Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Soccer City Council meeting for Monday, October sixth, twenty twenty-five at six thirty P.

M.

Before we start the official meeting this evening and call that to order, we do have two joint meetings tonight.

First one, we are meeting with the school board to get some updates, and then we will be having a meeting with the long range planning committee.

If you want some of our handouts, I have a few in the back.

Um our goal is always to keep the heat off in the buildings just as long as we possibly can because several of our buildings uh on the older sides, once you turn those on, it's hard to uh turn back on those and warm the buildings back up.

One item that was not on the agenda tonight uh for things I talked to was would be just to update you guys.

Uh as you saw at the beginning of the school year when we had a water leak at Fairfield School that broke in a very unique uh part of the building as it comes into the building, and I think uh that water pipe, which it was built uh when the building was built back in the 60s.

Don, we estimated that that was encased in approximately four to six feet of concrete throughout all of them.

And uh so as we were looking at the fix options, uh Don and I quickly uh turned to the option that would cost about 40,000 versus the 125,000 dollars by trying to bust out all of that concrete, uh knowing that we could uh be using the building for a few more years.

Uh but boy, we're very lucky to have Don and his team uh working with us.

Uh I've said time and time again, one of the better things that we've done is combining um the departments with the city, great communication, working on problems together.

Um it's just I want you guys to hear how well it's going from the school's perspective.

Uh it's going great.

I have uh four main topics I want to talk to you about.

Um, and the first one uh tonight is I want to talk about uh enrollments of where we are right now in our city.

Uh currently our pre-K through eight population is at 1,898 students with 144 uh multilingual learners.

On the high school side of things, we have 891 students, and we're still working on residency and verification of about another 10 to 12 students with about 25 um multilingual learners, and then we see the highest number of kiddos in the several years attending vocational programming.

Vocational programming is up everywhere, but we are at 115 SACO students who are attending the Biddeford Regional Center of Technology, who which also has its highest count ever of students attending, um, which is really exciting for us.

Overall, we have 27 uh 189 students, uh, and I have provided breakdowns for all of you throughout different uh enrollments, the increases, the decreases of where we are combined.

What did as a general overview what you can see is our enrollment is down this year.

And one of that, the very big reason is that we had 60 plus students who were staying at the hotel that is now closed.

And so really that's where that change has been that those students are no longer in the district, and as you can see, our multilingual count has gone down because of that.

We see steady of uh growth or maintaining uh what have been families who are residents in town that have been long-term residents or new to the town that seems to just be at the same rate, not a lot of growth in either direction.

Um and then just when I touch on this vocational piece, and I'm gonna touch on it a little bit again when I talk about the budget piece of where we are uh budget-wise, is that when you look at our high school students in 2022-23, 65 SACO residents were going to the vocational programming, and now that's up to 115 students.

People are paying attention.

Our families are paying attention, our students are paying attention because AI is changing so much.

Um, and there's quality programming and kids.

We all know what it's like to call any of the trades for something that we need.

There's not enough, and our young people are responding.

Uh and so what we do with these enrollment numbers is we've finalize them over the next uh month.

They tend to pretty much settle in after this point.

The first three or four weeks can be a lot of fluctuation.

This will be about where we're gonna be for the remainder of the year, and then we have a snapshot on enrollment again on April 1.

So on enrollment trends, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Any questions for the Superintendent?

Counselor Hatch?

Uh thank you, Mayor McPhail.

Uh Jeremy, uh, I just want to expand a little bit on the um residency verification.

You got about a dozen students there, and if I do the math, that's a fairly significant number uh to the taxpayers.

Uh so can you educate me and the public uh as to what are some of the primary causes of of this issue and then what steps you take to make sure that you have adequately uh verified residency.

Yes.

So when when we talk about residency verification, we look at uh a couple of forms of ID.

One of those is a driver's license.

And this was something that I learned over the last couple of years.

But if you move, you're required by law to change your driver's license within 30 days.

Um nobody wants to go spend any more time at the DMV, and it might take you an appointment uh to get that renewal at this point.

Um, but that's the big piece.

Voter registration, making sure that people are uh registered and or have voted in the community that they say they live in, making sure they have a lease or a valid uh bill uh in their name is something that we look at.

Um we know that we experience a lot of homelessness uh within our schools, so sometimes that can be a factor that we may not know what's going on, or sometimes people move, but their children have a connection to a community, and we'll see a duplicate address come up and we'll be like, okay, that's two different families, what's going on, and we'll have to reach out and make sure.

We'll see a kid who at times you're like, okay, that kid always took the bus, and this would be for all sectors of our school.

This kid always took the bus, and now this year, you know, they're late a lot.

So is there something going on, or are they really not at that address anymore?

So as we go through that verification process, um we make sure that uh the taxpayers of SACO to the best of our ability are supporting the students who live in town.

Um and sometimes that can be a little bit more challenging in others.

No, I appreciate that.

And I I think it's important for folks to understand that there is a very uh good vetting process that uh gets us to that final conclusion and in fairness uh to everybody should should be uh in play.

Thank you.

Counselor Hewitt?

Do we have do we have numbers on how many students are being homeschooled and attending private schools?