Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the semi-annual joint meeting of the Carroll County Board of Education and the Carroll County Board of Commissioners.

We're very happy to be hosting the Board of Education this afternoon for our joint meeting this time.

And uh we do have a hard stop time of three thirty, so we want to get right into it.

And uh Superintendent McCabe, I will kick things over to you to start us off.

Excellent.

Good afternoon, and thank you for this opportunity to get together uh and discuss uh important matters for the future of CCPS.

Um and it's really timely for us to gather now with the two thousand twenty-six General Assembly having just concluded uh their work a week ago, and you having released your proposed FY27 budget just two days ago.

So first let me begin by thanking you for your commitments in the FY27 budget.

We are so appreciative that you were able to fully fund the board's operating budget request and meet the capital requests as well.

Umgoing support of our needs is very valued, and we are aware that there are other jurisdictions in the state who do not enjoy the kind of collaborative partnership that we have with you.

So thank you, and we don't take that for granted at all.

Um from the state standpoint, uh you always sort of hold your breath.

Um with the legislative session now behind us.

We can say it wasn't too bad.

Um, and it can always be worse.

Um, it helped that we are in an election cycle right now, and the state is facing a structural deficit.

Uh so those two factors helped temper some of the bills that would have carried more of a fiscal impact right now.

Um our projections uh for state operating funding were pretty accurate, uh, from what we had shared with you in the winter, uh, with just a few minor adjustments.

Um, we're scheduled to receive what we would have anticipated, although there is one adjustment there to work through as well.

Um, and we'll cover those items in our presentation.

So with that, we are we're we and it's I I will say the presentation is very quick.

So that we can spend most of our time uh talking.

So if uh would you like to do other um introductions, or would you like to go right into the presentation?

I think I think everybody knows everybody.

I mean, if you would prefer to do introductions, we can, but if not, we can jump right into the presentation.

We'll jump right in.

ProCup, our director of facilities to present a couple of these slides.

So wherever you want to go from, Robert.

Where did you hire him from?

Somewhere good.

Look how small that mic is he might be a little taller.

Yeah, we'll switch if you want to.

He's got this position.

Okay.

Okay, good afternoon, everyone.

Um superintendent mentioned, uh, we are uh going to go through some brief uh highlights of our operating budget.

Again, timely that you all uh released your proposed budget uh on Tuesday.

So uh just going to kind of share our uh status as far as the operating budget, so as far as local funding with your proposed budget, uh fully funding the board's request.

Um the board and superintendent obviously uh appreciate your support.

Um we believe through our budget process, uh you know, the discussions we had, the uh transparency of the uh discussions in our open meetings and so forth.

Our board and superintendent made some difficult decisions in arriving at that budget, and so uh we appreciate your support in the funding.

As far as state funding goes, um, although we have some high-level information, uh we'll be getting more over the next month or so.

Uh we project having uh final uh state aid calculations uh in mid-May.

So we will um be keeping in close eye on that, but our um in our as far as we look at that, we expect some minor uh decreases in a couple of areas of blueprint funding.

Um and so uh that shouldn't uh have any significant impact on our budget plans as we uh were working through the board's budget uh sessions, and I believe at the uh agency hearing that we shared uh during the commissioners beginning of your budget process.

Uh we tried to provide some uh perspective on a five-year forecast and what the budget challenges are as we see them out over the next several years.

Uh we've had the discussion that enrollment is uh flattening, and in this current year was a uh decrease in student enrollment that triggered the three-year average provision.

So we'll continue to recognize some of that enrollment decline over the next two years as well.

And so we look out over the next several years, what we see is a significant uh slowing in state revenue support funded by on a per-pupil basis.

We see increases overall as the blueprint funding formulas increase over those years.

So we've kind of got variables working against each other, the the funding formula increasing, but our enrollment uh potentially decreasing.

So we've projected small uh increases there, that's only about a half a percent a year.

So as we look out over our revenue projections with the state over those five years with the county, what's included in the uh operating plan, uh, as well as a projection of a consistent amount of funding for fiscal year 32 that's not yet in your plan, but just for the broad picture to be able to see what we see is revenue uh growth in the 10, 11 million dollar range, so that's about 2.2 percent.

And as we look on the expenditure side at the cost pressures that we've seen related to compensation and employee benefits, uh other operating costs from utilities to insurances and and many of the shared operating costs that you all face as well.

We see uh projected uh increases in cost pressures on the budget uh in the close to five percent range.

That's about 4.9 percent per year.

So what we're seeing is uh is a variance between our projected revenues and projected expenditures looking out over the next several years, and so uh we wanted to share that with you, begin to have conversation about what that could look like, and you know, we've got some perspective over the last two decades when enrollment and and state revenues tighten up what that can mean for the school system, and so I think anything that we can do to get ahead of that and have those discussions uh you know would be beneficial for everyone.

So I will just point out these were sort of built off of our recent history.

Uh, what we did not build in here, the only piece we sort of know and didn't build in here yet is uh the impact of a charter school, you know.