Here we go, here we go, before I get, all right, thanks Taylor. All right, I want to welcome everybody, and there's Caitlin. I want to welcome everybody to the Endover Elementary School Board of Education budget workshop. It is Wednesday, January 31st, and we are here, and we are going to talk about facilities and maintenance and other miscellaneous line items that are available. We're not covered in previous budget meetings. Just a couple of ground rules. The purpose of these budget workshops is to inform the board of what goes into our budget, line by line. And it's also available for the residents of Andover to understand what goes into our budget. We will be also reviewing briefly recapping what we discussed last week, which was salaries, benefits, and insurance. Our goal is to vote on this budget at our February 14th regular BOE meeting. We will have our last budget workshop next Wednesday where it will be public forum for anybody and everybody to come and ask questions. Regarding our budget. We do have a dedicated email address, AES budget at Andover ElementaryCT.org for anybody who wants to ask questions about our budget. And I know we did receive one, and I believe, value, be it talking about that. We also will be posting our power points. They are posted. The power points are posted. The meeting recordings have now been posted on the school website under the Board of Ed tab under the minutes and agendas. All of them are there. I did ask Val when our proposed budget will be posted so we can look at it. And again, other members of the community can look at it and Val indicated that it would either be posted Friday of this week as your goal.
If not, no later than Monday of next week. And that will also be under the Board of Ed tab and the school website under minutes and agendas. I think that's it. Those are the ground rules. And Valerie, take it away. Okay. Let's see. Let me make sure that this is the right screen. Oh, that. Yep. Okay. Okay. Right screen. Here we go. All right. Can everybody see it? Yes. Yes. Yes. I can't see you guys. All right. So in reviewing what I thought would be most helpful in case somebody missed one of our other Information is to kind of go through and quickly review by showing the highlighted areas of our regular expenditure report that we use monthly our budget because this is what people are used to seeing. So we've already covered the ones that are highlighted and the ones that aren't highlighted are going to be the ones that we look at tonight. So if we review what the. The areas are on the first page of our expenditure report their salaries there. When we reviewed salaries, we talked about the fact that teachers salaries are at a 3% increase. So all of the teacher salary line items in each of these account ideas each of these objects would wind up a 3% increase. We are going to estimate this 2425 budget with the same for the non certain even though that will not be. The contract will not be negotiated and signed before we adopt this budget.
On the second page, we had talked about special education in summer school in addition to those. The salaries and when we talked about that, we talked about summer school needing a little bit more for services. Again, we talked about contracts already being negotiated in the administrative line with those three were mid contract for all three of those positions, so they are already negotiated as to what the increases are in this section. The third page, we had already talked about pension and that being. Merff pension for our municipal employees, which are in the non certified union. We did talk about benefits last time and how our whole consortium would be going up 16 and a half percent and that we are planning for. 16% increase for teachers because they're contract when it had been renegotiated last time and this is their last year of it. That it was a half of a point increase this year on their end for responsibility. We did it for 16% can someone mute. The person that's not muted, please. At the bottom there in professional educational services when we did special ed we talked about each of those sections. Requiring the increases because we had an increase of services with the exception of psychological services not because we didn't have an increase in psych services, but because that was a grant funded through that mental health worker grant. On this page here, which is page four, we have most of the areas on the top that had already been covered we talked about professional development.
We talked about the other professional services that needed increase, which was just special ed. And we talked about the four on the bottom that are not highlighted in just a moment. We will talk about that whole for 30 section because that falls under tonight's category. We talked about transportation when we did special education and the bus contract the bus contracted yielded an increase for us of about $6500. This was a 6% increase for year one and that contract is signed by all of the superintendents in our area now each of our towns. We talked about the communications section not having an increase in the 530s.
We will talk about advertising and printing in just a second where our biggest savings for next year is. In review is that middle section the 560s we had a $96,000 reduction for an out placement in that out placement special ed line under travel. These are in here because there are certain things in people's contracts where we have to pay my life, especially when they go to professional development training. But that based on what's been needed year to year we didn't need to put an increase there and then we did spend one whole evening talking about special education curriculum and instruction and supplies. One of the things we did note was we don't love the fact that in our budget right now a lot of the supplies are separated by great. Because we don't normally purchase a lot of our supplies that way but that night we did decide that those supply items those lines would have 0% increases to them simply because we do have other sources of supplies right now we have some instructional grants that will cover some instructional supplies we have our summer program that's grant funded and we have our after school program and so any increase that we would have needed otherwise. Otherwise our covered through those programs but the bottom of the 610s they are we'll talk about tonight. We'll talk about electricity propane and heating oil we did cover no increases to the supplies on the top because of redirect grants.
Again, the rest of the supplies we will talk about 650 there and whether or not there's an increase that needs to occur for computer and media because we did not include that solely when we did curriculum and instruction. Do's and fees do's and fees we talked about briefly when we were looking at this before however for the most part. They don't really increase on a yearly basis whatever the caps fees are for super intended we pay half that has an increase for next year. These are organizations that's cable for the Board of Education that have maintained status quo for the last couple of years so there was no increase there. So when we look at the ones that weren't highlighted here that we want to really specifically take a quick look at tonight, it are located here. They started the 340s and they go through the 650s and include one or multiple lines. So I'll stop back at those now so that we can take a look at them.
On that first page, they're on the bottom. It was cleaning services, facility cleaning and cleaning and grounds, as well as the lunch program, the 340 on the top. Our lunch program hasn't changed. We do still contract to Coventry Food Services, that's a shared service agreement. It's their food service people. We get a good deal. We actually do get a good deal with Coventry. Coventry keeps a running record of money in money out, unlike other agencies that we could potentially contract to, for example, EastCon. If we contracted to EastCon, for anybody who's not really sure how our food service works, if we contracted to EastCon or another organization such as that, there would be a flat fee that we would pay for their services, let's say $30,000 a year. We would pay them that fee no matter what, and I can tell you that during COVID, when there was a lot of extra money coming in for rebates, anybody who contracted to those agencies
did not receive additional rebates. All they received was the regular. Whatever rebates they received for free and reduced lunch programs. But the increases, when more money was being given to districts, we didn't receive any of that. I do contract with them in my other districts, so I do know that that was a little frustrating. To coventry, they are more than fair with us, which is why we renew with them every year. When extra money comes in to coventry food service as a result of their partnership with us, they credit the majority of that money to our bucket. So if we received $3 an extra child during COVID for lunch program, they put that in there for us. And so we were very lucky that during that time period, we were reaping some of the benefits of those increases. Those rebates are not coming in anymore. However, because for a little over a year or more two years, that free and reduced lunch program was extended, they were not dipping in any further to our funds, which meant that there's a small amount that could be carried over in that account. And when we carried that over, it made it so 3 to 4 years running now, our lunch program line item here, that 34310, 3100, has not had to increase at all because of our relationship with commentary. So I wanted to put that on the record because I know that as a lot of the other expenses go up, people might wonder, how are we not paying more? If we're paying more for the employee that works in our kitchen, if we're paying more for food, if we're paying more for repairs, because we had some money that had been accumulated
that commentary as a partner allowed us to keep in there and utilize for the next year. When we looked down at cleaning services, these are not just regular cleaning services, these would be things that are not done, let's say, on a daily basis. Then we have to have, for example, rubs cleaned, that happen on a schedule periodically. This is the other cleaning service that would need to be called to come in to address things that are not cleaned on a regular basis here. And so we can see them right here. I made it bigger for you. For 30, this section here, this is the bulk of our regular just repair and maintenance
of the building. Some of these lines over the years seem repetitious to me. However, Terry and I talked about this and potentially kind of pushing some of them together for next year, but some of them were more created because we had contracts with agencies. So for example, you'll see there that there's one that says facility cleaning services and it was a thousand dollars. That one was at one time created and I don't know why there are so many in here, but created because that was an addition to their other account. For the most part, you'll see when there's usually able to may when we contract to some of them, able to may and then actually July and August for some other ones. You'll see that there's some movement within the 430s. Terry moves, let's say, the thousand from there to the other line. And we'd like to streamline that at the end of this year, moving into next year. The only one that we are a little bit short on now in the 430s, because of some of the changes that have occurred in repairs and maintenance over the last 18 months is going to be the 2621 line there. If you look, it says RNM repair and maintenance for HVAC. We found that all of these individual lines here, we had been servicing things within the building for regular repair and maintenance, but we had been avoiding some of the bigger ones. If you guys remember, maybe six months ago, one of our board meetings, I had brought you a report where we had had the traps all examined, all of our boiler traps had been examined, and they had given us a very diagnostic informational about each of those traps.
They were fixed and no longer outside my window or a few other windows did we see with our heating system, a lot of that, like I called smoke, but a lot of the smoke coming out of the steam traps where you could see a lot of exiting of air. Once those were fixed, we know that we're going to be more effective and efficient. We then to make sure that we don't wind up in that situation again, words 4 or 5 years before somebody comes in and does a diagnostic, a comprehensive diagnostic, we made sure that with our HFAC system, our heating and cooling system, that we added a number of things into our repair and maintenance so that that project that was done this year wouldn't have been done in vain. We can track and see just how much more effective and efficient we are. Maybe it'll affect how much oil we use this year, we don't know since it's so new.
But the service contract that we signed with one of our vendors that is able to service us in a few more areas, that contract for the 2425 year, it'll go in the 2621 line item there on the 430s, but that contract itself was going up. And because that contract was going up, that line item will need just under $5,000 more dollars in it for the repair and maintenance. The rest of them were fine with, but that service contract will appear in that line this year, and so that 10,000 will turn into 15. That's the only change on this page. The technology repair and maintenance, we have the two sections here. The 432 2580 line at one point, this was where all of our EastCon was. And a couple of years ago, when we had excess tech funds through COVID relief, when we were replacing from books, when we were increasing the efficiency of our internet and doing updates to our internet, we were able to take a big chunk of our EastCon costs and cover them with technology grants. As of this June, those technology grants are gone. And so that 23,000 now isn't enough to pay the full vote for our EastCon services as they relate to tech repair and maintenance. And so that line right there, we'll go up to cover the cost by 16 because our contract is 39,000. And so we were, at one point, we were paying
them in full out of our general fund. And then as I said in these last two years, we pulled out what we could to get it covered someplace else. That's where we made some cuts. So that 16 will appear in that line so that it'll equal 39. No increases are needed in the area of advertising or printing. We had increased to accommodate certain changes that were made curriculum wise in that 2230 line for instructional related tech. We had increased because we had lots of other manuals that had to be printed up. Our reopening plans that had to be shared, our safety plans that had to be shared in color on certain sections. We had last year when we had the waiver out and we didn't know whether or
not we were going to be replacing instructional materials. We had a fair amount of reading materials instructional related materials that were printed. And so had we not now saw the waiver issue and decided that we are moving on with another reading program, I probably would have had to up this section again because we do make so many copies and printing material for teachers. But for next year, it shouldn't remain status quo. How did you get that number? Like out of all the other budget numbers, you have 75, 6, 2, 13. So that one would be where they would go through Steve. When people make copies, it's tracked
on our copiers and it's one copier. I believe it's tracked just by someone's code. So I have a code. I punch in. Everybody else has a code. They punch in and there's a report that we receive on everybody's codes monthly. And then those monthly charges around the bottom of the bill and we know Steve, for example, is there one grade and actually we've utilized these reports before. Where maybe it's one grade that tends to have an increase this month in what they're copying and then Taylor can go and speak to them or answer the question for me, usually she knows the answer as to whether or not something had to be printed out. So for example, a couple of months ago, I knew a particular teacher had been printing and I went to Taylor and said, hey, Taylor, can you tell me why such and such printed, you know, 3,000 copies this month and she said, yes, they needed these white bider materials, they needed to go with the curriculum and this particular teacher printed them out for the whole grade. I said, oh, okay. That was what happened in the current year. We're budgeting to the 13 cents. Like that's where I'm
confused. Because Steve, the best number that we can utilize is looking at the trend and that we have with our bills. And so if we add up the 12 month worth of bills and that's where they come to, that's the number that's in there. So because you're right, normally it doesn't have the pennies on any area, unless you can take bills and add those bills up and that would be where those numbers would have come from. And on contracts, that makes sense. I guess I'm just confused. Because this is still an estimate because if they print one more copy or we give this budget item. You're right. It is. It could go up or down by a bit. But that's where those numbers come from for the copy. Because I think it was years ago, I thought the same thing. And then I said, how do we know how much? And they said, there's reports. And we started to look at the reports. And we get those reports monthly. So that helps, too, for us to see the trends.
So understand, but I guess my question would be, we know that everybody's getting hit with inflation a little bit hard. I, why aren't we assuming some rise in cost based on? Because breed next year, there will be some integrated materials that we get from the new reading program that the school selects over the summer. So whereas now there are certain materials that do have to be printed, because we don't have, um, integrating or bookworm. There will be some material next year that will be provided from the manufacturer that we won't have to copy. We just don't know how much yet.
So I can't decrease it because I don't know, but I know it won't be more. This has been the toughest year when it comes to instructional material that needs to be printed, because we didn't have a chosen and boxed set curriculum for reading. We were waiting for the waiver. So I could go down break. It just wouldn't go up. And I wouldn't know that now. Because they haven't selected the program yet. Once the program is selected, they will have a better idea. Does that answer your question? Yes. Okay. And again, remember, these are our estimates. So if I know it's not going to go up, I'm going to keep what's there until I know how much it would go down. I don't know that yet. Okay. In the sixth tense, um, where are we? In the sixth tense. Oh, this is, um, this is our page seven when we look at our monthly custom expenditure report at board meetings. Again, here, the facilities HVAC supplies. The one thing that we struggle with on that one is that there are new mandates that we are receiving from the state, um, for what it is we need now to report
and to comply with when it comes to ventilation. Um, once all of the mandates are and the criteria are kind of written in stone, there should be at some point the ability to apply for funding for that that isn't out yet. Um, so for us to continue with the mandates that have been given to us in the 21, 22 school year and into the 23 calendar year, we do have enough things like the filters. Um, whether or not we need to change that with the new mandates, we're not certain yet. And if that happens, there should be the ability for us to apply for additional, um, HVAC money to comply with those mandates. So in terms of what we need currently for filters, we're okay and
we're in compliance. Um, in speaking to the guys in terms of any additional supplies that would be needed, uh, what we currently order should suffice. The only difference would be if we are heavily traveled over the summer, um, in terms of building usage. And if that's the case, uh, those custodial facility cleaning supplies are built into a summer grant. So I don't anticipate an increase to these line items. Electricity, propane and oil. This is always the one area that we keep our, um, we hold our breath for and see what's going to happen. We did discuss this a little bit at one of the board meetings, heating oil. We've had two very mild winters so far on terms of heating, uh, however, the price that we locked in for this year was a good price, uh, and what we were seeing last year at three 10. What we've locked in for next year is 297. And so because we've locked in 297 for heating oil, should next year be a little bit less mild, um, Terri and I have discussed the usage and we still feel like we'd be okay with the 107, um, even if we use the little bit more because
it would be cheaper. The other thing we also don't know that I mentioned a minute ago is with a more efficient system with the, um, repairs and maintenance to the traps. We don't know if that's going to affect our usage or not. Um, we are going to be watching that all year on a monthly basis to see if the amount of oil that's used on a monthly basis is less. And if that's the case, then after the winter or at least at the end of the winter, this time next year, we would have a very clear understanding for a combination of savings in cost for a gallon, as well as the work that was done on the traps as to where we would sit in terms of, um, a trend for the next year.
For electricity, we do receive the two bills, the bills that we receive are the ever-sourced bill in the constellation bill. And again, because that number is so specific, what we did was we went through the average cost of constellation, which is what saves us with ever-sourced, and those bills ranged from give or take, I won't give you the pennies, but anywhere from 4,500 to 6,000 when we paid those. And the average then came in at about 5,400. And so if we do that and there's no increase at all, we will wind up in the 71 to 73,000 range, but since we don't have any anticipated increases, new anticipated increases, to go on right now, we kept it exactly where it was with no increase. As for this propane line, this propane line, you'll see it's only 1,200. This one I believe only services down by the kitchen. And so there's not a whole lot of use for us in this propane line here. And what we've looked at for the last couple of years, I know Eric was helpful. He actually, when we paid this bill one year, he said, hey, you guys may want to consider actually purchasing your tank. And we did look at that in purchasing the tank from the company and it really, with the amount of use that we have and the propane, it really wasn't worth it to shell out the money to go that route. And so we've just simply been paying as we go.
This gasoline line here, the 2630, this is just for like the equipment, the more things like that that we have here right on the grounds. And that gasoline doesn't range much higher than $250. This diesel line here is sometimes different for us could go up or down normally when we sign a contract with dime. We sign a contract with them for our heating oil and our diesel and we sign it with the town. What's different this year is the town, by the way, uses a lot more diesel than they do oil and we use more oil. We have our two tanks. We have the one down the preschool on the gym.
And so with the diesel, the only variable for us here could be that we get, we don't, we get built from the town. This is bus diesel. This is for our buses and the town sends us a bill. The town didn't opt this year to go in and contract with dime the way we did. They said the reason why they didn't do that was because they were planning to make some changes on the town side to kind of use less fuel and go more green. And so their plan, hopefully their end was going to be put in effect early enough prior to the winter that they wouldn't have large consumptions of oil. So they opted. They told us just to go ahead and sign our contract with dime, which we did. So based on what we think the town's price will be, the 16246 should remain status quo fixed year in terms of buses. But again, we received that bill directly from the town. So should something change there, we would be able to speak with the town,
that one and see what they wound up with as a price if they locked in a price or not. Sorry, can I ask you a quick question? So the buses, these are school buses we're referring to or is this the bus that we're using? I know, school buses. So how does, I guess, how is the we're sharing those with dime? How are we calculating what is our fuel costs and what is, so the town has their diesel expenses for everybody and they distribute it. They levied it based on usage. So if a bus drives a ram in the morning, they keep their mileage, then they drive us, they keep their mileage, then they drive ran am they keep their mileage, they have a log, and in the end it figures out basically how many miles the town bills to ram and how many miles the town bills to us. So we don't calculate that breed the town does and we found that they've always been fair and dividing it. We didn't have particular months where we saw big differences. So I trust the method that they're using is working and then they send a bill over to Terry and it's our portion. It's not 50-50, it's just our portion. If it was 50-50, great, if not, then rampays what they need to and the town bills asked for what we need to. How did you go back, sorry, the actual heating oil and we went down 13 cents a gallon. Roughly I know in the past we budgeted for 30,000 gallons. Did you actually use a number? We're just saying, last year was good.
So we, well, yes and no, we did sit down and figure out what are 30,000 that we normally would budget for would be and then as I said, Terry can go back through our bills and see if it was a mild winter, if it was not a mild winter, were the oldest days, the days that we had no school and figure out what we should be increasing this by and for this purpose for our informational, we didn't feel that we needed to add an increase to this. We felt that we won't go over the 107-8 and therefore if we're coming up with an estimate that's a good solid estimate,
the 107-8 was a good solid estimate because we may be a couple of cents less but for two years now we've had milder winters than we had prior to that. So we didn't go penny to penny here, Steve. We just didn't add an increase there. Difference would be roughly, I think like $5,500 or something. And we're going down 13 cents a gallon if we are leaving, we continue to leave money left in here and then price goes down and we don't cutting that budget and just saying no price is going down but we need to say about we need to last year that to me is a little bit of a problem. I think we need to do calculation the determines is not going, well we determine that we're not going to go over it so keep it as it was. We use less and we need to spend it. Well you're right, what you guys would have to decide is is it worth it to take the $5,000 out and if we have a colder winter next year and that line goes over where would we take it from? That would be my concern for the time. Yeah, I'm interested about but I do, I mean I would imagine we have some historical data of a cold winter and how many gallons we've used that we can use as a baseline to make that calculation or we could use an average of five years knowing that last two were mild, right? You don't have to just... Right. And if we use those calculations we absolutely are within 5,000. Yeah, because I know and you can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know how many gallons the estimate was but I know in the past I bought 30,000 was roughly around that and 30,000 gallons brings
us 89,100. We're up in almost 3,636,000 here so I don't, that's I just want to know what the number is that this is based off of a number. Okay, I'll get those for you. I'll bring them to the next meeting. Okay. Okay, noted, I will get those for you. Okay. That was this one. Okay, so the computer and the media section here, we did not include this when we did curriculum and instruction because generally speaking this would be the one area where you would expect that if you go two years without an increase what do you do when you need more devices. And the only reason why we can go another year is because the devices that have needed to be replaced or purchased for new student population have been purchased through E-Rates. E-Rates is a program that we use for rebate and it's not available every year that you get the rebate. But when you do they offer you the assistance a couple of years ago we had received 30,000 and that's how we were able to in made sure that implement the full school one to one devices. There is still some money left to that original 30 and in speaking to Nick
who is the person that services us through East Khan as well as Kistina. The use of the E-Rates in the next 18 months should cover the cost of the new devices, the upgraded devices and any repairs and maintenance. And so that is the only reason why I'm not adding to here. This definitely is something that Nick is working on with us to make sure that he's got that five year when you don't have any E-Rates what is your timeline for replacing. And so during the course of this year we definitely will be speaking about that at a board meeting in terms of the the five year
replacements. So is that is not the average we're getting on devices five years? I don't know it would depend on the device it would depend on if it was a Chromebook if it was an iPad. If it was a desktop or a laptop we'd used off some desktops here and it depends on when they were purchased. We have a large chunkbreed of them that were purchased at the same time obviously in 2020 when we received COVID relief money and E-Rate money so that we could offer them to all of our students. So they won't all be on the same five year plan. It'll be a big chunk of them at one time that at that. And then I guess that was my next question is one you know is there any sort of warranty
and I would imagine it's probably not five years. So is there a process for replacement under the warranty and if not they how do we just say I'm sorry it's on the device because Chromebooks there are Chromebooks that can be purchased for as little as you know two ninety seven two hundred ninety seven dollars. When they break you replace them. When they they have limited warranties which is great we tend to use those with certain grades and not other grades. We do have some iPads in the building and iPads if they were purchased with the Apple Care which the majority of ours are purchased with protection under Apple Care when they need to be fixed they're replaced by the Apple Care. So you often times then get two lives out of an iPad and when iPads need to be replaced not our old old ones but the newer ones not necessarily brand new but new to us they often times have a rebate. So potentially if there were five iPads that were ready to be retired it's certain
times Apple would offer a program where they may give you ninety nine dollars back for each one if you purchase a new one. So those programs vary from time to time and sometimes that is the incentive of when you would repurchase them if they're coming to the end of life. And so we do have a representative that services end of elementary school in Apple specialists that services end of elementary school and so Christina and Nick are EastCon Guy and Taylor are able to have that conversation with them about what's up and coming. So that isn't in for this year but that is absolutely something that we're going to look at for next year. Yeah no and I guess what is it is it spread out a lot among all
of these line items or is it or is the bulk and the bulk of of it would be here or in special end because there are some devices that were purchased through special education. There are also some devices that are one to one with specific children and so they follow them when they follow them from one grade to another that means replacing one for the the grade that they are leaving. And so in all of our equipment is tagged and inventoryed and so we do have a list of when they were purchased with a depreciation is we have a reevaluation for them we have that big book that I share with the board yearly that has all of our equipment in there. Yeah I mean I guess though what I'm getting it is five years for a Chromebook seems like a really long time I guess are we really I imagine that stuff is going to start to fail going
into this year and are really really posture appropriately to make sure that we can cover the cover us for the 2425 year yes because I have already spoken with our tech people for the 2425 year we are covered some of our other things that would fall under tech in another district like we have our dash robots we have some stuff that's in our maker space we have 3D printers a lot of that was acquired through grants with our summer and our after school so I'm not talking about computer devices I'm talking about other tech supplies we've been able to replace with those grant funds so where you know we may have been looking at a maker space and saying yeah that 3D printers 4 years old since then we've replaced that with another 3D printer that has come through a grant program so if we're not talking about devices if we're talking about other tech things and we're not talking about devices yeah and I guess my other question is if you're you're thinking like a enrollment of like 214 kids right in the Chromebook per kid roughly right we're we're looking in the 60,000 range I guess my other question would be why wouldn't we start to slowly transition some out so that it's not all hitting in one year well we have because when we've had opportunities with e-rates or other funding we've made sure to bring in Taylor could probably answer this one question but we have brought in iPads when we could get them so we have done some transitioning Taylor which grades are you yeah so four five six we do have one iPad cart which we're utilizing and then currently in our K1 we are using iPads
and I'll it's funny why I first came to end over I initially was like wow our Chromebooks last a lot longer here than I've ever seen and I will just say Christina does a fantastic upkeep job she doesn't let one button get stuck she's immediately on it to get that fix to take you know advantage of any warranties anything like that so our tech does last well our kids do a really nice job taking care of them and at the same time even one of you know a piece of equipment isn't broken we certainly want it to keep up with the times which can be challenging with Chromebooks as they cut older so adding in the additional iPads is allowed us to make sure that we're keeping the newest Chromebooks so the ones working the best with our older students whereas our younger students are using like the touch features more easily in an iPad so we're in really good shape for next year with devices thanks to okay so those are really all of the unhighlighted areas that we needed to talk about the increases we saw as I said 5,000 to the HVAC contract from the 10 to the 15 and then the increase for EastCon where we had taken that out and used other revenue sources the 16 so for the ones that we're looking at tonight that would be an increase of 21,000 last session when we ended our last session our third session we were looking at a potential anticipated increase after all of the additions and the savings of 95,000 so
what I anticipate in those final numbers for Mondays proposed budget to be sent would be 16650 which would be an approximate increase of about 2.75% over our current budget if we keep everything else status quo and not you know poll any resources so which I think is very fair and reasonable I will tell you that right now on the state we are looking at increases from 3 to 12% so I think that this is a very responsible number one of the things that I did want to add to this I'm going to go to one slide. I know Celeste you said Val will touch on that and I did touch on it a little bit in here but I actually want to draw attention specifically to it we did receive a couple of questions via an email in our budget email and just to make sure that those questions are covered specifically the first one was something that we had talked about not only at a board meeting but we had spoken about we were talking about curriculum instructions special and preschool the question was about whether or not we would expect a third less kids to be in kindergarten next year simply because September, October, November and December was going to be the change the cutoff instead of December would be September which is a good question I know a number of people have asked how
districts are going to be affected every district is affected differently and every district is affected differently simply because we can't make the assumption that children are all born equally distribution wise in every month so we know that more babies traditionally were born in July and August and post COVID there are a lot of babies born at the same time because of conception dates so I did answer that question to the resident who sent that in that if you look at our enrollment here currently in pre-K we have 43 children in pre-K and 21 kids in kindergarten there are only three children that we know of that would potentially be in question for that September to December and over children September to December change and what it's done for us is increased more interest in pre-K but it really isn't going to change our calendar numbers at all the question that was posed was will it give us a third less kindergarteners and it won't because we only have three kids that are even in question about whether they would go to pre-K or kindergarten the second question that was posed to us was about those curriculum lines like ELA and math books social studies books repair maintenance and cleaning and looking at things like electricity and gas and heating and exactly what Steve just asked was whether or not we were going to put increases in there this person said I'm not advocating that you spend more but how are you keeping it the same are there increases to those lines all right I did explain that
it isn't just a cotton paste that we do look at other factors so in terms of curriculum we mentioned getting some funding for reading and so us not having to increase the curriculum lines and I did explain that things like the COVID the ARPA money that really did help us out a lot in terms of and it's coming to an end you know in this next year but it's helped us a lot not increase that line because a lot of our cleaning supplies and things were as a result of being able to get them with COVID and ARPA money the other question that was asked was there was a third question in there
and this person was lovely they said that you know they know there's a lot of things that aren't within our control you know and so they get that contractual you know with teachers and things like that but they wondered about for next year about the people spending and I know that that comes up a lot with people people look at the state website and they pull a number off and everybody's usually within 500 to $2,000 on a per people spending but they don't kind of look at the rest of it they don't look at how the taxpayer is impacted by that number for example we have a 4.2 million dollar budget right now if you divide it that by the current number of students that number is lower than what people are looking at at the state website I also did remind that it's not just taxpayer dollars it is also ECS dollars and we get a little over $2 million in the town of and over on ECS dollars which is educational cost sharing which is money that's rebated rebated to the town for educational spending in pre-Kana to 12 so I did want to put this on here this
obviously being our minutes as well for the February meeting since this is you know something that is included every month in our agenda to notice that if you look at February of last year February of last year we had 198 kids the year before 100 because we're in February 194 kids the year before 181 and so in the last four years we have increased by pretty close to 10% of where we were and so I do want to remind people that a 2.75 potential depending on what the board votes on but increase and keeping some of the other areas at day the best that we could is is really despite the fact that we do have an increase of enrollment the other thing I wanted to point out and I did ask Rosemary to add the charter and magnet school number on there just simply because as another resident had asked me and I know this does come up every year about children that go to other schools so I did just want to take one second and reiterate that we are responsible to educate every single child that lives in the town of and over that is whether they're here
in our building right now in pre-K degree six whether or not they attend an out-placement program that a special education PPT determined was in their best interest and if a child attends charter or magnet schools there is a tuition bill that comes to us even if we never had that child that the child never attended the school here if they reside in the town of the end over we are legally responsible to pay that bill the only bill that we are not responsible to pay for is if the child chooses to attend a private school and they were not placed to their educationally by the school district or if they attend a parochial school by choice other than that those choice schools of charters and magnets are our responsibility to pay tuition for. So I just definitely wanted to bring that up because I do know that sometimes people are unaware that if somebody attends one of those schools we do receive the bill for that. And now just to piggyback off that because I know there's some new board members anyone else wrote. We went back and looked it was one of the big things about the pre- how full day pre-k was when we got people into the pre-k you can actually see that magnet school
line item go down as people are beginning at a younger age they're coming in they're staying and over and we're not paying for them to go somewhere else and typically because when one person would go their entire family often gets so you could have three four or five at one point I think we had up to like eight or nine prior to the full day pre-k. And Steve the other point to that is there's legacy in those buildings they like to keep siblings together so even some of them that are tougher for the kids to get a placement in once one child in the family is placed there there's preference to siblings and so you're right oftentimes then you know they opt not to join us here even when they're in we school or kindergarten they opt to to join that school so
first school choice so any other questions? I have more of like a general question about the budget and have we done any analysis or trend analysis about how accurate we've been over the line items as we've gone through this over the years like is there a line item that we're consistently like 10% off on or has any analysis been done to determine how accurate we are? Well we do look at where we might have having transfers at the end. I would say and you know I'm Terry and I can talk about this this week for the next meeting so I just wrote it down but I would say in my four years here that there are lines at the end that why it up over or under and we borrow from the others but I can't think of anyone that's consistently one that seems to be always under or always over because we usually fix that for the following year and we look at our actuals. I think for the most part you know our office in the board has done a good job of really trying to you know fix anything that we see from the year before and that's why it's important every month that we look at the financial statement at a board meeting so that we can see where we are with things and at the end adjust so I would say there could be and Terry and I'll take a look at that but none that comes to the top of my head that I would call consistent. All right thank you. Do we know I know it's it's hard but do we know
so we get a bill from those magnet schools right for we get a monthly bill or a quarter and then we have to what is that it's a monthly or it's not monthly we get it usually we would get a bill for them twice a year but it depends on when that child enrolls hypothetically if a kid their gardener enrolls right now we'll get a bill for the rest of the year for a particular child but okay does anybody have any questions for Valerie, Caitlin or Mike or I think my only comments last question would be kind of going back to what Steve was asking in terms of the oil
usage and looking at number of gallons maybe like as an average over the past five years and recalculating that line based on a number of gallons not like a financial number. Okay um I wanted to confirm oh I'm sorry just wanted to confirm are we meeting in person with the public next week or is it another Zoom meeting? I think I believe we decided it's going to be another Zoom okay yeah how about you Mike? I'm all set thank you okay Jerry how about you? I'm okay thank you Rick you're welcome and just getting back to the oil and I know you may note a bit Valerie that you'll get us those numbers will you get us those numbers before the proposed budget or is that going to be something that we can talk about okay all right so then if we need to make an adjustment we can make an adjustment and have it ready for the for the final meeting on the 14th okay all right um all right does anybody have any of their questions I don't see any members of the public so we don't have anybody here um any members of the public here um does anybody else have any other questions or comments no okay Terry no okay we're good all right thank you okay hearing none thank you Val we appreciate all the hard work that you have done creating this budget putting it together for us and taking the time to make these PowerPoints and explaining it I know personally it's been very helpful for me and I I think I share that with everybody here so thank you um hearing no questions I will say goodnight and we will see everybody here um back on 50 where you're seven for a
public forum and I know Valerie you're gonna get those the oil figures and also post the proposed budget either Friday or the following Monday on the end over school website under the board of ed under the minutes and agenda that word that's where the proposed budget will be right okay all right thanks Val thank you everyone have a good evening