Hello everybody, thanks for coming.

This is our town council budget presentation with the Board of Education approved budget.

Marianne's already gone through it one time with everyone, and would if you don't mind giving us a high-level recap first, and then we'll start some interaction and discussion.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you for again seeing me.

It feels like almost a month ago now with all the weather and things going on, but it was just last week that I presented.

You should have your budget books.

We'll probably reference in there a couple times.

And I'll just do the quick overview as Hank said.

I'll use the PowerPoint that I did the other day.

That one took 25 minutes to give background.

I promise I'll do five and just get us fresh back into the numbers a little bit, and then happy to answer any questions or give background or context.

So I will start and thank the board of ed.

I'm here representing the Board of Education budget.

This is the result of several months of work of our members and in the audience is also most of my administrative team, our principals, administrators, directors who helped put this budget together.

So I love this picture and our mission statement.

This has been our mission for quite a long time to empower learners to embrace and influence the future with courage and compassion.

Everything we do in our district is driven around this, including what's represented here tonight.

Our ask in terms of the supports that we need in order to accomplish the mission and support our students from the time they enter pre-K to when they cross the stage at graduation.

We do have a strategic plan.

It's based on four strategic objectives.

It is posted on our website.

There's lots of detail behind it, action steps, goals, information about how each school, each department is working towards that.

And then as we're looking at these particular action steps and goals underneath the objectives, that's where some of the decision making around the budget in a the supplies and curriculum and those kinds of things are represented.

Started way back in the fall as well.

Budget is a year-round process to not only develop it, but once it's approved, to begin to implement, to monitor it, and then use the information and our trending from the current year, understanding and projecting forward to get to our budget.

So as we enter this budget really represents four key things.

So health insurance salary increases, that's 80% of our budget just about this year.

And then you heard last year, and it continues, not at the same level of increase, our specialized program needs and out-of-district student tuitions for our students who need specialized programs and instruction.

This one, and I love this, so I'm gonna make sure I stay here for just a second.

Um we have really worked in the last couple years in containing our budgets, but being really thoughtful in our pathways and our programming for students and making those connections from the time they come into Joel into Elliott and then to the high school, and and these are hallmarks of what Clinton Public Schools is.

And we've done it through grant funding, we've done it occasionally a little bit through operating, but really repurposing money that may have been in another area to be able to really fine-tune our focus on what's important and what we want to do for our students.

This is our timeline of budget.

Again, we started the the board's work was really in January with a final approval at the end of January, and then we're here and we begin that process in presenting to you.

But we know over the next month, as you are evaluating this and the town budget as a whole, uh, we will continue those conversations and go back and do work with the board if necessary.

So this is where we stand.

Um our total operating budget increase is um 2.1 million dollars, a 5.44 percent increase over last year, and this is probably you know the the slide that really highlights why.

Um, and we can look in the detail, you can look at line item and operating center cost centers, each of the schools.

The increases are not in supplies and materials, very small increases there, or in some cases you'll see a negative operations budget.

It truly is in our salaries and benefits.

So about five percent of this budget is of the 5.44 percent increase is salaries and benefits alone.

Um, tuition represents a small, much smaller amount last year.

If you remember the increase in tuition last year was almost half of our increase, um three or four percent.

Everything else is a negative offset.

So that's that really hard work at cost containment.

So this is high level, it's it's about salaries and benefits this year, it's about our people that work directly with our kids.

So I included this slide, it's a snapshot from what's in your book.

So I'm gonna have you turn to page 19 in your book, because this is how I did the rest of the presentation, and and I won't go through each of the lines, but I think by showing this page on page 19 and the two pages before it take each one of these and give you a narrative description of why it's increasing or decreasing and what's driving it.

Um it's pretty clear that in this slide, 76% of the total budget is salaries and benefits.

And I will go to the slide that breaks down the certified and non-certified and why.

Um, but you can see our employee benefits, that's a larger increase than we've seen in quite some time.

Um, that we're on the state Connecticut State Partnership Plan, just like the town is, it's a 12 to 15 percent increase.

That's the highest.

I think everybody's facing these really large increases.

Um that move, we made that move to the state plan in 2020 21, and in the first five years, we saved approximately 1.9 million dollars.

So it was only in the sixth year that we got back to what we were paying prior to the move.

So we've done things and had to renegotiate contracts, we've done things to move at this point.

We think the state plan has been the most stable.

Their increases have been, you know, 5%, 10%, 8%.