll talk about that a lot over the course of the day as well. So looking again, kind of on that continuum, so revenue, we've talked limited within the school world, especially if it's reoccurring revenue.

[00:50:51] Sometimes you can find some non-reoccurring revenue, but the reoccurring revenue is difficult to find. Identifying those current processes, as Matt talked about as well, exploring those other service delivery options. But I think it kind of hit upon one of the comments that one of the board members made earlier. regarding not necessarily cuts, but how can we shift costs or do something.

[00:51:09] And so one of those other quotes kind of thing is, you know, we can afford anything, we just can't afford everything. And so at some point, we just have to start making some decisions as far as where those dollars are going to go, which ones that we want to put those in. So the question then becomes, you know, how do we evaluate programs and how do we evaluate their alignment to our strategic plan?

[00:51:29] What's that look like? So one of the things that Matt and I talk about often, If we have a program that we evaluate it and it's successful, you can have a successful program that doesn't necessarily continue to align with your strategic plan. So what would we do in that type of situation?

[00:51:46] Are we going to continue to fund that or is that one of those that, hey, maybe that goes on the table that we're going to revisit and see kind of a nice to have position? And so whenever we look at that, evaluating either as staffing levels, I mean, there can be some staffing levels that are nice to have or there can be some programs that are nice to have.

[00:52:04] And so I've had that question asked before. So what's a nice to have? How do you distinguish between must have and nice to have? So my frame of reference is if we have to have school tomorrow, who has to be here or what has to be here? Otherwise, I think it's a nice to have. And that can be a laundry list of things.

[00:52:22] Does not mean it's not important. Does not mean it doesn't bring value. It simply means if we have to have school tomorrow, this is essential. This is the essential business functioning of the school district in order for us to provide the services that meet a minimum to be able to offer to our students and then what are all those additional wraparound services that we're able to provide and then we can start prioritizing those because then we have some decisions are we going to double down and invest more in some other programs or are we just going to kind of sprinkle the dollars or the resources to offer a lot of things and that just kind of becomes philosophical in nature as far as how we want to approach

[00:52:59] approach those. One thing I'd also just mention along that front whenever you're evaluating those is what are the sacred cows? What is it that they're just non-starters? We're just not going to go there. Because I think that's also important. We just need to come to a consensus and call it out and say, hey, these are areas that we're just not willing to negotiate with. We're going to make sure that they stay in place. And that's just something that's been around for the school division for many many years or this is an anchor program that we have or whatever it is and so make sure that we that we call those out throughout this process i think is is key i would also say

[00:53:36] the thing that when matt and i have been walking around and talking with school districts about some of this stuff and i applaud you for starting early because oftentimes we will get a phone call whenever that red number has been happening for four or five years and it's a bigger red number than if they would have interjected a bit earlier in the process.

[00:53:56] So having this conversation early is great. And I would say, but it's just step one, because we've seen a lot of people have the conversation, even though that big number in red keeps getting bigger. But it's the actual implementation of something, the whole knowing versus doing.

[00:54:11] And so once we know we develop a plan, now we actually have to implement that plan. And that certainly becomes one of the biggest challenges that we have. And so in order to kind of help with that, we've kind of mapped out some risk considerations i think matt's going to talk through that a little bit no that kind of helps kind of further the next step in the conversation in terms of actually putting these things into action but before putting things into action it's also important when you're considering certain things that might be on the table what's the likelihood of success or being able to implement and implement the recommendations well so things that we look at in terms of how we prioritize recommendations or advise folks to evaluate recommendations

[00:54:51] or what the estimated savings are from potential reductions, what's the magnitude as well in terms of the overall savings? Is it something that's kind of a drop in the bucket in terms of the magnitude of the budget, or is it something that's quite substantial and we should maybe, you know, have more in-depth conversation or push a little bit harder for something that might be more substantial? What are some of the implementation challenges? Is there going to be a big pushback from the community? Is it something that's been in place for years and years and years, so there's a lot of change management involved is it a really well-liked program manager who happens to lead that you know what are some of those considerations that we have to think about

[00:55:28] then thinking about the strategic impact is another key thing as well is this going to impact our ability to achieve specific goals and objectives or is it maybe one of those more nice to have type of programs or things that we're looking at and the other thing too is thinking about time frame as well you're not going to be able to snap your fingers on every single recommendation in terms of cost savings and realize those savings overnight you know there might be things that maybe it's something in terms of talking to other local school divisions that you need to lobby uh the state for in terms of making adjustments to the soq or other things around that matter which might take two three four or five years or something like that and have a

[00:56:05] low chance of success possibly uh from some of the uh the the facial expressions within the room as well or it might be things where it's like yeah this is a no-brainer you know we should proceed with this as quickly as possible and move forward with it so again there's a continuity there's a continuum in terms of considerations for that risk side as well and then the last slide we want to end on here and we took maybe a couple minutes longer in this section but i think it's important to kind of set up the framework is how do you start to evaluate these budget strategies as well again it's like what jay and i talked about in terms of a framework this kind of helps to place

[00:56:41] some buckets in terms of what it actually means in terms of uh you know some of those risk categories in terms of implementation and then i think you know this kind of comes into the category as well is it really worth pursuing some of these depending upon maybe which quadrant it resides in from the upper right hand corner high difficulty high return okay this is going to be really challenging to implement but you know we might really get a long ways to where we need to be in terms of solving what we see in the out years in terms of a particular deficit there might be a high difficulty low return and these might be those that well yeah maybe maybe if we are really

[00:57:17] scrounging and scraping for what we need to come up with to solve the deficit maybe we'll come back to these later because these are just going to be too much time and effort to to get a minimal amount of savings per se and then the bottom left hand corner is low difficulty low return again these are maybe areas where you can quickly do this but you know it's a really low return possibly in terms of dollar value and the other thing is low difficulty and high return again these are the no-brainer type of areas in terms of the bottom right hand corner again there's a number of different considerations that we have lifted up there that you might include you know there's other ways to evaluate these strategies as well you know one example going back to the

[00:57:56] board members request of what we did at Chicago when I was there at a decade plus ago when we did some initial program evaluation we looked at four or five just very high level criteria in terms of what was the dollar cost of the program how many students were being served by the program approximate price per student then based upon those two variables the demographics of the students serve were the most high flying of kids already in the district or were at some of the most in need kids within the district and then we did kind of a simple test of the wind you know in terms of asking program managers and district leadership is this program effective or not and then you use those four or five variables to start

[00:58:36] making some decisions and when you have a number of programs maybe that have been continued on for a number of years survived administrations whatever you know those might be some of the more basic questions that need to be asked in terms of a framework as well so there's one example so yeah okay activity time we turn my microphone on activity time you've listened to us drone on enough here so we want to kind of engage um and get some feedback from the board so we're going to do a little post-it note um activity so you want to grab yeah i'll grab those grab those

[00:59:10] carts all right so with you at your station you should have some post-it notes along so we would like you to answer a few things and we're going to put them up on the on the board and have a little conversation um so regarding lcps's budget process so for those that are new you may not have as much detail or information as those that have been around and gone through this process a few times but i'd like so what is it you like so i like what are things that are working so jot some of those down on a post-it note and we're going to post that on the board so what do you like about the budget process what do you wish about the budget process something you would change and then lastly

[00:59:49] it's kind of a question i wonder um so may not be an answer that we have to that one just what is a wonder that you have about the current budget process so you're gonna jot down i like i wish and i wonder about the current process we'll take a couple minutes to jot those down and then we'll come around and collect them yeah maybe as you finish one of them if you want to raise your hand

[01:00:10] up and i'll come around and grab them be helpful if you put your microphone on because we are

[01:03:45] recording sure i know it's it's restrictive yeah no it is uh so some of the the things that folks like um the ability to engage in year-round conversations which is near and dear to a financial and budget person's heart um they like the clarity uh like collaborative um the ability of the board to have direct input and balancing process um again collaboration in terms of another comment here and then sorry that's really small and i can't read with my glasses on And then again, feedback throughout the school year as well is another one.

[01:04:25] Oh, hey, there we go. All right, now we're playing five.

[01:05:08] Okay, I think.

[01:06:08] Did we want to take questions on our framework? Yeah. There was a request if there was any questions on the framework in terms of kind of some of our approaches, some of the theory behind it that Jay and I just presented as well. So happy to answer any questions or the like.

[01:06:27] Ms. Chernoff? Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you so much. This is really a great move in the right direction, I think, in terms of giving background of what you all do and the systems here. And I thank you for quoting the books that you did because I love both of those books. And I heard that quote from a colleague actually here about the tension.

[01:06:48] And I asked him, where did you get that? And then I went and read the book. So I really appreciate all of those things. And I do think there are a lot of tensions to manage in a $2 billion system that is facing change. I think each of us can attest to that. So I think putting that out on the table as a starting point is where we should be.

[01:07:04] I have a little bit of a question and maybe just a little bit of a pushback. The idea of the forest through the trees, I mean, we're a big system. It's a $2 billion system. But I want to juxtapose that with our position, which is to make sure that we are not only being accountable to the public, but accountable here with every dollar.

[01:07:24] And so that sort of, for me, has always been a challenge to not get in the weeds, if you will, because I'm sort of a, like, I got to know everything in order to make a good decision. So I guess, how do we balance taking in the size and having trust that the people in place are accounting for every single dollar the way that it should be and moving us in a good direction?

[01:07:47] And certainly we are very successful division and we are lucky to have what we have here, but how do we balance that with then making sure that we have the information that is most valuable to steer the ship if we feel like there are areas that we have questions about and that so it's really that accountability versus trust question and so I know it's like sort of a philosophical one but if you could elaborate a little bit on your experience with that in the past with divisions the size of ours I think it's kind of twofold it's it's to the oversight piece you know

[01:08:22] in terms of the routine conversations that you have about the budget to actuals what the financial performance of the district is looking like and then most importantly the connecting kpi you know whether or not that those dollars are actually having some effect you know or some impact i think the second part of it is thinking more about the policy setting aspect in order to reinforce that the trust that you have to instill in the administration to implement and spend the budget you know you know faithfully and and with fidelity right but the policies i think are a big thing you Take, for example, like a procurement policy in terms of what your guidelines and what

[01:09:01] your thresholds are in terms of how they advance for approval, whether it's within the administration, what level within the administration, and then what rises to the level of then board approval as well. For a school district of your size, you can't set like a purchasing threshold for board approval at, say, 5,000, right?

[01:09:18] So it's a similar concept with the forest and the trees. I mean, I don't ever mean to diminish the need to focus on trees, but I think it's more looking at trend lines and see where things are going and whether or not they're meeting agreed-upon expectations in terms of where we would hope to be in terms of outcomes so I think I think the focusing more on out shifting to the outcomes and then the overall financial performance I think is the is the key way to really being able not to lose the forest for the trees so I don't know if

[01:09:51] you have anything else Jay does it help okay mr. Carty thank you madam chair and thank you guys for this presentation so you know I'm I'm a big fan of KPIs we don't see those really here up from a board perspective and it's something I would love for us to be able to see and again I think it goes to being able to do some more effective program evaluations at some point because we don't we don't look at program evaluation the way you've been describing it at this at our at our level at this point but it's a it's something that I would really like to see I think the other thing that you'll see as we get

[01:10:28] into this timeline is that by the time we actually get this budget this cycle coming up I think our timeline is like 19 calendar days to review and hear from the public and review a two billion dollar budget which I am not comfortable with personally but I think there's I really would like for us to re like to rethink and innovate our budget process in general I don't know that that my colleagues share that view but I personally feel like we've got to have a lot more insight into what's happening so that we can make sense of it so that we can get back up to the high level and I think that's kind of what Ms. Chernoff was kind of alluding to right is that there's

[01:11:04] it's hard to understand the budget at a 50,000 foot perspective if you don't have any insight really into the 40 or the 30,000 foot level just to make help it make sense at the 50 so I think that's a part of it too and I would really love to get your thoughts on you know as you've worked with other divisions and you've seen them have to cut back in budget where what's the approach for that like what's the what are some successful approaches that have happened in that process is it across the board kinds of things is it program evaluation is it I mean my whole take

[01:11:41] is staffing I really would like to be the last thing that we're adjusting anything that's school facing I would like to be the last thing that we do but we don't we don't have a lot we have you know like 90 percent or so of our budget is all in staffing salaries so we only really have this 10 percent but I don't feel I personally don't feel like I have a really good understanding of the 10 percent and what is in that and what that looks like so I'd love your kind of your thoughts and from your expertise about what that is best practices things you've seen approaches we should take yeah I mean I think the first comment out comment more on kind of your your points at the

[01:12:17] end I would say in terms of approaches across the board cuts I think is it's a last resort type of tactic because your departments that are already operating efficiently or a school that's already operating efficiently you're just going to essentially cut them off at the knee on one leg right and you're just going to affect their ability to operate well so I think it's a much more targeted approach in terms of looking at certain programs and services and then do a wholesale even though it's difficult and challenging just get rid of the whole thing as opposed to limp something along I think that's really the best approach while it's challenging and difficult and hard for sure I think

[01:12:57] ultimately in the long run it'll best that's best served the kids in the overall mission of the district the other point that you made about the staffing I think that's the the first place unfortunately that that you need to look even though it does impact people with your budget being 90% your ability to impact off a 10% of the budget since so many things are essential to keeping the lights on so to speak with that 10% that's going to be really hard to impact deficits especially a bigger magnitude if you don't take a hard look at the staffing and there's a lot of ways you can do that without impacting people you know looking to see where your vacancies are to reduce the overall

[01:13:34] size of the budget looking to see we did this with Arlington in particular you know we were looking at classrooms across the district and seeing that they were not abiding by their own policies for class size so that right there is kind of like one of the initial kind of no-brainers you should go back to abiding by class size and that was a multi-million dollar savings there that they could likely achieve without laying off staff because with natural attrition of teachers within the school district you could infill redistribute folks and you wouldn't necessarily have to actually lay somebody off so hopefully that helps with kind of providing a couple of examples there so yeah I appreciate and I also appreciate the program of

[01:14:13] evaluation framework components because I think that's something that we as a board should really come together on and that might be a committee conversation and then pull it up to the board or something I don't know where that would sit if it'd be FNO or PMC or I don't even know but I think that's a conversation that we we should probably have about how we want to see that data and information yeah I think it's important to have the conversation I think sometimes you know it's waiting for the perfect information as opposed to is it good enough

[01:14:44] to impact a decision type of information so mrs griffiths thank you madam chair um thank you so much for this presentation uh with a little research um i did find that as far as chicago public schools you made this suggestion um estimated at 200 million as far as cutting their budget It was furloughs, instructional days, we are going to discuss calendars today, and pursuing further debt.

[01:15:21] I want to get into programs and enrollment of programs and also divisions here that are not contributing to the success of our students. Would you be examining all of that? And my last question is, Did Chicago public schools follow that recommendation that you gave?

[01:15:43] Thank you. Sure. So the Chicago situation that we recently helped with was very complicated and I would say extremely different from where you all are at. When I was with them a decade plus ago, I mean, every single year we faced, what, a quarter to a half billion dollar deficit, which on a $5 billion budget, the time was, you know, what's the math on that five to 10% every single year. Um, they're even in a more constrained position now, uh, with some of the decisions that had to be made, whether

[01:16:18] kind of forced on them by the mayor and other elected officials or not. Uh, they had some extreme pension payments that needed to make, um, their ability to raise taxes while they did have the authority, unlike you all was severely constrained. Um, and their debt, I mean, to be very blunt is substantial and the amount of borrowing that they have to undertake even to just maintain cash flow is significant. So the recommendations that were proposed by the administration that we were asked to vet in order to kind of help a dispute between essentially the

[01:16:51] mayor, the lame duck CEO and the board president were extremely heated and challenging to say the very least. So I think a number of the recommendations there are very unique to their situation, especially things like furlough days. That is the kind of least resort type of option as well, in my opinion. It's horrible for morale and should be used a last ditch option, which you all are nowhere near apparent for the foreseeable future and then some, to comment on that specifically. So hopefully that helps provide a little bit of context. They're in a very

[01:17:31] difficult situation to say the least did they take any of their recommendations um ultimately they ended up borrowing so they borrowed so any further questions board members all right thank you thank you for entertaining that so i've got the next section and we're going to start with just a quick reminder of how there are you know several virginia code requirements that govern how we adopt our budget every year and i wanted to just take a moment to highlight two of them

[01:18:09] The first one is on the box on the left, which specifically calls out that the superintendent is required to provide an estimate of the school division's financial needs for the upcoming fiscal year. And then the process after that has been that once the school board receives that estimate, there's a review process and the school board adopts the budget, at which time it becomes the school board adopted budget.

[01:18:32] And then it gets transmitted to the appropriating body, which, of course, is Loudoun County. The box on the right establishes the role for Loudoun County, the Board of Supervisors, and how they must approve their annual budget by May 15th or within 30 days of receiving the estimate of state educational funds, whichever applies.

[01:18:52] This code language creates a firm deadline by which funding for LCPS must be appropriated. This highlights the statutory relationship between LCPS and the county in terms of the partnership we have in adopting the budget every year.

[01:19:08] and also highlights the deadline one of the deadlines that is included in part of our budget calendar discussion which we will engage in next you may recall seeing this slide probably many times it outlines the the various deadlines that we are trying to manage when we create the budget calendar every year while budget development is a year-round press process These are the very specific milestones that we must follow.

[01:19:39] I always like to start with the county timeline, which is in the middle of the slide. Again, while Virginia law allows local governments to adopt their budgets by May 15th, Loudoun County adopts its budget and tax rate much earlier, and typically they aim for their first meeting in April.

[01:19:56] This timing is necessary so that the approved tax rate can be applied to property tax bills that are mailed in late April and due to the county in June. That deadline is reflected in the box. It looks like it's a purple box on the screen on the slide there.

[01:20:12] Below that, there is also a state requirement that the county advertises its proposed tax rate in local newspapers within a specific time frame tied to the presentation of the county administrator's proposed budget. Because the LCPS budget is ultimately incorporated into the county's overall budget, the school board must adopt the budget before the county administrator presents their proposed county budget.

[01:20:39] This allows the LCPS budget to be incorporated into the county administrators proposed budget to the County Board of Supervisors So then we work backward from that deadline and the school board typically adopts the LCPS budget in early February And to prepare for that action the superintendents Presents the proposed budget in January and as you know, we hold a series of several work sessions Now moving to the state timeline at the bottom of the slide There's another important milestone that affects our schedule by December 20th of each year the governor releases a proposed state budget. This gives us important information about projected

[01:21:16] state revenues as well as potential funding requirements that may result in mandated expenditures for the coming year. It's important to note that the governor's budget is only the first step. While the proposal is released by December 20th, we are typically waiting days and unfortunately sometimes weeks for VDOE to release their funding templates. Those templates allow us to calculate the various state revenue streams based on the governor's proposed budget.

[01:21:44] So we began identifying budget priorities well before December, as evidenced by this retreat as well. However, the governor's proposal and the subsequent video funding information gives us the more complete picture we need to finalize the superintendent's estimate of needs. That creates the relatively short window that we have between late December and early January to finalize the the CEON document and transition to the school board's formal budget review process.

[01:22:16] When building the actual calendar, there are several drivers that we use when building that calendar. And I would like to take this opportunity to highlight in your binder, there is a tab called budget calendar number 25, just to reference the slide number. And we thought this would be helpful to just as a reference, it provides a more detailed look at the proposed schedule from mid-December through mid-February. The first step, again, as I just referenced, is developing

[01:22:50] that calendar working backward from the county's budget and tax deadlines. Again, that tax billing schedule ultimately drives when the county must advertise its tax rate and adopt its budget. That essentially creates one very solid bookend to our budget calendar process. In previous years, the school board and board of supervisors had significant discussions about whether that there might be an opportunity to change that schedule. For example, to align the tax cycle with the fiscal year rather than the calendar year. What that means is that currently, under the current

[01:23:27] schedule, when the Board of Supervisors sets the tax rate in April of 2026, that rate applies to the spring 2026 tax bills and the fall 2026 tax bills. So their tax year is calendar year-based. Under a fiscal year approach, the April 2026 tax rate would instead apply to a fall 2026 billing cycle and the spring 2027 bills.

[01:23:57] And I've worked under an environment where it was a fiscal year based. Making that type of change, though, however, would require the Board of Supervisors to adopt an ordinance modifying those current dates. Those discussions at that time included considerations such as the impact on the towns for which the county also collects tax rates for would require for them to make changes to their to their cycles cash flow implications of making that adjustment for the county as well as for the towns and the effect on the timing of the budget process and tax notices ultimately the

[01:24:34] board of supervisors at that time decided to maintain the current schedule in the time frame for this it was a fairly recent conversation where we really again had some very deep conversations and trying to rectify the concerns on the school board side related to the budget calendar, and that was in 2023, so it was only a few years ago.

[01:24:55] So that gives us, again, that one firm bookend. The other bookend, again, is that December 20th date of when the governor's budget is released. This year, December 20th, falls on a Sunday, so we would expect the governor's proposal to be released on Friday, the Friday prior.

[01:25:13] That gives us an important starting point, but again, we are waiting for when the funding templates may actually be released, and we have listed on that calendar a box leading up to the holidays that are blacked out on the calendar. Again, once we have that information, we can fine-tune our revenue projections and make the final adjustments needed to balance the CYON.

[01:25:37] If the governor's proposal results in additional anticipated revenue, then we are making adjustments to add priorities back in. If results are less revenue than anticipated, then we're having to make adjustments to, again, balance out, balance the expenditures to the available revenues.

[01:25:56] Once the budget is balanced during this shortened time frame, the work then shifts to finalizing the SION books and presentation materials. That step takes time because even relatively small changes can create a ripple effect throughout the entire budget book.

[01:26:13] and we need sufficient time to make those changes, review the information, and validate the final project before it is presented to the board. And of course, all of this work is occurring over the holiday period. And while the budget team is deeply committed to this process, we also want to build a schedule that is reasonable and allows staff appropriate time away from work during the holiday season as well. There are also two factors that are unique to this specific budget cycle that we need to take into consideration. First is that the budget team is planning to produce a second

[01:26:49] volume and make some initial changes to the budget book. And I'll present more information on that next after we finish the activity with the budget calendar. And so because this is not going to be a simple rinse repeat of last year's budget process and producing the materials for the board, we anticipate that the book will require additional preparation time. Second, we need to account for the ongoing ERP project. This project creates additional workload, not only for the budget team, but also for other departments and staff who are involved in preparing the final budget.

[01:27:25] So those final two bullets also listed on here on the slide represent other factors that we have taken into account based on feedback over several years of preparing the budget calendar. The second to last bullet is for the CION to be presented at a standalone meeting versus part of a regular school board meeting there have been instances in the past when the CION was presented as part of a school board meetings regular work session and the feedback at the time was that one making sure

[01:28:01] that there was sufficient time for that presentation to occur and then also that you know wanting to make sure that there was the importance of this presentation was not lost perhaps if it was included and perhaps maybe buried as part of the work of the other work that the board was taking into consideration during a regular school board meeting. So we have separated that to be separate. The last bullet was also wanting to ensure that we had a minimum of five days between the Sion presentation and the first work session. So for example, if we had a standalone meeting on

[01:28:36] a Tuesday to not then have the work sessions begin on Thursday of just two days you know recognizing the volume of information that is being presented and allowing board members to have some time to absorb that in before we kick off all the department presentations so those are the the tenets that are used in building the budget calendar and again we have that reference document for you in the binder since the proposed calendar was presented to the board last Tuesday and the board is anticipated to take action next week on

[01:29:14] the calendar thought this would be a perfect opportunity for the board to engage in a discussion to perhaps work toward a consensus if there were anticipated motions to change the budget calendar this would allow us to incorporate the the board's feedback and where appropriate make adjustments so that the calendar brought forward next tuesday would reflect the board's general agreement and would be positioned for an efficient action on tuesday one suggestion could be is for the board with the chair's permission to take a straw poll on the calendar as it is currently proposed as a

[01:29:52] start and then again on any additional discussion the additional slides i'll just click through them quickly that you have in your binder are just the dates again for your reference that were presented as information item and they are also incorporated in that calendar um that is behind the um the the tab budget calendar and they are shaded in pink and so with that i open up for

[01:30:21] discussion at the board on the budget calendar as presented mr ricardi thank you madam chair so um a couple of just questions for you so um i guess my first question is how many work days does it take you all to get from receiving the templates from vdoe to budget presentation not what's on here but like how many days does it actually take you to do that so it's really hard to estimate because those templates are based on the governor's proposed budget so if the governor's proposed

[01:30:59] budget does not have any significant changes, then, and we get those templates fairly quickly and, okay, let me give one scenario. Let's say that the proposed budget maybe offers maybe just a few extra dollars our way or, you know, really no significant changes to where we're not having to make any significant changes to the book itself. Then that is a, that's a very quick turnaround because we're pretty much set up for that leading into December. If there are changes related to cuts where we aren't getting the funding that we expected or that there are mandated

[01:31:38] expenses required that we now maybe have to make adjustments. That can have significant changes that, again, ripple throughout the book. And again, it's really hard to predict because we don't know what to expect. We work really hard with our lobbyists leading up to December to try to get any indication of where the governor's proposed budget may be headed. But again, until that release of that budget is made and also those funding templates we are we're really just waiting to see so unfortunately I'm unable to give you a definitive answer in terms of how

[01:32:16] many days so I mean right now you've got like 13 business days that you've already prepped on this calendar right so taking out the holidays that you've marked so I guess one of my questions is we're always going to, there's always going to be flux in what you're going to get from the state. So that's just part of what we're going to get. My question, I guess, is can we move the CION presentation date up to the 7th? Or my second choice would be the 12th to give us a continuing

[01:32:51] to give us more dates. And then the second part of the question is between now and the 23rd of December can we do can we do this in iterative phases or maybe we do because this is again my first cycle going through this and I haven't been through this back half of the process yet that we're we're already you know obviously we've come to the prioritization we understand staffing and what we want to do and that so by the time we get to this we're only doing fine-tuned tweaking and I'm assuming maybe that's what you're doing already right because that would make sense

[01:33:26] we just have to figure out how to give us a lot more time than the 19 days that are currently on here for us to review this like I think I can't speak for everybody but enormously for enormous frustration would be the great way I would describe it as everybody knows because I made that pretty obvious back in January but I would like to see us at least move this the C on date up to the 7th of January if we could and that's probably what I would present to the board as a first option and then maybe the 12th is a secondary choice a couple days earlier but

[01:34:03] I really do feel like we need to have as much time as possible to really wrap our heads around it especially because I think we're going to have to between now and then come up with some prioritization of programs and look at some evaluative information and really wrap our heads around how we're going to move the ball on the budget if you know if our enrollment keeps surprising us as it has this year I'm just really concerned that we're not going to have enough time to really get in here plus you know many number of us have full-time jobs so this budget process is like working three jobs in and of itself in a very condensed period and so there's some time I

[01:34:39] just want to make sure also that we've got that the public understands what we're doing in this this cycle too because again every cycle that we've had up to this point we've been getting more and more and more money and adding greater and greater and greater programs to the suite of offerings that we offer here which has been a really great blessing but I really do believe that we're going to have to start leveling off and or cutting things which is going to require an extra level of effort and I think more discussion during that window of time that we're reviewing this so I just feel like we've got to blow the window out here a little bit some in some way and make sure that we're getting a head start on this. Mr. Pepper? Thank you Madam

[01:35:18] Chair. I'm actually going to reflect on what my colleague Ms. Riccardi said very similarly but I'm going to start with a question for Ms. Willoughby. And I noticed that in the proposed calendar here, our budget adoption is on February 2nd. What's the actual, I don't want to use the term drop dead, like what's the drop dead date we really have to approve this for the Board of Supervisors?

[01:35:40] Is it February 2nd or is it a little bit later in February? It has always been essentially around the same time frame. So to give an example for the budget that this board approved in February, I believe it was on February 3rd, just to give you a peek behind the curtain of what is happening it is such a very quick turnaround time of what the budget team has to do to flip numbers there's official communication that has to occur between lcps and the county of the transmittal of the official dollars and numbers so there's significant work that is occurring between february 2nd or february 3rd from last

[01:36:16] year to that following week so we're talking literal days in terms of you know taking any changes that were made when the school board adopted incorporating them and then having that ready to go over to the county so that is essentially the the drop dead date for the county okay so there's no flexibility on the back end for me and maybe i'm speaking a little bit differently but in my experience going through the budget for the first time this year I personally and I can't speak for my colleagues but I personally found more value in the individual presentations

[01:36:54] we got along the way than I did from the overall presentation of the CN and the CN was a good working document and I know that you know in conversation with my colleagues we hashed through the budget I'd be like okay so what page is this on the CN but it's in this presentation and we were kind of going back and forth with it too. But for me to, to go piece by piece, I found much more value in the presentation. So I don't know if I necessarily need as much of a gap between the Sion presentations as I do, um, to digest the individual presentations. And so when you go, you know, cause budget season really it's, it's presentation, then it's Tuesday, Thursday,

[01:37:31] Tuesday, Thursday, and then we just keep going back and forth until we adopt. For me, I almost would rather have a little bit lengthier of a presentation, either on the Tuesday or the Thursday, maybe double up and then have kind of some time to digest and go through the presentations as opposed to coming in.

[01:37:49] I know that we have to have a certain number of times for public comment and all the important things that we do, but that's just kind of my take on it and the value that I saw going through the process this time. Thank you. Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[01:38:05] And I thank you for the conversation and that we have a space to have it a little bit more length even on the dais next week because I think it's an important one. I sympathize with the new board members. I mean, it is really rough. We all remember my meltdown when I got on the board about the budget. So it was a marker for me, though. It was a marker of how do I shift this? How do we change this? And I, you know, I've definitely changed the way that I've approached the budget as a result of our timeline. I think Mr. Slevin and Dr. Ellis can attest to pretty much as soon

[01:38:42] as we adopt the budget February 2nd, on February 3rd, we're talking about the next year, because you feel the time crunch and you feel that you have to stretch it. And a lot of those things sometimes make it in the sea on as a result of year long conversations and committee work. And I have found the committee work to be very powerful in driving certain initiatives that I have. But again, to get to that 50,000 foot view, you have to have had the experience under your belt of what is needed and a lot of this just the timelines for us are really challenging in particular the calendar year the school year for us we have an additional calendar a school year calendar

[01:39:18] and then we also have a fiscal calendar so I think all of those challenges three years deep I'm I feel pretty good about where we are but I don't want to forget where I was in that process because we are also on staggered terms now we're always going to have new people coming in for better for worse, that's where we are. And it really isn't fair to the new board members to have that crash course. It's the reality, but it is very difficult to contribute to something that you just don't have experience with. And I'm not saying I'm an expert because I'm still learning. But I also feel

[01:39:51] very much like one of the downfalls also is that we keep having budget conversations now as we're leading up to a final adoption still. And we have to keep rehashing this. We keep asking, well, why are we having this conversation? Well, why are you asking for that money now? And well, why are we talking about this? Because in the crash course of the Sion, we cannot project out what those things are going to be. They're variables that maybe we could address if we had a longer timeline. And I'm going to say this, and I don't know how my colleagues are going to feel about this, but I think this is a real opportunity for us to show some united leadership

[01:40:29] and say, this is really constraining, and I know you've had these conversations with the Board of Supervisors, and I know it hasn't changed, and maybe Town of Leesburg is a part of that, too, so if I need to get in the trenches there, I'm happy to have some conversations. But we do have the Joint Supervisor and School Board Committee, and sometimes, to me, those topics feel sort of like a check the box, like we're just informing each other.

[01:40:52] I would love for us to gauge whether this is an area that we want to step up and say, we need something different. It is not working. And I think this year we're really going to feel it. And to Ms. Riccardi's point, when there are big sweeping changes to certain groups, we've seen this in the past, that happen on the budget work session on the 21st, and then budget adoption is two weeks later, you've got groups like LEA and different people scrambling and coming to us in panic. And nobody operates well that way. So what I'd like to see

[01:41:27] is obviously this year is this year, and I'm always kind of regretting when we get to this point and we see the timeline again that, ugh, I didn't have those conversations, so I'm going to remind myself now that it's, I think it's time for us to revisit this with the Board of Supervisors and have a conversation, a bigger conversation that maybe years down the road we can impact this process, because year after year sitting here hearing the timeline and basically having to accept it is really challenging. And it may be more challenging this year than ever.

[01:42:00] And so I think that's kind of where I'm at is sort of a challenge to us as a board to maybe consider having that conversation for something down the road to give, because I think we know enough now that we can stand on that. And certainly it would alleviate a lot of stress across many places. So thank you. Thank you. Okay. Ms. Willoughby? Hearing the feedback, I'm wondering if there is interest of the board um so again the third no the last item well actually it kind of takes

[01:42:38] into both the last two items if because obviously we've had you know significant discussions with staff in terms of you know what the impacts would be of adjusting the seon to either the 12th and have it be part of a school board meeting and or moving to the 7th i would share i think to lobby on behalf of of our amazing team would be to push to the um the 12th if there's not a concern of having the cion on a tuesday and then the first session beginning two days after that it's only

[01:43:16] two days however it adds a whole additional day of um of another meeting so instead of six meetings it would be seven meetings i will also share that we try to strategically program the cadence of the presentations so that recognizing not that business and financial services isn't important but that the you know that the crux of the work is in other departments and having those departments go first so that you're hearing those very important presentations about programs and in different factors early on so I if that is something perhaps chair that if there is a straw poll

[01:43:55] a straw poll interest in. Thank you for the conversation and I really wanted just for myself to take a moment to reflect on the conversation and some of the things that I'm hearing before we move forward with a straw poll. I do appreciate being able to visually see how constraining this is. I couldn't think of a worse time to present the governor's budget but that's something that's completely outside of our control but it does resonate with me how difficult it is to add that piece and to also understand the constraint with the sort

[01:44:35] of drop-dead date that we have to offer to the Board of Supervisors I find that I have not personally felt particularly constrained by the schedule as it stands now, but I also had the opportunity to work on it for a few years before I got here, and I can acknowledge that. So in terms of our planning ahead, I find that I resonate

[01:45:07] personally with two ideas, and that's with presenting the Sion on the 12th and moving forward with trying to leverage change through the Board of Supervisors. I hadn't really contemplated before some of the options like aligning the tax cycle with the fiscal year as opposed I think there are some really interesting things that we could do especially as we move out of the potentially you know it's still unclear but projecting a tightening coming I could see that as being a more

[01:45:45] workable solution so with that before we take us I will technically ask the straw poll to be whether or not your preference is to start with the Sion on the 7th or the 12th but I'd like to offer board members the opportunity to speak to that if they would like to at this time any further discussion okay so would there be a preference from board members to schedule the Sion on the

[01:46:16] 7th if so miss Griffiths of your that you're okay so I see for if your preference is to do it on the 12th. Yeah well I mean okay okay but I mean we have to ultimately make a decision. There are eight people in the room who can vote on it so you're going to have

[01:46:49] to commit. I will and in terms of offering some other context the school board organizational meeting is the day in which we choose the chair and it seems to me an awful lot to say hey guess what in 48 hours you get to chair meeting there there's a lot that goes on in that time and I think it's worth contemplating the fact that that could contempl that could complicate committee assignments or or the you know the process by which all of those things are taken into account from year to year as that could change so with that is there just got yes miss Riccardi I guess

[01:47:27] I would just say on that the the Sion is just a presentation I get that the new chair has got to come in and chair that first meeting and i get that there's pieces of that but we have that pretty well scripted out for a presentation i i would really like us to have the extra week because if we do that then we've got the weekend to digest before we come into a school board meeting and in theory start seeing presentations from staff and then we just kind of move this up so and it also again i i do agree that all of our ancillary groups that want to pitch in and provide feedback are going to have a little bit more time to digest if we move it up to the 7th the 12th is fine if that's a secondary choice, and I'm for either one, but I think the seventh is really going to give us

[01:48:05] a lot more leverage and understanding, and LEA and the other organizations that are supporting us to have some time to process that. Okay. Ms. LaBelle? Thank you, Madam Chair. I have to agree with Ms. Riccardi. If we look at who is sitting on the board now, there is no election going on at this point. We will all be here again, and we have all gone through the process at least once,

[01:48:32] So the fact that we may or may not have a new chair or may or may not have new committee assignments will not necessarily contribute or take away from the need to have as much time as possible with the C on.

[01:48:50] So I think that the 7th would be a more appropriate time. Okay. Just for clarity, I want to reiterate that this is not technically a vote. The official vote will be held on Tuesday night. This is just an opportunity to express your preference.

[01:49:05] on holding the CYON presentation either on the 7th or the 12th and use that to inform next week's vote. Yes, Mr. Pepper. Thank you, Madam Chair. Really just for clarification and saying that, you know, both are better options because it gives us more time. I really wanted to know the pressure that those five days put on Ms. Willoughby and her team. So is there a huge difference for your team between the 7th and the 12th? There is. And so I would clarify if, if it was the

[01:49:43] direction of the board to go with the 7th, I would request in terms of expectations that on the deliverables, meaning you may only receive electronic version of deliverables because it also takes substantial amount of time to produce the books. Um, similarly with the version of limited materials available on the 7th just because of the time constraints and of those

[01:50:13] of losing out on those additional days okay any further discussion all right so i guess if there are going to be amendments to the calendar that come those should be submitted on our typical timeline so that we can contemplate that on tuesday so with that we'll move on yes and actually I think we will, looking at the clock as well, we haven't had a break yet.

[01:50:44] And so if we could do a 10-minute break, Chair, and then we can resume our program. All right. With that, we will take a break and reconvene at 11 a.m. Thank you.

[02:01:36] All right, board members, I'd like to ask you to come back, please. All right. Thanks, everybody. With that, we will come back into our work session. And Ms. Willoughby, the floor is yours.

[02:01:57] Thank you. we will move on to our next section which is regarding multi-year budget forecast i'll just note that we are running a little bit behind according to our schedules so we're going to try to catch up a little bit and i will first turn it over to mr brevnis or mr staley to introduce multi-year budget forecasts sure thank you so just a couple key considerations to think about with the presentation the multi-year budget the multi-year forecast i mean with having done a a lot of forecasts both jay and myself um they're best guests at a given point in time i think that's

[02:02:35] always the key consideration it's not a magic crystal ball we often joke if you're exactly on the line for what your forecast is in any given out year it was probably more by dumb luck than skill and we say that as practitioners who do forecasts for multiple dozens if not hundred school districts uh in terms of forecasting so again it's a best guess at a given point in time it's really important for you all to understand the assumptions behind how the forecast is developed the reliability of those assumptions whether we're talking about things like consumer price index or especially when it's related to your staff the collective bargaining agreement itself since that

[02:03:13] dictates so many of the terms of raises going forward for the organization and then the last thing here really you know key for you all is thinking more about whether or not that forecast supports the ability for you all to offer additional services and programs or do we need a pullback? You know, it's that push-pull type of proposition that the forecast really helps to inform. You know, and again, you know, you're looking multiple years out here. You don't want to just look at that subsequent year because, again, the more proactive you can be in terms of making decisions now, even while still challenging, it's going to be a lot easier to make that

[02:03:50] decision to kind of right-size, so to speak, or alleviate some of those fiscal pressures that you might see in the out years of the forecast so so I've just got a few slides just to update the board on funding that we're looking at for FY28 this is just a quick refresh that I know you're all very familiar with that we receive about 70 percent of our funding from the county and the rest from the state you know those are our two main funding drivers that we build our budget against in terms of available funding and again you have that in your your your packet in terms

[02:04:26] just what that trend line looks like. The multi-year forecast. So back in May, we provided for the first time a multi-year forecast, and we were able to do that because the county was able to provide us with a multi-year forecast of anticipated funding. This was based on their growth factors that they were looking to implement. However, since that time, as you're aware, the county has recognized that there was an issue with how they were calculating that growth factor for LCPS and once that is now aligned we have updated the slides that were presented to you back in May real quickly just in terms of what is being

[02:05:05] depicted here on this slide there's no changes to any other state or other revenue on this slide it really is just looking at two components and that is new anticipated additional county local funding and expenses related just to compensation and so the the top line where it's 119 million for FY28 has been improved so back in May on May 12th before they made their adjustment that was only 101.3 million so it was a substantial correction that we absolutely appreciate and has improved our forecast still though looking at

[02:05:42] those numbers you can see that just to do the minimum per the collective bargaining agreement which is just a step increase and a 2% COLA, along with required health premium increases that we need for the sustainability of the fund, that you can see that it still basically utilizes the majority of that new revenue.

[02:06:04] So out of that $119, we're looking at almost $90 million of that going directly to support compensation. So the bottom line across the board looks more favorable. We don't anticipate going in the red under this high-level scenario. until FY31. The next slide also was from May and it has been updated again. This is where we added another layer to the scenario building. And again, these are the same numbers. All the new numbers are the same from May. So we've added in some additional state revenue. We've added in some

[02:06:42] additional base expenses and some other costs related to inflation. You can also see on this bottom line, that that bottom row is, there's no red across the bottom until FY31. If you were to flip back to the May presentation, that bottom row was entirely red for all four years. So again, that one adjustment to the calculation on the county side has definitely improved our forecast.

[02:07:10] I will say also at this time, this is also their high level forecast. In December is when we will get their official preliminary projection. So the 119, it may improve even further, or perhaps it could go the other direction. I would not be surprised if perhaps it improves.

[02:07:30] I want to highlight, though, that that bottom-- oops, wrong way. So for FY28, again, under this super high-level scenario, that would project about $10.7 million available after compensation and base budget changes.

[02:07:46] Again, I want to highlight we are very early in the budget development process. you know, for example, next year phases of multi-year investments that the board invested in last year are not included in this scenario. New recommendations from staff are not included. They are just in the process right now of really developing their budget proposals for internal review and that ultimately we would be bringing recommendations for school board feedback to the October work session that we have scheduled. Lastly was in terms of budget deliverables. So

[02:08:24] So based on the currently proposed budget calendar, we were anticipating attempting to expand the superintendent's assessment needs proposed budget book to include additional division level reporting.

[02:08:40] Currently, we only publish and report at the department level. We were also looking to expand our organizational chart to include more information on that graphic in terms of the budget and FTE count. And then also we were looking to include a second volume of additional detail similar to what was produced for the school board last year, but wanting to perhaps clean that up and, again, try to meet the board's request for additional information.

[02:09:10] And that, again, is what I was referencing earlier in terms of deliverables. And so related to that would also just be a discussion of the board in terms of other types of information the board would need to help in guiding the school division. And again, based on the currently proposed budget calendar.

[02:09:52] All right, board members, there is a question here that we have to contemplate. What other types of information does the school board need help in guiding the school division? And ultimately, what changes are we looking for in terms of how the information is presented?

[02:10:21] Ms. Riccardi? Thank you, Madam Chair. I think, and I don't know if we're going to get to this today or not, or if it's going to come up in the next work session, but I think it would be really helpful for us to have an idea of the universe of programs that we're offering outside of like core education, core curriculum types of stuff, and then identify the criteria from which we want to evaluate them.

[02:10:52] I think the ones we heard earlier were really useful so that we can start just looking at those investments. I mean, I think that's just, by the way, a good governance thing to be doing anyway, is taking a look at the successes of our programs, the investment we're putting in them, the number of students that are in those programs, the demographics of those students, how many they're serving, the cost per student.

[02:11:13] I think that's something that we should be looking at just from a good governance perspective anyway. And I think now is really the time that we should start building that data out so that um number one we're just aware of it from a separate perspective but then also to help guide our i mean it could be that we decide to make additional investments in some of those programs um in the future in this budget and maybe that some of them we want to either maintain or scale back so i think it's just a good piece of it's a large piece of data i get that but i think that would be a really good thing for us to be able to take a look at and have available thank you Mr. Pepper.

[02:11:51] Thank you. I know this is kind of a harder thing to do, but I know that projection-wise, it's easy to project in the context of the CBA what salary and benefits are going to be years out. I'm particularly concerned about health insurance.

[02:12:07] I really feel like we don't know what's going to happen with health insurance in this country. And I would love to see, and this is kind of a bigger thing here, but I would love to see options, perhaps partnering with other divisions, perhaps partnering with the state at a statewide level of something we can do to both reduce our health insurance costs as a division, but also the health insurance costs that our employees, the burden they face.

[02:12:38] And so we'd love to see if there's a way that we can use that perhaps as our advantage to get a little more flexibility in our budget. Thank you. Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair. I know we're going to share priorities later, and it's already been mentioned here, so I think I'm on the same page as my colleagues. But for me, the mantra this year is staffing, staffing, staffing. I think we're going to be, obviously, it's 90% of our budget.

[02:13:02] We talked about enrollment concerns. So for me, the way the SEON is organized right now with the different departments, it feels like a lot of page flipping when I'm trying to figure out which staffing is aligned to which department. So what I would like to see this year is a consolidated section on what our staffing count just is top to bottom and what those different positions are what the different classifications are and then additionally how and maybe this is more in the presentation but how those staffing standards have evolved maybe over the last three to five years whether that was a state change in code that we had to for class size or the ratios

[02:13:42] I know our special education ratios have had to shift with our enrollment and with our hiring So if we could see that historical look at staffing and what LCPS has done over the years, I think that context for not only our schools, but for us as board members would be really helpful as we're going to be looking at probably adjusted staffing standards, what I would project there's going to be as we attempt to address enrollment issues.

[02:14:08] And I think to Ms. Riccardi's point earlier, then we can make good decisions about differentiated and flexible staffing where we really feel like we don't want to have those gaps. So that's just something I'm noodling on. But I think more clarity, less having to flip around to who owns what, but just a list of staffing and their standards.

[02:14:27] Thank you. That's a point of information just really quickly. Sure. On that, which committee would that fall under or does it? I mean we have a policy could anyone speak to the policy that outlines the staffing standard yeah Mr. Allen we don't have a policy related to staffing standards it's all incorporated as part

[02:15:06] of the budget process and so the school board each year when they adopt the budget they're adopting those staffing standards for that for that upcoming year and so that's why we'll also perhaps propose enhancements you know you know changes to staffing standards for the board to consider and adopt and so it's not really captured as a policy versus it it lives in the budget just have a clear memory of discussing it in that context but thank you for that clarification right any further comments or questions

[02:15:45] at this time no okay so if it could I'm sure sure before we before we move past this a couple of questions for you so do those you know from a feedback lens to those deliverables beyond the the question about the staffing count deliverable which really is the expanded chart with the budget and FTE count do those look like the right deliverables what we want to do is make sure we get

[02:16:21] the deliverables right so is there any additional feedback there Ms. LaBelle? Hello. Regarding the suggestion by Ms. Chernoff about a list of the different programs that we have, and Ms. Riccardi asking basically the same thing, I know we've talked about, you know, how many students are being served, what the cost per student is.

[02:16:52] Could we have a total for each of those programs as well? In other words, if we're doing dual language, how many students are served, how many teachers, staff are needed, how much we're paying per seat.

[02:17:10] And then again, there's more than one dual language program. But all in all, how much does the entire program cost? So we can take a look at that. That's just an example. I'm not saying that that was just the first thing that came to mind. Ms. LaBelle, I appreciate your comment.

[02:17:28] And I would say, I guess, in terms of building that out to the next step, it seems as if something we would need to look at for all of the special programs. right and we took that down as information kind of answering the question of other information the school board might need in terms of helping to guide not sure in terms of the deliverable that that would be part of the cion but i do think it's information that we can provide in a work session so i think as before we get to the cion we would want to provide the board that information in a work session that would be wonderful thank you i'm wondering too if we

[02:18:07] just need to shift some of that work to spc as an ongoing sort of kpi process where we're sort of evaluating those different things in preparation each year for the budget so if we can think about how we want to structure that if that's something that the board is going to need going forward those are key questions that we can integrate as we're getting updates from those programs all the time yeah and i think there's probably my team needs to to take this feedback and have some some deeper conversation about how we're defining programs i mean i think certainly special programs is part of it i think there are other things that we invest in that

[02:18:44] we want i would want to take a deeper dive with my team and and come back and talk at a work session with you all about that and then maybe from there we can figure out you know how do we how do we look at that and where's the right place for that to live and certainly same conversation with staffing standards although just generally the staffing standards as has been said lives within the budget process um anything else on deliverables because i do have a question i want to ask the board based on that i just wanted to clarify there is technically a policy on class size it's It's policy 50-80, and it sits within curriculum and instruction, I believe.

[02:19:24] But there is a policy that sets the class size by grade level, by, I guess, school level, elementary, secondary. Well, really, it's a little bit more complicated than that. But it's policy 50-80, and I believe that would sit in C&I.

[02:19:45] Yeah, Dr. Spence, if you'd like to proceed. Yeah, thank you. Right. And, yeah, there certainly is a policy that governs class size. the SOQs which obviously also impact staffing standards for us because we have to at least meet the SOQs although we pretty much exceed the SOQs in most categories so there's a couple of different places those live which I think is why we try to put that inside of the budget process all of that said so if these are the deliverables this is in some ways substantively different

[02:20:19] than previous years right so I'm gonna make a last-ditch pitch to not ask our team to be prepared to deliver these on the 7th of January because this is substantively different and you're talking about a team that's already pretty stretched based on working on the ERP transition to finance at the end of this school year so I would ask the board to at least consider that Sharon's being nice but she's quite stressed over here when she's responding to your questions about how how much of a problem is it to go a week earlier I

[02:20:54] I think it's a significant challenge for our team, and every day we can give them, given the timeline that you've seen earlier, is helpful. I appreciate the conversations. I understand the frustrations. I also understand the timeline we're working from with the tax rate from the advertisement from the Board of Supervisors.

[02:21:14] And I'm just asking the board to consider staff burden here. And certainly I think we could, you know, I could do a presentation on the 12th, and then that gives you a couple of days before we get into the departmental presentation starting on Thursday. but I'm really concerned about our department's ability to deliver on that a week earlier.

[02:21:33] So I just want to throw that out there as my last pitch on that before you all take it up for consideration. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Mr. Carty. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I guess one of my questions would be, in order to help alleviate some of that, could we start seeing the framework for these documents this fall in kind of a straw man perspective?

[02:21:58] because I'm really hesitant to say, yep, I'm good with all these because I don't know how you're defining org chart or how you're, you know, when you're talking about wanting to make changes to this, see on detail, what you're specifically thinking about and, frankly, what you think would work and what you have access to and how you want to deliver it.

[02:22:14] So I think it would be really helpful to see, and I'm not saying a full-scale, like, workup. I'm just saying can you, I think it would be really helpful to see a couple of examples of just pieces like I had done at the school board meeting a while ago about showing like by department or whatever, can we just see an example of each of these so we kind of get our head wrapped around what you might want, how you want to do it so that we make sure we're getting it? Because I would really hate for you to go through all this effort and create these and then us come back in January and say, look, this isn't as helpful to us as it could

[02:22:50] have been. I think we have some time now where we could really get in and work at it. And maybe this is a FNO activity working session kind of a thing I don't know but I think that it would be helpful for us to take a look at this ahead of time before we just say yep this is it go for it because one sentence for each of those probably doesn't do it justice. Ms. Willoughby? Yes in October so I will for the first bullet it really is the book as it's currently structured it's just expanding to the division level and so we can bring in October what those divisions would look like and

[02:23:25] basically have a list of previously you saw 13 departments and now you're going to see x many number of divisions um so the structure of the book per se won't necessarily change um it's pretty static the way it's it's currently structured um with our current software the expanded org chart we absolutely could bring a mock-up of what we're envisioning with that it's essentially taking the current org chart that's in the book but we can bring that in and then similarly we can bring another example of what was produced for the school board previously last year and just have

[02:24:02] a discussion on what was shared and if you know what was helpful and our inability or challenges to go beyond that additional level of detail again I think this is where as you heard from Mr. Bovenison about the role of the school board and wanting to give you the adequate enough you adequate level of information without drowning you to where then it becomes you lose context and we're having to do a lot of explaining of what you are seeing because it is at such a extreme level of detail and and so it will be during our october whole board school our whole

[02:24:40] school board work sessions where we would have the ability to preview yes we're on the i think it's the second meeting the 27th absolutely great thank you for that clarification um any further Ms. LaBelle. Thank you, Madam Chair. The reason I had asked about the costs of the program, the number of students, and the number of staff, is I was considering Mr. Bubnis' chart that he had with high impact, low cost, low impact, high cost, those four boxes. Unless we know

[02:25:16] how many programs fit and where they fit into that little chart, then we can't really make a decision about which of the programs that are having a high impact and we need to absolutely keep or a low impact and maybe we should consider withdrawing them, drawing them back.

[02:25:42] So that's the reason I asked for. And as we move forward into this process, maybe we won't get to that point this year. This might be something for next year's budget. But I think that at some point in time, we kind of need to look at those programs in that framework, in that light. Thank you. Dr. Spence, could I ask you to respond and then could we get back to the presentation just with an eye on timing? Yes, ma'am. And I think I agree with that. And I think as we're talking about that in program evaluation in general, one of the important parts of that conversation is what what do we mean by impact what do we mean by impact right so just wanting

[02:26:21] to ask the board to be thinking about that too because I think there are some programs that we would put in place because it creates opportunity and and then how do you measure that opportunity versus anticipated impact or outcomes specifically versus maybe you're saying it all has to do with SOL scores which I hope is not what we're saying but looking at you know a good conversation for us to have between administration and the school board is how do we want to define impact and is that program by program so we will need to figure that

[02:26:51] out as well transitioning a little bit to enrollment trends so just kind of looking from a national perspective and then zooming in here a little bit more locally as you go through what your enrollment trends look like so we've seen decreases across the country I mean various pockets are growing in some areas but for the most part just overall k-12 education we're just seeing a decline so certainly many factors are impacting that we have families that are having fewer children. That's the biggest driver of that. We have less kids to be able to educate.

[02:27:28] There's more opportunities for parents to be able to choose where they're having their children attend on a national level. So that's driving a bit of that as well. And so there's just homeownership. Homeownership. Recently, we keep seeing the median age of homeowners going up, and the older it is, typically the less number of children we have in those families. So it's just several mitigating issues. I don't know if there's anything one thing you can pinpoint and say this is kind of that that key driver but more importantly what's going on at the local level and even within your county I'm guessing there are various areas that have grown more than others

[02:28:04] more rural components versus more that have grown. Are they now built out? We see that in several areas so if you have some fast growing suburban areas that have grown and then you get to a point Where you just kind of have no more ability to grow in some areas.

[02:28:20] And then you have some aging in place that's going on as well. So, again, lots of mitigating pieces to it as far as trying to determine those areas and what they are. But kind of as has been mentioned today, staffing. So when 90% of the budget is people or in a people business, how do we correlate the staffing needs versus those enrollment trends?

[02:28:44] And I think one of the big shifts that we've seen is talking with schools, especially post-pandemic, is the needs of students. It feels like the needs of students has drastically changed post-pandemic compared to pre-pandemic. And so it's not just simply the number of students.

[02:29:00] And I know we've talked about those staffing factors, but what are those student needs? And so my wife was a former director of special education, and so we had some great talks with walking our dogs. she's telling me all the needs they had and me telling her the money didn't exist and so um thankfully we made it back no one got hurt during the conversation but it was um it's certainly there are just an enormous piece of needs that are going on and so how do we keep that in the forefront whenever you're having those conversations on what needs to change now because if our if um our community is changing um based on how we have been growing etc what does what's the what's the

[02:29:40] downside of that look like and so certainly looking at those elementary staffing levels I think is kind of where we have seen as Matt and I've been looking around the the biggest change thus far so as you're starting to compare what's our graduating class look like compared to our kindergarten class and how quickly is that that change occurring and then you start getting into all the discussions and some of the things that we'll look at later in this afternoon regarding okay now what how do we how do we kind of deal with that. So when we look at enrollment for LCPS and this morning

[02:30:18] we're going to look at what the enrollment trends mean for revenue and expenses, there will be additional time in October work sessions in order to dive into the actual enrollment trends and how they're projected and how those are modeled, etc. Today is really focused on how it impacts the budget or how it affects the budget. On one side enrollment really drives revenue. State revenue makes up 27-ish percent of our total LCPS funding and enrollment drives a huge chunk of that through what's called average daily membership centric funding or ADM centric funding.

[02:30:50] It contributes to basic aid, which is the largest component. We get special EL and special education add-on components. We have compensation supplementals. All of that is driven by total enrollment. And then on the expense side for what goes out, enrollment drives, like we've been talking about, 90% of our budget, and the vast majority of that is driven by staffing standards.

[02:31:12] And staffing standards incorporate everything from teachers to APs to librarians to deans to some of our technology positions. It really is the backbone of the budget for LCPS, and enrollment is the primary variable in that.

[02:31:27] And additionally, it drives some of the school-based support. So when we think about allotments, that sits behind a lot of the allotment funding that goes out directly to schools and principals that they have access to to spend for the local needs at their schools every year as well. So if we look at what that means division-wide, and again, this is here to help think about 28, 29, 30, as we think about long-term trends, pre-pandemic, LCPS enrollment was growing pretty quickly.

[02:31:57] We leveled off during pandemic. We grew a little bit, and it's been on a consecutive decline. So if we look at the budgeted enrollment for FY26, we were at 81,629 students division-wide, inclusive of pre-K through returning graduates.

[02:32:15] FY26 actuals were just over 80,500, so a shortfall of about 1,100 students. We're seeing that trend continue for FY27, so off of a budgeted CIP enrollment of 80,201, our unofficial count on day 15 was 78,039, or about 2,100 students short.

[02:32:38] And I do want to emphasize that this is the early count, So we're comparing a count that budgeted enrollment is supposed to be on September 30, and that unofficial count is on September 3rd. So it will continue to fluctuate throughout the year. But that really does drive not only the staffing that we have in place for this year, but as well as the revenue that we're expected to receive.

[02:33:00] In prior budget cycles, we've also talked a lot about why the budget changes despite slowing enrollment. And one of the reasons that we've talked about is what that population looks like when we look at students that receive additional required services.

[02:33:15] So we do have our special education students. We've seen similar trends there, where in FY26, we were budgeted for 11,147 students, and we came in at 10,810.

[02:33:32] So we were about 337 students short, or about 3%. And again, we're seeing the same thing for FY26. or I'm sorry FY27 we're budgeted 11,526 where we expected to be at the end of the school year and as of September 3rd we're at 10,475 I do want to emphasize here again there's a timing difference so when we budget for special education services we're actually budgeting for students at the end of the year so that 11,526 estimate is for the end of this school year and we're comparing to September 3rd so there's an entire year's worth of identification and

[02:34:11] eligibility services that have not yet happened and then one of the other populations we talked about that have a special staffing standard tied to the population in our English language learners and we've seen very similar trends there in FY 26 we were about 1,616 students short from budget and then we're shaping up to see something very similar in 27 but again the same caveat outholds that we're looking at end-of-year numbers compared to early September numbers so we are missing out on an entire year of its student

[02:34:47] identification eligibility reviews etc so we do expect these numbers to change but going back to how this affects the budget when you look at the state budget we do have those ADM centric accounts in there the money that we get from the state on a per pupil basis the largest is around basic aid and that's per student we get about six thousand dollars five hundred or five thousand eight hundred ninety five dollars per student and that's a variable number based on average daily membership we also get special add-ons for EL students depending on the weed access levels as of September 30th and then we also have a

[02:35:25] special education add-on that was added to the budget I believe two years ago based on special education service levels based on December 1st child count numbers so as you think about how enrollment fluctuates throughout the year it has a very direct impact on our revenue levels that we get from the state and I know Miss Willoughby has shared those numbers during several board updates regarding how that might affect FY 27 revenue given the enrollment numbers we were looking at on previous slides and then finally on the staffing standard component for kind of what goes out on the expense side our

[02:36:05] staffing standards were built really when LCPS was still growing rapidly and they were put there to ensure that we maintained a base level of equity across all of our schools, that schools could be appropriately staffed when we were growing, that we maintained at least a minimum compliance with the standards of quality and to demonstrate where indeed we actually exceed the majority of those standards, and as well as to importantly for this conversation assistant transparent budgeting like we talked about a few minutes ago the staffing standards are part of the adopted budget each year and that drives the vast majority of the FTE counts the dollars etc for what show up

[02:36:44] in the operating fund in FY 27 we had just over 200 staffing standards that equated for about twelve thousand three hundred twenty nine FTEs if we were to estimate and when you think about all of this together that then sets a stage for how do we balance revenues versus expenditures with where we want to be for enrollment projections so with that I'll turn it back to our colleagues for an exercise on enrollment projections set it up yeah sure so for for this we wanted

[02:37:21] to do an exercise regarding the two options that are under consideration here and in case you please interject if I don't summarize these correctly so looking at two options for you to provide some feedback on for the administration in terms of another i like i wish i wonder type of exercise so we're going to do this in kind of two different phases here two different steps first we're going to do an i like i wish i wonder on option a which is looking at a lower enrollment assumption so this would be more conservative revenue estimate there's a lower risk of budgeting revenue that does not materialize

[02:37:58] this may require additional staffing resources if enrollment exceeds expectations which may be difficult to acquire so I don't know if Casey or Sharon had anything else to add on to option A outside of that summary I would just maybe clarify that also kind of what's embedded in those bullet points is what also happens with a lower enrollment assumption is that if we were to receive more students so like let's say we budget at a lower projection and now we get more students then that means

[02:38:33] we may get additional revenue but we may have larger class sizes because we've already hired teachers based on the budget and enrollment and even though we may have the funds available we may not be able to secure additional teachers based on those staffing standards because that period has already happened so there might be a recruitment issue i think is a fair way to summarize that so so like i said for that option think through i like i wish and i wonder related option a the lower enrollment assumption then j and i can come around and start to collect some

[02:39:12] sticky notes and and post them up so sorry thank you um it recognizes the potential revenue from

[02:43:31] higher enrollment support staffing based on anticipated student demand and greater risk of a revenue shortfall if enrollment comes in lower so being more aggressive in terms of the revenue assumption which results in potentially higher staffing levels if enrollment does not pan out via the projection so and sorry casey sharon i don't know if you had anything else to add on

[02:44:02] on option b okay okay um so in looking at both i mean there's certainly similar um similar i

[02:51:58] likes i wishes and i wonders um for both of those um assumptions as far as which to use to drive the budget so within your uh i think it's within your binder in the binder you should have four dots so we are going to ask you take off one of those dots and vote for either option a or option be on one of the uh the the boards behind us so that you can uh the the budget team has a uh a path forward and how best to prepare this upcoming budget so is there a path that you prefer one over

[02:52:28] the other um all this feedback will be really helpful for the support services team when they are presenting the detailed presentation on enrollment of the projections what we're seeing happen this year. So a lot of these questions will be very helpful for Ms. Taya as she prepares that presentation. And then also with the dots, while hypothetically, if all nine landed on option A, I know there's a whole system of how Ms. Tate does enrollment projections that may lean towards

[02:53:03] B. So I just want to emphasize it's an exercise. It's not a binding dot commitment. So just to state that but it will be very helpful information in terms of as if if you were the projector where would you land in terms of these two philosophies and so if you can yes please can i ask a question while we're doing that just as because you just said something that i i'm not i wasn't aware of so this state if is this then influencing our request from the commonwealth for a budget that

[02:53:41] is our estimates or is that an internal projection that you all are doing based on data that you get from the Commonwealth? The support services team does enrollment projections as part of the capital improvement project budget process. And then we use that first year projection. So for FY28, to help drive the development of the operating budget. Okay, but there's no reporting into the Commonwealth about kind of what you're estimating for budgeting for? Well, we use those numbers in terms of the funding templates. So when so for example, like those VDOE funding templates that I was referencing during the budget calendar.

[02:54:19] When the budget is, when the governor releases, you know, her budget and we have those funding templates, there's an input spot for enrollment and we would then use the budgeted enrollment to then determine what the projected revenue.

[02:54:35] Okay. So we're, we're, we're using our own numbers to give to the state in using their, in their, in their formula, our projections. Correct. Okay. Got it. Thank you.

[02:54:55] All right.

[02:55:42] looks like option A was the most popular so all right so we want to move in the salary and benefit update no I I know it's a difficult one for sure so yeah I'm sorry so with the salary and benefit update some of the key considerations and levers here to think about is really kind of the overarching question is what is the goal of the compensation philosophy of the district I think it's been mentioned a few times to be an employer of choice for teachers and

[02:56:19] related staff throughout the region a lot of competition obviously with all of the nearby school divisions and then even the Maryland and DC public school system as well not too far away in addition to other possible private and charter options as well so also thinking about what types of staff is LCPS most in need of in terms of recruitment retention and the like and also who are you competing with for staff not only the nearby school divisions and school districts in neighboring Maryland but are you competing with say for folks with CDLs and bus drivers with folks like Amazon or UPS or FedEx or something of

[02:56:55] the like so you have to take into the competition is not just for the school divisions that are nearby your neighbors but also other employers for non teaching staff in particular so then also a good understanding of your staff demographics and how the compensation structure may impact costs do you have a lot more staff in certain types job types they're much more senior than junior what type of direction is the district looking for you're trying to recruit more folks with experience are you looking for more youth to be interjected to say into your staff population just a better understanding of what the demographics look like of your actual staff as well there's also a

[02:57:33] good good practice in terms of looking at salary and benefit overall so with that thank you next we have several updates on the compensation side for the FY28 budget. If you think back to prior year superintendent's estimate of needs and the adopted budget, one of the largest drivers every year is what's happening on the compensation side. In November of 2025, LCPS ratified its first collective bargaining agreement that established minimums for certain elements of employee pay for FY27,

[02:58:12] 28 and 29. When we look at FY 28, those minimums included a step increase and a 1% top of scale bonus for eligible employees, a 2% COLA, minimum 2% COLA, and all of that is subject to affordability for what's appropriated from the county. Early estimates are that that step increase for LCPS within the operating fund would cost $28.8 million. The associated 1% top of scale bonus

[02:58:43] for employees would be $2 million, and the 2% COLA across all salary scales within the operating fund would be an additional $30.7 million for a minimum compensation increase estimated at $61.5 million for FY28 based on the minimums of what's included in the collective bargaining agreement.

[02:59:04] The other large area for compensation increases when we think about total compensation for employees are health premiums. In FY28, staff has indicated that our intent so far leading into FY28 is to propose a 14% premium increase across all insurance plans for plan year 28.

[02:59:26] That 14% increase, the employer contribution would be an additional $20.5 million, which puts the entire compensation increase at approximately $82 million between the minimums required per the CBA, as well as the health premium increase.

[02:59:45] For that health premium increase, there's a couple of slides on this just to put it in context. LCPS has steadily been raising these rates since FY22, and the FY27 increase for plan year 27 was 20% with the intent to decrease future years as long as claims continue to trend downwards towards national averages.

[03:00:07] Part of this is part of a long-term strategy to balance a health self-insurance fund, which we'll talk more about in a little bit. But over these last several years, we've looked at revenue enhancements, adjustments to plan design, and seeking more affordable options through contract recompets in order to balance this fund instead of relying solely on premium increases.

[03:00:28] This slide you previously saw in May of 2026 when we brought the first look of the FY28 budget to the school board. So you have seen these numbers before, but it just shows that this multi-year strategy is working. You can look at that over-short position when you compare overall, or overall revenues to overall costs for the fund. If you think back to the last several years worth of quarterly reports that we've provided at board, the Health Self-Insurance Fund has been running in a deficit, but this multi-year strategy has been working and we're actually

[03:01:02] expected to turn the corner beginning in FY29 with the FY28 forecast to be relatively flat at $4.9 million net loss. All of this, again, is part of a larger strategy as we've looked at health -- the cost of health care, the cost of health insurance for our medical care as well as our pharmacy claims were rising pretty significantly.

[03:01:30] Beginning in FY29, we did see a small dip around COVID years, but we've been exceeding the national averages for the last five or six years regarding what our total year over year claims cost increases have been. The good news, though, is as we've indicated during FY26 quarterly financial reports, is that we are-- we have started to see those trends decline a little bit towards national averages.

[03:01:55] What that means from the premium side is we did have to have relatively quick escalations in premiums to rebalance, but again, we think that we're at a position where over the next several years we should be able to bring those back in line with trend for claims, and we anticipate that premium increases will continue to decline in future years, so long as claims costs do the same.

[03:02:17] At this point, I'll turn it over to Ms. Brown to talk about some of the other options that we're looking at for FY28 healthcare. Good afternoon. I have three proposals that are being considered that will impact retirees and their healthcare coverage.

[03:02:34] The first, shown here on the screen, is to bring us into regulatory compliance with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Our pharmacy coverage, as part of our medical benefit we offer retirees, needs to stay under a certain threshold.

[03:02:50] And so our benefit consultants take our premium rate, calculate the true cost of the pharmacy coverage, which we refer to as egg whip, for our retirees. And we have found that one rate on our pre-2014 retiree health insurance premium sheet is over that threshold.

[03:03:10] And so this provides us an opportunity to simplify. this particular retiree rate sheet by eliminating an unnecessary group distinction here. So with the proposed or the anticipated premium increases year for year between now and plan year 28, the projected 10 to 14 LCPS years of service rate would be $584.48, which is again

[03:03:43] over that threshold. So we are considering a change that would combine the 10 to 14 group with the 15 to 19 group, and the 10 to 14, the retirees on the 10 to 14 group would see a decrease in their premium amount for plan year 28. And again, this is to ensure that we are in compliance with the true cost of our egg whip plan. The next change that is being considered is to fully leverage

[03:04:18] the Virginia Retirement System Health Insurance Credit Program. The rationale behind this proposed change, it would promote shared responsibility between retirees and the active employees. Active employees pay a portion for their health insurance premiums, and some retirees have a $0 rate, which can result in a richer benefit year over year than current employees.

[03:04:46] This proposed change also helps us to improve long-term sustainability to offset these rising health care costs and to reduce the future pressure on this fund. It will help manage OPEB liability, moving away from fully subsidized health care coverage for retiree health benefits.

[03:05:04] And again, it will bring in line to have a consistent benefit philosophy between the retiree coverage and our active employees. And so the Virginia Retirement System Health Insurance Credit Program is one that LCPS contributes into for every employee that participates in the VRS system.

[03:05:26] The way that VRS works, some employees are in group one and others are in group two. Our contributions vary based on group membership, but everyone that retires with Loudoun County Public Schools that is eligible for our retiree health insurance will be eligible for a health insurance credit under the Virginia Retirement System. And so as we move forward, we are considering eliminating the zero dollar retiree health insurance premium and making that

[03:05:59] premium $22.50. And we have derived this number because this is the minimum monthly benefit possible for a retiree to receive from Virginia Retirement System if they are eligible for our retiree health insurance coverage. So our hope is that this will be a neutral impact on retirees as they do not receive this health insurance credit unless they are participating in an eligible plan.

[03:06:30] And so this is over and above the amount that they would get in their normal retirement monthly benefit. So we're hoping that we can leverage this program, this benefit that our retirees have access to, that we have contributed towards for their entire career. So we currently offer retiree health insurance plans with $0 premiums in two scenarios.

[03:07:01] So our pre-2014 retirees with 25 years of service in our Medicare Advantage plan and our post-2014 retirees where only the employee is enrolled in both our OAP plan and in our Medicare Advantage plan. 64% of our retirees are enrolled in these plans and are paying the $0 premium.

[03:07:20] And again, we have contributed towards this program throughout their careers. And so by increasing the $0 premiums to this $22.50, we would be improving the revenue for the self-insurance fund by $465,000 annually.

[03:07:40] And we know how important retiree health care is. And so we want to, as part of these proposed changes, be sure that our retirees are aware of what we are contemplating. And so our Retiree Fall Newsletter was just published.

[03:07:55] It is on the streets, as they say in my department. that does have some information about the proposed changes to be watching out for any formal communications about what we might be considering should this become something that is considered in another school board setting we will send out robo calls and emails letting them know that there is opportunity for public input and of course we want to coordinate with the lrea to ensure that they can leverage their communication channels so that every retiree is aware of the proposed changes and have an opportunity to weigh in on those changes and then the third change

[03:08:33] is a revision to policy 7628 retirement benefits it currently reads that for employees who retire on or after july 1st 2014 contributions made by the school board will be based on a flat rate determined by the school board currently equal to the school board contribution to the oap employee-only coverage with contributions capped at 150 of the 2014 contribution so that's a lot But essentially, it is a measure to control, to put a cap on the amount that LCPS would contribute towards retiree health insurance coverage.

[03:09:11] That cap, as it is written here in the policy, is $975.65. So we are proposing a change to this policy to bring us into alignment with where we are today with our contributions. We are proposing the change that we would establish the new cap at 150% of the school board contribution to the 2028 active employee OAP employee only coverage amount.

[03:09:37] So this would tie our retiree health insurance premium rates with a contribution made by the school board to our active employee rate to hopefully bring consistency and balance to those different employee groups that are covered. The next proposed revision to this policy would be to codify our current LCPS practice, which is to increase the retiree health insurance rates by the same percentage that we increase our active employee health insurance rates.

[03:10:10] And then the third revision to this policy would just be setting a review period of at least every 10 years so that the school board can ensure that this number still remains appropriate at 150% of the 2028 rate. So if the proposed revision were accepted, the 150% of the proposed 2028 plan year rate for active employee-only OAP coverage, the new LCPS contribution cap would be $1,934.

[03:10:46] Again, this ties the retiree rates with the active employee benefits. We will know that the rates will be the proposed increases to rates will be the same between active and retirees. It will have the review period built in, and it still allows for market adjustments should the market dramatically change, and again, helps us to have better management or just another step towards our responsible management of the OPEB liability.

[03:11:16] And just one other note, the new cap of $1,934 in our proposed retiree rate structure for plan year 28 the highest employer contribution would be 1624 dollars and 96 cents so we would have quite a lot of room between the current employer the highest employer contribution rate to this cap so it would be several years before we would run up against that cap and need to make any adjustments or to move some of the cost of the plan from the employer to the employee thank you

[03:11:59] Okay. So, I think there's an appetite for questions. Before we move on to lunch, Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you, Madam Chair. I chair the Finance and Operations Committee, and I assume this is going to come through the Finance and Ops after it is put out there in the retiree fall newsletter, robocalls, an email, and I guess it's listed here, coordination with LREA.

[03:12:30] I am actually we we had an issue when we were making changes last time so it is going to be part of the finance and ops and just confirm but I ask that my colleagues you're probably gonna get hit with a lot of emails please explain to them the situation here with the changes to the policy and also maybe if they don't have this document send it to them and get their thoughts we really need to get our retirees thoughts before we make any decisions and it does come to the

[03:13:05] F&O so I need I will need our committee let me just say that we'll need absolute feedback total feedback on this proposal thank you okay so seeking clarification to that point since we're talking about revision to policy I had a question about that as well but this is through the budgetary process could you speak a little bit further about the what the proposed track is here to making sure these updates are handled adequately sure so as part of the budget

[03:13:42] process also the school board adopts the salary scales as well as any benefit programs and so historically you know you may recall in January we would have a dedicated presentation on compensation and recognizing how important this is this is one example where we're trying to get information before the board earlier so you're not hearing it for the first time in january and so that's why we're providing an update related to compensation and as you're hearing related to benefits so for benefits you heard about the

[03:14:17] premium increase as well as the other proposed changes i think the the timeline would be of more of just starting the conversation making sure it's public so that there are no surprises in january And then in January, should the board adopt these proposed changes, then there would be, you know, the required changes that would be needed to the policy.

[03:14:40] I'm not so sure it would necessarily be a separate track of the policy versus the budget. I mean, this is just one example of I'm drawing a blank of, but I'm sure there are others where operationally there may be some changes made. And then we need to go back and make sure that our policy is in alignment.

[03:14:57] So this could be a longer-term conversation, but ultimately this is something that we should reflect upon before we approve the budget, and we can work with Mr. Allen to make sure that that's handled appropriately. Let's see. Ms. LaBelle?

[03:15:14] Yes, I understand about the raises that the retirees will have to pay, But many of our retirees also have their husband or wife or special children that are also receiving benefits.

[03:15:32] You haven't mentioned anything about the cost for those policies. So if you could include that in the information that you're sending out, I'd appreciate it. I know how many emails I'll get. Thank you, Ms. Griffiths.

[03:15:49] Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you, thank you, thank you. This is so great to hear it in September instead of January. So I am so grateful for this shift and your responsiveness to what happened in the past. I would just ask that as we go forward, I know last time there was a lot of questions, I'll call them questions, that were being raised and also some accusations of what was happening that weren't always rooted in the full context of what was actually happening and who was impacted.

[03:16:23] a lot of those FAQ documents and different things were created in response I would just ask if it's not already if that's something we could think forward on who is this going to impact who's going to lose out who's going to be paying more who's going to have those questions about their spouse whose coverage is changing I mean you guys are the ones that know all of these things we really tried to school ourselves up quick last time with the committee but I would just ask if we could get ahead of that with the faq document that was really helpful and kind of providing a context for our community so if that could be included in the newsletter or whatever or for us that would also

[03:16:59] be helpful thank you thank you miss ricarni thank you madam chair so i would say um you know on the collapsing the pre-2014 group rates um one i think that um is a really i think good move it's pretty favorable to everybody so I'm all for that you know I have some concerns with the second one mostly because if you calculate out the $22.50 per month I guess in theory per person that's about

[03:17:36] $270 a month a year per retiree and if spouses are on that too that's a chunk of money that they would be paying for health care that wouldn't necessarily be budgeted and I can appreciate you know retirees on fixed budgets that's a that's an ask and something we need to be careful of I'm I have a lot of questions and really need to dive into the policy 76 28 revision because I have a lot more concerns about about that so I'm just gonna put a pin in that one for a minute because I've got a bunch of bunch of questions I'll send you over send over to you all but that

[03:18:14] one is I think of the three my most concerning for a couple of reasons so I'll just put that out there for what it is and we'll come back to it another time thank you actually can I ask one question one data point do we know how many retirees are currently at or near that cap the the 975 cap do we have any idea of like how many retirees are getting close to that the premium cap I

[03:18:51] I believe that in the past, for this plan year, LCPS's contribution is actually exceeding the $975, which is why we are proposing the change to align where we are today with policy.

[03:19:08] That was a result of the premium increases that were applied to both the employee side and the employer side, because we have shared along with the employees the increase of our health insurance premium costs. do we know what our dollar exposure is going to be on on that I'll get I'll get you guys separately in this because I just have a lot of questions about about this one in particular thank you board members any further questions all right seeing none I'm going to ask vice chair Donahue to please read her disclosure and then we will recess for lunch thank you madam chair as a member of the London

[03:19:48] County School Board I make the following disclosure to the school board into the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding employee salaries the budget and or health insurance and any other discussion that may include or affect salary and benefits for LCPS employees. Specifically, my spouse, my minor children, and I are enrolled in LCPS health insurance that may be affected by any potential changes to employees' salaries, the budget, and or health insurance. Additionally, my sister-in-law is an LCPS employee who does not reside with me and is not dependent on me.

[03:20:15] These subjects include thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may be affected, of which my spouse, my minor children, my sister-in-law, and I am included. I can and will participate fairly objectively and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. All right, we have reached time for a break, so the board is now in recess and will reconvene at 1250.

[03:20:53] The school board is coming out of recess at this time.

[03:21:13] Next up, we will head in, we'll continue with our budget discussions. Ms. Willoughby the floor is yours my microphone situated. Yes, so we've got as I mentioned earlier The second half will be a little more of a deeper dive And where we will talk even more about the priorities that we've already heard about from any of you and with that I will turn it over to mr

[03:21:52] Bredness sure and we still plan at a 145 just to make sure for the budget stuff. Sure. Okay So just want to kick this off like in in some of the other sections here with just talking about some of the key considerations and levers. So the one thing is just to think more about, and some of this is kind of rehashing of what we had mentioned earlier when we were talking about the framework that Jay and I have worked with, you know, even prior to joining Baker Tilly, in terms of thinking through, you know, how does the prioritization work, the areas of different possible reductions in terms of

[03:22:30] reiterating that graph that we had shared earlier. We're thinking through from the revenue enhancements, which are a little more difficult thinking about efficiencies in terms of controls and shifts of current expenditures are there different ways we can deliver services again in terms of being possibly more efficient and then finally kind of getting into that last option on kind of the continuum of service level reductions possibly so you know really thinking through in terms of the prioritize and the must-haves versus the nice-to-haves like we've talked before you know and then also thinking through the considerations of not just reducing programs to close the gap but are the other things that you

[03:23:07] might need to do a shift in terms of current expenses to meet those changing needs and students like Casey articulated with the enrollment numbers in terms of the changes in terms of looks like more sped students of are being identified in terms of your current population so does that mean an impossible shift an approach that you might need to take in terms of current expenses as well and like Jay had mentioned before two schools are a people business but need to establish and follow guardrails as well as the one point we'd articulate and one thing I just wanted to mention really quick kind of piggybacking on talking about programs earlier in the day I just want

[03:23:45] to echo the superintendent's point about making sure that there's a good conversation in terms of what the definition of a program is for a school district because that might not be as easy as it seems on its face programs might be as simple as maybe a certain division of a department is a program possibly in terms of the definition that you come up with it might be a service that spans multiple departments multiple divisions different schools demographics etc that might be a lot harder to quantify in terms of how your accounting system and HR system are structured so walking through it

[03:24:21] creating definitions for what programs look like and what those programs are I I think it will be a really important step that might take time, too, to get really good reporting on that as well. And I think that's really important to keep in mind as a lead-in to this section, in particular since we're talking about particular programs or services or strategies to evaluate for your consideration, too.

[03:24:45] So I think having that conversation to do that, having a discussion collectively, I think will ultimately serve you in the long run. But just a forewarning, it might take some time before you're able to get information and data that's more neatly might not be the right word, but aligned with what that structure looks like, because your systems might not necessarily report out easily on that structure.

[03:25:08] So just wanted to offer that piece of advice, too. Thank you. In May, we did bring to the school board our initial FY28 budget outlook that included a five-year review.

[03:25:24] And we also announced the AIM budget strategy to go along with what we've been calling a new budget era, knowing that we actually have five-year guidance from the county of Loudoun. Associated with that, when we unveiled AIM, it stood for align, invest, and maximize, which was supposed to be an all-encompassing budget strategy for what we would be doing to make sure that we were preparing for the future in this new era.

[03:25:46] AIM really had four primary components or phases associated with it. There was centralized planning, which was a continuation of work that we've been doing for a long time within LCPS, which really worked on standardized forms, enhanced training for budget managers across the division, and providing centralized guidance for what every department should be doing as they think about their base budget for the following year.

[03:26:10] We've also been doing budget deep dives, and I'll talk more about these in a few slides, But these really have been line-item reviews of all O&M accounts within the operating fund and many of our non-FTE salary accounts. So when you think about extracurriculars and part-time and overtime, we've done deep dives into all of those as well.

[03:26:29] So that's that other 11% of the budget that we've been talking about. We have been doing targeted program reviews, which are similar to deep dives, but do involve an operational component where we look at how the program is running and the outcomes it's expected to achieve. Bless you.

[03:26:47] And we're also teeing up new investments where any investment within the budget will go through a high level of scrutiny to make sure that we are targeting any new dollar and prioritizing where needs are aligned to LCPS strategies and priorities and making sure that all decisions are funding and resource-informed, not only for FY28, but going into longer-term reviews as well.

[03:27:09] All of the AIM actions have been sequenced, and we've been working on this for the last several months. Main components have been the budget deep dives. Usually we start the budget, just for context, usually we start budget conversations in mid-August.

[03:27:29] We started the first deep dive in late June or early July. So we started the process really six to eight weeks earlier than we have in prior years. The budget deep dives have been senior leader reviews where we've built executive dashboards for budget managers to better understand, track, and prioritize their spending.

[03:27:49] and understand where to look, and we've sequenced these earlier in the process really to inform base budget decisions, so from a resource-informed view, there's a better understanding of how much is left over after all of the must-haves are there. We've been looking at the program reviews.

[03:28:06] We started those as early as March and led into April and May, again, with the rollout of AIM, and the example we'll walk through in a little bit was for school nutrition services. Here, Starting next week, we're actually kicking off staffing standard reviews where we are going through all 200-plus staffing standards with account managers to make sure that everybody understands exactly what the calculation is, how it works, what the projection would be, and start having earlier conversations regarding what FY28 staffing levels might look like to inform budget conversations and also begin just preparing

[03:28:43] what lower enrollment might look like if we don't change staffing standards. And then investment reviews will kick off in October and really run through December, culminating in when we have the governor's proposed budget as well as the state funding. And these are for every new investment and continuing investment that LCPS would include within the superintendent's estimate of needs in January.

[03:29:08] With this year just a reiterated, emphasized focus on understanding and tracking how we would manage the success of the program and whether or not it's achieving the stated aims when we make that investment as well as what is the long-term fiscal impact of starting anything that might be a pilot now but would grow over the next two, three, four years to make sure that we're making resource-informed decisions.

[03:29:32] The deep dives, so far we have -- these are -- from a budget side, have actually been really exciting. We've completed 26 of these so far where we've met with every single account manager within LCPS for the staffing standard reviews and almost every one of these meetings has uh included senior staff at the director level of above and almost and over half of them have included members of cabinet uh just emphasizing the priority that has gone to each one of these and the emphasis that's been placed on the importance of preparing for the fy28 budget we've reviewed more than 120 programs and when i use the term program i'm thinking about

[03:30:09] the lcps chart of accounts but we've reviewed over 120 programs and across those we've accounted for for about 11% of the operating budget to include just shy of $184 million of operations and maintenance expenses when we buy stuff, $35.6 million of non-FTE compensation, including part-time and overtime and extra hours worked, et cetera, and then $7.1 million of capital outlay.

[03:30:37] So when we think about that remaining other, that's where that 11% comes from. From each one of these meetings, we walked away with specific FY28 budget actions that either the account managers in the budget office, my team agreed to, or with specific items that teams would research in order to better understand what needed to be in the 28 budget based on prior year trends and plans going forward.

[03:31:02] From initial results, after all those reviews, we've identified approximately $2.6 million in savings that we think are relatively straightforward. These include contractual services where looking at actual contract spend over the last three years indicated that there could be room in the budget to realign the budget closer to what the actual contractual expenses have been.

[03:31:25] And we've seen that across a number of areas across the operating fund. We also found areas in non-FTE salaries where we have tapered some of the COVID-era supports that we had or COVID-era programs that we were running, and we think that the budget can likewise be realigned or reduced in those areas as well.

[03:31:47] We've done the same thing for training and continuing education in food supplies, where after reviewing three years of trends at individual division levels, we've identified that the budget could be, again, realigned to match what actual expenses would likely be going forward.

[03:32:03] However, it is important to note that even though we've identified those savings, we also had very targeted conversations with departments around what might be happening in the base budget that would offset those savings. Inflation has obviously been one of the primary drivers.

[03:32:19] On the computer and software side, just to be transparent, we've seen price increases for student Chromebooks in the neighborhood of 30 percent, actual real expense increases over the last year. We've gotten notice from our local utility provider that in fiscal year 27 we should be expecting 22 percent increases on our electric utility bills and another 12 percent in the following year.

[03:32:45] Similarly, for anybody here that drives a gas-powered vehicle, you see what happens every time you go to the filling station. We're similarly seeing diesel and gas prices rise accordingly, and we would expect that to have a budgetary impact as well.

[03:33:02] And then similar for contractual services, where we're seeing rising costs associated with the contracts that we have in order to maintain LCPS buildings, facilities, and machines, as well as the parts that go into that same sort of repair and maintenance service, and then similarly for additional student supports where we're seeing rising need for things such as personal care assistance in other areas.

[03:33:27] Across all of these, staff is continuing to work on evaluating these budgets, and within the next week or so is when we should start seeing the culmination of the budget deep dives as we get a better sense of what the FY28 base would be after all these reviews.

[03:33:44] We do want to talk through one success story that we had, and school nutrition services. I did mention that we did a program review on school nutrition, and just for context as we lead into this, school nutrition is a separate fund with an LCPS, so it sits outside of the operating fund, and it was designed really to be self-sufficient where revenues should cover the cost of expenditures, where those revenues are primarily cafeteria sales as well as reimbursements from federal and state governments.

[03:34:16] Also, over the last several years, we have been running an intentional deficit in that fund in order to maintain compliance with USDA directives on the target fund balance that we're allowed to hold in that fund. Beginning in March and running through April, we worked with the school nutrition team and their leadership and specialists to review all 47 expense line items that were in their budget, which equated to about $25.7 million of O&M expenses, as well as non-FTE salaries, again, primarily part-time and substitute costs.

[03:34:51] We evaluated menus. We looked at food costs, meal prices, and prior year expenditures across the last three years in order to have trend analysis for actual expenses were coming in. We also assessed vendor contracts, and all of this was with a lens to minimize any future subsidies or support from the operating fund, which is something that we've come to evaluate for future years.

[03:35:15] The good news, though, is that we actually had a lot of success when we did this review. We jokingly called it the nickel and dime exercise because we really were looking at every single line item within that budget to make sure that we could maximize exactly what was in there. On the revenue side, we did identify revenue enhancements, including proposed 20% meal increases to maintain compliance with the paid lunch equity tool, which is a USDA tool that establishes what lunch prices should be for K-12 education.

[03:35:46] public schools. We also looked at what potential revenue enhancements would be from increasing the average daily participation rate at our CEP schools which might generate an additional $89,000. On the expense side we believe that there's opportunity to work with vendors to restructure certain pricing arrangements for potential savings of approximately a half million dollars to align menus to federal requirements set by the USDA for what must be on each individual lunch plate for a reimbursable meal for an additional $188,000 in savings and then we've even gotten so far down into the weeds for

[03:36:24] this one where right-sized dues and membership budgets for an additional $9,000 savings going through each employee and the specific professional development organizations and professional organizations that they would be a member of again for additional savings. So net that out between revenue increases and expense reductions and it's a 1.5 million dollar net improvement to the operating income with additional identified opportunities to improve financial reporting at the school level really to drive sustained operational increases within that program and here I will turn it over to

[03:37:02] Ms. Willoughby for an update on staff's initial aim considerations so earlier this year members of cabinet participated in a budget exercise to So identify areas that we could consider if we needed to make significant adjustments as we develop the FY28 budget.

[03:37:21] As I was looking at these cloud bubbles, I was tying it back to the fiscal sustainment strategies that were on slide 17 and also, again, on slide 64. And so you'll see examples where we're looking at possibly increasing revenue and, of course, also service level changes.

[03:37:42] These areas, though, could have a meaningful financial impact, but they also come with broader implications for students, families, staff, and the community. Each of these items also would require additional analysis, as well as thoughtful planning around implementation and communication.

[03:37:59] And so for those reasons, that's why we want to start the conversation now. Rather than developing detailed information on every option, we'd like to get the board's direction on which areas you believe warrant a deeper look. The priority ranking activity that follows will help us understand where the board would like staff to focus our analysis in preparation for the October budget work session.

[03:38:22] So this will be a two-part exercise. One, we'll be asking you to prioritize staff's initial recommendations, but then you'll also have an opportunity to share out on your own areas. But I did want to briefly kind of just describe each little bubble that's on the screen here.

[03:38:38] So the first one there is increasing facility rental rates. We identified that this could generate additional revenue. However, this isn't a significant revenue source. We only budget about $1.3 million in FY27. However, it is an opportunity to consider.

[03:38:55] It's also noteworthy that because a variety of community organizations use our facilities, any changes could generate community interest and feedback. And so if this is an area the board identifies as a priority, staff can provide additional information on potential revenue and broader implications in October.

[03:39:14] The next bubble is discontinuing virtual distance elementary. This would require us to look closely at enrollment per pupil costs and student needs. If the board identified this as a priority, we would also bring back that more specific information in October.

[03:39:32] School consolidation would involve examining school utilization, enrollment, and the potential for greater efficiencies, particularly among some of our smaller schools. This is separate from the boundary discussion associated with the CIP.

[03:39:48] Specifically, LCPS has several schools with enrollments of approximately 200 students or fewer, and there may be opportunities to consider consolidation with nearby schools. Any such analysis would need to consider both the financial and operational impacts, as well as the effect on students and communities.

[03:40:06] Reducing training and professional development is an area that is often considered when budgets become more constrained. staff would also provide additional information about the funding dedicated to professional development across our organization, along with the potential impact on reductions. Increasing class sizes is another area that can generate significant savings relatively quickly. However, it also has direct implications for students, classrooms, and the instructional environment.

[03:40:39] On your priority sheet, this option is broken out by elementary, middle, and high school, so the board can indicate whether there are particular levels it would like staff to examine. Next, we have adjusting the one-to-one device policy, which would provide an opportunity to review LCPS's current approach of providing a device to every student and consider the instructional, operational, and financial implications of potential changes.

[03:41:08] Finally, optional summer programs currently charge fees in some cases, but those fees do not fully cover the cost of providing the programs. If this is identified as a priority, staff can provide additional information on participation, the purpose of each program, current fees, and the financial impact.

[03:41:26] I want to again emphasize that this is not an exhaustive list of potential budget considerations. There is significant work ahead already underway in other areas, which you will also hear about more this afternoon.

[03:41:42] These particular items were brought forward, though, because they have, again, the potential for significant impact. And so we want to, it's really a little bit of a litmus test on some of these topics and knowing that they would require substantial analysis and further discussion.

[03:41:59] So the purpose of today's exercise is to simply help us understand where the board would like staff to focus our efforts on these considerations. So you, and again, you will have a separate activity to identify your own items for consideration, but your feedback will help us determine which areas to develop further and bring back to the work session.

[03:42:20] October and with that I will turn it over to our colleagues to walk you through the activity all right so as Sharon described there is a ranking score sheet underneath the AIM items tab within your binder it should be about the last tab I think within there at least for the budget related information so so like was stated there are nine options for consideration there again it's the seven bubbles but the bubbles for increased class sizes broken out by

[03:42:56] elementary schools middle schools and then high schools so we're asking for you to rank within the binder those nine areas for consideration with one being the highest priority for staff to do additional research on analysis on to provide you with that information for that additional consideration in that specific area so we will take at least I would say two or three minutes and we'll kind of do a gauge here to see how much more time you all may need and

[03:43:32] then we'll do a brainstorming session after that for additional ideas so I'm sorry yeah thank you I was wondering if I could ask a couple of questions to help inform my prioritization okay this will be the the two questions I had were where it says increase or change charge fees for optional summer programs.

[03:43:58] Could you give me some examples of some of the programs that you're referring to? The one that immediately comes to mind is Summer in the Arts. I think that's the name of the program where it's an optional program.

[03:44:16] We do charge a fee, but our analysis shows that the operating funds subsidizes that. That would be one example. And so that would be an area that if this was a priority, we would inventory other programs like that and bring back in October.

[03:44:32] Thank you. And my other question was, when you say reduce training or professional development, can you expand on what you mean by that? Absolutely. So I think it's fair to say that across our organization, all departments have training and professional development as line items in their budget.

[03:44:55] And in my experience, that is usually one area that is typically seen as perhaps like low-hanging fruit. And I've seen strategies where it's a flat percentage, you know, just taken off the top. However, especially with LCPS and the volume of work that we do and reacting to changes that are constantly coming at us, I wanted to, I thought it was important in that with cabinet as well brought this up as a priority to really dive into versus perhaps a perception of just an easy swag at making a reduction and so again

[03:45:34] we would bring back in October if this was a top priority budgets across the division related on this but also where those investments are with the intended purposes what some of the outcomes are associated with that thank you Mrs.

[03:45:51] Thank you, Madam Chair. As far as discontinuing virtual distance elementary to help us to decide, do you have the current enrollment numbers for that particular program?

[03:46:07] Also, I'm thinking of other programs that are not listed, but for that one in particular, do you have enrollment? So that's where we would, if there was a priority, we would be prepared to bring a full kind of program evaluation related to virtual distance elementary in October.

[03:46:29] Additionally, I'm sorry, if you could repeat the second part of what you stated. Well, I can think of a whole other list of programs. I wasn't thinking about the virtual distance elementary. Right. Not the full program, right?

[03:46:45] that would be like phase out if you get rid of this right that would be the second part of the activity where you will along with your fellow school board members have an opportunity to brainstorm ideas beyond what staff has brought forward here sure miss Griffiths I can answer your question about enrollment current enrollment in virtual distance elementary there are 19

[03:47:20] students in virtual distance elementary grades 1 through 5 ms riccardi thank you madam chair um i like the idea that we're looking at this exercise um i think it's really i think it's too early for me to sit here and try to sort this part out because what i'd like to see is an even broader group of similarly situated initiatives and

[03:47:55] programs and things and then with that the data behind it to be able to make some really good numbers i mean the impact numbers i think would be important um besides just the finance piece of it too there's value um you know there are other reasons why we may or may not keep programs even if they're not if it's not a cost issue but i i think these seven are interesting ones to look at and explore and i appreciate the fact that these are the staff ones that you all have have identified i would like to expand this out to an even bigger footprint and then do that analysis of the impact

[03:48:30] analysis for all of those that we can really take a look at it because if we take option a that we had earlier and we're let's say let's just say we're under budgeting a bit what we could then wind up doing is have a list that says okay if we've got an extra five million the board has made already a decision that we want to take number one because we voted on it off the list and let's implement it and it gets us to implementation faster because we're not having to go through a new budget approval process does that make sense like we'll have this pod of initiatives that we have prioritized to then fill in the the any extra monies that we might have

[03:49:10] from a budget perspective so i personally am hesitant because i don't even know that i have enough data just from this um to be able to make a decision on it right now um i mean there's a couple of these that are revenue generators and then there's some things that would save money but i'm not necessarily sure that i want to pit one against the other at this point because i don't know enough about the value proposition of the seven that are in here does that make sense and this is by the way after lunch and I still probably need some more caffeine so no it does make sense

[03:49:47] and I know when we've done similar exercises in the past with our budget being so large and it it it's easy to cast a very wide net but we're really trying to focus staff's work to support the board and narrowing down to be able to provide that next level of detail information which our goal is to then bring back in October and so I do understand that it is hard these are that why we also try to out of staff's initial list to try to pick areas that thought would

[03:50:24] also perhaps resonate a little bit more with board members versus having to introduce maybe something a little more abstract that would really take a lot of education to the board um you know thinking of course you know like increasing class sizes i think you know everyone could understand that um the impacts of all of these and not necessarily in terms of costing out any of these necessarily it's really of just purely as just topics to help staff um drive their work for october which is is next month and because it's not just this it will be the next

[03:51:00] activity where you will be brainstorming your ideas that will also help drive what we need to bring back in October. All right so at this point perhaps it would be fair to say although there are some hesitations this is really just an opportunity for us to have an initial discussion that would inform some of the next steps so it's it's it is really just an opportunity for the board to have conversation so um would anybody like to kick it off mr svenson thank you madam chair um i appreciate

[03:51:38] the the exercise um i i think the one adjusting the one-to-one device policies um intriguing to me because we've received a lot of community feedback as is that we would like changes on that from a substantive uh standpoint and um you know if it's also a way to um decrease expenses that i think i'm all ears for for moving forward on that for an october presentation um so that that to me stood out as a win-win perhaps um for for the community um i think increasing facility rental rates um makes a lot of sense to me and then i would highlight on the virtual distance elementary

[03:52:17] spoke with dr ellis and staff last year when thinking about different ways to um maybe come up with some revenue to cover other priorities that program in particular stood out as one that is not heavily utilized and could generate substantial savings so i think this is all directional and preliminary and i would like to see more specifics on what that would look like but i think vde is very different from vdl virtual distance learning in terms of the utilization and

[03:52:48] importance so I'm definitely interested to learn more about what that would look like and I think I would be open to hearing a little bit more about the summer programs and what you know what particular programs and what the costs would be I don't know what the current fees are for those so it would be interesting to see but you know I want to make sure that those programs are still accessible and it's not a high barrier to entry. I also don't know what kind of financial support there is for students who may not be able to pay the full price fee. So maybe that's something that

[03:53:28] could be considered when we're thinking about raising the baseline fee if there are other supports that would enable students to participate if they could not afford the main fee. So with that, I'll pass it. Thank you. Mrs. Griffiths? Thank you, Madam Chair. I just had one more question and I'm not sure who can answer for the virtual distance learning elementary what what is the cost per pupil for well this is one through five but is it the same for all the students what is the cost per pupil I'm just

[03:54:06] curious it'll help me here thank you for that question so I do not have the in that answer at my fingertips we can certainly calculate it I will say that it is different from virtual distance learning as Mr. Spenson mentioned because the enrollment is much higher at virtual distance learning so that's our secondary program middle and high school so I think Miss Willoughby is specifically talking about grades one through five our elementary program and and again I can I can calculate that thank you in terms

[03:54:45] of performing this exercise did you want to do it in any other way rank them if there aren't any further comments yeah no the intent was just to rank within the binder and then post that we're gonna we'll collect that so they can inform uh the next steps by the finance department and then we'll have the brainstorming exercise after that and then you'll actually be able to that's what the remaining three dots are for a force they're not a force rank choice sorry mixing my exercises here a dot exercise on those things that we brainstorm that are outside of these

[03:55:19] nine seven to nine ideas depending on how you look at it that you're considering now so okay i just had a clarifying question or maybe it's a request but um i think as some of my colleagues are sharing you know there seems to be sort of a range of depth within each of these that as far as they could go i mean consolidating schools is that's probably a range depending on how far we go with that um so i'm i guess i'm wondering i know you don't want to spend too too much time on work that might not come to fruition.

[03:55:53] But I do, I am wondering if in the future, even if we don't decide to do a deep dive on it, if we could sort of see the range of savings. Because for me, if it's going to be millions and millions and millions of dollars versus, you know, a couple million, that could change the way our decision-making process happens based on what the needs are.

[03:56:13] And I think sort of that's what Ms. Riccardi is saying is, you know, if we kind of know what's a bigger bang for our buck, so to speak, and that's going to be different for everybody, I think that will help inform our decision. So I don't necessarily need a deep dive on all of them, but I do think having sort of a range of where this sort of sits in terms of weight in the budget, I think that that would be helpful.

[03:56:41] So I guess we can just pass our rankings over. Can we get it after? Okay. All right, so with that, we'll move on to the next step. Did folks need more time for that?

[03:56:58] Are you good with the rankings now? You'll pick them up then. Okay. You can just hold on to them for now, and we'll collect them afterwards. yeah okay all right sorry we're just adding additional confusion that right now so sorry so the next step of this like was described by Sharon and Casey is to really think more I kind of outside of the box so to speak so keeping in mind of the seven cloud bubbles that were presented earlier what other areas

[03:57:33] are there that you would like to see more information on or more consideration and discussion on and again this is it's intended to be more of a brainstorming activity and maybe there's even kind of a third you know not only additional information but appetite as well I mean I think that's gonna have to come into play I think it keenly as well especially when you start to think back to the the quadrant matrix that we had in terms of okay is it the juice worth the squeeze to bring back the analogy so but if we want to just

[03:58:10] take maybe just an initial minute just to ponder that and then we'll start to take your ideas as we go as you have a chance to think about that. Ms. Chernoff? Thank you. This is the part of the conversation no one wants to participate in because it's really hard. I'm going to throw a little bit of a philosophical curveball here. I am really wondering, I understand the idea of

[03:58:46] like, let's look at whole things and think about and consider them. Like that would be a cost savings if we just eliminate that one thing. I think as we are having a shift here, I think we also might need to shift the way we're doing it across the board. I really, what Casey just shared about how the program you went through the nutrition, you went through at that deep level and you were able to come out with a 1.5 million just by doing the analysis. Like, yeah, that feels like not a ton of money here in Loudoun County, which I still can't believe I say out loud

[03:59:21] sometimes. But if every department had to do that, combing through and really look at and offer up, I'm not, I know some districts say like every department cut 2%. I'm not asking for that kind of sweeping motion yet. I don't think we're there yet as a division, but I do think if we could be intentional and maybe you already do this, we don't have a lot of transparency into that particular side of things it's always been add add add this is the first time I feel like we're really going to have to analyze what we're taking away based off the clouds but if I'm going to consider like consolidating school communities that have existed for a very long time in Loudoun

[04:00:01] County Public Schools which by the way I put last on my list just so that everyone in Loudoun can hear me say that out loud I think it's only fair that we first internally try to find those efficiencies at the very granular level. And if that's a million, a department, like that's a win, like that's going to add up. So I don't know if I can sit here and say, I want to consider getting rid of X. What I want us to do is I want the people at the table who run these departments to take a deep dive into their own department and say, you know what, maybe right now that isn't the

[04:00:37] highest leverage thing. And I could offer that up on the table. I'm really looking for that shift here in LCPS. I'm the one who put the base budget comment up, and I think we're at that point where it's time to analyze the base budget and see if everything is serving us to, in a priority order, where are we at? Ms. Chernoff, I appreciate your comments, and I find that it, in reflecting on it myself, I would find it helpful to know sort of a cost-benefit analysis, like before I commit to

[04:01:12] something, it would be helpful to know what the savings would be. It is a nebulous idea, and it's definitely a shift in mindset from what has occurred here probably for decades. But that said, looking at efficiency first feels like a good place to start. Ms. LaBelle? Thank you, Madam Chair.

[04:01:39] When I look at this list, I think we can put it in two different categories. One is saving money, and the other is increasing funds and I think that there are more more things that we can look at for example if we increased the cost of attending sports events that would be a big one because that's something that happens all over the place in the county even by a few dollars a piece it would still increase if we look at things for savings you know obviously the biggest savings

[04:02:14] would be in the one-to-one device policy. I think that would be a huge savings there. So I think as we look at things, we need to kind of look at the category. Are we raising funds, or are we saving funds?

[04:02:32] So. Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you, Madam Chair. This question is for Mr. Svensson.

[04:02:48] Can you -- this one-to-one device policy that we were just discussing, this is for the lower grades is this involving Chromebooks get into more detail if you could for me because I I would like to go back to regular books and cursive writing and all that's in paper so if you could give me some thoughts on that I'd appreciate it to be fair to mr. Svensson ultimately that was a thought bubble and it might be more appropriate to address that question to staff I think mr. Svensson's point was that in some of the conversations that have been occurring offline. We've really gotten some feedback recently from families

[04:03:27] about exploring, especially in the lower grades, more balance in terms of how that technology works, but I'd like to make sure that we're keeping the conversation germane to the topic and and not necessarily engaging in anything that's too conversational. Those are all topics that are appropriate for us to have one-on-one conversations with offline and and certainly please don't hesitate direct your question to staff well that I can direct that to staff if they'd like to answer

[04:03:59] so I believe it would be as part of the as part of the October 27th meeting bringing data to inform the conversation of the topic as we are just early I mean we are what four or five weeks into our pilot so even the data collection side of that at the intentional smart start schools for the 13 pilot schools we're still collecting that data so we'll be providing a board update on the 22nd so that's Tuesday and then we will bring back appropriate data to talk about that so we can have that conversation as part of the budget and I believe that's what the budget work session is

[04:04:37] for is to bring these topics back with some additional data so we can have an informed conversation around it I was just curious because we're discussing it today Ms. Riccardi thank you Madam Chair just a quick question about that so are you guys I guess one of the questions I have is are you guys going to also be looking at kind of the downrange effects of things so for example If we're adjusting the one, if we want to adjust the one-to-one device policy, there's obviously the savings in the technology, but at the same time, then we've got to purchase curriculum in a different format, right?

[04:05:11] So that's going to be a cost. So it's not going to be a pure savings. That's one. Consolidating schools, you know, okay. It's bringing everybody into, you know, a couple of schools or whatever together under one roof. That's one, from an operations perspective, that's one piece of it.

[04:05:27] but then is it also selling off the property that's not going to be used and using that as a revenue generator? So some of these things aren't a one-step cost. Some of these have cost savings and then other expenses, so it's just not as big of a cost savings.

[04:05:45] I think this is where we get into the cost-benefit analysis and the full scope of what we're talking about, not just the one part. I'm sure you guys have thought about that, but I think from our perspective, we need to kind of see that full picture. Exactly.

[04:06:00] And that is a perfect depiction of why we really would appreciate prioritization from the board because that level of analysis, again, trying to throw a big net on a bunch of topics and do that level of review and identifying all the points.

[04:06:19] Even with consolidating schools, we'll be pulling information about there's code requirements, there's policy requirements, there's a number of implications that expand beyond just financial. And so having that prioritization, and again, it just helps direct staff time and resources to what to focus on, because it is substantial work to bring a full, complete package related to very big topics.

[04:06:49] Yes, Dr. Rasheed. Just to piggyback off of what Ms. Riccardi had mentioned, when it comes to the concept of consolidating schools, are we looking at consolidating schools like a portion of it? Like, for example, the way Independence does it with Brambleton Middle, or are we looking for mergers of schools?

[04:07:07] I just need that clarification. So historically, over my 11th years with LCPS, we typically, at some point during a budget process with a current existing board, do a check in terms of their thoughts on consolidating our small schools.

[04:07:28] And so, again, those schools that have less than 200 students, roughly, they do reside in Western Loudoun. Echoing Mrs. Chernoff's, I'm just objectively presenting information related to this option, but it's important to have those discussions.

[04:07:46] We are, you know, as has been stated many times, nothing can be off the table. So we want to make sure we're bringing all options and then getting direction from the board on how to proceed. And then just one more, Chair Chandler, for the adjusting one-to-one device policy, is it like that we're trying to say that whoever is in need of a Chromebook gets a Chromebook, or are we saying adjust that ratio based off need, or is it based off an entirety, like a whole entity doesn't receive it?

[04:08:20] That's the only thing I didn't understand. If you can provide clarification on that, anyone? so I think overall it none of those decisions or recommendations are ready to just say this is what we want to do and this is the budget outcome from that it is about do you want to have the conversation in October so we can come prepared with the data to have that conversation so again I think we will it sounds like there's some interest in that topic so but we are working on that currently if I may chair because I see we've kind of like morphed back to the

[04:08:56] staff's prioritization list and we have jay on standby here ready to take your ideas down in terms of what we what staff did not propose if there are any other topics that you would like for us to bring back in more depth in october and that's where you get to use your other three dots and so right now we've got a very short list because the idea is that we would have a list of brainstorm brainstorming ideas from school board members and then you would be able to use your three dots to then vote on which items you would like to see return and in terms of a priority

[04:09:33] um well to sort of re-engage in that conversation i will say i i can't say that i have prepared with any sort of analysis in terms of digging in or thinking about ways that could be meaningful um one of the things off the top of my head that occurs to me just this afternoon is it hadn't occurred to me that there could be programs that we were actually using the operational budget to subsidize. And so especially in things that are optional, having a list of other things that are

[04:10:09] like that might help identify. So where the cost to do something isn't necessarily, like where the revenue isn't generating, covering the cost, I guess, those would be the types of programs I would curious to learn more about and investigate does that make sense uh yes mr pepper thank you chair chandler i know i'm hard to see down here at the same level as you it's all good a couple couple thoughts one to kind of add to this list i um and this really comes from a lot of constituents

[04:10:46] reaching out to me a rethinking of how we might do some transportation um just in terms of i know that we we went away from kind of the double runs that we were doing in the past but it might be be able to increase our coverage while keeping us at a more limited number of drivers.

[04:11:02] Just a thought to put out there as a possible thing. But I do appreciate this activity because what I think, the way I'm taking it is there's a lot of levels to what we're talking about, right? A lot of us, and I will say myself included, probably had, I had one-to-one prioritized as number one on that list.

[04:11:20] And the question we could bring is, what does it look like if we just, what are the savings if we just do K2? What are the savings if we go third, fourth, fifth grade, right? So there's levels of where we are with this. It's the same thing when, and these were much, much lower on my list.

[04:11:36] They were like near the bottom, but class sizes, right? If we increase class size at the high school, do we increase in all subjects? Do we increase in some where perhaps safety isn't as much of a consideration, right? Outside of, you know, PE or the sciences or, you know, a fax lab, for example.

[04:11:52] So there's layers to each scenario. And I feel like we're picking meta topics that we might want more information into at a lower level. So I really do appreciate that activity.

[04:12:10] And then there's other things that might come out of it. For example, I know this was number nine on my list as well, Mr. Chernoff, but Consolidate Schools was definitely last. But if we do something like that, it might give us an opportunity to have some centers to run more pre-K. so thinking about space utilization along those lines so there's a lot of other things that might come out of this other than just a cost savings miss labelle thank you madam chair one of the things that i'm concerned about is we keep adding programs adding programs and we do it by putting

[04:12:45] out pilots first and then saying oh this is going well let's see if we can expand it i'd like to see us put a moratorium at the moment on expanding with pilot programs rather than go forth and look at new projects. Sorry, we're going to wait at least until we get the budget under control. That's sort of what I'd like to see done as well rather than new spending on new programs. Let's stay with what we have, see if we can fix things and bring it all up together. Okay, thank you. I feel a little

[04:13:25] hesitancy about your suggestion, although I would want to qualify it somewhat. I wouldn't want to say no more pilot programs because ultimately the pilot programs aren't only related to specialized programs because we have pilot programs where schools are trying out new schedules. And so I would be a little bit concerned about overgeneralizing. Expanding further specialized programs. I think that could be a meaningful conversation to have, although I'm hesitant about committing to that now, especially as we've looked at how we're reprioritizing what to do

[04:14:03] with our CTE. And CTE, I wouldn't necessarily want to, because we've made a commitment to sort of reinvigorating that program and have a five-year plan, I'm not sure that I would want to take any steps at this point that would interfere with that. But it is an interesting idea that I think it warrants further discussion. I'm not suggesting that anything we have underway or that we have committed to. It's just, as you said, special programs, new things that we're trying. Like a few years ago, we came out with the global linguistic program. A few years before that,

[04:14:43] came out with dual language i think that we could wait on those until we get control of the budget not those two take those two programs away but anything like that if we're going to try something absolutely new that we haven't committed to that would be a good thing to put on a back burner thank you um yes could i make one suggestion maybe i this might we might be too scientific maybe in terms of our approach right now just as a suggestion i mean this might be a program or a

[04:15:19] service or what have you that like my gut intuition is always like why why do we do that or should we really be doing that um i mean it could be as basic as that because i mean i think the one thing to realize and remember with not only the considerations in the cloud and what we're putting up here is this is just looking for additional information to make a more well informed decision it doesn't mean necessarily that you're going to say definitively yes by by either putting something up there or for looking for more information right you're just going to have more information to make a more well-informed decision even if that's like you know what all

[04:15:57] things considered i thought maybe that was a good idea to pursue but no that we're not going to go that way for whatever rational reason either in terms of not enough savings too much political capital that would need to be spent in order to proceed with it or what have you so um hopefully that made sense it was a little more long-winded than i intended so thank you mr carty i guess you know one of the things if i go back to slide 17 right the the four buckets of items compared to

[04:16:32] the aim list i'm kind of no so we've got some things that are revenue enhancement so we've got the rental rates and the summer programs under expenditure controls we've got the one-on-one device policy I don't see any items in here on service delivery changes you know and you have in your like contracting for services so maybe we need to spend some time looking kind of doing a deep dive on contracting services I think the other thing I have no insight into like grant programs that are that

[04:17:10] have staff funding and if any of those are sunsetting and what that looks like I mean I have no insight into that I'm not suggesting that should be a thing that's one that kind of comes it comes to mind too I think there's just some pieces around the service delivery changes I'd like to kind of see if we've got any options in that space too because then on the service level stuff that's like the school consolidation the discontinuation of the elementary virtual distance learning so I mean and it kind of comes back to the staff question too are the department levels expenses too are there any service delivery changes that we should be considering and here's the kicker

[04:17:49] around that I'm asking you all to you know look at your own budgets and that can be a really hard thing for people to want to do but we've I don't know I just kind of I'm just noticing that too that we don't have any in that kind of C category that we're considering here and I'd like to see if there are some things that we could I would offer I think perhaps a service delivery change could be related to the one-to-one device policy of how instruction is delivered if we were to make a change there even perhaps by increasing class sizes that may impact how instruction is delivered by adjusting those class

[04:18:25] ratios so that may be some examples of service delivery in terms of the base budget you heard mr. Jones describe the the work that they did related to the deep dives and what I'm and we used an example related to school nutrition and the note that I have is based on the feedback that I'm hearing today is maybe to bring even maybe some more transparency of what was more examples related to those changes.

[04:18:53] You know, he summarized 2 million plus of savings across the division, but then also how those savings would be really basically kind of reallocated to other inflation-driven cost increases. So it was all nice and neat on one slide.

[04:19:11] That could be something we can unpack more in October. And I think my colleagues have heard the message very clear in terms of perhaps a second round of a deep dive related to what I'm hearing of related to recommendations perhaps or suggestions or considerations related to the service delivery items that they have in their budgets, not necessarily a review perhaps of the existing budget and kind of status quo going forward.

[04:19:41] So that definitely is information we could bring back in October. i mean i think one of the things just to continue on that though is and i i don't want to be the one to have to say this but we've spent a lot of investment in administrative staff right over the many many years and we offer really great things but at some point in time if the budget continues down this path we're going to have to look at reducing the administrative staff and overhead that we've got here too and in my my preference well before we eliminate school-faced school-facing

[04:20:14] staff and teachers, right? So, I mean, when I think service delivery changes, I think there's something to be said for that. And I hate to say that, because I don't like that to be a thing. But I think everybody has to have that reality that at some point in time, that may be something that we're having to look at in the next few years, perhaps sooner than we want to. So just put that out there for whatever it's worth. All right. Before we move on, could I ask our experts from Baker Lilly who are here to perhaps share with us some ways you've seen other

[04:20:50] school divisions take this on what what other impactful ideas have worked in other places sure I agree with the approach of impacting non school facing program services staff first for example we just finished a project recently with Tulsa Public Schools where we did a deep dive staffing analysis on central office to examine what the trends had been over the last decade in terms of number of FTEs added at central office and we did that appear comparison to other large Oklahoma districts and we saw that they're they were going the

[04:21:29] wrong way essentially their enrollment was decreasing they were adding staff where their peers were cutting staff proportionally to enrollment reductions I think doing deep dives within the departments I think in terms of the magnitude of the challenge you're facing i think is a good approach i will caution in terms of longer term savings in terms of structural um structural balance that's not going to get you there in terms of the long run i think everyone needs to keep in mind that central office as a proportion of your budget is relatively small so there's only so much you're going to be able to

[04:22:06] squeeze out of that at some point in time before you need to start eliminating programs and services So, and I, to someone's point before they said, you know, in terms of trimming versus eliminating a program, I agree wholeheartedly with looking at efficiencies first before you eliminate a service altogether.

[04:22:24] So I think that is a good place to start, but it is, you know, you're going to get a limited pool eventually. I mean, we would call it, you know, in kind of budgeting terms, modified zero-based budgeting type approach where you do a deep dive. But with a zero-based budgeting approach, there's also the law of diminishing returns, because you keep looking at it, keep looking at it, eventually there's nothing more for you to try to glean or squeeze out of that before, okay, you've squeezed me to death, either do away with me, or I can't do what I need to do without what I have type of proposition.

[04:22:58] so I'd say that's the biggest areas you know I think in terms of I can see some of the questions behind some of the big seven nine areas consolidate schools that is it's it's a third rail but with operating such small schools you know that that is where advocating for closing schools is extremely challenging it's a lot of political capital to expend on doing that but when you get to schools that are under what j four or five hundred i think in terms of enrollment that's where your economy is a scale and your efficiency just just absolutely tank and then i think the

[04:23:37] other thing too is is the upkeep of the physical plant because your school footprint is so substantial based upon what you have in terms of either stable or declining enrollment you just have that many more sites you need to spread your limited capital dollars across as well and programming too you know in terms of high quality programming or say more robust programming because as opposed to being able to offer enrichment programs that you know 10 schools you have to offer it at 15 schools or 12 schools or what have you so you have to spread that that much more thin too and it it decreases the robustness of programming that you're able to offer at those

[04:24:13] additional school sites so that's helpful thank you I'm sure enough thank you I appreciate that I think that's a good perspective and it's helpful in our thinking. Okay. I'm just going to do what you asked, which is the way you phrased it is put some things on the table that you're wondering about. So something that I'm wondering a lot about is some of the partnerships we have with our vendors and what we're getting out of them.

[04:24:38] So just as an example, in middle school, we were using SEL second step, and we were hearing that it wasn't very effective. So we piloted, didn't cost anything, I don't think, a homegrown SEL curriculum which now we're rolling out so that's one area where I think you know where else can we do that we have a lot of great talent and resources here so I'm wondering too if there's anything I know it's work I know it's I know what the cost is there's going to be a cost right so I would be curious about what our partnerships are what our vendors are and what we're getting out of them I know that would be a deep dive again but I think that that could be another place maybe we're

[04:25:17] spending a lot of money but we're not seeing a big return and I think just to be a little bit more specific, one of the reasons I was asking for the staffing breakdown and the staffing standard is I do truly believe, and I think most of us do, that the school-based staff have to be tier one that has to remain intact. For me, that's going to be a non-negotiable. And if anything, we're talking about adding those extra supports in for the needs that we're seeing, which I know is a difficult conversation. But for me, there are positions where people sit mainly here or they

[04:25:53] support multiple schools and they pop in and out of schools I had one of those positions for many years here in Loudoun County so if I that's kind of where I'm getting at with the breakdown is what are the school-based positions that we have but what are the ones that are not school-based that maybe we need to think about how we're staffing those positions and I yeah and I would say I think we've taken that approach in the last couple of budgets to really delineate the differences between school-facing and non-school-facing positions yeah and school-based positions so there's three categories that we're now showing the board for precisely this reason right yeah so being able to demonstrate over the past

[04:26:32] few budget cycles that were we're really not adding non school based positions what we're looking at adding where we at it all has been school facing and school based positions and so then being able to go back and look at all of the non school based positions certainly is something that's an ongoing process for us as we look at our organization but if the board I mean again and this is why we have these conversations if the board has things they want us to take a deeper dive on with regards to those positions we're certainly happy to consider those as well yeah and it's a double-edged sword too right like we want school-based coaches in all of our elementary

[04:27:08] schools and we've done a phased approach to make sure that we have that but we have a hundred schools so moving them from a model that where they support many schools might not be economical to put them all school-based so I know there's a lot of nuances but I think it's worth looking at Yeah, there are a lot of nuances, and just like with any other programs and everything else with regards to service delivery, they're tradeoffs, right?

[04:27:32] So as noted, it's a pretty small overall amount of the budget when you look at the non-school-based positions, particularly at the supervisory level and up. And so when we dig into those, I mean, so we've done, I mean, you heard, I should point out because it's been said a few times, we did do a deep dive analysis by department, and those are ongoing.

[04:27:55] And we are looking at those things and then we try to figure out what's the trade-off if you remove that who's doing that function If that person in that position no longer exists like who picks that work up and who has? Nothing on their plate that we're adding that to To to ensure that there isn't a significant loss in service delivery in that area So we do have to kind of consider those as well as we have this conversation. Thanks you're dying you Thank you madam chair. I I am extremely reluctant to talk about closing schools,

[04:28:32] especially because of the impact that it would have. As has already been pointed out here, most of our extremely low enrollment schools are, I believe, elementary schools out in the western part of the county, the most rural part of the county, where these are small communities.

[04:28:50] Their local schools are of significant importance to them. I understand that we may at some point be in a situation where we have to consider things that we find unpleasant. For me, that's going to be one of my last resort considerations.

[04:29:10] But I also wanted to add, if we are starting to have the conversation about potentially closing and consolidating low enrollment schools, that we also need to talk about charter schools. i certainly am not going to consider closing and consolidating our public elementary schools if we are not also having the conversation about are we continuing to support charter schools thank you thank you okay looks like we can move on yes i think since we have a limited number of

[04:29:46] items we will forego the dot activity and we will just work internally to bring information to the board in october with that we've got our last section related to the survey results and last steps before we conclude the budget part and with that i turn it back over and just a real quick setup i mean just some considerations from our standpoint on on surveys and community feedback you know just ensuring that things are truly representative reinforcement of strongly held beliefs is it really bringing new information to the table so to speak and then really looking at

[04:30:25] the common themes but the big thing is just ensuring that feedback feels felt through action you know kind of the the more blunt statement with the point we have this data now what so to speak so thank you in May we announced to the board that we were going to go back and collect community input much earlier in the budget process for the FY 28 budget the intent was to utilize thought exchange as an engagement mechanism which is different than a survey so instead of just relying on rankings of one to five or prioritize these items for us that we're telling you what to prioritize and instead of just relying

[04:31:04] on public hearings during the budget process in January the the concept was to work proactively to go out with the thought exchange and collect community input and see what that engagement looked like in June we went through and presented that plan to the school board and we released what our one question would be that we would ask people to respond to. In developing the FY28 budget, what should the school board consider to provide the best educational experience to our students? That

[04:31:37] survey was open from August 24th until September 11th. It just closed last Friday. During that time window, as of Friday, we had more than 3,000 individual participants. We collected more than 2,300 individual thoughts and we had more than 84,000 rankings of those thoughts staff is still going through analyzing collecting and making sense of all of that information and we look forward to bringing that back to you in October with a much more robust analysis as all members of the public you are able to go in and see what those top ranked items are and you can look through it

[04:32:14] yourselves we would encourage you to do so it's actually quite interesting but as As an early look, things that we're seeing, there's a lot of comments around educational technology and student engagement, employee compensation, class size and teacher pupil ratios, and even calendars and some of the other LCPS policies that are out there.

[04:32:35] And again, we will come back in October with a much more robust analysis once we've had time to digest those over 2,000 comments and 84,000 rankings. So we originally had planned a final reflection opportunity for the school board and in the interest of time, knowing we are already over, I would just draw your attention to the questions and I would welcome any feedback.

[04:33:03] If you would like to email me or have a discussion related to this, I would appreciate any feedback related to the retreat as well as just ongoing support of the school board during the budget process. So continuing on in terms of next steps, you know, through September through December, we had mentioned, you'll be lots of information and work opportunities for the board related to the capital budget.

[04:33:28] That's where you'll get to do the deep dive of information gathering and hearing about enrollment projections, as well as adopt the capital budget. On October 27th, again, will be that very loaded work session. We've got a lot of topics that we will be bringing back and discussing with the board.

[04:33:44] December 15th is when we anticipate having the preliminary county fiscal update, and we'll bring that as an information item to the board. And then, of course, January through April, as you're well aware, is the public portion of the review and adoption process of the budget.

[04:34:01] With that, again, just reiterating, continuing to share feedback on the process, always open to that, as well as always open to setting up individual budget meetings with any school board members throughout the process to support you in your role.

[04:34:16] And with that, I would also just real quickly thank Mr. Budness, Mr. Staley for their assistance and collaboration in developing the agenda for today as well as the facilitation and engagement. So thank you. And with that, turn it back over to you.

[04:34:35] Thank you so much. And thank you for being here. i really found the framing that you brought to our conversation to be incredibly useful and with that board members i'd like to suggest we take about a five minute break and then we're going to come back and shift our gears just sort of discussion options with that the board will

[04:34:59] recess for five minutes and reconvene at well i'll say 2 15.

[04:44:25] did your hand yours in yet to be honest i really don't want to hand it in but all right everybody uh thank you uh the board is coming out of a brief recess and will return to our agenda for the budget retreat work session um the next portion of our work session is going to be completely different from the majority of how we've spent the day today um what you'll see is a list of topics that has been collected over the

[04:45:04] course of the year that really we're looking to assess the will of the board and in terms of determining the utility of some of these things and what should be the best practice moving forward I am very cognizant of the fact that we've been here since 9 o'clock and that we are committed to leaving at 3:30 so although this is not our normative practice I would like to suggest that we raised the topic either staff or I will raise the or perhaps other members who have brought these issues forward can raise the initial question and then what

[04:45:41] I would like to do is ask that we all share our perspective one time perhaps going in order starting on one end and going back around is that amenable to the board members yeah it's good I don't want to necessarily enforce a time limit but I would like to just keep an eye on the fact that we we've been here and we only have a little bit of time left so with that the first topic of conversation is related to scheduling of select committees of appeals and I

[04:46:19] understand miss Richardson you'll be speaking that to that today thank you chair Chandler it is the recommendation of staff that the school board members consider. Having set days and times of the month, we are proposing the second Monday of each month at five o'clock and the fourth Wednesday of each month at five o'clock to have the standing special appeal committees. So just for the sake of clarity to repeat that, the idea is in any format in which

[04:46:58] the school board serves on an appeal committee that is scheduled by month so it would not include SBAC. Correct. There would be two days and if they were needed they would be scheduled at that time so that it wouldn't take staff's resource time to spend an inadvertent amount of time scheduling. Correct. So those would just be the accepted times with which those meetings could occur yes all right um the second monday of the month at five and the fourth wednesday of the

[04:47:31] month at five um miss ricardi would you like to go first all good all good you're that's acceptable to you yes yep thanks um mr svinson i just wanted to say i love the idea so we all know in advance when it's going to be um and it doesn't take up staff or school board member time scheduling it So I appreciate you all coming forward with that.

[04:47:53] Ms. Chernoff? I support the idea. I am permanently out on Monday evenings because of nonprofit work that I support outside of the school board. So I'm fine with picking up Wednesdays if that's okay with the board. Thank you. Ms. LaBelle? Dr. Rasheed?

[04:48:11] I support it. Thank you. Mr. Pepper? I really like this idea. It's much easier to sketch around my work, so perfect. Mrs. Griffiths? I support, and this is going forward because I just set one up this morning, but also if I can't attend, I'll say yes.

[04:48:27] I mean, I think it's a good idea. If it ends up I can't attend one, then we go back to asking one of the other board members to cover. Correct? Okay. That would be, I think, the assumption. Yes. Okay. So I'm good. Okay. Thank you, Vice Chair Donahue.

[04:48:43] Same. It's a great idea. Thank you. I'm comfortable with this, too. All right. Thank you so much. So, hey, we did that in record time. very nice my head is reeling okay so the next topic is weekly board inquiries report I understand that at some point the weekly board inquiries report was

[04:49:16] created at the fundamental basis under which that report exists was in hopes of efficiency because the thought is what one school board member knows it's better for all school board members to know but there have been some concerns and Dr.

[04:49:35] Bergen would you like to speak to any of the underlying questions I would be open to hearing the perspective of the various board members on this question okay so with that I guess is the question then that staff would like us to pre to present should this process um continue or are there any specific oh okay dr spence yeah i'm happy to i'm happy to speak to that yeah that we're that's exactly right the the my and of course the inquiry started well before my time here but they started to precisely address that

[04:50:10] issue i think at that time there were concerns from some board members that you know some board members were requesting information and getting it and they weren't aware of that and so i think they started the inquiries report as a way to just kind of create a no surprises environment for board members um so the the question before the board really is uh i mean and if we're going to have an inquiries report and certain and some board members would prefer their inquiries not be in that report i think that just undermines the purpose of the report so in my mind because it it does take staff time to collate and put those things together um in my mind we're either going

[04:50:49] to do it or we're not and if we're going to do it it would be any inquiry that comes the only ones that we've typically have kept out have been like scheduling inquiries like can you can you work on a time for me to meet with you or can you can we set up a time to go to a school so we've kept scheduling inquiries out but but other uh inquiries were information that would be helpful for the board we put in so I think the the context again is are we going to do it at all if we're going to do it does everybody understand that your inquiries will be in there if we're not going to do it we need to come up with a different system and I'll just have to figure out with my team what that is and

[04:51:27] it'll likely just involve any response to any board members copied to the entire board which we could do as well but as you know then that becomes complicated in terms of your inbox and FOIA and everything else so I mean inquiries reports available anyway but so just would like your perspectives on how to approach this mr. Carty I guess what I would just say is I assumed that any general question that I sent to whomever was getting put in there anyway and it kind of looks like that I I don't see that there's a huge volume from

[04:52:02] everybody going forward I get that consolidating it is a thing I'll tell you, I appreciate them. So it's kind of nice to kind of get what's going on. I always, I kind of generally feel like I'm out of the loop on some stuff. So I like the communication personally, but I mean, I think it's helpful to kind of just see what people are thinking. I mean, I just dropped a big one that hopefully everybody will get to see because it deals with the enrollment numbers. So I'm in, I did that very specifically because I knew it would be in there and I want everybody to see those results. So that's just my take. Thank you. Mr. Svensson.

[04:52:40] I don't have strong feelings on it I agree I appreciate reading through it and it get a sense of what's happening maybe in different communities that board members are asking about that I might not have been aware of and see responses but I defer to others thoughts on this as well thank you I'm sure enough I read it I appreciate it I think we should keep doing it more information is better thank you I'm Miss LaBelle okay yeah dr. Bergen are all our questions being sent to you or do we send them somewhere else? The protocol has been when a board member asks a

[04:53:19] question of a cabinet member that they copy the chief of staff. So I'm aware of them directly because I see the question as it's being asked, even though I may most often not the one answering the question. I see the question. I see the answer. I formulate the report and it gets distributed through Dr. Spence. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Rasheed. I really feel bad that it takes up time for staff to put that together.

[04:53:49] I don't really read them. I'm going to be really frank. I know that with the flow of conversation, we hear about it anyway regardless. I don't have a particular stance on it. I'm okay with still proceeding with it or not doing with it. So I'm just going to go with the flow of my colleagues and be like, okay, yeah, I'm fine with proceeding with it as is.

[04:54:07] Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Pepper? I actually really enjoy reading them. I sometimes feel guilty that I don't have as many as some others. but um it's always interesting to read something and be like i was just going to ask that but you know a colleague of mine has asked the same questions now i have a response so i i enjoy them i do read them every week um just to get a flavor of what's going on thank you mrs griffiths thank you madam chair um i actually brought i probably the reason why this is on the agenda today and with all due respect to new board members um being here a couple years the current report gives the impression that some inquiries are being elevated while others are not

[04:54:47] being captured at all. That undermines the confidence in the process and opens the door to misinterpretation. So in my years, my couple years of being on the board, I think there was a lot of misinterpretation from the inquiries. Some board members were completely blank for several reports, but I was in every single one. There was a repeated assertion that members may be conducting their work through other channels whether it be in person meetings phone calls let's talk whatever and that tracking these interactions you know was not able to we were not

[04:55:25] able to get that information into the report when the reporting consistently reflects minimal or no activity from others it raises the question of whether the tracking is accurate applied consistently or selectively highlighting certain inquiries over others in its current form i do not support any system that could enable individuals outside of this process and this board to scrutinize or politicize the routine of board member inquiries board members should be able to ask questions and gather information and share with everybody else without the concern that those inquiries will be

[04:56:02] used to generate public controversy and I say this from experience previous inquiries generated controversy at school board meetings if I asked a question so there was a lot of misinterpretation so I started saving every single inquiry and I was on every single one and there were several board members blank every single inquiry so you can't tell me that you're not asking any questions on email or any other way that it's all in person and you're catching admin on the

[04:56:37] phone because it's very hard to get people on the phone and the quickest way usually is through email. Now, I know that a lot of questions come in through Let's Talk. I realize that, but not everything. As a school board member, if you're doing your research and doing work, you have questions all the time for admin, and I felt that any question that I put out there was scrutinized and queued up to public scrutiny. So with that, I am not for the inquiry list, and I have asked my

[04:57:13] name to be removed from it until I see that it's fair and equal to everyone. So when I say that, I mean the inquiry list, every single one of my colleagues should have questions in there. I should not see any blank pages. So it should be all or nothing. Thank you. Vice Chair Donahue? Thank you, Madam Chair. I am one of the board members who frequently does not get questions out, not because I am intentionally avoiding doing them, but because sometimes I have very busy weeks and

[04:57:52] don't get around to doing the research that I would want to be able to do if I had more hours in the day um that being said and i've been similarly i don't always have time to read the inquiries when they're sent around to be to be totally frank um but when i do read them i find them very helpful um i i also don't want to add any burdens on the staff putting them putting together inquiries but when i do have time to read them i do feel like they are helpful um for reasons that have already been said to raise issues that maybe hadn't occurred to me or to see

[04:58:27] if someone else has already asked a question that I'm thinking about asking and now don't need to or for reasons like that. So I would prefer that they continue to happen, but if that's not the will of the board, then that's okay too. Thank you. Thank you. I support the inquiries as they are done now. I find even that I appreciate the questions that all of my colleagues ask and And I appreciate the efficient way in which the information is presented.

[04:59:00] I think it's one of the most efficient ways that we can share information, especially given the quorum rules. And so I appreciate it continuing as is. With that, I think that completes the conversation on that topic.

[04:59:17] And I'll move on to the next one, which is meals at board meetings. This is a tough conversation. As chair, I could not tell you necessarily exactly when the decision was made to change how meals have been served at meetings.

[04:59:38] I will say, as a board member who was also a staff aide before I was a board member, that it was commonly my practice before to bring dinner from home. I wanted to bring this forward and see what the will of the board was at this time.

[04:59:57] As we are having conversations about tightening, it seems to me that this is a place in which we could improve efficiency in our spending to make sure that we are perhaps not buying food for everyone who is participating or expected to be at the meeting, but that we have some clear expectations about who um should be included um and and maybe make some changes going forward so with that i'll i'll ask miss ricardi for your perspective we can always reverse

[05:00:33] that circle too you know good i know sometimes that might help you it might might help you a little bit on timing but um i'm going to say this i um i am very much into taking care of my staff and it is not easy to go from here in 30 minutes go get food somewhere else and come back not everybody has the ability to bring stuff from home because they're working full-time jobs during the day. The minimal cost frankly per head for our nine board aides and not all of them come to these meetings and all of them eat is minimal compared to many other things that we spend money on and I

[05:01:09] would say if we feel like we need to recoup costs I would be more than willing to chip in from my budget to help pay for that if that's an option but I am absolutely for feeding our people because they're here for some time you know if they're here they're here for the whole duration and a nine-hour 10-hour meeting deserves a meal so thank you um yeah um mr spinson um i agree with miss riccardi i think that this is kind of you know we expect uh staff um both lcps staff school board aides to be here uh into the wee hours of the morning sometimes and i think the least we can

[05:01:43] do from uh is to have the food provided which is not a huge cost but i agree with the suggestion if we're discussing where we're funding that from, we could have that come from our school board aid accounts or things like that offset. Ms. Chernoff? Yeah, I agree. I feel a little weary that we're having this conversation. I think we're all professionals here. I certainly think our aides are professionals as well. I know the board of supervisors has a longstanding practice of including their aides in their mealtime, but I get the sensitivity of the issue. I'm more of a

[05:02:19] practical person we typically do a buffet style I don't know what happens to the extra food but there's never been an issue of not having extra food I think today at lunch there were whole entire trays of things still left over so in that case I mean is food being thrown away and then we're not feeding our aides like that just feels really silly but to me that feels silly but if we're going to go straight practical chat GPT says the average quick service meal around here is $15 in Northern Virginia. That's $600 a year for myself and for Ms. Puckett. And I would be more than happy to not only pay for my meals, but to also cover hers as well within my budget.

[05:02:57] Thank you. Thank you. Ms. LaBelle. I agree entirely with Mrs. Riccardi, Mr. Svensson, and Ms. Chernoff. And if it takes us chipping in the money from our board account, it's not a problem. Thank you, Dr. Rashid. Thank you, Chair. I have a couple of questions. It's a little bit of a loaded topic. I do understand there might be some dietary restrictions. I myself have a dietary restriction. Somewhere along the line of a year ago, we were respecting those dietary restrictions. But I believe something happened where we started serving buffet, which is fine.

[05:03:36] I'm all for it. But with those dietary restrictions, a lot of us board members, well, a lot of people, I can't speak for all the board members or maybe there are some aides that cannot eat the buffet style foods. So not to be nitpicky about it. But so I do believe on the method of delivery of of those meals.

[05:03:56] Like I do find that questionable because of me. I can't eat some of the meals that are offered buffet style because of those dietary restrictions. So I think maybe it could be tweaked, maybe, I guess. I believe we used to get a personal selection a while back. And with that, I was able to fulfill that. I was able to fulfill that restriction, that hindrance, so to say. Now I can't do that.

[05:04:24] Now I have to kind of work myself around it, which I'm okay with doing, but I still felt that it was more practical, especially for a diverse community and a diverse staff, and it's welcoming to a diverse board, so to say.

[05:04:43] I mean, I can't say we're all of the same race or the same culture, but that is something that I, those were my thoughts ever since the restrictions happened. So, yeah, I am open to it. I can accommodate, but I do wish it was like it was a year ago or a year and a half ago.

[05:05:00] I can't pinpoint what the time is. Thanks. Thank you. Mr. Pepper? Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm in agreement with my colleagues here. I'm happy to chip in part of the budget to feed everyone. It's also just nice for fellowship just to have everybody in the room together to have conversations with people I don't often have conversations with.

[05:05:24] I'm all for being as inclusive as possible with this, and that's all I've got to say. Thank you. Mrs. Griffiths? Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to thank our assistants for sticking it out for long meetings, and we have a lot of them.

[05:05:40] I don't see why they can't join us for every meal that they're here for these long meetings. I would think it would be expected, so I agree with my colleagues. Thank you. Thank you. Vice Chair Donohue? Thank you, Madam Chair. I agree with what my colleagues have said.

[05:05:57] I think it's important for fellowship to acknowledge the role that they play, to give us time to bond, to treat the people who work with us as colleagues, which is, in my view, what they are.

[05:06:13] They're my colleagues. I understand Dr. Rashid's point. I don't want to out anybody, but one of my aides has a dietary restriction, which once it became more regular for the aides to eat with us, I communicated with Ms. Byrne, and she's been really great about making sure that something that is ordered works for the person who has the issue.

[05:06:39] I am also more than happy to pay for it out of my budget. If we're talking about places to cut back, I think that's a reasonable choice to do it and works fine for me. Thank you. Thank you. From my perspective only, this is certainly not meant to be a reflection on the staff aides at all.

[05:06:58] But when I look at prioritizing the budget, I would prefer that we start by looking at ourselves first instead of necessarily jumping to other places in which especially anything that's student-facing could be cut.

[05:07:14] So this is a very small conversation. It was just a starting point. I don't believe that we've gotten to the point yet where it's really something that needs to be considered. I do think it's worthwhile considering and raising the issue, but I think the will of the board is clear that it will continue as it has been.

[05:07:39] And with that, we had a preview of this topic at the school board meeting last week, but wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the processes around proclamations. And you know what?

[05:07:56] To Ms. Riccardi's point, I will go from this direction this time. I would have said I might have been open to listing the proclamations and voting on them. And perhaps posting them on the website, but I also got the sense from some of the conversations that we had last week that this remains important to some members of our community.

[05:08:24] And so I am also currently supportive of keeping the process as is. I would not like to see it become an information and action item because I would find that to be an inefficiency for me personally. So Vice Chair Donahue. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[05:08:41] I agree. My understanding, I was, at the time that proclamations started going on to the consent agenda was before I was a board member, but my understanding is that that became the practice in order to make the process more efficient. I, to me, it seems like it's working more or less fine. People who don't want to support the proclamations always have the option of abstaining on the vote for the consent agenda.

[05:09:06] The proclamations do get posted with the rest of the agenda on board docs three days in advance. So there is opportunity for the community to review what is being proposed. I think proclamations in general are something that can play a very important role in identifying the public priorities of the division.

[05:09:30] And I'm glad that we do them. I want us to continue doing them. And, yeah, that's all I have for that. Thank you. Thank you. Mrs. Griffiths? Thank you, Madam Chair. As I have stated in the past, in my view, proclamations consume a significant amount of time, and they are not necessary to demonstrate support for particular causes.

[05:09:54] The reading of the proclamations is way too long. I think we had over seven, several times, and we keep adding more, more and more. So I think they should be on action, and we should be able to vote for them or not be there, not read them at least, every single one.

[05:10:15] And as my colleague, Mr. Pepper, pointed out at the last meeting, they are just words. It's nice to make everybody feel good, but they're not. They're just words. It's a lot of words. It takes up a lot of our time from when we can't really get down to business.

[05:10:31] And it keeps us late. So I'd like to reconsider having the proclamations. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Pepper. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to disagree with my colleague. And yes, they are words, but they do state our beliefs.

[05:10:48] And truthfully, if a board member has an issue with a specific proclamation, they are welcome to always pull it off and put it on action as we've seen before. At most, we've had, what, five, six, or seven. They take about two minutes each or so to read.

[05:11:03] They're in that, what I call kind of the 4.30 hour where we do our little work session. And, you know, a lot of times we go into information to kind of get ahead of ourselves. I don't see them as a time waste. I think they're important to stay where they are. And I like them where they are. And I'm all in favor of keeping them as is.

[05:11:20] Thank you. Dr. Rasheed. Thank you, Chair Chandler. I do feel with keeping proclamations as is. I do believe in celebration and all that they are about, especially individually, as we speak about them.

[05:11:39] And that's my stance. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. LaBelle. I think that some proclamations are well worth addressing, but I would like to see all proclamations move to the website.

[05:11:55] And I would like to see the proclamations be a little bit more instructional, suggest activities, things like that, to make them more in line with academics, and just have them posted on the website.

[05:12:11] We don't really need to sit and read them all, I don't think. Thank you. Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair. This is actually something that I've contemplated quite a bit. It might surprise people that I'm not the biggest fan of proclamations.

[05:12:27] I think they're performative in nature. I do not mean to diminish the content per se. I think that obviously we stand for a lot of great things here in Loudoun County Public Schools. I see that every single day in my work here. I see the work that we support in our policies.

[05:12:42] I see strong language around our beliefs and the way that we support our diverse learners and I think our programs and our budget. I think there's lots of ways that we are doing the things that show our beliefs. So I have always struggled with them. I will be honest, I don't love that they're on the consent agenda merely because I would prefer to sort of abstain from proclamations because I don't feel that they necessarily always have a clear directive towards what their purpose is, but I never want to abstain from the entire consent agenda because those are other important decisions that we have made.

[05:13:14] So I've always kind of struggled with that. So I did a little bit of a deep dive. It seems that Fairfax County Public Schools sort of reevaluated the way that they've done and something that I've actually been talking to Mr. Svensson with a little bit is about a potential for a strategic governance manual. We touched on this a little bit in our LAMP committee when we talked about having chair and vice chair roles possibly outlined, and so their governance manual has those different roles that the board takes, more operational, it's more like a giant regulation for a school board, and I'm wondering if something like that would be a good place for proclamations

[05:13:50] because they are sort of board driven, and they could be posted there. There's a governance manual website. You can go and look at the different proclamations. There could be a different process for soliciting our electronic signatures as we support them. That way, when certain ones are pulled off, it's not divisive against one particular group. I do worry about us marginalizing certain groups, picking and choosing. And so I tend to feel that they can have a divisive nature to them. And I really do believe that people know what we stand for by the actions and

[05:14:25] the work that we do every day for kids. So that's kind of where I'm at. I am very interested in exploring an idea of a manual, regardless of if it includes proclamations or not. But I think it could be a happy medium to save board meeting time, but also be a place where board members could work to pursue the causes that they're interested in. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Spinson.

[05:14:48] Thank you, Madam Chair. I support the process that we currently have. I would be open to the idea of having a consent agenda that is specific to proclamations and a consent agenda that's specific to other items, if that is the will of the board.

[05:15:05] But I just think that proclamations by their by their name are public facing. They're typically read so that we can communicate to the public instructional values, values of belonging, other priorities for the division.

[05:15:23] And I think it's important to take that opportunity. I don't think the proclamations are the reason our meetings go long. It's usually not not that not that long to read a couple.

[05:15:35] And I think that it's just an important opportunity for us to, I think also I'm very open to the idea of adding or thinking about how we can make them more action oriented in terms of what's happening at the school level, you know, for example, on Constitution Week, I do think that's very much tied to what's happening in the school building and making that perhaps more explicit in a proclamation, certainly willing to think about that.

[05:16:05] but I don't think that these proclamations are disconnected from what's happening on a day-to-day basis. They are education-focused, whether they're celebrating educators or putting a spotlight on educators or our students or particular aspects of curriculum. I think it's an important opportunity to train our focus on that, pause, reflect, and be together in community. Thank you. And Ms.

[05:16:33] CARDI. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I actually really do like the idea of separating out the consent agenda with the business items and the proclamations separate. I actually think that's a really smart idea. I've been struggling since January about the consent agenda, not because I had necessarily issues with the topics of the proclamations, but really that there's a whole set of business items that are there for quick approval because we've got consent. And then there's a bunch of proclamations which are kind of separate. And this is something that started in 2024, in January 2024, that's really shifted. I think the thing that's interesting to note is

[05:17:13] that last year, calendar year, we had 27 proclamations. Already to date this year, we have had 38. I am very much in support of the ones that are academic focused. And of the 38, we have six that have been academically focused. And then a lot of other ones, which are So recognitions of lots of different topics and groups and programs and all kinds of things, which I'm not necessarily opposed to, but I really do like the idea of separating out the business consent items from the proclamations themselves.

[05:17:45] And to be perfectly honest with you, I'm actually kind of interested and would want to see more about what Fairfax is doing with theirs and figuring out how that operations piece works. So I think I'll kind of leave it at that, but I do really like the idea of separating these things out because I just think we need to separate out the business from the proclamation piece, especially, and I get that they're posted, by the way, a couple days before, but only in the last two years have they not actually had time on the agenda.

[05:18:19] and another fact just so we know every single one of these takes about two and a half minutes to read so we've already taken almost two and a half hours this year alone in the reading process of these proclamations and again it's a couple minutes each meeting last meeting it was like 20 minutes worth of proclamations and these are just time-saving pieces I think that we could do and I think there's other places where we can put it and I frankly want to make sure that we're also putting everything on the consent we're treating everything on the consent agenda the same so for going to read proclamations that we need to read the other items that are on there too and if we're not going to read the other items then we shouldn't read these and the only kind of middle ground on that I guess would be to separate

[05:18:58] them out and we treat one different than the other thanks thank you for engaging in that conversation that was very helpful and the last topic is on public comment this this is something that I wanted to raise and it's been a conversation that has been ongoing probably every year since I started on the board I know we haven't had the opportunity with our new board members this year to discuss it but it feels that it could be possible to make a change to the public agenda or to the public comment process I think it's

[05:19:37] worth exploring whether or not we feel committed to continuing to take in a virtual public comment. I think it's worth having a conversation about whether or not we should limit it to what's on the actual agenda for the evening. It could be an efficiency, and I know some other places even limit it to a certain number. I probably would be most inclined to limit it to the agenda, just from my perspective. Do you have a question before we take perspectives no okay so that my perspective is that it would be

[05:20:17] acceptable to make a change now and that the way I would want to make the change is to limit topics to what's on our actual agenda so that it's it increases utility by Sheridan Hugh thank you madam chair I have been I have been an advocate of reforming public comment since I got on the board there has been some talk already today about how long some of our meetings get and what are ways efficient ways to cut down the time and those of us especially who have been here for almost three years I think are

[05:20:51] in a good position to know that frequently when we are here late into the night it is because we have a very long public comment list. I would be in support of rather than requiring public comment to be tied to items on our agenda because for example the issue with the athletic trainers the movement to have more athletic trainers assigned to different schools that would not have it may not have ever come to light if that hadn't been brought to us through public comments so I think there's a lot of utility in allowing the community that opportunity to bring issues

[05:21:28] to our attention that we might not already be aware of but I do have concern about the amount of time that it can sometimes take in our meetings when we're trying to get our regular business done and so my suggestion would be that we set aside one night a month for um to be our public comment and celebrations night and we have we have our recognitions we have our we do our proclamations we have public comment as keeping it as as many people as want to come and do public comment as want to come and do public comment and we can hear them out and and then move on

[05:22:04] our lives similar to how we did over the summer on the power lines issue thank you thank you mrs griffiths thank you madam chair um i disagree with both my colleagues um i'm just curious to know why it's so important to cut out the public on different topics they want to be heard it's the only chance the public has to speak to the board directly and i'm just curious why would we do that if we do go ahead and change public comment i think the public is not going to be happy about

[05:22:43] that um we'll have to answer to the public and i completely disagree with changing public comment as it stands thank you thank you mr pepper so a lot of opinions on public comment especially someone who often gave public comment at a school meeting only a couple times in loudon but in other places i gave comment um first and foremost this is the public's way to present issues that we might not know about and like vice chair donahue had said there are some things i even think the last meeting the librarians came up and gave a little speech about librarian staffing standards it's not something that's on our agenda but it's something that's important to them and it raises flags for

[05:23:22] us of things that we might want to investigate and might want to look at so i'm all for not limiting the public comment to simply what's on the agenda. If we were to make changes in public comment, there's a few things that I would suggest. The first is the virtual public comment I really struggle with. I feel like it takes an inordinate amount of time to like cue up a speaker. They always get chopped off. It doesn't seem that they're getting their say in the way that someone comes in person to get their say. And it's not as effective and probably would be better as an email and you can always email all the board members.

[05:23:56] The other thing that I would consider is possibly turning the cameras back on for public comment. I know that it has led to problems in the past and I got a whole deep dive on the history of it. But I think that if people are watching the school meetings at home and see someone come up with a public comment, it does a little bit more when they get to show their face.

[05:24:16] And I'm someone who is a visual learner and I like to see people's face when they talk. But outside of that, if we were to do anything with limiting public comment maybe there's an overall cap in time that we have for public comments 90 minutes i know that 60 minutes whatever we decide as a board i know that when i get the email every week from sherry with the list of of comment public comments i was like oh there's only 10 tonight oh there's 15 tonight oh there's 82 tonight and it sets my mood what i'm getting ready for for the evening so a lot of things in play here but i really do like public comment i think it's a really important piece of the community communicating with us

[05:24:53] And if we were going to make changes, I would streamline it a little bit, but not make anything significant. Thank you. Dr. Rasheed. Thank you, Chair Chandler. I'm a mixed bag with the rest of my colleagues that have spoken before me. I do like what, if I'm not mistaken, what Fairfax County public schools do, along with Prince William, if I'm not mistaken. I think that we shouldn't have repeat speakers on the same topic, how to filter them out. I'm not too sure. So when you have two

[05:25:28] consecutive meetings, it would be great to have like the one speaker or the one public commenter come out and speak at that one time because to hear them all over again gets a little redundant and it could make our meeting go long unnecessarily. The other one is if not, if we can't do that, maybe we could, I don't know, come up with like the first 25 that sign up and virtual could be separate or maybe alongside or inclusive with them. Another thing was, I do agree with Ms. Donahue, Vice Chair Donahue, when she had mentioned maybe doing one night of proclamations along with public

[05:26:06] commenters if we can't do any of that. So that way we could just devote that one day or rather that one evening to that. And then if not at all, maybe it's, maybe, and I'm going to say the curse word, Maybe all of us need to be limited as school board members in how we speak.

[05:26:22] So I'm all for public comment, and people should come out. They should talk. But we are also, like, guilty in that sense, no offense to all of our members here, that we talk and talk and talk. And I'm all for expressing ourselves, but it gets a little too much. So I know that the supervisors have some sort of, I think they have a two-minute timer or a three-minute timer, and they start the clock when each one of us talks.

[05:26:44] Maybe that could compensate for such a long public comment. Like, if we have people coming out for public comment, that's great. Maybe we could limit ourselves in that sense and just kind of stick to the point, just thinking out loud. Thanks, Chair. Thank you. Ms. LaBelle. First of all, public comment is required by the Virginia State Board of Education and allowed by the United States Constitution.

[05:27:09] So trying to eliminate public comment is really not an option. However, I agree that there are ways that we can control it. Thank you, Ms. Donoghue.

[05:27:24] I recommended last year at our last retreat that we could split, like, one time have public comment and all the celebrations and all the awards and maybe some of the work session and the next time get down to business.

[05:27:42] So that was one of the things that we had actually thought about at that time. I also like the idea of maybe doing away with virtual public comment simply because it doesn't seem to be working.

[05:28:00] It doesn't have the impact. I think that if the person really believed in it, they'd make the effort to get here. And if they couldn't, they'd find a way to get the message to us that brings things up, like the athletic trainers. which we already did, thankfully, pass.

[05:28:20] But I think in terms of public comment, I don't think we can cut more time. And I think that as board members, when we engage up on the dais and we are discussing ideas and we go back and forth and back and forth, that's our job.

[05:28:40] You know, you can't tape someone's hand and then say, okay, go ahead, operate. I mean, this is our job, is to sit there and engage with each other and come up with policies. And I think we need to be allowed the time to do that. And if we have to cut back on a little bit of opportunity for our virtual viewers, I think that it's a fair trade.

[05:29:02] Thank you. Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm just going to go down the line and kind of respond to my colleagues. I have been very clear in the past and have given very long speeches that have outlined that I am not for changing it.

[05:29:18] I'm just not. I think we were elected to listen to the public. I would rather find other efficiencies if we could, but I think our meetings are long in nature because we are a massive organization that has very, very important work to do, and this is what we signed up for. I am not particularly open to adding another night to the calendar.

[05:29:39] As someone whose family time is rapidly slipping away, I'm dedicating a lot of time to my evenings here. And I think one later night for me, even if that means midnight or 1 a.m., is more palatable to me than adding another night. Although I do respect the creativity of the idea.

[05:29:57] Ms. Griffiths, I agree with everything you said. Mr. Pepper, yes, camera's on. And I really also, just to address Dr. Rasheed's comments about us. I mean, if we're going to implement a structure where there's turns and things like that, I think that that could be something that we could explore.

[05:30:14] But in general, I agree with Ms. LaBelle. We were elected to address the public and discuss issues openly and transparently, and that is our job. And so I think very much that we should be able to say what we need to say when we need to say it.

[05:30:30] And I think we've done a pretty good job of, you know, leaning into the different things that we're passionate about, where our different expertise bring us to the table. So I do not want to change it at all, and thank you. Thank you. Mr. Svinson. Thank you, Madam Chair. I agree with Ms. Chernoff.

[05:30:48] I don't, I mean, the only instance I could see, and, you know, this is maybe being on the board when there haven't been that many evenings where we have, you know, 100 commenters live. But I could see, I think the way it works now has been working from my perspective.

[05:31:05] I like the cadence of having public comment at both of our meetings so that folks can speak to the issues that we are going to be voting on or getting information on on that same meeting. I could see a world where there's an upper bound on the max number of speakers that's pretty high to account for an evening where everyone's speaking to the same topic and it maybe take many, many hours and maybe there's diminishing returns everyone is speaking to the same the same point so I would be open to setting a max number of

[05:31:41] speakers that's quite high or a time limit that's quite high but from my perspective I think it's working fairly well in the months that I've been on the board and we've been able to hear from the public live and and virtually I think it's helpful to have the virtual option for accessibility purposes and i will leave it there mr ricardi thank you madam chair i i agree with a lot of what a lot of you guys have said i'm all for having public comment at both meetings i think

[05:32:19] we should turn the cameras back on i think we could give our speakers 90 seconds or two minutes instead of just the 60 unless we have some really large number of people um i don't cower from the criticism or the feedback that we might get from the public we'll get it and sometimes we do sometimes it's complimentary so I'm good for all of it I think that we have done I appreciate the fact that we have limited the instruction time ahead of time it's it gets a little concerning to me when our instructions take longer than the public comment does so I appreciate the fact that that's been cut

[05:32:55] back I think that you know we have had a year this year except for our special session which was very targeted we haven't had the normal well I wouldn't say it was normal but we haven't had a huge number of people and so I like the fact that they have whatever topic could come up I agree that one of the things that's really interesting is that sometimes things land on you know in that in those conversations that we don't we haven't heard before and so it puts it on our radar screen so I think there's real value in that so I'm I'm all for doing it I'm all for turning the cameras back on and T and you know treating our constituents

[05:33:32] with the respect that they're due and see where it goes I mean I just don't think that there's we haven't had I mean are we going to have contentious items between now and you know whenever all of our terms are over probably and you know what we'll just it is what it's part of we have a reputation for those things right so sometimes it's quite it's quite interesting but I I don't know I don't think we should be limiting public comment I just don't think there's there's a need for it and I get that it gets uncomfortable for some people but at the end of the day we're that's what we're here for thanks thank you and I will say to each board member thank you for

[05:34:06] sharing your perspective. I mean, really throughout this conversation in the work session, we really were trying to assess the will of the board. I don't, in some cases it was very clear we were completely in agreement. I don't necessarily think on some of these things that we have established an agreement enough to change the process as of now, but I think it's worthwhile for us having had the opportunity to reflect on each other's perspectives to go out you know as we go back out of the work session and take some time to think about ways that we could make

[05:34:43] changes and and I find myself reflecting on whether or not it's a could we have a special committee to review governance right I mean so I think there are some things that we should have some one-on-one conversations about in the next few weeks and and see if we can come up with a plan to explore some of these issues further, but not necessarily anticipating any immediate changes.

[05:35:07] So, Ms. Riccardi? Can I just ask a question? Because I actually think that there might be a number that would want to make changes or adjustments. So I would really encourage that perhaps we have that conversation in a meeting at some point and discuss what those might be.

[05:35:25] And I'd like to hear from, frankly, I'd like to hear from the public on this, too. Yeah. I think we could maybe. I mean, it's very difficult to imagine looking at what we have coming in the fall. I mean, our calendar is very full. So I think we could potentially have a work session and only discuss governance issues.

[05:35:44] I mean, there are some things about our governing docs that I myself would kind of like to explore changing. So I'm very much open to that. I guess one of my questions is if we brought it here to a work session, and, I mean, I don't want to see these things kind of just disappear.

[05:36:03] So what's the next step on these? We would have an agenda. We would have some proposals. We would have to get in the weeds with some documents and actually edit them. Yeah, I think there's some work that could be done here. But at this point, we have had an extensive conversation today, and I think it's worthwhile for us to take some time to reflect on some of the ways that we would each individually like to make some changes and then continue the conversation.

[05:36:39] So with that, we have concluded the business that we needed to do today in our school board retreat. and with that we oh no what is I'm so sorry I had the I apologize Mrs. Griffiths had raised another issue and would you like to speak to it Mrs. Griffiths thank you thank you so much Madam Chair for adding this to the agenda for me just a little housekeeping thing and I'm hoping my colleagues are in agreement if the administration is aware of an event at a specific school

[05:37:18] that would be our district school I'm hoping that there would be more communication out to us to let us know oh there's an event or a ceremony at one of your district schools would you be able to attend this would be similar to how the clerk office the clerk's office routinely distributes invitations and information about county-wide events for all the schools but this is also more specific to the school board member at that school just to make sure they know and they can

[05:37:51] attend. So I'm looking to improve communication on this issue and better communication would help ensure school board members appropriately support and celebrate the students, staff, and communities they represent. So I'm hoping I'll have agreement here that just in case there's an you don't know about an administration is going and you're free you know and you want to meet with your community that you could you would get an invitation so I just wanted to put that out there for the administration it would be adding something to the administration to send us an invite thank you so much for

[05:38:29] letting me add this to the agenda thank you for raising the issue and I will say I was particularly grateful to you for mentioning the 9/11 event last week um, because you spoke to it in your board member comments, I actually asked if I could go. Um, and I did find that that was a really engaging, um, opportunity for board members, and I was grateful to have that opportunity. I, um, I do think to some extent this is a conversation, um, in part

[05:39:02] that should be looked through the lens of what's, what does the school leadership want? Um, but I, can't say that I have clearly strong feelings about it. I don't want to get into a position where I'm taking away from something that's happening at this school, but I would want to define what would rise to the occasion of asking school board members to attend. And so I'm open to the idea. I certainly enjoy every opportunity I have to spend time in schools. So I am open to the

[05:39:40] idea but would want to have a careful conversation about defining the parameters. Vice Chair Donohue. Thank you Madam Chair. I just wanted to add another point for consideration if we move forward with further discussions about Mrs. Griffith's suggestions and that is what you mean when you say the school board member because there are right there are schools that might be in one district but have but have well I mean at large but apart from that there are schools that are physically located in one district but have incoming students who live in other districts as well so are you saying that you want to

[05:40:18] be invited to every event that occurs in the Ashburn district or at every school where any students who live in Ashburn may attend etc thank you thank you Mrs. Griffiths it's your turn anyway thank you for that great question yeah on On the website, on the LCPS website, we do share a lot of schools, and it could be looked at, and at large, Ms. Donahue, it could be looked at that when there is an event, administration could look, okay, who's the school board member there, and who shares it?

[05:40:55] It could be those two situations and at large as well. I think that, and if I may mention the 9-11 event that we both went to on Friday, I happened to reach out to the principal, and I know that they have a ceremony every year.

[05:41:16] When I showed up, I expected a little ceremony, but it was the 25th anniversary, so it was huge. And I didn't realize, and I'm like kicking myself for this, I've missed previous years because I had to work.

[05:41:35] I was trying to figure out why I had never gone before. I don't believe I've had invitations, but also the administration was there. So I said to myself, oh, my gosh, the administration's here. I didn't really get an invitation, but I happened to know about it.

[05:41:52] So I just think it would help. It would help all of our school board members if we knew. We don't have to attend every single event, but events like that are really important to attend and to meet with our communities and our staff and the students.

[05:42:08] That one in particular, very important to attend. And I know it's hard to distinguish sometimes between the different events, but if administration is attending and they were there with a photographer, I think they should take, administration should take a look and see who the school board members are, invite at large as well.

[05:42:31] So they have the opportunity to go to an event like that and meet with their community members. And I really don't feel like there should be pushback on that because we already get, as you know, the invitations from the clerk for events around the county.

[05:42:48] I think it's very important for us to get out to our schools and especially events like that, ceremonies and recognitions. There was a recognition for one of my principals that I happened to just, I ended up upon. I didn't know that administration would be there.

[05:43:05] So that's my point. Those were two instances where I felt like, whoa, I didn't realize it was going on and I should have. So I just wanted to put it out there to everybody and see how you felt about it.

[05:43:21] Because I know you all want to go to your schools and meet with your principals, meet with the community, meet with staff, students, everybody. So recognitions, ceremonies, anything like that for your particular school. I might not go all the way to Catoctin or to Luckett's for Cary.

[05:43:38] But for those in my district, I would like to attend. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Mr. Pepper. Thank you, Madam Chair. One of the things that I've always, when I visit with the principals, I ask them, I say, can you, you know, if you have a big event, please let me know. Happy to attend. I like this. There are things I don't know about. I will say I do echo the concern of Vice Chair Donahue. In fact, my kids go to a school that's actually not in my district. I can spit on it, but it's not in my district.

[05:44:07] So, and I will say on our website, it doesn't say, it just says who the school board member is that, whose district is in there all laughing at me. If you can't see on video, it's not bitter. But they, so it doesn't say on our website who, if there's an overlapping, you know, I have kids in my district who attend Light Ridge.

[05:44:28] It says that Dr. Rashid and Vice Chair Donahue are the two school members for that, even though I have students in my district who attend that school. it's not always necessarily obvious which schools which or who whose districts overlap but I do like this idea I like there's no guarantee I'm gonna make it but it's nice to at least know about things thank you dr. Rasheed thank you chair I concur with my colleagues I'll make it a point to whatever event that I come across with like for example in my district I'll definitely let my colleagues know. But yes, I do see the overlap with what Mr. Pepper had mentioned

[05:45:07] that I have, I think most of my constituents where I live, they all go to Ms. Riccardi's district, which is Rockridge, Stonehill Middle School, and all those schools there in the Sterling District. So I do see that overlap. I do see that need to communicate this issue. So yeah, I mean, more to come. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. LaBelle. I think it's very important that we get out and visit with our schools and our students in more formal places rather than

[05:45:39] just graduation. I think that a lot of times, as Mr. Pepper has said, we say to the principals, oh, if you have anything special coming up, let me know. I think it goes, you know, right over their heads half the time. They have so much else going on. I've had my assistant try to dig and find things that are happening in Catoctin. And we find a few things, but not a lot, you know, because they don't put them out there. We can't get it. So I think it's important that if there's

[05:46:16] anything going on at any of the schools, Ms. Griffiths has a wonderful idea. Let us know. We don't have to go to everything, but at least we know about it. We can send notes and say, you know, congratulations, things like that. So I'm all for it. Thank you. Ms. Chernoff.

[05:46:39] Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm, like you, open to this conversation. I think, I mean, it's no secret that I visit schools often and I employ the same strategy. I ask the principals that if they'd like to include me in anything that they feel comfortable with, I would be happy to attend if I can. And I think that that also speaks to what you someone said about school leadership I think sometimes it's not about us as a school board member and I'm comfortable with that sometimes it's about the school community and we could be a little bit of a distraction and sometimes they're totally

[05:47:16] on board with having us do all the things and I think there's a range there and I've tried to build the relationships especially in Leesburg with building leaders so that they know that I'm open to any and all of it. And sometimes it's last minute and sometimes it's ahead. I think for the larger holidays and if there are significant keystone things that, you know, that LCPS does, I'm thinking about like the one LCPS day. Last year I asked for, you know, Dr. Bergen if I could go to schools on, you know, just do one LCPS celebration day. That feels like something a board member should probably participate in since we're really proud of our district. So

[05:47:52] I think there's certain definite markers that the board mostly I think gets invites to so I'm open to that but overall I support the idea but I want to make sure we're clear because schools have stuff going on all the time and some is PTA supported some is PBIS supported some is booster supported some are athletic events I mean I do think the responsibility also falls on us to do that so I'm a little bit it feels a little bit murky to me about where that line should be drawn

[05:48:23] But certainly, if administration, Dr. Spence is speaking, if they feel it's appropriate for school board support to show solidarity for LCPS or whatever the significant event is, I think that that would be appropriate. Thank you. Mr. Svensson.

[05:48:39] Thank you. Yes, I agree with that comment. I think you said Keystone events. Yes, I think that certainly I think that's a great idea to make sure that we're aware of those important events, but also don't want us to be disruptive or a distraction from particular events that maybe are supposed to be just the school community and maybe don't need an extra board member floating around.

[05:49:02] So I think that maybe administration, Dr. Spence, can think about whether there are particular events to add to what we are already invited to that are district specific to Mrs. Griffith's point. But yeah, I think it would be helpful to have that clear delineation, maybe a little more expansive than what we're currently getting a formal invite to, but not so much that we're a hindrance to events going forward.

[05:49:31] Thank you, Ms. Riccardi. Thank you, I agree completely. I mean, I think one of the things I've been struggling with for the first nine months here is just figuring out where do I find out about all these events going on the ones that are division-wide as well as the one specifically in in my district so besides calling social media as thoroughly as I possibly can amongst the 5,000 other things we have to do I mean it's really hard to figure out kind of what's going on at the schools and I agree I don't want to be a burden to anybody either but I do want to see what's going on and I want to be able to celebrate with the schools too I think these things are just so much

[05:50:08] fun. And I'll be honest with you, I think it helps us really personalize and really get down to the grassroots, right, about what's really happening and why we're really here. So I think for me personally, I take great joy in being able to go spend time with our students and our teachers and our staff, because that's really what we're doing here. And these are the people that we're really serving. So some more insight into those events would be great. I have a limited calendar too so I can't go to everything but certainly it'd be great to be able to pick the key key events at each school and be able to go and participate or at least have at least know that

[05:50:48] they're happening I agree um with Ms. LaBelle too just being able to send them a note saying hey I can't come but I'm thinking about you guys today and you know if there's anything you need let me know kind of a thing so thanks thank you all right I apologize that I missed you before um but with that I do believe we have completed our work for today um and I want to thank every board member and really thank staff for being here throughout the entirety of today.

[05:51:15] It was a very useful conversation. And with that, the school board retreat is now adjourned.

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