WorkShop - Part 2 Meeting

No content available.

[9] SPEAKER_25: One of the next things is about revenue and the answer is the parcel tax, literally. Newark is the only city in the county of Alameda that does not have a parcel tax. That's a unique distinction, yes. You can either structure it with a flat tax or a graduated parcel tax. They can go anywhere from three to five to eight years. The district, what's really unique about a parcel tax is you structure it for the district yourself. You decide how you want to use the money, so it'll be a board decision. What types of things in the district do you want to see stronger of? You would structure how the money would be spent. It would totally be what the board decides and puts in the resolution to put it through. You also would probably go through a survey at the beginning to make sure the community would support it. The district can pay for that survey. You put on what you think you need, you put it on the survey, and see would people support it or not. And there are firms that will come in and do that for you. My history has been when you listen to them, you get real results. If you go against them, your results might not be as good.

[81] Nancy Thomas: We've always had, when we did the bonds, we've had grants from companies that are, you know, it's to their benefit.

[89] SPEAKER_25: Yes, that are going to benefit from it.

[91] Nancy Thomas: And a parcel tax, who benefits? Isn't it more difficult to get funds to run a campaign?

[98] SPEAKER_25: You get parents' donations. You get some learning organizations who donate. It's not as easy as a bond because they're not, you know, architects and things that will give to it. But you do get donations for it.

[112] Nancy Thomas: I think that speaks to things we've talked about in the past. If we had a robust, centralized foundation, educational foundation with a lot of our parents involved in it. They're the ones that go out knocking on doors and helping fund it and doing the door-to-door knocking. So it's kind of like a chicken and an egg. If you don't get the parents involved, it may be really difficult to run a campaign.

[139] SPEAKER_25: Yeah, you need to get the parents involved. And I have to say, I've been involved in many parcel tax campaigns where I was out on the phone surveys. I was out doing the walks. You know, teachers, you know, here in this district, I heard the teachers are very much in support of a parcel tax. So we have the teachers, the parents, the administrators. You know, you can have a ready, robust that support the district out there.

[162] SPEAKER_31: And our union president is supportive of the parcel tax.

[169] Nicole Pierce-Davis: to the right program.

[171] SPEAKER_25: Yes, I agree. And the voters will tell you what the right program is.

[176] Elisa Martinez: So again, I think I harped on this last time. Of course, conceptually, that's a great idea. But until we fix some of the structural issues, I mean, I think we're getting ahead of ourselves to think of how we would even fund this because we have to be able to articulate that you would be a responsible, you know, steward of that money. Absolutely. So I think, to me, that's really getting to the meat of, I think if we do that, I mean, I'm probably oversimplifying, but the rest of the job becomes so much easier to sell this. Yeah, I actually agree with you. Sorry for getting my soapbox, but I really just feel like, you know, every time we bring up parcel tax, I think that We just got to get through this other hard piece of fixing this.

[222] SPEAKER_32: And that's a good segue to go back to the reductions.

[223] SPEAKER_25: Because it's not going to come in right away. Yeah. It's a future thing. But the really good things is you could, the things you could put in there that can excite the community and bring the district. You know, STEAM coming in, helping with class size ratios, expanding intervention programs. you're going to want to see what the community is going to want to support, because that's the only type of campaign you're going to win. But you have to start some of these programs. If you already have the program and begin it, then they can say, hey, but they've already started and they need some help. And that's something where we have to work with educational services saying, what do our kids need here? Is it STEAM? What is it? But that's something very much for a future. You can only go out for a campaign once a year. And you are meeting with a financial advisor later this month to just talk about it.

[276] SPEAKER_31: Is that at a board meeting or which day? They're going to be presenting it on February 21st. At the board meeting? At a study session.

[288] SPEAKER_25: Like I said, we're not planning on it. It's a future thing that you might look at. The unknown right now is, I gave you a little piece of paper here because you may have some comments on it. Our demographer. The demographer hasn't been here very long, but literally planning the budget with the demographer's reports has not helped the district at this point. And CHI has had a discussion with them about it. And it's something that are going to be here in front of you. So if you have any questions, We have growth in this town. There are actually new houses. But the students don't seem to be realized in the district, as you would expect. Generally, a residential house should generate a few kids. And you don't seem to get those few kids. What is called a student yield is very low. He actually noted that. The student yield in Newark is very low, when you would expect much more. And we don't see it. Actually, where we're seeing a little bit of growth, is only in the elementary. We definitely don't see it in the high school. So the demographers are going to be here on February 21st. And if you have any questions for the demographer, if you put them on the sheets and we will tell the demographer what they need to answer to. We've already talked to them and said the board's not happy with your projections. We showed them and where you projected and then where we came in. So literally they were useless for our projections this year. And it cost us money. Yeah. And I don't know what was used at the beginning of this year. But whatever it was, it was 168 students off. And that's not a little bit. I mean, that.

[389] Nancy Thomas: We dropped it from, I remember Brian telling us, he dropped it down from what they said. So we didn't even go as high as they said. Yes. And it's still way up.

[401] SPEAKER_25: Yeah. It's very off. I mean, to be at the beginning of the year 168 projected and be under that, I mean, to be at that much low, that's not a good thing for a district to start off. You lost $1.8 million right off the gate.

[416] Nancy Thomas: Have we checked with the surrounding districts? A friend of mine said their district in Fremont was expecting 500, and they only got like half of that. I mean, it was a huge drop below what they projected. very large district, and people want to go to school in Fremont. If you look at our inter-district transfers, quite a few of them want to go to programs in Fremont, dual immersion and things like that, that they offer. And so even they fell far short. So we should probably look at that.

[453] SPEAKER_25: Well, we heard from the state that it was every district in the state is experiencing a decline right now.

[460] SPEAKER_32: So if you would please, any of your questions that you can give to us, put them down. We're going to send them to the monitor ahead of time. My question is, what happened? Why were you wrong? Yeah. So that's one of my questions, but please reinforce that. But we're going to send them or compile all your questions. We're going to email them over.

[476] Nancy Thomas: You were asking, questioning whether they're using the right.

[479] Bowen Zhang: Yeah, so I will say for the demographic projection, they were using the paywall data, right, to project harder. Yeah, that's what they said. all the new construction, the new addresses are located in new streets that were not created before. So from a school perspective, it's actually very easy to capture a student coming from a new housing, because the street name never existed before. So all of these area two and the central village area three, the streets will be created, so it's not that hard to capture a new student coming in. And given we already know the data from the city, how many new construction are there? So we can compute our own yield number for the demographic projection, rather than just borrow the number for Hayward

[521] SPEAKER_25: So write that down, because they actually noted that they used Hayward's numbers.

[525] Nancy Thomas: Yeah, well, yeah, and maybe we know more about our city and the environments than they do, compared, you know, and did they just pick it out of the hat?

[535] SPEAKER_25: That's not... No, they have factors they use. I mean, we sat there and listened and went through their factors, but the bottom line is you were wrong. And that's the concern for us.

[544] SPEAKER_32: And why should we continue with your firm? Why don't we just put an RFP and look at other DevOps?

[548] Ray Rodriguez: Yeah, if they look at, let's say, 1.5, you know, students. I think that there's a way, there'd be a way like a, you know, similar to a census where you go in and actually ask the question, who's actually living in the home? And maybe do our own, I don't know if that's something that's possible, but, and then you'll know how many school-aged children are actually, as opposed to just, you know, to me, not too many, you know, when you're talking about, you know, homes that are averaging 1.1, 1.2 million dollars.

[585] SPEAKER_25: It's something we need to ask the questions of demographers. To me, there's no excuse for them to have given you guidance that was so far off.

[593] Nancy Thomas: You looked at cohort survival, right? If we had used cohort survival, we still would not have predicted a loss of students, so would we have?

[604] SPEAKER_31: It was pretty close to what is actually a woman.

[611] Nancy Thomas: It would have predicted under 40 students down?

[615] SPEAKER_31: Right. But I did not factor in the new housing development. They factored in the new housing development. So they predicted that enrollment was going to increase. But I did not factor in the new housing development.

[625] Nancy Thomas: So you assume zero from that.

[628] SPEAKER_25: And it's often, when the houses come in, it takes five years for about students to come from it. They call it maturation. And there's a whole thing. The kids go through the school, and then they start going down. So there's a whole level that they analyze. Right now, you're going to see the demographer on the 21st. I want to be here. In Dublin, we actually got rid of our demographer, too, because he was under-projected. We kept getting hundreds more than we realized in our schools. That's what we want. We can give raises to teachers. It was much easier to give raises to teachers. OK.

[676] Jodi Croce: Right. OK.

[681] Carina Plancarte: School closure.

[683] SPEAKER_31: I know some of the board members want to discuss about the school closure. So this is school A. We're not going to name the name of the school that we're looking at. But this is the principal's salary, office manager's salary. This includes benefits as well, CalSTRS, CalPERS. medical benefits, office clerk, the librarian. It's going to come out to be about $426,000 at school A. Then also the infrastructure, gas, utilities, water and supplies, $67,000 in savings. So in essence, it's going to be about $500,000 in savings for school A. And that's going to be ongoing savings. Here's school B. This principle is thinking about clean pants and everything, 535,000. The office manager, 68,000. Custodian cost. So we'll be limiting all these positions or reducing, excuse me, these positions. It's going to cost the district, save the district about $401,000 plus the infrastructure, 67. So we'll get about 470,000 in savings.

[759] Ray Rodriguez: Yeah, and I don't agree with those numbers. For instance, people have the right to debunk. So a principal might decide to go back in the classroom. So then that would take it from the principal's salary to, let's say, $100,000. The office manager, those are classified that would have bumping rights, and they would go to other positions, where the person that they might be replacing might be at a much lower scale. If you do close down a school, you still have to maintain that property until you either rent it or you sell it. So there's still some cost there. Not as much as naturally when you're using it all the time.

[812] Nancy Thomas: What about the cost of the students? So students bring costs with them. So the larger class, they'll go to a school with larger numbers of students. So the classes might be able to be more full. They might be bringing their supplemental money with them and stuff like that. So they said anywhere from 500 to 800,000 is what other districts have said. Right.

[843] SPEAKER_31: So this is actual, right here, from last year, numbers. This is the infrastructure cost. This is current salaries of our administrators, office managers, and custodians.

[856] Nancy Thomas: So what member Rodriguez said is correct, you know, that there was bumping rights, and we might not realize that much of a savings. But there's other intangibles or difficult to measure things that are going to be beneficial that aren't factored into that 469.

[876] Ray Rodriguez: And then on the other side, you're assuming that if you close the school that the kids in the state, you know, you might lose 20% of the kids that decide, hey, I don't, you know, we're going to go elsewhere, you know, so.

[891] SPEAKER_32: There is a slide on pros and cons.

[892] SPEAKER_31: Yeah. So yes, so here's the pro that the district will save close to a million dollars if we close two schools. There's a breakdown of school A and a breakdown of school B. But the cons of this, if we close a school or two schools concerning parents, unlike you say, Mr. Rodriguez, parents are gonna take their kids out of our school district. and realignment of school boundaries. Again, that's further potential. You know what, I don't want my kids to go to that school. Why, when he or she should be going to this school. So they may decide to go to a private school instead. So, and then if we decide to close that school, then if a charter hears of it, then the charter school will come in. There's a potential that, give an example, we may lose 100 students. That's $950,000. So it's a wash of savings. And then in addition to that, in the outer years, they may get more students from our district. Then our district will be competing in addition to the private school that's around here, but also charter school.

[969] Nancy Thomas: There are dozens of articles with pros and cons. It's a terrible, difficult process to go through. There's just been a lot of districts in our area that have done it. We're lucky we don't have charter schools. A lot of them have closed schools because of charter schools. But it's getting to be more and more difficult for charter schools to open. And the state is putting a lot of pressure on them in terms of proving that they are viable. And charters are being denied where they weren't at a rate before. There's just a lot of dynamics there that we can add lots of bullets to both sides.

[1019] Ray Rodriguez: And you can also combine schools, where you might save on one administrator. But the school is still open. And then the way they share an administrator, where you have schools that are, let's say, 250 to 300, and you have one administrator. I know that's difficult on everybody, but the savings is probably half. And then you also have, if you do go to a school, you can do, I know Frankie had mentioned it, doing a magnet school, you know, a math and science, where that school would still be there open, but it would just be for math and science. An academy or something.

[1062] SPEAKER_31: It could be a really good option, the magnet school.

[1066] SPEAKER_32: And I agree, there's a lot that can be said of both sides. But one thing that we did see in all the research that I've done at least, one year is probably the fastest, and up to three years is kind of the time frame that they look at for closing the school. I don't see many that have done in less than that time frame. It takes a little bit.

[1083] Nancy Thomas: It takes a while. That's why, yeah, it's too late for next year, and maybe too late unless we start now for the year after.

[1091] Ray Rodriguez: Yeah, you're just not closing down a school. You're disrupting a school as a community. And it's a very hard decision.

[1101] SPEAKER_29: I think it is important just to know the time frame that it does take for this. Within the time frame that we are now, we need to look at concrete numbers that are really going to help the following year, because this is something that It's going to get projected out in two or three years.

[1119] Nancy Thomas: I question whether we have the capacity to do the right kind of job. The districts that have successfully done it, that I've looked at their plans, they have committees of 30 people. They have detailed drawings that they present of attendance areas and the impact on this school if they close this school. So they talk about all the schools. And I don't think we have the staff to even put the stuff like that together, and if you have... The demographer would work with a lot of that. Yeah, but then that costs money, too, right? Yes, it does.

[1153] Ray Rodriguez: But combining the schools is something you could do right away, is my understanding, right? I mean, that, you know, you can give somebody a, you know, the March 15th or whatever it is, deadline, and that's something that could be done right away, closing the school.

[1169] SPEAKER_29: Question in regards to that, would that not involve any... community involvement in regards to notification and committees, kind of like Member Thomas was talking about, a combination school?

[1181] Ray Rodriguez: I don't know. I'm thinking about that.

[1184] SPEAKER_31: I think we would have a town hall meeting to notify, inform the parents.

[1187] Ray Rodriguez: Well, yeah, we did a little bit of that when we did the, you know, Burr's Grove, you know, when we did that. and didn't go as well as we wanted it to.

[1197] SPEAKER_29: That's kind of what I'm asking because I think the community would need to be involved.

[1202] Nancy Thomas: Yeah, the capacity to do the right kind of job hasn't been demonstrated.

[1208] Elisa Martinez: But I think, again, it's the, what are we trying to do? Again, being a parent in that condition, I think we weren't very transparent as to the objective of the combination of the school. I mean, in this situation, if we're really after the savings and then we At the end of the day, you know, this is the first time we're actually kind of having a serious conversation about the possibility. We know it's not a short-term thing, but frankly, we've been shying away from even having a discussion. So we need to go do the homework, and we don't have to go spend that external money right away. We can start to get our community a committee, and I'm not sure you all have to educate me on how we would start that process. And then maybe we get it far enough to say, okay, hey, we need to consider this seriously, then let's start spending some potential, some external money. But, I mean, I thank you for sharing these numbers. Like I said, nobody wants to be talking about it, but I think, you know, we do need to, this is still just the number. What else do we need to go uncover?

[1272] Bowen Zhang: It's important to have the conversation. Is there any possibility or potential of land loss due to merging schools or closing schools? from a district perspective?

[1283] SPEAKER_32: Not necessarily. I know that the charters would have preferential access if we were to sell property or to vacate a property. Not necessarily, but part of it is thinking, what would we use that property for? Generally, a building that's standing there unused over a few years, it starts costing you money to keep it closed. unless you demolish it, you just have a lot. So there's a demolition cost that usually what happens in the industry. So yeah, I don't know. I think that's something they would factor into this plan.

[1322] Bowen Zhang: Because we're located in the edge of Silicon Valley, right? And land is the most precious assets right here. So we need to hold on to as much as possible. And Fremont, in the past 10 years, they probably also initially had this working class moving out, and new engineers coming in, and they have this dip in enrollment. They closed school, they sold six schools, they closed six schools, they sold a land. Right now, the people, the new engineers have children coming to school, they start overloading, and realizing they sold six lands for much cheaper here than they sell today. They could have held on to it.

[1360] SPEAKER_32: The other thing that we talked about earlier, we had another part of the conversation, not so much school closure, but school restart. where you would take a school that's been declining enrollment and you start opening from grade one and you sunset the old school over three to four years and you bring in a new school like a STEAM or a bilingual program that phases in over years. So you phase the old one out, the new one in, have an application process and a new program. Those are other ways that we could attract enrollment or do a STEAM or a Mandarin or Farsi dual language. So those are some things that, other things I've seen schools do in this scenario of, hey we have a school here, we kind of, we're thinking about closing it, but if we did a restart of the school and had the staff rally around what would our new identity be and how can we move something forward that is really progressive and something that's new. So it's that idea of blending a magnet program with a restart kind of idea. Then they do a phase in, phase out, and the whole time the campus gets shared. And there's even a point where they're midpoint where they might have two principles, but that phases out over time. But those are all things that I think longer term that we need to talk about. But typically to answer, remember, Martinez's question, what we've put together is kind of a cross section of a research action group to start really analyzing the pros and cons and at least get to the place where they say, okay, now we need help from an outside person. We've kind of gone as far as we can go with this, and we presented it to the board. But let's, you know, this is what we know, and then the board would decide, okay, yes, we want to invest in outside Nevada for it to help you, or, yeah, maybe we don't want to do that right now.

[1465] SPEAKER_25: And just to keep in mind, it isn't just charter schools that come in. Sometimes the city may want your land. Oh, we have to sell it below market. Yes, absolutely. And we had that in Dublin. We wanted to close the school. The city wanted it. So we had the city and charter schools wanting it.

[1481] Nancy Thomas: And we'll take back McGregor from them.

[1490] SPEAKER_31: Next step, timeline. I'm going to bring it back to Beverly so she can discuss about some of the timelines.

[1497] SPEAKER_25: You have the letter in front of you from the county. They're expecting something from us, saying the board is going to agree to some cuts. This is going to be at the next board meeting for you, the resolution. You haven't made the decision yet, but that you are going to cut at least $2.2 million. So this is just for you to look at the resolution. It'll be at the next board meeting. This is something that we need to tell the county that you're going to agree to make the cuts, even though you may not have decided on what the cuts are. So one of the things is March 15th is the real deadline. I don't know if this district will need any layoffs, but we need to let people know what we're going to do at the county. I would hope by the February 21st meeting, we'll have an idea of what we need to do. But any teachers, and I'm not saying any teachers will be laid off at this point, But if it had to be out there, we need to know by the end of February so HR can get there and get the notices out to people that they could be changing schools or they could be laid off.

[1566] Nancy Thomas: You're saying temps and floats, we might have enough of them? Yes. It's possible, yes.

[1571] Bowen Zhang: We really can absorb 13 through nutrition.

[1574] Leonor Rebosura: Yeah.

[1575] SPEAKER_25: So we don't think any layoffs will be necessary. Yes.

[1579] Bowen Zhang: What is the average nutrition number?

[1581] SPEAKER_32: There may be one exception. at the high school because of the content. I don't know yet.

[1587] Bowen Zhang: Well, what is the average attrition number per year?

[1593] SPEAKER_31: It varies. Last year it was like about 28. Correct me if I'm wrong, Carol, the attrition last year was about 28?

[1603] Jodi Croce: I think it was a little bit higher.

[1607] SPEAKER_31: A little bit higher? Maybe 30, 32.

[1609] Elisa Martinez: How many, and that's not, I'm sorry, go ahead.

[1612] Nancy Thomas: Well, I'm just curious about how many teachers are in the first year of our induction program this year?

[1620] Nancy Thomas: And that's our students in it?

[1627] Nancy Thomas: A total of 20 for year one and year two teachers. So, wow. We hired 20 new teachers even though we had to lay off teachers last year. I don't know. I'm not sure. Well, I know they were on the list. We didn't lay them off, but we had potential March 15th notices that we were talking about.

[1656] SPEAKER_25: So there's a timeline involved here. The county is asking for us to let them know by about the 15th that you are serious about contemplating, that you're serious about the cuts. Basically, remember, when we're planning a budget, you're not planning one year, you're planning three, and that's what the county's looking at. Can you be solvent the way you are ongoing? So you may not think you need to do it for one year, but you have to plan for the third year out. And if you look at this thing, if we don't do anything, that third year out, we're gonna have a real problem. Yes.

[1694] Nancy Thomas: I remember, you know, Ms. Terry Ryland telling us that Okay, we have a balanced budget for this year, which I'm wondering if we do because of all the increases. But next year you're going to have to cut a million. So, I mean, are we going to talk about 2.1 million this year? Does that mean we have to cut more next year?

[1715] SPEAKER_25: Or 2.2? If you cut this year, this is if there's no cuts. Right now we're saying, right now we're recommending $2.2 million in cuts. And then we'll see how far. Are we going to decline again? If we decline further, we may need to do more cuts. But right now, we know we can't cut everything in one year. FCMAC said that over two years, you need to look at four to five million. So we're saying we're doing half of that right now, and we're hoping to have some growth coming. But you may have to do cuts again next year.

[1744] Nancy Thomas: That's very possible. So you're saying we're going to have to, if we have a $4 million program, and we cut 2.2, we're going to have to take two point 2 million out of, or 2 million out of our fund 17, out of our reserves.

[1762] SPEAKER_25: We don't want to do that. We're not going to be using one-time money. We're trying to have a balanced budget with the revenue that we have. I mean, the purpose is that we work within our revenue. That's what a district that's balanced is.

[1773] Nancy Thomas: Okay, I understand. I thought you were saying something different. There's multi-year protection.

[1778] Elisa Martinez: Yes. Okay, I'm sorry. So this one assumes Steady or a decline, I couldn't remember.

[1786] SPEAKER_27: Decline.

[1787] Elisa Martinez: Decline by 4. Sorry, I couldn't remember.

[1790] SPEAKER_29: Thank you. I just have a question for clarification. Basically, February 21st, we need to say we are committed as a board, we are showing our commitment that we are going to reduce X amount of teachers or X amount of positions.

[1810] SPEAKER_29: doesn't necessarily, and maybe our superintendent, or we might have some identified positions, doesn't necessarily mean those people are gonna, those positions are gonna be removed because we still have to wait for attrition. No, we know some of the attrition already.

[1827] SPEAKER_32: Okay. But the sooner we get the number of positions to human resources and through Ed Services, we'll begin identifying what are the right people and what are the right positions. So we can maintain programming and still keep going forward.

[1845] SPEAKER_25: You're very lucky in your district that you have that much attrition, because it just means the position doesn't need to be replaced, but that will need to be looked at and what you need.

[1861] SPEAKER_32: in order to feel comfortable making that decision. And then we collected some of the questions thus far. Do you feel we need to have another study session next week? Or what do you feel we need to do?

[1869] Bowen Zhang: There is this one item in this year's budget on the professional services and consulting part that looks like we significantly under budgeted by the previous CBO. And that column might be costing, I remember last year it budgeted at $7.9 million. And we're projecting $9.7 million this year. So that's $1.8 million difference. I think the bulk of that is sped, but we could check on what exactly that was. And if that part is not being under control, then even though we cut 2.2 million, this one category alone, you know, the other 1.7 million, you end up only saving a couple million.

[1904] SPEAKER_31: So we'll be looking at all these services, the 5,000 object code.

[1908] Nancy Thomas: Yeah. That's one of the questions I touched on when we had a conversation. And we're going to come back to you next. Things like, yeah, I mean, how could we have been so far off on special ed transportation? And $875,000 added to the budget for software license fees. Those are the things that need to shout for an explanation.

[1932] SPEAKER_25: We'll do that.

[1935] SPEAKER_32: I guess my question is, do you want to have that study session in advance of the 21st? I would think you would, so that on the 21st you're not seeing it for the first time and then voting on it. So that's kind of the question you're asking. Maybe we do it in our formal meeting, but that's something that I think would be helpful for us to be able to plan towards. Is the next Thursday study session just on budget, or do you guys want to do it?

[1963] SPEAKER_27: I have a question.

[1964] SPEAKER_29: Sorry about this, because I do understand Member Thomas' questions, and they definitely need to be addressed.

[1970] Bowen Zhang: The 600-th alimony? I just remember that one as well. So we need to verify that 600-th alimony is transferrable. Oh, for the LCAP. Not the one that we need to be able to use.

[1985] Nancy Thomas: So I do understand. Right, I know that one, yeah.

[1987] SPEAKER_29: So I do understand that this needs to be addressed. And again, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is separate from trying to move forward with these steps. Yeah, these are different type of questions.

[2000] SPEAKER_31: Yeah, it's just a board. And a lot of them are special education questions. that again, the district actually contributes so much amount of money to special education every year contribution. And special education, there are some, we have some severe to moderate students that we have to outsource.

[2024] Nancy Thomas: Yeah, I understand special ed. My thought is that we've talked about filling classes so that we save money by filling classes. That's a big dollar amount. What we haven't looked at is all of that, maybe that you consider it small amounts, but up 80,000, 100,000, 200,000, because we have started programs with one-time money, and we haven't monitored their expenses and whether they're cost effective. And so we've been mum about programs. We've started programs. We've increased the size of some of our programs. and we aren't looking at scaling back or re-looking at them to see if we still need them or what kind of cost benefit we're getting out of them. It's easy to start programs and in this district they die slowly because they're not used, because they're not effective or they, I don't know. I just think we need to be looking at everything, not just

[2092] Ray Rodriguez: No, I agree, but that's an ongoing conversation. But on the 21st, the resolution is going to be on there, and then we'll have discussion. And then, basically, we have to let the county know that we're willing to make, based on what was on here.

[2108] Nancy Thomas: OK, but I'd like to know that it's more than just what's on the list that we will look at. As part of coming up with that $2.2 million, we're going to continue working after that. We say, yes, we're going to do it. We're going to continue looking, but we're going to look more broadly, I think.

[2123] SPEAKER_25: No, I think you're going to have to, to be honest with you. And it does take a bit longer to look at each program. How effective is it? I mean, is it us saying what's effective? We have to talk to the educators, to Assistant Superintendent of Ed. What is working for the kids? It takes study to say what's going on. on it, how much money are we spending on it. I think it's something we're going to have to look at and that's what I told you in our meeting yesterday. We need to look at it because we're probably going to have to consider more cuts next year if the enrollment continues to decline like it's indicated right now. So but for right now, we need ongoing expenditure reductions and you guys haven't been making the cuts as you should have all along. So there's no doubt that these cuts need to be made now.

[2168] Nancy Thomas: But there wasn't 2.2 million on the list. Yeah, there is.

[2172] SPEAKER_25: Is there? With the 600 coming from the CSR. Oh, yeah.

[2178] SPEAKER_32: OK. So back to my question. Do you want to have a study session next week to do one more even deeper clarifying of the recommendations?

[2189] SPEAKER_32: What else do you guys need from Brown?

[2194] SPEAKER_29: I have a question in regards to that. If we do have another session. Like you said, for me, what different information are we going to hear than what we've already heard here?

[2207] SPEAKER_32: Other than answering the questions you guys have brought to our attention tonight, not a lot that's new.

[2213] SPEAKER_29: Because I feel, and again, this is just me, I feel like you guys have given us all the information that we need. I feel like you guys have given us recommendations. And I think that now you're just asking us to move forward. I'm just wondering, you know, again, I understand the questions and I do understand this is important information that needs to be addressed. But I think it's something that is going to, we should, like Member Thomas said, should continue addressing because we don't want this to continue to affect our district. But I don't want this to keep on going on. I don't know how the other members feel.

[2248] Nancy Thomas: I don't want to have another meeting that's only information and we're not touching on anything other than what we've already said.

[2256] Ray Rodriguez: I think, again, we're going to have the resolution on there, there'll be discussion, and then there'll be an open session, and then we just move on from there. Because to really get into it now would be a broad approach. we are going to have it at the next session. And then in the meantime, just like Member Thomas asked questions, any one of us can ask for additional information.

[2279] SPEAKER_25: So you want a meeting next week to just talk about the questions? No. No. Okay.

[2283] Nancy Thomas: No, but if you can get it to us in writing, that would be nice. Yeah. Were some of these errors in coding, or were they... what was it for? That's all.

[2295] Ray Rodriguez: I think a Friday update would be good.

[2303] SPEAKER_32: or something that concludes our portion of the study session?

[2306] Ray Rodriguez: There was one thing that wasn't on there. Yeah, a lot of things on there. And I know it's something that, remember, Thomas and I, we've been going back since Jan Schaefer was on the board, is other than solar, as far as revenue, is employee housing. And it's something that, I mean, we are blessed And it's something that we've talked about. But at some point, that can also help you with retention. And also, it could be a revenue source. And I don't know the criteria there. I know you offer it to your employees first and then other public entities. know, to help with housing, you know, the affordable housing.

[2367] SPEAKER_32: So, I mean, you know... And we did look at that, like, three years ago, two years ago.

[2374] Elisa Martinez: Conversion of a site. Right. Yeah, that's something that I'd like to... I know it's the longer term, but I think... But that's okay, let's add it to the list. I would like to, you know, I think, you know, before wrapping up, the idea of getting that committee, or you called it a group, I forget what you called it, I mean, because a lot of, there's always going to be a ton of questions, expenditure questions, but if we're, you know, really now, it's going to take a while. You know, how do we get the right committee going, you know, with a clear agenda of deliverables now, right? So, I mean, that's something, like, how do we actually get that going? Do we have to, you know?

[2420] SPEAKER_32: It's pretty simple. The board asked me to do it, and I do it. So even more simple than that, during the portion where you do reporting out, you can do it with your board members, you bring it up, and you can create it. Can you guys start looking at that? If you want me to create it, that's one thing, and that's easier. So that's pretty simple. But I even can do it just based on if there's agreement in here. That's easy to start.

[2446] Nancy Thomas: I think another thing, I hope that I hope you're capturing the requests that are being made. Not just today, but at the end of the meetings when people ask for board requests and to make sure that we calendar stuff or at least tell the person requesting it that we don't want to do it. You know, I think there's a lot of things that might play into looking at, programs and effectiveness that could be on agendas, that we can start understanding more, especially with the new board members, understanding the history of some of the programs we have, and some of the costs over time, and the history of how they were generated, and maybe the ongoing cost of them. Because I think, you know.

[2500] SPEAKER_25: The revenue that comes on, the expenditures, how they weigh, cost benefit.

[2506] Nancy Thomas: Yeah, I think, you know, That will only help us as we look for more reductions, because the more reductions are going to allow us to give increases to our employees and retain them.

[2520] SPEAKER_32: And I would just say, in my opinion, the instability and the high percentage of attrition is one of the big things I would point to about program stabilization. If you keep hiring new teachers every year and keep bringing new people every year, you start getting implementation fatigue. And then so that base salary and that benefits package, that matters. And I think that that's how we can stabilize things. But that takes time, and we have to work with our partners to try to stabilize that. But that's a bigger factor. And so that's something we need to consider. OK? OK. I think we have a pretty good idea, then. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[2566] Ray Rodriguez: So we can start, you said 6, can we start the closed session a little earlier?

[2573] SPEAKER_29: I mean we have a year.

[2577] Ray Rodriguez: We'll take a five minute break and then, or do we just go to closed session right now? Take a five minute break, okay.

[2601] SPEAKER_27: you

No minutes available.