So it's one o'clock.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Thank you for joining us in this is a education uh committee.

We're here to hear from our uh fellow participant people from the from the Syracuse City School District in the amendments of the budget.

Thank you, Pat Hogan, Marty Navy, Councillor Jones Rousser, Patrona, and thank you, Tony.

Uh, Superintendent and uh I'm gonna totally forget your last name.

Chief Potenko.

Thank you for joining us for the presentation.

You're welcome.

Thank you for having us.

Um we came to the Common Council uh a few months back with our budget subsequent to that uh additional funding was received from the state in terms of state aid.

Um, so we're coming back to you for a uh amended budget.

Um briefly go over some of the the highlights.

Um really what has occurred is yet state budget um released and the state aid, and then I'll talk about some of the revenue and the expense overview.

Um, if you look at the page three, there was three seven point six billion of education funding that the process updated the Foundation Aid formula.

This was an increase of one point seven billion dollars, four point nine percent over the twenty-four twenty-five budget.

It was 29% increase over the past four years, uh $8.3 billion overall.

And there was a $6.5 billion increase in foundation aid, which is $33% increase over the last four years.

So when we came to you uh previously, uh a few changes um had occurred with our budget.

Um there was a change to the foundation aid formula, and there was an increase in the uh the weighted average of how they uh calculate the English language learners.

So that went from 0.5 to 0.53.

Um there was also an increase in special services aid for CTE programs.

Um we would receive $3,900 per student.

Now it went up to $4,100 per student.

And they also included ninth grade students and the per pupil count for CTE services.

Um previously it was just 10th, 11th, and 12th graders, and they increased that to ninth graders as well.

So when we looked at the changes that had occurred, um the English language learner weight, even though it'll say 0.03% change, it actually added $1.1 million to the district's budget because of the large number, almost 20% of our students, our ELL.

Um the special services aid increased our our budget by about $4.5 million, and then there was about $8.4 million that was changed based upon the um February school aid database update.

So if you go to page five, so when you look at overall, um the final state budget highlights it was an increase of $50.2 million in state aid over the current year.

$38.8 is increased in foundation aid, $6.4 million was transportation aid, $4.4 is the special services aid that I talked about, and 0.6 million is the all other aid increases.

And if you have any questions on any of this, please just go ahead and ask me.

Um again, the transportation aid increase, uh, I haven't spoken to that, but that's really uh part of the CPI increase, also uh increase the McKinney Vento students, those are our homeless students when we get reimbursed for previous year transportation.

Um, those numbers have gone up over the last couple of years, and uh after school programming and and alternative sites um busting for students that we have in our alternative programs, and then the all other aid increases due to the charter school phase in at the citizenship and science academy um charter school.

So when we looked at that would be the point six million, yes.

Okay.

But the special services aid, can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, that's I want to know what is that aid.

Special services aid, that's the uh CTE funding that we received for students.

So there was a $200 per student uh increase and per pupil aid, but they're also now including ninth grade students.

So we went back and looked at all the ninth grade students, and we do do a lot of CTE programming with ninth grade.

We don't start at 10th, 11th, and 10th grade, we start at ninth grade.

Um, and that was something that we've uh lobbied the legislature um heavily over the last few years about um because we want to start those programs, and as you can see, it brought in an additional four and a half million dollars to the district to help support those CT programs.

Do you think that ninth grade is the best grade?

You don't think that like six or eighth grade is well we start foundation things at the middle school.

So we do start foundation foundation aid type foundation um work at the middle school level to prepare those students so when they decide to where they want to go in ninth grade, they have some foundational knowledge about some areas that they want to go into.

The exposures at middle school.

Yeah, I know I had it.

I just didn't know what was what was taken away since then and what's in the back.

So yeah.

Thank you.

So when we look at the revenue assumptions, we're looking at uh uh legislative state aid increase of 14 million dollars.

Um again, it was the 1.1, the 4.5, and the 8.4, and then there's a decrease of 0.6 million in miscellaneous revenue.

Um told, we also going to be um using our committed fund balance.

So um as I spoke to none of this has changed um from previously, but we're using eight million dollars of committed fund balance on the STEAM high school, uh, and two million dollars is going toward the Delaware Delaware Montessori phase in, and then there's 400,000 dollars that's going toward our workers' compensation um settlement.

In addition to the committed fund balance, we're using some unassigned fund balance, four million dollars for capital projects, which will include the ITC and the Roosevelt Stadium projects.

And then we're going to use $11 million to continue the district initiatives.

So previously, when we came to the common council, we're going to be using $15.5 million of the unassigned fund balance to balance our budget, but due to receiving this additional funding, we reduced that by $4.5 million.

So we're using less fund balance going into this coming school year.

So you're balancing it.

I mean your balancing in effect more because we got more funding, we could put more money in the fund balance and still do the projects that you would commit to, correct?