Special Budget Work Session   2/19/2026

I'm Rosalyn Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer.

Thank you so much and thank you to our police officers who serve us every day and are here today to also keep us and the public safe.

And I'd also like to thank you again.

We have Claire Curry here as our student representative.

And as many of you have seen, we talked about this a bit last week, the student representatives from Monticello, Western,

AHS and Community Lab will rotate so that we will have a different board member each time.

We will now pause for a moment of silence.

Thank you.

The next piece of our agenda today is the actual approval of our agenda.

Do I have a motion to approve tonight's agenda?

I move we approve tonight's agenda.

Moved by Ms. Lee.

Seconded by Mr. Dillenbeck.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Our agenda for tonight is approved.

So we are now moving into our budget work session.

This is budget work session one, and Ms. Maya Kumazawa, our director of budget and planning and budget guru behind this amazing budget book, is here to introduce us to the budget book and to talk us through tonight's agenda.

I have two mics.

I'm Maya Kumazawa, Director of Budget and Planning, and I'm here to facilitate tonight's work session.

I will also be joined by Brooke Conover, Senior Budget Analyst, and Chandra Hayes, Assistant Superintendent.

So as we mentioned, we want to introduce especially the new board members to our budget document.

Does everyone have one?

Okay.

The budget book is broken out into sections with letters A through G. The first section, section A, is an overview for the whole budget.

And then the last section, section G, those are all of the

the variables and inputs that are used to develop all the budgets.

And the budgets you will see are in sections B through F. Section B is a detailed overview of revenues.

Section C, D, and E are detailed expenditure budgets.

And section F is special revenue funds.

This evening we will focus mostly on school fund expenditures, so that's sections C, D, and E, and then next week we'll look at revenues, which is sections B and F.

There will be a lot of flipping through the book because while B through F are sort of the budget outputs, the assumptions that are used to determine those budget amounts are all in section G. And then the kind of qualitative overview of, well, what does this all mean, is all in section A.

And so that's why we're kind of flipping everywhere.

But it does make sense if you wanted to start out with a

a qualitative overview of what's changing, seeing all the budgets, and then in the end, what's supplemental is what's driving those decisions.

This will make more sense as we go through it.

As our budget process aligns with our strategic plan, Learning for All, it is in direct alignment with our third goal, which is equitable and transformative resources.

So our budget aims to do that, is to provide equitable and transformative resources to all of our schools and communities.

Separately from the strategic plan, we have budget goals.

These were adopted several years ago, and these are pretty much the scaffold by which we build up the budget.

To summarize, fiscal responsibility, we align resources with our mission to support student success, community engagement, family, staff, business, and nonprofit partners and community members help shape and inform our work.

To attract and retain a strong workforce, we prioritize competitive compensation through market-aligned salaries and benefits, and we also focus on sustainable operations using best practices to manage facilities, transportation, and operational services efficiently.

Every proposal that we bring forward tonight, including this evening, is aligned with our strategic plan and school board priorities, and decisions are informed by data using performance measures and logic models to guide investments

and to ensure that funds are used effectively.

So this is an overview of our expenditures.

These three pie charts show the same expenditures of $311 million that's proposed in the FY 27 draft funding request.

We'll start first with the purple one by expense type.

This can be found on page C13.

And I forgot to mention every slide has yellow highlighted page numbers.

and so you can look at the slide and then you can reference the budget book just to see how everything is connected.

So we'll start on page C13 and that page shows what the money is actually going towards.

What is it paying for?

So the way we categorize them is by salaries, benefits, other wages, operations and transfers.

The second way you can slice the data is by state reporting category or function, or sometimes called program.

What is the actual program that those expenses are going towards?

and those categories are defined by the state and this is how we report our expenditures so that the state receives data from other school divisions and they're comparable.

They're pretty set for every school division and those functions are instruction, administration, attendance and health, technology, building services, transportation and transfers.

And then the third way you might look at our expenditure budget is whether a budget is school-based or department-based.

A school-based expenditure is when you can tie an expense directly to a physical location like a school building.

This would be the case for our teachers, our principals, our nurses, our custodians, most of the staff who travel to and from a physical location every day.

Department-based is a different type of budget and that's for budgets where the staff and the operating expenses serve the division as one unit and you can't break down somebody's job between schools.

So the best example of this are

bus drivers.

They serve multiple schools and so we budget them as a division-wide expense and we don't break down exactly what portion of their FTE is serving which school.

That lets us be more flexible in how we staff our routes and it's also more indicative of this is a division expense, it is not linked to any school.

So all three of these pie charts have a total dollar value of $311 million, which is the expenditures that we'll be reviewing this evening.

In section A, we outline in detail exactly what is changing from the FY26 adopted budget to the FY27 draft request.

So it is a budget-to-budget change.

And the reason why we're looking at budget-to-budget is because we're still in the current budget year and we don't have actuals yet.

So most comparisons that we talk about will be from one budget to the next.

Once we finish out this year, we'll start showing actuals and that will differ from the budget But the best comparison point is the adopted budget to the draft funding request

The FY26 adopted budget was $284 million.

And then the middle column shows exactly what changes are being applied to get to that draft funding request number that we've been looking at.

These categories include a baseline adjustment, non-discretionary changes, new schools, workforce investments, service reductions, and new proposals.

Another way we can look at expenditures is by per pupil.

This essentially means if you took the whole budget and you divided it by the number of students that the budget is serving, how much is each pupil costing us in terms of expenditures?

And so you can do this for any budget year, but as an example, if you look at the FY26 adopted budget, as I showed on the previous slide, was $284 million.

Then that middle column showed the changes, which is $27 million.

And then the third column is what the proposed funding request is.

The per people expenditures, if you look at other divisions, those are calculated differently.

There's no exact set way of exactly how it should be calculated.

In most cases, though, capital expenses are not included, because as you can imagine, capital expenses will vary significantly from year to year.

Are you building a new school?

Are you not?

And it would just skew the data.

So typically, capital and debt service is not included.

As you know, there is a one-time transfer to capital included in that $311 million.

So I've provided an adjusted number that's $307 million if you take out the one-time transfer to capital.

So that's the numerator.

The denominator is the number of pupils.

That also could vary depending on how you wanted to calculate it.

For our K-12 population, we have about 13,800 students.

That was the projection for the current year, and the projection for next year is also around that.

So the number of students, K-12, is not planned to significantly change from one year to the next, so that's not driving changes in the per pupil amount.

Another number you could use is pre-K to 12 students, so including preschool as part of the student count.

Normally, we don't do that because the state ADM or the state average daily membership, the number that they use to determine how much money they give us doesn't include preschool.

but in reality we are serving hundreds of preschool kids and they cost money and so that is it would be a more realistic way to look at well how much is each child costing rather than dividing it by number just because it's used in other formulas but that is the k-12 number is typically what you'll see throughout the budget book.

And so if you use pre-K to 12 students, which is our actual number of enrolled students, and you divide by the budgets, that's the per pupil amount.

So in the FY26 adopted budget is $20,000.

Per pupil, the change was $1,900.

And then if you update the numerator with the draft funding request and divide it by the pre-K to 12, you can see a range of

$21,000 to $22,000, depending on what you use.

The 9.5% increase that you see, that is the same as the total expenditure increase, and that's because the number of students is staying the same.

If the number of students were increasing, you would see an increase that might be a little bit less.

This is just a chart I pulled using available public data from the VDOE about what per pupils look like.

This is a list of all Virginia cities and counties with a local composite index of greater than 0.5.

Our local composite index is 0.64, and that just is an indication of how our budget is structured.

A majority of our budget, three quarters of it, is funded locally, and then one quarter of it is funded by the state.

and so a lot of these counties have similar structures where the locality is paying more than the state because of the LCI.

The LCI is capped at 0.8 which is why it doesn't go all the way up to 1.

I'll pause there and see if you all have any questions before I turn it over for discussion for just this section.

And it helps because I know a number of us have put questions forward and my gut is if you kind of look the probably the most common one is and we that we both have as well as that we get from constituents all the time is you know what what is included in or and or why the increase over the last five years.

in per pupil.

I think that's a good question.

So as I said, because the enrollment number budget to budget is fairly flat, what's driving the increase in the per pupil is just the increase in expenditures.

And so that's what's shown here and we will be covering each of these categories in more detail through the rest of the conversation.

the evening.

And we are working on some more analyses about prior years.

This is an example for what, how you might look at it.

But this information exists in every budget book for a long time.

or discussion.

I'll move forward then.

This slide you'll see is a repeat from what you saw last week.

The purpose of it is to show how much of our budget is already set.

If we maintain the service level that we have now and we move that forward one year,

and we keep all the same people and we update costs, that's what that purple area is showing.

And then the gray and the green and the orange, those are the new costs that we're adding or what new program changes or things that will look different next year and the things that have monetary value attached to them.

The first step in developing this baseline budget, which is in purple, is by building up a baseline budget.

We start from what we call a zero-based budget, so we start with nothing.

We start at zero, and then we build up from there.

We build up every single FTE, every single allocation to the school.

use all the salary and benefit information that we have in the fall, and we build up a budget from scratch to build up the purple section.

And then we add in, okay, well, if we want to maintain the current services, if we want to maintain our contracts, if we want to maintain, for example, our partnership with KTEC, how much would that cost in terms of cost increases, even though we're not changing partnerships or contracts?

Cost increases are included as well.

And then after that, after we've added the non-discretionary contractual costs, then we say, okay, well, what's changing next year?

We're adding two new schools, three if you think about it in a different way.

We have workforce investments, including compensation, working conditions and benefits.

And then what we have left is $6.9 million or about 2% of the budget that's really at the discretion of the school board to say, okay, well, we have this much money allocated based on the formula from the state and local government.

What's the best way to use that?

In order to build the baseline budget, there are several inputs.

So you'll see some reference to Section G.

We use a projected enrollment number by school and grade.

We have adopted staffing standards that determine the level of service.

We have updated benefit rates.

And then we have inflationary and contractual changes.

And I'll go through each of those.

We'll start first with enrollment.

Since the pandemic, we have grown very slowly but steadily.

We're projecting 14,174 students next year when including preschool.

In this chart, K-12 growth is about 4%, but what's interesting is preschool growth is much more significant, a 77% increase.

The orange column to the right is what the funding request is based on and what we apply the staffing standards to.

Another metric we use is economically disadvantaged student rates.

There are four specific metrics that we look at.

So you can see each school has four columns.

So I'll go through each of those.

The first column, which is in light blue, is the direct certification rate for K-12 students.

So this is in the fall of 2025, we looked at how many students are directly certified for government services.

This would be like food stamps or other federal identifiers.

And we take the number of students who are qualified for that and then we divide it by the number of students in the school.

That gets you the rate for what we call direct certification.

The second column in the dark blue is the 2025 free and reduced lunch rate.

In order to get this, we take the number of students and families who have applied for free and reduced lunch.

We divide that by the total number of students in the school and that gets you a percentage of the free and reduced lunch rate.

Knowing that we have nine schools that are in the Community Eligibility Program, or CEP, that program provides free and reduced lunch without the need for an application.

And because we have that program in place at most of our schools, that free and reduced lunch number is not quite accurate at those CEP schools because you're not applying for it, so it's bad data.

In order to normalize for that, what we've done is looked historically at, well, what's the difference between the direct certification rate, which that methodology hasn't changed, and the difference between free and reduced lunch rates before they were designated a CEP?

And we look at trends and we extrapolate, well, what is probably the true free and reduced lunch rate if they weren't CEP?

That's what the orange column is showing.

That's sort of the number that we use for CEP schools knowing that the free and reduced lunch rate is not accurate.

For non-CEP schools, we stick with the free and reduced lunch application rates.

Finally, the fourth column is a metric we've started in this budget process, is what I'm calling the economically disadvantaged rate.

This is a different rate that we have been using for applications for federal title funds.

and in this methodology, it takes the direct certified number of students, applies a 60% premium or multiplies it by 1.6 and says, okay, well this is a better, general, more conservative estimate of how many students are actually economically disadvantaged because of the flaws you see in free and reduced lunch.

There might be stigma tied to applying for it and there are other reasons.

that it might not be a true indicator.

Whereas a direct certification number is a more solid number, but you know it's not fully representative.

So by applying a premium factor, you're getting a better sense of the needs of the school.

So that is throughout the budget document, we're calling that the economically disadvantaged rate.

The orange column, the used free and reduced, the adjusted free and reduced rate, that one is used for developing target class sizes and other differentiated staffing like reading specialists.

But then we have shifted towards using the economically disadvantaged rates in other areas like providing school operational funding or providing staffing like APs and clerical.

And the reason for that is because it would be a significant cost increase to change our methodology all at once.

We're slowly trying to bring that in in areas where there isn't a huge financial impact, knowing that it is probably a better metric to use.

This is the same chart, but for middle and high schools as well.

The next piece of data we use that drives increases in our budget is the number of special education students.

While our general student population has grown fairly slowly, the special education population has seen a 13% increase in the years in this chart.

Special education students require greater level of service and that's seen in the staffing ratios that we provide.

And those staffing ratios are on page G16.

They're very detailed.

You can see exactly.

We take the number of special education students and apply a ratio to them and that's how the staffing is determined.

And you can see those ratios are student to staff ratios are fairly small.

Also while special education student enrollment is increasing, the severity of disabilities have also increased at an even higher rate.

The more severe the disability, the more resources are required to ensure that students receive the services needed to learn.

Right.

So, I've mentioned the staffing standards a few times now, but this is several pages in Section G, G5 to G18, where we outline all of the school staff based at each school and we determine a way to ensure that resources are allocated fairly.

So what's shown on this slide, these positions do make up a majority of FTE budgets, but these are classroom teachers in the purple table.

For kindergarten through third grade, we have a target class size of 20.3 students per teacher.

and then as the free and reduced lunch again we're using the adjusted free and reduced lunch rates as those rates go up the ratios get smaller so more teachers are provided for a lower number of students for fourth and fifth grade our base target class size is 22.5 and then you can see how those ratios go down with different demographics

For sixth through twelfth grade, the base target class size is 23.75 students.

And then you can see again the different thresholds for free and reduced lunch.

So this may be the first time that returning board members have seen a table in this way.

We have worked over the last year to simplify these standards to make them more transparent and accessible to decipher.

Previously, we did not have established target class sizes.

Instead, we provided base teacher staffing and then additional fractional FTEs depending on every free and reduced lunch student.

This was done very incrementally so schools would go up or down by fractions of FTEs each year and there was not a clear goal of what the class size should be.

So this change has led to some shifts.

Some schools gained FTE and some schools lost FTE.

Overall we maintained a net zero financial impact throughout the division by making this change.

The green table on the right is another staffing standard that we recently revised to promote, again, a simple and transparent standard that wouldn't fluctuate so widely from year to year.

So there is stability and kind of an expectation of a staffing level.

So for example, we have reading specialists on here.

They're provided for one reading specialist per 100 to 250 free and reduced lunch students, depending on the level.

Other tiered services, these are often used for math and reading interventionists and specialists.

They're assigned based on academic performance and size, kind of in these broader bands.

All right.

I would also like to mention that these, the staffing at a school, they make up on average 93% of a school's budget.

The other 7% of a school budget goes to operations.

So it's a very small percentage of the total budget, and you can see what those are.

We provide general allocations.

This is calculated by a base budget level and then additional money provided per pupil.

And this funding is used for supplies, materials, contracts, services, copiers, and just day-to-day office supplies.

Program allocations are allocated to schools that have or host those certain programs.

They include preschool, special education, classrooms, interpretation, career and technical education supplies, and athletics.

And then the third bucket that we call supplemental pay.

This is the largest part of the operating portion.

And this is provided to schools based on enrollment and staffing levels and use for tutoring, substitute pay, stipend pay, overtime, and temporary wages.

And this is laid out line by line in Section G. You can see exactly every school and how much they're getting for every one of these items.

I have two questions.

The first, and I briefly brought this up in our call this week, but when we're looking at the baseline, the 287, what cuts were considered

prior to adding on additional services and you may not have those answers right in front of you but I think that's something that's really important for us to look at if we're increasing our budget what

What did we look at that's not working well, that we cut?

I noticed the EDEP staff was reduced significantly.

But where else did we analyze?

And the reason I'm bringing this up is last year when we made the difficult decision to get rid of FLESS, even though it was a program I loved, you supported with a lot of data that showed that it wasn't working and it was a cut that was not money.

Previously it was not money well spent.

I would like to see if there's other areas in our budget that there are things that money is not being effectively or efficiently spent when we got to that baseline.

Because I don't think any of us could say that, you know, if we just maintained everything that everything's perfect.

There's got to be things that aren't going smoothly.

So I don't know if you want to pause there if you had anything to say or if you want to come back to that.

I would just make a general comment is that we scrubbed and scrubbed in the last two years.

We sort of made those reductions where we knew we had evaluated and knew it was possible.

I think going into this budget process was a little bit different because we didn't

We do have ongoing logic model reviews and program evaluations.

For example, this year we did a program evaluation on our AVID program and found that it had a strong return on investment, so we would continue that.

But honestly, through the process that we've gone through, if you look in the budget notebook

There are some programs that are in yellow and that means that they are in the process of improving but not as strong as they could be and we have our eye on them.

But almost everything that this board has invested in over the last several years is working and is having the results that it's intended to have.

Okay.

Just as a follow-up, but I think on that, and I think this is one of the questions that I submit, is I do think we would like to look at those things in yellow and just understand the basic of those decisions, and then what I always say is then, what is the mark to say, okay, if not improvement by X, what is the next step?

So, apologies for that.

And then my other question had to do with SPED.

As you said, we've seen a consistent growth, especially post-COVID, of students needing specialized services.

And I guess my bigger concern, and I would like some more information on this, is

One of the three things that is talked about as your key priorities, one of them is strengthening targeted supports for SPED.

But unless I'm looking at it wrong, the overall SPED budget is decreasing.

So while we're putting $300,000 into these specialized positions, the overall amount spent on SPED for the next fiscal year is actually going down.

Would you be willing to share?

I'd like to look into it, but I don't know.

Yeah.

And I can send an email and we can follow up, but that just sparked my memory when you said that I want to get some comparison on that.

So I will follow up with an email and get some information.

Yeah.

I've got a question about enrollment projections.

I know we've chatted a little bit about this and the growth in certain areas and how do we plan for that.

I noticed that from last year to this year enrollment was down slightly and the projection is that it will be up slightly for next year.

Sure.

So every year, we do a 10-year projection, but the 10-year projection is updated each year based on the latest year's data that gets folded in to the past 10 years of data.

So we look at the past 10 years of data, whatever is most recent,

and we look at the trends of cohort progression.

How are students moving from one grade to the next?

And there's definitely patterns with that.

Recently we've seen an increasing rate of students coming in in first grade, for example, and not at all the schools, but at some of the schools.

We have patterns where at some schools students will not stay for sixth grade and then come back in the ninth grade.

And so we have 10 years of data by school and grade level that looks at that and we kind of build a regression to say okay well what might next year look like based on past trends.

For areas that are growing faster than others that have development

We use a more aggressive assumption.

So it's all based on historical data, but the assumptions you can use, do you look back three years, six years, or nine years, those can be changed by growth area to grow schools at different rates.

That's the gist of it.

We'll keep moving through to our inflationary and contractual changes.

So this was shown as a non-discretionary item of 1.2 million.

That 1.2 million doesn't really tell the full story because there are ups and downs.

On A31, these are outlined in even more detail.

But on this slide, I'm showing the general increases

that contribute to this category.

So the first is an increase in technology operations and technology replacement.

The second is an increase in building services operations.

The third is an increase in Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program, or VRIP for short.

We also have an increase to our healthcare rates.

This is the anticipated change when we build in the plan year 27 rates, which is a projection.

This $1.8 million doesn't capture the entire healthcare fiscal to fiscal year increase.

It is the impact of plan year 2027 on fiscal year 2027.

And then other changes of $0.2 million.

So these total up to much more than $1.2 million, but we actually are seeing a windfall with the VRS rates.

Those are going down for the next two years by a significant amount.

And so we're seeing $3.2 million in school fund savings

for the contribution we put for the employer portion of VRS is going down by more than $3 million.

That combined with the increases at the top of the slide result in the net increase of $1.2 million of non-discretionary.

So I'll spend a little bit more time on health insurance, because while it's not a huge change in this budget process, it has been a huge change in previous budget processes.

So I just wanted to provide a little bit more background on that.

ACPS and Albemarle County have a self-funded health plan.

And this means that instead of an insurance company, instead of a traditional model,

An employer purchases coverage for their employees through a company and that company offers access to a provider network.

They create the plan design and they set the rates that the group pays for the coverage.

The insurance company also takes on the risk for insuring that group.

and our self-funded model, instead of us paying an insurance company to take on that risk, the premiums that the employees and we pay go into the health care fund.

Those are the revenues that go into a fund and then claims are paid out directly from this fund.

Claims, administrative costs, a stop loss re-insured,

Stop Loss Insurance, a wellness amount, and then a reserve balance.

That reserve balance is there because we assume the risk of claims, and so it's a required reserve that we have to maintain, and it's a budgeted, balanced, it's a balanced budget, revenues on the left and expenditures on the right, and it's all contained within the healthcare fund.

We, in recent years, have been dipping below the required reserve levels that are needed to maintain stability in the fund, so rates have been increasing at a significant rate to keep up with the number of claims that are being paid out.

In this chart, we're seeing a 108% increase in terms of how much ACPS is contributing to the healthcare fund.

So that's in 22-23 we were a little less than 20 million dollars and in this proposed budget we're approaching 40 million dollars in premiums that we're paying towards health insurance coverage.

Another non-discretionary cost is the new school cost.

The construction of Mountain View Upper Elementary School is ongoing and has been approved by the board.

With the opening of Mountain View Upper, we are opening also a new school called Mountain View Primary in the current building location.

And so the way that these budget costs are presented is that we first start with kind of a pro forma, what is the projected Mountain View Elementary School for next year if they were one school, if they were status quo in terms of their operations.

Given the new costs and new enrollment numbers, this is the comprehensive cost of the elementary school.

So that's kind of our starting point.

Then we budgeted, well, what does a Mountain View primary school budget cost?

That's on page D29.

And then we developed a budget for Mountain View Upper Elementary School on D31.

And so the increase in cost between a status quo pro forma Mountain View Elementary School and then the increased costs in the two new schools combined, that change is what's being defined as part of the $2.2 million in new school costs for Mountain View Primary and Mountain View Upper Elementary School.

It was a fairly similar methodology for ACE Academy at Lambs Lane.

I thought it was simpler to look at it this way, to start with, well, what's the budget for Ace Academy, Lambs Lane?

You can see it on page D71, but we can subtract out the costs for students and teachers shifting from their base schools to Ace Academy, Lambs Lane.

Now pause there.

I think the 30, the percents on the right kind of confused me a little bit.

I get it now, thanks.

Yeah, it's medical cost inflation.

I know that's a county-wide thing, us and the county, but this screen is the schools, correct?

Yes.

This chart is for schools expenditures.

I don't know.

That's a good question.

Are the healthiest?

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe, right?

Yeah, obviously we, just with the number of employees we have, make up the bulk of that health fund.

We do not bifurcate the data by employee type and this and that, but the County Gov is experiencing the exact same percentage rates because we move together.

Yeah, I just I wonder and this has been brought up I think for the last few years it's you know a cost that we have no control over and is there any

Yeah, so I mean, we've had, as you know, conversations over the years and there's been intentional actions to control costs, right?

Right.

Plan design changes, opening the employee clinic.

Right.

We had a couple bad years with some high-cost claimants, right?

I am happy to preview this current year was much better, which is why you're seeing that

who would have thought 18% seems good but better than the last two years, right?

And so we're seeing hopefully that more of a trend of a reset.

Yeah.

Currently, our colleagues in the county government in the Department of Finance and Budget are doing some work around return on investment to try to capture that data.

They're using data on the clinic visits, the services provided, what would that cost under our insurance plan compared to the costs of providing it at the clinic.

So we'll get that ROI data.

Yeah, right.

That's a great question.

The general rule of thumb is that by going on a fully insured plan, you do great in your catastrophic years because the insurance company pays those gigantic claims that would wipe out your reserve.

The challenge is, when you're fully insured, that insurance company is not going to lose money for more than one year.

Your rates are going to go through the roof the next year to make up that loss.

We carry stop-loss insurance so that when we get those catastrophic claims, after a certain dollar value, it is reimbursed into the healthcare fund.

I know that one of the potential cost savings in opening the clinics was pharmacy costs.

When you're getting the update on the data, I would love to see that if there's a genuine savings there.

Anyway.

And you did say that, I know we had two or three years of catastrophic costs that triggered our stop loss insurance.

I know at the time we talked about whether that limit, the stop loss limit, I think it was like $300,000 per claim should be increased or decreased.

So that's a question.

The pharmacy, that, and then in terms of administrative costs, I know that we had to contribute to the opening of the two clinics.

Are we also contributing to the management of those clinics?

Yes, the operation of the clinics, we do pay a contractor to do all of that.

And so all of those costs are woven in as part of that overall package.

In terms of the stop loss, we have raised that stop loss limit just like a fully insured

Health insurance company, stop loss insurance companies are going to lose money when you get those catastrophic claims.

They increase their premiums for the upcoming year.

So we did see some raise in those premiums and to mitigate that increase, we did increase our stop loss limits.

Okay, so we eat it up to 400.

Okay.

Maya, you mentioned a savings on VRS contributions from ACPS.

Is that an anomaly?

$3 million is significant.

We have seen fluctuations in the past.

This is probably one of the more significant fluctuations.

This is determined by the VRS board, and that's just based on the value of their investments and how they're changing.

I have one question on the new school costs.

There were not, they were anticipated.

Other questions?

So I have two questions.

Back to the first slide just on the technology.

And then on the last slide, on the Ace Academy Lambs Lane opening and those costs, those startup costs, do we anticipate that being just this year's startup costs?

If you look at the projections for that building, it's not meant to be at full capacity.

The cost that's shown is a recurring cost.

It's the first year of recurring costs that will show up every year starting next year.

We don't anticipate any additional costs on top of that as we are staffing the building as if it were full and we don't at this point anticipate more new school costs.

Now if there's growth in the division, we would show that the budget to budget growth and then the cost for growth.

Yeah, I think some examples I think would help.

So these are not startup costs.

Like if I think of a startup cost, like making sure we have copiers and all the materials to start up, we are funding that from the project.

These are your recurring costs of an additional facility, right?

So we have a full-time nurse at every school.

Mountain View has one nurse.

Now they will have two, one at each facility, right?

You'll have a principal, a lead custodian.

The utility costs of these buildings.

So they're staffed like they're full.

They're staffed like what you would need to operate a second facility.

Okay, let me think about that for a little bit.

Thank you.

Any other questions before we move on?

Hi there.

I'm Brooke Conover, senior budget analyst.

I'm going to speak a little bit about compensation, which is typically one of our largest costs in any given budget.

And for fiscal 27, it's about $7.8 million.

This year, we are having two different percent increases for different groups of employees.

Oh, sure.

For our licensed employees, $3.75.

and for our employee support personnel, it is 4.25.

Now, along with those, we have a subset of employees that are confidential employees.

These employees do not, because of the nature of their work, belong to either of the bargaining units.

These employees might be positions such as principals, APs, directors, but sometimes they're also employees that are, because of the nature of the area that they work in,

are a deal with confidential information and also cannot be covered by a unit.

So this could also apply to an office associate that might be working in fiscal services or human resources.

And so along with the prescribed increases for the bargaining groups, we also want to make sure

that the non-unit employees are taken care of.

So for employees that are pay grade 20 and above, they would also be at 3.75 and for those at 19 and below, 4.25.

We do have two different increases this year.

And our employee support personnel are at a higher level of increase.

And this has intentionality behind it in that that bargaining group has some of our lowest paid employees.

And so there was the desire for them to receive a larger possible increase.

We also have a compensation strategy that

We've had for a while, which is that we have an adopted market, a competitive market, and we look at what each entity in this competitive market does in terms of an increase.

The idea is not necessarily that we're right at exactly the middle of what this market basket does, that we want to be above it, at least a little bit.

And so we target about 10% above.

The adopted market, these are all school districts that are within the Commonwealth of Virginia.

they tend to be school districts with similar characteristics to us including their instructional programming and sometimes they are simply ones that are in physical proximity to us because this is, you know, we compete with our neighbors.

For 25-26, this market, adopted market, their average salary was about 3-4% and we gave 3%.

and so we don't yet know what this adopted market will be doing for next year.

For working conditions and benefits, the items that are on this slide are just part of what was in our collective bargaining agreements.

The ones that we've chosen to list here are ones that had

Budgetary impact not everything that's in the collective bargaining agreements costs money, but the items on here You know this is about four million dollars out of our budget.

Which is dedicated for these items and

Now, as I said, this is just a subset and there is much more and much more detail and information that is posted on the collective bargaining website under human resources.

But I wanted to just call out a few of the items here.

There is a new pay scale for special education specialists.

And so this includes school psychologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech-language pathologists.

This scale was developed separate from the licensed teacher pay scale.

The rates on this scale are based on adopted market data indicating that we were low.

And this scale is now also a step scale and will be treated just like the teacher scale going forward, so subject to the same percent increases, same modifications.

I'd also like to mention that the license planning time and specifically for elementary

Prior to the collective bargaining agreement, the planning time within elementary was somewhat inconsistent, and so now there is a consistent standard where licensed employees will get at least 250 minutes a week

and with no fewer than 50 consecutive minutes of daily.

There are, of course, some other parameters around this and a lot of verbiage, which you can look out there.

But this is a big change and a nice way to be very, very transparent and consistent.

There's also some guidelines around the number of meetings that can happen during planning time.

Secondary also gets planning time.

There weren't really any changes to how that has been treated, but with the collective bargaining there's no consistency around that.

Also, duty-free lunches or duty-free meal breaks.

For licensed employees, they will now be provided a duty-free lunch period for every scheduled workday.

And for fiscal 27, this will be for at least 25 minutes.

Starting in fiscal 29, then that will be increased to 30 minutes.

So that is a great quality of working conditions change for our ESP employees.

They also will get at least a guaranteed 30 minute unpaid

duty-free meal break if they are working 30 or more hours in a week or at least five hours in a day.

It's a shift that's way less than that.

Having a 30-minute guarantee break doesn't necessarily make sense.

I'd also like to mention the paid parental leave.

This is a fairly large change.

And so employees who meet the eligibility standards and complete the process, an application process, will be granted six weeks of continuous paid parental leave.

This does not get deducted from any other types of leave that they may have accrued.

and this is for the purposes of parental leave for birth, adoption, or placement of a child with that employee.

I noticed that non-bargaining unit employees are also getting raises, 4.25 and 3.75.

Yes, so the non-bargaining unit employees, and I don't have today's number, but it's a little more than 200 employees, so it's not a small amount of employees.

In any other year, we would be giving an increase and people would get their salaries increased just like the year we're in right now.

But these employees don't belong to a unit because of the nature of their job.

And in a leadership position, you might certainly understand, well, that's management.

It certainly would not be keeping up with market standards to not give any increase.

The 3.75 is for those that are pay grade 20 and up.

That actually aligns with the broadbanded pay grades on our classified pay scale.

For those employees that are pay grade 19 or below, we've aligned those with the ESP rate of the 4.25.

Are you able to share the market comparison charts that you referenced?

It's easier if I come up here than if I shout from there.

We have some.

We don't validate every single position every year.

We do kind of a smattering of positions, and then we definitely look at, of course, teachers and then some of our high need areas, special education TAs, bus drivers, some of those areas.

That would be great.

And then I'd also like to know, we talk about the 3% to 4% increase for the employees from collective bargaining.

If the employees that aren't included in the collective bargaining agreement from principals and whatever

all the way up through central office, what those pay increase percentages are as well.

Okay, great.

Thank you so much for

We are charging forward.

I'll turn next over to our discretionary amount.

So that was that orange slice on the very edge of the dollar bill.

That was $6.9 million, or about 2% of the budget.

That $6.9 million, if you were to break it out in terms of how much we're investing, you can see a majority of that is proposed to be the transfer to school capital, and then smaller portions of that discretionary amount are purposed for different instructional programs.

So consistent with our commitment to community engagement, we've engaged in an intentional listening process in the development of the draft funding request.

Starting last fall, we looked for input from across the ACPS community through multiple processes.

They included advisory committees and leadership groups, a community-wide survey that generated over 1,500 responses,

and ongoing school board feedback through the state of the division, accountability framework reports, and mid-year reviews of division and school level data.

This engagement identified shared priorities, highlighted areas of concern, and directly informed the recommendations that are reflected in the draft funding request.

This is a full list of the requests that came to the top.

There were several levels of prioritization.

This is one level of prioritization of some of the requests that were considered for the draft funding request.

And we can see this is a fairly lengthy list.

We just wanted to make you aware that although we only have four new proposals to present to you as part of the draft funding request due to

I would say it's kind of a cycle.

Based on the community engagement, the list came forward internally based on what was heard, and then we put that back out to the community and said, okay, now we have the shorter list, what do you all think about this?

So it's kind of a cycle that repeats itself.

So both is the answer.

So, with only a small portion that was available to us for strategic investment, we have these following proposals that we will present this evening.

The consistent priorities that emerged were maintaining small class sizes,

strengthening math instruction and the use of student learning data, expanding hands-on career-based learning opportunities for our secondary students, ensuring access to high quality instructional materials, and increasing specialized supports for students with disabilities.

As Dr. Haas mentioned last week, we just wanted to note on class size, that was the clear priority for our community.

But given our financial constraints, further reductions were not feasible.

If you were to change that target class size just by one student, if you wanted to lower it by one student, we estimate that cost to be about $4 million.

The proposals that are before you are designed to maintain and not increase current class sizes.

You may remember the last couple of years we have had to increase class sizes to balance the budget.

So based on these priorities in our analysis of impact, sustainability, and fiscal feasibility, this draft funding request includes targeted strategic proposals designed to advance these priorities within the constraints that we're in.

Good evening, board members.

So the next few slides I will highlight

The makeup of each of the proposals that for the most part came out of the Department of Instruction.

So the first proposal that I'll discuss is the second year of the scholars, thank you, second year of the scholars studio implementation and sustainability.

Last year we brought a proposal forward and this year is just the second step in that.

This proposal will support our division's mission of preparing our students for enrollment, enlistment, and employment once they leave Albemarle County Public Schools.

and it will also allow them to have that specialized instruction in our traditional district setting.

So this proposal will add 11 new classroom teachers as well as funds for the operating budget for field experiences, industry credentials and

promotions.

It will also maintain class sizes and provides specialized staffing beyond standard high school ratios.

Some of the CTE programs classes are capped at certain numbers, so this makes sure we can adhere to that.

And then also, this proposal allows us to sustain support for our English language learners, our students with disabilities, as well as our advanced learners.

The next proposal is focused around our instructional resources.

We have a budget for our instructional resources here in the division.

However, due to inflation and increased costs in materials, the current funding that we have in that budget line has not kept pace with the cost of our core instructional materials.

As a result, we have had inconsistent access to materials that contribute to uneven learning experiences for our students.

As most of you all remember, we went through the Bellwether review a few years ago, and they identified some key instructional resources that we would need to leverage for improvement.

And so this proposal establishes a baseline that will allow us to continue to keep pace with the things that we determine that are needed internally, but if the Virginia Department of Instruction decides that there are things that we need to adopt or that are mandatory, very similar to the Virginia Literacy Act, this would allow us to have the funds to do so without having gaps in the supports that we can provide for our students.

The next proposal

to be able to

programming, whether that is letters or helping with diagnostic assessments, and this position will allow us to further support our secondary students.

We also are requesting a behavioral specialist.

This position would allow us to be more proactive as we are coaching our staff around supporting our students that may be in crisis or if we need assistance with legal compliance.

And then the third position is an extra position for adaptive

P.E.

or Adaptive Physical Education.

Currently, we are providing services through a grant with UVA, but that grant will not be continuing into next year, so this proposal will allow us to add an additional position to support the students we have.

Currently, we have approximately 65 students that receive services through Adaptive PE, so this proposal will allow us to have more of a 1 to 30, 35 student ratio versus 1 to 65.

And the last proposal I'm going to discuss is the math and data support specialist.

And while our overall math achievement is beginning to improve, gaps continue to remain for our historically underserved and marginalized populations.

And so this proposal

was a joint proposal between the Department of Instruction and Strategic Planning to provide daily math support for not only our administrators, our teachers, to improve instruction for our students.

It embeds math

supports into the classroom, helping with the classroom.

These math specialists will be licensed educators focused on math content and pedagogy as well as using a protocol that we have been working on to implement this year, Driven by Data 2.0, that focuses on providing rigorous assessments and then using that data to analyze it and see exactly where students are struggling.

and then act on that to make adjustments in real time to target the specific needs for the students in those classes.

And then that support, these specialists would work with our staff to help build their capacity so that they can continue to provide high quality instruction to their students throughout the course of the year and as students continue to come through their classes.

I have a question related to the scholar studio.

So one of the things we've discussed is now that we have hired a principal for the Ace Lambs Lane campus, some of that work will then be handled by the principal.

So it may not necessarily be the case for all of our programs, because we know some programs are going to stay in their current schools.

For example, Terra is out at Western Albemarle, and so they would need someone actually to go out, recruit, provide information.

But for the Ace Lambs Lane campus, that may not be the case for all.

Right, and because they're also very different programs, one may require a lot of that and one may not.

I have two quick questions.

The $800,000 for instructional materials for the bellwether, it's a little vague.

So for example, it could be actual textbooks that we utilize.

So we have gone through the process of approving an adoption process for our secondary literacy curriculum, but we are waiting to make sure we have the funds to purchase that.

It could also be a database, a program where

If the state provided us with a free access to a program, we realize it was beneficial.

We want to maintain that for our students.

Then that's something like, for instance, Zearn, was something they provided for us for math.

Okay.

My other question has to do with the math specialists.

Those positions are intended more to work with the teachers.

They, you know, can be similar to reading specialists where they can work with students.

But the goal is to really provide our teachers with the skills necessary to provide high quality instruction to our students.

But it can be utilized.

It just depends on the needs of the individual school.

We don't want to make it too broad but also too specific so it can be adjusted for those schools as it's needed.

But the data piece of it would certainly be working.

Yes, those schools are currently listed as Mountain View, Greer, Agner, Woodbrooke, Journey, and Burley.

Thank you.

I have a couple points and a couple questions.

One, I appreciate in A36 that this is the first time I've seen a sunset provision.

I don't know if prior to me being here.

This was included, but there's a sunset provision on the math and data specialists that we fail to meet year one benchmarks.

And so I appreciate that and I think it's an important thing and I'd encourage us to, when appropriate, I would encourage us to include those as well.

This might be a question for Ms. Schmidt.

The materials, as we open ACE Academy, Lambs Lane, there are

Yeah, so those are funded by the project itself.

You're right, we have a whole task force on the procurement and planning of all the stuff that goes in that building.

Okay.

But in the future, that's in a way a one-time in the build, and then we'll have to be looking at that refresh of those types of materials, which is just a different type of refresh cycle then.

Correct, and that is part of the, it's a small piece of that scholars, the majority of that is classroom furniture, or classroom teachers.

The rest is around knowing those programs have a higher operating cost, right, for the field studies and credentialing and materials.

Okay, thank you.

And then the only other piece would be I don't think we've seen the results from the survey and I would like to see the board see the results from the survey aggregated.

I think the categories when we did it are community, employee, student.

We know how many staff, we don't know by staff type.

And just a small side note, I joined the student senate when we did the last meeting and joined the Western students and they took that survey as part of that day and then we had a discussion about it and they almost overwhelmingly discussed the need for additional instructional materials.

That was in the top three if not the top two of every one and they shared a number of

instances where particularly around English, the kind of ELA type classes, not having enough books and not having enough materials and that being frustrating.

So I'm happy to see that.

Almost there.

So the other proposal that's part of the discretionary category is the one-time transfer to the school capital program.

Over the past two years, we have built the capacity to make this one-time transfer through reductions and other disciplined budgeting decisions.

During that time, our local composite index has returned to a more typical level, and our state funding that was previously reduced has been restored for FY 27.

Rather than reversing all the prior cuts that we have made, this proposal reflects a more measured and strategic approach.

We're recommending a one-time investment of these restored funds into a portion of the restored funds into the school capital program.

This approach allows us to be flexible in future years, so rather than tying up funding with new regular employees,

A one-time commitment allows us to start with a lower baseline expenditure budget in future years.

And we've heard that schools construction and renovation is a very high priority for this board.

We will discuss this more at our revenue work session next week.

Next, in FY 23-24, ACPS provided 15 half-time teaching assistant positions to combine with half-time EDEP after-school assistant positions.

These 15 full-time positions were created to increase accessibility, reduce wait lists, and mitigate hiring challenges.

Speaking of sunset provisions, these positions were projected to continue through FY 2728.

It was a temporary arrangement until the workforce returned to pre-pandemic levels.

In addition, salary and benefits have significantly increased since the pandemic.

And as you know, EDEP is a self-sustaining fund.

And to assume even half of the costs of full-time salary and benefits of the shared position has become cost prohibitive for the program.

Lastly, the school division has many instructional priorities, as you have just heard about, and cannot continue to fund the portion of the shared full-time position.

Additional resources, though, have been allocated to schools for teaching assistance related to the working conditions and benefits that were presented.

And this may reduce the need for the part-time TA and the responsibilities that were previously combined with this EDEP position.

I know that is a very complicated setup and we've received a lot of questions about it, so happy to answer more questions on that.

But first, I also wanted to talk about prior reductions that have made, even though they are not showing up in this budget.

This is a list of reductions that were made in the last two years and are being maintained as part of this funding request.

So it wasn't just a one-time reduction that we're bringing back and increasing the baseline.

The reduction is still maintained, so it is still a reduction for FY 27.

So any questions on reductions or this EDEP, Instructional Assistant Arrangement?

$4 million transfer to the CIP, I think that's wise.

We have done that in years prior.

One example was during the pandemic, we had a lot of savings that we built up in our operating budget.

And we knew that was a one-time savings.

So we didn't want to use that and start hiring more people or changing class sizes.

So we did make a one-time contribution to the CIP then.

And there have been other instances or examples where we've kind of made one-time transfers as a financial strategy.

enrollment for EDEP.

With higher costs to families, correct?

That's what it looked like.

So just to kind of go back over what Ms. Kumazawa said earlier, the way we're offsetting the reduction to the schools and their TA staffing that was part of that initiative is they're going to have additional TA staffing added going into next year to allow for the consistent planning time.

and the lunch breaks for the teachers.

So it's really a different reason that it's going into the school.

But that's how those were staffed before was part TA and part EDEP.

So it really ought to be an even swap for the most part.

Because it was about 20 FTE, I think, to do the lunches and the planning time, something in that ballpark.

So it should be a pretty even swap if we can

working individually the principles on how to plan it and get it right.

This is also, I will mention too, just forecasts that we are working on restructuring EDEP to improve quality and concentration of services.

And so you'll be seeing that coming your way, but it's just part of an overall project that we're working on to really

I read that you're outsourcing some of that.

Not yet, because it's in procurement, so we're just going to hold off on that.

The lawyer next to you won't be happy.

All right, this is the last section.

So now we've reviewed the baseline budget, all the changes on top of it, what makes up the $311 million.

Now we're gonna break that number down a little bit to show, well, what does this mean for schools, departments, budget managers?

This is a chart that shows all of our school-based budgets as outlined in detail in section D.

and then also G34.

The columns represent the budgeted amounts for each school.

So elementary schools are in the blue, middle schools in orange, high schools in the purple.

As you might imagine, our elementary schools are smaller, so their budgets are smaller.

Our high schools are much larger and their budgets tend to be much larger as well.

This chart in the yellow divides the number of pupils by the total school's budget so you can get a sense of how much are we spending per pupil by school.

A note on the per pupil, these per pupil amounts average out to less than the amounts we were looking at earlier, which were more in the $20,000 to $22,000 range.

These amounts are lower because this only includes school-based budgets.

Our total school fund budget includes both school-based and department-based budgets, so that's going to raise the per pupil amount.

And the purpose of those yellow levels by school is to show that on average, the smaller a school, the higher their per pupil spending is going to be.

While classroom teachers, the number of classroom teachers are generally equivalent based on the number of students you have.

We, for example, have a principal at every school.

We have one at Redhill Elementary School and we have one at Albemarle High School.

So that's the other extreme example where the smaller the school, the more it's going to cost per pupil because we have some fixed costs that don't change based on the enrollment of a school.

Another factor that plays into the per pupil is the differentiated staffing that we have.

So when you saw the target class sizes that were variable based on demographics, you saw reading specialists and tiered services that were based on not just enrollment but free and reduced lunch.

and other factors that will also show that the more students, more disadvantaged students a school has, the higher the per pupil costs will be for that school.

So it's two factors.

One is the size of the school and the other is the amount of differentiated funding that that school receives.

So in the budget document, you will see that the school budget for each of our schools is shown in various ways.

The pie chart on the left is the FTE budget and then the FTE budget versus the operating.

So as I said, most of a school budget goes towards staffing, and the determination of that is through the staffing standards that we talked about.

That determines how much staffing a school gets.

And then the small remaining sliver in the orange is how much a school gets for things like supplies, copiers, materials, and wages.

On the right, you can see two screenshots from your budget book.

This example is from Stone Robinson as it's a fairly average sized school.

You can see that we show historical actuals, a FY26 adopted budget, an FY27 draft, the increase in dollar amounts, and then the increase in percentage amounts.

You might remember you can show expenditures by expense type.

So what is the expenditure going towards?

Salary, other wages, benefits and operations.

And then another way to show it is by functional category that I talked about that the state determines and that's broken out between instruction, administration, attendance and health, technology, building services and transportation.

Section E shows all of our department budgets and these bars indicate the budget amount for each department.

I'll note transportation and building services, those are our largest operating departments.

Those costs tend to be

have higher proportions of operating costs versus staffing costs.

This has to do that they're dealing with actual things that cost money.

For example, building services budget contains all of the utilities costs for every school building.

So that's electricity, water, sewer, all of that is contained within the building services department.

That is the largest cost there.

For transportation, we do have a lot of drivers, and as I said, they're not assigned to schools.

They're all assigned to a central department.

That's contained there.

And then they also have costs.

They maintain all the buses.

While the bus purchases themselves are contained in the CIP, which is not here, the maintenance of those buses, the repairs of other vehicles, the fuel that's used for the buses every day, that is part of the department's budget.

Some other departments that are less traditional that we include in the budget are the lapse factor department and the non-department department.

The lapse factor department is the projected division-wide savings due to vacancies.

And so we know we're not going to be 100%, if we were 100% staffed, then we would not have a lapse budget.

But we know we're not going to be 100% staffed for the whole year.

the budget that you see throughout the school and department budgets do assume that all positions are filled 100% of the time for the full fiscal year.

So the lapse factor kind of takes a division-wide approach and says okay well this is an average level of savings we've seen so that's what we're projecting because we don't want to tie up resources if we know we're not going to spend it or we're likely to not spend it.

The non-department department has division-wide expenses that include the VRIP program, the Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program.

That's for all of our retirees in that program.

More significantly includes all of our transfers that we transfer out of the school fund.

So that one-time transfer to school capital, that's included in this amount.

So you'll see a big percentage increase.

It's because of this one-time transfer.

Some recurring transfers that are more significant include the transfer to computer equipment replacement, the Learning Resources Fund, which that $800,000 we talked about for instructional materials, that would show up in a transfer

to the Learning Resources Fund.

It wouldn't actually show up as an expense for textbooks.

We also have a recurring transfer for the VPI, the Virginia Preschool Initiative.

That's a cost-sharing fund where the state pays for part of that cost and we pay for part of that cost through a transfer.

Those funds are accounted for in a special revenue fund.

And I'll get into more detail about these special revenue funds next week.

and then the last category of transfer are transfers to Albemarle County.

So while they fund us our operating budget, most of our operating budget, there are services that we pay to provide for them.

So for example, school resources officers, those are employees of the county providing a service to ACPS and we pay a recurring amount for those services.

And then we've got some other services that we transfer over to the county.

So this is the slide we started out with, our expenditure overview.

As a review, our total expenditures in the draft funding request equal $311 million.

And that can be broken out in several different ways, as you have seen.

This bottom pie might make more sense to you now.

You saw the chart of all these school-based budget expenditures by school location.

If you take all those budgets, add them together with all the department-based budgets that you saw, those are those horizontal bars coming out, and you add all those budgets together, that also equals the $311 million.

So there's a lot of ways you can look at it, which is why there are so many pages in your budget book.

But that's pretty much it.

And I know there's a lot left remaining, but hopefully this clarifies more for you of what's contained in our expenditures.

I have a question about the transportation.

I noticed in section G, and I have to confess, section G is like my favorite section in the whole thing.

It's like the coolest stuff in there.

It seems like our maximum bus times is up to an hour for elementary students and an hour and a half for middle and high school students.

That seems like it's a lot higher than when my kids were in school back in the dark ages.

That's been a general routing guideline for as long as I recall.

So that's not the average, right?

That is a guideline for the max.

You know it's just one of those issues of we're the sixth largest county by land area in the state and so we have a large geographical region and we try to be efficient with the buses and that that is that maximum has been in place for as long as I can remember too but you you go to places like Augusta other school systems that have this vast rural region and they'll have two-hour bus rides or

in that ballpark.

Section G is not my favorite section, but I do have a question from there.

On G20, there's mention of holdback staffing.

We have several staffing that is not assigned to schools at the time that we publish the document.

For example, the first one on there is permanent school-based substitutes or permanent substitutes.

By staffing standards, schools are allotted a certain number of school-based substitutes.

and that's based on enrollment.

But we also have 10 FTEs that we wait until we see the data around fill rates, substitute fill rates.

And those are assigned out based on fill rates.

And that may change from year to year.

And because it's not part of an adopted staffing standard, we're holding it back in the budget.

But in reality, they're distributed to schools anytime between now and the middle of the year.

It's similar with English learner staffing, so depending on enrollment and the needs, we want to be flexible in how staff are distributed, knowing that we don't know exactly who's going to show up in the new school year.

Special education is similar.

We talked about special education growth.

Other questions?

The only question I have, and this can be for further information, it's always helpful to see the three pie chart views.

And the bottom one for the budget, the 72.1% of the budget is school-based, 27.9% is department-based.

I tried to do the math on my own and it wasn't working.

I'm curious, if you wanted to come back to us,

and how that, looking back, whatever is appropriate, three years or five years, if that has been a consistent kind of percentage distribution or if that has changed?

Yeah, we could pull that.

Any other questions on this portion of the budget?

Good?

OK.

Our second work session is scheduled for February 26.

As I mentioned, we will focus on revenues and special revenue funds.

And just for, apologies to interrupt, but just for my peers and Chair Galloway is in the audience, so if I'm wrong, please correct me.

That presentation is at noon in 241.

I've got a thumbs up on that.

On the 26th, our work session, there will also be a public hearing, as Dr. Berlin mentioned earlier, which provides an important opportunity for students, family, staff, and community members to share feedback directly with the board.

Would you go back to that the chart before?

Yes.

Yeah.

So I have that, I'm looking at my phone because I'm looking at the Board of Supervisors.

March 16th is a 5 p.m. meeting.

It would be helpful, I mean we can all look at the calendar, but just to confirm all of those times because usually it's a 1 p.m. presentation.

I just that's a that's a 5 p.m. and I'd love to see where we are on the agenda but the board would we present to the Board of Supervisors that's a 5 p.m. meeting on the 16th which is a Monday so I just want to make sure that

It is unusual.

That's why I'm looking back and forth.

I could also make another comment about this calendar.

Dr. Berlin, you're doing a nice job informing the wider community.

The public hearing is on March 4th, but March 12th and April 23rd are also regular board meetings, so there is public comment at those meetings as well.

And just to clarify, our public hearing is on February 26th.

The Board of Supervisors public hearing is on the 24th.

Just a pitch here, too, that we are trying to work on and finalize our two by two schedule with school board members.

And once we have that nailed down, when you are coming to visit, we're going to be asking you to invite your counterpart for your magisterial district.

And I think we've just got one board member left that we're working on scheduling.

So as soon as we can get everybody scheduled, then we're hoping that you'll be able to invite your person to come.

Thank you so much.

We appreciate all the time from you and the staff.

The next piece on our board work session agenda is other business.

Ms. Currie, is there something you would like to share?

Yes, I have a statement.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Yes, thank you, Dr. Brillen, and good evening, school board.

I am aware that during these meetings, you all are often confronted with and toil with tedious and unexciting tasks.

At least for tonight, I want to be the person that chooses to celebrate rather than criticize.

Last time I spoke to you all, I came with complaints and concerns from within the school that were prevalent at the time.

This time, I want to focus on the favorable aspects of not only the work of the individual schools, but of the school board as a whole.

Recently, in the Western Albemarle community, we have had numerous sports teams win Jefferson District and Region 3C championships.

some of these notably including our swim and dive and track and field teams.

Over the past few weeks, we have had the formation of new clubs and student groups that have the sole intention of creating safe and welcoming spaces for expressing pride in one's viewpoint.

To briefly summarize, wonderful developments are being made every day within the community, and that is an incredible feat in itself.

Along with this, February is also School Board Appreciation Month and Black History Month, both of which are meant to be months of recognition, thankfulness, and togetherness.

The goal I gave myself when taking on this position was to be the representative that would always find a way to create an environment fueled by interconnectedness and bipartisanship.

These pillars have always stood as the foundation of who I want to build myself into.

And many of these attributes have only been amplified by the work you all partake in.

It is with this that I say thank you.

Thank you all so much for all of the lengthy hours, difficult deliberations, and careful consideration you put into this job.

If you have not heard this already, you are doing exceptionally well.

As we approach the final week of February, this is the perfect time to reflect on the meaning of unity,

Though ACPS has remained well-versed in terms of what unity looks like in our schools, there will always be moves to be made.

For my school in particular, our way to combat this is by taking matters into our own hands.

A few years ago, with the help of the ACPS Student Senate, we created our own multicultural festival that we love to call Better Together.

Ever since the first event in 2024, we have made it our mission for Better Together to be the factor that smothers negative cultural sigmas and aids in building cultural appreciation.

We have begun to call this year's event Always Better Together, and we are cordially inviting all of you to come join us in celebrating all of the cultures that make our community so special.

As the currently popular Bad Bunny made clear, the only thing more powerful than hate is love.

Thank you so much, Ms. Curry.

It is March 13th from 4.30 to 6.30.

Thank you so much.

So that's March 13th at Western from 4.30 to 6.30.

Seeing nothing in front of me, I will adjourn us at 8 20.

Thank you all for your time tonight.