Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: First time I've looked at myself in the screen Welcome all

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: to House Education on Wednesday, January 21. Gonna hear some testimony today on how Burlington does its budgeting for all of its schools. This was a presentation that the Commission on the Future of Public Education heard during the summer. And I found it particularly valuable because in a way it sort of mimics what would it be like to have a foundation formula. And anyway, so I thought of it and said, Oh, let's invite labor to come in and bring it to us. So just a few days notice. And what always amazes me about this job is that when you ask people to take time out of their busy day to come and talk to us, they often say yes. So very thankful that you're here, Nate, and the floor is yours.

[Speaker 0]: Great. Well, thanks for having me. I, you know, as Chair Conlon mentioned, I did kind of do a little bit of an update, but largely similar presentation to what I've provided before that provides a background and a little information on our equitable budgeting model that we use in Burlington as which is a major component of our budgeting process. So I'll give a little presentation on that and and certainly reserve plenty of time for any questions or, you know other ideas that people want to ask if I if I don't cover a certain element of it in enough depth. My one technical question before we get going is I did provide some slides I sent them over to Matt earlier is that something that I should run from here or can you guys do you have access to those slides?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: No, if you don't mind sharing your screen that'd be really helpful.

[Speaker 0]: Okay, sure. Stand by.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And we do have them in front of us.

[Speaker 0]: Okay, very good.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: From the viewing audience.

[Speaker 0]: All right,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Can you see

[Speaker 0]: the presentation now?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Perfect.

[Speaker 0]: Great. Okay. So we will jump right in. So I like to start the kind of discussions about the model we use in Burlington by just giving people a little bit of history. And the history was gosh it must have been about five or so years ago now at least when at least that many when we when new superintendent, superintendent Tom Flanagan came in and this was a priority area to develop a budget model that centered equity. So we assembled a team of district staff kind of principals and leadership in the district, and we set about building this budget model. And one of the things we defined right from the beginning is that the model wasn't intended to be an opportunity to increase or decrease funding generally. We know sometimes when these opportunities present themselves, people take it as an opportunity to be like, well, we should have 10 of these and 50 of these and so many, you know, kind of gets a little it becomes a feeding frenzy if you will and and the result is something that you actually can't implement because it's not affordable or sustainable. So we made clear really what we were aiming for was a way to more transparently and equitably distribute whatever amount of funding we had and a model that we could adapt to the amount of funding we have. So that if we need to make a change in the total amount of spending, that it doesn't feel arbitrary to people. That we would see a change in the model that would be applied broadly across our schools and get away from what we kind of call advocacy based budgeting where it tends to be whoever can show up the most or whoever's allowed us in the room tends to get what they want for for their particular school or department or so forth. So I think that's really important to keep in mind that like we did not set out for this to increase or decrease spending and I think that's important to understand particularly in context of the state level discussions about where spending is a very relevant portion of the work that you all are grappling with right now. So we used, I call it a research based model. It's where possible we relied on research but we also relied heavily on input from our community in Burlington, not only students and families but just general community members who may or may not have had a direct relationship with the school. We sought information from them and one of the things that was really compelling to us was that there was overwhelming support in our community for allocating resources to students who have the most need. And so our model attempts to reflect that priority. The basic structure of the model is a kind of foundational level of financial and staffing support plus some flexible funding that we call RISE funding that we allocate to each school and that gives them flexibility to make decisions at the kind of lowest level possible. So another philosophy that we pursued in this process was trying to drive the decision making as close to the students as possible. And finally, particularly important for us over the past probably four or so years at least, been recognizing that our staffing and our model and the associated staffing needs to be responsive to enrollment changes. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Just to emphasize the amount of input we received when we developed this, we did an extensive community survey. It was in fact one of the highest response rates that we've had in our community in terms of doing these surveys. People don't generally get super excited about survey overload I think, but we had a pretty representative scale of response and that was pretty intentional on our part to try to make sure we reached people who maybe traditionally had a harder time accessing some of these surveys. And the key theme, as I mentioned here, was this broad level of support for allocating resources to students who need the most and that is how we think of equity when we talk about budgeting here. So I think it's important to know that this may or may not be representative of other communities in state, but it was pretty clear message that was sent by our community. I won't spend a lot of time talking about the nuts and bolts of the process unless folks ultimately want to dig into it later, but as with any kind of high level process, the devil's ultimately in details and there are a lot of really specific tasks that we need, we go through during the budgeting process. We lay out a high level timeline, which is accessible from this presentation, that just shows when various tasks happen and who performs them. We have a whole kind of category of tasks that are performed essentially by principals and at the school level versus tasks that are being performed at the more central administrative level. Portion of that is obviously checking roster validations, making sure that we're we're starting from a a shared understanding of where things stand in schools every year. So we revisit that, make sure that nothing has changed in the last year that we failed to capture in our model so that we know exactly how many positions are in each of our schools, where they are, what types of roles they are, so forth. Then we provide schools with a baseline allocation of staff as well as funding per student and then this supplemental additional RISE allocation. I'll talk a little bit more about these. I think this visual is probably the easiest way to truly understand what I'm talking about when I talk about the different components of the model. So the baseline staffing, that accounts for the vast majority of the dollars spent by the district. Folks are probably well aware of this, but schools tend to spend upwards of 70%, 7580% of their budget on staffing is not at all uncommon. It's probably norm across the entire state, if not the country. It's a labor intensive industry. And so we were really careful in developing our staffing model and and establishing ratios and knowing that that was gonna be the biggest portion of our our budget. So we provide the staffing, then we layer on top of that what we call the non personnel funds that, again it's a formula based number but we layer that on top and those both of those first two elements we consider kind of the foundational elements. And then it's the RISE funding that little green layer on top that's intended to provide discretion to schools, give them the ability to meet their specific needs, and in some cases even experiment and try new things, all in the service of our equity goals. So what's in the baseline position models? Just about everything you would probably guess, right? Principals, teachers, librarians, we've listed some examples here. We do provide some flexibility in the model, right, where we allow for a few different configurations, the idea being that they all roughly are equal, right? So for example, when we talk about special education teachers versus paraeducators, there we allow a kind of mix of those two things, but there's a ratio. A special education teacher is a lot more expensive and comes with, in theory, higher level of skill and training than a paraeducator. So, you can essentially have more paraeducators or you can have fewer special education teachers, but we allow some kind of trade between those two depending on the needs of the students at the school. The baseline model is intended to ensure that every school has a core level of staffing that can meet all of the basic needs of, you know, that we expect schools to do. And actually before I go on, will say some of the resources that we drew on when creating this model were resources that had been developed in Vermont, including reviewing what at the time was the only, I think, report that the Pikus Group had done. So I know that they've done some other work, but just know that like some of that work, the original work that was done number of years prior, informed some of this. We looked to that. We looked to published research that we could and we looked at our own experience. Right? What was working? What would what do we have in our current school? So we kind of blended where we could the research when it was available with our actual experience in Burlington to come up with staffing ratios that we felt worked for us, knowing that they can be changed. And they have changed at times in certain roles based on our evolving needs.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Nathan, just if you don't mind. Yeah. So Burlington has how many schools?

[Speaker 0]: Sure. Sorry. Good question. So we have six elementary schools, two middle schools. We are just about finished our with our building our new high school. So, one high school which also contains a portion of our tech center programs. We operate the Burlington Technical Center as well. So, six elementary, two two middle, a high school, a technical center, and we have a program that's kind of part of our high school program. It's like a satellite. We might think of it as like an alternative small scale high school for students who just aren't thriving in the kind of bigness of our normal high school. So that's kind of housed separately, but those are high school aged students.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you. Sure.

[Speaker 0]: The non personnel allocation. This probably isn't the most exciting piece of the model, but this is essentially dollars per student and you can see the numbers listed at the bottom of the slide. This just looks at a raw head count, right, enrollment based, and provides a certain amount of money per student to meet a number of what we think of as like the typical school purchases. It could be supplies that classroom teachers buy. It could be used for professional development that is determined at the school level, for example. But this is provided to each school to use to meet the kind of operating needs that they have. I put an important caveat there that it's not this does not include, like, building maintenance or utilities, which we manage centrally in Burlington. So, for example, we don't give schools an allocation for electricity and then expect the principal to be monitoring that line item and like turning the lights off if it's, you know, if they're using too much. We we manage that those types of costs centrally, but all the types of things that might be needed just in the kind of provision of the education at the classroom level and so forth, we provide a per student amount as a kind of baseline amount for these non personnel expenditures. And then we move into what we call our rise money and this is the supplemental money and I'll spend a little more time talking about this because I think this was one of the components of our model that is a little more innovative compared to some of the models that we studied when we were building this. So we set out to answer that question of like, how do we best drive money to the students who need it most? And we came up with this model which provides a weighted allocation per student. So you can see the categories below and you can see the amount per per student. Right? We have a baseline amount that we then apply weights to similar derived from the same weights that are that are in law right now. We use those same weights. It's not obviously it doesn't match it. It's not a total funding formula, but we use the same kind of relative weight of of the different variables in constructing this. So the idea is that you could have two schools that have the same absolute level of enrollment in terms of number of students, but they could receive different levels of RISE funding. Even though they would get the same core staffing, they would get the same non personnel amount of money, that kind of but then they could have vastly different RISE allocations. And that is intended to move that money towards students that fall into the categories that we have identified as representing higher levels of need. And we've had some analysis by a third party group that was funded by Nelly Mae that shows we've actually made a lot of strides in ensuring that the funding is aligned with the level of needs that we see in our schools. So we've got some kind of third party evidence that shows this is really working to get the funding there. The the bigger challenge, I think, and the part that we're really turning our attention to now is translating that funding into actual student achievement and student outcomes. Right? It's one thing to say, oh, we are putting more money into schools that have higher concentrations of multilingual learners or students in poverty, but are you actually giving those students what they need to to have the same opportunities and levels of achievement as as their peers. So that is a big piece of the puzzle that I say we're we're now really turning our attention to. We have the resources we believe, and now it's a question of making sure that we deploy them in an effective way. And I think one of the things that we allow in this RISE allocation is flexibility for schools. So we give schools wide latitude in how they spend the money. We ask them to develop a plan that is done with by, you know, ultimately by the principal but in consultation with what we call school advisory groups that consist of teachers and parents and students when appropriate to weigh in on what they feel like that school that particular school needs. So we have examples of schools that are using this in some cases to hire an additional interventionist for example for reading support. We have other schools that might use it to invest in more social emotional supports. And there could be a mix, know, they don't all do just one thing, of course. But there's sometimes it's spent on professional development in certain areas for teachers. Sometimes it's spent on programs designed to increase family engagement. So different schools assess their needs, they try it, and one of the things that we're trying to emphasize is that it's okay to to try something and and have it not work too. But the idea of the annual review here is if you try something and you hope it moves the needle and after a year or two it's not, right? Then we should we should take that as money well spent because we learned something and let's go, let's but but not keep you know, the answer to that isn't necessarily just keep putting more money into that one thing, right? It's like, okay, what what else could work? And given that we have, for example, half a dozen elementary schools, we have the capacity for those schools to learn from one another. Right? If two schools are kind of trying different strategies intended broadly speaking to achieve the same outcome, we might be able to actually have a little bit of a natural experiment and see if that investment is working in one place, for example, better than another, or is a school who tried a particular strategy seeing more more improvement or better results than a school who tried a different strategy. So the idea here ultimately is decision making at the school level, flexibility in how they spend the money, but intended to ultimately, you know, result in more equitable outcomes. The other thing I'll say about this, I think it's important, is when we transitioned to this model, we had one thing going for us to some degree, which is that we had some additional level of federal money. So we had some flexibility, but by and large, we didn't have like a whole lot of new money. We didn't raise, you know, increase our budget dramatically or do something like that to generate the funds for these rise allocations. What we did is we looked at the staffing model we built and we compared that to what we actually had in our buildings. And we looked for those examples where a where where our schools had certain positions that were not deemed part of our core staffing model. And where those positions were, we essentially quantified the value of those positions and said, okay. That's the money for our RISE allocation. Right? So we added up those positions, we found out how much money that was, we said, okay, these positions are no longer automatic, they're not necessarily going to return next year, instead we're going to distribute the funding for them through this RISE mechanism. And if a school chooses to essentially buy that position again, they're free to do so, but they don't have to. And so I think on the one hand, again, keeping with the theme I talked about at the beginning, this wasn't intended to grow the pie, so we didn't just add a whole new layer to the budget and a whole amount of new cost. But I will say that, Kate, there was a bit of a pain point there, right, for the people who felt like they were losing something because they used to have position a. And then through this process, their team decided, nope, we're going to put that money toward some new investment, position B, whatever it might have been. You know, there was certainly an adjustment period there because people had to understand that they now have they're now empowered to make that choice. They have this money, but it didn't, it wasn't free money. It didn't, you know, kind of come from a new revenue source. It came from within existing resources that we said you now have the flexibility to choose to spend this differently, but we didn't force them to spend it differently. What we've seen over the years is that in the first couple of years of doing this process, a lot of schools just did what they were doing before. They took their RISE money and they put it right back into the things that had been removed to generate the funds for the RISE investments. And then over time, we've seen a migration away from that as people, I think, have become more comfortable with the process, had better seen this money as kind of an opportunity, they've started to try new things. And now a lot of those items that were previously funded in the first year or two with with this rise allocation are no longer funded. And we've seen more divergence of schools trying trying different things and addressing their own their own needs. So I think it's been an evolution. I think it's been a learning process. And I think it's also been working ultimately to get the money, you know, in the hands of, or it's, you know, the, the money as close as the point of student level decision making as we can. But we really need to keep the focus now on actually determining whether or not those investments are proving effective in terms of student achievement. I think that's our next big, big challenge. The last thing I wanted to kind of summarize here and just give people an update of a little bit of like what does this look like for Burlington, for example, right now in the budget process that we're that we're going through? So our board just adopted a a proposed budget for the coming fiscal year. And right out of the gate, our model was showing us that based on our declining enrollment in Burlington, that we should be reducing about four and a half teaching FTEs and another three kind of related district operational positions and so forth, as well as a reduction in that RISE funding. Because again, that RISE funding is based on it's a weighted enrollment, but it's still an enrollment. So if if enrollment goes down, you can solve situations where the weighting measures increase, but in this particular year, the decrease in enrollment produced a reduction in the total expenditures on, you know, budget for for rise expenditures by about a $100,000. So one of the things that has become apparent to me when I talk to some of the call my colleagues across the state is that that I I think that we've really benefited from in Burlington by using this model is that having a kind of formulaic way to adjust your staffing to changes in enrollment that isn't dramatic, right? We're not we're trying to avoid a seesaw effect. We don't want to cut a position one year only to hire it back because two kids show up the next year and then cut it again the next year. Like that's that's not good for anybody. That's a lot of administrative work. That's really disruptive to the school. So we're we're judicious in terms of when we feel like we've gone far enough over a line in one of our metrics to to make a staffing change. But at the same time, we have a transparent kind of under I don't know how well understood it is, but at least accepted process to that that is that we're and we we talk about it. We need to align our staffing to enrollment. And as a result, for something like four of the past five years, I just looked back this morning, we've reduced positions from instructional and non instructional roles across the district. And I think one of the advantages of doing this is that we haven't had to make major reductions in any particular year despite having significant decrease in enrollment. And when you do these reductions kind of regularly and annually, I think both it builds a level of trust that there's kind of a process behind it and a methodology that's rational. But it also, by and large, allows us to actually retain a lot of the human beings because in a district of our size and scale, you know, of these four and a half teaching FTEs, for example, you know, two or three of them are at the elementary level. We're gonna have more than two or three retirement and resignations. Like, in all likelihood, if the people in those positions want to continue working in the Burlington School District, they're gonna be able to do so. We're not looking at a situation where when we reduce positions, have kind of major layoffs and we have a lot of people that, you know, that we worked hard to recruit and now we have to let go. So I think that's another advantage of of kind of regularly doing this work is that we've avoided major disruptions. We've just identified opportunities as the, you know, year over year where we've got more third grade sections than, you know, than we need, for example, because the rising class is smaller. So I think that is to me been one of the things that it's been noteworthy to me about the process. We've been able to avoid the major disruption and I think, even when going through the always difficult conversation of with principals and school leaders and ultimately impacted people, that positions are going away. I think it's been generally understood that it's the product of a thoughtful process as opposed to feeling like it's arbitrary or it's just the least popular school or whatever it might be that's suffering from it. Lastly, I will say that because our superintendent said last night, so I don't feel like I'm breaking any news here, but, you know, we have started to talk about the fact that we have six elementary schools and in a relatively small geographic area and we have been we've seen a series of years now where our enrollment has declined somewhat. Maybe not dramatically in any one particular year but it's declined to the degree that we are now saying part of our process over the next year, we're going to begin examining whether whether the current trend suggests that we need to look at closing a school here. And that's we know that that's a really difficult conversation for communities to have. We hope to be, you know, thoughtful about it, but I would point back to our model as an example of that. When we get to a point where we look at, some of these schools and if if one of them is so small that even though we our model often has a floor, like a minimum, right, that that a school would have. And if we get to a point where the the staffing for the school, even at the minimum levels looks you know, essentially makes that school much more expensive to run, know, that's a signal to us that we need to look at whether or not it's prudent to continue operating that school. And our district leadership in discussing this year's reductions was really clear. And by say district leadership, I mean, principals, the kind of director level folks. People felt really strongly that they didn't want to keep cutting, kind of trimming services here and there and everywhere across the district and ultimately bring down the overall level of programs and services we could provide when it would make potentially more sense if the need arises to close a school that can whose students can be absorbed by other schools and thereby preserve a robust level of academic programming that we're offering. So that's not, you know, nothing is imminently on the horizon or not, but I know that consolidation and and, you know, kind of the number of schools has been a major topic across the state. And I would say it's a topic even within our own district. And I view our model as one of the ways that we can kind of dispassionately assess whether or not our schools remain kind of economically viable because we know that if, you know, if you spread it too thin, you end up with schools that have less opportunity for students, not more opportunity. And that's something we're very conscious of. So I'll leave it at that. And then if I was too fast in any place, someone wants me to go back, I'm happy to do that or answer any other questions about the model.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Thanks for pointing out that declining enrollment is not just a rural Vermont thing, a good reminder. So I have, in talking about your presentation today, I've talked about it as it's a micro version of foundation formula funding in that you fund your schools by allocating money based on student profile. I just wanna make sure I'm accurate when I say that.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, I think that is accurate. Again, it's a little bit of a mix though. It's kind of a hybrid because we do have staffing model. So the staffing model is, you know, is is not driven by the student profile. It's it's just it's enrollment driven, but it's not driven it's not weighted. Right? So you the number of principals, the number of homeroom teachers you get is not a product of waiting. That's just a product of raw enrollment. So it's a little bit of a hybrid, but I think broadly speaking, you're saying is a reasonable characterization of kind of the approach that we're taking.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, I look at that sort of what you just said, that base funding as the same thing as the foundation of the foundation formula, it's then layered upon with weights. So the presentation you gave to the commission was rather enlightening that in providing a way that is almost dispassionate to allocate money, that's more about sort of objectives and objective measures than anything else. Anyway, let me throw it open to the committee. Representative Long.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Thank you for that. That was really interesting. And I appreciate especially the attention being paid based on community feedback on need, student need, which is what I think most of our districts do. You do it with intention. I'm just curious about, you mentioned geographic area when you're talking about. So could you just give me the number of students in all of your district? I don't need to know the number of students in your schools, just how many students are enrolled in your Burlington School District? And do you have a rough idea of what the geographic area is?

[Speaker 0]: Well, when I say the geographic area, I'm talking about the city of Burlington.

[Emily Long (Member)]: That's right. And I don't know what it Sorry, I just go in terms

[Speaker 0]: of like what like it's size.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Yeah, mean we all know Windusky is a mile. How quick is Burlington compared to Windusky?

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, we're definitely a larger geographic area

[Emily Long (Member)]: than Yes. That might be.

[Speaker 0]: For sure. I I couldn't tell you the that's a great that's a good question, but I haven't looked up the the square mileage of of Burlington. But I would say this, it's a more right. Compared to some of our other school districts, particularly those multi town districts, we're relatively concentrated. Right? We're so much so that we, you know, our students are served when it comes to transportation. A lot of them are just riding the municipal bus service, right? We're not we don't need to have our own buses going all over the place. So there's some advantages to that for sure. Yeah. I don't know that that square miles, but I can tell you as a district, we're a little over 3,000 students now. That is a that is, you know, a non trivial decline from where we were five, six, and even ten years ago when I started. So and, you know, we're, I'll say, we are, fingers crossed, keep hoping that that when our new high school opens that there'll be a certain attraction to that facility that might but you know, the reality is what we when we've analyzed our our kind of enrollment patterns and so forth, the biggest obstacle to kind of increasing the school age population in the Burlington area is essentially affordable family housing. Even many of the new units going up are not project they're they're, like, single like, they're, like, you know, kinda one bedroom. It's just what the market is is demanding right now. And be that a you know, like, that is what it is. I I you know, I'm not a housing expert, but obviously we we get these projections that show that, that's where a lot of the growth is in housing. And so our district has faced, you know, a challenge of declining enrollment, as I said, and figuring out both the kind of short term, what adjustments we make to school, you know, but also like is there a strategy that we can use to actually attract more school age children to our community is something that we're thinking about. We're not quite sure how many levers we have to pull on that front, but it's something that, you know, that we're not overlooking.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Can I just ask a follow-up if Jeremy's jumping in? Comparing your model of budgeting to the foundation formula and what we're expecting, I'm just trying to peel back layers. How would you handle it if we were suddenly in a recession and the foundation formula had to be lowered? The base funding had to be lowered. And would you have to adjust the process with which you do your system? Or you do you worry about that? You know, you don't have any control over the dollars that are coming to you. Right. Right. You can't ask your taxpayers for more. You're gonna so I'm just wondering how this budgeting process would fit into that.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, mean, I will say I haven't thought deeply about that scenario under a foundation formula model. But what I can say is internal budgeting model, the idea behind it is that if for any reason, whether the state changes the funding model, whether the community just says we're not going to support spending at this level and we have to come back with something lower, idea here is that rather than for example, like, you know, let's just say we had to cut whatever a million dollars from our budget, right? Rather than just trying to pull a bunch of people together into a room and say, what can you live without? And hoping that it adds up and and and having, you know, the natural kind of territorial defensiveness that that those kind of discussions evoke. We the idea of the model is we can look at it and we say, well, how much money would we save? What would the impact be in terms of FTEs and savings if we, for example, increased the the average class size by one or two at, you know, the elementary or middle school level or or high school level. Right? We could change the model itself and then we could see what that produces in terms of the number of, or the different, you know, what changes in terms of the number of positions that we have a kind of, we have we have a way to approximate the cost of those, right? Put an average cost in each one of those positions. If we say changing the model, you know, in a savings of 10 positions and each of those position, average teacher position with wages and benefits is a $100,000, that's a million dollars. We could then determine whether or not that change is something that we think would be kind of instructionally sound and and worth doing, but it's a way to apply it to everyone kind of equally. Another, you know, and it doesn't have to be a teaching position, it could be any any sort of position that we model. But the idea again is if we have to reduce spending, we want to ask ourselves the question of how do we want to change our model? Like what what can we live with in terms of changing the model? And then, we go from there to determine you know, the amount of savings that that that generates. And so it's not I don't think it, like, avoids difficult decisions or anything like that. I think we're more interested we know it's never easy when and I've been through a number of times, right? Cutting any of the school budgets is not easy. But what we've learned is the combination of, I think, transparency in in the process and and fairness to the extent that you can demonstrate it goes a long way. I think what we've also seen, and this has happened in my early in my tenure, is budget reductions that kind of weren't as transparent and certainly not perceived as fair. And now you have people feeling aggrieved and you have a lot more resentment. I think when people at least feel like the process is fair and that they they might be making do with less, but everyone who's kind of situated in an equivalent manner is is being treated the same way, I think that's a lot easier for folks to to accept. And I think it allows us when we change the model to demonstrate and to articulate, like, here's what what we changed, why we chose to do it, and here's, you know, here's an alternative that we felt was worse. And so we didn't we didn't want to change that. We might, for example, say, we think we can reduce the number of teachers at the high school based on this model by having a slightly larger class size. And the research shows that at the high school level, those larger class sizes are not likely to produce, outcomes that are, you know, any any lower than or any they're not likely to kind of reduce the outcomes for students. So we can kind of talk about different ideas that we explored in order to generate the reductions.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

[Speaker 0]: You're welcome.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I think one of the selling points of your system is that it's sort of neutral, it's formulaic objective. So has it reduced many small areas? Ultimately, budget decisions might come down to who the teacher is that might be getting cut, and nobody wants to see that teacher go. Has that sort of level of discussion with the community gone down as a result of this? Maybe it never existed in Burlington or do you still have to face that no matter what?

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, I would say it definitely existed in Burlington and I would definitely say it's gone down, but I would not say that it has eliminated it. Right? We have had situations where we've come forward and we've said, you know what, we're a little out of alignment with our model in this area. And we've gotten significant pushback from, as usual, like a vocal minority. But and and we've altered course. And I think some of that, frankly, is a learning process for us too in terms of kind of what we bring forward, when we bring it forward. We don't what we this year, I will say, I was actually remarking on it this morning. We just had our last, you know, board budget meeting, last night. And I'm not sure we had a single public comment, at any of the last three meetings when we've had these position reductions on the table, which was pretty remarkable in my experience, not to have someone cut out and be like, but man, you know, I love teacher Nathan or something like that. Now granted, we're not discussing individual teacher names, but but by and large, people in the buildings know who the least senior people are, right? They can they can do the math themselves. So it's not unknown. And and the folks who are likely to be impacted receive a direct communication from their principal, even though their names not appearing in a slideshow. It's like, hey, we don't want people speculating. We want to be transparent with people. So so it's out there. I I know that. And the fact that we didn't get kind of resistance even from kind of more narrowly interested folks, I think is is important. But I don't want to sit here and tell you that, yeah, you put this model in place and, you know, there's no more no more of that kind of advocacy effort. There is. And I think a big part of our learning is trying to be really disciplined to make sure that when we bring forward a change that we articulate kind of where it's coming from, what's driving it. And as much as possible, we try to be in a position to resist the the kind of advocate, the advocacy effort because we know that at least in our community, the the loudest voices are often, not representative of our broader community. And if you kind of make your budget on that basis year after year, what you find is that more and more of the resources are concentrated in certain areas that have access to power and and voice already. And so really this this model as much possible, we try to we try very hard to kind of cling to it as a way to not only deliver what we hope to deliver for students, but also to change the way and the kind of culture around budgeting so that we've moved away from that advocacy based approach. And I think it's, I think we've made a lot of progress there, but again, I would never, I would never want to say that, you know, we've, we've somehow convinced everyone in Burlington that they don't need to come out and advocate anymore because, I'm sure that we will face that again in the future. And you know, every year we work to kind of strengthen and broaden the model and hope that we can articulate a clear rationale to people.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think as you said, trust and transparency go a long way with doing that work. Could you talk a little bit about the school advisory councils or whatever term you use for them, sort of how robust they are, how involved they are in some of this?

[Speaker 0]: Sure, yeah. I think I would say it varies by school. We call them school advisory groups, but we've tried to be really, a lot more intentional about, getting voice again from, from people who weren't traditionally involved in the budget process. So when we formed these school advisory councils, one of the things we talked about early on was, well, why don't we just use the existing PTO structure? And what we, the kind of, the work group that was comprising this, that was composing this model, kind of identified, particularly the principals on the work group. They said, you know, the PTOs are great, but they're not a representative group of parents of our families. And so when we formed these advisory groups, we stipulated that the principal who was assembling them really needed to make sure that they were representative of the various communities and that were represented, that appeared in their school. And so we've tried to be very intentional about that, to broaden the voices at the table, to bring them in to those discussions. The, I think in some schools have had more success in that on that front than others, for sure, and I think that some of that probably rests with the kind of particular strengths of the the principal involved and some of it is is maybe just, you know, it's not always easy to get people to come out and participate in something like this. It's not the, you know, not most people's idea of of the way that they want to spend their their time. We don't ask, we try not to ask too much of them. I'd say that's important, right? We try to keep them really focused on giving them that rise allocation and showing them what their other staffing allocations are so they they can make their rise decisions in context. The principals usually meet with them two to three times over the course of the budget season as a group, and we provide supporting documents in terms of, like, for the principal so they can to facilitate those. So we'll give them a kind of sample set of presentations that they can use to kinda structure those meetings. So we try to give them supporting materials. Again, some some principals rely on that more heavily than others. And I think that it's kind of on basis of their strengths and, you know, as leaders and also based on maybe how many of the people in their group are returning and are familiar with the process. But again, think of it as maybe two to three meetings over the course of a three month process. And then sometimes the the necessity go back, right, and review it. At the end, they'll they'll make recommendations. But if if based on, you know, a new information that comes to light during the budgeting process, if we have to say, well, we're reducing our RISE allocations by, you know, two or three or 4% that might cause some of them to revisit. So they can revisit it. But generally speaking, it's all kind of wrapped up in the months of November and December.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: How large are the school advisory groups?

[Speaker 0]: Probably in, you know, again, it's varied, but I would say we're looking at probably six to 10 people in most cases.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Other questions around the room? Thanks again for making the time so quickly for us. It's very thoughtful and very helpful.

[Speaker 0]: Great. Well, thanks for having me. Good luck to you all. Appreciate the work.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We'll need it. Thanks.

[Speaker 0]: Take care.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Bye. Thank you. Bye. Alright, everybody. Let's take seven minutes.