Someone's trying to be

Recording in progress.

Good evening. I would like to welcome you

to our January 6th, 2025 Needham School Committee meeting.

Tonight's meeting is broadcast on the Needham channel in

livestream, on needham channel.org.

I would like to begin this meeting as we do with each

of our meetings with public comment.

Is there anyone in our viewing audience today

or online who would like to make a public comment?

Okay, we'll now move on to our school committee chair

and subcommittee updates.

I would just like to say Happy New Year. Happy 2026.

I hope all of our students, families, teachers,

administrators and staff had a restful, happy

and a healthy start now to the new year.

And I look

to my school committee members if anyone has any

subcommittee updates that they would like to make.

Okay,

Moving along then

to our superintendent comments if our superintendent has

any comments tonight.

Thank you and happy new Year to the school committee.

I've seen a couple of you, a few of you already this morning

with the finance committee,

school committee budget liaison meeting.

So good to see you again and I hope our families

and staff had a great opportunity to rest.

Everyone loves this, this eight day holiday break.

It's just the way the calendar falls,

but it, it did seem to provide some respite for people,

so I'm glad folks are back and,

and we're, we're, we're back to work.

I did want to highlight something

that happened back in the fall that is, I think something

that happens every year and it's pretty extraordinary.

And that is to congratulate our students,

high school students who are involved in students

acting to make a difference.

They had their performance this past year, past fall

of Chicago and students acting

to make a difference is, is neat.

A couple ways any student can participate.

That's, first of all, you don't have to be, you know,

this professional actor, actress,

anyone can participate, which is great.

And it also provides an opportunity to highlight some

of the skills and talents of, of our fine

and performing arts staff and, and students.

But beyond that and,

and making sure the community has an opportunity

to see these performances, the students get together

to raise funds for a nonprofit.

And it's not, it's a twofer really.

They, they get to have fun, they get to perform on stage

and they're, they're pretty awesome.

And this past fall they raised $8,500 for origination,

which is a Boston project

that provides a quality dance, theater, arts,

and African American history education

to about 1500 young people in the Boston area.

And that donation of $8,500 really goes a long way.

So it's just a neat thing to point out that our students,

a variety of students participate, do a great job.

They, they provide an opportunity for a community

to come together and then they provide an opportunity

for another community to thrive in a different way.

So just wanted to congratulate all them

and we look forward to their work and performance next year.

And Mr. Chair, those are my comms for this evening.

Great. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Really a meaningful update from Sam DI, along with some

of the other school community members, had the pleasure

to see Chicago, not only is it a tremendous performance

by our students and the talent that they all have,

but the fact that that group was present was available to

engage with us and ask questions,

we could ask questions of them.

So it was really terrific to hear the amount

that the students had raised for that organization.

Thank you. We now move on

to our next agenda item, which are two consent items,

meeting minutes from December and FY 25 and 26 grants.

Does anyone wish to remove any items

from the consent agenda?

Alright, there being no objection.

These items are approved by unanimous consent

and we now move to our two discussion items tonight.

Recording stopped. Are we good to go?

Great. Two discussion items for tonight, which is the bulk

of our agenda, which are related to our budget.

And we will start with our first one

where we welcome our town manager, Katie King, thank you

so much for being here tonight.

And Dave Davidson as well, our assistant town manager

for finance to talk about our budget

and also an update regarding the Steven Palmer project.

Please take it away

or if the superintendent has

Welcome, this is actually the first time

Katie King is coming to the school committees town manager

to talk about her, her first official budget really

that she's responsible for, for the town of Needham.

Dave comes all the time, so, but I, I'm a pro at this.

I do, I do wanna say that in the short time

that Katie has been town manager, of course she's been part

of Needham for, for a while, the collaboration with her

and her office with, with Dave,

with her staff is pretty exceptional, extraordinary.

And it serves our students and staff really well

and that doesn't happen in every community.

I appreciate that our town manager is ready, willing, able,

available to sit down, whether it's a matter

of public safety, we had to do some of

that over the holiday break

or just to, you know, check in on a building project or

or some other facet of town government.

So thanks for the collaboration and welcome tonight.

Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you Mr.

Chair and to the superintendent for those kind words.

And I think when you take a new job, you know, one

of the things that I did was what's working well

and you better make sure you don't break that.

And so the previous town manager,

the superintendent worked together so well

and the collaboration I think is something that I've enjoyed

in my prior role as deputy town manager.

So we will continue

that organizational culture and good work.

So this is my sixth budget cycle,

but here today to have the first

consultation with all of you.

And I think really

I wanna hear from you what's on your mind,

what questions do you have for me?

What are you thinking about for the year ahead?

But I thought first I'd share some trends on the cost side,

on the revenue side, a sense of what we're seeing,

what we're thinking about

and talk a little bit about the, the timeline in the,

in the days ahead, weeks ahead.

So we're currently in fiscal year 2026

and it was a tighter budget than we had had for a few recent

years prior to that.

Largely we're currently operating under a maintenance budget

from the prior year we

where we had very little additional

investments available to make.

And I'm anticipating a similar situation

for fiscal year 2027.

We don't have specific revenue estimates to share tonight.

Dave is working furiously on that now

that the capital budget is out and available.

But we do know that expenses are growing faster than

anticipated revenue and we are

projecting a multimillion dollar budget gap

across town wide.

All departments that we will need to close

and that's the work that we'll be doing to kind of fine tune

and crunch those numbers over the coming weeks.

In terms of cost trends, just a few things I wanna highlight

that are major factors for fiscal year 2027.

The school committee you all with the superintendent,

have been working hard on year collective bargaining

agreements on the Townside.

We have four units that are expiring at the end

of fiscal year 2026.

So we'll be working on successor agreements

for our police officers, our police superior officers,

our firefighters, and our building trades and custodial.

So four contracts

that we're looking at for 27.

A major cost driver,

this is no surprise if you read the newspaper

regularly, is health insurance.

And so this is budgeted centrally for town

and schools combined.

And we currently are budgeting a 13% increase

in the rate for health insurance.

We don't have the final numbers yet, so

that's our estimate and our hold number.

But we certainly are kind of no exception

to the trends in the industry.

We did undertake a health insurance analysis

study over the past year because this trend is not new.

The percentage increases have been increasing every

year and significantly.

And so the conclusion of that health in

that analysis was really looking at our current situation,

which we're a member of West Suburban Health Group,

it's a joint purchasing collaborative.

Our other options for health insurance would be

to either go it alone

to join the group insurance commission,

which is the health insurance aggregate for the state

and municipalities who opt in

or to use Maya, which is the insurance branch of the

Massachusetts Municipal Association.

So we took a look at those options

and the conclusion of the report is

that we are in the most financially advantageous situation

by being part of the West Suburban Health Group.

So that is good news in the sense

that we are doing the right thing.

It's bad news because the anticipated growth in those

premiums is a challenge.

And also for cross trends, just generally inflation

and tariffs, I think people's personal household budgets are

experiencing this as well.

Things are expensive

and this is true for the town as an organization as well

for contracts and supplies, equipment, et cetera.

On the revenue side, I think two things

of note, of course we, you know,

property tax is our largest revenue source.

The second to that is state aid.

So we're monitoring the state budget process

closely as we do every year.

A couple of weeks ago the state had their consensus revenue

hearing where they get together

and project out what they're anticipating FY 27 to look like

for state revenues.

Those estimates are range from 1.2%

to 3% growth over FY 26.

So those,

it's definitely slowing from a state revenue perspective.

And we're currently working off of an estimate

of anticipating a 2% increase in state aid

to need 'em over the prior year kind of within that range.

And then on the federal budget side, you know, I think

it's just volatile and so it's hard to predict

and hard to plan when there's increased volatility.

And I think when we are thinking about the federal side,

I think the schools and health

and human services are the two areas that we'd really have

to do some thinking about if federal dollars were

to shift or change in the coming year for

one of the, those two departments get direct federal aid

but also I, I think would be most impacted if federal

support to the state gets reduced

and then the state makes decisions related

to reductions either in direct aid to communities

or cutting of services that then cities

and towns may be asked to backfill.

So that's high level kind of the lay of the land

that's really helping to shape

how we're thinking about FY 27.

Again, we're working through the numbers

and we will live within the resources that we have.

And in terms of timeline,

I'm here with you all today.

You have your hearing and your vote

on the 13th and the 20th.

My budget presentation will be

to the select board on January 27th.

The few days prior will be the Mass Municipal

Association annual meeting.

The governor usually goes to that meeting

and talks about local aid numbers

and it usually announces then what our chapter 70

and unrestricted general government aid numbers

will be at that meeting.

So that's gives you a sense of kind of the last bit of news

that we will have to inform my recommended budget

before it has to be transmitted to the finance committee

by the end of of January.

So with that I'll pause

and see kind of what questions you have

and what you're interested in.

Well thank you so much for providing that high level

analysis of sort of where we are currently with budget.

A question if I could kick it off

is when you talk on the revenue side, one piece that we

as a town have heard from the last couple

of years has been the former Muzzy site

and I don't know if that's anything you can shed light on

just because as we're approaching sort of where we're going

with our override and and where that stands

and what that revenue stream could have been,

is there anything that you can share about the status of

that tonight?

So that property had gone to the planning board

to get a special permit for a particular development profile

that included commercial space, some medical space,

some retail office.

The owner of the property decided to not move forward with

what was permitted.

And so we have heard that from the property owner

that they're interested in proposing a new

development profile there

that would also include some residential

multifamily housing.

But that I guess is still in the early stages.

So in terms of trying

to think about is there revenue we can estimate

or bank on, in my perspective it's too early to do that.

And you know, new growth for property taxes

comes once project has reached completion.

And so if you're kind of not even

permitted, it's still a ways out. Would you add anything to

That?

I wouldn't add anything other than it's not going

to do anything for us for 27

and probably not 28

based upon the permitting process and,

and we are aware they're going through the MEPA process so

probably looking at 29 the earliest.

Okay, thank you. Any questions, comments?

Liz

As always, thank you both for taking the time

to be here tonight and I really appreciate the presentation

Katie, with there's so much detail I have, I have a question

that may not have an answer but I'm gonna ask it anyway.

You were talking about revenue at the state level

and saying that the state right now

is predicting anywhere from 1.2 to 3% growth

and that you'll know more later this month.

It sounds like at the same time we know that there are going

to be potential impacts on the federal

contributions to state level budgets possibly for FY 27.

So I am wondering in terms of the timeline of some

of the things that we know could potentially already impact

the Massachusetts State budget and

therefore in turn impact needham's budget,

do any of those potential impacts occur

during the FY 27

cycle, if that makes sense?

I think, yeah, I think I understand your question.

I first I'd say in terms of the state budget,

we'll know more in terms of the governor's

proposed FY 27 budget in January,

but they still have the whole rest

of their process to play out.

So we are always in a position, all cities

and towns are where we go to a May annual town meeting

to have a final vote on our budget.

The state doesn't finalize theirs until closer to July one,

they're usually a few days late.

So we're always kind of working

with the best information we have at the time

that we finalize the warrant

and the finance committee is doing their work

to finalize their budget into March.

So the best information they have on the revenue side.

So the question about timing of federal,

Essentially I'm, I'm interested in how much

volatility we may see over that year based on,

I think sometimes folks don't understand the interaction

between the federal budget,

the state budget, and the local budget.

And so that's essentially my concern

from a school committee's perspective.

Yeah, I guess two thoughts.

The, the federal budget is on a different timeline.

It starts October one through September 30th,

but it really is how the president

and Congress decide to time their votes on it

and those have not been on a regular schedule.

So I think it is a very challenging question to answer

and I imagine the state's planning for

how they're thinking about their rainy day

funds with these questions in mind.

Thank you. Yeah,

Thanks Liz. Andrea,

Thank you both and Katie, it's really a delight

to see you here in this new role.

Thanks. I have two questions.

First, could you provide sort

of a really quick high level update on the status of some

of the other big projects that have sort of come

before town meeting that require dollars?

I'm thinking the Envision project, quiet zones, sort of

where are we with a couple of those big ticket items

because you know, as, as our chair mentioned,

you know, the schools are planning to go to the town

for an override this fall for the Pollard project.

And so just having I think a sense of where some

of those other items might be in the process

and sort of timing would be great and like real high level.

And then the second question is, you mentioned

that there's a multimillion dollar budget gap

that we're looking at this year and I'm curious,

and it may be too soon to to know,

but what, what are you sort of seeing as potential areas

where you could, you know, make adjustments

to, to close that gap?

And specifically would you be looking for the schools to,

you know, make a modification to our budget or at this time

and you know, what, what might that look like in terms

of a number if you know,

Let me ask, answer your second question first.

So we are kind of going through now and doing that work

and trying to figure out where there are places

that I'm gonna have

to make adjustments in my recommended budget.

I think, you know, generally speaking

this is a broken record hopefully from

what you've heard from the prior town manager.

But the town has for many years projected our,

our recurring revenue and you know, that grows between four

and four point a half percent generally speaking.

And so areas of the budget that we're taking a look at

are ones that are requests are being submitted to me, to us

that are higher than that number.

You know, the school's budget is at that number and

and under, so thank you.

But I just, I do wanna reflect, you know, there's been a lot

of hard work in scrubbing are

before the recommendation ever comes to me.

So I don't have a final answer yet,

but I appreciate, you know, the, the recognition

that this is a challenging year

and we are trying to look at areas in the budget

that are growing faster than that four,

four point a half percent to see

where we can make adjustments. Okay, thank

You.

Your other question, big projects,

thank you Dave for pulling that up.

Envision Needham Center won't be

financial request at this annual town meeting or October.

I'm not anticipating the project won't be far enough along

I don't believe and it's not currently in the capital plan.

The quiet zone is in the capital plan

and we are recommending funding for fiscal year 2027.

The current estimate for that is $7 million

and we're trying to fine tune that number.

So I'd say that's probably the biggest ticket item

capital wise being recommended right now

for annual town meeting.

And I think second to that probably is renovations at the

center at the heights that we've designed for

and would like to construct.

Thank you Michael.

Thank you Katie. Thank you Dave as always

for, for being here.

Welcome for your, for your first visit.

Let's, let's get back to health insurance and healthcare

'cause we know that's the one

we're all worried about everywhere.

Can you just give me what's the approximate percentage

of the total, our total operating budget altogether

that health healthcare is consumes

You're

Better at quick math.

Yes. I'm gonna have Dave take that.

Yes. The, the healthcare budget is about 8% of the budget.

8%, okay.

So at 13% increase there is like, that's gonna be like 1%

to the overall budget just by itself.

Right, right. So that, that obviously, you know, limits

what we can do on the other side.

'cause that's the way we, we typically look at it too.

When the superintendent presents as budget, we think

of the three to 4% range

and look how we can stay within that.

You mentioned, and we do this as well,

obviously you have some pretty

significant contracts coming up.

What again, what percentage of the budget are the,

all those salaries of your budget are all those salaries

because you don't know what the increases are gonna be,

but how big are those?

The salaries combined? The current

Salaries, the, for the units as a whole

that are gonna be, you know, yeah. Coming up

Other than public works, which

of course includes public facilities.

They are the two biggest budgets on the downside.

I'm sorry, how much police department in,

in the salary area is 9.1 million

and the fire department is $12.1 million. Okay.

Yeah, so, so those are significant

and you will not know those until you know,

you finish negotiations.

So obviously a lot of uncertainty

and then for the rest you don't see any other, so far

as you're looking at requests

and things, are there any large potential increases

that you're seeing that you're gonna have to wrestle with?

Other than we, the ones that we always do, everyone wants

to be able to do a little bit more than they perhaps can do.

But there any, any other things that are on the horizon

that need to, that need

to get tackled From an operational point of view,

I think there's nothing that jumps out at me

as a singular thing that is a very large request.

It is more expenses generally are outpacing, you know,

that four, 4.5% on the revenue side,

just expenses are growing faster than

that generally across the board.

So there's not kind of one Okay. Kind of blockbuster item.

And obviously we're all waiting

to see on revenues from the state.

But again, are you, you are continuing that you said

to project the increases from the local revenue

to be maybe around 4%.

Might you be looking lower this year for any reasons?

'cause given uncertainty data,

'cause I know four has been a typical

guideline that you have used

At this point we are looking on

recurring revenue for local receipts

just under 4%.

And that's based upon, because last year was a higher push.

Some of the local receipts, which I am not as optimistic on

for FY 27, that contributed greatly

to local receipts in 25.

It allowed us to have a higher estimate in 26

in interest income.

I mean it was $3 million and it's dropping quickly

because general investments earning 4%.

If they dropped down to 3%, that's a 25% loss

in your major revenue stream.

Motor vehicle excise tax cost is impacted by interest rates

because the higher it costs to finance the vehicle,

less likely people are purchasing.

That took usually accounts for 2020 5% of our local receipt,

local receipt revenue

and then two other which three other areas which,

which are impacted by the economy that can go down.

And hence why we have to have the hedge is motel, hotel

excise, meals tax

and something that we're already seeing a trend on which

for tells something in the out years for

new growth as building permits.

Building permits are down and a building permit today

may generate new growth then one to two years later, if

that's declining, that will then effectively means

that new growth will probably decline as well.

Thank you. Several picture as we all know all

around. But thank you very

Much.

Thank you. Any other questions or comments?

Okay, thank you there.

And I know you'll provide an update on Steven Palmer.

Great.

If I may, Mr.

Chair and as the, again, thanks to town manager and, and Mr.

Davison for the budget update.

The school committee is discussing the status

of Steven Palmer

and I appreciate the town manager being here

because she's been intimately involved in the process.

And I placed at every school committee member's seat a flyer

that announces an upcoming meeting on the 12th next Monday.

Brief history, Stephen Palmer building used to be a school

named after a minister in Needham

and it ceased being a school in the seventies, became a,

an apartment building situated on about an acre

and a half on Pickering Street in the center

of town right behind St.

Joe's church. The residents will be out

of the building within the next year

or so, I believe, or before.

And the building remained under the ju remains under the

jurisdiction of the school committee.

And so the school committee faces the prospect of,

of being responsible for this building

that is no longer in my view intended for

or practical for educational purposes.

It's again, it's been turned into apartment buildings

on a relatively small site.

And I invited the town manager to come in

and talk to you a little bit about it

because one of the things I would like to recommend

to the school committee later this month if it's

appropriate, is that the school committee, perhaps

after hearing this, asking questions,

understanding the issues, of course, vote to

see the parcel as no longer for educational purposes

and then if that were the case, a town meeting would have

to approve that and then the parcel would become under the

jurisdiction of the select board for a purpose

to be decided, which is part of

what this Stephen Palmer committee is,

is looking at right now.

So with that town manager, I'll let you take it from there.

Thank you. I think what I would add, you know,

this parcel when it was surplus by the school committee

in the seventies, I actually was going through the old lease

and pulling up the vote.

The school committee, the NM school committee met

January 6th, 1976, which is exactly 50 years to the day

of today, which I couldn't have myself, but I also Googled

and it was a Tuesday, but so the,

the vote at the time in 1976 was

that it was no longer needed for educational purposes,

but that vote was for the term

or the period of time defined in the vote

that town meeting took related to the parcel.

And so ultimately town meeting

and through the select board did a 50 year lease

that resulted in the current

residential use of the property.

And so this school committee vote to surplus it as not

for educational use is tied to that 50 year lease.

And so this is something that came to our attention

as we're planning for the return of that building back

to the town in 27.

I think the only other thing I would add

before seeing if there are any questions is at the October

special town meeting that we just had,

the select board had come to an agreement with the current

property owner and building management company to

wind down the residential use

as the superintendent mentioned,

the town meeting appropriated

funds to support that agreement.

And we also have funds in place

for tenant relocation support that is really separate.

And the decisions around the current use

and the current tenants is, you know, in process

and under the select board's jurisdiction, the

select board had separately established the Stephen Palmer

Development Review committee

and that committee has been charged

with running a community engagement process

to vision the future use of the site.

They're looking at does, does the building stay,

does it get renovated, does it go, what would the use be?

And they're really at the beginning stages.

They started meeting in October,

so January 12th on Monday is the first community meeting.

And really just broad brush strokes, you know, what,

what does the community community feel like We have a

need for in town.

And we've already heard a number of ideas from open space

to retaining and as housing to commercial uses.

And then of course the superintendent

and I are being asked, is there an educational use?

Is there a municipal use?

So that we're looking at all of this holistically.

So I think the committee has been interested in

understanding where the school committee is on this, given

this uniqueness of it having been voted surplus,

but now kind of reverting back to the school committee.

So that's why this was a, a discussion item

and thought we should get the conversation started

before the development committee

and the planning process gets too far along.

So happy to answer any questions.

Thank you for sharing that update.

Any comments or questions? Andrea?

I appreciate that there's a desire to kind of come

to a decision on this so that the, the process

of potential uses can really be as expansive as possible.

But given what happened with our recent

discussions with other parts of the town,

other elected bodies, I'm very

concerned about giving up any land

that is currently under our jurisdiction

because there's almost none left.

And I could, you know, I would love for us to participate

holistically and collaboratively with all of the people

that are interested in finding a use for the land

and then maybe at some point down the road saying we

will give it up.

But I'm not in favor of of doing

that personally right now.

I could see, you know, I know that we've been looking

for space or there's a potential,

there have been discussions pie in the sky, dreams of,

you know, what's gonna happen?

You know, could we put a preschool there?

Could we, you know, if, if universal preschool is is needed,

is there enough space to do something like that?

You know, our little Rockets daycare program is not housed

in a school building facility.

And I also think, you know, I I don't believe that housing,

the IT at Hillside is a long-term plan

that school and municipal it.

So I do, you know, those are three potential uses.

Pot, you know, I don't know how much space any

of those take up, but I would be very, at this juncture,

uncomfortable giving up land when the schools have

so very little of it left.

And not everyone in town seems to be as amenable

to really exploring the highest

and best use for all the land that the town collectively

has jurisdiction over.

Thank you Michael.

Thank you Andrea. I'm not sure I would've said it

that directly, but I appreciate you're doing so,

and quite frankly, I agree with you,

we have been down this road before

and the recent experience was very unpleasant.

We have always tried to take that approach

and I think it is important,

I think you pointed out a couple of potential needs

that we have that we will have to consider.

But I want to go back a few years ago when we were looking

to the Emory Grover project

and we had some discussions at

that point about Stephen Palmer.

It was several years out

and there was some initial conversations about what,

what might be uses for Stephen Palmer.

So I think it would be good to kind of revisit that look at

what, what people might have surfaced at that point.

But I think it, it is a little too early to assume

that we would just turn this over

and for some use as to be determined.

I, I would, I would with Andrea be very reluctant to do

that, given some needs that we do have.

And I think we wanna do that collaboratively,

but it is appropriate for people to think about what,

you know, what might that site be, how does it relate

to essential greenfield, which is right there.

That was part of the conversation as to whether

that whole site might be something different.

So I think, I hope that you

and the select board will look kind of on a large scale,

not just at Stephen Palmer as you think about it,

but at, at that whole block.

Again, not that we would want to change that,

but those conversations kind of got started a little bit.

And then of course we were able to settle on, you know,

renovating the current Emory Grover,

which was a great solution.

But I would encourage us to think about those,

maybe those bigger pictures as well at, at, at this point.

Thank you. Other comments, questions? Matt?

Thank you both for being here.

I just wanna go on record as

agreeing with Michael and Andrea

Cher.

I, I think a lot of projects here start with the,

we've discussed this, these were all these options,

but then when you think about the timestamp, it's

15, 20, 50 years ago, right?

So I think one of the questions that I have is in terms of

ideas and potential users

and opportunities that we have,

how recent are some of those ideas?

What are sort of the needs

of the community at this point of time?

And looking ahead, I know there's a lot

of rich information looking retrospectively,

but I I am curious sort of, you know,

this is something I will attend,

but has there been input representation at large from

the schools and Yeah, so that's,

I'm I'm just wondering like of all

those options, it would be great.

Like I, I doubt it's like all encapsulated in one slide.

That would be a dream. But,

but just knowing like what are some of those things

that have been talked about

and the first thing that struck my mind

as well is like just childcare and, you know, and,

and sort of the location of where it is as well.

So, so I, I, I think

what Andrea was saying sounds really good,

but I am just curious, like looking ahead, what are some

of those needs and, and how can we address them?

And, and maybe those needs are the same from 50

years ago, but I doubt that.

Yeah. If I could just on that comment to say

that is the work of the development committee

that they're running the first community meeting

to hear from the community what are the needs so

that we're at the very beginning of that kind

of forward thinking, what could that site be used for?

And again, that may be an educational use,

it may be a municipal use or it may be neither of those.

And that would be where we'd wanna hear from the public

of housing, childcare, commercial space, artist space,

a hotel rate, like just blue sky, what

The bank not,

Yeah, yeah.

Yes. Thank you. So at the beginning stages of that,

and I think I, I hear the concerns that,

that you're expressing and I think we'll follow up

with the superintendent and the,

the last time we as a town I think have really looked at the

Steven Palmer site was the Emory River feasibility.

And it was an option considered in that

and was ultimately not chosen

to be advanced for that project.

But

Thank you. Any other comments?

Mike? Just questions when

you're, when you're, when you're done.

Okay, thank you.

I don't know if the superintendent

has anything to follow up on.

No, I, I appreciate this

and I will follow up with the town manager on it.

I do, I would encourage school committee members

to attend this meeting on Monday to hear some of the ideas.

I will, you know, I've spent a lot of time

thinking about Steve Palmer with the Emory Grover project.

Other uses, you remember it used to be the senior center.

I guess all I would caution the school committee about,

a couple things come to mind.

First of all, it's a 1.5 acre site.

Any school use would require a different parking pattern.

And there is not sufficient parking on that site.

It's not a school anymore, it's an apartment building.

So it would have to be retrofitted

and especially as you go to town meeting in the community

to ask for a new middle school, you have

to think about the timing of asking for additional funds

to do something with that building.

And in the meantime it would have to be maintained.

It can't be empty, would have to be maintained.

So we will be curious to hear what some of the,

the uses are and what ultimately the community wants to do.

I just, from my perspective, it is not a parcel

that is going to serve the needs

of the native public schools.

Now we're in the immediate or frankly in the distant future.

And that's what this process is about.

Okay. Well thank you for the additional comments there,

superintendent and to my school committee colleagues

for offering their thoughts as well

regarding the Steven Palmer property.

And if that concludes things, we appreciate

our town manager, our assistant town

manager being here tonight.

Katie and Dave, thank you so much

and we look forward to future meetings

with you here. Thank you.

Good to see you all. Thank you.

And now we move to our second

and last discussion item, which also has a lot of

good information for sure.

And we had some of us preview earlier today with our

liaisons for fin com to talk about our technology IT budget

with Mark Messias

and I know there's some other members here

who might provide some background as well.

But thank you for being here. Thank you.

And Mr. Chair, after Mark is done with his presentation

and school committee gets your questions, we're going to go

to, I have an update on some operating budget adjustments

for FY 27 that I wanted to share at the conclusion

of his presentation.

Very good, thank you. Great. Welcome.

Please go ahead, mark. Thank you. Welcome

First and and foremost, thank you for having me tonight

to consider this budget request.

And to start off, Mr.

Superintendent asked me to just give you a little bit

of a update of the status of our department

and where we're at since we met last

June and, and discuss that.

So I'll jump right in with that.

So just to start off staffing something, you heard this,

sorry for the folks who heard this all this morning,

but to start us off as staffing, I'm very excited to say

that we, for the first time since we started this merger,

we're fully staffed.

As of yesterday, we hired two technicians

and filled those positions and,

and we also,

we were having a tough time filling the management position

on the enterprise applications team and,

and additionally another spot on that team.

And we decided to promote, promote within.

And that has gone exceedingly well.

It's been a great decision

to promote within and, and hire that.

So that's been going great this fall.

We had our second meeting of our IT staff advisory group

for technology and that went very well,

about 35 people in in that group.

We did a workshop on planning for staff IT training or,

or staff training in general

and to try to set some guidelines for staff training

for the both town and schools.

And we also developed an AI focus group for both town

and schools to, to have a group, a small group of about

roughly 30 users on each side.

It might be 20 on each side, so 40 total.

And we're gonna give them some higher,

higher level tools within the AI suites to, to show what

staff support staff

and regular staff can do

to improve productivity with AI tools.

This is not about teaching and learning.

My colleague Chris has all, all the AI for, for teaching

and learning and he, and he can dive into that another time.

But this is solely focused on staff

and just some big over oversight projects.

We're getting to the building site,

building project cycle again,

and my, my crew, I,

I underestimate all the work that they do.

People don't know in the back end of a building project,

but the new Newman Auditorium is coming online this summer

and that's been a lot of work

for the team in designing that.

And we will be a lot of work in, in project managing with

that and two new town build

or two renovations in town buildings to Jack Cowell building

and the library project that we'll be involved with

as everything has it today.

And we're we're involved helping with those projects.

So just some more focus areas.

The the, the, the primary area that my team is,

is focused on across all, all,

all my sectors is cybersecurity,

even though cybersecurity lands

with a network team as a primary role.

But cybersecurity is my primary focus for all of my team,

the apps team and the, the service desk team.

And I can't emphasize that enough how much they were making

that an important part of our department to have focus on

that at all times for whatever we do, policy

procedures and and whatnot.

The team's been hard work helping Carmen

and the curriculum department with the the Canvas project,

which is a, a great project for the district and,

and trying to support that.

And we are also starting the, the helping out

with a new enrollment system that we are transitioning

to in the data team.

We're, we were doing things like investigating collaborative

communication platforms across both sides.

One of the strategic plan initiatives was

to have more collaboration in IT systems across town

and schools to help with collaboration and,

and potentially save dollars.

And we are looking strongly at those over the last year.

One of those things was the, the town

and schools have merged into one phone system, zoom phones,

and we have all the town buildings minus public safety done

and we have all the school buildings as

of this past week except for Elliot

and Elliot and Williams.

And those will be be done by the end of January.

So we'll all be on one unified platform for that.

The team has been working hard

to replace the town data center, which was a, a,

a herculean task.

It's about half done right now

and they are, hopefully we'll have

that finished within the next month and a half.

That was a big project. We, we switched with my help Chris,

Chris Goslin, we switched to a K five iPad transition.

So all iPads at the, at the elementary will be finished out

with Chromebooks at the end of this year.

But we budgeted and planned and,

and made that transition happen thanks to the work of Chris.

And with that had to come a new iPad management system,

which was not a small undertaking for my team

to switch completely a whole management system for

3000 iPads, something like that all at once.

So that's just some brief highlights

about what we've been doing.

Dan asked, we're gonna do questions at the end,

but, so I'll jump right into budget at that point.

Sorry, that slide.

So the first slide about budget,

and we're gonna focus tonight

on school school committee budget.

We had a good conversation today about this morning,

about the town IT budget.

We're gonna focus on the school committee budget

tonight on the school side.

So this breakdown is a, is this, this wheel of a

of budget here really indicates for, for those

who didn't see that this morning, is most

of our expenses are on software contracts, which is software

as a service on the right hand side

and hardware for both students

and staff take up 90% of our budget.

And unfortunately that also means we're at the mercy

of those in those industries

and those companies that provide those devices

for our increases.

If Apple decides to up the price of an iPad, we, we have

to up our budget to do that.

And as we'll discuss in a minute, software

as a service is one that has been what we,

companies have been really upping their annual increases.

And that's a large effect

considering we spend 800,000 over

$800,000 on software as a service.

So a 5% increase is a lot, right? Every year.

So the, our our, to get into our request, the first

and most important request is following

with our strategic plan objective of hiring a,

a cybersecurity officer.

This request funds that request.

This is a a two part request.

There's a 60 40 split with the town and the school budget.

$80,000 on the school side

and $53,000 on the, on the town side.

This person will, will act as a,

this won't be a highly technical job,

it'll actually be more like a high level project management

person who's actually making sure we're almost like a

compliance officer, but someone who's making sure

that we're complying with all the policies

that we're gonna implement, tracking down all the,

the events, recording them and getting in there.

And I was, I won't go into too much detail,

but we, we get a lot of requests lately

with our new platform and it takes someone's eyes on them

to, to hunt down every request

and this person's job will be solely to do that, do that

and make sure that every request is, every

incident is tracked and we know what the outcome is of that.

Moving on. So software as a service

and software requests, as I was saying earlier, our,

our $870,000 worth of software as a service,

not all of those, that money that we spend

has an automatic increase.

Some of them have, we know won't, won't be as heavy a hit

and some of those ones will are very expensive.

For example, PowerSchool, one

of our biggest contracts has a 7% increase

for the next three years at a minimum, which is a heavy hit

to take and we have to average all the rest of them

and we average them between five and 7%.

So the math on that works out to be about $41,000

of an estimate for the, for those, for those costs.

We have an increase in our PowerSchool product licensing

that we had all part of our strategic plan,

but one of the key things in there were some products

around data storage and data archiving.

And so our PowerSchool licensing is changing

and that's a set increase.

The next request is

for our advanced AI user licenses.

As we discussed about that IT advisory group.

These are the licenses to cover that for those 30 users.

They are expensive. AI licenses are a very expensive thing,

roughly $20 a user a month.

So this can't scale up for for everyone obviously,

but it's about figuring out what these tools can do for,

for, for our users.

Software continues. We have additional Tyler's

Infinite Visions, which is our school ERP, it's our,

our finance software that we're currently using.

We're, we're transitioning some of our HR modules ahead

of moving to a muni.

And this transition is actually

came about through processes of the PLANTIN study that

Ann had done and HR had done for revamping our onboarding

and operating processes.

So the, we're getting started now it's a three year ramp

before we get to these in uni,

but these will get us started now

moving on, we have additional licenses for our canvas,

our learning management system that we're implementing.

We have a small increase in the licensing that we need

to bring the students on board for September.

We already license about $68,000 worth of licensing

for the core product, but we didn't buy these

because we weren't bringing students in until September.

So we have a slight increase for next year.

Does that sound That sound right?

And then last

but not least, we have the things that we asked for

but going to defer due to

what we know is a a tight budget year.

We had several things that we'd asked for upwards

of a hundred thousand dollars that we are deciding to defer

until further years and try

to figure out how to manage that.

And you can see that list there

in your, in your packet there.

And we will, we'll come back

to you in further years for those.

Which brings us to questions

and then we had a lot of questions this morning already.

Yes. But questions on that? Questions on any

Of those?

Well thank you very much for this very high level

and yet detailed presentation on our it.

Are there any questions, thoughts from community members?

Cher,

Could you just tell me a little bit more about this

AI support group?

You said it's, it's not for the teaching and learning.

So what, what does it really encompass

and how does it synergize with sort of AI tools

and usage at large

In the district?

Yeah, so it's not that we're, so not that the district is

not doing anything with teaching and learning, right?

You said that's separate.

So yeah, there's the,

the media digital learning department is square on that

and doing that with the teachers.

This was designed for support staff, administrators, all

that for their own productivity.

Many of our users in their training requests

to us are asking how do we use these AI tools?

What can they do for us? We want more tools.

And it's become one of the top requests.

And rather than, you know, just saying No, no, wait,

wait put on the brakes.

We want to get ahead of it

and be able to be able to have a core group

that can one, make recommendations.

And honestly the recommendations might be

that these tools aren't for everyone, right?

We don't need that high level of tool,

which we've already talked about some, some of us today

reporting that back or what level do we need,

well what do we need?

And then, you know, basing,

basing our trainings based on the feedback that they have.

What these, what these can do for us.

'cause you know it on the school side we have teaching

and learning, but on, you know, on the, the town side

and other departments we're using, using in finance to,

to review bills and,

and it can help automate all that workflow, you know,

and save time and, and we should be doing that if we're not.

Right. Some people are afraid to use it

'cause they've been told don't use ai.

Right? And,

and we wanna be able to give them a safe place to learn

and then, and then report back out

to the, the the larger group. That's the general idea.

That sounds great, but you can't set that out.

I think no group can. Great.

My, I have a second question, which is really silly

and minor, but you know, I I like probably many

of you have the grievance of having had to switch

to Microsoft teams over Zoom in the last couple of years.

Yes. It's not a big amount,

but I am just wondering about Zoom licenses

and is that, is that something

that more from the special ed side is like,

has its advantages

or again, in, in your broader budget it's not a big thing

but I am wondering about Zoom licenses being

something that lots

Of are, are you saying that the, the are the,

the cost of them, are you Yes, yes.

It's been a reason that many companies have said, oh

that's, that's a cost we can cut. Yes.

So we, we went to Zoom phone, right?

For, to replace our phone platform,

which we were already paying for the, my phone system,

our Zoom video conferencing, our footprint is much smaller.

We, during the pandemic, we,

we had a license for every teacher, right.

And I, and part of the phone transition was we

clawed those back, right?

'cause we had a thousand licenses

that we didn't need, right.

And anymore coming out of that.

So we've paired that way back to a very smaller number

between the town and the school.

So we actually don't have Zoom for everyone.

We use Google Meet for the, the teaching staff.

They, Chris has helped with that transition.

And some of the special ed staff,

it hasn't been an easy transition

'cause they're, they're used to Zoom and it's not a

one-to-one platform change.

And then on the townside they use teams when they can,

you know, the people who don't have the Zoom license

and they're used to using that anyways.

It is a very expensive platform.

We get some discounts by having the phone system bundled.

So that's been a good thing as well. Yeah,

Thank you for those questions.

I guess maybe just one follow up with the

licensed users in the 60

and if it's 30, you know, for each group,

how are those individuals determined

to be a part of those groups?

So there so many other people sort of waiting in the wings,

I'm guessing that these are unique licenses

that they can't be shared.

Correct. And yeah, how you sort of come up

with like this 60, you know, 30, 30 split.

It's a little bit rapidly changing chat.

GBT changed their, their structure.

They introduced chat GT for chat GBT for teachers, which

saves us a little bit of dollars, but

'cause they're, they're giving us basically everyone a year

free or a year and a half free.

So that'll change that structure a little bit.

But so one, there was this advisory group

and the offer was made as per, you know, those people

who gave their time for that group over the last year,

almost year and will continue to, the offer was made there

of anybody who wanted to join and felt a need to join.

And then some people by the town manager

and by our central office were

handpicked to ask.

And I also handpicked some folks that would,

I thought would be a good part of this as well.

So that, that's basically, there was some offer,

there was some question, you know, if they, if they wanted

to, they could and then, and there was some

handpicking and you wanna,

Okay.

And do you have a follow up there?

Yes. The idea were that the users

would be selected based on their ability

to be a power user that could model for others

the kinds of uses that might be beneficial with these tools.

So these would be tech savvy users who had the ability to

share and disseminate the knowledge with others.

Yep. There are some teachers in that, in that, on that com

advisory group and it, you know, they, the ones

who were selected will also be that this is not part

of the teaching learning suite, you know,

that wasn't the intention.

So that we're not crossing any,

any boundaries with that, with that as well. So, okay.

Yep. Thank you. Yep. Other questions? Michael?

Thank, thank you Mark.

I, I just, one thing I do want to acknowledge,

and I, I know it's been a couple of years,

but you came from our, the school side

and have now, you know,

basically filled out the entire organization

and does a lot of work involved in that, a lot of rebuilding

and I just wanna make sure that it's acknowledged

and recognized the terrific work

that you did without missing a beat on the school side

to bring what is now I think a very

terrific organization together.

And I think, you know, based on some conversation you

and I had this morning, you're gonna see some real benefits

I think for the whole town by having that kind

of combined organization.

So I wanted to make sure we acknowledge

that and thank you for that.

Well I appreciate that. Thank you.

And, and thank you for giving me a really great team.

I, the question was asked earlier, you know, earlier today,

what, how did we compare it to other towns as far

as IT department goes?

And, and we are very lucky here

and I, I have to acknowledge that

and thank you for that sincerely today as well. Yeah.

So I mean, I appreciate on the,

and I think it just is important to, to emphasize that

outside the teaching, the teaching

and learning side, all of all industries are looking at

AI to see how they can help running their business.

So it's really more, there's a lot of process work,

there's a lot of work where AI could potentially

be useful as a tool.

It's not about what people think, you know, talking

to something and having a conversation.

It's about basically potentially bring all the information,

a lot about a lot of complex processes and technologies

and allowing an AI to help you kind of work through that.

So I think that will take some time

and I appreciate your putting together a

group to work on that.

I, I did want to come back a little bit

and I know you didn't wanna repeat some

of the things you did this morning, but I think it's

important to just talk a little bit about the platforms

that you put in place in terms of SI cybersecurity

because it's something that we have been

very, very concerned about.

You know, it hasn't been

that long since we saw some pretty ugly things happening

in municipalities and schools

because I think the bad guys out there look at

municipalities and school systems

and think these folks don't have a lot of technology,

they don't have a lot of money, they're easy targets.

So I think I would like you

to talk a little bit, just briefly Yeah.

About the platform you put in place

and how this project manager fits in

and how it helps protect us from, you know,

what could be pretty significant data breaches.

Yeah. And I, I will preface this by saying,

because we're public, we're on, I, I will maybe not say some

of the things I said this morning, but, so

One of the main things that you funded last last year was

a cybersecurity platform.

I won't get into details 'cause that

that actually just exposes a little bit,

that if someone wants to have

that conversation privately, we can have that.

But, so we have a platform running that's managed by

a very large company, let's just say that, which

entails three parts.

It's system monitoring,

remediation after something happens, right?

They, they help after something happens and, and training

and support for our, all of our staff.

That, that whole picture.

And it also has 24 7 monitoring

with our managed service provider.

So if something happens in the middle of the night,

you know, 'cause we all sleep and

that's when people all over the world

are starting to get, get to us.

You know, they have, we have monitoring 24 7

and we have an alert structure for that to wake us up

and deal with that, that that platform has given us,

you know, a lot of feedback, let's just say that.

And a lot of alerts. And each one of those alerts has

to be tracked down to make sure that it, it's, you know,

the validity of each alert.

That is very hard to do when you have, you know,

you're the CTO or you're the network manager, or

whenever you have a, you have another job, you're training,

you're in, you're in doing whatever it is for the day.

You don't have that focus all the time.

And it's important that those all do get tracked down.

And as we all know in the world, not just in need,

the amount of the phishing and

and attacks through email is increasing exponentially.

And it's, they're getting better and better.

It's hard, harder to stop them if we all knew, only knew

how many we, people always ask,

I can't believe this is getting through.

If you could see what doesn't get through,

that's the important stuff.

So without going into too much detail, this, this platform

that we built, which has, has training, monitoring,

and support all built into that has been really instrumental

and, and, and letting us see where our,

our vulnerabilities are and,

and fixing them fast. That's,

That, that's really, that that's, that's very helpful

and I think it's, it's gonna be important that, you know,

we have someone who can help to kind of oversee that because

otherwise you and all your

staffers running around doing that.

Yeah. It's one part of what we do rather than our focus

and, and obviously this person will have to be on vacation,

they'll have to be, you know, collaboration and,

and overlap with all of our roles always.

But we'll have a primary role for that, for

That.

And I, I guess the, the other, just as a brief comment, I,

I think one of the concerns that you raised

and that we will all have is that as we use software

as a service, which sounds like such a great idea

because basically you don't need staff to do everything.

We are at the mercy of some large,

sometimes predatory companies

who you are locked into a platform, whatever they want to,

you know, you mentioned iPads,

but frankly iPads are multimillion devices

for people all over the world.

PowerSchool is a very limited audience,

so Right. You're kind of,

Yes.

You're kind of at their mercy

and it does, I guess, concern me a little bit.

Are you, as you look out further, do you see potentially

significant increases or does to the appear

Work?

I mean there, there is PowerSchool, you know,

lost some market share

for the first time in the last couple years.

Okay. They had not lost market share in over 10

or 15 years for a long time.

But they lost because part of that is, part of that is the,

you know, the cyber security attack that they had.

And part of that is their cost.

They, right after that, they increased their cost to 7%.

Not a good message, you know, I mean, I've been a fan

for many years and, and supported them for many years,

but that's, it was a tough, a tough thing to see,

but it is a very hard prospect to try to leave some,

some districts have said we're gonna leave,

but leaving your student information system is not

an easy thing.

We have 20 plus years of records in

inside there. So yeah.

Okay. Thanks. Yeah,

Thank you Michael. Elisa,

Just following on that, I'm gonna ask a question that

I know the answer to because we talked about it this

morning, but I think would be helpful for the community

and my colleagues to hear.

Can you just talk a little bit about some

of the purchasing collaboratives and,

and ways that we approach partnering with other districts

and municipalities for some of our purchases?

Yeah, so we we're always looking to to to, you know, find,

find ways to save money where that is my primary focus

and we have several options that there are,

there are collaboratives like tech collaborative

that there are doing more and more buying power.

We have state contracts that we use and help me out here.

But you, you said this morning we have several

collaboratives that we use to, for,

for everything from supplies to all that.

But I guess the software contracts,

it's these big ones like PowerSchool

and things like that, it's a shame that there's not more

because everyone goes at it, you know, individually

and you're at the mercy of the, of them when you do that.

Some states have taken the approach

for these big enterprise systems to buy them, right?

So North Carolina, there's at least like, I think 12 states

that, that say, we're gonna buy, we're gonna tell you

what you have to buy or we're gonna buy it for you.

So then they get that group state,

but we don't, that's not something that Massachusetts,

they did try to do it I think like 15

years ago, but it didn't work.

So every chance we get, we use those collaboratives, we do

that, we use contracts that are collaborative even though

they're not, you know, just some

of the contracts we use in general, like the, you know,

the mass higher ed collaborative, they,

they all, we get contract pricing.

I did mention earlier today that the, the,

the schools get very good software pricing.

I will say that the town more

and more companies, big companies, Microsoft, Adobe,

all them are treating municipalities more like businesses

and, and reducing the gap percentage

of discount they give them.

They used to be treated more like a nonprofit.

They, they don't treat 'em like a nonprofit anymore.

And that's definitely jumped up the

price for sure.

Yeah.

Any other comments, questions from committee members?

I have a question, and I don't know if this is,

I don't even know the right word, but when I was watching

or looking through the category breakdown

toner popped out to me

of being almost a hundred thousand dollars.

And I know we can joke about it and being like, oh,

It's not a joke.

It's, it is a very painful thing for me.

You know, who's printing what and all that.

And you know, if I see this also from the lens myself

as a parent, I'm definitely noticing

because our students are utilizing either iPads

or Chromebooks more, there isn't

as much paper at least I see in my household.

But yes, there's still all the expense of

what we're printing out there.

I was just wondering, and not to say that, you know,

as we're looking at town costs

and being so nitpicky on like what's being printed

or not, if it's, you know, just an e version of something,

are there certain guidelines and if there are already,

and I haven't seen them

and that's my own piece of how we're sort of

educating our staff administrators on the use of supplies,

paper toner and things like that.

When it's sort of like, oh, you know, do you really need

to print that or, or things like that.

There, there we, our, our, our toner budget, I would say,

so in 2017 when I took over our toner budget was

actually like $150,000 back in those days.

So yes, we had those conversations.

We, we really tried to spread the word about

what every color print color printing is the biggest

killer in, in this budget, but with every print cost.

And we did a lot of standardization on printer models

and all kinds of things

that we could do right about getting out there and,

and trying to educate about re reducing and printing.

We were hopeful that, you know,

the one-to-one projects would reduce and, and they did.

And in general, the print, the,

the toner costs have come down over the last couple years.

Funny since the pandemic has

cret back up a little bit again.

And it's an interesting conversation to have,

but it, it's, you know, it's a, it's an area

where we can cut

and we can, we can make hard

decisions to say we're not gonna do that.

So with that said, good con, one of the softwares

that we've been testing out over the last, he,

well we just saw, we just bought it this summer,

it's not fully testing yet,

is a another print management solution

that actually lets us, you know, see everything

that's being printed very clearly in a much more modern way

than some of the print management systems we had before,

but also put in, put on controls.

So every printer, you know, every printer is,

every user is a user in the printing system

and now we actually can see who's printing what

and we can put controls on it.

Doesn't mean we're going to, 'cause that's the conversation

for central office to say, you know, and, and really DLT

and to say, what should we printing?

But it's gonna give us the, the tools to be able

to pull back when we want to, and that's both town

and and schools as well.

So we're, we're trying to position ourselves in a position

to, to be able to, to put that reins on.

Okay, thank you for that. Yeah, yeah.

Alright, well I think we appreciate again the presentation

that you provided tonight, answering our questions,

having a chance to have seen a preview earlier this morning.

And I would echo my colleague Michael's comments on the

years that you've been in service here

and expanding your role, we appreciate all the efforts

that you've done to make sure our town schools are, are safe

with the technology that they have

in the team that you have in place. So thank you. Great,

Thank you very much.

And with our budget discussion turned

to the superintendent to provide,

we have some additional information

regarding some adjustments

and look forward to hearing some updates.

We do. Thank you, mark. So thank you.

As I, I know the school committee understands the budget,

even though we present it in December,

we continue to work on it.

It's not finished really until you vote

and actually when in town meeting

meets is when it's really all done.

So I did wanna share with you this evening a couple

of adjustments that we've made

and provide some additional information on the budget.

And you have a copy of this in your, this, this,

this we finished at about four o'clock this afternoon.

So it's, it's fairly new.

We have identified some areas within our salary account

and special education tuition

where we can make some, some adjustments.

We also discovered as this outlines that we made a mistake,

I made a mistake, and that we

inadvertently pulled an Elliot classroom teacher out

of our projections

and we need that teacher for those students.

So that teacher has to go back into the budget

and that's a cost of $79,000.

However, we made a couple

of other adjustments, some minor adjustments.

We are, we are, we are very much cognizant of the fact that

as we heard from the town manager

and assistant town manager earlier of

how much we are requesting from the town, knowing

that there are some headwinds.

We're also aware of the fact that every person we,

or half person that we add to our budget

that goes into healthcare costs that the town is paying for.

So we're trying to balance all of these things.

And so we were able

to look at our instructional assistance at the high school

and were able to make one reduction

by reorganizing some positions there.

Additionally, we, we, we heard from the school committee

that you were interested in some

of the program improvement areas.

Of course we always are that are in that part of the budget.

And so I am recommending that some of these stipends that

before I had not initially recommended

be included in the budget.

These are all programs that have students

that are very active as you know, you've heard from some

of these students, you've seen some of these students

perform or, or work or, or speak to you at school committee.

And we also think that, you know,

that's overall good for the program.

All told, we're able to make adjustments that will

increase our, our budget by $1,944,

but keeps us at 3.9699999999999998%.

We do drop our FTE request by 0.07

and for a 3.97, excuse me,

4.69 FTE request.

And I want to thank Matt, it was a couple meetings ago,

Matt, I think, you know, but not the entire community knows

because school community members wear many hats.

Matt is your representative on the tech collaborative

and one of the things he alerted us to

in a recent meeting is that tech had to

raise their tuition rates

because we do send some students to the tech collaborative.

I wanna say what percent the dollar amount.

I know, but do you remember the, it's about 7%

I think think, but it's lower than the other things

that have gone with private tuition.

Yes, yes. Definitely much lower than

It's a, it's about a, it was about a $53,000 swing

and we were appreciated being notified of that.

And we worked with our special educ special education folks

to make sure we can place that in the budget.

So that's included in here as well.

So the adjustment right now at this point, the,

the request is a $106 million request, 4.69 new FTEs

and a

3.9699999999999998% request.

I do want to, and,

and the school committee's asked about this

and I I wanted to highlight here

for whatever reason and well long

before I came, the,

the school committee budget is different than the town

budget in that the school committee uses the phrases

of a level service budget and a program improvement budget.

Ian and I have talked about this and I'm not sure calling it

program improvement is the best thing anymore

because the reality is we do make improvements

to our program throughout the year with existing dollars

where we can and when we have to.

But it is what it is right now.

So what I wanted to point out to the school committee

that our investments this year for students

and for programs on the left side of the sheet,

this is everything that is, if you will, baked into

the budget to be program improvements

that will provide either new services

or more robust services for students

and staff that we did not have before.

And we're excited about this.

These are, these are stipends, for example,

that will enhance programs at, at the middle school level

and at the high school level.

The, there are a lot of acronyms,

but Needham High School

that CCOR is the courageous conversations

on race instructor.

We've been leaning on grants for years.

We've been putting that together with duct tape and glue

and now we, we've asked to put it in the budget so

that it can be sustained.

And that makes a statement about

the importance of that program.

For all of our ninth graders, we're, we're, we want

to add more robust teaching

and learning to the science center.

And of course, as you heard, we want

to strengthen our postgraduate program

as you heard more recently.

And finally, we're looking at

adopting a new literacy program

and we're looking for those funds.

If you look at the other in district investments,

and those are all part of the level service budget

if you take everything together, this budget

represents $979,000 in new investments

for our students and programs.

I think the way I presented it in December

and the way I've traditionally presented,

it's just not that obvious.

But I, I wanted to point that out tonight that,

that actually is what is in your budget currently.

And if you are willing

and able to vote that budget,

these things will, will take place.

As far as next steps are concerned,

there will be a public hearing next week on the budget

for folks to weigh in.

And Mr.

Chair, if it's okay, I'll encourage family members,

staff members, students to come

and express their opinions on the budget.

That can happen via email as well.

But certainly folks can come to the school committee meeting

and then January 20th the school committee would vote a

budget plan and between today

and then there, there may be some other adjustments.

So the school committee may want, you know,

to make some other adjustments as well.

The finance committee had their last,

they suggested they did not need to meet anymore.

This finance committee liaisons at the meeting this morning

that they had sufficient information.

And we, on the 21st of January,

will present the school budget to the finance committee

as well as have an update on the Pollard project.

So that's the next step with the, the finance committee

as they continue their work.

Last thing I wanted to mention, Mr. O'Brien asked me

to share this with the school committee this evening.

A couple school committee members have asked,

and I I want to try to address it, I may lean on

on and to help me.

And the question was asked at a recent school committee

meeting in light of, you know, we're not always,

it doesn't seem we're always able to honor all

of our requests and even as Mr.

Messais pointed out, there's some requests

that I am suggesting it be deferred,

but I'm also suggesting in this budget we have just under a

million dollars in new investments for,

for our, our students.

So the question that's come up is how,

how do we manage funds at the end of the fiscal year

if there are surplus funds?

And there have been surplus funds

for the Needham Public schools in, in recent years.

And I just wanted to quickly outline, you know, what we try

to do, first of all, all of the funds

that will be appropriated at maytown meeting for FY 27

will have to be extended by June 30th of that year.

And the same is true this year.

By by June 30th, 2026, all

of those appropriated funds must be spent by state law.

They, they're, they cannot be carried over into,

into the new fiscal year each quarter.

So four times plus two other reports,

which I'll explain each quarter, Ann provides a report

to the school committee, a quarterly report

that shares the status of the appropriated budget.

You've already had a first quarter report,

your second quarter report is coming next Tuesday.

And within that report, Ann includes an estimated balance

based on current expenses.

So it's kind of, you know, year to date, this is

where we are with, with our expenses.

What Anne also does,

and this does not happen in every community,

Anne also provides twice a year.

She keeps saying to me, I wanna do it more often.

And I tell her to just sit down and,

and we, there's only so much we can, we can do.

She provides two supplemental reports

that actually include a projection,

not just expenses projection.

That projection will be coming probably in February or

or March this winter.

And that will, will share what Ann, based on

what we understand, could be a projected surplus

or deficit in the budget.

And that's really when we can start anticipating, okay, what

what do we do with that and what, what does that mean?

Now in June and July, the school committee budget liaisons

and the finance committee budget liaisons start

to review the status of the budget

and if it, if it is apparent

that there will be a surplus as there was last year.

I can talk about that in a moment.

You know, for example, due to salary turnover, we, we,

we did not, we hired teachers as was the case this year

at a certain level and, but we budgeted at a higher level.

So there was significant savings

that we've actually already baked into the budget for FY 27.

But if there is a surplus, then I will make recommendations

to the school committee, to the liaisons to discuss

and we'll make some, some,

you know, suggestions about what to do.

Now the, the part that's important is the, the mechanism

for the schools and the town

doesn't have the same mechanism.

The town has has other mechanisms perhaps,

but the schools are unique in that if there is,

if there seems to be a surplus

and there is an unanticipated need

because the budget's developed

and voted on January, town meeting happens,

but now it's June and we have for example, some students

who have special needs that need service

or we had more kindergarten

students enrolled than we thought.

If there's an unanticipated need, you know,

there are a couple ways to deal with that.

One of the ways to deal with that is for the

school committee to send a signal for us

to prepurchase special education tuition, which we can do,

it's one of the mechanisms we have.

So let's say we prepurchase $300,000 in special education

tuition, that will free up $300,000 in the budget

that you'll be voting on.

And then we can use those dollars to pay for whatever

that need is.

The caveat to that is it's a onetime need

because at the end of that fiscal year, it goes away

unless you build it into the subsequent year's budget.

So these onetime needs in, in my view generally are

for things that are truly one time, for example,

we have $200,000 that we're requesting

to you for the literacy program.

But if Dr. Williams and Lisa Messina

who are coming at the, which meeting

February 3rd

To talk about the the literacy program and, and it's

after the budget process, but we're really, we, we want

to excited to talk about the literacy program

and we think these dollars are correct,

but if it turns out we might need $50,000 more

now we could wait or we could ask, why don't we prepurchase

that amount $50,000 and we could get those materials.

The good thing is, that's one time that wouldn't have

to be repeated the following fiscal year.

When you hire staff, you do have

to bake them into the budget, otherwise you're laying

them off at the end of the year.

So we, we try not to do that

unless it's a need, for example, around a student

as a particular need in a particular year,

then we may do that.

There are times we've come to you

and we've, we've had positions that we hired temporarily

for a year and we've proposed them in the budget

for the following year because they then become part

of the, part of the staff.

Any funds other than that, that we do not have a need for

because we can't just carry funds forward

and say, well, we'll use them

for something that may come up.

We turned back to the town this past year

and projected about 700 thou in one

of your supplemental reports,

we would turn about $700,000 back to the town.

I think it ended up being around $800,000

that was turned back to the town seven 60,

About

7 60, 700 $60,000.

It turned back to the town. That money then eventually

becomes certified as free cash, which funds our computers,

our buses, the, the the dump truck, the, the,

the the building project, the, the auditorium project.

So it, it's kind, it's cyclical like that.

It doesn't just, it doesn't go away

and the schools never see it again.

But schools in town see that as part of free cash.

And then part of the Capital, capital project.

This past year, last June, when the school committee met,

we ended the fiscal year.

You may recall one of the conversations we had is Ann

and I were particularly concerned about IDEA funding.

We were concerned about Title one funding to the tune

of round, I'm gonna round here about

a million and a half dollars.

We were worried that those funds could go away,

they could be cut back

and that funds around 30 to 35 folks

who provide services in the district.

And so we had approximately call it $2 million,

$2.3 million as surplus.

And so we pre-purchased the, the 1.5 million

and we moved that forward into FY 26

to have available in the event there were problems

with federal grants, whatever.

So I an there haven't been problems with federal grants

so far, so I anticipate

that we will have a surplus at the end of this year

and that we'll have another conversation about what to do.

And the conversation needs to be balanced with.

We can't hold onto it for no reason.

We have to have identified specific reasons

and we have to remember that are they one time

or they're gonna continue if they're gonna continue,

we've gotta bake them into the budget the following year

and not fall into a, a trap of trying

to do one time, one time funding.

And also, I know Andrew, you suggested,

is there a possibility of having those

funds that are turned back?

It's a bigger conversation with the select board,

the finance committee, a reserve fund

for debt relief, debt service, rather.

That is another conversation.

And that would come out of the, the turnback,

whatever is residual, whatever is left over.

I'm saying all of that to let the school committee know that

I think what's in the budget plan right now does meet the

identified program improvement

and investment needs

that our staff have proposed to the school committee.

And it's possible something may come up between now and June

and there may be an opportunity to talk about

what it is you want to do with that.

And it has to be in collaboration with, you know, your,

your other board members and and finance committee members

and certainly all within the, the context of, you know,

what the town, what the school committee will be

asking the town in the fall.

So I just wanted to provide that big overview.

I know I may have gotten some detail wrong,

I dunno if I got it wrong, but there's a

lot more detail into it.

I just wanted to provide that

and see if there are any questions about that

or about the amended budget request.

Thank you. In a short, sort of a follow up

from earlier presentation,

this was a lot and thank you for that.

Thank you for providing these updates, really being able

to highlight the, if they're gonna be called something in

the future, different program improvements

and how we're continuing to advance and innovate

and, you know, really think further

with our educational programming

and then hearing with the town manager earlier this evening

where we are in terms of our percentage increase

and if we're just under that 4%, that's great to hear

and how that all sort of fits in.

So, and the additional analysis regarding surplus.

So thank you for all of that.

If any school committee members have any follow up

questions, comments, reflections, almost just shared.

Michael,

Thank you and thank you Deanna.

I I know it's always a challenge when we talk about program

improvements and level of service

and over the years what we've tried

to do is just make clear when we're trying

to do something new and, and different, right?

'cause those are, those are the kinds of improvements

that require bigger investment.

Some of the things that you pointed out here are

improvements, but maybe I'd call some of 'em

as maintenance improvements.

We're taking things we're doing

and trying to make sure we can continue to do them well

by adding resources to them.

So it's not like we're, you know,

we're creating brand new things

and I think that was the,

the context in which we had used those terms.

But I think it's a good discussion to have

because level service kind of, i i is challenging I think

for a lot of folks and we don't want people

to think we're not making any improvements,

but there's a distinction between starting new programs

that require new and additional resources

and really keeping the programs that we were running

as effective and efficient

and, you know, productive as possible.

So that's I think one point that, that I would,

that I would make on that.

I guess the other thing, just to briefly mention,

since the town manager is still here over the last number

of years, we've really worked hard to

have our budget request

and our budget work always start with that 4% or below.

And you know, as Katie said for her side,

and I think that plus some good economic conditions have led

to pretty much multiple years of no drama where we were able

to vote a budget and town manager was able

to put together a budget and it all worked.

And I think, you know, we will continue that discipline,

but just fair to note that given the uncertainty

we could find ourselves, even

with the best work on both sides with some voting budgets

and then coming back and saying revenues aren't coming in.

We, we have some challenges.

That has been a number of years since we've had to do that.

I'm hoping that we won't be there again,

but I just want the community to be aware that, you know,

the fact that this is smooth doesn't mean

that there's not a lot of furious paddling going on

underneath or that some things can't upend that,

especially in today's very strange environment.

But hopefully we will, we will get through this.

Thank

You Michael. Matt,

you had a comment or question? Yeah.

Thank you Dan. Thanks for this information and update and,

and explaining some of the process that's helpful.

I, and I, I guess I feel like the,

the budget is really an opportunity for us

to communicate out what we believe in and what we value.

We are spending almost a quarter million dollars on

literacy, maybe more because we saw gaps in the data, we saw

that we could do better

and so we made some real significant

investments and changes.

And so I guess as we think about the budget

and investments, you know, maybe there's also a way

to almost like categorize them a little bit, not for now,

but this, a lot, a lot of these improvements are,

are we're supporting extracurricular

for supporting student experience.

We have literacy teaching and learning.

So I think it would be helpful also as a committee member

to understand what we're investing in and how much,

'cause it really reflects our beliefs

and what we want to do as a community

and there's a lot in here.

And so I, I just, I'll just share that to say I,

I like the direction of thinking about this as investment

and, and I think it's an opportunity for us to, to

communicate and discuss with each other

and family, students in the community

and the town about what we believe in matters

and this is what we're putting our money in.

So anyway, so thank you for that.

Thank you Matt. Any other comments, questions?

Okay, well thank you very much.

We look forward to the next couple of meetings.

We'll continue some discussion. Our public hearing.

We invite again community members to come.

We look forward to hearing from you

and to get to a vote later this month.

Okay, we now move on to our next agenda item,

which are final school committee comments.

Does anyone on school committee have any comments

that they'd like to make this evening?

Okay, well seeing and hearing none.

Is there a motion to adjourn? Tonight's meeting moved.

Second. Okay, that was a motion made by Michael, A second

by Liz.

We will come to a vote.

All those in favor of adjourning tonight Discussion.

A first discussion first of all, sorry about that.

I jumped the gun there. All those in favor?

Aye. Opposed? Abstentions.

That is a 7 0 0 vote ending On

that humorous note, we are adjourned.

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, the 13th.