Okay, welcome everyone. Thanks for being here. We will go ahead and start with Dr. on the budget options review. And if you all could hold your questions through a good portion of the slides and then and then and then we'll entertain the questions. Thanks. Yeah, thank thank you all for being here. I hope today is educational. I hope that it's enlightening that we'll be able to show you some things in our planning process that you that you may be aware of. You may be seeing it for the second or third time and it jogs your memory. Maybe something that you see for the first time that you that you didn't know about. And part of that may be the approach that's taken as we go through the budget and what we look at in the different iterations of what we work through. So, the first few slides that we're going to set up, we're just going to kind of set the stage for some background and contextual information that I think is important for you to know. And then after after we have that done, I want to get into what the budget asks could potentially be. And and that's not what I'm going to try to accomplish today in terms of of telling you anything. I want you to give me feedback so that we know what those proposals would look like and then what some of the dollar amounts are around what we're looking at. But to give you and and I've asked Dr. Weiker to be here as well. We've gone through three different dress rehearsals and he and I back and forth and giving each other ideas and suggestions on edits and things like that. So, if you have a burning question that comes up, yeah, go ahead and ask it. But if it's something that can wait, we'll try to address those because there's a good chance it'll be answered a little bit later. But I don't want to anybody to think that we're trying to stifle communications or comments. But I'm hoping that put this together in such a way that it'll answer some questions. And I'm going to speak from from the chair here if that's okay with everybody. And and just go through the slides. So, the budget reality that that we're working with right now is and it changes from time to time as as we look at what's going on around us. One of the pieces that's an example of that was when we look at our local funding and what that dollar amount is, we've got a funding formula that we really never know what the dollar amount's going to be until we know what the revenue is. And and those that can be up or down or can be fairly flat. In conversations with county manager a couple of weeks ago, the information was that the the funding was not coming in at the level that they had hoped for and there'd be very little increase. And and when I hear very little increase, I just have to assume if any increase. And as we do the budget part that we're doing, I've got to plan for the worst case scenario and then hopefully have some positive positives that that happen out of that so that we're prepared and and able to to be able to land at a spot where there's there's no growth. A week or so ago, she sent me a text and said that there'd been a slight uptick on revenue but not where they want it to be. And again, I don't know what that translates into and she and I'll be meeting here in the next few days to talk about that a little bit more. So, as we put this together, we can't wait until we get a firm firm number because we've got to work on things. There's some other things that we don't know as well and you can see those in the second bullet. We don't know about a an employee salary increase at the at the state level. I've said to you with it being an election year, it's very likely that there will be an increase. There was a proposal in the house last year and and a year before conversation about ultimately trying to get beginning teacher pay up to $50,000. If they were to get a $47,000, that would be a significant increase and we we don't know what that dollar amount's going to be. And it's And the thing I want you to know is it's not just the beginning teachers, it's all the way through that salary scale. So, will they add additional bands? Will they adjust the bands within the salary schedule? What will happen in that particular area and what impact that could potentially have on us. Now, we're only concerned on the full salary side with the locally paid individuals. And you all know that we generally pay the lower paid people in those categories out of local. Strategically, we do that. But it still could have an impact on us when we talk about supplements in areas that the state doesn't provide supplements for certain paid teachers in those areas that we'll show you in just a little bit. We also are not sure of the health insurance retirement matching benefits. We're putting a guess together based on many leaders, CFOs and superintendents and HR directors across the state. But we don't know what that's going to be until the General Assembly makes that decision. A big one for us that hit at really the worst time. And if this were not on the board, the process that we're going through would be difficult because it always is, but not nearly as difficult as it is now. And the ADM decline that we've had and some formula changes in developmental day and pre-K as that relates to some of the things that we're doing have yielded a decrease for us of about 11 and a half million dollars. And to begin with, we were talking about the specific numbers of positions. But because the ADM cut cuts across not only position allotments but dollar allotments and several other things, I think it's easier to frame it as 11 and a half million. We'll have a little bit less federal carryover. These are monies that are left at the at the end of the year that you're able to carry over on the federal side. We're estimating that we're going to be down about 3 and a half million dollars on our federal carryover. Our debt repayment obligation will be at about $4 million. This will be retired by the end of the upcoming school year, which I'm happy to be able to say. What what is a burden for us that continues to be a burden is that we have the debt obligation that we can't use to spend on other things that we'd like to spend it on. For example, personnel. And if there were to be additional monies that that come in in addition to what we're budgeting, then we could retire that earlier and and possibly be able to do some things. And then then the other piece is the lack of fund balance to provide very little room for any variance. So, as we've talked about other districts or as we've heard about other districts across the state who were dealing with some of the same issues in terms of ADM cuts and other things that they're having to to endure right now, many of them have a health a healthy fund balance that they're able to dip into and it allows them to get through that and then get themselves right-sized. What I really expect and and I want to say hope, but for me hope and expect are are hopefully the same thing when we talk about budgets. The year coming up is is a year for us to stabilize. And I I think we have to be stabilized before we can thrive. And we want to do more than survive and we want to get to a point where we're thriving. And I think if we get through the 27 26 27 school year, whatever level set we have at that point, we don't anticipate a 1,500 student decline every year. So, you're not having to make up what we're having to make up. You're not having to endure the cuts from the state that we've got and you also don't have the debt reduction piece that's there. So, the outlook would be much brighter as we move forward. But that that we're still where we are in in being able to share with you what we have. So, to put some real numbers together and and you all saw these, but unless you study this and really dug into it and had it in front of you, very for many many iterations, you may not know these off the top of your heads. A couple things I wanted to share with you here just to frame the 26 appropriation. So, the original county appropriation was $155 million and change. There was a reduction for SROs and nurses. The part of this that one of the things that we want to look at is the amount of money that was given in that original appropriation and then was taken back for nurses and SROs, there's a charge of 9% that we have to send to charter schools for that appropriation amount. So, when you think about that, we got that for SROs and nurses in our allotment and then we had to take 9% of that allotment part out to give to the charter schools and then when we wound up paying for SROs and nurses, it wound up being a a bit more money out of our own pocket because that 9% was gone. One of the things that we'd like to talk to the county about is making that payment a direct payment to the to the providers instead of coming through us at all, and then it's still paying the same amount. They're still funded at the same level of what they come up with, but it doesn't run through us. That That would save us on that charter amount for the for the Then if you take a look at the county of preparation and what we're what we're talking about would be the $150 million if if they don't send the the money directly to us for that. The Article 46 supplement, and I I don't know how comfortable you are with Article 46, but we're going to go into detail on this on a few more slides to be able to share that with you. You can see that that's just shy of $20 million. Capital maintenance is 5.7 million for total county revenue of 175, almost 176 million dollars. But not all of that money is going to go to personnel, and we're going to show you that that has to meet all of the needs that we have. And when you think about it, we're talking about this is what we fund all of our work outside of what we pay for with state dollars, federal dollars, and any grants that we get. So that's that's what this balance is for. $2 million in fines and forfeitures. And then the local revenue comes up to just shy of $178 million. But again, that number gets whittled, and I want to show you what what that looks like. So in the project in the in the projected fund two revenue that we've got from from our county commissioners, we've taken out the capital piece here. So that's down to $172 million dollars and some change. There's a non-personnel amount that we're going to show you a detailed breakdown of what that looks like, what non-personnel is. The debt payment is there. The amount that comes out that the public's probably not aware of, and you all may not be aware of to the extent of what that dollar is is 15 and a half million dollars of the local appropriation that we get right off the top is going to go back to charters that we don't have to spend. So that $177 million dollars that I showed you earlier is now down to $100 million in terms of what what we've got to work with with non-personnel. And And we'll break down for you what what all these numbers look like. And this is our presentation of what we put together. If there's anything in here that needs to be changed, then we certainly can adapt that and and come back to you with a little bit different numbers. When you look at the local current expense, the appropriation that we get, just wanted to show you what that breakdown looks like. Generally when we look at our overall school budget, our personnel costs are somewhere in the 80 to 85% range because we're having to pay a lot of capital and a lot of the other things that happen out of local. The The distribution is a little bit different when we look at just local appropriation. Again, that takes out that one capital piece that we pulled out that was a little bit over $5 million, but our personnel cost you can see there is is the largest one at 58%, and the non-personnel expenses, which again, we're going to show you in shortly what those are, and then charter school and debt repayment just so that you can see what they look like. There will also be a combination of pie charts and and graphs and other people like things in different formats, so we tried to mix it up a little bit to be able to show you some things. So when I asked the folks in our our department heads to come together and give us some idea of what they need as they move forward with their budget. There's a non-negotiable budget piece that really is non-negotiable when you get into it, and the question that begs to be answered are what are some of the non-negotiables. I'm going to show you those in just a second. There's a non-personnel requests that were the budgets, and we asked folks to try to come in with a budget that was very similar to what they had last year with little or no growth in in trying to manage that the best we could. And then we asked them to put on the list for us what were some of the unfunded requests that were there. An unfunded request, an example of the technology piece was the refresh that we have for devices. And in operations facilities would be some of the things that we've not been able to get to because we've had to delay maintenance and reduce some of those costs. So we we have this captured because we want to know what those dollar amounts are because if we have the ability to dip into that at some point, we want to know how much we can go, how far we can go, and what the need is. So when we look at the non-personnel non- non-negotiable pieces here, these are things like the debt that we have to pay, the things that are in HR where we do background checks, different things like that, the insurance, our custodial contract, utilities that we have to pay in charter schools. So you can see what those things look like. Um The department's 2027 non-personnel requests mostly remain flat except for a couple of areas. Charters went up some because of the percentage that's there, and the utilities have gone up. Utilities are one of those things that we take a stab at, but we really don't know what the what the rate may be fairly stable. We don't know what use is going to be because it really depends on what the weather is like, and whether we have a harsh winter or you know, a light winter. Unfunded requests, I mentioned these, and you're going to see these show up again in the student Chromebook refresh. That would be a quarter of That'd be two and a half million dollars. That would be a quarter of what we need for for a a full $10 million full refresh. This would be done over a four-year period of time. So we do a quarter of them one year, a quarter the next, but this would be an ongoing $2.5 million need that we would have. And And I would escalate this as a need because we saw when we talked about textbooks, much of what we have is digital and is is dependent on us having devices that students can use. Facilities, supplies, and materials for routine and preventative maintenance. Those are the things that we sort of take for granted, and they're easy to put off for a year, but if you put them off for three years or five years, then all of a sudden you've created a bigger problem than you would have if you were able to do the preventative maintenance ongoing. And then instructional support, you saw some of this with a price tag of of just under $700,000, and then a postage machine, some software, and workshop expenses that go along with that, which are a a smaller amount, but certainly a part of the business that we have. Could you Could you go back to that slide, William? Okay, an unfunded request. Why wouldn't we include things like the gaps in where our facilities are versus what standards are, or the gaps in having ADA accessible facilities, or or Title IX gaps? Yeah, and we could we could we could certainly put that in, and those numbers are going to be really really large, but I think they they paint a accurate picture of where we are. Yes. >> And I I guess I just want to make sure those are captured, and then that people see like where what we're asking for it is not even close to what is needed to close gaps that we currently have. Okay, we'll work on pulling that number together. On the personnel side, again, working from the local piece of of $100 million, there's some things here that that Chris deals with every day that are important for you to to know, and and Chris can talk through it better than I can, but I want him to help me sort of tag team the the next few slides that come up if you want to talk about these. So first of all, we anytime we do a personnel budget, we have to have a few assumptions and disclaimers. So one thing I just want to put is you know, we're using an average salary amount of current employees when we do our state PRC. So like when we look at our state EC, so our average EC funds applied to how many positions we have. We know there will be a little variance, but we know the average plus one step should get us pretty close. And we use that across the board until we get to our how many locally funded teachers. Cuz we know we're going to push all the folks into state positions, lower people pay people on local. And we chose to use an A5 because when we look at our years the number of positions we're looking to fund locally, A5 is the average plus one step. We have to include the step. We don't know what the salary schedule will be, but we do know we're going to probably get a step. We also uh in all the personnel costs you see, you're going to see it's going to include We already put in FICA, retirement, and health insurance. So it says total cost. If you see salary, it means salary plus the matching benefits. All right? So and I and you might have be getting ready to explain this, but how do we include FICA or I mean like all of the things when we don't know what the rates are going to be? >> So great question. It's my next thing here. Is FICA still going to change? Nope, sorry. FICA is 7.65%. That hasn't changed in a few decades, it feels like. Retirement is $9,000 per person. I'm sorry, excuse me. Health insurance is $9,000 per per person if they're full-time. And then we're using 25% for retirement. That's the estimate that all across the state the CFOs and HR people are using. Currently, it's 24.67. Is that Is that rate like I guess that's the But every year, there could be some variance in which one? Which one is it? The bottom two. Health insurance has increased every year. Right. Retirement increased for seven consecutive years, and then we had one year of drop, and then we went back up last year. So these the 9,000 and the 25% are based off of potential project like just what Projected increases based on conversations across from CFOs and with DPI. We know the employer side health insurance will go up from 8,500. The state has already said that due to the funding amounts in the state health insurance. So we we use 9,000. We wanted to declare what our assumptions are. Got it. Thank you. So this chart is one that that really surprises me, I guess, when you we talk about it when you look at it, I think it it paints a a pretty um interesting picture. This is the overall local personnel total expense breakdown, and it covers two broad areas. And the first is on the left-hand side in the orange is supplements and stipends. This would be what we pay out of local, not just for local individuals. These would be even state paid folks that that work with us that earn a stipend, get paid the stipend out of local dollars cuz local supplements aren't paid out of state dollars. When you look at that, you realize how much of the personnel cost that we have gets tied up in supplements and stipends. But that's just extraordinary that the number is that high. The personnel salary expense that you can see over there, it's not quite 50/50, but it's very close to being an an even match of what we have. So when we talk about a locally paid employee, and we're talking about what I call their loaded salary, which includes benefits and their and their regular just their pay that they get, the additional part to that is the supplement that's added. And again, I want to reiterate that for a state paid teacher, for example, they the state pay for them, if they're state paid, comes out of the state, but the salary supplement comes from us, and that's why it's reflected there. Those together total up to the million dollars that we're looking at. So it's really not a salary amount that we've got a large majority of the money to work with. We're cut almost in half in terms of what we have to work with with personnel salary, because we've got so much that's dedicated toward supplements and stipends. That that is inclusive of not just the teacher supplements, but the principal supplements as well. And and and some of the stipends that are that are provided. Well, that was my next question is is there a place that where we can see it might not be on the website, is there a place we can see what the different like types of stipends are that people would receive based off of like I just want to know what's possible. I have some of them in my brain, but I want We have a breakdown on some future slides. It may not go down to the detail level you're wanting, but the four major areas. Okay. I'll let you know if I need something more than that. So when you take a look at the total personnel salary cost, and we think about what what are we paying for out of the local side, the 52 million dollars that we have? And I I told Chris I I wasn't sure whether to read from the top down or to read from the bottom up as you go through it. So the majority of the positions that we have are down at the bottom at 23.3 million dollars. These are licensed staff positions. And your question may be where they at? All of these, Chris, except for one, are school based positions. These are licensed positions that are school based that make up the 21.3 million. As you go up reading from the bottom, non-instructional, non-clerical operations based staff, about 12.8. You want to make a comment about that one? So unfortunately, the state does not provide funding for our technology staff, our maintenance staff, our local transportation, and what we call our OSS or exempt classified staff. So, you know, your HR coordinators, your payroll coordinators, your student information system Infinite Campus, those folks that work with Kelly Moore, those are not funded by the state. There's no dollars for it that are allotted to our school system. So they must come up with local. And then you can see what central administration looks like here. You can talk about who who's included in that category. So central administration will be anyone identified from program manager to superintendent on the scale according to the state regulations. Substitute expense is just that, substitute expense. The combined lowest three, I'm going to show you in just a minute about what the lowest three means. We switched the graph around, and we had one earlier that would explain that. You'll see what lowest three means. And then non-instructional support This number, the custodians and clerical used to be much larger. Prior to our you know, outsourcing all of our custodial services with the exception of the 34 that we kept in house, that number was dramatically higher. We'll have a slide in a little while that talks about the percent of the allotment over the typical state allotment that you'll see that percentage. But that used to be well over 12 million dollars. So showing you this in a in a little bit different way, the same bottom line, the positions that we have that are licensed, the non-instructional, the the combined lowest three are near the bottom. It includes You want to talk about what the three parts are there, Chris? Yes, sir. So one example is the OSS roles I was discussing. We have two OSS roles, extended learning coordinator and the IIG coordinator. Those are OSS skills. They don't really fit anywhere. We also have some We save money reserved for pay raises. At one point, that money we were working through was larger. But as we've worked through the budget, you can see it's this shrunk. So when you see us talk about options later, you're going to see money's from the local government for pay raises. And then the last one is we know we're going to have state bus overages. We also have overages in transportation for personnel cost that aren't reimbursable. Athletics, certain field trips, and those come up with local dollars. So we've used our historical number to know that we need at least set aside 2 million dollars to cover those personnel overages. You know, transportation is based on efficiency, and unfortunately, we don't we get an allotment, but we don't get the efficiency report until later in the fall. So we know we have to set dollars aside for that. So the supplement cost breakdown, and Alex, you may touch on a little bit. I know you mentioned stipends, but Chris, you want to talk through this to show you what the different supplements are and and where they're directed to. So I'm going to work top up, if you will, or bottom up. So the first one is our teacher supplements. That's our tiered scale based on the years of experience. The more years of experience or the higher degree, the higher the supplement. We used an average supplement times the number of employees, and you can see it's just about 22.7. We're going to have a slide two slides about the supplements a little more about teachers. The next largest one is Article 46. That's two portions. That's the flat 300 $3,000 per employee for 10-month employee, as well as the senior experience supplement that we did in FY23 to ensure everyone got to 4%. Those folks, if they were here, get that extra amount, and it's in perpetuity. So that's still about 1.2 million dollars of the expense until those folks retire. Next is your school administration. That's your principals and assistant principals supplements and stipends based on the number of positions that we're going to allot this coming year. The co-curricular stipends, that could be athletics, it could be band, um clubs, chairs, you name it. The majority of it is athletics because we have the most sports in athletics. It's more There's more opportunities, if you will. But there's 4 million dollars we've allocated there. The next is the remaining Article 46 funds. And I'm going to ask that we wait till the next couple of slides to get that uh into that a little more. You know, there's an amount that we have to spend on local plus the Article 46. And because of the decreased number of employees, we may have a balance, all right? And we're going to talk about that a little further. Miscellaneous will be extended days for extended terms of employment for certain employee groups. We have some extended terms of employment days in state funds. We have some in federal, and we have some allocated for local, as well as some other just other stipends that don't really fit anywhere. I just want to know if this is going to be like if this is where this would be covered or if you're going to do it later. But the Article 46, is that going to Are you going to go into some more detail on that? >> Give me two slides. Okay, perfect. Yeah, we we had this one this morning cuz we suspected the questions. So here it's broken down. You can see, and as the superintendent said, it's not just your locally paid teachers or licensed employees, it's all folks that are on state or local. All right? If it's a federally funded position, a grant funded position, or a direct paid from our school, then they have to pay for that expense. So you can see that FTE is right there, you know, a little above 3,500. That's licensed folks. That's includes psychologists, social workers, media center coordinators, etc. You can see we have 190 administrators. That's your principals and assistant principals. And then we just The other ones don't have counts because they're they vary. Sorry. Dr. Wager, when you say they vary, on the co-curricular stipends, so the number of stipends, for example, we have a certain amount of athletic stipends, but they get the number of coaches based on the number of participants. For example, if you have a really small track team, you might not get three assistant track coaches. And I I made that number up, so my track coaches, please don't get me. The number of you know, the supplements vary based on size and who's there. Also, let's say, you know, maybe you your size your band depends on things of such. Principal Wager could probably get to talk to more about that more intelligently than I can. So I get cuz I'm trying to understand like from a budgetary standpoint, we can't project how many we potentially are going to have. That right there is projected at max plus some other stipends. So but the amounts of the supplements themselves are not always the same. Well, there's a years of experience scale for some of them, so they do vary a little. So we're using the average amount passed on the expense. So like just like teachers, I can't tell you what every teacher's going to cost because who we hire. Same thing with coaches. Um But isn't Aren't the teacher supplements the same in that the amount of the supplement varies based off of the years of experience of the teacher? That's correct, but I don't know who I'm going to have have here next year. We'll have turnover. Okay. In variance. So the 4 million dollars has been pretty stable for the past couple years with our matching benefits that we've increased. The other part that impacts that is what happens if you have a community coach? You don't pay retirement on that person, but a staff member, you do. So the 4 million dollars is we feel comfortable is a good placeholder for that. We do have to monitor it because if it looks like it's going to come a little over, we have to, you know, find we have to make adjustments. At the future of budget amendment transfer. Okay. Mr. Brandy, this this kind of gets at I think maybe where you were going and and for other board members, this may be uh something that helps describe some things that you've heard about, but maybe didn't understand all the details, and maybe you did, but uh I want to Chris to go through this and so for the public to understand when we talk about Article 46, we talk about supplements, there there two things that go into that almost $40 million that we have there. So, our first is our um you know, uh when we had received Article 46, we made the agreement that we'd always maintain the approach appropriation from our of $19.8 million towards teacher supplements. All right? Then, we use the Article 46, which the current allotment is 19.7. That number may will may change in May when they give us a a more specific planning allotment. They're still doing you know, the third quarter just uh the first quarter of this year just closed. So, at some point about mid-year usually we get a uh message from the county saying, "It's not going to be 19.7, it's going to be 19.6." >> And Chris has tied it to the >> What? It's tied to the quarter cent sales tax. All right, thank you. So, between the two right now, we have 39.51, you know, million we need to spend in supplements. So, when we take charter schools, because it's an appropriation, get 9%. Well, they get their portion of it, which we're estimating to be 9%. So, we have to deduct that 1.7 uh off the top because they're going to get that portion of it. That portion's already captured in the non-personnel cost, but to explain the supplements, you need to account for it. The next is the teacher supplements. Uh when we looked at our average supplements and added the matching benefits, it ends about $6,400 a person. All right? Our average age of a teacher right now is about 4 years higher than it was uh last year. So, you can see how we did the math based on the number of FTEs we have planned to fully fund. All right? And then we're at 22.7. Then, we use the Article 46 flat rate. That one's kind of easy, it's 3,000 plus the 33%, so that's 3,030 dollars. Uh and that gives us 11.8. We also have that still that FY23 senior supplements, folks, and it's about 1.2 million. It's 1,064 people. I put varies on the cost per employee because each person Some people get 60, one gets one person gets 24. I think the highest is like 108. Uh but it we know it's going to be right at 1.2 million dollars. Uh that portion Those retire, they could go down. So, we have a total, you know, expense of 37 million. 5.5. However, we're required to spend uh 39.5. So, we're going to have a surplus in supplements right now of about 1.9 as currently staffed. That number could change if we're able to, you know, secure more funds and add more licensed positions. All right? It also could change that the Article 46 revenue does not come in uh at 19.7 this year. If you recall, we just did an amendment to pay the county back. So, our staff's recommendation is that we at least budget $500,000 in next year's budget to set aside just in case revenues don't come in. So, you don't have to look for it, if you will. The other part of it is this means as we think in our next budget, think about the county ask on how many positions we might ask, we don't have to ask for salary plus supplement, all right? Because we have surplus here to to pull from in our budget. We can go up to about 150 licensed positions. If we don't add 150 positions, then the board will have some decisions to make is do we let that money sit and just move forward just in case the revenue ever do revenue decreases, so you don't decrease the teacher Article 46, or do you pay it out as a one-time bonus in May of next year? You know, those are some questions that are probably going to be a little further down the road, but at least wanted to plant the seed. So, let me let me add to that, too, because I want to make sure that that you all in the public didn't miss hear what Chris said. When he said we had enough money there to to add 150 positions, we're talking about just the supplement part of the 150 positions. There's no way that would fund That would fund about 12 or 15 positions of folks that are fully staffed. So, you know, the other question would be do we use that money in a way to potentially pay a bonus at the end of the year. It would be a small amount when you divide that by individuals who because there are only certain individuals who can be paid out of this, and we can't pay um there just certain stipulations of what we can do. Sabrina. That is actually with reference to my question. Is there's been a lot of I think confusion and maybe question about who actually does receive the Article 46. There's been questions of are people other than teachers Is there any way to elaborate on how it and who it goes to? >> So, if they're on the licensed scale where they receive a teacher supplement, they receive the Article 46. So, if they get a, you know, a teacher supplement, so obviously teachers, schools, counselors, psychologists, social workers, media center coordinators, uh diagnosticians are actually licensed personnel. It's We don't We have three of those roles. You may not have heard that one before. Uh those type of roles. Uh roles that would not would be teacher assistants, assistant principals, principals, central administration, uh physical therapists and occupational therapists are actually on the uh their own scale, so they don't get it. So, it's if when you look at the salary schedule you approve, uh each of the titles are listed there. Where I think sometimes people get confused is an instructional coach is a teacher. An instructional facilitator is a teacher. An MCL is a teacher. So, it's tied to the salary schedules. And just so everyone remembers, in 2019 when this got approved or 2020, at that point there was one scale, it was a teacher scale. It was a teacher's, a teacher's master's, uh teacher's national boards, uh and so on. There was no counselor schedule, uh speech language pathologist, psychologist uh that we have now. Those were added in '22, '23 uh years. So, I just I know that you said that kind of this is maybe a conversation for down the road. I just want to know I just want to say that we've kind of been through before the whole we have money left over, and we said 3 years ago we were, you know, put it all like give it all to like teachers, and I don't save any, and then what ended up happening is exactly what I said was going to happen, which is that when the when the revenue fell short, people were looking at us like, "Where's my money?" Um even though we tried to communicate to folks about the fact that it the the amount of the the Article 46 supplement could have been flowed based on revenue. I think that for us in planning purposes, it is beneficial to keep the amount stagnant, and then to the superintendent's point, if we have the ability to provide it as a bonus, we can do that at the end of the year, but I think that we potentially put ourselves in a position to have to pay money back, particularly given the volatility of the economy right now. Well, and just to add to that, the board voted to give people the or to give teachers to pay out this supplement with the educational piece that it does fluctuate year to year, and don't base your household budget on a portion of your salary that or a portion of your Yeah, don't base it on the supplement cuz it it fluctuates, and it's we made I mean, our board voted to do that, and I know Alex, you were a proponent of holding back the money, but the majority of the board was a proponent proponent of paying out money to teachers who had or who had that money coming to them. But one of the things I know I I mentioned when we had this whole meeting was separated on their checks because when you put it in the as a, you know, just a a bold piece, people would base their budgets on that. So, you have to separate it, and I know we did That was part of the education component we said need to needed to happen so people understood what was more permanent and what could fluctuate. But it was a matter of treating educated professionals like educated professionals. That's what guided my vote. Yeah, so and again, the board's vote was the board's vote. I'm not saying anything about but like I've respected the board's vote, but not like it is what it is. The reality is is that we were we've been in a position where we've had to pay back money. And so, what I would rather us do is not be in the position to have to find money to pay back when we could save it and then not have to find the money that we, you know, we had if we just planned properly and saved some money. That's my point. Agreed. Okay, the the other thing we wanted to look at were what How do these broad categories how do they look when you compare what the state allotment is? So, when you go into uh you know, elementary schools, for example, and and I don't know how many of you have looked at a state allotment table, but it it really spells out for a reader how many classroom positions. And and those all they vary based on the grade level because we've got different grade level requirements in kindergarten, first and second grade, and then they group them together, fourth and fifth, and then you have some middle school, ninth grade, and 12th uh 10th and 11th. They're they're just different when you look at that. Uh different areas of program enhancement teachers are treated differently at the elementary level than they are at the high school level. And those are things like art, music, PE, foreign language, uh those kinds of things. So, when we took a look at uh where we're at compared to the state allotment areas, the pluses mean that we had 10% more folks than those areas than what was allotted by the state, which probably shouldn't be a surprise because in areas where the state's not doing a great job of providing support, and we feel like those things are important, then then we're going to do this those pieces. Uh I think it's important to note that the areas that are high here, the mental health piece and the assistant principals piece are two areas that we've already allotted higher and those were two areas that were high on our scale of interested individuals said we they wanted to to make sure that we focused on with our budget priorities. You can see where exceptional children is there. Part of that is related to the cap, the the cap that's imposed at the state level, but Chris, you want to talk through these and add anything else to I just see lots of us taking pictures. Is there a way that we could get a copy of this? Okay. Okay, thanks. So, this is you know, based on the typical state allotment. There are two other fund sources within state that are flexible. That's at risk and PRC 24 and we use that, all right? Like in addition to local. But for our typical state allotment, so you know, what we get in exceptional children's PRC 32. Uh, you know, whatever the typical ones, we add those up and we kind of said, all right, what's our overage based on either our position amount or the dollar amounts for those uh PRCs. And you can see there, you know, this is currently how we allot it as of the base budget of what we can balance right now. So, this is the allotment books that went out. Last year these would have been different. As a matter of fact, they would have been many of them would have been dramatically higher. All right? So, you can see elementary and 6-12 are about 10% over. Just so we all know, a few of the some of the 001 positions are required to be given to EC because they're self-contained classrooms and those positions have to follow the children. Uh, so there are some positions there, but you can see the mental health instructional support, that's our psychologists, social workers, media center coordinators, nurses, your IB coordinators, your magnet coordinators and I think I missed one in there, but it's in that group of diagnostic physicians. Uh, your classroom teachers would be anyone who teaches a child of core content or even an elective. All right? Unless it's the elementary school and that's where the program enhancement. So, program enhancements in that elementary school as well. AIG 7%. The only area that's really in the teacher allotments is within the state allotment is CTE. All right? CTE is within its state allotment. All right? It's 1% over, all right? But with any vacancies, we still get to keep those months to pay for the sub. So, there's really no it's it's it's zeroed out. Uh, but you can see the non-instructional support in therapeutic studies is 5%. All right? But if you include the SSC contract that we moved, you know, moved the personal expenses to non-factor contract services, you can see it goes up to 109%. Uh, 003 in central administration are dramatically underfunded by the state. All right? Additionally, there's some groups that we talked about earlier who are not even funded by the state. Uh, there are just because you see this, please understand not all these overages go to local. Some go to federal. All right? Your central administration, all right? We fund a a portion of most instructional directors or program managers on either title two, one or four. Um, we fund a a all of our instruct district instructional coaches, all right? Not EC related. We fund all of them on federal funds with the exception of one preschool coach cuz we're required to have that. So, you'll kind of see we as we go through there, but I think it's important to say as a superintendent said, no group can live within their state needs. So, in in the classroom that I in the class that I teach at Appalachian with the budgeting, this is one of the activities that I have students go through and the scenario that I've created for them is they're not doing it at a district level because it gets too big and the numbers when people think about a hundred million dollars, that just doesn't seem like it's real. Um, so we we do it at a as an one elementary school and it's an elementary school with just over 700 students and what I task them with is you've got to determine based on the the rules that exist in North Carolina, what your classes are going to look like, how many students are going to be in a class, you've got exceptional children students, how many are going to be self-contained, how many teachers do you earn from the state and how many do you feel like you need? And if you need if you feel like you need or you want more than you get from the state, how are you going to make that you going to make your fourth and fifth grade classes larger and then get an extra teacher and put them where you want to put them at? What are you going to do with your teacher assistants? Again, the first question is how many do we earn from the state? Cuz we know the numbers we earn from the state, we're good. We've got to go above and beyond that. And then I talk about what a a system set aside is, which is really their local amount that they can spend and it's interesting when they do their presentations to determine how they spent their money. And part of the work is for them to go back in and look at test scores, look at performance data, look at the vision and the mission and the particular school that I've created has a STEM focus. So, when you look at how they spend their extra dollars, maybe they decide to have larger third grade classrooms and they have a STEM director or they have a teacher who's in the rotation who does STEM type work. That ought to be reflected in terms of the money that we have, but you're limited on what you can spend based on what you have available to spend. And and what we're talking about as we go through this and we work toward what what our setup is is that when you go beyond what the state provides, you're left then with basically local helping pay make up the difference and how far can you go and what can that ask be? I just want to ask a question. When you see 129% overage, is that current? That's for next year's allotment. Next year's allotment, so we're still be 120 Okay, thank you. >> And it Can I make a comment on assistant principals? We we're actually 5% under on principals months because we have two principals who supervise two schools and we have two school closures where we get months. So, that helps offset it. So, that's even including the offset. All right? So, It's my same question. We're 105% over in EC as a budget planning for next for next year. Just for context for folks, do you have an idea of what that percentage was before? Like how over Just remind folks. It was it was uh it was probably closer to 135 to 150. Depends on the year and also the other part of it is contracted services are not included in there. We have more speech pathologists on payroll this year than we we have in many years compared to contracted services. So, you know, when you add that in, that's a whole different story. So, EC is a kind of a tricky one. Uh, for the instructional facilitator position, is that under instructional support or where is that? That would be in elementary school cuz they're on the teacher scale and they're master teachers. I got you. You you'd pay them on 001 positions. There's no there's no position called instructional facilitator in terms of what we get from the state. The other thing I wanted to draw your attention to is assistant principals are a little bit different. CTE is in the same category, but the others are not. We get assistant principal allocations in months of employment. So, we get one month of employment for every 98.53 students or you get 10 months, which would basically be a year for every 985.3. But think about that for a minute. How many of our elementary schools have 985 students in them? And if if you don't if you've got an elementary school with 400 or 450, you may have a full-time person there, but you're not getting that full-time position from the state. You're having to supplement that with local money. And and that's what we run into when we start looking at state allocations versus what we want our lineup to look like. And like our magnet programs, our extra teachers for DLI to make sure we offset some of the classrooms, they come out of these elementary school secondary teachers, you know, all the great things that we offer, there's there's a funding source. So, as we work through the you know, budget with the 11 million dollar reductions that we've had and all the other you know, I could say obstacles we're overcoming, we've had to reduce some allotment formulas to kind of to get us within where we can balance. So, some areas that we decreased is instructional facilitators at elementary school. Uh, school counselors, we adjusted the formula closer to what the state allotment is for the high schools. Um, that was a loss of six positions district wide. Uh, we had not we've had the same amount of school counselors for almost six consecutive years minus the SR paid folks. Even though we've lost 5,000 kids. This is the first time we've actually, you know, adjusted that a smidge if you will. Uh, social workers to elementary schools, all the elementary schools will have a half-time social worker unless they are CFST. Previously, if they hit a certain CEP data, we were able to give them the 1.0. Um, grade 4-5 allotment went to 27. 6-12 allotments, it the number increased. Um, the number denominator changed a little. The big one is is we're giving them a third of extra teachers to account for all of their planning times. Uh, we're only doing 10% now and then we've added some extra teachers for based on programs like JROTC, they get one. Based on school size, they may get one extra teacher for some extra encore to try to make sure everyone at least has opportunity to have band and arts. Um, this is where the probably largest reduction has been is in 6-12. The K-1 assistants, we also adjusted uh to on kindergarten to every 21 kids and then first grade for every 63. Uh, we're going to be under on the kindergarten assistants, all right? Our K assistants, but the reason we're under is cuz we're using to offset EC uh cost. EC lost two over two million dollars in state funding. We did not reduce the number of EC teachers we have. All right? You can see we even increased nine teacher assistants. So, even though our EC went down, funding went down, we maintained the level, which shows a priority. All right, when things are reduced, the money's reduced, but you maintain the level. All right, and the one that how that we were able to do that is your K1 assistant, that was a portion of it. Not the whole thing, it wasn't $2 million. We don't get that much money in ECTAs. Uh the ISS teacher role will be coming back to an ISS assistant, all right, which we've had that that role's fluctuated over the years. We have increased the assistant principals to not by nine FTEs. Uh not every school will have a uh full-time assistant principals. Uh they'll be two that will be shared as a two secondary schools and two uh EC specialist schools that will share, as well as uh the two uh specialist two specialist schools will not have uh an AP cuz of their school size. But otherwise, we're at 114, which the superintendent said we alluded we have about 498 months of employment, and we're going to be at uh 1,004 1 1140. Cuz we have a four without the counting any extra days of employment. Uh the ECTAs, before the middle school ECTAs was a one ECTA across the middle school after the riff. When we started looking at that, we went to a formula of like DPI recommends of 1 to 12, so that does increase it by nine. Uh roles that we have eliminated is the high school media assistant. Um there was a half for the comprehensive high schools. We do have We'll have one FTE of media assistants, and those are the point twos for schools that don't have a media center coordinator. Uh dean of students for the two large high schools, and then the an extra TA for large elementary schools above 600. These are kind of the major adjustments that we've kind of hit to try to make sure we can balance. And And this is based on no increase. This is the worst-case scenario of a base budget of of what we would do if if we don't get anything at all from the commissioners, and we absorb the loss that we have from the state. Do you already tell some of them they're not going to have a job? We've told them that we're planning for the worst-case scenario, and that that we hope that things are better than that, but that's what we've got to plan for. We haven't told anyone no one's going to have a I'm not following that part. >> I There it seems to be a um understanding in the community that IAs have already been cut. We reduced it down to 14. All right, nine for the elementary schools, and there's some other secondary schools that some specialist schools get an IA that don't get an AP. Uh the nine highest EP school elementary schools are getting because there's there's a specific literacy intervention funding source in the state that we can use to pay for it. All right. That's the last role we reduced. They'll still have positions. They're just make IAs or teachers. They may go back to classrooms, or principals may choose through the allotment process to trade a four five teacher a grade four five teacher into four and increase class sizes. A federally a title one school may purchase a teacher and trade it. They'll have Schools will Principals will have opportunity So no one at this point has been told that they are not going to have their job is what Okay. No No one's been told they're not going to have a job. I'm sure that some I'm sure the messaging from as the allotment books have gone out is you may not be in this position at this school. So not with the job. And I The question probably is cuz we've already done the employee count. All right, with the number of interim contracts that we have, we're pretty good on certified. Now, the question comes after all allotment books have done on surpluses is how do certifications work? Okay. That's I I I can't I don't have that First of all, if I did, I'd give you the Powerball numbers and solve the $4 million debt. But But I just I I have a I want to make sure I'm understanding this just from a kind of 30,000-ft view. So generally speaking, the superintendent has the ability to assign staff. That's like a statutory authority granted to the superintendent by statute, right? Yes, sir. And so what that means is that depending on what our needs are, a person is not guaranteed to necessarily remain in their position even from like year to year, cuz we've heard things like in other districts people will get moved around all the time. But in this district, we just haven't been that way. So then this is one of those instances where when a decision is made that certain positions won't be allocated because of whatever reason, budgetary, what have you, that means that people might be moved to other positions that are open and available, but they still are going to keep their jobs. >> That's right. Or keep a job. That is correct. And the one thing we're working on is that we actually the recruitment team is going to give me a team with a small group of principals I work with, and we're going to pull some other folks in and talk about how we're the surplus process is going to work, and we'll have some more information to you. We're probably going to have a surplus fair. Does that make sense to really emphasize employee voice and choice along with principal voice and choice? We want to find good matches. Uh we'll get more details at, but as the superintendent said, this is our base budget. All right. We'll help While I'm while we're on the subject about allotment. So the dean of students position The dean of students is paid is a teacher is paid at the teacher level. >> It is a teacher level. So we were were we allocating the a dean of students, or were principals taking a teaching position and using that as a dean of students? Both are correct. Uh we allocated one dean of students any high school last year that had more than 2,000 students uh was allocated one dean of students, so that's two. That's Reagan and West. Okay. Other schools were trading in teaching positions for dean of students, or doing some other type of uh allotment magic to create deans of students. We We were on our allotment book process on April 15th. Due to the reductions, there could be there there probably more or less lesser dean of students because of that. Could they use a title one You cannot >> position for a dean of students? >> You cannot use title one to purchase a dean of students, but what you can There is a way to do it. What you do is you purchase a teacher, then swap out the teacher. Now, one thing is deans of students are supposed to be in the instructional support category, not teachers. Right. So they'll have to salary swap out in that area, not the lowest-paid teacher. Uh we have to make sure we're doing everything by the book. Chris, I got a question. On the ISS teacher that now will be a TA role, currently are the ISS people certified teachers, and that's going to switch out to a TA? >> So great question. The ISS teachers will be um either find a teaching position within that school, or possibly surplus. All right, they're not We're not demoting them a TA. All right. Yeah. They're They're going to be They're They're It's kind of similar to the instructional facilitator. If someone doesn't swap something out, they could be, you know, in another seat, another assignment within that school, or another assignment as a teacher in another school. I guess my question though is currently have we been using certified teachers for ISS? Yes. >> Because that changed somewhere. It used to be a TA position. >> Yes, I think that role's changed at least twice is what I've been told by folks who've been here longer >> Okay. Longer than Chris Yeah. Okay, so that makes sense. I I got it. If you can bear with me as as we move forward, then this is Chris just another picture of what you talked about. >> So this is all of our This is our personnel count that we're allotting by all counts, regardless of the funding source. All right. Um there's grant funded There's So it does not include bus drivers yet. All right, we haven't mapped buses like, you know, that's always a target that changes a little based on need. It doesn't include uh child nutrition uh staff who are not funded on district funds. So it would include your executive director, however, not the child nutrition manager, cuz that's fund five. All right. Uh and it also doesn't include school-purchased title one positions. All right, last year was almost 280 positions that they purchased off school funds. Uh I can't tell you what that number's going to be this year. I suspect they'll be a little less, but they'll be in that area. Uh we haven't ran our allotment books or title one plans, so I can't tell you those numbers yet. But you can see that number has decreased. Just to put in perspective, at the May 13th uh board meeting last year in the budget presentation, it was around 6,200 10-month positions. All right. Uh when you look across the board, I mean, that just shows you the number of reductions between uh reversions, uh our reduction in force, and our hiring freeze that we've been going through. Um So there are five models that I that I want to present to you that have dollar amounts attached to them. And there's nothing fixed in terms of written in stone that the dollar amounts are here. So I wanted to give you some scenarios just to get you to think about if we do this and we include that, then this is what the total amount would be, because these would ultimately be the asks that we we go to our commissioners for when we we do the the budget that you all ultimately uh decide that that you're going to to go after. The flat funding request obviously would be no increase and would have the greatest cuts in terms of of the things that we've talked about already, because that's what we're building on. The base service request, I'll show you what that includes. The And And I don't know what the right name ought to be. We had requests one, two, three, and four. We could do silver, gold, and platinum. I mean, we could really call them anything you want to. And I I don't mean to put any value in in one over the other, other than they cost different amounts in terms to fund what we're talking about. And it could be that some of the things that we put in here that are carryover that include that go from one to the other may to the board not be as important as they were when we were when we were putting this together. And we certainly will will adapt and adjust to that as we go through. So I I want to show you as we walk through this, and again ask ask Chris to to step in. Something that's important to note here is the the base increase is what it would actually cost us when we add all the things that we say are in, for example, the base service request, when you see what that includes, is it would cost us just short of $7 million. To get that $7 million, because out of the appropriation is going to become the dollar amount for the charter schools, we have to request more than that to get that amount. So, to get what we need for just under $7 million, we got to ask for just over $7.6 million so that that tax can come out of it and we have what we need moving forward. Again, these these are five different plans. You've You've basically seen the base plan and it's moving forward without any increase. And if there were an increase of, say, $500,000, we have to come back and figure out based on what we had on our base, where do we want to apply $500,000? If it's a million and a half, we do the same thing. So, we really can't We have to come back at some point when we know what that dollar amount is to be able to to reconcile and and to get everything in the right place. So, keep in mind what I'm getting ready to show you are these five and it shows you what it includes and this is what the dollar amounts are that are associated with it. Um, no additional funding requests unless the county You want to talk about this at all? You want to add anything? >> Yeah, this This is basically we take the county formula, if there's a raised grade, I think the big ask here has to be if there's an increase on the testerone or side, all right, that they absorb that through their appropriations and not put it in ours. All right, it's I think it's really important that that this part of our appropriation is not tied to ours in any way. Uh, just to resist any temptation for the what the superintendent was talking about a second ago with the 9%. So, the the base service request, the these are the things that we put in where where this is Let me get back a minute. So, the flat funding is is what I told you earlier to assume that there's no increase at all. The basic most In In basic would be um, what we feel like we really have got to have and the other things are things that we would love to be able to work toward if we have the funding to do it. So, this would include and and I think we probably need to change the order of what's on here because regardless of what we choose, we've got to be able to have the funds in place to pay for a pay increase that we feel like is going to happen. So, in all of these you're going to see that we've got the 3% pay increase. Now, it's possible that it's a 7% pay increase, but we've got to put an estimate in of where we think we're going to be to be able to accommodate that. So, this this request would include the 3% pay increase for only locally funded positions. You're going to see in the next level of the budget, it includes more than locally funded and I'll have Chris talk about that. But, this would be the one that we put back instructional facilitators that we took out in our base. There would be 32 of those positions reestablished, but you can see the cost of that is two a little bit over $2 million. We've also included something we think is important and that's the student uh, refresh rate for our devices, that $2.5 million is there. Uh, 25% of the operational unfunded non-personnel request, which is which is uh, just over a half a million dollars. We can show you specifically what those things are, but they're operational pieces that that we feel like we need to have and not continue to cut back on. And then the instructional support for unfunded requests for non-personnel request. All of that together comes up to 600 and and 6.9 million, but to get the 6.9 million, the request to the commissioners would have to be 7.6. And and what I want you to see is that if we ask for those things above what our basic kind of cut rate, no increase budget would be, it would cost us this and this is what we are recommended that we could get out of it. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to do just that. You all may decide that you want to take one of the pieces out and not include it or you may want to include more in a certain area. But, if you let me walk through these, at least through a couple, and see what they are, then then there may be some questions that you have. The The next level up and you'll notice that this carries over everything that was in the level prior and it adds to it. So, it includes instructional facilitators, the dollars don't change there. It adds additional EC teachers. Now, you all know that by the the funding that we did with not making cuts, we technically didn't add, but we kept EC teachers at a higher rate than what the allotment would be in the base that we had. This would be adding additional 28 exceptional children's teachers. You would add additional positions at grade 6 through 12 and the ADM positions that they have. It would restore the school-based instructional supply allotments that were there. It would fund 3% pay increase. Here's where it's a little different to for locally fund funded positions and state positions from non-match PRCs. And then the three non-personnel requests from the base service request would be included. Do you want Do you want to talk about those? Yeah, so the three we talked about before is the operations, technology, and um, student student device operational instructional and student device. That's That's bottom The bottom three. But, the I want to talk more about that extra raise for the 3%. There's when they get when the state gives pay raises, all right, some if it's a position allotment, it's dollar for dollars, great. If it's a dollar PRC, some will be a dollar for a dollar, but most are not because they don't expect every dollar to go towards personnel. So, EC will not increase dollar for dollar if they give a 3% pay raise cuz they expect certain money to be for supplies as well as contracted services. And then we have funds like at risk dollars and our $24 that won't increase at all because they're not they're generic things. Then we also run the risk of sometimes what they'll do is when they raise pay give pay raises across the board to offset the position cost for them, they'll reduce other allotments. All right, teachers experienced this when they did a big pay raise in '13 and they did away with the state longevity. Principals experienced it in '16. All right, so we have to be careful. So, we know we need to allot money in local to cover for those 24, 69, any percentage of those other dollar amounts that we've looked at historically don't go up. Like teacher assistant allotments don't go dollar for dollar. And when they went to $15 an hour, the allotment didn't cover up to necessarily. All right, and remember RTAs get paid more than the state allotment does. So, when they're percentage, it kind of hurts us it doubles us a little. So, that's why we put money in there to cover some dollar amounts that the state won't cover. You want to talk about number three? Which is the Oh, ADM, yes. So, those 26 extra positions, we've we worked we worked we say 12 models, it might have been 18 to 20 on the first scratch papers. One of the models we wanted to do was provide additional you know, you have the allot ADM divided by the number times 1.1. We wanted to allot additional teachers to try to make sure we could protect some of our own core classrooms or principals could you know, you know, give school choice. Uh, the 26 would uh, make it where some of the smaller middle schools might get two. All the high schools get at least one with some smaller ones getting two. You might say, "Well, why would the smaller schools?" Well, the smaller schools have less impact because of that 10%. You know, if I give you extra 10% on 50, that's five. If I give you an extra 10% on 100, that's 10. So, it's it's more of a trying just to add more teachers to soften the reduction at 6-12. And as you go through it, you're going to see that number probably increase to get to some different models. That would be what we call model five. The model we have right now is model seven. Uh, yes. But, when you look When you look at that, what I want you to think about is that we're only talking about 26 positions to to spread across those grade levels and look at what it costs. And and everybody wants more, but there's a cost associated with that when if we're talking about not having any money and we need the additional pieces that are there. So, that number could be 52, it could be 126. Whatever it is, there's going to be a dollar associated with it. And it could be that that's so important to you all that you want to pull it out of here or keep it here and include it in some of the other models that we have. That's why I wanted to show you what they look like. So, if we go a level up, again, we're going to carry some things over. You can see here the difference between that model and that model is we've gone to we've keep the 32 facilitators. We've gone from 28 instruc- EC folks to 48. You can see that pushes us over $3 million. Additional positions that you see went from 26 to 43. And then we've added an additional flex day position. This would be a classified position for every school. This This was a thing that I wanted us to try to be able to to build in and I don't know whether it'll fit or if it'll be able to be kept there. But, as I've gone around, particularly to our elementary schools, particularly early in the morning, and I see the number of folks that are in the lobby area, and the positions that were cut that were bilingual folks that helped in the front were extremely valuable. Everybody's valuable, but at that time during the day with a lot of our non- Spanish speak or non-English speaking families that come in, those bilingual assistants did did great work. I would love for us to be able to give and and I and I want to say flexibility, but it's very flexible. We We don't have a great deal of flexibility when we don't have a lot of extra that we can work with. When you have extra, rather than dictating where it goes, I'd love to give principals the ability to make some of those choices in their building. This would be one where we'd allot to each school classified position for them to use as they see fit. It could be that they want to do a bilingual assistant. Could be that they want to put an extra assistant in kindergarten or first grade classroom. Whatever they want to do that would be there. But, again, that sounds like such a small thing when we're talking about one person in a school, but look at what it costs. When you're talking about 78 people and we're talking about a loaded salary of $48,000, which is is low when we talk about a relative salary for a lot of the positions that we have, but it costs us almost three and three quarter million dollars to do that for our school system. So, it's it's a small thing to talk and ask for, but there's a big dollar amount when we talk about it. And that's that's what I want you to see. Restoring the the school-based allotments, you've seen those already. The funds for 3% raise, you've seen that. And the and the others are the same there. Notice that the numbers are getting bigger and bigger as we go through. And the thing about this in terms of a request from the commissioners is not to give us a shot in the arm to get us into a position where we're good for next year because then you have to have another shot in the arm the next year. These are ongoing allotments that need to be maintained year after year after year to be able to support the numbers that we're talking about. So, for us the need is just a little over $19 million, but because of that 9% piece that we're calculating, we're just under $21 million would be the ask that we'd have from the commissioners that would give you what we have here. The request that came in from our Forsyth County Association of Educators and had a chance to meet with them and talk with them about what they'd like to see restored. And and you can see the the positions that are there. You can see the the numbers that are there. And we've done the dollar amounts that are attached to that. And you know, we we were we were thinking along the line that we were going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 28 to 32 million dollars when you do the full request of what you have here. And I and I don't I don't want to read the slide for you. There's a lot more than than what we've talked about. And certainly if we could have everything we wanted, we'd love to be able to have everybody back and be able to function the way that we've been functioning. But but you get that at what price? And the subtotal amount would be just over 35 million dollars. But again, because it's based on a percentage of what the cut's going to be, to get that request, we'd have to ask for just under 39 million dollars from the commissioners to be able to get back in and and put these positions in place. Again, that would have to be ongoing support that you get year after year after year to be able to fund that. Um So, those are five different models. And of course, I want to get as much as we can because I want to provide as much support as we can to our to our folks that are working in our schools. There's no question that there's there folks that are working harder, longer hours, more requirements, more demands on them than that we've ever had because we've got almost a thousand people fewer than we had not too long ago. And the demands haven't gotten lighter, they've increased. I would argue they've gotten a lot heavier with the work that we're doing. There's there's no debate about that. What my concern is and what I feel like my responsibility to you all is is to deliver to you a balanced budget that we don't have to worry year in, year out, month after month, are we able to meet payroll? Do we have the money coming in? And as bleak as it looks, we know that that we're at least covered in terms of working within our means. Now, if we get additional support from our commissioners or something were to happen at some point at the state level, then we come back and we can adjust those things. But for me to give you something that looks prettier than we can afford is is just not right on my part. Um do any of these models um take into account uh the moving ADs back to 12 months, moving high school counselors back to 12 months, ensuring that each school has an assistant principal. I see that one says four assistant principals, but I don't know how many are sharing right now. That would if with that one, the four additional would be on top of what we said that we give you give you principals and assistant principals in every school. Yeah, not not anywhere. Okay, how about the ADs and counselors restoring them to 12 months? They would will not be restoring them. There's additional days of employment in each of the models in our base model. The ADs and and I'm I'm going to say 40, but it might be 42 days. I don't have it that memorized. I'm sorry. But it's based on the how we're doing June. But we could we could come back with a number to show you what that would look like to do that restoration. Okay, so at their regular rate, I want to make sure it's at their full rate at their salary, not the stipend. And and then so are you saying none of these models include restoring athletic directors or counselors who are already working the 12 months and are expected to work the 12 months, but we're not paying them for 12 months. None of these models account for that. They there's money built in for summer summer pay, but not not 12 month not not having a the 11th and 12th month as if it were the same as the 10 months. But but we can go back and pull those numbers and do that. Um Okay, couple of things. I agree with Leah. Those whatever requests, like if we're going to go big, we need to make sure we're going big and actually including some of those things. My question is obviously, whatever we choose to ask, the commissioners can say no, right? So, why wouldn't we just ask for all of it? Like just make the big ask. Why do we and let them say, "Sorry, we can't do this." or whatever. I just I guess I don't understand why we would not just go ahead and make the big ask and say, "This is what we truly need to function." and then go from there. Why would we sell ourselves short? I'm just curious. It it is. And I'm I'm I mean, I'm not suggesting one way or the other. I I wanted to show you what they look like. And then I would prefer to have more to be able to meet the needs. But we've got a land where you all feel like we we need to land for me to be able to move forward and share that with them. Well, so I think if we're going to let's just let's I just feel like we just need to say the quiet part out loud. I think that this has been sort of our kind of back and forth debate at least I mean, it's been a back and forth thing since I've been on the board about how much to ask for because the commissioners, I think a lot of times have been and maybe not the commissioners, but the superintendent obviously has a relationship with the county manager. They should be kind of in communication about what they're potentially looking at projection-wise. Sometimes the perception has been if we're supposed to be in communication and having a and having a good relationship with them and we're supposed to be aware of kind of what they have going on, they're aware of what we're having going on. When we come to them and we say "We want this huge amount." when we understand what their limitations are, it it appears to them to look like we're doing that on purpose to try to like shift the responsibility on them when we know for a fact that that's something that they're not going to grant. So, I feel like the question to me is and I what I hear you asking is, do we care about that? Or do we just ask them for what we know they're saying they can't afford and just let it be like that? I I personally think at this point we are at a place where we just need to ask and and stop They they have the power to say no. That's their wheelhouse. Like our job is to ask for our needs. And then they can accept it or not. But I think what frustrates and concerns me is that we are basing what we want to ask for on conversations and feelings or whatever with people who are saying one thing in private, but another thing in public. And so, it it falls on us to look like we aren't asking because there's people on the commission saying, "Well, you can't ask for that much. You shouldn't ask for that much." XYZ, whatever. That's my frustration is that those conversations are happening and those things are being said, but it's not being said by them publicly. That or complete not all of it is being said publicly. They're saying they have less money, whatever. They're in a bind, whatever. But they're not saying some of these things that they say to us or to you or whatever to the general public. So, then the general public looks at us as a board as if we are not fulfilling our duty by asking. I mean, I feel like it's a dance because we know there are not unlimited funds. Um And with that there you know, there is a finite amount to distribute. And we also have to be good partners to the other people who are getting distributions from that same pot. I.e. public safety, the EMS system, you know, that type of thing. So, um But with that said, if we don't make known what the need is the problem is that it it also gets convoluted with whose responsibility is it to fund all these things? And if it really is more on the state, but yet we're asking our county to do it at the at the you know, detriment to to what else in our county? It become it we're the dance is being unrealistic to the point of delusional ask versus what's realistic and being a good community partner. And I I don't know where that that line is necessarily, but I feel like that's the struggle that we're in. And more people need to appreciate the struggle that that gives us. And I think the super the way the superintendent This is the first and you all correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is the first time we've seen this kind of like scaffolded like could be this could be that, you know, this is from the bare minimum to like, you know, if we needed to restore everything. I think the way in which we presented is also going to matter because if if it looks like we're we've done the work of saying we understand you have you know, things that you're prioritizing. So, we've prepared options. This is our preferred option, but we also understand that there might be limitations. I think that that goes a long way cuz the other critique that I know that I've heard, you know, directly from commissioners is is the whole point of like it looks like we're kind of passing the buck like we are they already fund us at a higher percent like they're doing when we talk about the difference between personnel and operational cost statutorily. I I've been reminded multiple times by commissioners about what the statutory obligation is versus what they've been doing additional. And so, I think that to the point it's about balance and trying to say that we can't just we're not in a position to be able to meet the needs of students while also maintaining current funding levels. So, we have to balance that with what's operationally responsible. I have a question, too. Going back to the SROs, I know this is going to be a touchy touchy touchy thing. The SROs, what how much do we take out of our budget every year for the SROs? Do you all know? It was 4 million. >> 4.6 million. Okay, and I've always asked this question. That 4.6 also includes the nurses. >> Nurses. And it does not include there's the Kernersville Police Department. We have some schools that which is a few slides back it's in the not it's at non-negotiable slide. And let me tell you why I'm asking the question. I know probably a lot of people won't agree with me on this. The SROs are actually the employees of the of the county. Am I right? And so, you know where I'm going with this, right? So, not I've always wondered why that would just fall under them and not be put on us at all because it's helping the county by having SROs in our in our schools. It's it's really helping the county, too. So, my thing is why couldn't that 4 million stay with stay with the county and not be charged us at all and would that not bring back some of the things we need? And didn't they but they did say that they were going to take that fund that they weren't going to give it to us. But they didn't subtract They're subtracting. >> But they're subtracting it still some of us. It's just they're not giving us the money and we give it back to them which was crazy. >> can That was crazy all right. But they're charging us the charter extra percentage. >> Well, and that that can also apply to through public health with our mental health needs. Um Charlotte-Mecklenburg uses part of their county mental health funds to go towards the school because we have nearly 50,000 Forsyth County residents that happen to be students. So, there's a percentage there. If you have 400,000 residents in your county, you know, that's a good little chunk of mental health funds that are Like why isn't I don't know. To me there there could be a better way of sharing some of these pools of money when you recognize how many residents we're serving Right. even though they're students, they're still residents. And then we're not even taking consideration cuz we know that SROs are going to come back and say they want to increase which they do every year. So, that still should That's why I say it all should fall under the county, but that's my thinking. So, have we ever had that conversation with the county about about using portions of their pots of money that they get for countywide citizens and helping you helping us get our fair share of that? That that certainly will be on my list as I have my next conversation. Just going a whole 'nother direction again. And it's the same thing and I know Steve asked this question one time in board meeting. You know, how many of our students are city and how many are county? You know, and I know the city is not obligated to give us anything, but I feel like we should still be going to the city because it is their citizens. I mean, regardless of what we say, it's their citizens. So, and when I say their it's our I should say our citizens. And I I just think at some point we need to go to the city and ask for some things, too. Would you include the other municipalities like go to Kernersville, go to Clemmons, go to Rural Hall? And do any of those municipalities currently contribute? Cuz I've always been under the impression Kernersville does invest in Kernersville schools. Public schools and I think it's >> Clemmons-Lewisville has done an amazing job. Visually, I mean, it's not really a line item per se. It's maybe at at will or varying based on the the need or the perception of a school or the connection they have with that principal municipality, I think. Jonathan was going to say something, I think. I was just going to say that we have had conversations with with the city, you know, from when the town and city pulled out. And honestly, throughout our negotiations throughout the years, I've always had thought that that the county should probably pick up some of those costs. Now, those are decisions for other people to make. I will tell you that other counties do use the municipalities going to each one of the municipalities and asking them because I think it's in the in my opinion it's in the best interest of those municipalities to have safe schools within their jurisdiction and that's what gets people to move into that area and set up business and set up and buy a home. So, but that's a decision that that you guys would have to decide along with other county leaders and other municipality leaders as whether or not you want to push that, but I can tell you that that does occur in other counties across our state. It has not been my intent to to give you five exclusive models and tell you to pick from one of those models. What I'd encourage you to do and I'm not trying to cut off the conversation. I just want to say this before we wrap up is that we've we've prepared for you and we'll give you electronic copies of of everything that we've done, but the spreadsheet that Chris created I didn't want to put in front of you because I know you all would start manipulating numbers and and you because it's exciting to get into that and see how much it changes the bottom line. I wanted you to see what it looked like here and then be able to go back and do that on your own if you wanted to. And the the the a la carte menu list and I don't know what else to call it other than that is not limited to only what we have there. Leah's point about the the restoration of those positions to 12 months, we can add that on. There's a separate conversation that I want to have about safety and security. Nobody brought that up, but it's it's it's openly openly missing there and Robert has asked for us to have some conversation, but cuz that fits into our security plan, that's not a conversation I want to have openly. I want to talk about that and then be able to come back and report on the things that we can talk about openly, but you can we're going to give you a workbook that you can work with if you wanted to and you could put a check mark in what you feel like is critical that we have and you can do the math and add that up and find out what the ask would need to be if you want to do that. If you like what you've seen here and you feel like there's a particular one that you want to settle on, then you may not need to do that, but Lisa's got that and she'll hand them out to you and you can can call me or Chris if you have any any trouble when you start going through it, but there may very well be other things that are that you'd want to put on the list that we haven't included, but we tried to listen, we tried to respond, we tried to build something around budget priorities. And again, I want to say as I finish up my part that what's made this increasingly more difficult is the ADM decline that we've had right on the heels of all the other stuff that we were dealing with. And if if we were going into year two coming out of the budget and financial woes that we've had, we'd be having a little bit different conversation because it wouldn't be as heavy a lift. It's always going to be a lift, but to make up 11 and a half million dollars and all the other stuff on top of what we're doing and debt you know, reduction and all just just makes it more difficult. Um never easy, never a clear clear answer, but I I wanted you all to see what all the moving parts are and there's much more than than what we've shared today and I know that you all do that. I don't want to talk over your head. I don't want to talk beneath you, either. I'm trying to hit it at a point where it helps enlighten you and let you see what we're dealing with and can understand some of the decisions that we're made. The chart that you see there was was the the work of Chris and the color bands are things that fit inside the same band. So, in the I don't even know what all the colors are technically called, but in the in the one that looks kind of pinkish with a the the second group that you see on the on the screen on the page that you have, if you notice one of those is increasing EC teachers by 28, the other increasing by 48, and the other increasing by 62. And we put dollar amounts. There's nothing magical so much about the you may want to do 57 or you may say we can't do 28, what does 14 look like? And you see what the numbers are per person. You can do the math on it, but if you wanted to pull that over and take a look at it, what I think you're going to find out is that as you add things to your list, you're going to get very close to the last model of what we saw in terms of big numbers because you're going to argue, too, that everything on that list is important and everything on that list is critical to success that we have in our schools and and the work that we do. And it's it's going to it just becomes it becomes a kind of mind-numbing in terms of how large the numbers get, but that's what they are. And and it's it's unfortunate that the cost is that high, but I also want to stand up for our faculty and our staff and our students and the work that we're doing in our school system and and to to give every effort that we can to to do first-rate work it with the first-rate expectations that we have. This is great. Um I think you mentioned that you were happy to add some extras to all the carts. So, will you be sending like an addendum that has the AD and um the cost for those so we can manipulate those as well in the it would in with these? I'll I can add those numbers. Uh I'll just I'll just say on the just so you know, the ADs will be a little different than most salaries due to the fact that they're not doing teacher responsibilities in summer, so it's all the dollars have to go on local. I can't do salary swaps with that. Uh cuz if they're not teaching, they have to be on local dollars. So, you're going to the number you'll see there will maybe higher than your counselors because I can't salary swap, folks. Does that make sense? So, just I don't want anyone to think like why? There's That's the reason. But yeah, I can do that in the ADs. And I guess you said ADs, counselors. All right. Mhm. And what is assistant principals? >> All right. What is assistant So, what is assistant principal per school or are we talking months of employment? Months of employment. All right. So, I'll I'll try to work some different models for you. Uh just if you can give me this evening to do it. Uh cuz what happens is I have to redo the calculations cuz like if you have 114 assistant principals, all right, and we add a month to each one of them, all right, we just added up 11.4 APs, and now my lowest the number of months I can put in that 49, it won't be 90,000 anymore. It goes up because with the lowest people I go on local. It the way it shuffles because there's only so many state positions I have. So, the more I put on local, the more the higher the the higher ranking people end up coming on to local or dollar amount. Uh so, when you see the numbers change, I just want you to know it's not it's just the math behind it. It's not no funny business. Um Mhm. So, can somebody explain the order of the I get the colors, but like why is instructional facilitators first on the list? >> There There's no particular order that we put together. No. >> Okay, so it's not any kind of prioritization or Okay. No. It it just so happened that we, you know, we said one of the things that we wanted to do after we dealt with the EC and the APs would be the instructional facilitators, but they just happened to be on the top of the list. But that that can be put in any particular order, and I think we may need to think about that because I don't know what the response would be coming back from the commissioners. Uh but if it were not fully funding whatever I requested is, then we've got to go back and decide, okay, what is it that we're going to do? And to have some idea of what priorities would be prior to that would be helpful for us. I didn't remember them being the highest priority on either of the board surveys or the public surveys. >> They They weren't They They weren't on that list. And that really was not a conversation we were having because we didn't know when I put that list together what the impact was going to be on the on the local loss, either. Well, the elementary school principals um the instructional facilitator reduction was the last thing that we reduced uh when we discovered it was going to flat rate funding. So, because it wasn't on anyone's list of being reduced, that's why we kind of put it first. Uh you you may have got different survey results if it if they would have known it was on the line to be reduced. Uh so, that's makes you the results a little, but really the first thing we should have put is the the percent as superintendent said, the percent pay increase to cover. Right. Uh And And also, I just want to add if we're talking about all the cart, um so I really like this because you've got dollar figures for our legislator priorities. We can add to that, and I know that some of the board members wanted to talk about possibly um hiring a lobbyist. And I know, you know, it's a smaller number um than all of these big numbers, but just if that's something that that the board still wants to entertain. Um I did try to secure that with a grant, and I think I've written an email to everybody saying that that is not um a possibility. So, just didn't know if that would be another all cart item that somebody would be interested in. Yeah, we can put that on there. Just because it's on the list doesn't mean that it has to be included, but I think it can be reflected with whatever dollar amount you all tell us needs to be there. Okay. I don't remember which slide this was on. I wrote a note that it's the slide about the K1 TAs. I guess it's the adjusted allotments. Um would it be possible for us you gave some more detail than what was on that slide? Could we actually get that detail broken out so we have it like >> Like it's going from what to what? >> Yeah, and yeah, like I think I wrote down the number like kindergarten something about 17 the cap sheet. I just would like to know all those Yeah. May I request give me a few days to get that together for you. The math one's kind of easy. That one's going to take a little more typing. And I think if you'll if you'll look at the state allotment, it's called the initial allotment formula, and you'll you'll even see that for TAs it's different. It's different at kindergarten. It changes as you get a little bit older, and then there aren't any allocations later in elementary school. So, you you may want to see something that's really nice and clean, and even the the sheet from the state is not. You have to do that sort of in part and parcel as you do in the formulas to put all that stuff together. Uh question for clarity just to help me out when I look at all this. We heard a great presentation from instructional services on on their needs. Is that anywhere in in this document or in the presentations like the textbook Yes. And other instructional How do we get there with Yeah, we we had I know that uh There was an area in one of those we had Um All the additional pieces around pre-K for creative curriculum and for TCS old redesign have a funding source. We were able to move forward with textbook funds and we have a continuation for a year, but we'll still have the issue around the um multi-year adoption as we go through an adoption cycle. Right. So, Miss Stansbury, is that is that something you'd be including in our discussions as we move forward? And do we know what that dollar amount would be, Paula? We don't have the final until we make the adoption. But you give us just a ballpark figure. Right. What would that be? So, for ELA it's about 8 million Well, if we're going to I ask questions about these kind of things. How about um where do we account for our folks? I know we talked about bus drivers, but for our folks that are doing our trade skilled work, where do we account for them? Because I know that they have they've been struggling for a while, and we tried to address that, and we had some hiccups in addressing their um pay. But how I we I understand why we talk about teachers and all of that, but these folks that are doing those I I feel like we forget them when we go to the county to ask. Um So, do do are they accounted for anywhere? >> Like classified pay? Is that what you mean? But I It's classified, but is it our trades Do our trades folks fall under classified the same way? Like our electricians, our plumbers, our mechanics, our like They're listed They're listed on your presentation under your uh not classified, non-clerical. That's the positions I said you get no state funding for uh with the exception of the transportation mechanics. I'm talking about local transportation. Right. Um we do have some additional We have some positions frozen all year long. We do have some added back. Uh please don't ask me for the the quote you the count. I want to see there's six or eight. It's not as many as we probably want. Uh but that's kind of where we're at right now. Uh so, I guess what I hear you as saying is two questions, maybe one. Is do we want to add more positions? And two, how do we address the compensation structure? >> And does I am concerned that often times we forget about the folks who are actually making the district run behind the scenes when we focus on asks. So, that's all. I I just feel like that is sometimes um the fight isn't as as big. I I don't know. I'm I'm glad you raised that, and and their importance can't be overstated. If If we didn't have them, we wouldn't be able to do anything that we're doing. So, um I don't bring this up in support of it, but I do think it's something we need to think about because we did off-ramp custodians, and we off-ramp or off-ramp thing, you know, some other operation positions like mowing. Is that something we need to be exploring? Is moving more of the non-instructional positions to, you know, contracted work or partner with the county and have it be there's one maintenance facility for the whole county, and the school system uses it and the county's I don't know. I'm just asking. I I know it's not popular or ideal, but I think it's it needs to be put out there if we're talking about fiscal responsibility. So, next question, Dr. Fields, is we got all this. What are remind us again what our timeline is, and what are you expecting from us at this point? We We have a another meeting uh scheduled tomorrow as a follow-up if needed, and that would be hopefully for you to go through and and look at think about look at what we've shared with you and then come back to to try to cobble together for me what you want me to move forward with on the 14th. So, at our board meeting next week, what I would be presenting would be a budget proposal that you all would vote up or down that we would move on to the to the county commissioners. And I want that to reflect the the wants and the will of the board, and I'd love for it to be everything, but it may not be able to be everything. What what is it that you feel like we we have to have on there that we have to make the ask for? This was a note um to something Leah said. Um the non-personnel gaps, like the the the cost of those kind of things. So, we should be working on a bond right now, shouldn't we? Like we should be in the process of working on that, which would address her concerns of those numbers not being um accounted for somewhere. So, how how can we um maybe start the process of working on the bond and look at some of these things that maybe maybe aren't going to be the best thing to fit into our ask, but we could say this is a bond item. I I Where are we with doing some of that stuff? >> Well, Chris I talked this morning about even if technology piece. You know, the question was the refresh that we had, would that be built into a bond? And the question on that is how often is the bond going to be done? And if it's a 10-year deal, the refresh we need to refresh rate earlier than that. But, there may be some things that we can put into the bond piece that would take care of some of the items that we have that wouldn't be the year-to-year annual budget piece. And and I'd rely on Lauren and others to be able to tell me what those things need to look like, but for us to sit down with folks at the county and the other people that are working on putting that together to be able to make sure that those elements are written in to what is going to be created. So, the a question I would have is um could we and I'll yield to uh board member Ron Gaither as chair of the Buildings and Grounds Committee is if could we have on a future agenda item just an overview of what the last bond process was and what it looked like because that was back in like 2015, 2016. So, just so we understand kind of cuz in our minds I think some of us are like it you know, 2028 is coming up really soon. So, it'd be nice for those of us who weren't part of that process to see what it it entails so that we can just, you know, spot-check and make sure we're on a timeline that we need to be. Does that Is that okay? >> We'll we'll do that. Yeah, I think that's a great idea to go ahead and put that on our agenda for the next Okay, now you know, I like to bring closure. So, it sounds like to me we are definitely scheduled to we're it was kind of gray about meeting tomorrow, so it sounds like we're definitely meeting tomorrow as a board to have further discussion around from 1:00 to 3:30. Is that correct? 1:30. 1:30 until 3:30. Okay. Just making sure. So, we all have homework assignments tonight. And then we'll come back tomorrow with further discussion from 1:30 to 3:30. As a teacher, give me ticket out the door. Make sure they leave with a ticket out the door before we exit ticket out the door. Are there any other questions? Uh yeah, I'd like to just pledge out there again, is there any appetite for looking at any other positions that could be done differently? Whether not on our payroll and our benefits, but that were offering pay. Do you have an idea Example. Give us an example. >> I mean, the only ones I can think of would be in operations. You know, how much Do we have people who or do we have painters on staff? Do we have electricians on staff? Are those things we should be contracting out? I I'm not going to personally um But, nobody wants to. I just feel like but I think until we I think until we um look at it, where we are, what we can do, what we can't do, I don't think we should be personally, I don't think we should go to start talking about contractors until we have a little more information about the trades, maybe, and where we are with how many people we have, how many positions are frozen, where we are like what are our work orders look like? How far behind are our folks? You know, can we Is there any information like that that we can get? I just don't want us to start talking and have conversations when we don't have all the information. So, I was going to say a simple to me Okay, simple may not This may not be simple, but I think an answer to the question could potentially be drawn from taking a look at what the current market is for contracted services around our common trades. So, if we're looking at like we have electricians, we have plumbers, we have painters, what within those fields, like if you wanted to contract out that work, what's the average kind of per hour whatever rate? Because I think you can look at that and you can see cuz I think that those the cost of those trades have ballooned to the point where it is it is not going to be a savings to contract out those services. I think that one of the reasons why we have conversations about where our operations folk are with their pay is because they're so far behind where the market is in terms of pay. So, I think if you looked at the comparison between those, you would see based on those numbers that we would not and we would not have a savings if we went to contract. >> Yeah, that's what I'm asking is do we need to look at if there is savings? Like I would argue we didn't think there would be as much with custodians, but it was 4 million annually. Uh or mowing contracts. I mean, I'm I'm not saying let's let's let's go write up a a chopping block tonight. I'm saying do we need to look into what the potential cost savings would be if we shared services with the county or if we contracted out. Well, it hurts nothing to explore that and and we'll get with Lauren and and take a look at at how we put that together and what that may look like. And we we had a conversation. The only thing I mentioned to Lauren was the painting piece. Cuz painting seems like it's not significant until you don't paint for 5 years in a row, then you walk into a building and you realize that it maybe it's more significant than I thought, but it's expensive when you when you bring folks in or you contract and then you got supplies that go along with that and and everything else, but I I think while we're having the conversations, it's the right time to to at least reach that topic. I hope this has been helpful. And and what I tried to do is to put together for you the real building blocks and the pieces that we deal with and to understand that it's an expensive endeavor. And we're not just talking about dollars, we're talking about millions of of dollars, and we're not just talking about positions, we're talking about people. And we're talking about people's livelihood. And what we're ultimately talking about are faculty and staff that we represent and ultimately students in the classroom. So, there's probably not a more critical conversation that we as a school board can have than what we've talked about today. I appreciate your participation and feedback. Thank you all so much. Well, guess we'll meet again tomorrow at 1:30. Thank you.