I tried to convince her she wouldn't do it.

Okay. 00:00:21,800	Okay. All right. Good evening. I call to order the meeting of the Hamilton Windham Regional School Committee on Thursday, December 4th, 2025 at 7 p.m.. Um, first order of business. We have an opportunity for citizens comments. We have an opportunity both here in person, in the room, as well as on zoom.

Um, any citizen wishing to speak before the committee, I will ask that you identify yourself. And please spell your last name so that we can get it correct for the minutes. Um, please know that we a lot. Three minutes. Um, please keep your comments to three minutes. Um, Amy is our official timekeeper here, and, um,

she'll let you know when you have about 30s left. Um, and it does not look like we had any of anyone on zoom just yet. So we'll start here in the room. Um, so if there's anyone in the room, um, who wishes to make a comment.

00:01:30,269	Oh, and I'm sorry, I should have said just so everyone hears me say it. I should have said this is an opportunity for us to listen and for you to be heard. Um, so it's not a back and forth. We will, um, listen to your comment and then we will, um, thank you for it. Um. Thank you.

Welcome. Good evening, Scott Maddern. Uh, old kart road in Hamilton. Uh, a few points. I know tonight you're going to be talking about next phase for grammar school renovations. And, um, uh, Eric has a, uh, uh, some efforts he wants to get kick off related to that.

Um, I want to thank him for his leadership on the grammar school renovations. I really appreciate that. You're, uh, sticking with it. The schools aren't getting any younger just because we failed a lot of votes. Um, for the next phase, I'd ask that you. I've asked before that you reflect on everything that we

think maybe went wrong before. But in all your community planning efforts and outreach activities that you have, especially these working sessions that might be coming up as like keep the Ed plan front and center it, I think people lose if you don't know what we're trying to achieve, any path will get you there.

Anybody's ideas about doing something, they're not bad. They're just unfounded. They're not linked to the Ed plan. And you are the epicenter. They had a plan that's not challenged. It's the thing that you're supposed to be doing if that's not continually communicated to people. So you know what we're trying to achieve.

Um, I think you're going to have just all sorts of unfounded biases being presented and not know how to deal with them. Um, and then in terms of dealing with them, I think I've mentioned this before. I think you need a dedicated social media budget so that you promote what's going on.

You watch what's happening in the social media world because that's where the fight is. It's not here with the three people who are attending your meeting. It's in the hundreds of people that are in your social media ecosystem. And, uh, responding to that, being current with it, um, is critical because your meetings of every two weeks.

Just keep up with the news cycles that happen in real time social media worlds. So editor. Front editor. Front, front. I mean the editor. Planned. Front and center. A dedicated social media budget for this next phase of the project, I believe, is mandatory. And then I'd also ask from a money standpoint, that you ask

all the five boards. It hasn't really been part of your discussions yet. 30s the select boards and the and the fin coms to have a annual capital funding request. It's going to be a big number. We don't know what it is yet, but it's not prudent to not start saving for that now.

We need to save it now. Our library took ten years of planning, communication and effort before it opened. The school renovations are bigger than that, so there's no reason to believe it'll be shorter. So, um, therefore, we need to start saving now so the impact isn't just on ginormous number ten years down the road. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

00:04:59,170	All right. I'm I'm assuming there's no one else in the room. Nope. Um, and it doesn't appear that there's anyone on zoom. So at this point, we will close the citizen comments on zoom closing out, and we'll close them here. Thank you very much. Um, next up is a review of a portion of our protocols.

I think that is you, Jen. Is that right? Yes. As elected members of the Hamilton Wenham Regional School Committee, we, including the superintendent, accept the high honor and trust that has been placed in us to ensure that the students of the district receive the best education possible. To that end, we hereby commit to the following.

In the conduct of our business school Committee members will attend meetings on time and be well prepared to discuss agenda items. While at meetings, members will stay focused on the agenda items and will not engage. Engage in communication outside of the agenda being discussed when making decisions. School committee members will keep in mind utilizing the best

information possible available, including research, best practices, public input, and financial considerations. Members will debate issues and not each other. Members will analyze carefully and debate fully whenever necessary prior to making decisions. Thank you. Next up we have a portion of the mission statement. Kristen. Thank you. The Hamilton Windham Regional School District, excuse me,

school District School Committee's mission is to ensure our schools create graduates with a passion for lifelong learning, together with the critical skills needed to maximise their potential. The Hamilton Wenham Regional School Committee will lead and inspire a district that is a source of civic pride and municipal engagement to serve the community for generations to come. Thank you.

00:07:07,470	If the committee is willing, I'd like to propose. You'll see that our student government representative, Emily Pitkin, is here. And I would like to if. Unless without objection, I'd like to move her up to before the superintendent's report. If everyone is okay with that. Okay. To you. Emily.

Hi. So I'm just here to talk about the student activities.

00:07:34,970	Um, to start with events, we just wrapped up Spirit Week and the Fall School Musical Chicago. Both were super successful, and it was a really fun and competitive week for all grades. There's also the Hamilton one M Regional High School Winter concert and Art show December 10th. That's at 6 p.m..

Admissions are both for both events are free and all community members are welcomed. We also have Deca coming up and districts. Is this upcoming Wednesday for the role plays, which is super exciting and for sports. We had a super fun end to the football season, winning the Thanksgiving game against Ipswich on Thursday morning.

Um, this is also the first week of winter sports and we have a bunch and it's super exciting and we're excited to like get started with those. And then for clubs, there's been a bunch of new clubs that have been formed this year, and there's roughly 32 clubs overall, which is super fun.

And there's a lot of different options for every one. Um, over at the middle school, they are coming up on their weekly early release, and then they also have a winter concert at 7 p.m.. This is going to be taking place at the high school. And then we have just winter break approaching.

And they also have a bunch of clubs that are thriving with around 14, and they are starting their winter intramurals. Over at Winthrop, they have the book fair today and tomorrow, and they also will have their report cards being published. The holiday boutique is also this Saturday and they're looking for volunteers, which is super fun.

And it's always a great way to kind of like a throwback going back there. And then at Bucur, their music program is doing really well, and they have a bunch of, um, lessons for, for people who are just learning how to play an instrument. And then they also have the ensemble, um, and they're also

hosting a school committee meeting. And then at Cutler, they have the Holiday solstice read aloud slash lantern craft at 6 p.m. on the 17th, and they are preparing for winter break. That's all I have. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Always great to hear.

And I love the work that you did in making sure that we got a lot of information about the elementary schools as well. Thank you. Thank you for that. Um, it sounds especially the music program at, uh, at Booker. Sounds like you got some good information about that one. Yeah. Thank you.

Does anyone have any questions or anything for Emily? No. All right. Um. Thank you. Emily. Um, I'm guessing you may have other places to be. We are fascinating and open to the public, but. So. However, you are also welcome to go if you're done. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to. All right.

Um, always great to have the student representative here. Thank you. Um, so, um, we did take things out of order. You'll notice that we, um, put the superintendent report. Up at the. Closer to the top of the meeting. It's just something we're testing out. Was Amy's suggestion that, um, you know, lots of times Eric

has information that's interesting to the public, and they might be perhaps more engaged nearer the beginning of the meeting. Um, so we'll see. Um, Eric. I thought it was because you wanted my exciting personality up front. That was. Keep everyone interested all the way through. All right, so a few quick things.

We have, uh, an interesting, uh, release this past week of the graduation requirements at the state level. Um, I want to be very clear in this. They are not etched in stone. They have released it, and they are really shopping at about to see what different groups think about their plan.

Uh, the plan really includes rigorous coursework connected to higher ed make trying to make connections to courses and higher ed, um, demonstration of mastery, which will include some type of end of course assessment. I was in a webinar with the commissioner yesterday and they were talking about, you know, picking certain courses at

different grade levels and having all of those end of course assessments managed by the state. It sounds a little bit like a little bit for me, like MCAS again, but that's part of what they're thinking about. They're also looking at giving kids the opportunity to do capstones and portfolios.

And then, um, kids as low as into the elementary grades will be expected to use some level of career and academic planning, which includes the My Cap program, which is the state run program that helps kids to kind of find their way. There's a number of em out there. We used to use variants. We used to.

They're different just ways. Usually older kids use to determine college decisions, directions, etc.. Um, my cap is one that's been sponsored by the state and they are now leaning into that hard. We do not use it because we didn't think it was a robust enough for our kids. So that may present an issue

down the road as we move forward. They're still shopping around town superintendents are weighing in on it. I am on both the legislative committee and on the graduation requirements committee for the superintendents group. So I'll get information and bring it back as soon as I can. But I just want people to know it's not in stone.

Some people immediately emailed me like, what does this mean for my kid? It doesn't mean anything because it's just they're really just shopping it around. So that's one thing you want to do. Questions on that I just yeah, I have a question. Um, no, no, no, I just had a question about I know it's not

set in stone. I just want to have a question about students who are graduating this year. We did some work, correct, to make sure that they have clarity about what. So that was purposeful so that these kids didn't get caught in the loop at the end of the year. So so we're staying with that

with the current class of 26 okay. Yep. That was purposeful because I think they knew this would take longer than a year to get moving forward. So so. Regard the class of 26 has clarity about what they need and that okay. We approved. It making sure because. They approved it, it'll be submitted to the state mid

December and then be good to go. Okay. Uh a couple of other things. We had the second meeting of the school start time committee. We have about uh, we have 13 members on that committee working towards this past, um, meeting. We had, uh, breakout groups. I had to break out my breakout group skills for zoom, which I

haven't done in a while, but we had different great breakout rooms and had people brainstorm about impact points related to three areas so far athletics and after school activities. That's one area. The second area was transportation, and then the third area was looking at um, employment and after school care.

So those were the first three areas we started, we did bring kind of round robin brainstorms. One group started in each. Then we shifted every few minutes to give people an opportunity to weigh in. We had one of the gentlemen from the bus company in the meeting room, so he could answer some specific questions.

Next meeting we'll do some more of that, but also add in. We'll bring in the athletic director to get some perspective from him. Um, and then we'll start to begin to formulate a direction so that we can meet the March deadline. So it's a good group. It's a it's a actually really good group.

We we grew from 5 to 13 really quickly 14 plus including me. But it's a it's a good mix of people with people from the community, parents from elementary parents from middle parents, from high school, teachers who are parents, teachers from each of the grade levels, counselors, nurses. So it's a good, good mix of people.

So we'll keep doing that work and I'll keep letting get getting updates to the committee. Then finally, in this last past week, we had, um, geo imaging done of the middle school parking lot. Uh, we did not find any gold, so sorry about that. But we, um, as you remember, some new people may not know

the the committee, I think three years ago now agreed to begin to look towards the development and installation of a solar canopy in the middle school parking lot. Um, which would give us about 70 to 80% of the electricity for the middle school. And essentially what happens is the company comes in, they

build the solar canopy, and then they sell electricity to us at a drastically reduced rate, like $0.08 a kilowatt. So it's about a million and a half savings over a 20 year period. You lock in a contract for 20 years with this company, and it'll be a it'll be a big

savings for us as we as we move forward. Um, if it all comes to fruition, we're still waiting for approvals from National Grid. It's left the state House study realm. So now it's in the hands of National Grid. We should know by mid-January where we're going to go from

that point, how long it would take to actually get something up and running. But it'll still have to come back to the community one more time and then review that and get approvals and then move forward. And I just wanted to touch on one. Emily Emily Pickens talked about the winter concert at the middle school.

That's on December 16th. And then the high school winter concert is on December 10th. And they do an art show at six and then at 10:00, excuse me, 10:00. I'll be driving home then, but it's at 7:00. They'll do a concert. So I just wanted to clarify.

She had it in her in her presentation, but I don't think she had the time, the dates. And that's it.

00:17:24,529	Thank you. Anybody have questions? I was adding the Wonder concert to my calendar. Um. All right.

00:17:35,369	Um, next up is our consent agenda. Does anyone have any items that they'd like to hold from the consent agenda?

00:17:45,529	No. Julia. I move that we accept the consent agenda as presented. Second. Second by Jen Carr. All those in favor? That is unanimous. Of the six members present and the motion passes.

00:18:05,730	Okay. Um, so next, this is the, um, warrant for, um, the election of school committee members. This is, um, the language that were, um, required to put out. Um, and we all, uh, if once we. Once we approve it, we it needs to be signed. Um, the the thing that, um, members of the committee should

understand and members of the public should understand is that it's a little bit. Um, I mean, just to be clear that they're up in April. Uh, there will be three, um, seats open on the school committee that people could run for. Um, two of those seats, which are the seats that, um, Megan

and I hold are, um, three year terms. And then one of the seats, which is the seat that Kristen holds, is a two year, two term. So I don't know if anyone has any questions on that. It is confusing. Um, but that is the way. Um, and that is, um, that is because of the, um, being

appointed that like, if you're fulfilling the rest of the term. Um, it just so happened that Megan's fulfilling a term that's ending. Got it. That makes sense. Yes. I have a question. Yeah. Is that reflected on the ballot or like. Yes. And we've actually done this before. Okay. Um, so yes, it's reflected on the ballot. It will.

It will say, um, candidates for like in theory, a candidate, any candidate could run for the two year term or the three year term. You have to declare that so that they would be separate. Like it would say, you know, like candidates running for three year term, it would have the list of candidates that are

doing that, and it would tell you how many it would, you know, vote for two because there's two of those. And then it would say candidates running for the two year term. However, many candidates vote for one because there's just one. Um, the other thing that is important, probably more important to school committee

members than it is to the public. But just so people are clear, if you read the second part here, um, our regional agreement, um, states that if you have been if you are running for re-election, um, that you can declare your candidacy by writing a letter to the town clerk.

But if you have not, if you're running as the first time running for election, you need to obtain signatures. So that would apply to anyone who's been appointed, and also anyone from the public who is interested in running for the seats would need to obtain the signatures. Um, so, um, that was a lot.

Does anyone have any questions on this or. Actually, we should probably have a motion. Do I need to read specific language for this? Oh, that's a great question. I don't think so. Um, I think it's as presented. I move that the Hamilton London School Committee approved the warrant for election of school committee members as presented.

Second. Second by Jen Carr. Um, does anyone have any questions about this? Okay. Is there any further discussion? All right. Um, all those in favor? That is unanimous. Of the six members present and the motion passes. Um, and I assume we have a copy. Before you leave. Before you leave. Sign it again before you leave.

We got it all tied. Yes, it needs to. Be. Signed. And, um. Julia. Well. It's clear. I was going to say the secretary is, like, at the bottom. It's, like, officially coming from the secretary. Okay. So, um. All right, next up is, um, a potential vote on the 2027 2028 school calendar.

Um, we always try to have two on the books. So, um. Do you. Eric? Sure, yeah. The agreements that we have with the unions are to have two year, at least two years out. So we, um, following that process, usually right around, um, late October, we start to develop the calendar for two

years out, and then in November, late November and mid November, we give it to the union, uh, to, for them to review. And um, we kind of cross-reference information, make sure everybody has the same understanding of what the schedule is and then, uh, publish this draft for your approval.

I will say we have in the past had to change calendars for various reasons because of, um, different things that have come up. So no calendar is ever etched in stone. So don't feel like if you vote for it, it's stuck. But we just want to make sure we're continuing to follow the

language that's in our contracts and also to kind of give the general public a good idea of start dates and end dates and vacation times so they can plan. So. Um, so and you're looking for a vote if this evening. Correct. Um, so maybe we'll start off with a motion and then we can discuss.

I move that the Hamilton Wyndham School Committee vote to approve the 2027 2028 school year calendar as presented. Second. Second by Amy Burger. Um, are there any questions? I had one quick question. I noticed in September of 27, the early release day is the first Wednesday of the month, and in the other months it's

the second Wednesday of the month. So I just wanted to double check if that was purposeful or a typo Bow in September. Yeah, that's the second one day of the month. It is the first one. I teach a workshop day. So do you want it? Okay. Sorry. No mistake.

Yeah, it's a little confusing with the s in there. Okay. You just wanted to check. Yeah. Um. I was hesitant because it's the first day of school. Yeah, it's early release, but that's our. Our agreements are written. Yeah, yeah. Um. Does anybody else have questions? I think so.

Um, I, I did, I, I did look at it I it's.

00:24:50,599	I mean, like Eric said, sometimes people do see something or find something that like, doesn't, you know, doesn't make sense or doesn't, um, uh, you know, um, but, you know, it didn't seem nothing leaped out at me, so, um. Right. Anything else? No. All right. Looks like we're ready to vote. All right. All those in favor?

That is unanimous. Of the six members present and the motion passes. Thank you for that work.

00:25:26,799	Um, next up is to you, Eric. Um, so it's was two, I think, two meetings ago. Committee tasked me with coming up with, uh, process for at that time, we were talking about listening sessions. We've talked to a number of people and gotten feedback to say, do not call them listening sessions. So community conversations.

Um, so this is, uh, what I put together that seems to make sense. Gives us some time to have two meetings to gather feedback and, um, process that feedback in time for a vote if we need to, for town meeting or to at least get our ducks in a row. So these sessions would be run by me.

They'd be running a workshop format. The idea would be to have similar situation to here, except tables, and try to mix some people up and get some interactions between the tables, do some group sharing just to dig into what types of things and themes that the community has in mind.

You know, where do we go from here is the question everybody continues to ask, and we are seeing several themes that are reoccurring costs and tax impact, preservation of the small neighborhood schools, process, transparency and trust, and then understanding of options. So figuring that out is something we'd like to do through these sessions.

I figured we can run them for about 90 minutes. I have a pretty good idea of how to structure those, and then just use that process to bring information together. Create a report, bring it to the committee, and then try to determine some next steps with the committee. Right around that early February, when we're voting the

final budget, but also creating our warrant articles and things like that. So if we need to, we we're still within the 45 day window. We have an extra week kind of built in there because they moved town meetings. So that's helpful. Um, but I just wanted I just wanted to make sure this came

on quickly enough so that we could get it up and running. The second, um, item on the exhibit is just a sample of a mailer that we would use, uh, two sided mailer that we use. Very simple and straightforward. The question I have for the committee is on the back side of it. It says in red.

Well, it says the Hamilton Waterman Regional School District like to invite all community members and open community conversation with the superintendent and members of the school Committee. The hope of the school committee members will be there. Listening. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure that that belongs in there, but I wanted to check

with the committee to see if you wanted to keep that in there. Take it out. It's it's really just kind of a preference of the committee.

00:28:23,170	Are you asking if we. I think it's fine. Or if you want us to. No, it's it's it's really, um, the community conversation is really. It's a it's a it's literally me running a workshop for the community two times. So the debate we had in Central Office was, do we want to have

the superintendent and members of the committee or the school committee really just there to be participants in the workshop? Yeah, I just don't want us to be a distraction, and I just. Yeah. Um, I think that it should be clear that we're not there to lead it. We're there as, like, participants and listening.

Right. I guess I want to make sure I understand the question, because I think that's what Amy like, I and maybe we're all saying the same thing. I think in my mind it would be really important that there are school committee members there to listen, observe, take notes, be present.

Um, but I wouldn't want people like it's it's an I. The idea is.

00:29:32,099	It's not for opportunity is for the community to have a conversation. Not right for we have lots of opportunities to say what we think publicly. Um, so sorry, I don't know. Go ahead. So so I have the same question like and that's it is what I was trying to ask.

But I also would like people, if they would like to have conversation with us to be able to ask. So I wonder if there's a way to structure the event so that like we can listen. And then also if people want to come talk to us. Sure. Invite them to do that.

Right. I'm wondering if even maybe that like, it could even be like Eric said, you know, 90 minutes. It could even be like, before or after that. Yeah. That committee members are just. Hang. Out. You know, not not in this kind of a setting, just in a casual kind of setting or more relaxed, I don't know.

Yeah. And I think that might be helpful because as you stated for community comment, that's it's not really an opportunity for us to engage back into dialogue. And so this might open that door a little bit for communication. Yeah. But I mean, and and I know Eric has a here's a

separate question of just how to like write the word, how to word it. But I think we need to get clarity on what we want it to look like first. Jen. My concern is violation of open meeting law. Well, we'd have to post it as a meeting. Yeah. Okay, so. We would all be there. And even if.

Four people would be stuck close. Close it as a meeting. Um, but and I would do the I'm willing to do the legwork to sort of find out, like, okay, so we post it. But then what are the rules around how it works? And because we're not going to be sitting around the way that

we do here, we wouldn't take any votes. So, you know, we we. Make. Decisions. We post a workshop to which is which is something that we just discussed if we don't make any decisions. So um, but yeah, I would definitely find out about the logistics of that, but I think we definitely have to post it

at four of us would be there. Um, yeah. My other concern is the time. Like, will it be childcare provided? Because that's going to disenfranchise a lot of people. Sure is. Um, right. Like my cohort. Yeah. Or who, you know, can't bring their kids and to the meeting. Or should one be at a different

time of day, like a different day. I mean, I will say, as a parent of young children myself, anytime after 730 is generally more amenable to those of us who have kids who go to bed at seven, seven, 15, then we can scoot out and go to something like this. Just a suggestion.

00:32:14,069	Is that feasible to do? Like one at one time and one at another time? Yeah. Yeah. That's why I brought this here. I wanted to get some feedback on that. I mean, I'm I was even thinking one in the morning. One at night. We don't get a lot of attendees in the morning.

Yeah. But it's maybe it's a early afternoon and a seven or a 730 or something. Well, you know, what's interesting about that is that this is a community conversation, not a parents conversation. And so it's true, we don't get a ton of parent participation in the morning, but you might get seniors in the morning.

And to Megan's point, like maybe you do a 731 in the evening and then, I don't know like I. Because that is. That's been a long time off. Like oftentimes we're like, oh, we'll do one during the day and one day, and then you just don't get a lot of people during the day.

Or even like a mid like anytime. I mean, there's also parents who a lot of folks, more folks work from home or, you know, who might be able to sneak away during the day too. So you might be surprised. You might be need one. Um, I like the idea of having it at two different times.

I don't have deep thoughts about what those two different times are, but you know that it gives it two different possibilities depending on people's schedules. Particularly if one is before it gets dark, because that was the. Complaint. But that was a complaint of several seniors is that they didn't want to drive in the dark.

Correct. That was that was a big discussion. Yeah. So maybe we do a morning and then you do maybe a 9 a.m., and I just have to figure out parking during the. I'd have to. That's the only problem. Oh, yeah. That's if we have it on school property. Zero. Parking during the school day. During the school day.

Were the library. Or the rec center, maybe like over there, you know. We'd have to pay rent. Rent it. Maybe we can. Ask. Yeah. Lots of thought. I mean, yeah. Can we also make sure these get posted in big letters in the newspaper? Oh, yeah. We'll share it with all the local news.

These are going to get mailed to every single house in the community. That's the plan. My other, um, my other concern is that it's really clear what we want to walk away with at the end of it. Like. Or what? The purpose, the purpose that we're trying to get at is like,

this is a this is a conversation. You know, we're getting information. I think it's worded really well, but sometimes I feel like people will come. They'll they'll have an opinion, they'll tell us something, and then they get mad when we don't implement it. So we have to explain like this is a conversation. We're taking all viewpoints into

consideration. Um, is it going to be recorded also or. No, I can check with cable. I'm not sure if they'll be able to do it in the library. They could. Maybe if we do it in the calf, but I can. I'll ask. Yeah, and you can. I mean, that's part of the

I mean, it's a good point, but we've all you know, it's part of making it. And that would be on you if you're, it's making it clear that it's a conversation we're throwing. You know, we're like um, but yes, that's a valid point. Um, I'm sort of still focused on the whether I guess I'm leaning.

I would like to hear what other people think about like how to.

00:35:43,469	Whether or not to include like, end members of the school committee. I don't know what you guys think. I'm sort of I think I think school committee. I really want school committee members to be there. I think that's really important. I'm not so sure how important it is to put it in here, because that's not the focus.

It's not really. It's a real it's not the focus. Like what? I don't know. And it also like my concern would be that people would show up to harangue school committee members not to have a constructive discussion. Well, let's let's give people some like people might want to come and just talk to the

school committee and that's okay. But but the point is a broader conversation. So, um, whether they wanted to give, I don't know, I guess I in some ways I'm very torn because I do want people to know that the school committee is going to be there to listen and hear and witness this conversation and gain from it.

But I also feel like what's really important is the community aspect of this. Not really the school committee aspect. And so I'm sort of torn about it. I mean. And the focus of the workshop. So yeah, it's more of like a work, the. Work. Style.

Right? I know it can be very hard to sort of wordsmith something as a group. Um, but I just does it help to say that it's a community conversation led by the superintendent to share thoughts, perspectives and ideas? And then, I don't know, I know that the card is almost full,

but as a second sentence, say that representatives of the school committee will also be in attendance to something to that because I if I'm understanding it correctly, it's like we're trying to sort of differentiate between sort of the committee presenting or leading the conversation or facilitating the conversation, as opposed to more being. Or being the conversation.

Right, as opposed to more making sure we're having a firsthand Experience listening to the community. Yeah, I like the idea of. For me, I like that. Like some in some way. Reform school Committee members will be in attendance. I think that's a nice that's the right level. Like they'll be there, but they're not that's not the focus.

The focus is the like. Because I also think there could be some members of the community that might be disappointed if there weren't school committee members. I mean, there will be people with all diversity of opinion about the right role for the committee in this.

So I think I think better for some of us at least, to be there in some way, you know? Yeah. I think it makes sense. I like how you wear it at school. School committee members will also be in attendance to. Just maybe we'll also. Just. Period. Right. But I like lead by the superintendent

do you think or. Maybe we. Maybe do you not want to say that Eric does that. Facilitated? Yeah. Facilitated. Yeah, I could facilitate. It's probably a good word. Yeah. Are you thinking of having. Could even just say community conversations to share thoughts perspective. Isn't it right. Literally doesn't have. To have it.

Yeah. Just be silent on the detail. Yeah, I kind of think that might be better. Okay. Do you have a format in mind? Yep. Okay. Cool.

Secret. 00:39:11,800	Um. And I am planning on being there, I don't know. Me too. That is helpful. I mean, and obviously it will matter to the committee members to, I'm sure, what time these things are happening. Yeah, I can definitely do the seventh early in the morning, but I can't do the 29 five classes same.

And it's going to be just like it's just like, you know, just like the community. It'll be a mix and match of. A part of the community. Part of the community. Right? Like, daytime is very hard for me, but I can do a nighttime. Right. Exactly. Um, no, I think that was good feedback about,

like, sometimes I think I wouldn't necessarily like to think about, like, later is actually easier because the kids have gone to bed and it's a little bit easier. Um. Except you hoped you had that much quiet time. Right. But I think this is a great idea. My free evenings are. Eric, thank you for offering to lead this.

I think it's it is really, really a great idea. Yeah, yeah. And the goal will be to take this information, put together a report, get it to the committee early February. Um, and that way it's it's front and center in our conversations at budget approval weren't designed for the town meetings.

And if we need anything to come out of this to be in town meeting, we have that leverage. Thanks, Eric. All right. Um. Thank you. Did you feel like you got what you needed? Yep. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. Um. Next up. Um, I, uh, we added this, um, Ashleigh 241 update at the request of, um, committee member.

This was back in. I wrote it down, but I don't remember when it was, but in the spring, um, the committee vote had a vote to investigate the Ashrae 21 241 air quality standards, um, to investigate cost of, um, upgrading our systems to that standard. Um, part of the,

um, motion stipulated that, um, we would get this estimate of cost only if it didn't cost us money to get the estimate. Um, and anyway, this is the follow up to that to close out this, um, item. Eric, can you make it bigger up there or. I guess I can. Pull it up. Is that.

Better? Yeah. Thank you.

00:42:02,099	Let me take. It. Yep. Okay. So we. It was, uh, Mr. Frankel who requested this, I think last meeting to bring back around, taking a hit on the the high points, the the second paragraph, um, talked about B2. Q is a company, um, that we worked with that did kind of an overview.

So Vicki Mason, who is the energy manager for the town of Hamilton and Wenham and a few others, um, connected us up with this B2, Q who was able to start to look at some of the realities of what it would cost just to update and upgrade some of the equipment. Just HVAC. Not to. To.

241. 241 is really expensive. It's really high end. High grade. Um, but these are some of the options that they came to us with. Like option one would be 3.4 million just at the Booker alone. That doesn't count anything with hazardous materials or, uh, retrofit costs due to construction constraints like the building structure, etc..

So these these are really order of magnitude estimates that were given. Um, and the, the company you know, that gave these could give no guarantee that a construction company would say, yeah, I'll do it for that. So it's just kind of an order of magnitude of uh, so showing how we could electrify basically our HVAC systems at

all the schools and get rid of all the, the, um, fossil fuels. So we just wanted to close this out. It was a motion many months ago and just bring it back around.

00:43:49,329	Does anyone have any questions?

00:43:53,269	I kind of do, I guess. Kind of. That's not. It's not a good way to start a question. Um, in the chart. So this is estimates for upgrading electrical right in each school, which we're assuming would be kind of like the base to the project of doing this, of meeting this Ashrae standard.

Like we would need to do that in order to. Yeah. Yeah that makes sense. So it'd be electrifying the current systems, which are, um, a combination of fossil fuels. Oh, I see the okay. So it would be all the way back to a ventilation systems that are on the roof. Uh, ventilation system. I mean, um.

Boilers and pumps that might be in a boiler room. So anything that's related to to those items as well as what's happening in the classroom. So like, some of our older classrooms have ventilators that are original. They're they're literally a unit that is either run by electricity, which is not a common thing, or in most cases

steam, steam heat is run through and then electric motor turns on. And that's how the room is heat. So so this would convert everything to straight electric. Got it. Um, which would be this just doesn't look at anything outside of the buildings either. Like, okay, do we need a transformer,

uh, size increase to be able to pull something like this off? Probably at the high school. We ran into that problem with the boiler, uh, insulation at the high school where they wanted $600,000 to to put another upgraded transformer across the street. streets if we if we were going to go all electric.

So these are really order of magnitude. They're really like we think you could do it for this, but we're not 100% nailed down on it. So thank you. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. A lot of money. There's a lot of money. Um okay. Does anybody have anything else on this?

00:45:55,869	Okay. Um, so.

00:46:01,099	You know, um, David, who's the one who requested that we bring this back as, unfortunately, I'm here this evening, but I just the purpose of bringing this back is to fulfill that that motion is complete and that the report has been brought to the committee. Um, so my goal is to have this be complete at this time.

Thank you. All right. Um. All right.

00:46:28,099	Next, we are moving on to a FY 27 budget discussion.

00:46:37,000	Come on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you sir. Thank you. Thank you.

00:47:11,530	That awkward moment during a test. Yeah. All right. Thank you everyone. As you remember, we presented a budget and the initial preliminary budget. Last meeting. Then you went through a number of slides, gave, uh, many pages of information. So I wanted to try to help the committee walk through a conversation tonight

to give us some direction of where we want to go. We've talked about some of the ins and outs and the ups and downs and the increases, and why I think everybody I think everybody understands that. But if you don't, please ask somebody and I want to make sure everybody's clear on what's out there.

But right now, in conversations with the towns, um, after we've talked with them at the, the both the quintuple level of the full boards and also at the individual levels with town meetings. Town managers and their budget people. The town of Hamilton is asking us to reduce their share. So keep that in mind.

Their share by 1.4 million. Um. And bear with me as I go through this. I'll help you kind of see what that number looks like. Um, and in the same concern and same conversation. Different conversation, in different town. We had one in the area asking to reduce our their share by approximately $1 million.

So if you if you look at those numbers, keep those numbers in your head for a little bit and I'll, I'll walk you through some better detail in another slide. But that's roughly what they're asking us to do. And, you know, if you're looking at reducing one of them by $1 million, that reduces Hamilton by $2 million,

remember it's 2 to 1. Basically when we do an assessment, which would be a total of $3 million in reductions.

00:49:01,099	So what options do we have? And this is certainly not an exhaustive list. I just wanted to put some items on the table. You may have other ones that you may come up with. We can kick the can down the road and try to backfill with whatever we have. Um, something similar last year.

Not my favorite option, not Vinny's either. We can say, okay, we'll leave the budget as it is and go for an override in each town of everything that's in the current budgets. You could try to reduce between 1 and $3 million out of the budget as it was presented.

You could do a combination of override and some reductions in the budget, and then you could look into things like, how do we reconfigure the district to save money while also probably having to do some reductions? That's a little more complex, and I think that's a wider community conversation, but I just wanted to throw some

options on the table. You certainly may have other options, but just the idea here is just to open the discussion tonight. So I just took a number. I said, what's 5% of reductions look like in our budget? It's about $2 million. If you cut 5%, I've asked our leadership team to go through

the exercise and say, okay, in the. I use the Bücker. There are about 3.7 million. $3.8 million total. Take 5% of that. Do. Do some reductions. And we did that at every area, including athletics, central office, technology, special education. We asked everybody to sit. We sat in a meeting and went through, um, trying to get

people to do a 5% reduction. That was not an easy exercise and very uncomfortable because I'll show you why. These are the things that get impacted. Supplies, faculty and staff. Athletic user fees would increase, contracted services would be lost, professional development and memberships would be either reduced or cut completely. Uh, home hospital tutoring

would be reduced, reducing home services. Uh, we would not update our devices. So, uh, next year, I think the high school teachers are due for their rotation every five years. Uh, we would not update those computers. Just leave what they have. Losing some central office functions. Cutting late buses one, maybe two. There are two currently.

Now. Stipends for extracurriculars would be reduced or cut out completely. Graduation expenses would have to be reduced and then transportation reductions where we could. Those are a little bit harder because transportation in a regional school district is required. But we might have to look differently at, say, special ed transportation, some of those costs, athletics,

transportation, some of those costs. So just some things that that fall just in that 5% bucket, just me looking over what everybody would put in the list for me to say, okay, these are the things that are showing up in there. Uh, some things to think about. Upcoming negotiations. We have ESPs.

We're starting them on the 11th, I believe December 11th. Uh, so that's a process we have to think about that will impact next year's budget. If we successfully negotiate a contract between now and the end of the school year. Yeah, the end of the school year, we would. That would impact the budget we

suspect in some way, shape or form. Uh, and supplementation is problematic. Uh, we put $2 million in the budget from end last year to offset rather than, um, reduce. And that right now is still something we're going to wrestle with. So, uh, if we were to say, yeah, let's do that again.

If we could actually afford to do it, we would say, let's do that again. We'd be doing this again next year at a higher magnitude, a higher volume of reductions. New capital, uh, high school roof, as you know, is is in the MSBA process right now. Um, due to be discussed and hopefully accepted in the

December MSBA meeting. Um, that's that's about a $5.84 million ask.

00:53:05,969	And then OPEC is at our priority. Do we leave it as a priority. We have been we agreed many years ago to continuously add $50,000 to op ed op each year through 20 2032. I believe it is. And then lock it at that point. So right now we're in this budget for next FY 27.

We're looking at contribution contributing $350,000 in opacity. You know, is that something that you want to continue to do. You want to freeze or you want to look at reducing? Um, it's been you spoke about the budget. There's about $600,000 in needed, uh, maintenance that's in the budget built into the budget and not a separate capital ask.

The reason being is a separate capital ask is a one time shot. Building it into the budget gives us the opportunity to continue to fix and repair things. And if I had Curtis here right now, he would tell you he he's out of money. He is currently out of money. Vinnie and I had conversations with him.

Uh, he does not have the ability to do some of the things we need to do. So we may be moving some money around just in the FY 26 budget. And then do you reduce the fund, the $100,000 that we set aside for capital stabilization? You know, we want to continue to try to fund that so that

future capital expenses can be offset. But that's another area to look at if you're looking at not directly impacting the classrooms. So let me talk a little bit about impact. Currently we're looking at $3.896 million increase. That and you guys you've seen the slides related to salaries step and column changes etc..

Insurance increases a lot of things that that have contributed to that number which breaks down. Hamilton Hamilton increased being 2.4 million and the Wenham increase currently at 1.4 million. Now remember when I was asking us to reduce the 1.4 to 4 to 495,000? So let me show you how that works.

If you dropped $1 million out of the current budget scenario, that would drop Hamilton down to $1.7 million increase, which is about 7.1%. And when I'm down 1.1 1.2 million, which is about 9.1%. If you dropped 1.5 million, you're looking at Hamilton only dropping down to 5.8% increase and one of them dropping down to a 7.74% increase.

If you dropped $2 million, reduce $2 million from the current budget scenario. That would drop Hamilton down to 4.46% increase for about $1 million. And then when I'm at 6.38% increase, and then I'm going to stop at this 12. $5 million. If you would have cut $2.5 million from this budget,

Hamilton would drop down to a 3.12% increase over last year, and one of them would be 5.01% increase over last year. So a couple of things I want to throw on the table along with these numbers. Remember this chart that Vinny did. It was very fancy. Moved in and out. Uh, different parts and pieces.

I'm going to steal this microphone so everybody can hear me. But I items like health and life insurance, other fixed benefits tuitions, other district tuitions required transportation maintenance and cleaning supplies, utilities. These items right here really can't be reduced. We can't just cut our benefits. We don't have that ability. We can't just cut fixed charges.

We can't cut out of district tuitions. They tell us what we pay. required. Transportation is required by the state, so we can't really cut that. So now you're looking from here which is athletics in this light blue around to here. And this is where the big impact comes in your staffing.

So I just wanted to put that up there to just give people an idea of what types of things we're looking at from the perspective of where we can look and where we can't. And I wanted to just really get all this in front of you tonight so that we could have a discussion, open a discussion,

get some ideas, and hopefully we can. Vinny and I can walk away with the direction from the committee, because we have two meetings until the initial budget presentation in January, which is always kind of this is roughly where we're going to be at. Um, so next meeting, we would come back with whatever

direction we got from the committee, whether it's reductions or bring the whole thing back. So really just wanted to get that conversation going in public and give you some information to hopefully kick that off. So I'm going to switch back to my other seat. Okay. Thank you for that. Um all right. I have 8 million thoughts.

Other people. Let's go. I just have a clarifying question, I think. Um, and the slide, that's the impact of cut slide with the rectangle boxes that show like the -1,000,000, -1500. So if I'm understanding this correctly, to reduce by 1.4 million for Hamilton and and a million by one M where

somewhere around cutting $2 million from the budget. That means like the third rectangle down. Is that correct? 3 million right to get to what they want. To get to what the towns are asking. For. They want 2.4 about three. Okay. For both of them.

00:59:05,099	Okay, right. But we can't cut a million from one of them. And then only 1.4 million from hamlet. Correct. All right, so we have two. Three. So this is showing how that kind of shakes out between both towns. You have. A. I mean really well done to be able to pick that block I was

going to during the conversation say like one of the places you can be where Hamilton is comfortable, maybe that that third block, when I might think would still be problematic given given the information they're given us. I don't have an exact number because I don't know when those exact revenues what their revenue projection is, but that

number is probably over where they can comfortably. They're looking to try to get 4% growth annually out of the government side and the school side. Um, it's it's also impacted because the shift went to when I'm two years in a row this year and next year, which was $40,000. $838,000. Just before we even started

doing anything, they got $130,000. And, well, I'm sure we're going to discuss it, but. And the end, which we did, did very publicly, purposefully. The towns were aware of what the impacts, you know, that we knew that the end used last year was going to create.

01:00:33,869	This $1. Million shortfall. Yeah. So this is not it doesn't make it not real. It just means that it's something we did know.

01:00:46,869	So I have another question which I don't relish asking. I'm just curious because I'm trying to understand all the facts are possibilities and I'm not endorsing any one line of anything. Um, is it realistically feasible to engage in midterm bargaining with the teacher's union?

01:01:12,429	Because under their agreement, it says if there's a change in economic conditions and so forth, we can do that. I don't know if this meets that standard, but I just am. I don't I don't know. I'm not aware of precedent for that in any district in the area. But I'm just, you know. You can make the request.

They don't need to say yes. I mean, you could certainly go forward and say, we have a serious economic issue here. Let's relook at things. You could you could make that request. I don't know that they would have to agree to come to the table because they already have an agreement. Right? Right.

01:01:51,000	Okay.

01:01:57,969	Other people.

01:02:07,500	I have some thoughts, but I mean, I don't know if people have questions first or if you because I think, I mean, my understanding is you really do need direction from us about what you want us. So, like, I don't know if people are willing to sort of dive in on what you think, the direction that you're.

01:02:29,170	I'm not in favor of kicking the can. I would say I don't want. To in general. So if we can eliminate one of these bullets, we're down to four. Right. I mean, that's true. That's a good point. Well, I have a question. And again, they're not all of them. I mean, in fact.

Not. Like, in fact, you know, like you just asked a question about something like, is it even feasible to do that? Like, there might be other questions that people might ask that might be something like, could we do something right? I don't have one, but. Well, I just asked that because it's one it's our biggest expense category.

That's why, you know. Yep. Good. Do we have any idea of how reductions. Because I know they're going to disproportionately affect the middle school and high school, how those are going to affect class size, because I know we do have space at the high school. We have some classes that are 6 or 7 students.

Have you there is some room. Um, but remember, go back to what we talk about when we talk to the, the um, principals about reductions. We gave them round numbers. We said, look, if you're looking at a teacher, use the numbers 60,000. So when you start using 60,060 thousand is the bottom.

It's actually below the bottom end of our scale. There are other things that could also be added on top of that. Like if the person's receiving benefits, that's also a savings for us. But we just said use that 60,000 number, To figure out your first 5%. And when you start to do that,

you're looking at ten people at 600,000. Not close. 20 people is 1.2 million still not there? You know. So you start to you start and some of the cards are even smaller because you're looking at, say, support staff. Support staff don't even make that much. They're making in the 20 to 30 range depending on when they

were hired. So those are all kind of difficult numbers to work with. It becomes a fairly substantial number. But yeah, you would you have some room at the high school. It depends on what you want to offer for opportunities for kids to we want to look at everything and say, okay, can

we kind of look at all of it and figure out where the holes are? I did the enrollment report two meetings ago on purpose so that people could see that, um, you can see some of the, some of the places and the principals and I have had those discussions.

There are there difficult to have, you know, when we get to these points.

01:05:00,070	Can you refresh my memory, like what we would need to cut to avoid an override? Because I remember thinking it was completely not feasible, but I don't remember what the number was. They're telling they're telling us roughly. Oh, they. So each town said to avoid an override. That's the number one. That was four and 1 million.

Just estimates like, oh, you know, they have to figure. They're still working on final revenue figures and they're actually not doing their budget discussion I think till Saturday. So they're still still in the kind of the beginning stages. This is just the conversations we've had with town administrator, town manager and their business, their finance

people, with Vinny and I to say, okay, where do you need to be? Give us a number. So this is what they were able to give us in the past week. The number could change. Great. Revenues could change. I don't I don't know what state aid looks like or for the the

towns, but ours does not change that much. I mean, as we've seen. But it's a significant number and. It's a significant. I personally don't think it's feasible. Feasible, feasible, reasonable or feasible. So yeah, I didn't want to step on you either. So I agree. I don't think this amount of reduction is reasonable or feasible. Reasonable.

I if we can go back to the chart with the I guess my feeling the impact of cuts chart. Um that one. You know, my feeling is when I look at this, it's, it's difficult because the percentages are very high in, you know, nearly all of these boxes, I guess, when I'm

looking at it and I'm thinking about the budget that we presented, I'm thinking about the fact that overall, the district had an increase in enrollment of about 37 students overall. Is that. Right? I think it was 37. So we had, you know, it, um,

01:07:00,800	small increase. Some 37. Right. I, I guess I just to me that like I think that if we're talking about being within that top box of, you know, trying to make reductions, which might have to include, uh, you know, who knows what, but, you know, in that up to $1 million range, I guess I would encourage that.

I would expect that we can make some reductions from the of the initial budget that we saw. Like, I think that's reasonable to ask that there's be some reduction from that budget.

01:07:43,800	And it's you know, I don't see given like that, we're going to end up at least likely at least one town is going to be asking for an override. And I guess I don't see a benefit to doing like crushing reductions and still having to go for an override, even if it's a smaller override.

I just I think we prevented an override last year. We used that money and.

01:08:21,000	I guess I'm saying like what my vision is, is that like, I think that the budget that we got presented last time does need to be trimmed, but I don't think it I don't think these big numbers. I think it's like you're in that up to that top box, like the box before that box basically.

I mean, I don't know. That's If we trimmed $1 million, that's basically 6.6.

01:08:51,229	666,000 from Hamilton and 333,000 from Wenham. So we're giving Wenham a third of what they want, and we're giving Hamilton almost half of what they want. That's not bad. Well, and I guess I'm sort of saying like that to me, $1 million out of that budget that we saw is a lot, lot.

It's it's I'm not even really comfortable with saying that. I'm just saying I think it does need to be

01:09:25,229	trimmed. There's just so people are clear. Back to what he said last meeting. There will still be some revenue adjustments. We just don't have final numbers. So that million dollars, right. Might be easier to get at if we had $200,000 more coming from somewhere. We just don't finalize those numbers until we get into late December or January.

So where and which budget packet I was trying to find? It is the pie chart that kind of shows the budget kind of allocated by school. It kind of breaks it down. But is that in the detail okay. I don't know if. It's a pie chart though. Numbers. Just numbers okay.

01:10:10,899	You can certainly make one very quickly. That's okay.

Um. 01:10:18,270	So just okay. So I would say just a I don't know, because I'm, I think, you know, I know you want some direction. You asked for the 5%. Could we come back and like, look at what 2% might look like because it's not quite a million, right. This is just a recommendation to, like, see what that looks

like, I guess, right? I mean, that's not that. It's not going to be awful. Just under a million, I think.

835,000. 01:10:48,699	I think. I just I want to. Understand that it's still going to dramatically affect everything on the. What is the 5% reduction include? I. I wanted to just sort of touch on something that I felt really strongly about under the things to think about. Um, like the maintenance, the maintenance budget in this budget is significant.

And the feedback that we've gotten for a for a long time, the feedback we've gotten from the public and from the towns, um, and certainly in the most recent, um, vote on the consolidated school, the feedback that we've gotten is that it's our responsibility that the expectation from the public

is that we are going to maintain our schools. And a big I think that the maintenance budget has been historically a place that.

01:11:56,630	Has sometimes maybe been sacrificed. And I feel like it would be just really wrong to take that out of the budget and put it into a capital expense, because it's then it's just a one time. It's not honoring what I'm hearing and what I think we've been hearing from a long time from the towns and like the

government of the towns and from the people of the towns and me, they want to provide maintenance for our schools. And this is what it costs, and it needs to be in the budget. So yes. That's just a thing that I'm saying under things to think about. That's my opinion.

I'm open to other people having a different opinion. No, I agree with you. I mean, I feel like this whole list are all these things that we've made strides on in the time I've been on the school committee. Like it would hurt, I think, to let go of some of these things. Like.

Opa. I can't really hear you. Amy. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm just relaxing in my chair. I was just saying, you know, a lot of these things on this particular list are things that we've really made strides on in the time that I've been here. It would I would feel horrible about letting them go.

Like, I know that something has to give somewhere. Well, and the OP is an excellent example to me of something that.

01:13:17,869	Like it is so important to do something because it's 20 years from now. Whoever's sitting here is going to be very grateful that we did that. We should do it. Yeah. It's it's, you know, it's and that's it. It's the same with the maintenance. The idea is to do it for the future so that you're creating,

setting yourself up for success. You're not setting yourself up for, you know, trying to fix things on the fly with scotch tape. I can I just yeah. Go ahead. I just want to see if two newest members know understand what it is. Okay. I just had to ask. I wasn't sure. I want to make sure.

I was going to say because took. Me years. Because. Julia and I needed to go many times to understand. Though. And that's a number of people don't understand it. So in public, when you start to talk about open up your select board. People get it. You're thinking people get it. The average person is like,

well, I'm not sure what that is. Those are all the retirees. How many retirees do we have? 50, 100, 200. 400. A little over 200, right? 200. I believe it's almost 250. Yeah, 250 retirees that we're paying some sort of benefit for, which is generally health insurance. We don't offer a lot of outsider benefits, but that

ends up $1 million. Yeah, that's a million, $1.4 million. So that's a those are big numbers you're looking at. Okay, $1.4 million. If somebody had 25 years ago funded that for us, we'd be taking it from that fund. And that would save us $1 million in the budget. But like Dana said, it's a it's a gambit.

You get to 20, I think 20, 32. That number ends up at in the plan number ends up at, I think $700,000. And then you lock that in. That's hard. That's going to be hard for people to do in the future. But it's a necessary evil because at 1.4 number is not going to shrink.

People are living longer. People are retiring earlier. Well, it's hard in the future, but it would be even harder if we don't do it. Or even worse if you. Sure. And I just. Yeah. It's just hard for people to see that far out when you're talking 20 years from now where we can be, uh, using the

interests on those funds to be able to offset that million plus, it'll probably be 2 million in the next 7 or 8 years at the rate we're going. In that vein, I was wondering about the contribution to the Capital Stabilization Fund and does that relate to also like the comments that Mr. Madden has brought before the

committee a couple times about a reserve, is that something different than a stabilization fund or is it the same? Well, the capital stabilization fund and a regional school district capital Stabilization Fund is specifically designed to allow districts to hold money for use for capital projects, which our definition is above 25,000, in the regional agreement.

So any capital projects. Um, and it it's it's there when you need it. You just have to, you know, say you have the fields are a good example. We put $1.7 million in there. We built the fields. We had to pay that bill. We took it out.

And then we have to notify at the time, in the next annual report, we'll say we used X number of dollars for this. So it's a so the public knows. Yes they voted it to go in and we took it out. And this is what we use it for.

Um but those are it's good to have if you, if you had $10 million in there you could get a lot done. It's just not enough in the big scheme of what we need to do. We we use it to fund the initial project on the roof to get the. Yep portion of the turf field. Yeah, yeah.

01:17:13,600	I have a question about under what options do we have the reconfigure the district. What does that mean.

01:17:24,369	So if you there's a lot to this. This is. This is. This is like trying to open a coconut with a pen. The, um. The district has three elementary school. I'm gonna use elementary as an example. District has three elementary schools. We currently have in most of our grade level seven teachers. Average class size is 19.

Um, some of those classes are smaller. Some of those classes are here bigger. If you brought in, I'll use the Bücker pre-K K here. And you put one two in Cutler and three, four, five in Winthrop, as well as your specialized program, you'd be able to pull one staff member from each grade level. Is it ideal?

No. Does it raise class sizes? Absolutely to like 23 or 4, depending on how things shake out. But it's easier to balance when you have everybody in the same building. So all the. All the second graders are in the same building. The second grade teachers are in the same building.

So you can balance the numbers across those rooms much more easily than if they're in three different buildings. You look at kindergartens, a good example. Each year kindergarten has shifted. So kindergarten. There were three kindergarten classes in in Winthrop last year. Now, the story over in Cutler that will go back to Winthrop next year.

And those numbers tend to move around depending on where kids are located. So that's one piece of the puzzle you could look at combining, you know, different grades like moving up fifth grade, moving eighth grade to the high school. There's different things, different sharing the exact same schedule at the middle and high school and looking at

efficiencies with staffing. But again, those moves will will change class sizes. No doubt about it. You know, our classes, our class sizes are, in my opinion, really good comparatively. Um, so when you look at it from a comparison around other districts, we're in really good shape with our class sizes.

There are a lot of class sizes that are small at the high school, some of them because they're specialized classes like AP. US. History is always a great example. You always have kids that want to take it. Some years you have ten, some years you have 18. Do you not run it?

Uh, when there's ten, we try to give kids the opportunity to run those things. So it's it's more of a what types of things are you willing to give up because staff cuts are going to you're going to lose something if you start cutting staff. I have a question about like planning lead times, like if we

did that kind of reconfiguration or if we were going to cut 1 or $2 million from the budget or something. What kind of internal planning lead time does the district need to actually think through all those changes and implement them? Uh, it would be April till the start of school year and probably beyond.

Okay. Yeah, it would be. Once we knew which direction we were going in, we it would it would be a horse race. Things got to be moved around. People have to relocate it. There's a there's a lot involved in that, which is why I kind of put it at the bottom and said, this is because every

building has their own culture. Every staff has worked together a lot. In a lot of cases. Our staff has been together for a long time. Cutler's probably got the youngest, um, group of kind of they've had this kind of sequential group of new people coming in each year, but they still have their own cultures.

And to break that up is is difficult sometimes because you got, you know, like certain grades are humming in certain schools, like they work together well and they can do things, um, more efficiently. But it's it's hard to do. It's hard on parents because if your kid, you know, talks to

Booker, but suddenly Booker doesn't have third grade, your kids on a bus, those are that's problem. Those are problems to those. But it's uncomfortable in a lot of ways, not just Staffing. It's just. So. Yeah. I guess I want to say I'm glad you put this on here,

because I like that, that you and the leadership team are thinking outside the box and being creative and being open to new ideas. And obviously, you know, we were open. The school committee was open to some, you know, um, reconfiguration, obviously we were looking at the

consolidated school, I think I, I guess my I would just for me, I, I kind of want both I want that people, the leadership team and everyone to continue to think about those things. And to me, those are things that would need to be done cautiously and not like between now and September.

Like I, you know, in other words, like I would want to hear all about. Like, I have thoughts about some of those things I think sound good and some I think don't sound good at all. But I'd want to hear about like maybe there is an opportunity there, but I don't think it's something that I just I

wouldn't want it done that quickly, like I would want it done more.

01:22:36,069	It would be a drastic my opinion. It'd be a drastic measure. It takes time like to to reorganize just if we if we passed a new elementary school and went in that direction, it would take us the next two years just to get everybody in the mode to work, you know, kind of come together as one.

It would it would take a long time. And that was part of our planning process when we were originally trying to figure that whole thing out. So even something like this is not an overnight transportation alone would. I mean, if you've been part of our transfer bus system, we

were talking about it the other day, like, what would that look like now if we're transferring kids all over the district? So it's it's a, you know, you unfortunately can't just go pick up one group of kids all around town. So it's it's there are complexities in there that could end up costing us more money.

And that's a that's something to take some time to look at. Well, I mean if I'm looking at the one options do we have one. So it's like we don't want to kick the can. And it sounds like we don't want to reconfigure. Too disruptive, too many moving parts. I wouldn't mind looking at reconfiguring for a future.

Future. Yeah, but. Not for this. Not for next fall basically. Mhm. So I mean so I think like for this for the budget under consideration then it's we're back to a combination of override and override in some reductions. And it seems like

01:24:08,529	3 million is too high for, for a cut. Right. So we can't cut three. So because I was one of the reasons I was looking at looking for the the sheet that does the budgets by building like for this year, FY 26, because whole operating budget is 3.4, Cutler's 3.5, Winthrop is 4.8.

So cutting $3 million is is de facto cutting the school almost. And so and we've heard from the community very loudly that they do not want consolidation at the elementary school level. So if we were trying to do it intentionally with years of planning and design and everything and it was rejected,

I don't think that it would be wise to sort of do it de facto and to two buildings that still would bring with it, um, maintenance challenges, capital issues, and no funding to really materially address them other than the fact that maybe whatever nominal amount would be added to the one building

could be reallocated the other two or something, but that still doesn't to me seem like a large amount of money to address the deferred maintenance issues. Really. So so so to me, I'm sort of I think we could eliminate the first bullet. Eliminate the last bullet. 3 million is too high. So I feel like we're narrowing the.

Path of. Well, I. Mean. I think that was an excellent summary. I have to just say that was fabulous. That's because I was sitting here thinking like, okay, I need to kind of summarize. And I was like, yeah, um, I mean, does that like, does that feel accurate?

What Kristen just said is that I will say that for me, the the only part I would say, and maybe we should sort of get other people's sense of where because for me, that was very accurate that you summarized the group. I will say me personally, um, 3 million is way too high.

Like, I'm not sure that we can really get to 1 million. I'm like I. I'm hedging because I don't, you know, I, I trust these guys to look at it. I'm saying that I really do want some reductions, but I'm looking at even that. That's why I was kind of in that top box.

Like, even there feels like a lot. So. And we might. I. Know you're looking for consensus or kind of guidance. So like, I don't know whether other people feel like they're. I just wanted to sort of express that. Like that was accurate, I think of the group.

But for me, I'm not just saying 3 million is too high. Oh yeah. Neither am I. I mean, I'm just trying. I was kind of like, yeah, that was very. Helpful. Conversation, a little like just to kind of get to a just because I feel as though our I think that it seems to me like

the time just moves so quickly for the budget season and that there are so many interconnected parts here with the towns and with us. And that's why I asked the planning question, like if we were to cut something, what does that look like operationally for staff to like make that happen? Because I think and I don't I'm

not really in favor of any cuts really. But I think if that's happening, I think the sooner we sort of make that decision, the better for Eric and his team and the teachers and ultimately the students, you know, to have the maximum amount of lead time to make these things happen. That's where I was going with that.

So, yeah. The million number for me does one thing that I think is important is that it takes those double digit increases that we're seeing in Wenham and gets them under a double digit. Now, it shouldn't matter, right? No, but it is not. Do you think it's a psychological?

It is psychological like 9.1 is a whole different number than 11 something. Yeah I agree, but you say you understand, from what we've been told, that million would mean. Both in both towns. No, I get it. I can I just, I just, I because I asked Eric to find this out.

I do want to just be clear about when was the last time we actually had an override.

01:28:26,369	And. It was it was like seven in a row. Yes, there was, but it was been a long. Ten was the last one, I believe. It wasn't 10,009. I think it was 2008. It was 2000. I guess I just wanted to I guess the reason I wanted to say that is because.

01:28:48,229	I was here, I lived here, it was difficult. I had young kids. I like it was it was very difficult going to override after override year after year. It was very difficult at the same time. I want to sort of think about like, that's a very long time ago.

So like, I think maybe some people maybe like me who are around and did that, it feels like, oh, we've done this before. Yeah. But I just want to sort of say like it's true. It has happened before. And that was, you know, 16 years ago or so.

Yeah. Well, I think at that time and I, I don't really know which why I'm asking, but I think one of the bigger problems with that time was that there were so many in a row. In the row. Yes. It was. Weird. What's going on? There were so many in a row. But I also wonder, like

rolling this budget forward, I think we're seems to be like looking at the the teacher contract and all these other things where that is a possibility, you know, particularly if we're increasing maintenance and we're increasing teachers costs. What's a possibility? Having successive years of overrides again. Particularly because we're using end in this budget. Right. Well.

Okay. But is it I'm just asking. By but we are using it. Yes. You mean the 830 that's in the budget which we've been carrying? It used to be 770. Yeah. We've been carrying it along.

Um, 01:30:35,899	so but this budget, um, increase, you know, gets rid of the most of the 2 million that we put in, the one that we did the one time. 1.3 million. Of it. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, is it better to have one big override and be sort of Good. For a while or.

Have like a couple years of overrides, but maybe communicate that as part of the plan. Like, well, I guess maybe that's a good question because I don't see that as the plan. I don't see that. I mean, I can look I don't see that as the plan being that we would try to go for an override

this year and then again next year. But I think. Well, I don't I don't either. I'm just saying like as a hypothetical question, is it better to. If you let me try to explain to if you did a model and said, okay, we're going to hold that 3.8, we're going to go for two overrides.

If they're successful, then the following year you're dealing with a lot lower level of increase. I mean, this year we have just a big bump of salaries. That's a million. 5 million for I think the salaries that that has kind of thrown this out of whack a little bit. But if you do that, you're

you're starting from whatever percentage. I'm just gonna use the number cause I don't remember the exact one. About 3% increase for everybody. You roll that over. We generally roll our budget at 4.5%, so we're probably looking at 5 or 6% versus just ten and a half. Right. Which is generally normal for us because we usually start at

5 or 6% and work our way down to 3.8, 3.9 to 4. So it's it's a it's a reality. I just think it's um.

01:32:31,270	A straight up override to say, all right, we're just going to push this budget forward, I think would be problematic. And then we have to be ready on the other side, if it fails to cut to cut down below those numbers, which is roughly what they're giving us. So now we're in a position in May to cut.

I'm just going to use the the $3 million to cut the $3 million and have another special town meeting Meaning to approve it. Well, so I actually I did some research, um, on some other overrides in other communities nearby who have gone through similar challenges just because I wanted to get some understanding right.

Again, I think everybody knows I did not grow up in Massachusetts, so this is all new to me. We had just a different style of, um, government there in New York. Um, and so I just wanted to help myself understand kind of the override piece. Um, and.

01:33:28,170	It's. You're right. We haven't had one here in a very long time in Hamilton or Wenham. Um, and it was a series of multiple years of successive overrides that I think became challenging for the community. I think what I'm worried about is, you know, what recently happened in Melrose, where in 2023 voters rejected an override.

and then they had to make stark cuts at the school. Several, you know, a lot of positions were cut. And then the community formed a group to rally around it. And they actually went back this past year and passed an even larger override because they didn't like the cuts that they made.

And so I feel like that's perhaps a lesson for us, because, I mean, what we're talking about here, you know, just using the math that you've shared, right? If we're talking about a $3 million number, that's a significant number of positions and roles that would that would be lost.

Um, a similar thing happened in Georgetown in 2023 as well. Um, and they went through this past year and again approved an override. So it's just and then in, um, Marblehead, they've had similar challenges, and I think they're on the cusp of going back and, and passing a larger override than they originally vetoed. Um, and so.

01:34:58,170	I'm personally struggling right with not not going forward with an override. Right. To me, I moved to this town, and a lot of my friends moved to this town because of the school district. Right. And that's that is a testament to the staff, the teachers, the education that we provide our students.

And if we're talking about making some of these large cuts, increasing class sizes, which we've heard from the community, is not what we want, right? Um, I just struggle very much with how do we how do we make how do we do this? How do we bring this budget down in a way that doesn't

result in a drastic impact to the quality of education we provide our students? On the other hand, as a taxpayer, I also struggle a little bit with right signing up for increased an increase in taxes, and this is not even considering whatever else might be on the table. And I think, Vinnie, you talked about it.

I don't I don't recall if it was our last meeting or the one prior, but I mean, you kind of made the made the comment. Um, and and Eric, you talked about it as well with the, the funding that we're getting from the state. It seems like there are some severe structural challenges with how our budgets are

allocated and built, um, and funded. And that seems like a hard pill to swallow to pass that on to taxpayers. But I just I struggle so much with how would we. Like what would the ultimate impact be to the education that we provide our learners? When you say structured, you mean the money that we're getting from the.

States. And just. How. Little. It is. And I.

01:36:55,000	Mean, that was well said. And I guess where I'm coming down at this point and I, I, I'm not sure if that's where you're kind of landing, but like, I sort of feel like, yes, we want to be as lean as possible while still honoring that art. We want to provide our students with what they need and

like we need to bring it to the people and ask them if that's if they're willing to do that. And I, I, I understand it's a risk like that. Maybe their answer is no and that that like but I just don't I can't see not bringing to the to the voters what we really believe is necessary.

I just can't see doing that even though.

01:37:48,630	I understand it's, you know, it's a lot and it's difficult. It's to your point, it's what a lot of other communities have dealt with. It's what this community has been through before in the past. So I don't know.

01:38:07,630	Other people. I've said one more thing. Um, kind of building on your point, I think what happens when you make cuts, like if you look at the 5% reduction and what I really think the public needs to understand is that if we are a community that is dedicated to diversity, equity,

inclusion and belonging, if you're looking at the reductions here, its athletic user fees will increase. It's late, buses cut, graduation expenses will increase, transportation reductions, stipends will be cut late. But all of this affects the most disadvantaged students. And I just think that, you know, I say it all the time and

I say, it, I'll say it every time. The budget is a reflection of our values. And I completely agree with you, Dana, that we all individually need a budget that we can be proud of and really excited to present and really like, can stand up for. Um, and I mean, I think the budget is that.

But I also agree that there do need to be some reductions. But I'm just saying for me personally, I don't I don't think we can hit the million dollar reduction mark, but I'm willing to reach a consensus if everyone else is on that page. But I just think that would be a bridge too far and it would

affect, um, disadvantaged students too much and all students too much. I just think if we don't at least have something to show the town that we made the effort to cut because. Right, everybody deals with their own household budget. And if, you know, if prices go up, You have 1 or 2 choices.

You either make more money or you cut. And prices are going up. You know, we can't just say, well, we're going to raise the fees on you, but we didn't do anything to try and reduce, you know, the pain that we're about to put you through.

And when I'm 30% people over the age of 60, they've got no incentive to vote for a double digit budget increase. None. And we have to get it to pass with the two thirds. Majority. Values because of the schools. Right. I don't think it'll be enough. I mean, I was I taught was talking to friends about it

like for the last two weeks. And even people who have kids in the school system and the high school are, are hesitant to vote for a double digit increase in one. Oh, I agree, but then the problem is they want, you know, we all want to live in a community where we pay our

teachers fairly, where we have maintenance on all the schools, where everything is safe and we have transportation and we provide all these services. And I think it is, like you said, like you really have to make hard choices. Like, are we willing to pay for that or not? That's that's in my mind. And I and I.

And we just have to make hard choices and they might make a different decision than I would make. Right. No. And I and I, we don't. I think it's important to listen and talk, but we don't actually know. In other words, like, um, there are incentives

for people who don't have kids in the schools to want to have excellent schools. And and it's not just property taxes. There's, there's, there are people that just want to live in a community that has excellent schools because they believe in the importance of educating the next generation. I mean, there really are things like that.

And there are people. There are a million reasons why people might vote no, or so we don't. We can't know all of the reasons.

Um. 01:41:53,529	And it's really important to think about, I guess my I'm not sure. I think that the biggest obstacle is going in terms of voting is, is having an override at all is the biggest obstacle. Like the amount of the override, of course is important. But the biggest obstacle is like that you that you have to

actually vote for an override. And I do think Jen is right about the psychological difference, but I do think that is true. I don't know if we can get there under the double digit. Um, I'm not sure about that, but I think you're. I'd like to be able to argue that we tried.

01:42:41,329	Um. I do think part of the reasoning behind the budget numbers this year is the use of the end of last year, which, as a new committee member, trying to kind of wrap my head around all these languages, all these terms and the rules and everything, you know, that's just I don't think a concept that is

readily understood. You know, it doesn't exist, like in your sort. Of super hard to understand. Small business or in your household or whatever. Um, and so I think, I mean, I remember around the town meeting times last year, there were some folks saying like, oh, well, you know, there's not an override because of the

school, but there will be, you know, there was kind of conversation, you know, about it. So I do think that maybe it's helpful to say there could have been an override last year. Intentionally there was not. So we could focus on the consolidation. That didn't happen. So we not only have kind of the deferred override from last

year, but the increases that are inherent in this year's budget, just through the normal cost of living, like teacher contract would have you. And I think this is all really hard to explain. And I think it's hard to get everybody's attention to explain all this detail. So I do wonder, in the current fiscal year,

do we have additional resources to help support communications in some way to be. Around communicating around the budget? Yeah, no matter where. No matter what exactly, no matter what it is. Because I do think that's a challenge. You know, I think the addition of the paper is super helpful and all this and that.

But there is and I don't think everybody is on social media either. I mean, I do think that is undoubtedly a feature of everyday life now, but I do think that the sort of community Facebook groups miss a lot of people, you know, who aren't in there.

So I think, I think it's really tricky to get all of this information out with enough detail that people can make an informed choice without it sort of being overwhelming or confusing. You know, like, I think this is this is really tricky. You know, I think understanding all this.

Yeah. And how to message it, I mean, because I guess like I would sort of say like we did we did what we did last year to prevent an override.

01:45:13,170	And like that. I mean, it's done. It didn't know. You never could know. Like we didn't 100% know all of the moving parts of what this budget would look like. And right, you know, one of the town officials actually said, well, when we were doing that last year, which was very

public, and that actually said, well, you know, you should do what you can every year to try to prevent an override. Like, in other words, there's it should always be a discussion about what I mean. We just talked about kicking the can down the road. Like, you know, it isn't always the right choice, but it is

something you should always be discussing. And so that's what happened last year. And so I like to try to explain that.

It's. 01:46:00,899	It it's a deferred. It's a deferred thing. Like in other words you could have had a budget override last year and then you could have had one. Well, I think. We sort of used say like quote unquote savings almost last year to balance the budget. I mean, I know it's not really

savings, but you know what I mean? To kind of try to put it in more like every day. What's hard about it is that, like, right. But yeah, you. Did. But it's just that like now it's in the budget. And so like next year. Like. These are recurring costs. The recurring cost. So it's just a difficult.

Yeah. Um. One time, the one time use of access deficiency is maybe good for one year, but reflects badly in the next year. If you don't say you didn't have any access and deficiency for FY 27, and you didn't even have that 800. That's another 800. On top of that 3.8.

So it's like it's this it's as bad as Jack in your credit card up and paying the minimum. It's it's it's hard to get out from underneath. And I think many and I have tried to strategize. How do we from this point get off the end train and then try

to lower even that annual number that we've been moving in to to make it something more reasonable. For three years or five. Years? I don't know if it's ever actually zero, but there's it's but there's different uses. You can offset it. But expenses presumably it was zero before 2020. It's been zero. Before. Yeah, it has been.

Yeah, it has been. Yeah. It's so. Um. All right. Do we? I don't know. Like, I don't know whether you feel like you have or what. Do you have questions or do you feel like you have guidance or what's your question? Like, how can we be. I'll go back to this slide.

So we've taken the first one out. The last one out. I mean kind of the second one. Nobody's has anybody really willing to say let's go forward with it. All the override no matter what. Both communities don't change the budget at all. Don't change it from what you currently. Present. What we're presenting. I mean.

Part of me does wonder as a just a philosophical question. Like to Julia's a point about values and things like that to just, you know, in the interest of like full transparency, this is what it takes to run the district to the level that everyone expects to do something with

the buildings to pay the teachers to, you know, and I and I some even looking at this and I understand the towns have, um, you know, requests and things, but I think the year over year facilities money is way too low. Yeah. Honestly, and I, I wonder too about, you know,

all the other functions of the district, like do we have enough support in central office for all of the things we're trying to do right now? Do we have enough support and all the other buildings like I just, you know, if anything, it seems to me like for what we're

trying to achieve, like it's honestly amazing what we do achieve with what we have, which I know is still like tens of millions of dollars. I'm not trying to say that. I don't think it's a lot of money because I know it. It's a huge amount of money.

But just when you look at how it's allocated across all the buildings, all the facilities, all the staff. I mean, I think it's really amazing that what we do get done and that the people that are in front of our children every day are doing a really amazing job, you know.

And so there is definitely a part of me that believes, like, you should do the budget that you need to do. And I'm saying this from like a non-profit background where there's always horse trading and negotiations and adjustments. But to say like we're we have these goals that we have been charged with and this is what

it costs to achieve those goals. Yeah. And I think there's an argument to be made there. I understand people are saying that number is will not be palatable because it requires overrides. But I don't know. It's such a difficult decision because pushing for that and if it fails then that's what I sort of worry about.

So I'm sort of like, am I undercutting my own argument because I'm concerned about what happens in May? We don't want to start the fiscal year without a budget, you know, all these sort of downstream effects of, of a failed override. But and that's why I asked the question about the

communications, like to try to support really getting the message out in terms of this is why this is happening. This is what this is paying for. You don't you want separate schools, you want better maintenance. This is the cost of that. We don't really have a communications budget. I know, I know, that's why I asked, you.

Know, just. But I. Mean. We do. I don't I mean, just I mean, you can speak a little bit. We do always do a little when we do a budget. I mean, you can speak a little. Yeah. We do the annual budget. Like. A one. Page. Flyer front and back to help explain, you know, what certain

things are. But I think you're talking about something more detailed and more conversational. And yeah, it's hard because I think we all want that. Right? And I think the community wants it too. But it's it's sort of like we're talking about trying to save money and spending money to get more money.

Like, it's just kind of this I know, you know. I just kind of. Know, I know, I mean, well, and I also think, like, this is when the budget conversations happens. It's in all the many committee meetings that happen here and in the municipalities and I. And it would be wonderful if there were more people here and

if there were more people engaged, because it's hard, I think, when it comes to town meeting. And, you know, I think through comments made at town meeting or people who have the ideas of making motions from the floor or whatever they're trying to do, they're trying to effectuate the change, then that needs to be part of the

conversation now. Yeah. You know. And so if I can just summarize a little bit about, I mean, what I'm hearing, I actually think I mean, I'm hearing some we're in this range. I actually think I'm sort of closer to you, although I'm sort of saying I still do think I don't want the budget to come

back exactly the way it is. I think it needs to get. Um, and it will naturally. And it will. And that's my I guess that's what I'm saying is that's my expectation is that that's normally what happens anyway, is that it gets paired thoughtfully between now and the time we see it again. But I agree

with Kirsten and with what Julia said about

01:52:45,100	like this. This is our values. We're going to we're not going to compromise. And like. You could end up having to compromise your values for what you value in education, either by cutting it down so much so that you can get the budget passed or by it failing.

Both of those things are going to result, and it seems wrong to not try. Um, and I just, I mean, I sort of wanted to highlight some of the things Julia said I felt the same way about like the user. Like things like user fee increases and the late busts and things like that are things that are.

01:53:25,970	Not going to solve the bigger picture budget wise and disproportionately

01:53:34,470	hurting the kids who probably need it the most. Like. Right. You know, I in other words, when my kids were in high school, we had 100% user fees. We paid 100% for my family. That was doable. My two kids, they did three sports, three season, you know, sports, three seasons. That was doable, but it was

100% a lot of families that was. A deal breaker. Like, so. That's. Heartbreaking like that. That meant that my kids got to do something like and again, that's not going to solve the budget problem. But it's to your point. It's those things that get taken away that, um, but. We'll still have our scholarship program.

And I'm sure that that was there then, and that was like, I just used that as an example of like the, the those things that get cut tend to help be most impactful to those that might need it the most, that it might be the most important. Um, all right, I'm going to stop talking.

Um. Um, so I think we're really like, I think Eric and Vinnie, what are you hearing? Are you still waiting for us to sort of say how much we want to see reduced between now and the time we see the tentative budget? Or do you have an idea of what we're.

I think we can do it in two steps, like we can say, all right, we'll bring back. I'm just going to hit a number a million. See what that looks like in real life? Because I have to let people know, like, hey, your job is going to be mentioned next Thursday night as being reduced.

Um, so that's that's a direction we can say, all right, we want to hit a certain number and then whatever is left is an override. I think if you don't get down to that 2 million, you're going to be in an override. You. But we will be in override in both communities.

So. 01:55:52,170	So we're in agreements or consensus. There's going to have to be some override. Right? It's just the amount. Like we can't cut $3 million. No. Well right. Yeah. If you cut 1.4 from the just say Hamilton side and made that one not override. You're still in a difficult position. Went in one of them.

Like I said, I don't know their exact number. They have their meeting Saturday morning so well. And to get to 1.4, I mean, you can't. It's 2. Million. So it's not a good word. It's not doable. And we don't know. I mean in other words they the towns are still in an estimation correct.

Stage two it's possible that one or both of the towns could revise their numbers. And one, you know, we don't know like they and they don't know because it's I mean, it's just hard. Chilton's been in their select board meetings talking about the possible $500,000 they could get from Gordon Conwell if all you know.

Right. That could happen. That could happen. It's just not on the table completely. And they can't and they can't really be making decisions based on that because they don't know, like that's right. Okay. Do we have. When is our next quintuple board meeting? I know we have a schedule, but we took the next quintuple board meeting.

Of Martin Luther King. Okay, so it's a it's not this month then. It's it's okay. Okay. So we usually have the first one. Early in the second one in January just before we get to the final budget. Okay. So everybody can kind of put their cards on the table fully.

Yep. That's what I was kind of wondering, like when we have all the pieces because I think for me that's one of the things that I'm having a hard time kind of understanding, just sort of like the overall goal here from sort of like 25,000ft, like is I know that keeping taxes as low as

possible and running efficiently and things are always priority, but always priorities. But I'm also trying to understand, like what are we trying to achieve? You know, in terms of the municipalities in the district kind of working together in terms of like services and funding, retirements and salaries and benefits and

capital like kind of I feel as though it seems like it's a year over year kind of battle to balance the budget, and not necessarily a year over year strategy and pursuit of a goal, you know, collectively anyway. And that's sort of, I think, why sometimes this is hard and

there's so many moving pieces here and it's ultimately accountable to the voters. So the the high level of residential expectation there is is is problematic. I mean, you have small towns and your tax base is just about all residential. That becomes problematic because as one of my fellow superintendents said, the value of your house doesn't pay your

taxes, right? Even though you're you're living in a house that might be valued $1 million, you may only be making 100 grand a year, right? So, you know, so that's that's a that's one of the issues we're talking to the state about when they use equalized valuation of housing as part of the formula to figure out.

So so these. perceived to be wealthy communities have those pieces that never get factored into the puzzle, you know, and that's where some of our senior citizens are trapped in a house that they've had for 40 or 50 years. And I don't want to say trapped is just in a house they've had

for 40 or 50 years, and it's probably gone up dramatically over that at that time. And, and, you know, they're they're probably on fixed incomes, most of them if they've retired and left the workforce. So those are things that don't get accounted in any state aid figures, uh, making it more complex.

I had a conversation with a Pinkham member today, and he is digging into this deeper than I've ever seen it. He's trying to compare, like schools to say, okay, how can this school educate kids for 18,400 when we, you know, it cost us 21,000, which is an interesting conversation, but there's so many differences in

each community, some communities. Some school districts don't pay their insurance. It's paid by the town. Some communities have required transportation like regionals. Other communities could cut transportation. I was in Salem 30 years ago, and I remember they cut all afternoon buses as a budget saving thing, so we couldn't do that.

So those are the the difficult pieces of what's included, what's not included. So things that seem similar may often not be. Some of the comparatives are just not it's not linear. It's not perfectly linear.

02:00:36,100	Another. Again, this is more of a long term thing. This is not this year's budget, but it might be worthwhile to look at what we would have to do to pull back that $4.8 million in out of district tuition. Like, what would that actually require? Because the cost. If we could eliminate that, we

don't have a budget problem anymore. Yeah, we couldn't do it all. Only because some of our placements are medically fragile. Permanent placements like 24 seven. And it costs money to. Like. We might be able, in theory, to educate those students for less money, but they're still going to be expensive to educate those students.

Will it pay for itself? That's the I. Mean. That was the reason. We called. Maybe that was the reason we pulled language based program back into the district and built that up. The problem is, you still have people with the capacity to fight that and put their kid in a program like landmark.

Anyway, even though we have the same exact literally using the same program, we've been trained by their people. We, you know, it's just people have the willingness to fight. How much money do we want to spend in court to, you know, depending whether our program is better than another, private program. So those.

Those are some of the things we're tied up in, I think three cases now that are not cheap. And they continue to over more in some cases more than a year. Um, just because parents believe, like, okay, my kids are not getting service, I want that service. So it's hard to get all of it down.

Yeah. Could you look at different scenarios? Yeah. It would. It would be against startup costs. You know, it would cost money. It'd be a bump to get a program started and running to be able to continue that through. So you don't actually avoid costs in that initial year. You actually take this hit a

little bit and then it levels out. We looked at it for. Not something to think about for this year. No no no. Right. Just but it's a good conversation piece. I think it's important when you start to think we I hope everybody remembers maybe the newest people don't. We went with a contractor out of district placement

transportation service, one company. We did it with 11 different school districts to try and reduce the cost of Transportation. When it first started up, we were like, it's not going to save us any money. It's not going to save us any money. But now the the company that's running this now is starting to

say, okay, I can pair this kid, this kid, this kid on one route now. And that saves money for these two schools or these three schools. So we're starting to to work that through. In fact, I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon about that. Some of the efficiencies may help us, but it's not a lot of money.

It's a couple hundred thousand dollars. It's not. When you're looking at $40 million, $200,000 is not impacting the budget. But it's a piece of the puzzle when you're saying, okay, can we save money? Can we save utility costs by, you know, if we had that that

solar canopy in a year or two years ago, would we be saving this dramatic sum of money? Possibly. But that would be designed to save money over a year rather than in one year. Yeah. Okay. I'm feeling like we're ready to move on. Yes yes. Yes. No. Yes. Do you want more? I want? Well, so.

So tell me what you need to know. I feel like you're.

02:04:03,170	Leaning into you as a group, consensus wise. Leaning into. Let's see some reductions with the probability of an override in at least one town. Like, maybe. I don't. Think. We're. Looking for an override, but that's. Just the reason. There could be another bullet. You could? Yeah. I mean, oh, you've got override in some reductions on there.

Like, sort of a mixed bag of. Yeah. Is your feeling, though, in overriding just one community. Or both. Of different numbers. Though? Hard it feels.

02:04:39,729	I mean, while we don't know, like, well, we don't know for sure what exact number causes an override. I mean, we only know.

02:04:54,369	I guess it would be slightly less than what they're asking. You know what I mean? So what I'm saying. Drop a million. Maybe write. 900. Maybe 800? I'm not sure. But again, I don't know their exact numbers yet.

02:05:10,899	I guess. I mean, maybe other people feel differently, I guess I I'm not. I understand your question is like, are you understanding that? Like, if. You know, if you could reduce it enough to only have an override in one town? Yes, I'm sort of I'm more in the like, let's pare this down.

As you know, where we're still within. Like, this is what you believe we actually need. Get it as tight and then see where that lands us. And it seems like. Yeah. Because we. Can have a conversation that might. Still land us into overrides. It might. We can pair it down, bring it back. We still have that one.

We still have one meeting to have a tentative budget ready for that first meeting in October at the fourth. January 8th. Because the first is the Thursday. Yes. Okay. So January 8th, we'd be looking at a tentative budget that those that have been here know that floats down a tiny bit

between tentative and final, but the biggest reductions will make in the next two meetings. Actually the next one meeting. Yeah, it's one meeting.

02:06:25,970	But I mean. Yeah. Okay. Other people. I'm just I mean, are you are you looking for a number to cut to cut or a percent or just we're just going to do sort of a hypothetical if we.

So. 02:06:49,170	My goal is not to cause unnecessary alarm with my staff. Right. Yeah. That's why. Yeah. Because if I if you if you said. All right, show us what 2 million looks like. There's a lot of people that are very nervous about. Even though we could say to them this is just a modeling

scenario, I would still be nervous. I mean, my first seven years I was being slept. Um, just because that's the way the budgets were run back then. But, um. But 2 million is basically, I mean, in other words, to to start thinking about not having an override in one town. That's where. Right. I mean. Somewhere around there.

Right. And I guess that's what I'm saying is that, like, I just think that's too much. I, I, I understand that that might mean that there's too I mean, we don't know, there's so many, but I understand what you're saying, but I don't know. It just seems like two.

It's. It seems like we're not there yet to say.

02:08:02,529	We would only want there to be an override in one community. It seems as though we're still thinking about what it looks like. If there's an override in two communities of some amount, with some amount of adjustment and the expense side. And we're still guessing on on those numbers. So I know. You make this conversation. Even more.

Yeah. I mean, in other words, that could happen. Like Hamilton could have revenue and they could say we're good. Yeah. You know, and and we don't know like that's and that's not really our. We can't decide. That. We can't decide. That. Exactly. Yeah I mean in in history has shown that when you go to town meeting.

The override is specific to the school district. Right. But not the town's. I mean, the town's will say we balanced our budget. We've come in. School district needs an override. So that's the focus shifts completely to the school district. Right. And that's one of the I mean, that's the difference

between being in like if you were in a regional versus a municipality, if you were just in, you know, then it would just be the budget needs an override. They just give you a number. And when you're in use Beverly as an example, chapter 70 goes through the city and the city will say to the schools, are

you going to get 4%? Figure it out. Um, whereas it's the other way around here where we can say, this is what we need. And, um.

02:09:41,000	I wish I had an amazing idea. I wish I had. A. Big idea. Um, I mean, you're looking at. I don't know. Go ahead. So 1.99 million that I showed you in that 5% slide. I guess I'm, I'm maybe I'm. I don't think anyone here is saying we want to see that. No, no, I think.

That puts me in a better place. I, I. Don't think that that's what people are saying. No, that's I like I guess what I heard is I heard some people saying like, a million feels like too much, but we want to see something cut. And I heard maybe some people saying, I'd like to see a million.

What a million. Okay, looks like, but I'm not hearing anybody say, I want to see what 5% looks like. No. Absolutely not. I mean, we kind of have an idea, I think. Right. You know. Right. Yeah, just. I know there are high level numbers. But. Yeah. And and then. And then like people. In other words.

Like, that's what I was trying to say about this top box, which you've got it sort of as a million, but I'm saying it's kind of up to a million, right. And like it, it doesn't I get it, it doesn't like it might be that both towns then say, well, if that's really what you're

asking for, we have to be in an override and like I. All right. So we'll bring back a budget about a million less than what we're looking at. But see, I don't I don't want that. But if everyone wants. I don't either. I'm sort of feeling like. But I think we're all feeling individually differently.

Yeah. So it's hard to give you direction. But don't cut. It at all. If. Everyone else feels that way. Honestly, I'm obviously I will support the committee, but I, I personally don't want that. But I want to see nothing. I don't know. Right. Because I'm saying I think there's definitely something that could be paired. Kristen said I.

Don't. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, we we go through this exercise every year. We come in with a number of, here's everything we need is everything we want. We know we don't get it. We know there's still some revenue offsets. We. So there are some things that just change over the night.

Like once we find out all the retirees that gives puts us a little more money back in the bank for us. So but we don't you don't have to notify us until December 1st. So we get to that point. Like last this week. Nail that number down and here's here's what it's at.

You know, here's our possible savings. So the thing is that I think for the public and for all of us, it would be helpful to look at that 1 million. But I also agree with you. I don't want to terrify people ever. But right before the holidays, so I don't. But then I don't really have a solution.

So I just I just know what I don't want. I can't tell you what I do want. Well, I mean, I think. The. Problem. That. We're trying to fix, a top line problem on the expense side, right? Right. Exactly. Yeah. You know what I mean? It just. But it's. But it's where we are. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. And the revenues have been increasing at a fairly reasonable clip. Approximately 5%. It's just all the shifting around and out. And in the end, that starts to make it messy.

02:13:01,630	Thank you for your work on this. All your work on this. All right. This is really helpful. We'll make some we'll make. Some this this. Realistic trims that we would through the process. We'll look for other efficiencies. There are some efficiencies that we know that we can make that we've planned for.

Um, because some of our programs are, um, maturing, kind of growing from 3 or 4 years ago. And we started them. We needed more staff. So we're starting so so we can make some efficiencies. But, um, I just want to make sure that people are clear. Whatever I put out there, I'm

going to notify people ahead of time. I just don't think it's fair to say, hey, I saw your name on the school committee list last night. It wouldn't be names. It would just be pretty easy to. We're small. It's easy to figure out what's what. So that makes sense. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate the conversation.

Okay. Um, that was. A. Difficult conversation. Um. Uh, moving on to committee reports. Uh, capital finance. Um, we have a meeting next week. Okay. Is it at noon or 11? The eighth? Monday? Is it. 808? Oh, it's on the eighth. Yeah, it's on the eighth. What time? I wrote down 11, but then the calendar invites at noon.

I have. Noon. Okay, good. That's fine. 12:00. 12:00? Yep.

02:14:31,869	Um. Policy. We actually did not meet on the first because we had nothing to talk about. Oh, so I will. That's a good problem. It's a good problem to have. So we will meet in January. I need to send out an email about when. But it sounds like Mondays. That's fine. And for you to join even

earlier in the day, we could do. If that works for you too. So, yeah. Check your inbox. Um, negotiations. We are tentatively meeting on the 11th.

02:15:09,329	Um, and we're gonna begin our, um, negotiations with the ESP, um, union on the 11th. Um. That won't take effect, though, into fiscal year 20 2727. This budget. 2728. The budget we're working on. Right. Correct. Okay. Right. They're not on the same cycle as the teachers. Yes. Um.

Uh. 02:15:42,100	To the secretary report. So I've emailed the chairs. I'm hoping for our last meeting of the year to prepare like a full. Like this is where we are. Um, something like, I could probably put an exhibit, or I could hand it to you. Great technical question. Yeah, I was going to ask your question. Go ahead.

Well, no, no, you can ask it because I. Was wondering if it's if it's possible to access Google drives of past committee members thinking that these minutes might just be living in other people's. Mhm. How defunct. I have no idea. Accounts. Um, because I think we've kind of exhausted this.

Yeah. I think, I think the, we're looking at like, like exist things that are from long ago. Um, I don't know the answer to that question. We'll find out tomorrow. I have no idea. Not 100% sure, but I believe we could probably pull that off. All right, if we can talk to school community members,

maybe, who aren't here that we know might have the minutes. Yeah, and they also just might not exist. Like, that's so. Which is why I think moving forward, it's just such a good policy that immediately after the meeting to provide Janelle with draft minutes because at the very least then they exist. Yeah, she has them.

And a future committee could look at the draft minutes and vote to approve them, and they would have them. Um, so. I know for me, a sticking point with minutes is formatting them into the with like the header and. The janelle. So I mean, I think. There's a link.

And Janelle is also willing to put minutes in that format. So if that's something that is barring you from sharing your minutes now don't worry she will help you out. She will fix it. Thanks, Janelle. Um, yes. Um, okay. Anybody have anything else on minutes? No. Um. Thank you, Julia, for that.

Um, Amy, do you have anything on in our inboxes? Inboxes have been very quiet. Very quiet. All right, well, maybe we'll get budget feedback now. Um, which would be good. Um, so I have on the chair's report. Um, I wanted to make sure this is really mostly for members of

the public to remind you all that, um, Hamilton is holding a special town meeting on December 9th. So I just wanted to put that out there so that people know and remember to attend, to participate in the process.

Um. 02:18:26,270	And. Uh, well, I guess I should say one of the, one of the major topics is around the zoning at Gordon Conwell. So, so important meeting. Um, and then you had a couple things, Amy, on the, um. Doodle poll. Oh, yes. Uh, so we've talked before about holding a workshop to

kind of debrief about the elementary school project. I sent out a poll to see who is available. One. Um, we had zero dates with total consensus, but we had four where six people were willing or able to meet. And really three because one of them was like a if we have to. So, um.

I think that was me and I would I said if I have to. So if I have to. Okay. Uh, is it helpful if I report the dates and the members or. Um. Should I just separate from the workshop that we usually do? Uh. In the summer? You mean in the summer? Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Question.

Yes. Yeah. No. This is. Yeah. Um, yeah. Um, I don't mean, I guess, date wise, if. I mean, it's up to the committee. Do you want to sort of try to hash it out now, or do you want me to just send an email that says, these are the dates?

I mean, I don't know who, like, somebody's going to miss it. Is the deal. Yeah. Somebody's going to miss one. The other thing to consider is if we're talking about the seventh. Oh, to be one 7th of January, rather to be one of the community conversations. Mhm. You know

that if you know, we could have a really long school committee day that day or we could eliminate that day for that reason. Oh, is that one? That's one of the days. That worked for people. Yes. Um. Tuesday the sixth. Everybody except Megan is available all day. Um. And then Thursday the eighth.

We have a school committee meeting. So I put an option for a meeting an hour before our meeting. So if we feel like an hour is enough time, we could do that. Minus one person. Um. And then Monday the 12th. Uh, sorry, I forgot the time. I think that was 4 to 6 in the afternoon.

Everyone indicated they were available except for one person, so.

02:21:02,530	I'm not. I don't know if it's a matter of just choosing one and rolling with it, but I do feel like that January 7th, because we already have an event happening. We should probably eliminate that day. Yeah, maybe that eliminate that day and then maybe, um. I'm sorry. January the 12th is a Monday.

I put 1030 to 1230. Okay. And you had six again. That was one that had six. I had six. People. Okay. Um. All right. Um. There's like 5000. 1000. Ads going on on your doodle poll anywhere from. 1030 to 12. Oh, well, I don't have an answer because it would be

really nice to have everyone there, but that's also really difficult around the school committee. We didn't get a meeting. We didn't get everyone there. We did. So that is. On the. Six people on the eighth from 6 to 7. Okay. That's this one. Okay. Oh. So I just for that one, I don't

know if an hour is enough time, but.

02:22:03,000	I don't know if we want. To vote. Or just. Choose. Because people did. Choose.

Basically. 02:22:13,500	I don't know, what do you want to do? Me? Yeah. I don't feel like an hour is enough time. Okay. Um, so I would kind of move towards the 12th, but.

02:22:29,170	That's a Monday. Okay. And that is Megan can't come. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Not during the work day. Yes. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. That's okay. So, um. All right. Did. I can't remember because I did fill it out, but I don't remember what any of the dates were. Did I mean, I asked.

I mean, we can I can make more dates. Like, we can definitely vote on more, but, I mean, we've got some consensus. So Tuesday, the six, Wednesday the seventh, Thursday the eighth, uh, the 10th, which is a Saturday. The seventh might be one of Eric's community. Yes. That's right.

She was just saying that that maybe doesn't really work. Squash that. Um, and I'm sorry. You say there was a Saturday in there. I put the Saturday the 10th two time. Not super popular. Not super popular. Yeah. No. Okay. Um. That is my birthday. I will not be. We might have cupcakes. We could get you.

As much as I enjoy spending time with you all. Um. You two is your birthday, too?

02:23:36,729	Um, okay.

Uh, 02:23:42,270	I don't know what to do about that. I really I'm sorry. I'm okay. I mean. What was was there one? Is it me that there was one? That if I was willing to do it, we'd have all seven? No, there's none that have all seven. Even with me saying. If you say no.

Well, like one of them, I say. You said yellow. That was no. Even with that. We still have members that can't. Okay.

Um. 02:24:09,899	I feel like that January the 8th, the hour before meeting, is probably easiest for everybody, because it's kind of. Yeah, I guess I sort of feel like that's right before school committee meeting. I know somebody said they can't come, but it probably just means they're going to be late, right?

Like, you know, like, yeah, I feel like maybe that's as close as we can get to. And I know maybe an hour is not enough, but at least. It's. A start. Everybody I think we can get. I don't know who it is. Oh, okay. He's not here. So. Yeah. Is that also, like, would it be worthwhile to

do that before we do that meeting, prior to the meeting where we get the report from the community feedback. So we're talking about everything all at once? I was thinking that too, but I feel like the purpose of this workshop is to look back. Yeah. And the purpose of the conversations is to look forward.

So I feel like it is kind of two separate. Yeah. But. Um, well, I guess I'm because I'm actually starting to get a little punchy. Yeah. Um. Let's, um. I usually got some pretty good stamina until ten, but I'm not.

Um. 02:25:23,899	Shall we? Well, I guess I'm looking at trying to do it on the eighth. I don't think that's a lot a long enough time, but I like the idea that it's right before committee meetings so that even though I know we've got one person who says they can't

come, but we can reach out and see if that can work because it is a meeting anyway. School committee meeting anyway. Mhm. Um, I don't know what other people think about that. The January. Thing in my calendar. I know it's only an hour. But at least we could start. We could start the conversation. No. Oh okay.

Yeah. Let's do that. All right. And then can you reach out to everyone and just say that and then. Yes. Thank you. And we'll just meet here. Yeah. I mean, we could meet in a room here, right? Yeah. I don't want to be here. That's not what I said I couldn't make, was it?

You said you could make that one. Okay. Does that still work? Yeah, that still worked. Okay. Thank you for all that. Yeah. And now. Oh, yeah, I may mentioned it, but. Yeah. Saturday is the holiday boutique at the Winthrop School from 9 to 3. Lots of local vendors. Um, it's super fun. It's super fun.

Sand is coming this year. We couldn't make it last year. It got disappointed. Um, I'll be there as a silent auction. So come check it out. And if you would like to volunteer. They're still looking for volunteers to help stop it so that you can email me. And I can hook you up with the list. Excellent.

Um. All right. Uh, topics for future meetings. Let's just give one point of clarification? And he did a little more digging. Go back to the meeting we talked about overrides the last override. And when I'm was in 2021 up $700,000 during Covid. Is that 2021. $723,000. And that was the one I. That would have.

Been that was the other chapter 70 money. Yeah, I know I remember right. Yeah. So that would have been the 2021 budget or the 2020. Fiscal. Year weren't they. I remember I think oh yes. So that was before I was on the committee. I was like, I would remember that.

But that was that was when I was elected in that craziness in the midst of that. So the. 2010. Of course, not the money we're carrying. Yes. That's the 770 that. Yes. Yeah. So thank you for that, for that update. Sorry. No, that's good to know. I did not know that.

Um. 02:28:08,799	Uh. All right. Um, where was I? Topics for future meetings. Did you have some budget? Nothing. Um, so I this during this meeting, I have figured out a such a problem that we need to think about, which is that the April town elections are now on April 16th,

02:28:36,170	and we have a school committee meeting that day. I'm going to check with the town clerks. But I think in the past that was sometimes problematic. And I think originally that wasn't when their election was. So I'm going to put that on a town on a topic for future meeting.

Um. 02:28:59,530	Sorry, isn't that also April vacation? No. The 20th. That's the following. Week. Okay. Yeah. So it's not. Yeah. It's not. In Spain. Yeah. No no no. It's. No it's not. Yep. Not a vacation, but, um. I just. I'll just check with the town clerks, because I know that at one point we had.

I think that happened a couple. It happened a couple of years ago in the town. Clerks had let us know that we shouldn't do that. Um, and we tried not to this time. And, um, so I just I will check in and then I'll bring it back. Um, anybody else have any other topic for future meetings?

02:29:42,000	Okay. Motion to adjourn. Yeah, I move that. We adjourn the school committee meeting at 9:27 p.m.. Seconds. Um, I need a signature before we do. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All those in. Favor? That is six in favor, and the meeting is adjourned at 927.