Alive cablecast did online, too. This is the same channel as the regular Board Meetings. The live video stream will also be available online. Welcome to the district Staff Members and members of the public. Thank you to the budget staff in advance for their the hard work and getting information ready for this special meeting. The process for this afternoon, i would like to turn it over first to superintendent matthews and the staff who will start out with a presentation. I will then open it up to Public Comment and depending upon how many speakers we have requested, i will also put a time limit in case, again, really wanting the purpose of todays meeting to have dialogue amongst the commissioners. We have had a lot we had lots of engagement as well the past tuesday evening at our Board Meeting and we will also have an opportunity this upcoming week as well. So at this time, i would like to turn it over actually, before i turn it over to dr. Matthews, you know, the purpose of the meeting is to recognize from two tuesday nights meeting over the desire for further discussion by commissioners in order for to pass in order for us to pass the budget next wednesday, july 1st. I want to highlight a couple of areas from the last tuesday nights Board Meeting that was clear for some areas of discussion. One is looking in understanding of the recent budget decision and how that is going to impact us as best as we know it, given that news just came out today. Second is around understanding the Budget Solutions including cuts in reductions centrally and at school sights. And third, the path towards the budget and timing of the decision. I would like to turn it over to dr. Matthews. Thank you, commissioner lamb. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, members of the public. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. As commissioner lamb just laid out, we have a robust discussion on tuesday night and the board had several questions and wanted to give had the opportunity to have more of a discussion around the budget and more detail so that we are here today the hope is that through the questions that are asked, as well as the direction that the discussion goes in, it will give staff the opportunity to craft a budget so the board can pass this budget on july 1st next wednesday evening. With that, i would like to turn it over to the deputy superintendent who will lead us into this discussion and as i said, the one thing that i hope is at the end of this evening, at the end of the afternoon, we will have clarity around the direction that is most important and key. Without that clarity we would return wednesday night and not be in the same place we were tuesday. We really need clarity around the direction. I appreciate the opportunity to present and get that clarity. I will turn it over to the deputy superintendent now. Thank you, dr. Matthews. Good afternoon commissioners and colleagues and Community Members i would like to start by wishing everyone a happy pride weekend. It is not like everyone had hoped, but it is worth noting nonetheless. Happy pride, everybody. Thank you commissioner lamb and dr. Matthews for setting up the conversation. As a preface, we staff are a little unclear on what the right structure and content for this afternoons discussion should look like. We were eco eager to get some direction from commissioners about what you would like to see. We were a little unclear about what would be the best fit for discussion from your perspective we took our best we made our best attempt at pulling together content surmising from the discussion on tuesday night. With that i hope you will bear with us. We put together a fair amount of information and some of it may interest some of you more than others, but, like i said, we were trying to interpret from the discussions from tuesday night what would be of most interest and most relevant for this discussion today. Let me go ahead and provide a little bit of a table of contents for the discussion that staff has prepared. There is three main buckets of information. One is that we wanted to clarify the goals. We wanted to share information about the content of the budget and whether commissioners are members of the public expressing an interest in better understanding the budget. We wanted to provide an opportunity and we will do most of the presenting in this section to walk through the budget book. We are not entirely clear that everyone is familiar with the contents of the budget book. We wanted to spend a few minutes walking through highlights there and talking about the evolution of the projections over the past several months, which we know has been complicated. It has been an unusual year and it has taken a lot of concentration to follow the storyline. So we wanted to recap that. We wanted to address questions and address very specific questions that commissioners have asked since the last meeting of tuesday night. We are happy to be able to share some reports and i think youll be quite interested in them. With respect to what comes next as commissioner lamb and dr. Matthews mentioned, it is important, as you discussed on tuesday night, to have a budget to submit to them. We want to make sure we identify any lingering questions and concerns and most importantly, from our perspective, the path forward to being able to adopt a budget. Part of our presentation will frame the importance of that action being taken and what happens if its not taken. With that, let me turn it over to the magnificent and marie gordon who is going to walk through the highlights of the budget book and other information about the budget. [indiscernible] im sorry [indiscernible] your audio terrifying. Theres something wrong with their your audio. Its terrifying. Go out and come back in because it is a little scary. [laughter] its like i am scifi. [laughter] wow. We had our first zoom call and i did not know budget was such an exciting committee, you know . The staff is full of surprises. That was unplanned, commissioners. [laughter]. I thank you were trolling us. I havent come across that particular snafu before, but hopefully she will join us in a second. While we are waiting for her to rejoin us, this is also for members of the public who are interested in these topics, too. We did repost on board documents there are a few attachments that will be on the agenda for this evening. One of them is the budget book for second reading and it is also posted on the districts website, on the budget page of the districts website. What she will do is we will just pull out a few key elements from the budget book, but we do think that it is never perfect. The budget is confusing and complicated. That said, this document has been drafted to be helpful for the reader to get an introduction of the districts overall budget. In the first few pages there is an executive summary at a section about how to navigate the document, you know, literally how to engage with the document. The description of the structure of the document, how to navigate the tableau dashboard. We think that for anyone who is interested, including commissioners, and really plumbing the depths of the exhibit and everything, if you havent already looked at the document closely, we think that is a good investment of time to walk you through that. And we have been inviting for a while to have feedback. We have a request to meet and this is a Good Opportunity today to do it as a group. We do look at this document as a foundational Reference Point for the overall budget of the district. I dont know if mr. Gordon has rejoined us. [laughter] you may have to call back in. Yeah,. Since you are meeting and you just helped with the description of the documents on the board docs, i just want to go through it so the public and myself are also understanding what we are seeing. The first one is just the resolution and the reason why we are here, then it is the budget book we just shared. The next document attached is what it is a presentation you are going to show us. Correct . Actually, meghan, please chime in here. It looks like the third attachment that is supposed that is posted on board documents, the first page says june 23rd. What we want to show, or what we are about to go through in the document should say june 26th on it. So the presentation that is attached is the june 23rd presentation . Yes. So it would appear on the third attachment. Does it happen to be are there any other attachments . I wanted to know if it was just included as a reference to the prior meeting. Lets take a peek. I dont see any. I think its just the wrong document that appears to have been posted. Okay. We will swap that out in a moment. The fourth attachment is a p. D. F. Of a word or google document document that includes questions from several of the past week and then the last couple of documents are data reports. One of which, two of which you saw on tuesday night, which were related to sitebased positions. Correct. And then the last one is a new report, and this was requested by commissioner collins and commissioner lamb. We hope that is what those two commissioners had in mind. A comparison by job titles and job code between 1920, and the budget year of 2021. That also contains a breakdown of filled versus vacant positions. I think she was going to walk through those attachments in the presentation. The second to last two school site budget documents, one is all of the jobs, and one is by school site. Correct. Right. One of them has i think it is based on the same dataset, but one of them is sorted so you can see the impact by each school site and the other one aggregates the same information across the school sites by job title. Thank you. Is this any better . Yes. Thank you. [laughter] i have never had that happen before. I am just here on my phone. It is probably your broadband that is probably what it is. Sorry about that. I guess you are welcome for the entertainment. Should i go ahead and get started . Yes, thank you. Awesome. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for bearing with me through the technical difficulty for today, i will start with a brief overview of the budget that is highlighting a few of the exhibits in the budget bank. The beginning of the budget book is a narrative and i think that is what was being shared as the format of the overall structure of documents. And starting around 29 pages in, we have an exhibit. That is where i want to start today. In talking about what the budget actually is and what is actually what comprises our budget, our district operating budget is 849. 1 Million Dollars for 2021 and it is broken up into the unrestricted general fund, restricted general fund, and a number of other funds that you see listed on the slide. In the budget book itself, we have this is shown in exhibie budget book. This is from nine a. Nine b. Has a little bit more of a specific detail for each component of the fund that you see here. On the next slide we have on the next slide we will see the operating budget which is 135. 8 million and it consists of the county general fund, special education and other county programming. Going to the budget book our exhibits 11 and 12 the focus on the components of our county operating budget, including revenue. This is where we begin when we are talking about what our budget is. I do want to take a moment to dive in two schools. I brought back this visual that made its debut at a couple of the budget Business Service readings meetings earlier in the year, which have a framework of school support. As you can see and as we have discussed in a lot of detail over the past couple of months,. [indiscernible] as well as in multiple ways from Central Office to court. This framework helps to begin the conversation about the latest formula and multitiered system of support and comprehensive review that we began this year. On the next slide, i brought back some findings and themes around School Resource allocation that we shared at the december budget and Business Services subcommittee meeting. I will not read through the whole list, but in order to establish a mower car hearing vision around School Resources, we use the experience to orient four core values, which you will see on the next slide. Those being equity, transparency , flexibility, and stability. One thing i do want to acknowledge about these values is that there can be some push and pull among them. For example, we have been talking a lot about transparency , and also stability and the contingency to mitigate unexpected changes and schools are not seeing drastic drastic shifts. Sometimes owes go handinhand with one another. In order for us to create a transparent system and a clear criteria, we may have to move forward with some change in order to restabilize under a transparent and coherent system. A lot of our discussion over the past couple of weeks have been i guess i did a recap of the impact of the changes to the multitiered system of support. I do want to take one moment to come back around to the budget and the student formula. In addition to incorporating new ways and modifying some of the weighted student formula, we also implemented the baseline this year. The preferred baseline was the idea around the Baseline Services and programming that we would want the school to be able to implement. It was the way that we operationalize and monetize those different components and proposed baselines. The baseline is not given to a school in terms of the positions that are lifted here, but in terms of dollars. The idea it is the minimum Funding Amount that a school should be able the minimum amount to be able to do things here with only at site dollars and promoting different decisions and what is listed here. They do have the dollars to do so. In our spring allocation, we had we have about nine schools that have the dollars exactly corresponding to the baseline and every other school actually has more than this baseline. Nine are at this minimum and every other school, based on the dollars in our school have the capacity with their dollars alone to do more than what is lifted here listed here. Next slide. Back to the budget book. If you want to be able to dive into of these details around school funding, we have three exhibits. Eight, be and see they give you school by school detail about this formula and the multitiered system of support and Central Office managed allocations. [please stand by] now these additional materials that you can see the two that are listed as updated. The position changes which is the school by school level, of school by school report, and then the job summary is the overall across all of the schools. So, the update that we were able to make from tuesday until today was to get a little more specific around the job codes for positions like family liaisons and elementary advisors where we had initially not been able to go school by school and identify the very specific job code, so that has been updated in both of those reports. Also, the new report combines it looks similar to the school report, but also includes information around vacant and filled positions at the Central Office. So i will say that the Central Office report is a little bit of a challenge to create. We have a lot of school site positions, which we discussed on tuesday that are in Central Office and we dont always have a clear path to know that it is actually deployed to a school. So if you have questions about specific positions or would like any detailed follow up, this report is a very comprehensive first take that has been valida validated. The next step will include reaching out and confirming some of those details. So i will be handing it off to chief Financial Officer megan wallace. Thank you ann marie. Good afternoon everybody. So im going to take you all down for a walk down memory lane with regards to our budget process this year. So to begin, you know, this is the calendar of our school year, fiscal year and back in october and into december, i started to come and report to the budget and Business Service committee, primarily about some issues that we were identifying in the current year budget, particularly in october when we closed the books for the prior fiscal year. We had found that we were starting the current fizz fiscal year with a lower fund balance than we built in our budget. Later, going into december, i was able to provide more information around new costs or costs that we hadnt built into the budget. Its not that they excuse me. Im sorry. We consistently do reviews and i dont want to be rude and jenny let me know what you think. We constantly done a review of where we, how we got here and i want us to leave this up to commissioner lam, but i think we consistently spend about 30 minutes every meeting doing a review. I do think thats helpful for folks joining us, but i also wanted to beg the question commissioner lam. Yes, commissioner collins is just level set for the staff, well get through to the dialog which is important. I think it is level setting for the public in case its again for that revisit. Megan, yeah, if you want to i can move quickly. Yeah, thank you. All right. Okay, so also in february was when we really started to dive in to looking at our historical spending, relative to revenues and asking what happened . Why are we finding ourselves out of the balance, and how is it that were in this current year deficit and whats the trajectory for the path ahead. It was the february committee as a whole where i presented the out year projections for fiscal years 2021 and 2022. The primary take away here for the public that have asked about what the key drivers were of our change, the change and outlook, it was really stagnant. Were not seeing growth in those state revenues. Thats being paired with rising expenditures, primarily on personnel, our pension contributions, and also on the progr programmatic side, that we havent built into our budget. We havent been building that growth in our budget in the p t past, as well as other areas. Its just general operating costs. Really flagging in years 20212022, we would be out of our rainy day reserve, which is supporting a living wage for educators act, salary increases. Also in february, we came forward with our initial balancing plan to address approximately 50 million shortfall in fiscal year 2021. That did include sharing of reductions between Central Services and school sites, as well as looking for district wide solutions. However, through a course of