Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So here we are still in

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: the Ways and Means Committee, and it's still February 3. And, we are taking some testimony today with some folks from Burlington School District about essentially how they construct a budget. And really, the hope is that you'll treat us as if we are new school board members who you are telling how to do our jobs, however that works for you. So I'll give you the floor.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Okay. Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Nathan Lavery. I am the Burlington School District's executive director of finance and operations. I've been with the school district since, I want to say, 2014, October 2014. I think it's about right. So, wow, I regret actually trying to think of that. It's a long time now, it seems. But prior to that, I was actually with the legislative fiscal office. So some familiarity with the work that that you all do and I appreciate the pressure and the challenges that you all face. So I'm happy to talk a little bit about our budget process here and and certainly feel free to fire off any questions. But I think one of the things that I would start with were you all new school board members is to try to provide some sense of, at least in Burlington, the level at which our board thinks oh, and hi, Claire. Welcome. We're just just kicking off here. Do you want to quickly introduce yourself? I was just going to start talking about our budget process generally, but just so folks know who you are.

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Claire Wool. I'm chair of the Burlington School Board. I have been chair since 2018. I am excited to be here with Executive Director Lavery to share in what we can offer you with regards to budgeting. Thank you so much for having us.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you both taking the time in the midst of a whole lot going on in schools and particularly in your district right now. So thank you. Thank you.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Thanks. So I was gonna give a little overview of kind of what I might say to new school board members about our budget process. And I think the first thing I would say is that in Burlington we have a we kind of get really serious about the budget process beginning in the fall September really into October with an internal internal pieces of information. And we periodically update the school board at our regular finance and facility committee meetings as well as at full school board meetings. One of the things that I think is important to understand about the kind of level at which the board has kind of engages in the budget process in Burlington is that early in the process, we really look to the board for guidance, high level guidance on how to formulate a recommendation or a series of recommendations as necessary to the board. We don't expect or ask the board to kind of get into a line item level review of our budget. For example, you know, sometimes people talk to us about that level of detail and we say we're you know, we can talk about it, but our, you know, our budget has fifteen, twenty thousand line items in it. So it's not an efficient way to do it. So what we we try to do is get high level guidance from the school board and and we use that and we combine it with what we've developed in Burlington, which is a budget model. Other school districts may have some form of this or not. But in our district, we have a model that essentially allocates staff to each of our schools based on enrollment and based on some kind of metrics that we have established for allocating staff. We also have allocations, preliminary allocations we usually call them, that we give to schools for other monies that supports kind of the non staff spending that schools do. That could be for things like supplies for students or it could be for dues and fees to, you know, whether they're going on a field trip money or whether that is professional development money. All the things that a principal and the leadership team of the school has discretion over. We give them a an amount of money that again is based on enrollment. So it's kind of like a head count and then we multiply it by a number that we we choose and that gives us the amount of money that each school's getting. Then we have a third part of that that we use that we layer on top of that which we call our rise funds and that is money that we provide schools that's flexible. They can choose how to spend it on whether it's on personnel But the key there is that it is based on the what we do is a weighted enrollment. So we essentially use weights that are mathematically derived from the weights that you all currently have in law for certain classes of students in our district, students who are English learners, students who have IEPs or have free and reduced lunch. We look at the actual weighted enrollment of a school and then we give that school additional funds based on that weighted enrollment. So it's kind of like three parts. There's the core staffing, the kind of core essential funding that covers kind of basic stuff, and then there's this supplemental we can think of it as kind of supplemental fund funding that is intended to better ensure that we are putting the money where we have the students students who need it most. And the philosophy behind that is also about kind of driving some of that decision making down to the school level. So we ask the schools then to meet with a school advisory team or set of teams composed of not just staff but also parents and in some cases at age appropriate level students as well to generate ideas on how to spend that money at each school to address that school's unique challenges. And they so each school community can kind of incorporate that into their spending plan. So those are the three major components. And I know some of you may we've done some presentations on this so I could send slides if that'd be helpful at some point to see some of this visually. But think of it as those three major components. So that's kind of the high level work that we give to schools as I'm thinking about how are you going to spend your RISE money. At the same time, in the business office, the kind of administrative center of our budget process, we are looking at all sorts of other things, factors that are changing. Right? We're looking at the contractually negotiated rates of pay increases and other changes. We're looking at health increase health care, health insurance premium increases. All the things you might imagine, right, to figure out what do we need to budget to make sure that we are adequately resourced to face those costs that are that we know will be coming. We put all that together and we arrive at a what we call a level services budget. So essentially what we try to do is figure out what would it cost us next year to maintain the same level of services that we are providing this year. We did that process this year. We looked at that cost. We looked at it in light of some of the preliminary figures coming out of the tax department on the December 1 letter. And based on guidance from the school board, we determined that we needed to look at our district and identify opportunities to reduce spending to bring down the projected tax impact on on our community. So then we switched to kind of a phase two in that process where we assembled a budget work group of district leadership to generate ideas for reducing spending beyond what our basic model would would point to. And I think that's an important distinction because our even our our basic enrollment model showed that in Burlington, we had declining enrollment. And so even absent any of the information about tax impacts, we had already identified, for example, four and a half teacher FTEs that we were expecting to reduce simply because enrollment didn't justify maintaining those positions going forward. So then so we have that. So the model gives us some ability that could go up or down depending on enrollment. In the case of this year and the past couple of years, we've seen enrollment declines that have caused us each year to make modest reductions to our our school based staffing. We've also kind of commensurately reduced some of our central administrative staffing at the same time. So this year when when that essentially wasn't enough to get the tax rate down to a level that we, you know, that superintendent felt like he could recommend to the board. The board felt like they could recommend a community. We generated ideas through a a process with our district leadership. Couple scenarios we we considered about how you know, kind of how much reduction and what does that translate to in terms of an estimated tax rate so that we had some sense of whether or not, you know, major change was necessary. Through that process, we identified some other positions and some other spending kind of priorities or strategies to reduce spending. All of that kind of is going back and forth with kind of regular updates to the school board either through email communication when it's just a kind of update of where we're at or again in a committee setting or at a full board meeting. Ultimately, that gets us to a kind of end state where the superintendent through consultation with the board as well as his leadership team has identified or settled on a recommendation and we put that recommendation together with estimates of what it'll mean for tax rates and so forth. And we share that with the board who deliberates and ultimately determines what the the figure is that will put on the ballot that goes to voters at the town meeting day. So we're already through that whole process. We've we've arrived at our figure and our our ballot question and that is something that we we send in our case to the city of Burlington to to generate all the ballots. So that's kind of where we're at right now and of course then you know depending on what happens on town meeting day we may or may not need to do further analysis. Claire, any big things that I missed in that process from a board perspective?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yes, there are. I know I'm gonna let Claire jump in on first.

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: No, it was a great overview. I think if you want, how would you like me to contribute? Would you like to ask questions to Nate and then or have me contribute some here or you tell me?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I think I'm I think we're curious what happens sort of after the team, like, fiscal team, and then you all, you know, before it goes to the whatever the board does. And so maybe we could ask questions of Nathan about sort of that side of the equation, and then we can go to you for you to explain your side of the equation. Does that make sense?

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: Yeah. I would just first say, even though I hear what you're saying, and I will Yeah. Yeah. The over the key essential part of all this is strategic planning. So even when it gets to the board after the level, like from the beginning, before we even start, the strategic planning process is absolutely necessary in every school board. So if you do not have a strategic plan, it is a clear calendar outline, which we can go through that I can share about board process from the beginning to the end, but that is essential. Thank you, Nate, for explaining that. And I yield to Nate again.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So do folks have questions for Nate? Yes, Branagan. Yes. So after the school board and superintendent and the leaders sell on something that they put out to the public, you have public hearings. So, can you tell me or us what happens when we put the info out there and the public shows up and then you change what's in the budget and you react to the public input at the hearings?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So can we hold that question for just a minute? Because I wanna focus first on what happens in the background before the budget goes even to the school board for a school board conversation. So does anyone have any questions about the I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit more in your budget. What I hear from you is that you're developing your budget from the bottom up rather than from last year's numbers, Nate. Can you talk a little bit more about how you balance resources across schools?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Sure. Yeah. And I would say it's a little bit of a combinator hybrid in that we certainly look at historical spending trends and so forth when developing our budget. But I would say we don't rely on simply saying, well, if we had two teachers at third grade last year, we need two teachers at third grade this year in a particular school or so forth. So we are looking at kind of, you know, the way students are moving through the system. But but we're so also looking at things like what's been our trend spending on electricity over the past three years. You know, what is that likely to tell us about where we're headed? So so yeah, we do kind of a little of of each of those those things, guess, in the process. So what was the second part? I'm sorry, representative How

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: you manage the different needs of the different schools?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah. So thanks for that. So again, the way we approach it with our our model is we're looking at the enrollment, obviously, as a major factor at each school. And that is driving some of the staffing levels in a very kind of simple and direct way, right? So we might look at how many students at a particular elementary school. In Burlington, we have six elementary schools currently. We might look at the enrollment level at one of the schools at each grade level and determine how many teachers we need at each grade level in that school. And that could obviously differ from one school to another in terms of what their needs are. We also though are looking at, for example, students with IEPs and broadly speaking, essentially we look at kind of categorize them in a high level into a couple different categories based on the level of service that the IEP calls for. And so that, for example, might determine how we allocate special educators between two schools. So hypothetically, right, you could have two schools that have not only perhaps an equivalent enrollment, but even the same number who have IEPs, and yet they might get a different number of special educators or support paraeducators based on the level of service that is required of each of those IEPs that are in that individual school. So we're trying to, again, match the service providers there with, you know, with the student need in that particular school. And then as I mentioned before, we also allocate across schools funding that is some of which is based on just their enrollment. So if a school's enrollment goes up, they might get a little more money than they had the last year. And similarly, if it goes down, they might get somewhat less. There's that bit that core kind of allocation plus what we call the rise money on top of it. And that's really the the way we try to really promote some of that like horizontal equity across our system to make sure that if different schools really have different student characteristics that we are putting the resources where we believe they're needed most based on, you know, the students in each of those schools. Does that Yeah. Answer your

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So you have your ADM and then you essential, to some degree, use the weights to create what you call the rise dollars?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah. I think that's yeah. Right. Exactly. We we kind of use something that's mathematically proportionate to that so that we're know, we really made an effort. We wanted that to be based on kind of some research and some foundation. It wasn't arbitrary. So we we spent a lot of time working on trying to understand that to make sure that, you know, that it wasn't really a big part of it. I'll say a big part of our model that I think has been a big success. I or at least I like to believe it is, is the kind of transparency it brings. So we've made reductions to teaching positions probably for at least four years in a row in our district. And I think every year, it's gotten a little smoother in the sense that people know and expect it. And when we say enrollment's going down, it doesn't mean that people like it, right? No one wants to hear that maybe a colleague that they've befriended or someone who's really capable teacher, for example, is that their position's going away. But I think that number one, people understand that the rationale for it. And number two, because we've been doing it in a fairly incremental way in a district our size by and with almost in almost every instance, like I can think of maybe one instance, but in almost every instance, we're able to retain the actual impacted staff person because we're kind of we have very you know, we have just general turnover. Every year, we're gonna have some elementary teachers who might leave or so forth. We're we're we're big enough in terms of the number of employees we have that we're able to manage that. So So I think that's part of the success of this is the transparency that it brings so that people understand why it's happening, that it doesn't feel like a particular school is being targeted just because a school board member or a superintendent or a business official has it out for them in some for some way. Right? We it's a pretty transparent process, and I think people are coming more and more to understand that.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I wanna flag for the committee that we have a to do for this year around the idea of intradistrict equity, meaning equity and spending within a district, not between districts. Burlington has a very explicit system for that. A lot of other districts don't. Do you

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: balance Does anyone else have a question for Nathan before I ask another one? I have a

[Rep. Mark Higley]: silly question.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Okay. Go for it.

[Rep. Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Then I'll end the representative Higley. Nathan and Claire, how easy is it to make those reductions? So you talked about reducing maybe partial FTEs here and there. I mean, is it as easy as enrollment dropped by three students this year and so that results in one less teacher or how does that work?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: It does work like that, but we're not a slave to the model. And by that I mean that if enrollment dropped by three students and we just ticked over a margin where we say, right, we wouldn't necessarily we often will wait a year to see, right? What we don't want to do is lay someone off and immediately have to hire someone back the next year and lay them off again the next year and that kind of, you know, whiplash is not good for staff, for students, it's a lot of work, right? It takes a lot of energy to recruit people. So essentially, we will we try to like make, you know, see a trend, make sure it's real before we jump to action. And again, I think the fact that we have been making these modest changes year over year, it buys us a little bit of that time because we haven't been faced with such a significant pressure to reduce that we felt like we had to pull all the stops out. Right? And just make all the reductions. So so we will look at and and we'll also look at things like, okay. If it says we can reach a teacher here, but we know that the incoming class next year. Right? Let's say at the high school level, we knew that there was a huge eighth grade class on the horizon. We were just gonna have to add back the next year. That would give us pause. Right? We're not trying to get as close to the bone as we possibly can at the expense of just good management. But we but we absolutely are looking at that. And at a certain point, we're gonna look at it and we're gonna say, If we are below the level, the kind of class size targets that we have and so forth for a particular grade level, and if we don't see an otherwise reason to retain that position, then that's exactly what we do is we say, okay, we're gonna eliminate whatever it might be, a fifth grade teaching position, because we know that in whether that is whether that ultimately results in a slightly lower budget or whether that money is put somewhere else to better serve students, we know that you know, based on the model and the research we've done, we don't believe that it's kind of you know, it's not consistent to keep that position there when it's not it's not how we've decided we're know, it's not our approach, for example, to to if we have a difficult cohort, let's say, at a certain grade level. Some people are like, well, you should just have smaller, smaller class sizes. That's the answer. Keep extra teachers there. And that hasn't been our strategy. They might need a different type of support, but simply dealing with it through smaller classes hasn't been how we do it. So we would we would generally say, yeah, at a certain point, if the model tells us that we should be reducing there, then we're likely going to do that. We might, again, we might make a strategic choice now and then to delay that, but we try to honor that as much as we can because, again, we're trying to show people that it's a transparent process and that, you know, it's something that is predictable even when they don't necessarily like the results.

[Rep. Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Can I ask a follow-up question? Has enrollment declined so much? So, you've talked a lot about, say, reducing a classroom teacher at an elementary level, but has enrollment declined enough that you have found yourselves in the position of having to cut actual programs or actual things that like offerings maybe at the high school or the middle school level, you know, actual programming that you had before that you've had to step back from because scale has reduced.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: We've generally been able to avoid that. And part of the guidance from our school board has been to try to preserve the programmatic offerings that we do. One interesting observation that came out of our budget work group this year when we were evaluating potential reductions across the district, and this is a work group that had principals and director level people in the district, is, you know, we thought about that. Well, what if we cut this program or did this differently? And while we had certain ideas that we thought could work, one of the pieces that came out of that was a broad feeling among the work group that was related to the superintendent and up to the board that if our enrollment continues to decline at this kind of trajectory, are more we're probably going to be better able to preserve access and opportunities for students by having a community discussion about closing, for example, one of our six elementary schools, as opposed to continuing to cut back programs and services and staffing at all of them. Right? And I think one of the concerns is if you keep doing that, start delivering less quality to everyone where you have many students who perhaps by just going to, you know, a different building could could preserve access to a lot of those opportunities. So we're not there. We're not closing something yet. I'm not trying to break any news here, we are being candid about the fact that the enrollment suggests that it's a conversation we need to start considering really seriously.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Representative Higley and Lamoille.

[Rep. Mark Higley]: Thank you. Nathan, if I heard you correctly, you were talking about that level of services budgets that you prepare in the September timeframe And then you look at the December 1 letter. And I think I heard you say you adjusted at that point. Is a percentage that you're allowed to look at before you give it to the school board? How does that work?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: No, it's not. Board hasn't told us, hasn't given us instructions like come back with a budget that increases by a specific percentage or not. That hasn't been the guidance. I think, again, it's kind of an iterative process where we're doing some of this work. We're sharing it with the board. We're getting reaction and feedback at those meetings. So we we again, we identified what the spending level increase on our budget would probably look like to maintain level services. And in our case, that was approximately 6%, which wasn't super surprising to us because we had collective bargaining agreements that had wage settlements that were in that ballpark especially when you add on the increase in health insurance premiums and those are two of the major drivers of, know, account for a huge portion of our total spending. So we came up with that budget in terms of a spending budget. What the December 1 letter allows us to do is then convert that potential spending increase into at least an estimated tax impact, right? So some people may be more concerned with the growth of the budget, others may be more concerned with how what does that translate into in terms of tax rates. December 1 letter at least gives us the first glimpse into the the tax scenarios. And so then we kind of combine those two things And in this case, this year, based on conversations and guidance from the board, we set about trying to bring down the projected impact of our budget growth on tax rates.

[Rep. Mark Higley]: If I can ask, what was that tax rate after your December calculation?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: I want to say our original calculation going back then was probably, I want say 10.5%, 10.6%. I think that's about right based on our original level services budget. Subsequently, again, we reduced spending and we've also, you know, considering the impact of the likely some of the likely buy down of the tax rate that the governor and legislative leadership has has kind of discussed publicly. So we're kind of listening to everything that's got all the chatter coming out of Montpelier to try to understand where tax rates are headed, but we've but again, that I think that was where we started from. And when people looked at that, I think internally and at the board level, you know, we said we think that's that's too much. We need to find other ways to to adjust our spending.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. Representative Bridget.

[Rep. Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Nathan, one of the things when I was a new school board member years and years and years ago, that was confusing for me when I first came on was the difference between total spending and ed spending and how those two things impact your tax rate and how you sort of get from the total budget to the tax rate. Would you mind just giving us a little bit of a primer on that?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Sure, yeah, I mean that is really confusing and sometimes I get people ask me questions about like what percentage of the budget goes to x y and z and what percent, you know, it's like you can almost pick your answer based on what what denominator you're using. But, right, for folks who may not be familiar with it, so the total budget of the school district includes, you can think of it, right, all spending on that is supported by any revenue, any money coming into the school district. The biggest piece of that is education fund money that we call education spending. Capital e, capital s. Right? Education spending. But in the Burlington School District, we also get substantial federal dollars, for example, in the form of title one, title two, title three, title four monies, IDEA money from the federal government and so forth, Medicaid as well. And we get some other sources of revenue, albeit less than those of those are the two big ones, but we do get other sources whether they're grants through private foundations or just, you know, other other smaller revenue pieces. So the growth in a total budget could be driven by things like a significant projected increase in federal support, right? Where you could be like, oh our budget's going up because we're gonna, you know, use a good example, recent example, right? Our total budget went up when we were getting significant ESSER money from the federal government in the wake of COVID, but that it didn't directly impact tax rates because that wasn't money that came from the state education fund that ultimately, you know, so it didn't impact tax rates, I guess I would say. So certainly when we do our tax calculations, we're looking at our projected spending and how much of that change in spending is actually changing our education spending number. It's that education spending number which is always gonna be less than your total budget because it doesn't you know, there's certain spending that that doesn't count for us. Similarly, right, your your nutrition services, your food service. If you're operating that fund as most school districts do as kind of an enterprise, that's getting different federal money that might be part of your total budget but it's not going to change your education spending unless of course you're you have to subsidize your food service program with your general fund. I hope that answered it. I know it's there's no doubt about that. I think it's a great example of what new board members need to hear.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yeah, Representative. If I could go first.

[Rep. Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: I have a question about your reserve policy. What is your reserve policy in terms of how much you're sort of keeping on hand for things that might change after a budget is voted? And how does that show up in the budget?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: We don't have a reserve policy in terms of like setting aside a fund that we just treat as a budget reserve. That we would what we do when we build our budget is endeavor to have adequate kind of capacity within that budget to adjust and adapt to kind of reasonable unanticipated events. There's a certainly a limit to that, right? Fortunately for a district of our size, when you just think about things like turnover and so forth, like we we end up we typically end up in a in a normal year not spending all of our money. Right? Like, we we try to be be conscientious of what we're doing. We try to have controls in place. And so in a budget that's well over a $100,000,000, if if we just, you know, if we land that ship within 2%, we may well have $2,000,000 of surplus funds from the prior year that we are then incorporating into the next year's budget. So we try to essentially manage to to kind of stay within our budget for year over year to not. The last thing we want to do, right, is go to taxpayers and have start the conversation with we need we need an increase just because we, you know, we overspent last year. So so I think it's a lot about kind of us trying to build in some capacity to adapt to those things that change. We have, again, have some luxury in the sense that being our size at least gives us more flexibility I think because we're gonna have, you know, kind of unanticipated things that go in both directions, right? Like some school districts or some school if you're really small, an employee turnover where an employee who was formerly on a, let's say, a single person health insurance plan transitioning to a family plan, that might be hugely consequential in a much smaller district. Whereas for us, we have enough people that those cut things kind of even out over a thousand plus employees on a year. So we try to build in some capacity in the budget process and we try to be kind of good have good strong processes in place to ensure that we're we we try to we do not incentivize, for example, spending every penny people have. Like we don't say if you, you know, if you don't spend your budget, we're gonna cut that extra that you didn't spend the next year. We try to be really intentional about saying we're not gonna do that because we don't want people spending just for the sake of of spending and thinking that they're somehow protecting themselves from a future budget cut. So we we kinda make a habit of not doing that or or similarly like, I don't like I don't like strategies like spending freezes for example when they're not necessary because again, think that just creates an expectation in people's minds that in the future they should spend all their money at the beginning of the year so it doesn't get frozen on them at the end of the year. So I think that so I think yeah. So we don't have a explicit reserve policy. We do have we do have kind of a regular reporting to our board about our cash balance that we have in a bank and our ability to settle our payroll and and, you know, payable debts in a timely manner and so forth. And and I think also we have done a lot of work in Burlington recently as people are aware and you know, kind of when it comes to things like facilities to try to manage our long term costs, but that comes at a cost of going out and asking voters to authorize debt. So again, we don't have a huge, we don't have a huge like capital reserve, just kind of growing and growing with the intent of being able to do some big project, but we have used debt to finance, improvements to our facilities when we've been in position to do so.

[Rep. Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Do you have any other special reserves? You said no big capital reserve, but are there any other reserves that are set aside?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: We do have, we do at like kind of on a regular basis in toward the end of the fiscal year, we will look at particularly if we if we anticipate a need in the following year that was not anticipated and we have money in the current year's budget that we think won't be needed in the current year's budget so that we can kind of like move it forward to the next year we do bring that to the school board, get an authorization to assign that money to a specific purpose in the next year, and then that shows up in our audit as money that is, you know, that wasn't spent in the current fiscal year, but has been given a designated purpose in the next year. And so it's not treated as just surplus funds that would go back into the budgeting process.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Very helpful. Yeah, oh, sorry, it's representable. There you go.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yeah. Thanks for coming in today. One of the things that we're trying to understand is also what the impact of state policy is on decisions and operations locally. And so would you be willing to take an example like pre kindergarten where you are responsible for paying tuition to whatever provider provides pre kindergarten? What are the costs related to pre kindergarten that are different from that particular tuition payment?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Are you talking about like the administrative component that we do for that?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: That might be one piece of it. Might also be triple E, it might be professional development. I don't know how you do it. Your

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: statement. Yeah, Well, so there's right. There's a few pieces of that. So we certainly the biggest change there that to my recollection, right, was that we essentially administer all that program. So we are we are getting the information about students who are registering and who are becoming eligible for the ten hours. I know this firsthand because I was advised politely by my own child's daycare that he's now eligible. And they thought it was pretty funny that the financial person had like overlooked a few weeks of subsidy there. But in any event, so right. So we have people who do that as part of their job in terms of collecting that registration information and making sure that all that work is done so that the eligibility is determined. And then obviously coordinating with the independent providers who ultimately then receive the money from us and it passes through. I think I don't, you know, I don't do that work so I don't want to say whether that's a whole heck of a lot of work or to what degree that, you know, like it would be hard for me to quantify the impact of that. I would say it's not trivial when you add up all the like different different elements like that. There's no doubt that that choices made at the state level do generate, you know, consequences for people doing the work. I think the maybe one of the things that I would would note about, I guess about that process generally, right, is that that's an example where, you know, if you get if you if you accept the fact that there's gonna be a certain amount of money spent on that and that decision's made, know, we're also budgeting for that in our budget. So I think, you know, it makes our budget look a little bit higher to show that we're spending money even though it's not being spent on like programs that people would think of in our schools. Right? I'm not saying it's not the best way to administer that. It might be the most practical way. I don't I don't think we've had any problems administering it, but you know, there certainly is work involved in that respect. I don't think that, you know, I don't think there's an easy way around that at times, but I appreciate the question. I think it's a nice, you know, it's nice at least to try to consider all those those things when new policies coming forward because ultimately, know, sometimes it's not me, sometimes it's more program people and other other folks, but there there's no doubt that sometimes it's difficult to figure out how we transition to ensure that we're doing the new kind of work that we've been asked to do in association with any change in policy.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: You set? Okay. Just a question. It seems like you use a hybrid of a foundation formula and then also just working backwards and making sure that the money that you would get if you're budgeting per student actually equates to the money you need to run your facilities and the staffing levels. Is that an accurate statement?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: I think at a high level, there's elements that I'd agree with. We certainly don't call it a foundation formula. I think one of the big differences between the way I've heard foundation formula used in some of the conversations, you know, coming out of Montpelier that is is a little different from the way we do it in that our our formula like, started we the process by looking we we spent multiple months developing our budget model and trying to identify, like, how much money or what kind of staffing ratios are appropriate based on a combination of how we deliver services and what research we could find. So we didn't pick a number, for example, and say, well, we wanna keep our budget to this amount, so this is gonna be the ratio. On the other hand, when we built our budget model, we also were very clear to people involved that this, you know, it has to be affordable, right? We can't build something that we can't afford and sustain. And so, for example, when we decided that we wanted to use this rise mechanism to more equitably distribute the funds, we didn't just assume that we were going to increase spending by a million dollars to give everybody some more money. We actually looked for opportunities in particular in certain positions within our schools that we felt like didn't belong in our core model. And we said those positions don't have to go away, but we're going to account for those positions, you know, add up the cost of those positions and use that money, make that the rise money that gets redistributed. So some schools at the beginning of the process, right, took that money and they just bought the same position that they'd formerly had right at the beginning. That was just like they're going to keep doing what they're doing. Over time, we've actually seen a shift. I think as folks have become more comfortable with the approach and have thought more about how they could better deploy that money, they are making different choices. But the point there is that we, you know, the model wasn't intended to create new money. It couldn't create new money, right? It just is an allocation methodology. But at the same time, its foundation, we believe that the foundation provided adequate resources based on our research and our needs and it was, know, in using it to our school so yeah at some level it is kind of like a foundational level of support but it's, it's driven by an assessment of our local needs. You know, as opposed to like a kind of something it may or may not work for every district I guess is what I would say.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: That's fair. And a totally different subject than, like, the representative Before you change

[Rep. Mark Higley]: the subject,

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: go ahead. I just wanna clarify. The foundation formula that we started, that we passed, is also not sort of taking a random number and dividing it equally. It is based on real costs. So just sort of clarify that with her.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: That's helpful.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Head of Representatives Kimbell.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: So we've been talking a lot about pre K and you've mentioned pre K and just how many hours do you offer in Burlington for pre K in your public setting?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: In our public setting, I don't know the exact number of hours. It four is days of preschool. We offer like Monday, Tuesday, a full day I should say. I can't remember the exact length of that full day. I don't know Claire if you know off the top of your head, but it's but you know it's so it's probably, in the order of twenty five to perhaps

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: By full day you mean like a full school day? Full school day, yeah. Day 12 rather than a full work day.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah, yeah, It's not eight hours.

[Rep. Mark Higley]: Okay. Thank you.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: And then do you ever get into calculating exactly how much it costs you to deliver pre K per student?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: I think I've done that in the past, although I haven't done it recently. No, but we absolutely, we could do that for sure.

[Rep. Mark Higley]: All right. Great. Thanks.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: When you talked about sort of working through your numbers, looking at the December 1 letter, and then sort of said something in passing about sort of the legislative up down watching, not watching sort of journey. Can you tell a little bit can you just tell us a little bit more about how much attention you pay to us and how much I the idea that, like, folks are watching us work through this in real time and then making decisions based on what our profound hypotheticals has always been sort of a striking experience to me.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's challenging for everyone. I I appreciate that. I mean, we pay attention. There's no doubt that we're paying attention. We're watching. And we're not reacting to everything, every idea, every piece of news, every proposal. Right? Okay. Yeah. We're not doing that. What we're trying really, what I'm trying to do and particularly with the budget and is trying to say when we when we start as we're doing now and we have to produce for our community materials that attempt to describe kind of what they are getting for the budget we're asking them to vote on and what it would cost them, right? We're trying to use the most reasonable assumptions we can. And some years the most reasonable assumption is whatever was in that tax letter because we know it's going to change but like who knows how it's going to change, right? And everyone's got a different idea. And some years it seems like there's at least some measure of, I won't say consensus, but you know, at least more momentum such that we feel like it probably and our our for example, this year, right? We felt that using projections for tax rates in Burlington based on a $75,000,000 contribution to the, you know, additional revenue, the Ed Fund that that felt justified and more realistic than assuming zero. So, that's the choice we need is pardon

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: 75,000,000.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah. Right. We know that that was one of the early numbers that came up. We know that the governor has has for example, suggested a different number, right? But again, that's where it starts to become a dance of like, when are you gonna, when are you, when are we gonna stop trying to guess and start producing materials that that we think, you know, our school board members when they're knocking on doors would say like this is has a reasonable basis and in reality and is a reasonable expectation. And we also in this case of this year, whilst using that for our major projections have kind of footnoted, here's what it looks like in the absence of that money. So if someone feels really uncomfortable with that assumption, they have the information they need to at least, you know, look at what it would be like from the December 1 letter. So we start with that December 1 letter and then if there's a real convincing reason to change it, we might change it. But we only have so long to do that because, of course, we're we're already going to print with those materials now.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And how much does your TV of reading come from sort of directly from members, like our own representative Ode, and how much from, say, your district lobbyist, Maggie, and how much from, like, the school board's association, and how much from you watching us from?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Right. We rely more heavily on what I'll call kind of like official communication.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Uh-huh.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: So, like, what I don't tend to do is update a projected tax rate because I hear in a you know, or for example, actually, our our business managers association will get information and they'll say something like, you know, in the current yield bill out of the house, it's this. And in the senate, it's that or whatever. I usually don't update tax rates on that that kind of basis even. It's more that if there has been broader reflection among of people, you know, in the system who are seem to be lining up behind a certain scenario. And we say like, we don't know if the number will be 75,000,000. We don't know exactly what it will be. But, you know, in this particular instance, what we heard was early on the governor and legislative leadership in both chambers and of multiple political parties all kind of acknowledging that they felt like something of that magnitude was in order. So And we felt like that it was most appropriate to assume assume that rather than, you know, ignore what was seemed like a pretty strong guidance coming out of Montpelier. But like I said, we don't know for sure. I don't know if anyone has a crystal ball up there right now. So we also know that those numbers can and we tell our voters every year they do change. It's only almost the only thing we can guarantee is that this won't be exactly right at the end. But we're doing our best to give them some context for making their decision.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. Representative Burkhardt?

[Rep. Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: They kind of clear, could you give me an example of an unfunded mandate that the district has to deal with and how that impacts your budget?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah, just one second. Will do that. I'll give you a really like a recent one, right? And again, I'm not trying to take any policy stance on this, but I'll just use an example that I had to deal with. It was not so long ago that Vermont enacted a childcare payroll tax. And so there was a new obligation for us and we didn't have to do anything. I mean, in some ways that's maybe not exactly what you're thinking of because you didn't tell us to do something without giving us the money. But what you did say was make sure that you spend more money in the form of a payroll tax that you give back to the state. And so now one of the new line item expenditures in our budget is, you know, every employee is the is the child care payroll tax. And interestingly, that law also gave us the option to pass on, I think it was a quarter of that tax to our employees. But we're a, you know, we're heavily unionized organization with a lot of collective bargaining agreements that we can't just change like when the state law changes. So we didn't have the ability to even with the even with the legal flexibility that's provided in the law, we couldn't avail ourselves of that because of the status of our collective bargaining agreements. And so that was an example where our budget had to increase to pay a tax that, you know, again, I'm not trying to take a stance on the the impact of the spending on the, you know, the policy goal there, but ultimately effectively that's school school taxes going up in service of a kind of a different policy objective, right? So that's one recent example that I just remember. Another kind of, again, I tend to think of it, I guess, more in the financial lens than others, but one that that that is still kind of growing on on us is the fact that we have to when when I started here, the contributions to the state teachers retirement fund were all made by the state. And then the law changed and said, well, if you're paying any teacher with any federal dollars, you've got to use you've got to make that contribution from your federal dollars. So effectively, it made us take federal money that used to be going to staff and programming and so forth and and turn it into a contribution that was formally supported by, I think it was the general fund, a general fund contribution to that. So those are some some examples of of kind of the financial pieces. They're probably better examples that if I jog my memory for a bit, can think of in terms of like activities that we have to do as well. But I might need to pause and just collect my thoughts to get to some of those.

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: I think great, Nate, because I don't know, you know, people are privy to that, those contributions to the retirement, you know, from those federal dollars. That's big, using those federal dollars for that purpose.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I also have lots of questions. I'm going to ask one of them and then would actually love to go to you, Claire, to talk about sort of the second half of the process here, if you don't mind. The 75,000,000 and the yields related to that, we haven't seen those numbers projected here, so I'm curious where you saw them. Do you create yield resulting from that? Yeah. Do you have your own yield model?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: We don't know. I had I asked one of our state senators to request some estimates from the fiscal office.

[Rep. Mark Higley]: Okay.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: And we got some estimates from the fiscal office.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Cool. Thanks.

[Rep. Mark Higley]: Yeah.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm so curious if other districts do that. That's such an interesting angle.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Right. I mean, maybe I have a little advantage of knowing a few of the ins and outs, admittedly. So maybe But but I did share it with my colleagues. Yeah. I shared it with my other business manager colleagues who who were interested in understanding what the impact could be for their own discussions.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So Appreciate that. Out there. So do you wanna tell us a little bit about sort of how you manage that all on the school board side?

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: Sure. Thanks. So I think, as I shared before, every year we have an audit and obviously the audit happens before potentially new school board members are sworn into office in April. But the audit is incredibly important to us, shows us how we're doing as a district, and coupled that with our strategic planning process that we communicate out to the citizens of Burlington and within our district, so that we have definitely steered away in the eight years I've been chair from advocacy based budgeting. And in a district our size, that's really important. That wasn't always the case. And I think that your financial manager or director of the district has an incredible task along with the superintendent and the school board in instilling that confidence of budgeting and transparency throughout your school district or supervisory union. So as I shared, we start the process as early as looking at the audit, bringing our school board members up to speed, working through with the financial director, what, you know, as we look at that budget development overview, how the process begins, and we're including, you know, at each school board meeting, how we're progressing. So month to month, could look like, you know, how we start a roster confirmation of all that are working within our school district. We look at enrollment projections. We look at in come November budget allocations, as Nate talked about, with the RISE allocation. That RISE allocation, the acronym is recognizing injustice and seeking equity, that every school is different, the makeup is different. And we have, you know, put out surveys to our community, to our staff and district, recognizing and receiving those results that if there is a school that is in greater need for providing students for improved student outcomes, that a school might forego their budget, requests for a school in need. So internally within that district, and we do hold advisory groups as Nate was saying at each school. So there is, faculty, staff, and community members, parents, engaged in the process as stakeholders. So it is not done in a vacuum. And I think that has been incredibly helpful in the success of our budgeting. And as Nate shared, not only is it dictated by enrollment, but it is also the ability to pay. I'm hyperly conscientious and concerned about the affordability in the city of Burlington having saddled the citizens of Burlington with the entire development of a new high school and tech center campus. That unfunded mandate, as we, you know, back in 2000, I've got to look back how long ago it was where I testified about construction aid, coming from Massachusetts and presenting with the AOE at the time. I want to say ten years ago under, I think Rebecca's tutelage, but the concerns we had at that time were our capital campaign and our infrastructure. We had our middle school and elementary school that did not have an elevator and needing the support of developing a campaign. So recognizing, you know, what are the limits within our city of affordability and making sure that through all these conversations, working with the municipality of, you know, what their goals and needs are so that we still ask one taxpayer for our education and our city tax, you know, come ballot time. So the overview really is a yearly process of hard work, looking at when we talk about those unfunded mandates or, you know, things that we want to celebrate universal pre K, but we also want to make sure that we're able to do it within each of our schools. To answer Nate's question, it is a full school day as if you were dropping off your elementary students. So within each of our six elementary schools, we were able to accommodate and carve out pre K space to make that a reality. And they go to school Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, can be dropped off 07:45 and leave at 02:50 with their siblings if they're at the, you know, if they have older siblings. And then, you know, constantly you asked, I appreciated your question about how do we get our news from Montpelier? We are highly engaged. We do rely on the Vermont School Boards Association and appreciate the neutrality of their information. We have always worked and sought engagement with the AOE as well as the state board and obviously our elected officials. We are in constant communication. I appreciate the leadership of our superintendent being in communication with our elected officials. And it is really important to us, the health and wealth of the state. For five years, we worked really, really hard on the way to pupil in Act 127. Five years, we were one of the first school districts to invite everybody to the table to create a task force to address the weighted pupils in the state. There was no empirical data that gave reason to how we funded each of our students in public education. And through, you know, the report of the AOE and Tammy Colby, we really believed in that work and including everybody in the state at the table, even though, you know, people might feel like it didn't work for them. But I think that was because it came off of, you know, federal funds. I'm getting off topic, but we are dedicated to affordability of Vermont and working collaboratively with all throughout the state for best results. And I'm just grateful and appreciative that our citizens have had trust because of our process that we want to share with you like we're doing today. So we appreciate the call, but it has been a learning curve for sure for me. I'm a lime producer by trade, so business, finance and budgets are what I do for a living, but it is navigating like last year, the year before I chaired the VSBA report that we presented to the state board of ed, it was sort of an overview. Please don't pass any more mandates. Just take a pause because we really need to work on what you're doing now, which is developing a system and reforming so that we can all work together for, you know, more progress and, you know, better outcomes, opportunity gaps, and all that included. So I'm rambling a little bit, but just greatly appreciate the opportunity to share what we do and how concerned I am and our school board is for the future.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you so much. I believe representative Ode had sort of more questions about nope. Not anymore. Okay. Can you you said something at the very beginning of her testimony about activist budgeting, think maybe Advocacy it was based budgeting. She was I love that phrase. I've never heard it before. Is it? What is it? Yeah. Can you tell me more about it? What that means to you?

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: Yeah. So it is, know, when a select group of people are advocating for something, if we have to reduce, you know, something within our school district, and each year we have reduced full time equivalent teachers based on enrollment, as you had asked, like, we delineating programs or are we? And yes, over the years, are some things that we've had to reduce, whether it's an extra block of math or, you know, what have you, based on the number of students in each of our schools. And people come out and the squeaky wheel gets the greasy, and can agree to disagree, but we have to make those hard choices that I'm sorry, we are reducing this position and advocacy in the past, might be, you know, we would have to reduce a para, you know, somewhere in, or a mental health services person, or, you know, something that we have added to, you know, support students that we don't have the funding anymore, or, you know, that we can't justify it. And, you know, we would have school board meetings filled with people, you know, really upset and we'd have to explain our rationale and stay steady to our, you know, still be human, but stay steady to the common goal of what the future is. And we anticipate that, you know, going forward because, you know, of the healthcare costs and, you know, our recent, you know, we have seven bargaining units and the scale of which we want to retain and attract talented people. Even in Chittenden County, we're not the top district top salaries for sure.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I know.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah, I think one other thing I would just say like that's really important, as Claire mentioned, like what we found in our district was particularly in the absence of kind of a transparent and clear approach to making changes in staffing levels that that it invited a you know, essentially it invited like people to make up their own reasons of why we were proposing what we were proposing. But then what we found is, and we talk about advocacy based budgeting, it tends to be a the people who can show up at a school board meeting, right, or who have access are not a representative group of the families of students in our school, right? Are people who tend to have more access, more privilege, and so we wanted to make sure that, again, in service of kind of our equity goals, making sure that kids get what they need, We didn't want our decisions to be driven by who has the loudest voice or who already has the most access, who can then kind of tilt the scales in their favor more more dramatically. So so we tried to be really intentional about creating a transparent model that would allow us to say, we hear you. We we know you may not, you know, you may not like that this is impacting your school, but here's the model. Right? Here's why it's it should be impacting your school based on that enrollment and so forth. And and if, you know, to go somewhere else would would not be fair or equitable to those in that school. So I think it's really when we think about advocacy based budgeting here, we're talking about having essentially like we want to get feedback. We you know, during the whole budget process, we do a lot of this publicly and we invite public comment at all those meetings, but we don't want the ultimate decision to just be one that's based essentially on volume. Right? We want it to be based on an assessment of what's going be best to meet the needs of our students. So that's what, again, we try we're referring to when we talk about trying to move away from advocacy based budgeting. Because for sure, as a Burlington resident, I can say that people in Burlington love to advocate. And we don't wanna discourage that, but we wanna temper

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm from Marlborough, so I understand that, Emilie. The how does I'm curious a little to learn a little bit more about how that plays out in the context of you know, each of your especially each of your elementary schools has a very different sort of neighborhood culture, where families might have very different expectations of culture and very different expectations of what the school's responsibilities might be. And I'm curious how that sort of plays out in the context of sort of advocacy.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think that's true. And I think that Burlington has made, you know, a couple of our schools are kind of magnet schools in our community where we attempt to bring, you know, we kind of and really, when we made the switch to magnet schools, we essentially have citywide elementary school choice. So you can you don't have to go to the elementary school that's closest to where you live in Burlington. You can choose. And, yeah, if if we're kinda full or at the margins, like, we give preference to the people who are most, you know, who are in the neighborhood of the school, but we do do off currently offer what we call elementary school choice within our in our district. So so that can help kind of diversify the not just the kind of student enrollment, but the kind of care the characteristics of the, you know, who's involved with with each school. But having said that, I think a big piece of that again is having a transparent model that allows people to understand this is what is being offered to each school, here's how it's consistent across the district. And you may have less than another school, but if you have less it's for a kind of verifiable reason, not just because your PTO or your families aren't as vocal. Right? And so I think that's a big piece of the model trying to ensure that, you know, that and then we offer, as I said, we offer quite a bit of flexibility to our school leaders, particularly in how they deploy some of those RISE funds and others, which then gives those individual school communities an opportunity to exercise their own voice and make decisions that are really much closer to the student, if you will, in terms of what they need. So we try to provide that flexibility. Even our staffing model has some flexibility in terms of choosing a couple different approaches, for example, when it comes to things like student supports, like what what kind of what kind of array of support so there are things that we might consider roughly financially equivalent but we let the school choose so there's a process and where we tell principals when the the budget development process is going on, it's really important that they convene those school advisory groups and that they hear from and that those groups are representative, right? The we we say you can't just your PTO cannot be your your school advisory group. Those school advisory groups have to be intentionally composed of people who represent voices that may not traditionally be part of PTOs or or other regular channels.

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: Thank you. Yeah. I would say we've come a long way under Superintendent Flanagan's leadership and board in making sure those elementary schools, the staffings there is, you know, we recognize throughout equity, equitable and like exactly what Nate said, but it wasn't always the case. And so we wanted to make sure even with your enrichments and even the acknowledgement of the two magnet schools, which are, you know, opportunities for different types of learning and enrichments, but that the other schools, the other four schools had the standard curriculum throughout all five, all six elementary schools, Consistency.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. Represent Waszazak?

[Rep. Edward "Teddy" Waszazak]: That answered my question. Great.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Anyone else have any questions? Yes. Yeah, go

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: for it, representative.

[Rep. Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: This is a little bit on a slightly different topic. I looked at some numbers over the off session that really showed that across the state, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of support staff, even as our student enrollment is going down, especially when it comes to things like math interventionists, reading interventionists, behavioral interventionists. Those numbers have really gone up. Have you seen that in your district? And what is driving that choice? Because statewide, our actual number of classroom teachers is actually going down at about the same rate our enrollment is going down. Like our seating students are going down. But the number of interventionists has grown dramatically. Is that the case in Burlington? And if so, what's driving that?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Yeah, good question. I don't know. I can't answer it with hard data. What I can say is an interesting a couple interesting observations that I can share that kind of speak to that. And I would so I would say broadly speaking, I think there is in Burlington as well. I think our and I'm not a you know, I'm not in the educational delivery part of our field. So, I'm a little less qualified to talk about this but I would say that yes, we have what among the things that I've my observations I would share. Number one, is that when we talked this year about potential positions to reduce in our district that were not part of our core, like you must have, you know, a classroom teacher and so forth. We have we are our model affords, for example, each elementary school an interventionist position. We, the budget work group and feedback from our cabinet, our larger kind of cabinet of all district leaders was pretty consistent in saying that we should not be reducing in that area. Some of that I think is based on kind of the exactly what you mentioned, the kind of broader needs that have been identified. And we had a we specifically in Burlington identified a cohort of students where some of the assessment scores were behind where we wanted them to be. So I think there is a sense of like, that is an important tool, a lever to kind of improve in that area. But so I think in one sense there's a specific example of people kind of expressing value there. And we've also been talking a lot about how we can better meet some of those needs for support for some of our struggling learners. And that intervention example is one where I think schools have kind of voted with their dollars in in some cases, as I've said, with the with the Rise Money schools choosing to invest. And we had a lot of success, for example, we had a school that was that was identified through the school improvement grant process, right, as needing improvement and got some extra federal money. And one of the things that they did was kind of double down on their interventionist approach, supplementing their the interventionist they had with our core model with some extra federal money, and they've made some real progress. And so I think that while I can't give you obviously like hard numbers, I can say that I think the experience demonstrates that there's definitely a need for some of those student support roles in a pretty intense way. On the other hand, we're always looking at like, you know, we want to make sure that that first best instruction meets the needs of the students as much as possible. So we we don't want to find ourselves in a position where the you know, where students who have significant needs are or, you know, need instruction, where they still need to be getting great instruction from their their classroom teacher, I guess what I'm trying to say. And we don't want to be the case where those kids are not getting that because we think, oh, well we'll give you, you know, paraeducator or something. I mean, think it's pretty we, for example, have have migrated we still have paraeducators for sure across our district and they're as required and necessary. But we have actually reduced the number of paraeducators at times trading in essentially multiple paraeducator positions to hire one special education teacher because our assessment has been that that we want that students with the highest need should be taught by some of our most skilled teachers. And so trying to give ourselves as much flexibility to put highly skilled teachers in front of students who have, you know, increased needs has been something we've been trying to do as as possible, know, while also meeting all of our requirements in IEPs in terms of service minutes and so forth, that sometimes is best met with a para.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Can you tell us what Burlington School District has done in response to the state recent legislation related to literacy instruction and science of reading?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: I'm not the best person to speak to that. Claire can do a little. I can probably kind of regurgitate some of what our super intendent would say. Claire, do you want me to give that a shot or do you feel like you should best do it? I I can say that we we adopted a a a literacy curriculum recently and kind of similarly we saw that there were, you know, and really like with with that focus on on I think the science of reading, but that also we what was identified here in Burlington was that there was kind of a gap in that curriculum specifically related to phonics and phonics instruction. And so to the extent that we've kind of identified that, we are now moving to rectify that by supplementing and getting more appropriate materials that support that portion of the work. So I hope that makes sense because again I'm not claiming to be an expert in that area by any stretch. I'm trying to do my best to channel some of what I've heard our superintendent and our curriculum folks attest to.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Have you done anything with respect to professional development?

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: We have a lot of professional development associated with the literacy curriculum that we had, but we also noticed when we moved away from having some of that professional development provided by the curriculum company, the spot you know, like, that that developed it that we saw again, as I mentioned, we saw some drop off in some areas and so we're going back to figure out what of what the gap is there like in terms of making sure that that curriculum is being you know kind of implemented with fidelity and so I think we're probably kind of revisiting some of that right now to focus on how we really target those areas where our assessments have just not been at the level that we think, you know, that we expect.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. Any other questions on their budgeting process? Yep.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: What hit me was when you said, Nathan, that once the, when you were asked about unfunded mandates, when the teacher retirement was pulled in in a way that it had to be funded, you chose to or had to use some of the federal funds to cover that. And those federal funds, and then the childcare tax, how would it impact your budget if those were not counted as education spending? What?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: No, actually don't know if I do understand that question. I don't know if you understand that question, Nathan. I struggle with the constructive unfunded mandates since we fund everything that needs funding. And so I think what it means is spending that wouldn't impact anyone's tax rate anywhere in the state, maybe. Is that what I mean? I really don't And so I'm trying to I think it's a philosophical difference about how the Ed Fund works to some degree. I'm really not sure.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Suddenly, I'm

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: thinking, Well, it's held against school district, what their ed spending is. I mean, it's like, look at how much you're spending per pupil in your states. And when you just are compared to everyone else within the Florida.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Right, yeah, mean, guess what I would say is I think representative Kornheiser makes a fair point. At some level it's like nothing's unfunded in the sense that we can always ask for more money. And that's the nice thing about the current system is that we, know, we our community votes on a spending number and and embedded in that is your education spending, which then is the amount of education spending we're gonna get from the varies is the associated tax rate. So in a sense we have the ability to draw down that money. I think the challenge is that when those things are added if to the extent that they're added and then as a result we are increasing our education spending, then that just drives the narrative about too much school spending because obviously increasing education spending increases in particular you know property tax rates. Certainly, so I think there's right, there could be a if those same costs were paid, were not attributable to individual school district budgets but were still paid for by the Education Fund, then the Education Fund's still gonna have to generate all that money. It's not gonna like obviously make you know make taxes go down or something like that, but it also helps in the sense that it you know as school districts we're not saying that our budgets going up as by as much or for reasons that we have no control over. So I think in that sense there's still you know there's still an impact there, right? Things that are causing us to go to our community and say we need to spend more can be driven by state policy even though the state's not denying, you know, the current funding formula doesn't deny us the ability to ask for more education spending to meet those needs. I don't know if that answers the question, that's kind of how I interpreted But interpreted

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: in the very beginning of it, you said under the current education funding formula, we say how much we need. And then even though it looks like we're choosing to spend more because the payroll tax, it's actually out of our control. So then- I

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: just wanna- It's what? The quantity of the payroll tax is not similar to healthcare costs. It's not outside of a district's control because it's dependent on how many personnel they have and how much they pay them.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Well, I could say that, but they're already locked into a teacher student ratio and they're locked into their contracts. And it's not like you wake up one morning and the school board says, okay, everyone's paying a cut pay so that we can make this cost less somehow. I mean, but they also just explained to

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: us how their staffing changes year over year.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Right, which would change is not that we have some ability to impact the amount based on staffing and wage rates, but we didn't have a choices to and not that we should, I'm just saying like that's an example where from one year to the next we then needed to budget additional funds to pay that tax, which we had not previously had to do.

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: Right, and I also think when people, you know, we get the I can't believe your pupil student costs rise and everyone understands whether it's staff, you know, 80% of our budget, 78 of our budget is staff, you know, wages and healthcare. But rarely do people know that that shift has happened with the, you know, the general fund not taking, I mean, putting it back onto the school districts, which I understand, you know, some may have their own opinions, but it does increase our per pupil spending. And if you think of academic dollars, you know, is that money being spent for academic dollars? Like people are enraged because costs go up and the cost, how can it cost more while people are living longer and their pensions, you know, they're, so that, I don't think a lot of Vermonters get that that is included in the costs of each pupil each year, those costs.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Then going forward to the, is Nathan, I think he said, but I didn't write it down because that's the social media. Will be any bad. That under the current formula, what use and then gets covered within the current formula, it's raised with the yield bill, whatever decisions are made. If you've got the foundation formula and you've got the equal opportunity payments and it is at X, and let's say at that point, pretend there was no payroll tax for childcare. And then there's the childcare increase. Would we be, I don't know, well, I'm gonna ask this

[Rep. Mark Higley]: to you.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Well, they're the way it says so you can ask. Well,

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: you expect and hope that that equal opportunity payment would be increased to cover that new millions and millions of dollars, New mandate. I will call unfunded because it's gonna be funded. I don't know what to call it. Yeah.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Mean, I think if the the the general question is like under a foundation formula that is, you know, derived and intended to support to meet student needs if there is a new kind of service or cost expectation that school districts are required. I mean, it would certainly make sense to consider how to fund that through that same foundation formula in some way, I guess, if I'm understanding that correctly.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And I do wanna sort of we asked the Burlington School District folks in very specifically to tell us how they construct their budget, and I want us to just be careful about going too far afield into hypotheticals that we did not ask them to prepare for because it's not fair to them. Appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. And also, just sort of one of the reasons we often have superintendents, like associations in rather than individual professionals in is what happens in Burlington might happen in many other districts. It also might not happen in many other districts. So I caution us to create trends in our minds based on their very thorough and fantastic testimony and the really incredible work it sounds like you all do there to build a fair budget. Any final questions from anyone or thoughts?

[Rep. Mark Higley]: So much.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Anything from you two before we say goodbye and thank you for all of your time today?

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: I really appreciate all the work that you do. We, you know, our nighttime Netflix is watching your meetings.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So sorry, absolutely devastated.

[Claire Wool, Chair, Burlington School Board]: No, I just can't thank you enough, truly. It sounds corny to say, like, I hope it's not political. Really, we have the opportunity here for healthy reform to, we have the scale and the size to get this right. And I just, you know, you have our support and, you know, Secretary Saunders, we look at the AOE and state, you know, we are partners in all of this. And I just can't stress enough that modeling, being able to share with Vermonters what it looks like, what the financial impact is, how, when we make decisions, how we stand behind decisions. And again, I just can't thank you enough because our work is really reflective of the greater work that you do in the state in passing laws and we implement them, but we really are effective when it's done, like I shared with, you know, modeling that's been done elsewhere and healthy outcomes and that opportunity gap, we're all, I'm appreciative of the work of the redistricting task force. I really can't stress enough having watched every single one of those meetings and the research that was done to inform and engage citizens of Vermont throughout the entire state. You know, just having a listening tour and asking feedback, I mean, the concrete information we found out from that task force in such a short time was incredibly influential to people like myself who have taken on this volunteer role over this course of this time. We are all working for the betterment of Burlington specifically, but throughout the state. And I work in partnership with every school district throughout the state the level with the VSPA. I'm not just concerned about Burlington. I really want people to move here and for our schools to be robust and successful. And I do see that imbalance. I want those at the decision making table in your world, if, you know, 80,000 students are public school students and a fraction of them are choice private schools, I want that balance to be dictated in policy to support that larger percentage. It's really important because public schools have been so successful in this state and especially with our higher education and opportunities here. We do attract people on the education who value education. So I know I've gone on a little bit longer, but I really, really can't thank you enough for the opportunity to speak. And this was hard work getting to where we are now. And I don't take anything for granted and I'm just a glorified Sherpa, but I just can't thank you enough for listening.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you very much for your time today. Really appreciate it and for all that you're doing for Burlington. Yes, representative. This

[Rep. Mark Higley]: is a general comment. I'm very, very impressed with your budget process. I mean, granted, you're you're bigger and more sophisticated than a lot of little towns that we represent, but your process is really very admirable, and your outcomes are good, given what you have to work with and how you put your effort into it. So I'm impressed. Thank you.

[Nathan Lavery, Executive Director of Finance & Operations, Burlington School District]: Thanks for those kind words, and again, yeah, I really thank you. I know, just personally, I know from having seen the work that you all do firsthand that it is very difficult and you all work really hard. So I would, I just encourage you to remember to give yourself some grace and know that you can't possibly make every every decision perfect or everyone everyone happy in this process. So we'll continue to stay engaged and and try to support how we can. And wish you the best of luck.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Folks, we are done for the day. We'll be back here tomorrow morning at nine.