Board of Education Meeting

All right. Good evening everyone. This is the financial workshop of the Downers Grove School District 58 Board of Education here on Monday, January the 26, 2026 at 700 p.m. at the Downers Grove Civic Center. This meeting is being live streamed for the public on the Village of Downers Grove's YouTube channel. Melissa, will you please call roll? >> Member Bernard >> here. >> Member Do >> here. >> Member Ellis >> here. >> Member Hannis is absent. Member Ol >> here. >> Member Thomas is absent. Member Hughes >> here. Tonight, members of the audience will have an opportunity to provide public comment to the board later on in the agenda. The board asks anyone wishing to comment to please fill out a card. They're over there on that table near the front door. Please indicate the topic that you would like to address and then place it in that basket. Uh we have allotted 30 minutes for public comment tonight. All right, we're going to start off as we always do with the pledge of allegiance. If everyone would please rise. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> All right. Tonight is our financial workshop. So, I'd like to welcome up Dr. Gregory Harris. Good evening, members of the board. Um, tonight I'd like to um set the tone of the conversation we're going to have tonight u by giving some background information around uh the current financial state of the district and basically the impetus for the conversations that we're having around cuts for next year. Um, as the board is well aware of of many of the facts in this presentation, um, there's many things we've been talking about over many different meetings. I am happy to go in more depth or or um, explain anything in more detail anytime you wish me to. Don't feel um, shy about interrupting me at any time. Um, first of all, just the background, the big picture is that there are, I guess, three cracks in the foundation of the district from a financial point of view. Um, the first one is that the district is having a hard time balancing its budget. And as a matter of fact, according to the um the FY2025 audit that was just uh presented to the board at the last regular meeting, um it at the end of the fiscal year 2025, which ended on June 30th of 2025, um that the district's expenditures over revenue was $1.4 million. So, um, as and as the board is well aware, in the summer of 2025 when I came on and as your CSBO, um, it was a challenge for me and for the rest of the administrative team to present a a balanced budget to the board of education at the September adoption. Um, understanding how important that was. There was still a lot of conversations and a lot of um, uh, a lot of exercise that had to be done in order to achieve that goal. Um but generally speaking, our expenditures are increasing significantly and our revenue just is not. So balancing the budget and our and our struggles to do so is is the first of the three main problems. The second of the three main problems is is fund balance which is related to our to deficit spending. Um our fund balances took a $ 1.4 million drop um in at the end of FY25 alone. Um, and when your fund balances are low are lowering, it makes it harder to um meet the the May low cash point. Um, every year we we rely on a a healthy reserves um in order to make our way through the fiscal year with from a cash standpoint. We get a lot of cash at the beginning of the year and then we get a lot of cash at the end of the year. And um generally speaking, we need a we need a certain uh ser um amount in reserves at the start of the year so that when we get to April and May, we don't run out of cash because we do receive so much of our annual revenue in June, which is um a point in time that is past when many of our u obligations are due in terms of accounts payable or payroll. Thirdly, um despite having a balanced budget this year, uh the um board of education, the school district has not been able to put any money into investing in in the future of our of our buildings. Um despite the fact that um we have spent tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of million dollars over the last couple years on on construction projects at the school, um the the referendum was was not um as broad in scope as it could have been. Um, if you recall when the board of education put the referendum question on the ballot, it was July of 2022 and in July of 2022 CPI was running at about 8.5% and the national average for gasoline was $5 a gallon. So, um, the board of education realized that the the impact of the referendum had to be modest. So, the the board of could not go and ask for every dollar they um that they wanted to get from the community. So they had to scale these the scope of this referendum back and therefore there's a lot of work that needs to be done um outside of the referendum when all the referendum uh construction projects are completed. There's a lot of work left to be done and so um we have to be able to afford that with some of our our tax dollars from and the money has to come from our operating budget. And conceptually, the board has identified a number of $750,000 that it would like to allocate towards construction, um, new roofs, etc. every single year to make sure that once all the referendum work is completed and our buildings look great and they're they feel new and fresh, but we are able to keep them that way. Um, so, um, the the the three cracks that I discussed, the question is how do we get there? So, I'm going to talk about our revenue um from our three main sources, local, state, and federal. First, I want to talk about our local dollars. Um during the pandemic, the um corporate personal property replacement tax was something tax was something that uh kind of took everybody by surprise. Um around 2021, 2022, um CPPRT just kind of blew up and it doubled, which which for the for a school district like um district 58 could be hundreds of thousands or or seven figures. And everybody was really excited and everybody was thinking this was this was the wave of the future. We're going to start getting all this revenue and then the state kind of backtracked on us and um they said no there was there was we got a little bit too generous with that CPPRT money and we have to scale it back. So while while we were we were hopefully expecting a lot of additional revenue from this one local source, it turned out to be um kind of a mirage and that was something that took again a second surprise and that was um something that that has hit the the district's bottom line just that that reduction in CPPRT. It wasn't didn't last long, but it's something that we're still um feeling today. And and it's very difficult to budget for now because um we don't know if it's going to u just kind of stay flat or if the state's going to kind of pull the rug out from us. Uh once again, um interest rates are also dwindling, not significantly. Um but as you know, if you if you've been paying attention to the new the federal the news, the Federal Reserve has been um generally every few months um ratcheting down the rates by 25 basis points. And uh this year our re our um our investment revenue um estimating between 700 and $800,000. Uh I don't think it's going to be this good again um next year or or anytime in in the near future. Um and the last piece here that I want to discuss is uh CPI. again with with a record high inflation in the in the in the earlier part of this decade. Uh that was um that has since cooled and with dwindling interest rate sorry with dwindling cor um consumer price index uh it's it went from 7 to 6 and a half to 3.4 to 2.9 now it's at 2.7 and that money that that figure 2.7% is used to calculate our our new revenue from our property taxes. And so when that number goes down, um, our our taxpayers are happy, but that also means that we get less money from our taxpayers to to pay for our needs as a school district. On the state side, this is there are several sides on the slides on the state. There's there's much to be discussed here. Um, the first thing I want to discuss is evidence-based funding model. This is a um, the way that the district has been funded by the state um, since about 2017. Um at the when when EBF or the evidence-based funding model was per first put into existence, the school district was a tier three um out of four. The and the way the funding model works is that um when you hear about new money going to school districts, it's most of it's going to the tier one and the tier two districts. A very small amount goes to the tier three districts and statistically nothing goes to the tier four districts. Um, up until 20 uh I want to say 2022, the district was a tier three district. That means we were getting some new money in EBF every year. Uh, but since 2023, the district the district has been a tier four district, which means we're getting almost nothing in EBF. And that that significant funding source is something we would like to see growing, but it's going to be most likely flat for uh the foreseeable future. Um also I'm going to discuss in a little bit more detail um the proration to our mandated categoricals. Um this uh mandated categoricals are um generally speaking I'm when I'm talking about that talk about what the state reimbures us for for regular transportation for specialed transportation and for private facility tuition. Um although those costs are going up significantly for us especially transportation um the amount that we're re we're being reimbursed by the state is being um prorated and just proration in a nutshell. Um >> Greg before we get into the proration >> if you kind of look at those two slides for local and state the the five bullets which one has the the largest relative impact out of the five bullets? Um, it's definitely not it's definitely be on the state side because um I mean I would I'm going to have a couple slides on on EBF and I have a couple slides on mandated categoricals. Um I would say it's pretty close between those two. Um I'm going to discuss um I'm going to show you a couple examples and um kind of price them out. Uh, but I would say if we had one ability to change something, if we had one ability ability to um advocate for the school district, it would be to to put more money into the mandated categoricals. That's what that's what we're asking for through our our legislative group anyway. Um, because we've seen how much our transportation costs are going up and they have gone from in the two millions to in the seven to the seven millions in a matter of um five or six years. And if so, if we were getting um more money from the state to to cover those costs, I think we'd be in a much different position today. >> Yeah, I would piggy back off that as well. Um and the mandated categoricals really hit the collar counties like DuPage extremely hard. The reason for that is most of the districts in DuPage are going to find themselves in a tier 4 designation, meaning that you are not going to be getting really any money um from the evidence-based funding model. And so we rely on the categorical uh reimbursements from the state and if those were paid in full uh we would have so much more money available to us. But because those are not those are still mandated things like transportation, special education, transportation, uh special education in general when we're not being reimbursed um to the fullest by the state, that money has to come out of our education fund. um where other districts who um are also experiencing proration, but let's say they find themselves in tier one or tier two in the evidence-based funding model, they're at least getting um an influx of new evidence-based funding model. So, every year the state puts $300 million into the evidence-based funding model. So, they're getting that money. What Greg said, um you know, statistically, tier four districts don't get anything. 99% of the new money, that $300 million that the state puts in goes to tier one and tier 2 districts. the other 1% is divided amongst all the tier three and the tier four districts. So mandated categoricals are the biggest issue that we face in the state >> and specifically the uh of that final 1% that goes at tier three and tier four districts um 90% of that 1% goes to the tier three districts and so 10% of 1% goes to school districts like us. That's that's why our our new EBF money this year was uh $4,000 on a on a $3.5 million budget. Um so I want to discuss about discuss pration a little bit. Um just I think it's really important to to color um paint a picture for the community about the the delletterious effects of pration on district 58. Uh so here's just my my my silly little slide I came up with here. So if I gave all of you 10 $10 and there's only seven of you here tonight, so that's probably good news for me. if I gave orthough there's only five out of the seven here tonight. But um you know I'm borrowing $10 from each of you and but I only have $50 to pay you back. Um that means I'm only going to pay you back with $7.14. But the next year I am borrowing $11 from each of you and I only I have I have more money, but I'm not keeping pace. So I have $53 to pay you back. You're all getting $757. You might say, "Okay, great. I got an extra 43 uh over what I got last year." Um, still wish Greg had g me a whole dollar back, but I at least got a little bit more. But the only problem is um is you gave me an extra dollar and I gave you a smaller percent. So each of you received 71.4% of your dollar in the first year and um in the second year each of you um only received 68.8%. So you're you're loaning out the same amount of money, but you're getting less back. In our case, we are spending more money and we're getting a smaller percentage back. So, we're getting we're getting kind of hurt both ways, but I'm going to go into a much more detail here. Um, this is a graph that represents um just one of our mandated categoricals. I chose special ed transportation because this is actually our our most costly of our um mandated categoricals. >> What do you mean by most costly? >> Um just raw numbers. >> So, this we spend like $ three and a half million dollars on on special ed. I think probably regular ed is in the I would say probably like three $3 million. So this just this is the big of the mandated categoricals. This is the biggest piece of the pie. >> Okay. And then just dollar amount approximately for like special ed education private facilities. What's that? >> I would say um private facility tuition is probably I think it's less than a million. Um >> so 331 or kind of >> Yeah, I would say that's about fair. Three and a half 31. Um so this is um our expenditures versus our revenue over the last five fiscal years. Um and you can see uh in the blue the blue line is our expenditures and the red line being the revenue. You can see that in fiscal year 2021 the gap between what we paid and what we're eventually reimbursed is is fairly narrow or at least relatively narrow compared to what it is in FY 2025. So as you can see our costs increasing significantly. the amount that the state is reimbursing is staying kind of flat. And so what we have to do, what we have no other choice but to do is to divert money away from other other expenditures to make sure that we're covering our our transportation costs. And when we did the levy in at the December board meeting and the the November and the December board meetings, I was careful to make the point a couple times, we have to we have to increase our levy into fund 40, which is our transportation fund, and take money away from fund the educational fund just to make sure that there's more money um enough money in there to to pay our bills um this fiscal year and next. So, you know, that's that's that I I I I I say that a lot because that to me as a as a parent, I mean, I believe that transportation is a service that we should be providing, but that's that's money we're taking away from other educational programming um that benefits all all students and putting it towards towards busing. Um so that the impact on on on 58 and uh from proration is that in the last five years we've talked many times about how transportation costs especially have skyrocketed since the pandemic. There are many factors for that. Um gasoline costs in the early part of this decade. Um driver shortages. um the IHC, the interim housing center, and and now that our now our our homeless transportation costs have have significantly ballooned, but over the last five years, just special education transportation alone has increased by 164%. While our state reimbursements have increased by only 54%. And when you're talking about millions of dollars, you're talking about a significant chunk of dollars that we're we're we're losing in reimbursements. Um, I calculate that if District 58 were reimbursed this year for our special ed transportation at the exact same rate that we were reimbursed last year, this year alone, we have an extra $264,000 in revenue. And again, that is one of our three main mandated categoricals. And that's just one fiscal year. But that amount right there is sufficient to hire three new teachers and then some. Um the district's five-year uh forecast um that we presented to the board of education in December um indicates that this problem assumes this problem will get worse for us. Um there are already signs looking looking to um the state's budgeting process for next year that uh the the powers that be down in Springfield or we'll be we'll be putting no new money into mandated categoricals or at least there's there's suggestions that that's going to be the case which just means that we're going to be um our our at best our our reimbursements from the state are going to stay flat while our costs continue to go up by CPI or more actually more than CPI. I think we budgeted I think we we assumed um our transportation costs are going to increase by four to four and a half percent every year for the next five years. Um this is um using the assumptions from the 5-year plan. This chart um shows the impact of pration on the five-year plan on our five-year planning. Um the the blue lines there are how much we expect our special ed transportation cost to increase uh yearbyear. um in in next year which would uh school year 2026 is also known as fiscal year 2027. So in fiscal year 2027 which begins on July 1st of this year um we expect we'll spend about $3.2 million in in special ed costs for transportation um that will increase to about $3.8 million um by fiscal year 2031. However, the red line at the bottom you see just stays flat and and the flatness of that line illustrates the problem which is we're spending more and more and we are not getting any new revenue to cover that. So we have no other choice but to use other revenue sources like our property taxes to cover that. Now, if new money was allocated by the state um in the in the coming years sufficient to reimburse the district in um in the future fiscal years at the same rate as we were reimbursed just last year um over the five years from fiscal year 2027 to 2031, the district will receive an additional $2.4 million over a 5year period. So that's works out to roughly $500,000 a year, which is again six, seven teachers salaries and benefits. >> And as I shared with the board in last week's update, um ISBY did make their budget request for next uh school year. And what they have requested is that proration stays the exact same amount as it is this year. We're hoping that the governor's office doesn't reduce that further. So that's why that line stays consistent year-over-year. Uh because that's what the state board is indicating that they're going to be asking for. But when you say that, you're talking about the proration rate that would require them putting additional dollars into the pool. And what you're kind of alluding to is that that may end up staying flat. >> We don't we don't have any reason to believe they're going to put any additional dollars into the into the MCAT funding pool. So when we talk about and and I think this is important to clear up when we talk about um the request of ISBY to just say all right we understand that we're in this proration cycle but if we're at 68% let's stay at 68% so at least start increasing incrementally to to keep some level of growth in there but we don't even see that happening at this point so we could continue to see that percentage dwindle >> correct >> and I and and you'reing to it. And I think it's incredibly important for us to talk about the compounding effect that this has. We always we all talk to our kids about investing early and and the the power of compounding interest. >> We know you talk to your kids about that. I'm sure >> um but the the the the general concern I have in here is the inverse, right? If they're hitting us back with reimbursements at a deficit, you know, in in what you were, you know, in the example that you gave with us, right? We were $2.86 short in that first year, but now we're $6.29 because it's compounding on top of each other. And that's one thing if I if I gave you $21, but it's it's a it's a completely different thing when we're talking about millions of dollars here and in services that we have to provide. And I'm just really concerned obvious obviously that's why we're here today, but you know um about how this aligns with the next five years if we don't even see the proration rate um holding. Obviously, we're going to continue to advocate, but um I mean, you talked about CPI having an impact of not allowing us uh to grow, but low CPI should be a good thing because it should mean that our our prices are correct are stabilizing. >> But my understanding from the conversations that we've had is is in certain markets like transportation, we are still not seeing that even though gas prices and some of those things have come down. >> Yeah. the general cost there are not >> the board of education signed signed a 5-year deal with first student as I recall in May or June and the the escalators are built in there all in the force for five years >> and and again as we've spoken at previous board meetings it's not a matter of simply just well let's go out to bid and get a different transportation provider they're all at that rate or or higher because what's happened since the pandemic um I remember my first year as a superintendent um in Cook County and we were trying to find ways of how are we going to get to $15 an hour, right? Um because that was the new wage law. The pandemic blew right past that. And so, you know, 10 years ago, bus drivers their their wages that bus drivers commanded were were so much lower. Now, they've almost doubled. And so, all of that increased cost in transportation is because of the labor. And that that's the problem that we're in. So, it's not a matter of of going out and just, you know, to the open market and and rebidding everything, although we always do that. Um, even if you were to rebid, you're going to see all the companies are up at that level. >> Okay. Thank you. And one other point just to make here is um I I do believe that there is some political pressure building at least within DuPage County to um rattle some cages down in Springfield and get the attention of some people that um this isn't something that's going to be good for schools just to kind of ignore MCAT for the next five years. I'm not I'm not 100% convinced that over the next five years it's that there is going to be no new money put into man mandated categoricals. Um, but that's that's the assumption anyway. And and the reason why I'm okay making that assumption is because I think things are might get worse before they get better. And how they could get worse is Mr. Hughes, when you came on the board, you'll recall that the state wasn't making all four payments a year. It was only making three. So if we ever got into that situation where the state was make was was missing one of our four mandated categoricals in a year, we'd be out hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I think this is um I'm pretty comfortable with the assumption where it is. It's a little bit um pessimistic, but I we've we've been we've been hurt by this before in recent memory. >> Um I want to switch gears to evidence-based funding. These two things are um again both state related. Uh the um pro evidence-based funding, like I said, it's it's a newer model for how we would we would fund our our public schools in the state of Illinois. It's an equity based model. Um it was something that has has had wide support. I think where there's some frustration with evidence-based funding now is um I think the people that signed on to evidence-based funding from school districts like DuPage County um would never have agreed to it if we knew that it was going to come at the c at the expense of our mandated categoricals. But that's that is the situation that's happening currently. Um the district has been bouncing back and forth like I said between districts between tiers three and four. Uh I think one year we were four, then we were two we were four two years in a row and then last year in fisc year 2025 we went down to a three again and this year we're at tier four. I do expect that we're going to be a four for the next five years that's built into the model. Um and one of the reasons why I feel comfortable saying that is because CPS the Chicago public schools has been um moved down to a one. And so when you have that much um you know the way the math works out when you have that many that size of school district at the at the bottom of the of the model it just it it I don't think there's any chance that we're going to be moving around to a three. It just it just throws all the weight the weight there. There's a lot of averaging and things like that. I I believe that while that it's it's a reasonable assumption that we're going to be in tier four for the next five years. Um the our like I said our our new EBF money in fiscal year 2026 was insignificant. It was $4,435, which is an increase of 12100ths of a percent at a time when CPI was at 2.7%. Um, I I did an exercise here to um help make the the board and the committee understand like the impact of the EBF model on the district. Um, so I I kind of created a model where um CPI is used to calculate our our EBF increases instead of instead of the EBF model. Um, this is not an alternative that's on the table. It's not never been discussed. It was never the way it was done before EBF. But just to just to if there was some if there was a way to calculate um to to assume that uh that we would get funded a different way, I think CBI is a reasonable way to to to do that. So I just said for just for the sake of conversation, what would it look like if our increase of instate funding was tied to CPI? Um, so if we started five years ago and we tied CPI um to state funding um instead of the the current EBF model, the district this year would be receiving an additional $400,000 in revenue. And the the what is actually happening is that we are being quote unquote held harmless. Uh we are just we we're not losing any money. We're just we're not really gaining any money anyway. We're just being held harmless. That's what that's the state's term for it. Uh but in in practicality um when you're using state dollars to fund programs um that have costs associated with them, a lot of those costs are salaries and benefits and those are always increasing. Um there's you're not really being held harmless when you're funding a program that has increasing costs. Um, so because we're not actually held harmless, just like with mandated categoricals, we have to use other funding sources like our property taxes to increase to to incre to cover the increase in the cost of that programming. So we again as is was as is the case with mandated categorical, we are required to do more with less. Here's a chart that just this again it's it's a it's a an exercise just to generate conversation and to and to kind of illustrate the issue for for our community if CPI was the driving force in in state funding. Um the red line is what that would look like. We would start in five years ago in fiscal year 2022 with our state funding at $3.4 million and then it would it would go by CPI. I even capped it at 5% instead of going up to six and a half% and 7% and it would go up to $4 million by this year. But but it's not we are being quoteunquote held harmless. So it's it stays very very flat. The only time you see growth is in fiscal year 2025. That's because we bounced back down to a tier three district for one year. And apparently and and assume assumingly we're only going to be a tier three district one year. So for the next for for the future we're going to assume tier four. So, we will see that that that line be completely flat while all of our costs are increasing. That $3.6 million um chunk of revenue is just going to stay completely flat, which means we just have to do more with our other sources um in in a in a very tight economy. >> And just for everybody tuning in there in the audience, when you see 22 or 26 down there for the year, that's the fiscal year that we're talking about. >> Correct. We are currently in fiscal year 2026. um the um the it's the the year ends on June 30th. So the if it's June 30th of 2026, that's that's fiscal year 2026. Um the impact of EVF on five-year planning looks something like this. Um we again we're we're doing going through this exercise where we are um looking at what it would look like if we're wondering what it would look like if CPI were not um static if there was some growth of CPI using uh CPI as as as our as our um our figure for making assumptions. The the blue lines there are our forecasted uh revenue from the state over the next five years. As you can see, it's perfectly flat at 3.556 million. There's there is no um no um optimism that that money is going to that figure is going to grow. And but if it did, we'd have a ton more money coming in um over the next five years. If we were not held harmless, if state funding did grow by CPI, we'd have an additional $1.4 $4 million over a fiveyear period or close to $300,000 a year, which is enough to to fund the salaries of of four teachers for a five-year period. On the federal side, um so I had a ton of slides. I had one slide for um local, I had a ton of slides for state, and I just have one more slide for federal, and then I'm I'm gonna be winding down here. Um, another big piece of of the puzzle is the the ending of the ESSER program. The ESSER program was the elementary and secondary school emergency relief grants. And there were three of them. There was ESRE 1, there was ESRE 2, and there was ESRE 3. And the deadline to use your ESSER grants was September 30th of 2024. So, so last year was the last fiscal year in which we used any ESSER dollars. Um we we used that you know over the the several years that those grants were active and we were receiving money from Washington DC. We did use those dollars to um fund a variety of programs some of them being salaries and benefits and we did earnestly try to keep those those programs going because we knew they were beneficial for our students but that became increasingly difficult when the dollars behind them dried up. We also put assumptions into our five-year plan. This has not happened yet but we have to prepare for the worst. Um the five-year plan indicates um that some of our federal grants will dry up. Um the biggest of of the four is title one. That one we assume um a 25% cut. And then titles two and titles titles two, three, and four, all of which are significantly smaller, we assume go down to zero. Um we're hopeful that they won't, but we have to prepare ourselves for what might happen. Um on the expenditure side, so we talked about revenue. Um on the expenditure side, I want to just make note of PEL, which is the property tax exempt extension limitation law. Uh we talk about that when we're passing a levy every year. Um PEL caps u your new dollars at 5 p.m. 5% or CPI, whichever is less. And that was never a problem for the district because it was always less in CPI than CPI until 2021 and 2022 when CPI was at 7% and 6.5% respectively. So um when our when our the increase in our cost was the the most um fervent uh we were our new dollars were capped at 5%. And that 5% cap affect us over three fiscal years, which would be 2023, 2024, and 2025. And and I might confuse you by explaining this, but the the reason reason why it affects three fiscal years is because CPI in 2021 is used to write your levy in 2022. and our 22 2022 levy is collected in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 that so that's why two years of CPI hit us um over three fiscal years and even though we're we're no longer in in that range of those three fiscal years we're still feeling the effects the the compounding effects of of of increases in in our expenditures um they're slowing down but they're still you're still putting smaller percentages on on bigger numbers. Um we talked about uh transportation, our costs have skyrocketed because of uh driver shortages, um gasoline costs, um which have have eased. But um one thing that has um also that is unique to 58 is uh the interim housing center and the the the McKini Vento legislation that requires us to provide 50% of the transportation for students who are who are homeless. Um, and also it's it's worth noting that in in the post-pandemic era, a lot of our costs have gone up because of that related to special education and the the diverse needs of our of our of our um most vulnerable learners have increased significantly and and the costs associated with them have been considerably greater because of it. Okay, so um in summary, um this is uh the uh the big takeaway from the December meeting when we're presenting the five-year plan. We have to kind of forward a new path forward. We have to um prepare ourselves to be in a position in fiscal year 2027 which starts next year that starts that's the next school year is fiscal year 2027. We need to be in a position where we can mend those three cracks in our foundation. We have to be able to stabilize our budget and ensure that that this board of education is not in a position where it has to spend in a deficit. We have to make funds available for capital improvements and we have to increase our fund balances um in order to make sure that we have enough money to start the year that we don't run out of cash in April and May. Um the number that we identified as an administrative team in partnership with the FAC and brought to the board of education as a recommendation was $1.5 million. And we'll discuss um the the outcome of of our conversations around that 1.5 million dollar figure in a moment. Um but what that accomplishes is it erases our deficits over the next five fiscal years and it also um creates enough opportunities in our budget to um invest $750,000 a year in capital improvements. And that is that money, that dollar figure grows by CPI because obviously our our construction costs and our our maintenance costs are going to increase by they're not going to stay at $750,000 a year. So it's that's that number grows in each of the five years. Um this um the one thing this doesn't accomplish is um keeping it it does it does um accomplish the deficit spending problem. It does accomplish the it does solve the um the the capital improvements problem. It does not address fund balances. It does not help us grow our fund balances. But we have discussed other options as with the board of education about what what we could do to u build our fund balances. That would be um uh selling working cash bonds under our debt service extension base and also um trying to um cross our fingers and hope we'll have a good amount of money left over from the referendum to to convert to our operating funds. >> Dr. Harris, um go back one slide for a second there. Um, first I want to acknowledge I think one of the things that the board is asking you to do is is bring stability to our environment here when we don't feel a lot of stability uh primarily with the state of Illinois but obviously uh all of our revenue sources have some level of instability CPPRT and and some of the federal funding. Uh, I know that's not and it's not an impossible task, but it certainly was not an easy one to ask of you. And I I I think one of the challenges that I have is is not that long ago, I I sat in front of your predecessor and I really asked the question of like how how do we feel comfortable in assessing what we need for the next five years? because we need to create an environment here that feels like steady ground for everybody here for the for the board for the administration for the staff many of them who are here today. Um, I think one of the places that we want to be is that the call that we're making with the exception of the state just deciding we are no longer going to fund transportation or some kind of big bold move that we cannot foresee that we are creating an environment that we can feel stable making decisions on minus fund balance at this point but staying um on a balance balanced budget, funding the key things that we need, funding transportation, um facing the challenges that we have with Mckin Vento and the IHC and the additional need that we see coming out of there because when Mckin Vento was written, it was not intended to have the majority of one county concentrated into one school district. So that was supposed to balance out amongst a lot more school districts than it currently is. So I think I want to ask you the question that maybe I should have been more stern about with your predecessor is the level of confidence you have with the assumptions that we're making and I think assuming tier four assuming flat is probably uh a good solid conservative base uh to start with that we feel like these are that we have some level of confidence over our fiveyear financial planning period. Mhm. Well, the one thing that that Dr. Russell and I have reminded the board um in a humorous way, but it's absolutely true, is that the one thing that all five-year plans have in common is they're all wrong. Um what what I believe um should instill confidence in the board, though, is that the fact that we are extremely conservative with with the planning. We don't necessarily assume the absolute worst. But, for example, we you know, with every we assume that all of our state dollars are flat. We're not we're not counting money that we're not being optimistic and and hoping that we're gonna get more money than than we are than we expect to receive. We're putting in just you know if if if the if if things don't go our way are we able to to face to are we able to um you know survive the storm. So we think so we're extremely conservative in our assumptions and we we on both the revenue and the expenditure side um we we were very meticulous. We were very intentional about how we approached the process and we um I think we we we play it it it was you know the the the amount of detail and thought put into it was not haphazard. It was it's not it's not rosy. It's not we're not it's not we're not living on a wing in a prayer. We think this is this is a a a real way of of of reading the tea leaves from the state side and and the federal side and seeing what's happen with our our local dollars and and predicting what's going to happen with our big the big costs that we know that we can identify like transportation but not just that but like our SASID tuition bill. Where do we see that going? Where do we see things like um technology refreshes, curriculum updates, like those things are are are baked in here. So, it's it's a it's a very intentional process and and we do believe that um we we are coming to the board with a high level of of confidence that um that the the concern we have is real um and but we think that we if we take some steps now we we save off bigger problems later on down the road. Um, one thing that we are committed to as an administrative team is we are going to be, you know, constantly updating updating the board and refreshing the data and and as we get into the summer, we're going to be um bringing bringing um real numbers around revenue as opposed to just assumptions and and and checking them off and seeing how we're doing and just constantly updating. So, this five-year plan is not just a five-year plan that we're gonna we're going to dust off the shelf and and um come back in five years and do another one. we're going to come back in a year and we're going to say, "Okay, this is this is what we got right. This is where we have to um make some tweaks and this is what the next five-year landscape is going to look like." But we do believe that um the board of education should feel um that this is not going to be an every year thing where we're coming to you and saying, "Okay, well, we have to cut another million, another two million, whatever." We think that um we are we are getting control over things now in a in a way that we didn't have them before. Um we are we we are very um and we've discussed with the board and with the FAC but we think that our uh our way of forecasting our way of counting our dollars now and projecting our dollars in the future is um our methods are more accurate and um you know for example we are we have we have been talking about the difference between cash basis and acrruel um since I came here we're talking about um you know we're we're not trying to we're not trying to be to to to um make things over complicated. We're looking thing we're looking things very very basically. This is the money we have in the bank now and this is what we need to have in the bank at the end of the bank. We're not going to do oh we're going to move some payroll dollars in between the two fiscal years. we're not going to um uh look at different expenditures and how which which fiscal year should they be recorded and that's where we got in trouble in the past and that's that's where the board of education thought it was hitting the 35% fund balance policy but then in reality it was not when you look at when you look at just our audit back in >> the last month. So um we're we have um a good amount of confidence in our methods. um we we don't we don't there's so much we don't control, but we're being extremely conservative and we are um we think we're putting ourselves in position to um to safeguard the district and and kind of um stem the bleeding and and and and do some course corrections here. >> Well, because I you alluded to it without saying it directly, but but at some point, right, from a political perspective, the state of Illinois is going to have to solve this problem. It's getting too big. It's impacting too many school districts. uh it's going to have to get solved, but I don't think anyone in this room or or watching tonight probably thinks that that's going to happen within the next three years. It's going to be a slow process to make happen. And um our families, the staff cannot feel like comfortable if the ground feels like it's sand. So I just I I think more than anything I think many of us that were sitting on the DES a year ago having a similar conversation really didn't expect to be here and that's not on you. You weren't you weren't in that seat last year but you get a little bit of the brunt of it in and going like you're coming to us. Is this the right choice? Are we doing what we need to do so that we can create, like I said earlier, stability in kind of an unstable um fiscal >> environment right now. So, it sounds like you feel pretty good about it. I know five-year plan. I know the fifth year is always the hardest, but I if you're keeping it real conservative, I'm hoping >> y that >> the other thing >> something big would happen. I would just observe is if and I I this I can also say with confidence if I if you were to ask me Greg we thought we were okay a year ago. Why are we back here again? I I couldn't tell you to be honest with you. I mean I could I could make some speculations but if a year from now if we're if we're way off I can tell I will be able to tell you what went wrong. I'll be able to say, "Oh, a roof broke or, you know, we had to we had to repair this or we had to hire um a a couple new teachers at this building because of of a of a whole bunch of people moving in." Like, I I think, you know, the way myself, our administration team, uh the people who work in the business office, we we have um a good line of sight on where we on where we are, where we need to be. So, um we won't there won't be any guessing games. If if we're off a year from now, we'll know why. And we'll be able to explain that to the board of education to the community. >> It would be something specifically >> something very specific. Point to something and say, "Oh gosh, look how look how much preration went down, for example, or look how look look how we missed a mandated categorical payment." I mean, like right now, we think that we know we know where where we are. We know where we're going. It's not ex it's not entirely clear like what went wrong with um with with some of with earlier projections, but we we think we have a good grasp on them now. I think just tagging on Darren to what you said agree with everything right and we want to be stable but we're relying on external factors right heavily state other things so if we take MCATs as the example and we think about sitting here one year from now we probably also need to be really >> that there could be things that impact us because they're out of our control and let's name the one two three things that those are that could impact us million plus if they go the wrong direction and then when do we monitor them throughout the year so we're not waiting Um, and I'm not saying we are waiting, but so we're not in January, February, April having the discussion. For example, MCATs. When does the state set those? When do when do we have confidence that we'll know where they're at for the next fiscal year? >> For MCATs, I mean, the officially we just got the the proration number, I think, in November for this year. I mean, we'll have we'll have a um, you know, an idea in in when when the the budget is um the budgeting process complete. I think that it's usually at the end of May when the general assembly approves a budget. That'll help us um kind of figure out, you know, did they put any new money into mandated categoricals or not. Um and then that's that's and that's that's good for us. That's right around the time we'll be actually writing the 27 budget. >> We keep a close eye on those and even bring them to this the board, publish them, make them more public so that we know exactly where where they're at, where they're trending. >> Absolutely. And then another another one would be I think that we could um I I'm not entirely clear on how the federal process works. Um but I know that they're you know they're talking about a shutdown in the next four days or whatever. I don't I don't know how that would impact um our title dollars, but it's it's right it's whatever the conversations that they're having now is is is what what funds the state board of education in Illinois for July 1. So, if if if we get through the next few months without anything crazy happening to our federal grants, I think we would have confidence to say that we're able to go into next year believing that all of those um grants will be funded at the current levels unless again there could be craziness. We don't know. >> Okay. Um I have uh I think one final slide and my final slide is um just just for the sake of um the community is I talked a lot about how we got here and I can tell you with with 100% confidence one reason we is that is not a cause of our current um financial um woes and that would be the referendum. So it as the as everyone is well aware in 2022 the um the community approved a one point a $179 million referendum question for construction bonds. Um but um those those funds cannot be co-mingled. We have our our operating funds that are fund that are funded by property taxes, state dollars, federal dollars, and we have our non-operating funds like our referendum dollars that are completely and totally separate. You cannot use uh your referendum dollars on on teacher salaries and benefits and things like that. You can't use it to buy technology. You can't use it to buy furniture. Yeah, furniture. can't use to buy uh textbooks and things like that. The money is not is accounted entirely separately in a different fund. We don't even keep the dollars in the same bank. Um but the the the referendum spending has had no impact on our operating budget. And if you're walking around a school and saying, "Oh, wow. Everything looks really great. Man, if they would have like maybe cut some corners here and there, maybe not done that, maybe use a cheaper material here, we could have some more dollars." Nope. That's not how it works. the monies are completely separate and the referendum if if if we had never done the referendum we'd still be in the same position we are right now. >> All right. I want to thank Dr. Harris for giving us um a comprehensive financial overview. Um for those of you obviously the board members and the administration who's here every month um none of the content that we just shared um isn't something we haven't been discussing at length every single meeting. I also want um to share with the community that um we have increased the amount of times our financial advisory uh council is meeting. Uh that uh group used to meet quarterly or sometimes every other month. Um to member Bernard's question, we are meeting uh monthly. We are looking at everything from our year-to- date reports. Anytime we get a new number in that um you know is permanent, that is something that we then go back and look at the five-year plan and we make the uh proper adjustments. I want to thank um all of the FAC members. Uh they are very very um intelligent people with strong financial uh backgrounds who really help uh give us guidance. And so when we talk about a million uh.5 uh that number just didn't come from thin air. That was through a lot of really hard conversations uh with our FAC uh with Dr. Harris um and talking with people from ISBY and other areas to make sure uh that we got that number uh right. So, thank you Dr. Harris for putting that all together. For those of you who want to see the history, uh all the FAC documents are published online as well as all of our previous board meetings uh where we did discuss all of these things at length. So, getting to 1.5 um is not an easy task uh especially um making reductions two years in a row. Every time you make a reduction, it gets harder and harder. Uh so here are the areas that we uh looked at just in in general terms. Obviously, we looked at transportation. When you look at the one thing that has increased exponentially for us, um transportation is one of the biggest. Um staffing. Uh we always have to look at staffing. We are a service organization. Um the overwhelming majority of our dollars is going to pay for people's salaries and benefits. And so we have to look at staffing. Operations is another area that we looked at. The resources that we procure was another thing uh that we looked at. And then um are there any revenue opportunities? So not just what do we have to cut, but are there things that could generate new dollars uh for the school district. So the priorities are always uh maintaining class size targets as established. So what you're going to see um in the coming slides, we did not want to change where our class sizes are here in district 58. uh our class sizes um you know are already a little bit on the higher end and so we wanted to make sure that we weren't overloading those. In fact um we look heavily at the middle school where those really did swing higher this year to see how we can bring back uh those into what we would have typically experienced in a typical uh school year. So that was a big priority for us as we looked at this. Also obviously minimizing the impact to instruction and programming to the greatest extent possible. anything that we do um in terms of reduction is going to change how we operate. It's going to change what we do. Um in particular when it comes to staffing, you know, I want to thank so many of our staff members for coming tonight. Um I can assure you that whenever we talk about reductions, these are the things that keep all of us up at night. All of us sitting up here, everybody in the audience, we value everyone who works in our organization, everyone who services our students. And and so we really do try when we go through these um to minimize the impact um to our staff, to our kids, and to the core programs that make this school district um a wonderful place to learn, a wonderful place to work, and uh where our kids can grow and achieve. So with that, we're going to dive into um you know, how we got here. But before we do that, I want to give you an overview of some of the dollar amounts that we're looking at. So, when we're looking at operations, it's a little north of $250,000 in in um reductions. Uh resources is approximately $86,000. Staffing is a little over 3/4 of a million. And then transportation is just shy of $400,000. When you add those up, you get just a tad above 1.5 uh million. So, Dr. Harris is going to come right back up and uh talk about transportation and then our other assistant superintendents are going to go through the rest of the slides. >> So, our transportation costs are obviously a huge chunk of our budget. Um the this year they're they're expected to be over $7 million for all in all of our different categories of transportation from regular transportation to uh special education to homeless to parochial to um gifted um early bird etc etc etc. So, um, we had to take a really hard look at this. We've been taking a really hard look at it all year. Um, Michelle Kovar has been, um, been the the tip of the spear on that, doing a great job and finding efficiencies. And we've been trying to to, um, look at a look at a a program that hasn't really been looked at in a long time. And well, and seeing seeing where we can trim some of the fat. Um we got um fortunate in a couple of them that that they were just kind of some costs were rolling off um because of just changes in in our educational programming. Um our gift we have we're losing a gifted route because we're no longer um busing kids to a central location for the extend program anymore. So there's a modest amount of savings there. And then um early bird routes are no longer going to be running at the middle schools because um early bird is being incorporated into the day. So for example, my daughter is a band student. She has to be at Heric every morning at 7:45. Um, next year her band um class will be within the confines of a of the the bell the bell schedule from between first period and and and the end of the day. Um on the a bigger one though is um parochial transportation and um by law we are required to um provide transportation services to uh non-public students who reside in the district. their parents are taxpayers and so they are entitled to take advantage of of taxpayer funded programs and and uh services. So the um we run buses uh every day to St. Mary's and to St. to St. Mary of Gston and to St. Joseph. Um those there are 12 routes are currently running and and when we took a good hard look at it um which probably hadn't been done in a long time, we discovered like there's probably not a need to run 12 buses to those schools anymore. Um there are a number of students there but we we didn't um we didn't have a lot of we didn't exert enough direct control over um that aspect of our transportation program. Um it was some it was some there was kind of just a little um there was there was us in one corner, there's first student who was our transportation vendor another corner and then there's the the the the two um Catholic schools. Um and we there wasn't a lot of conversation going on among the three parties. So, we were able to kind of, you know, we're paying for the bills, so we're going to kind of take over. And we just identified that they probably don't need 12 routes. They could probably get by with seven or eight, as many many as as um possibly as few as six. Um, and we we are identifi we are we are um continuing to analyze that, but we have actually made some mid-year tweaks um to that program because why why wait until August? So, we um are are officially rolling that out in the next couple weeks where we're telling them, okay, you're you're here's here's some new route sheets for you and for your students. There's going to be some changes to um what you're used to, but we need to um find a more efficient and cost-effective way of transporting um students. Um we're not treating any students differently. Everyone's going to no matter what school you attend, whether it's a 50-day school or not, you're going to still be be uh receiving the same quality of service. Uh but we need to um you know, just make sure that we we have we tighten the reigns and make sure that um the the parochial program mirrors the district 58 program. So, we think that we found some immediate savings in this fiscal year, which is great, but we also think long term we can we can push those out to um uh future fiscal years to the tune of about a quarter of a million dollars. >> So, how much of that is efficiency versus parochial or is it >> I would say um it's I would I would feel confident um saying that most that's parochial. Um a route is generally about $50,000. that that's the number we use to to kind of calculate how much our transportation costs are going to be. So, if we think we can get down to seven routes, we're going to save a quarter million dollars on just on the pro alone. Um there there could be more savings there. Um the thing that we don't really understand yet because we're still working with with first student to build a model is what's what's the delta going to look like when you have sixth graders at the middle schools. Now, we know we're going to need additional routes um at Herac and O'Neal because you have 50% more students going there. Now, we think we can collapse some of the K5 routes because of that, but we don't really know um you know what's what's the what's the gain? Are we how many how many are we gaining and how many or losing it with which level? So, but we think that there are um some opportunity like most parochial, but we think that there's some chances to get some other savings in other areas as well. >> There's also some efficiencies that we've built in um midyear actually. These were done in the fall. In terms of um dual language transportation, um homeless transportation, we switched providers uh where we could get a uh same level of service uh but at a cheaper cost. So again, as we shared at the last board meeting, these aren't things that we're sitting on. We want to go ahead and do that. You know, we're estimating adding um approximately five buses at the middle school next year. Uh three over at Herac, two over at O'Neal. So all that has to be built in, the efficiencies, the reduction in parochial routes. um perhaps reductions in elementary routes and then adding the middle school routes. All that has to be baked in. So um you know as we were talking earlier, this is something that we're continually meeting with first student on meeting with our parochial uh schools and then continuing to fine-tune uh this number uh to make sure that we can achieve these savings. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Justin. >> So excuse me. >> That's okay. Um so the next um slide that we're going to look at is some of our operational shifts. Um the first one actually does have a tie to transportation. So we've been looking at our midday math routes and how we instruct our traveling math students who are single and double accelerated from the elementary school over to the middle schools. And we think that we can find some efficiencies there in shifting our um practice and providing that instruction during first period of the middle school day. um that allowing for one of the two ways in the bus route to be eliminated, having those students um ride the AM middle school bus routes and then just transporting them back to their elementary schools after first period is over. And so that will save half of our um midday math transportation costs at the um cost of $110,000. Um there are some um efficiencies there as well. When we look at the number of students who we will be transporting, it is a smaller number in the upcoming school year because we don't have as many double accelerated students um at the fourth grade level as we do with our current fifth and sixth graders. And so um there will just be a lower number of students that need to be transported because of the shift of sixth grade to middle school. But that is a place that we do um anticipate some increased savings in that model shift. >> The pony is our term for interdist transportation. It is actually a cargo van. It is not a pony, but that's what we've called it for decades. And so that is the term that's familiar to all of us in district. Um there was a time when this was a week a daily route that was run between all of the buildings. We're currently at 3 days a week as most um paperwork is transferable digitally between buildings at this point. There are still items that need to move from building to building, but we believe we can accomplish that on a weekly basis for the majority of the year. There will be a couple of points the beginning of the year with curricular materials for students and things like that where those that that will shift a little bit, but that actually aligns with current practice where we increase sometimes from three days a week to even four or five. So again, not a massive dollar savings, but an example of just truly looking for efficiencies everywhere we can across the district. When looking at our copying practices, uh we have a lease with a copying vendor and we've had some fairly significant overages in past years. And so this is something that we've just been communicating with staff about and we've already seen some positive trends um this school year. So, I think we we're confident we we have got some options that we can use here. Uh continue to educate staff, continue to adjust practices. We are also going to take a look at working with the vendor and can we reshape the lease to better suit our use case to try to get some more efficiencies there. Uh you know, ultimately if we need to, another option we have is to to use the software to put in place uh quotas or or or limits on copying. But, you know, that's an option we'd obviously discuss with staff and kind of think how that would work out. But, I think we're confident ultimately we that through shifting practices, finding efficiencies that we can save around $50,000 moving forward with our copying expenses. an operational opportunity that we have uh with uh sixth grade moving up to the middle school and the Indian Trail uh part of preschool moving over to Henry Puffer is an opportunity for space. So, keeping in mind um equitable opportunities in what will be our K5 buildings. We did find that we have an opportunity to offer more classroom spaces to SASID. Uh they we lease those spaces to them. uh it's a mutually beneficial partnership. Uh on their end, they get the opportunity to have their students embedded within a public school setting. So, we're appropriate. There's inclusion opportunities. Um and on our end, we have several students that participate in that programming. So, posting those uh SASID programs means that families don't have to operate on two separate calendars, that um all their children are on the same um basic schedule. Um, and then there is also then the added benefit too of the cost associated with the lease. So by increasing those opportunities, we would be looking at increasing our revenue by about $100,000. Um, we are looking primarily at uh some of the spaces that'll be vacated at Indian Trail from the preschool and some spaces over at Kingsley which already houses uh three SAS classrooms. So, as we start to look at some of our resources that we have um in the district, one of the places that we continue to look is where are some of our efficiencies and ordering? Um looking at number of subscriptions and making sure that enrollment numbers are accurate and we're not overpaying for resources. And so, just one small um spot that we are current that we currently found was within our Scholastic News um magazine subscriptions. in with a small savings of $3,000. But I feel as though as we go through next year's ordering, we're going to be able to find more of those efficiencies in our enrollment um you know um projections and then being able to find um savings within those um resources that we use. In looking at the resources that we have available, there are a couple of middle school resources that have been available that are used by a limited number of staff. Um they are utilized by staff, so we'll work with staff to try to find some replacement tools, some alternative solutions. Uh and so we've got some time to collaborate with staff and try to get solutions in place for next school year, but believe we can save around $10,000 uh by eliminating those two tools that are currently in use. Um some other >> James, just quick on that, is is there any initial thoughts? Obviously, you got some time to figure out the replacements, but like initial ideas as to what could replace those two resources that would be eliminated. >> Yes. I I mean I I think that you would like the names like that. >> Yeah. I'm curious. You know, you said it's limited use, but it is being utilized by by staff and there's some alternatives are probably lower cost zerocost options. Just curious as to >> I I think for for Ed for Edpuzzle there's some built-in Google tools. So there will be some some some work and some effort needed to kind of shift some of those resources into the to what's built into Google and Google classroom uh which allows you to put some questions into YouTube video formative there you know there are some options it's kind of a quizzing and assessment platform so again I think we'll have some conversations with teachers there's you know may not be able to achieve all the full functionality but there's some free tools available there's also again some Google form functionality available so you know it may not full-on exact replacements, but we think we can >> Thanks, James. >> Solutions. Sure. >> Um, other technology shifts that we're looking at, uh, a little more kind of backend items. One would be our student content filter. Right now, we use a product called Securely. It's uh, and that is how our student devices, both iPads and Chromebooks, are filtered. Uh, whether they're on-site or they are offsite. Uh, there is a free tool available from the state. There there'll be some change in functionality, some loss in functionality, but ultimately we still have the ability to to fully filter students uh and their technology use whether they're on-site or remote and keep them safe. Um so we can move to a free tool. It's offered by the state. Power School registration u again to be clear, P school is our student information system. We'll continue to use that. Uh but the enrollment platform that we're actually just going to be opening up next month, we'll continue to use this tool. uh the registration tool, enrollment tool uh this spring, but then next fiscal year, we think we can find an alternative to this. Again, there may be some loss in functionality or some some uh some shifts in our workflows, but uh you know, between those two items, we can save almost $50,000 by uh you know, making some sacrifices and making some changes to our workflows. As a part of our contract with SASID, we contract a number of days every year for what's called instructional support team. Uh, and it's really a catch-all for a number of functions. So, um, in instructional support team members can come in and assist us with our professional development options across the district. They come in and do case consultation for some of our students who have more significant needs. uh this proposed reduction is really because as we look at some of the initiatives that we will be focusing on in special education we know that there are some state resources that can assist us with some of that professional learning in particular. Uh so we this is a reduction this 25,000 that we feel that we can still continue to address the need um with a different resource. As we shared earlier, just over half of this um set of reductions comes under the the category of staffing. And before we get into reductions, there are some additional changes based on the transition to 68. We've talked about this as an FTE neutral transition. And so tonight, they're shared here because they have an impact on and then they are a part of some of the other um things that are going to be discussed. So, as we increase um a full grade level at the middle schools, we are looking to recognize the need for some additional administrative support. So, we'll be working to um put together a plan that that increases assistant principles by.5 FTE or a half-time assistant principal at each of the middle schools. We also have all of those students coming over who are sixth graders, which include um all of the sixth grade health needs that happen, all of the physical forms and all of that that has to have to be processed, as well as likely an increased number of visits to the nurs's office, let alone the main office. And so, we are looking to increase middle school clerical support by adding a part-time secretary position. And that's a 5 and a half hour position with an emphasis on supporting the health office. Not necessarily as a first aid provider, but more as that person who can help enter and document those events into our systems, who can help with parent phone call follow-ups so that we can maintain the level of student support in the offices that we have seen. So again, we're we're not in the practice of talking about additions to things tonight, but these are things that we recognize need to happen and they'll have they they they relate then to some of the other transition pieces. Before we go on to the next slides that are going to talk about some recommendations for reduction or restructuring, I want to make two thing two points. One is that as you see the title of a position in the coming slides, in most cases, the person currently holding that position will be impacted as they will no longer be in that position. But based on the way seniority works, based on the way contracts work, it is likely not that person who will be at risk of having their entire job eliminated for the coming school year. There are some cases in which yes, some of these things will result in people not having positions available, but it's that is a a longer process to work through as we look at all of the enrollment factors, all of the student support needs across the district, all of those things, and we work through all of that. We've had individual and in some cases small groupoup conversations with everyone that we can reasonably predict will be personally impacted by what comes onto the next slides. So if you are a person watching or listening and you see a role that resembles yours and you haven't heard from me in the past week and a half, you can rest assured that your position is not predicted to be impacted by what is on the next few slides. Now having said that there is impact that goes beyond the individual whose position may be changing or restructured. You know even the things we've talked about previously the midday math change that has an impact on everyone who teaches math in fourth and fifth grade because of the timing of when math is going to have to be instructed. So there are there are impacts across the board, but in terms of something that would have uh a personal and professional impact where someone's individual job would look different or be at any sort of risk of of being reduced or eliminated in the coming year. Those people have heard from us personally prior to tonight. That's the beginning of the conversations. There are many more to have once we kind of get that green light of this is the direction we're moving. and we work through that process of talking to all of the individuals as we work toward full staffing patterns for next year. On the administrative side, we have posted as Dr. Aikim Miller is leaving the district to become a superintendent, we have posted that position as a director level position. Dr. EMiller joined the district as the director of innovative technology and learning and was elevated to an assistant superintendent position based on district needs and his own performance over the course of time with the district. He's done a phenomenal job in that role. As we look to fill that role, we are identifying it to return to a director level position, maintaining the core needs of supporting district technology infrastructure and district technology as it relates to student learning, but removing some of those pieces that really dealt with professional development, some of the higher level tasks that we have come to appreciate James for, but just realizing that that will be a case where those tasks will be absorbed by the remaining assistant superintendent over the course of the next few years. we have the reduction of uh one the equivalent of one special education coordinator. So that in this particular case will be the middle school special education coordinator. So that was a position that we restructured going into this year looking to provide middle school administrative support and some specific support to those programs. We will be now at three coordinators and one assistant superintendent in terms of special education administrators who will be assuming the roles and responsibilities of what currently was four special education coordinators and one assistant superintendent. So all specialized programs will continue to see support through these folks. All out placements will continue to see support. But this is a another example and and Dr. Harris used the phrase earlier of we will have to do a little bit more with a little bit less in this case. Do we believe that we can accomplish that? We do. But there will be impact and restructure as we go through all of that. I also want to acknowledge as we put some of these dollar amounts on the slides. These figures in some cases are very specific in terms of what the difference between one person's salary and another might be. In others, they include salary and benefits. And so they are they're good estimates, but they vary a little bit by which number is which. As I mentioned, we're looking to provide some of that additional administrative support at the middle school. So, that will come at the reduction of a half-time curricular curriculum coordinator who will shift into a half-time curriculum coordinator and a half-time assistant principal at O'Neal Middle School and then a reduction of a half-time assistant principal at Leicester where we will gain the other half of that role as a half-time assistant principal at Heric. the um the curriculum coordinator is is a reduction. That brings that down to one and a half curriculum coordinators in the department where we've had two full-time equivalents for the past several years. The Lester um reduction is also a reduction. That one is truly based more on enrollment though. Next year, Lester is projected to have right around 400 students, which is a number that is more consistent with where we have assigned halftime assistant principles over the past several years. the remaining elementary schools will be much lower than that and so would not warrant that assignment of an additional assistant principal whether part-time or full-time based on our structure that we had used previously. So while it falls into the budget presentation that one in particular really is more of an enrollment-driven shift at we as we look at administrative priorities. So those don't see those don't realize savings but they you know there is some shift and reduction in those areas when we look at our educational support staff currently in our blended preschool classrooms and these are our preschool classrooms that include preschool age students who receive special education services preschool age students who are eligible do the preschool for all grant and categories and in there as well as our tuition based programs. So these classrooms we put a cap on at at 18 students, typically about a third in each of those categories that I just mentioned. What we have historically done is to staff those classrooms at a ratio of one staff member to six students. So that's typically one certified staff member and two instructional assistants. Our practice has been to staff those three positions, though the classes don't typically open at 18. And there's a number of reasons for that. Sometimes that has to do with just the number of tuition students that we capture, but it also has to do with the nature of preschool in which students are identified for services at their third birthday. And so we do have to leave some space in these programs for students to join mid year over the course of each year. The shift here is that if we have one of those blended classrooms that is set to begin the year at 12 students or less, we would hire the one instructional assistant, but we would hold off on staffing that second instructional assistant until we reached that 13th student, at which point we would then hire the second instructional assistant for the classroom. This one's a little difficult to predict because it is truly enrollment driven. But looking at recent historical trends, we're estimating that there would be one to three classrooms depending on the year where this would have come into play at the beginning of the year. In prior markets, I would have expressed concern about hiring instructional assistants mid year, but we have found more success with finding qualified candidates at different points during the year. And so, we believe that we would have the opportunity to staff these at different points during the year. The next support staff piece is the reduction of the district office receptionist position. So when we moved from two buildings to one building, we really took some time to monitor is there overlap, is there efficiency we can capture here? And at the end of the day, we believe that yes, there probably is. Now the reality is that that position is both front office receptionist answering phones, greeting visitors, taking care of some of the office management of supplies and things, but also has has some responsibilities in the personnel department, particularly as it relates to onboarding and bringing new people in. And so the plan then is to redistribute those responsibilities among the remaining staff in the district office. So where there were probably the equivalent of, you know, two and a half support staff in the personnel department, that will go down to two. where there was a secretary in a technology department that was exclusive for the technology department. That person will take on some of the district office responsibilities as well. Years ago, we had clerk positions in our elementary schools that worked shorter partial days to support busiest times of the elementary school day. Those positions increased 15 years ago, primarily as we saw some of the student health needs start to increase and the need for additional student support in that way. Since that time, we've gotten to a system where we have a full-time RN in each of our buildings and we intend to maintain that support. But as our elementary schools decrease slightly in enrollment with the with the movement of sixth grade and we review this, what we are looking to do is to take those part-time secretary positions at the elementary school, which are currently five and a half hour positions, and create three-hour positions out of out of those roles. So, anyone who is currently a part-time secretary will have some sort of a position available to them next year, but many may be three-hour positions as opposed to five and a half hour positions. Again, there there certainly is some impact in terms of support in the office and all of those kinds of things, but we believe that with two full-time people there and one person there to help in what we identify as the those most critical points of the day, we can continue to to meet the needs. Maybe not the exact same level of responsiveness to the lower level triage things, but we can continue to meet the needs of our students and families. We're still in conversations about what are those critical hours of the day. There's conversations around morning and attendance. There's conversations around lunch and coverage and those kinds of things. And so we're working through exactly what that will look like. When we talk about certified staff, we are looking to make a reduction of a 6ft FTE of our certified school nurse. So again, back to the previous slide, maintaining full-time RNs to provide for those student health needs. And this really will mean that our CSN's are going to be focusing pretty much exclusively on the special education component of nursing and some of that, you know, assistance and supervision and direction of the nursing program. But they really are that that will limit their ability further um to to participate in the sort of daily first aid, but more focus on the those special education, evaluation, health history, all of those types of needs for our students. The board's aware that we previously years back had used some ESSER funds to fund some additional interventionist positions in the district. We held on to those positions beyond ESSER funding because we did ident we did see this the value of all of that and the need that was there. At this point we are looking to reduce that equivalent. So it's the equivalent of one and a half interventionist positions. We will continue to allocate based on our same formula just knowing that we have a little less to allocate overall. So this won't this won't hit all one building. This will be you know distributed in the same way that we look to distribute support based on the number of student needs and the ratio to staff support. It simply is going to drive that ratio up ever so slightly in a couple of places as we work through that process. The last reduction is the reduction of four instructional coaching positions, which is essentially the elimination of instructional coaching in district 58. This is um going to have an impact on our professional learning. It's going to have an impact on new teacher support and all of those kinds of things. It's something that we It's the dismantling of a team that we've spent the better part of a decade building up to become a model in district 58 and across the county. And yet, it is one of the things that is in place to put us on the path to that $ 1.5 million reduction. At this point, we are seeking to maintain the single behavioral coach position that we have in the district. Sometimes the coaches are talked about um together, but this is this is the one separation that we would look to in that case. And I think with all of these examples, but with that example in particular, it's it's important to note that, you know, we've identified things that hopefully minimize impact to student experience. And I think when you look at some of these things, they feel further from the student experience, which was part of our intent. But there's impact that we can anticipate from some of the tangibles, but there's also intangible impact that we won't be able to articulate until we get through this for a couple of years. The amount of support that comes to a specialized program from a coordinator who is dedicated to it. The amount of support that comes to our teachers from embedded professional support, you know, where not only in new teacher moments and new curricular implementation moments, but simply throughout the year, it's difficult to quantify where those needs will emerge over the course of the next few years. And so, you know, to to to recognize that these positions may not impact students in a in a visible way in August, we do have to be cognizant that over time, we have to monitor the impacts of not just the teacher experience, but the student experience as well as we go through because some of the things that we have come to appreciate as far as implementation support and all of those kinds of things will be will be done in very different ways. Can we do it? We believe that we can do it. I don't know that we can do it for 10 years without some of these supports, but we know that right now we we have to make some tough decisions. And so it's just that recognition of there is value in every bullet point that's here. You know, there was value in every bullet point we put up a year and a half ago when we when we had a similar conversation. And so I think that's just that's the perspective and I I I know that I speak for our my administrative colleagues and for Kevin and he'll reiterate a point similar to this. It's difficult to know what the impact will be for all of these things and yet we believe that we can find a path forward but it's going to look different. It is in all cases that that level of immediate responsiveness that we've come to appreciate whether it's administratively or for professional support in a classroom or things like that. There will be some there will be some shift to that. There will be some impact to that and we will we will work through it. We will develop plans that they will they will not be the same kind of plans that we've been able to develop in in almost every department over the past several years. So, as we get to the end of our presentation, we wanted to put this slide back up here as you see all the numbers and the various slides again just to kind of show you a summary for each area that we looked at and how we got to that 1.5 million. Sorry. As we move forward, obviously Dr. Harris did a a very nice job of talking about putting us are on a path to fiscal stability, right? Low cash point must be solved. We're working with the FAC. The board's had several conversations about that. Capital expenditures, you know, um roofs have to be replaced. Um parking lots sometimes have to be resurfaced. uh at the next board meeting um we are going to talk about 10-year life safety uh with our architect and that's the mandatory thing that we have to look at every 10 years in terms of what are those critical areas of our building so that we can keep them open uh that we have to address and so um you know just like at our homes if our furnace goes out you know it's not the most exciting thing that you have to replace but you do have to make sure you stay on top of those one of the things that we spent a great deal of time with our community with our staff members um as we were selling the referendum to the community was that how do we not let our buildings get back into this state that they were in? Um and we just can't allow that uh to happen. So balancing that need as well. Obviously several factors caused us to be in this situation. Inflation, rising prices, proration of state funds, federal funding's changing. Um our modeling uh we have spent a significant time with the FAC basing it on cash versus acrruals as Dr. Harris shared. Um and the final point that I want to make on this slide is this certainly feels um all district 58. However, numerous school districts in particular in the Ker counties with how uh the impact of pration is hitting tier 3 and tier 4 districts are having similar conversations. I spent a lot of time uh recently with my colleague right next door in Marker School District 60. That is a district um that has three schools, a much smaller budget. they're they're looking at cutting $850,000 this year. Um they're in a very similar situation. Um even districts that have significant fund balances or might be way past their adequacy target. Um unlike district 58, they are all starting to feel the pinch when I go to my uh DuPage County meetings and even the meetings in Springfield. This is the topic of conversation. And so while this of course is going to feel very personal to us in district 58 and while this is not reassuring every single district um when you're talking about the impact of state and federal dollars disappearing is going to be going through uh similar exercises as we have done in the past. Although it's been a while since we've had to do this with pration. Um we have been down this path before in the state of Illinois. Again, we've made significant reductions over the past several years. Each reduction carries an impact that progressively makes things more challenging. The more you reduce, the more challenging it becomes. Um, not just to positions, but but to the people. Um, in particular, our staff does a wonderful job day in and day out. We have some of the most dedicated teachers, support staff, custodians, maintenance employees, administrators, and when you're talking about positions, there's always a person with a name attached to those positions. And that's not something that's ever lost on any of us. It keeps me up at night. I know it keeps everybody up here as well and everybody in the audience. And so, we don't forget that as we go through these challenging um times. I want to thank our staff um you know for their patience and their flexibility but but it does have an impact on the on the human level and that's never lost on any of us. Uh the goal remains to reduce expenditures in a manner that impacts students and staff as minimally as possible. But as Justin did a nice job alluding to everything has an impact. Um placing the district again on a sustainable path will have an impact on all sorts of things operationally as well. Uh we're going to continue to monitor our financial situation closely. If further efficiencies can be achieved or new revenue, some reductions may not be necessary. Um if costs continuing to increase, further reductions may become necessary. That's why we meet in January. We want to meet in January to have these big conversations. Again, as Dr. Harris alluded to, our fiscal year starts July 1 uh for FY27. Uh by having these conversations in January, it allows the board, the community, our staff time to digest this, to ask questions uh before we have to make uh some of those big important staffing uh decisions. As a reminder for the board, all administrative decisions must be made prior to April 1st. All uh teaching positions must be made prior to April 15th. And so by having this conversation in January, it allows us time uh to continue uh the conversation and to ask any questions. With that, that does bring us to the end of our presentation for this evening. So, I do want I know board members were asking questions as they went along and certainly uh this is not the first conversation we've had uh in this room uh over the last six months regarding these things, but if there are any questions uh from the board for myself or the staff, we're happy to answer those. >> Mr. Sis, before we get into questions, I want to take a a moment and acknowledge how you kind of closed out your statement, and that was um uh the confidence that you had in being able to to work through this right now with the reductions in place, but the impact that that can have over a longer period of time, 10 years, we built an infrastructure here and then we can take a couple pieces out and that infrastructure, that model still exists for some time and we can maintain it. Um, and I but I know that over time that can start to atrophy and and it and it certainly is a concern I think for everybody sitting up here. I will tell you that um it was supposed to be on Friday and and unfortunately it got uh frozen out but we'll have the legislative breakfast next month. Um, we continue to hear from the state of Illinois uh that education is a is a fundamental a fundamental importance to them and I I think that we as an organization will have to continue to advocate for the impacts of the decisions uh going on down in Springfield. Uh that is a great opportunity because we gather all the feeder districts into 99. Um I will continue to advocate on behalf of making sure that we try to create some stability. I don't know where that that money in the state of Illinois is going to come from. If you look at their budget, it is not overwhelmingly um optimistic for for what we can do, but at some point we're going to have to prioritize. We we talked in in some of the other meetings about, you know, their full focus being on trying to find new sources of revenue, but that doesn't seem to be happening. So, at some point, we got to start talking about priorities in the state of Illinois. I think there's only a matter there's only so much many times that we can sit here and do this without it starting to have a profound impact on actual student learning. Uh I really want to commend everybody who stepped up uh in our district to make sure that this is having a minimal impact on our students, but I know that's coming at a physical and mental toll to everybody that's involved. So I just I want to thank you for I just want to acknowledge that statement. We will continue to advocate hard um on behalf of our district, use every resource we have uh to do that because as I look at I look at the math, I don't know how we sit here 10 years from now. Uh even though it may be eight different people, uh you know, nine different people sitting up here on the on the deis and and and then many different people sitting down there, it's still going to be a challenge that has to be battled. And so I I really want everybody thank you guys so much for the hard work, but I did want to take a moment and acknowledge that even if we are able to sort of, you know, tighten our pants and make it work now that it it will build up over time and that that uh that challenge will continue to grow. So thank thank you uh for that acknowledgement. So with that, we'll open it up for for questions either to Kevin or anyone on the administration. I guess I just want to connect this to I don't even know how many months ago, but uh board member Doshi I think when we kind of talked about new realities and I guess the terminology we use now is cracks in the foundation, right? I think that's a good analogy to kind of tie it all together. But one one thing, you know, I always commend you on the great questions that you ask each and every session. But one of the things you said, you know, like are we doing enough out of the box thinking in terms of longer term um finances? So, I just wanted to kind of check in on on that and see how how you're how you're feeling. >> Um I appreciate that you're like a bigger fan of mine than my wife is, so I appreciate that. Um No, she's wonderful. Um >> yes, she is. The uh I think the challenge that I I grapple with when I look at this is every single bullet makes sense and the entirety of this slide deck put together is a spot no district should have to be in. And I'm not speaking just on behalf of 58 but any district in the in the state of Illinois shouldn't have been in this position. The moment we weren't able to fund our mandated categoricals at 100% red alarm flag should have gone off. The whole idea of proration, the whole idea of saying we'll give you 90 cents on the dollar, 80 cents on the dollar to a state that says we prov prioritize education is laughable. Uh and so I think just like looking our at ourselves as taxpayers when we say we're not going to approve a tax increase or we're going to approve things as state taxpayers that reduce the amount of revenue coming into the state. The implications are very real and we're feeling them. And these these are the implications. I'll also say that what is unique to district 58 and the reason that my family moved here and I imagine a lot of folks choose to stay in district 58 is we love our neighborhood schools. Having 13 building principles is very expensive. We choose to have 13 fixed costs of brickandmortar buildings whereas neighboring districts can do with five or six for the same student population. That's an additional $1.5 million right there. But we continue to choose to do it and there's a third rail in district 58. If you say that we're going to go to grade level centers in district 58 instead of having neighborhood schools, you might as well close down group because the reason that people choose to live here is a big part of having neighborhood schools is a big part of why they uh really appreciate the the the way in the way the way in which things are structured. And so what I when I when you asked me the question like what does this make me think? It stinks we're in this position, but what's not on the slides is all the choices we continue to make that are inefficient but we love. And so I I appreciate the hard work. I don't think any bullet on here is a easy pill to swallow, but what I didn't see on here, which I really appreciated, is that certified teaching staff positions weren't one of the bullets. And that directly impacts individual students every day, every hour. And so I I saw ways in which we can do better with uh with or we can do with potentially less. And none of them are easy to say yes to. Um but in some ways we as taxpayers in the state of Illinois have chosen to say yes to this current reality. Thank you. Um, other questions, comments at this time. >> Yeah, I mean it kind of double clicking on that. the neighborhood schools. The other things that we talk about often but get very very quickly um slighted down is you know redrawing lines, looking at student population, looking at class sizes, looking at the lines of which where the population goes to a particular neighborhood school, right? So, not eliminating the neighborhood school model, but changing where kids are going based on the need of that individual building size-wise, resource-wise, etc. We've talked about it a lot. It's another decision we make um as taxpayers in district 58 that we don't want to change our our school. We went to our neighborhood, we chose our neighborhood, we like the school our kids go to, and we don't want to change that, right? So, that's one that is another one we talk about quite often. um you know, we touch on here and there. It's not one that, you know, and again, it's another one of those things that people move to certain neighborhoods because they know the school and they're excited about being within those boundaries of that school district. So, or that school population. So, that's another consideration um on this whole, you know, spectrum of, you know, how long is the sustainable model that we have? How long is the model that we currently have sustainable financially? um as a district um before we start impacting day-to-day um student student experience and student and teacher and staff experience. Um and we're starting to see that cutting in now. Um which is really unfortunate and not a position I like seeing and I know that it's a state level issue as well. There's so many factors here that play. Um yeah, and I and when I see interventionists coming off and instructional assistants coming off, that's really hard because that support staff means a lot to a very um needy group of students that are really need-based and need that help. So I urge because I know that we did a a cut of a similar um spectrum earlier. Uh what does that look like for our individual students and what is that going to mean? I want to see what that's going to mean for them on a day-to-day basis because those are really impactful um on those in I know that we're the the things that we're doing don't don't impact broad scope the not losing a certified teacher every student experiences a certified teacher but a very need-based group of students experience an interventionist or special education coordinator or things like that. So what is that going to look like um will be really important to me. Thank you. Any other comments or questions at this time? >> I have a question about professional learning Mondays. With the instructional coaching positions being impacted, I'd love to hear us plan for >> uh professional learning Mondays and how we continue to make that uh the programming that we expect. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, some of the things that we have talked about in restructuring is um part of our strategic plan is pushing to a PLC model and a more structured conversationbased um look at student learning, student data, and how we're going to drive our instruction forward. And that kind of lives at the classroom teacher level um with supports from building administration as well. And so I think that we can look at some of um our professional learning Mondays um as opportunities for PLC conversations. Um but we also recognize that there are going to be implementations that we need to um ensure our teachers have the best professional learning out there to um you know implement new resources in their classrooms. And so within our, you know, our current structures in the department members that um are available, we're going to provide as much support as we can in that realm. And then looking at what do some of our vendors have to offer in terms of professional learning um potentially for implementation as well. Um we're going to be, you know, really relying on um our administrative partners at the building level to help support um some of that, too. We've also recently rekindled the professional learning council which is a group of administrators and teachers who really kind of review both the format and effectiveness and feedback on all of our professional learning opportunities. So that will be an opportunity to involve our staff in those conversations as well as we work through you know what that will look like and I know there are a lot of staff lift staff listening. We certainly have room for a few more members in that group if you are interested in joining. There was also one other area I saw kind of an impact to a smaller group of students, but a pretty pretty large impact. I think could be depending on the plan. So, if we're going to send um accelerated students to the middle school at the start of their day, I'd really like to know what that looks like for them when they go to their school after the start of the day. um because that means a fourth grader is getting on a bus and going to the junior high at as the start of their day which is a very different feel because the start of your day with your classroom is where you get kind of oriented for your day going forward. >> So understanding how those fourth and fifth grade students are going to experience that start of their day will will matter. >> Yeah, absolutely. and and as we start to build out the structure of how many students we are looking at that impacting um as we have wrapped up our benchmarking our window closed today um with the use of um the e-learning day on Friday we needed to add one more day to our benchmarking window to finish up makeups today um and so then we'll start pulling all of our math math um data and making some determinations about placements for acceleration for the upcoming school year and so once we have numbers more solidified we'll be able to start you mapping out what that really looks like and being super intentional about how we plan for the beginning of the elementary day specifically for our fourth and fifth graders who travel and where certain um portions of their day will fit um within you know their schedule. I >> think you made a great point on like things that impact students directly. I really appreciate that. What's what is on these slides gets us to 1.5 million. >> And what's not on these slides is what the next 300,000 was considered that was left off of these slides. Because one of the things that I I'd be interested in understanding the trade-off on is um intervention interventionist positions to member Ellis's point uh and the beginning of the day transportation for fourth and fifth graders. um and what were the items that were left off that we chose to make those trade-offs for? That'd be really helpful for me to understand to get behind it. >> Yeah. I I think whenever you're talking about tradeoffs, right, um one of the areas, as I alluded to at the beginning of the presentation, um that we did not want to go down the road was increasing our class sizes. um if you increase class sizes, there is where you can save significant money on um FTE, right? And we did not want to do that any more than where we're currently at. So that was one of the the biggest tradeoffs uh that we wanted to do in terms of you know the the middle school kids going to um the or excuse me our elementary students who are accelerated or double accelerated going to the middle school to to start their day. Um that to us there there's a lot of inefficiencies in our current system when you bust them both to and back. And so we wanted to eliminate um that inefficiency, we also saw that as a really good um cost saving. On the flip side of that, if we were to just say we're not going to bust kids to the middle school anymore for math, right? Um this was a problem I faced as a building principal in in 181, our building principles um and teachers would face it as well. when you're looking at sections of math. If you have, let we'll just make this up and say, um, you know, a fourth grade, let's say you have two sections and 40 of the kids are, um, you know, in accelerated math and 10 of the kids are in grade level, right? Um, if we didn't bust those kids over to the middle school, you would have a potential class of 40 accelerated students and then 10 students in the other section. And so busing kids over to the middle school helps us balance those in a more grade level center approach and doesn't adversely impact our elementary students or our teachers at the elementary level by overloading one class with wherever your numbers are and then you know underutilizing another class if those numbers are really small on the other end. So those are a lot of the trade-offs that we um discuss and in really looking at the impact on our staff and the quality of education that we can uh provide our students. Um, I want to be careful that I I don't throw a bunch of hypotheticals out there. Um, again, going back to that point, um, you know, if I were to sit up here and say, "Okay, here are 10 positions that we could consider." Those are 10 more individuals that, um, you know, now, um, would would be impacted and might start worrying about uh, their position. So, that's why I always want to be careful of here at the at the DES. We approach this um we really approach this from we believe administration should always um take the lead a as we go through this and make the sacrifices. Um certainly every group is making sacrifices here though. Um but we really tried to approach this in weighing the pros and cons of how can we be um you know as efficient as possible with our administration. if people are going to be getting that uh increased workload, um administration should lead and that's uh why we prioritized it in the way that we did. I I know we're talking about maybe some of the concerns with with moving um math up to the beginning of the day, but as a side note, when I read that, one of the things that I thought was actually really great about it was um when we transport kids in the middle of the day, both directions, we actually lose time both ways that the kids are not in the classroom by starting off and that's one of the directions of transportation time that's not coming out of classroom time. Uh so I actually saw that as kind of a general uh positive in if we put it either at the tail end or the beginning of the day. Um they're starting off without um transportation cutting into actual school day. And so I I saw that as a as a real benefit when I when I first saw this. I I got kind of excited about it just as a a side note. And certainly there's there's work that needs to be done as and again I want to emphasize that's why we start these conversations in January. You know we are going to be working with our middle school administrators on where to sit our uh elementary students on those routes versus where we're going to sit our our middle middle school students. Um every district does transportation a little bit differently. I know there are some people saying well you know maybe we shouldn't put elementary kids on a middle school route. Um, you know, when we look at the age gap of of what we're doing right now at the elementary school, you have kindergarteners all the way to sixth graders, right? And that poses some problems. Um, on the flip side, I'm sure we will run into some situations where putting a fifth grader on a middle school bus, we have to monitor that closely to make sure we don't run into those problems. Um, then when the kids come back to the elementary school, um, to, uh, member Ellis's point, we don't want our kids to miss out on things like morning meetings and all of those things. And so that's where we sit back with our various councils and committees and administrators and teachers and say, "Okay, if we can't do that right at this time like we're used to, when might we be able to fit that in so we don't lose that opportunity um for our our students?" And so there there's pros and cons. There's good things in in um you know, some of the ways we transport kids. There's things that aren't as good, but how do we make the best situation possible? And that's what we're committed to doing. Other questions or comments? >> Yeah, just one one question. I think uh I just want to make sure I understand maybe this is a question for both you Kevin and Darren in terms of new revenue potential and advocacy with the states right and obviously we got state issues but we have our own unique challenges with homeless shelter and and other things. So I guess >> yeah I'm just you know what is there anything else we could be doing? you know, do we need more voices, different voices, louder voices? How do we kind of >> So, let's talk about the state angle. Um, we do have a unique thing here in district 58 where we bring our legislators in uh once a school year. They all come. Uh, that is a wonderful opportunity for us to advocate. Um, we've spent a great deal of time with our legislative committee talking about how we can make finances uh the forefront of our forum. unfortunately was canceled on Friday, but we are rescheduling that and uh shaping that time uh where we can really advocate for what we need and use that as an opportunity to educate our legislators on the on the impact of things like proration. So, that's a a great advocacy point. Also, um lend lend is a group that we belong to like every other uh DuPage County School District. Um that is a high priority for Lent. Uh lend is currently working with legislators to see who will sponsor um fixing proration. Um so that is another area where we're advocating at the state level and of course we have ISA, ISB and ISBO uh who are all advocating uh for the same thing. Uh locally, one of the things that I still continue to and I'm sure they're sick of me calling at the county and all of those things. Uh but I'm going to keep at it. I can't ever give any guarantees. Um but we are making more movement with our uh partners at the county board um in terms of are there opportunities uh with the IHC related to transportation costs that they might help supplement our budget uh given the uniqueness of um putting a homeless uh center in one school district. It works very well for their model as we've discussed. Um but it does have a very negative impact on the home district with transportation. And so currently we're in uh talks with the county um and uh they're reviewing our proposal and my hope is that we will then um and they've indicated that they will do this uh have a meeting with the uh impacted county board members who are in Downer's Grove along with the chair to see if we can make some movement there and get revenue. Um, looking at Sassid, I talked all the time at at the deis here that um, we are one of uh, the biggest districts. Uh, we are the biggest elementary district in Sassid. Um, I want to to uh, the greatest extent possible have as many SASID programs in our district as we can so long as it doesn't disrupt um, you know, how we function as a school district. Um, because so many of our students um, take advantage of SASID programs. I I would much rather have them here in a district 58 building versus, you know, in Winfield or another place. Nothing against those places, but I don't want our kids to have to drive on a bus. And it the more that we can bring um to district 58, there are revenue opportunities uh with that I as well. Um, you know, next meeting we'll talk about uh school fees and uh we will talk about expanding opportunities for kids um at several uh subsequent school meetings. You know, that is something that the board can consider as well like many of our neighboring districts um to provide kids more opportunities. Sometimes there is a user fee associated with that for sports or clubs or activities. Uh that's another thing that we can discuss as well. >> Thank you. And yeah, I guess whatever help you need with that county conversation. Yeah, >> please please let me know. >> Absolutely. So, you know, as I always do, I will continue to update the board on those conversations. As soon as I get uh our proposal back with their questions, I will share those right away with the board and I do anticipate um you know, having representatives from this board in that big meeting that we have uh with the county. Um, and I will work with the board president on that uh to see uh if we can get another member to come along with that because I also think it's important that they don't just hear from the superintendent, but they hear from uh the board members as well. >> Thank you. >> All right. Well, thank you guys very much. Uh these are our least favorite meetings uh to have. But um the thorowness that that entire presentation held was incredibly important. It allows us to get a a better view on what's going on and understanding. I think it also helps us walk into our meeting with our legislators uh in a few weeks from now with a with open eyes and have a better conversation. I alluded to it earlier. I don't think this is going to get fixed in a year or two, but they have to understand um the impacts of proration. I understand that the EBF model feels sacred at this point, but those benefiting from EBF are not really having the opportunity to benefit from it if they have to take that additional funding uh to make up for their losses in mandated categoricals. So really nobody at this point has been benefiting from the model that was created uh nearly a decade ago. So hopefully we can continue to advocate and find a way to make education a priority again. >> That is spot on. Um the evidence-based funding model which everybody supports um was never uh intended to um not have the categorical reimbursed alongside it. >> All right. Well, thank you to everybody. Um that brings us to public comment. Uh this is an opportunity uh for the community to make a public comment. The board is allowed 30-minut time frame for this opportunity. Uh anyone wishing to address the board is asked to please state their name and school attendance area. Please limit your comment to three minutes so that everyone has the opportunity to speak um and be respectful of these time limits uh and respectful of others and abide by board policy. Though I do not have any cards in my basket. So with that, I will open up the floor. So, if you would like to make a a comment, please come up and state your name, attendance area, or if you're a staff member where you teach. And uh >> Okay. Well, thank you for being here. >> I do want to thank um on behalf of everyone sitting up here, all of our staff, we know how busy you are to take the time to come out on a very cold evening. Um we do appreciate that you're here. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, then. A couple of announcements. Friday, February the 6th at 7 a.m. will be the next financial advisory committee. That's going to be here at the Downers Grove Civic Center. February 9th at 7 p.m., that's a Monday, will be the next regular board meeting right here at the Downers Grove Civic Center. Uh Friday, February 20th at 7 a.m. will be the legislative breakfast that'll take place at Heric Middle School. Monday, February 23rd at 700 p.m. will be our curriculum workshop that will also take place here at the Downro Civic Center. Uh that wraps up the evening. So, is there a motion to adjurnn? >> So moved. >> Second. >> All right. All those in favor? >> I I Anybody opposed? The motion carried. We are now adjourned at 8:57 p.m. Thank you. >> Thanks.