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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2024-12-13-SC-min (Finance Subcommittee) AGENDA Public Meeting Notice Lexington School Committee's Finance Subcommittee December 13th, 2024 from 4-5pm. Superintendent's Office Central Office Finance Department 146 Maple Street, Lexington FINANCE SUB COMMITTEE MEETING - LEXINGTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS PARTICIPANTS: LARRY FREEMAN, DEEPIKA SAWHNEY, DAVID COELHO, DR. HACKETT DATE: FRIDAY DECEMBER 13TH 2024 TIME: 4.11 pm start The meeting was called to order at 4.11 pm The participants discussed the `Budget freeze'. Julie shared that on Dec 4th Mr. Coelho put out a FY 2025 spending freeze memo. This essentially meant that every administrator or dept head who previously had access to a certain amount of funds as per the budgeted amount for them needed to get any expenses okayed by the central office. This was done after Mr. Coelho did the projections and found that in order to stay within budget there would need to be a substantial reduction in expenses. On further questioning from Deepika it appeared that saving about 2 million would be very helpful from the overall $20million bucket. The last occasion when such a memo was sent out was during Covid. Mr. Coelho shared that there had been flexibility by using ESSER money in the past few years. However, that money had been used up by the deadline set by the government. Some personnel had been hired with those funds. The increasing number of high needs students entering the district as well as the new short term students entering the system were a cause of some concern especially with transportation becoming the expense to monitor. The state govt supports the unsheltered kids with funds for the accepting school district. These may not be adequate when one factors in McKinney Vento transportation expenses. Advocacy to explain these scenarios and their fiscal impact needs to be done at the state level. Some expense types that have been reduced are travel for professional development. Ms. Gaudet and Ms. Soh have been also involved in helping reduce spending. These Directors have some department heads (with independent budget buckets) report to them. Staff people have been good about describing their needs. They have accepted there are guardrails needed at this time and the final decision on spending is to come from the central office. The participants further discussed that expenses is the smaller costs bucket in comparison to personnel wages and compensation. Therefore, expense reduction would only yield small dollars. The personnel numbers needed to be looked at too. The supplementary positions should be for emergency needs. Therefore positions such as Music teacher or elementary teacher should be more thoughtful decisions, especially given our declining elementary school population. Julie reminded the group that the METCO consolidation may have resulted in more need in Bowman. Deepika related some observations from over a decade ago when there was an adult in the room for a child on IEP however the aide was not required to do much for periods of time. She related how as a parent helper she had observed that it teh aide had to wait around while the child engaged in the classroom activities led by the classroom teacher. How many adults in a room were too many adults and whether there could be a more productive role for such aides. Perhaps we need to expand the roles as more hovering help does not necessarily build the child's independence and self reliance. Having so many adults in every classroom was also not benefiting the SPED or Gen Ed students. Another significant budgetary pressure is the statewide contracts pressure. For the 2025 budget the high risk numbers were pared down for the current year. The budget had been in previous years made more conservatively with many more high risk students anticipated. However for this year, the high-risk line item was reduced by over a 1 M. However, more than anticipatedSPED students came in and that flexibility was reduced. Julie's memo that she had sent out was discussed along with other ways to reduce costs which included increasing class sizes, messaging to the community about the fiscal tightening needed, consolidating through attrition. Larry said that we did not want an RI F- Reduction in Force to happen because of budget woes. Deepika mentioned that we will start having to behave like a less rich district to make up the shortfalls. The meeting was adjourned unanimously at 5.05 pm.