We'll work back.

Good afternoon.

Please to call order the speciality of the Alpha County Board of Supervisors on this 11th of March at 3 p.m.

in room 241 in the back of our building.

Supervisor present here.

We've currently the Ravenna District.

Forum is present.

We're also joined by our county executive, Mr.

Jeff Richardson, our county attorneys there, Mr.

Sweet Rosenberg.

Welcome.

And our clerk Borderson.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for what you do for our citizens every day.

Your service.

And at this time, I'll turn it over to Ms.

Judy, the chair of the OpenWall County School Board Introductions.

Thank you very much, Chair Andrews.

I'm here, Judy Lee, Chair of the School Board.

Vice Chair Kate Acup is here.

Also, we have in the audience Chuff Case and Graham Page joining us here today.

We also have staff, Superintendent Matt Haas, Rosalind Schmidt, Helen Dunn, Jennifer Butler, and Maya Kamzoa, and then Josiah Black.

Okay.

Thank you.

Well, and at this point, I will turn it over, I believe, to Mr.

Andy Bowman, Assistant Chief Financial Officer.

Today is the second budget board session on the county executive's fiscal year 25 recommended budget.

Really, two items on the agenda today.

First to hear from the public schools and their operating requests and to allow the board time to engage with them.

After that, we would recommend a break and then we will come back and continue in the general fund where we end it at the public safety chapter uh on Wednesday, and then we'll continue from there.

Um, with that, I'll uh turn it back over to the chair.

Okay.

Well, I I believe that uh back to our chair of the school for presentation on the school budget.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um, thanks so much for the opportunity today uh to make a brief presentation to you about where we currently stand with our funding requests.

After our presentation, we and all members of our school division staff will be on hand to answer any questions you may have.

As always, this is a needs-based funding request that focuses on maintaining services for our students as well as continuing to clear someone.

So that'll be okay.

Okay, we're ready for the next slide.

As we wrote in our recent letter to you, the basis of any public service is to work together toward the betterment of our community.

We're very fortunate to partner with the board of supervisors that genuinely cares about the quality of our public schools, not only the quality of the buildings themselves, but also and most importantly, the quality of the opportunities we provide to the students who attend them.

Brian communities are home to thriving students, and we recognize and appreciate your commitment to supporting the division, mission, values, and goals of the Almoral County public schools.

We do not want to miss this opportunity to thank you in person for your recent support of our appeal to amend our capital request and increase funding for our two critical projects, our new Southern feeder pattern elementary school and high school center too, as you can see in those slides.

Your partnership with us will help us address capacity needs and support student success in a county with growing student enrollment, and where our youngest schools are more than 20 years old, and our oldest schools are nearly 90.

We know our capital improvement plan still faces challenges.

But we also know that we have the support of our second members, and for that we sincerely thank you.

As I mentioned, today we're presenting a new needs-based funding request.

That request currently includes a sizable funding gap of 13.3 million dollars.

We are presenting a shortfall today because our budget development process is not yet over, and this is where we are right now.

Primarily, we're awaiting updated state revenue numbers, and our outlook is positive.

We also have plans for how we would make expenditure reductions should they be needed.

We'll also talk about why we have a gap, but the most important thing I want to communicate is that every budget decision thus far has been made in an effort to maintain current levels of service and sustain an upward trajectory for our learners and our employees.

Every year we include our strategic plan in our funding request, and we do so because our vision, mission, values, and goals provide the scaffolding for every decision that we make, and budget is obviously no exception.

We take care to align our budget decisions with strategic goals that focus on the well-being of students, supporting and strengthening our community, and distributing resources in a way that affects a positive change in efforts.

While our strategic plan guides our budget decisions, we also consider the valuable feedback and guidance from our research instructional.

Thank you.

One of the recommendations from the audit involves using a planning tool called a theory of change to identify to identify strategies, actions, and resources that can facilitate change and bring about desired outcomes.

This process includes reflecting on the various roles of the people in our school division and the influence of those roles on student success.

We're still creating our theory of change, but we're focused on the idea that we each play an important part in transforming the words of our strategic plan into actions that positively affect student learning.