School Committee: June 9, 2020

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0:06 Hello and welcome to MHTV’s Headliner. I’m John Caswell. The Marblehead School Committee held their public hearing on the FY21 budget June 8th. Here are the highlights. So there are a number of goals and priorities that were identified for the development of the FY21 School Committee budget. The first goal is, and priorities typically is standard, priority of any budget is to meet the contractual obligations of the collective bargaining units and to make sure that there’s money in the budgets for those obligations. A second goal, which is really a follow-up from the process that was started a year ago in developing the FY20 budget. The goal was to reorganize the central administration staffing. In doing that, we have for FY20, we did not fund the human resource directive position, and we also did not fund the director of operations and technology position. And then we’re also looking to restore full funding of the assistant superintendent’s position that was temporarily reduced to FY20 with the retirement of the former assistant superintendent, Brad Smith. The major goal for this year’s budget is to manage special education tuition and transportation services to full funding.

1:44 The goal of curriculum and student support is to ensure, and in this case with the focus on K-6 math and science curriculum, is to make sure that we’re providing equitable access to the curriculum across all the

2:06 grade level classrooms so that, you know, a student in one class section engraved to at the Glover School has access to the same curriculum, and in this case, and equally as important, access to the same supplies and materials for that curriculum area. In terms of equity and improved access for student support services, one of the concerns that we had identified was, again, students having access to the same services, in this case, both at the cost and in the Glover School. So one of our final goals for the FY21 budget is related to facilities maintenance. Facilities maintenance, both in terms of supplies, materials, repairs, and cost for utilities, our original draft budget proposed in February was the $41.4 million. It’s now at $40.5 million. There’s an adjustment from the original draft in February of an adjustment down of over $900,000 and an adjustment from the state of the town kind of target gap number of the FY21 budget list.

3:42 The cost of COLAs steps is down over $500,000. All of our original goals and what the original proposed budget was designed to support the educational program, if you will, for FY21, supports all of our goals with the exception of the curriculum coach and the administrative COLAs. And one last piece, and this is a lot of unknown. So FY21 School reopening unknowns, this is related to the money stack proposed in the budget to address any unknown or unanticipated costs. Possible impacts of reopening and cost-related impacts. We’re not sure what social distancing cost impacts will be. We do know that in our clerical areas, we’re putting up transparent barriers. You know, a lot of that work is being done this year. PPE costs, we know there’ll be PPE requirements for any kind of school reopening. Many districts have unknown transportation costs. Given our transportation, how it works here, I’m not anticipating a large degree in change there, but we’ll know better. We’ll know more when guidance comes out. Cleaning and disinfectant supplies.

5:16 Students’ support. You know, we mean what additional supports are students returning back to school going to have? What’s the social emotional impact? What are the learning gaps that some students may have, you know, as a result from school closures? And how will we go about helping students overcome those gaps? Will there be, you know, will there be, you know, after programming, will it be after school, will it be on Saturday mornings? And will there be student support programs that happen during the day with some additional staff? Will staff be realigned? And then, of course, technology, given that, I think it’s likely a school reopening plan that is supposed to come out from yesterday next week, the middle of next week, is called for some students coming in to school, after students coming in at one point the other half, the next, maybe a week on week off, I’m not sure about that. But, you know, will there be additional technology? And then others, there may be certainly other possible impacts. A few folks, Erin and some other folks have been talking and asking us, you know, where we’re going to find funds if we have these unforeseen costs that do overrun our revenue.

6:52 So I think that it’s, you know, I don’t want to be, sound like I’m wimping out here, but I think that from my perspective as a school community member, it’s hard to sit here and talk about where we would make changes for, you know, based on hypothetical and unforeseen additional costs and running out of revenue in different buckets. It’s hard to sort of do that. So I think from, you know, where I sit, the question is what do you, if you were here, because we can’t ask John, because he’s not really upset, but, you know, between you and Michelle, how would you envision a process? So in other words, if you were sitting in this seat on July 1st and by, you know, October 1st, we are looking at some difficult financial situation. How would you envision that kind of process going to you and Michelle, the business manager, finance manager, prioritizing or making recommendations? Because I believe, correct if I’m wrong, it would likely be a recommendation by the administration as to how we would overcome those costs or revenue shortfalls. If we needed to look at that once the school year started, that’s your question. Correct. Right. So what I would do is I would involve the leadership team. We bring the leadership team together. Michelle and I would have, you know, talked about some ideas.

8:26 But we bring the leadership team together. We lay out what the issue is. And, you know, we try to work as a team to identify areas that would have, you know, as we’ve talked about before, the least impact on direct student services and develop a rationale for, you know, each idea that’s pulling the table. And then to put that together, it would mean it probably would mean more than, you know, one or two meetings, but giving people an opportunity to perhaps go back, share it with, you know, talk to either key staff or some staff about that. Put together some different scenarios and then bring those back to the school committee with either, you know, might be a first pass of, you know, do you have, does the school committee have a certain, you know, sense of prioritizing different scenarios? You know, I’d want to hear your feedback. And then if you were ready to make a decision on one of those, fine. But if not, you need more information. We go back to the team and, you know, tweak things and then come back with a final recommendation. I agree with you that we did do a pretty darn decent job at building a zero based budget. You know, I think what we are now moving into is finding a, creating a needs based budget.

10:11 And so, you know, we know now where we stand, what we have as the priorities. And, you know, when you came in last year, the school committee had set forth a list that we all created together of priorities to cover through the year. And that I think is where you built that zero based budget from because obviously, you know, staff was one of those top priorities. And so I think as we move into next year, that’s where we sort of find ourselves is that now we’re going to task with, with really, you know, kind of shoring up any loose ends on that zero base, but then creating a needs based budget, it seems like. And so now we’ve got a list of answers to our questions and, you know, COVID notwithstanding, because I think, you know, that’s one of those pieces that again, like we said, we’re going to just have to continue to monitor very closely. And now we dig in with John and we figure out how to, how to really meet the needs of this district and move us forward. And, you know, that’s kind of that’s that’s my thoughts on some of the questions that were asked of the school committee this evening. I think that’s it for tonight. You know, we do have another meeting set up for Wednesday evening. You know, I think there’s been a little bit of concern amongst the community that that’s gonna, you know, we’re gonna completely change our path from tonight. It is, it’s a meeting that that we’re going to just hash out a few pieces to address that, you know, are concerned from the community.

11:48 So I think, you know, it’s just an ongoing conversation from this and that there are no huge pivots planned as far as far as I know. So, you know, everyone is encouraged to tune in again, you know, obviously, like Megan said, this is another silver lining. It’s just the ease in which we can participate and watch these meetings. But yeah, I just wanted to kind of address that. So just want to say, yeah, when when do you anticipate school committee voting? I believe that vote is set and Bill, correct me if I’m wrong, that vote is set for the next school committee meeting. Is that the 19th? It’s after the Fincom meeting. Okay, I wasn’t sure. Correct. Got it. So the 18th, sorry, I misspoke. Thursday, Thursday, the 18th. So the kind of the final regularly scheduled school committee meeting of our year, of our school year. And HTV will continue to bring you COVID-19 updates on our website, marvelatv.org, on our Facebook page, Marvel community access and media, and on our MHTV community bulletin board. And if you’d like these updates delivered right to your inbox, go to our website, marvelatv.org and sign up for our constant contact emails. For Headliner News, I’m John Caswell. Thanks for watching.