Okay. All right. Good evening. We are going to call to order the Narragansett town council work session with the school committee. Today's work session is an annual work session with a school committee on the fiscal year 2024, 2025 budget school and town revenues and expenditures as required by RIGL 16-2-21 today is Monday December 18th 2023 and the time is 604 So at this time I'm going to have a doctor Cummings present on the school budget. Thank you, Eva, and good to see you all. And so, today I'm just going to speak very briefly, high level overview on some of the factors that will be influencing our budget for this coming year. As you know, it's very early in the process, and so happy to answer any questions that you all may have on some of the conditions that are influencing our budgeting for the coming year. I'd be remiss though if I didn't thank you for your continued support of our schools. Narrogant schools continue to excel. We were particularly pleased with some of the ways that are A, that are students who graduated last year into excellent colleges and universities and are really thriving. We continue to do well academically. We were particularly pleased with some increases in our math achievement this year and that's really due to being able to budget the right supports for students that were struggling a little bit in mathematics so we were able to move them along and our elementary was among the top of the state and so we're really kind of pleased with the progress that we've been making. We're also pleased that, you know, last year's budget continued to fund our work on the auditorium, which is now complete, and so we are thrilled with that. It is absolutely beautiful. We want you all to have some time to get in there. The acoustics are amazing. I am told, not a musician myself, and it's updated with all the right technology and really a credit to the community. So it's beautiful. Our first holiday concert will be this Wednesday night at 7 p.m., so we're looking forward to hearing our students play there. So this year we're gonna continue to really have a lot of factors that are in play for our budget. One of the major factors is that the support from the federal government, the S.R. funds, come to an end for us this year. And so that is a gap in funding that we will need to address by other means. Karen really worked with me closely and with the school committee to be thoughtful about how we applied that. So we're not kind of facing any fiscal cliff with that. But there are some positions that are funded by those as or funds that are in support of students that will need to work into the budget in different ways. We continue to be challenged by enrollment. We've had many conversations around the housing stock and their against it and its affordability. And so we continue to draw students in wherever we can. It's still a very desirable school system for people. We get a lot of students to come into our high school from neighboring communities and to our career and tech program. But our kindergarten classes are gonna be around, well this year it's around 60 and we're projecting that to be around 60 again next year. Meanwhile, we will graduate a class of about 125. So it's really a big difference between the two. What happens with that when we have the smaller classes is that we still have to offer services to students. And so the example I like to use is whether you have a class of 60 or a class of 100, you still need to have a school nurse, right? And so the cost of that nurse doesn't change. And so for us, you know, sometimes the distractor for us is that per pupil expenditure, when you look at the finances of Narragance it, you know, the schools as a tax burden on the town have been less than 50% on a tax dollar. And then when you look at kind of neighboring communities, it's far more than that. And so, you know, for us, we do feel like we are responsibly funding our schools, but we will continue to need to meet our contractual obligations, which for next year around 2% and to continue to make sure that we're offering all the services that we always have to our students. Our capital plan that we are in the midst of building addresses our continued investment in infrastructure. So again, we maintain our schools really well. For those of you who have spent some time in our schools, we'll see that they are clean, they are bright, they're beautiful, they're painted. You know, we try to keep them in kind of in tip top shape so we don't anticipate kind of large maintenance expenditures or needing to go to bond or kind of doing any of those things to keep up our schools because we do that through our regular maintenance budget on a yearly basis. And then finally, as we go through the process, as you know, I work really closely with Jim, and we keep an open discussion about what are the needs of the town, what are the needs of the schools, and we try to come up with a responsible figure with the input of the school committee and the town council to make sure that we can bring out to the town Really how to maintain our schools at a high level So you know again those are the broad pieces. We are right now kind of finalizing the audit So I don't have a any fun balance numbers for you or anything along those lines So those are still kind of going through the town audit. So we'll have that a little bit later in the process for you and you know overall again we appreciate your support along the way and I'm happy to answer any questions that you all might have. Thank you very much. Any questions or comments from the council at this time? Councillor Copic. Good evening. Nice to see you all. But I often see you Wednesday nights. One question that I have is, what's the total, do you, you might not be able to do this all the time for your head and I won't understand that. The total enrollment for the middle school and the elementary school together. I can tell you that. I can do you that. So the total enrollment for the middle school and the elementary school together is, let's say, pre-K4 right now is 343-2-8-8. How about 600 students? Okay. Okay. I was curious about that. And just, again, this isn't all the top of your head, so if you don't want to respond, it's okay. Even though you haven't been audit, it isn't complete yet, is you're gonna fall into line with in terms of your expenditures versus the budget that we approved last year. Is that going to be kind of sick? So, you know, we anticipate that, you know, again, we will be right within our budget. And, you know, in speaking with Jim, you know, as we anticipate a fairly typical budget season that we've had in the past where we can work together to really fund the schools responsibly but also keep in mind the needs of the people. Right, right. Last question. Do you have capital expenditures coming up for the next year? We do. So what we do is that we try to stick to the town council resolution of using roughly three, the little three percent of our budget invested into capital and then holding 2% of that in reserve. And so we do have those capital projects planned pending budget and they are things that are kind of summer critical maintenance features. So for example, parking lot maintenance, roofs, windows, those types of things, right? And some of them are advances in what we're trying to do. So for example, some of our CTE programs need some upgrading of their materials or their facilities. And so we invest in those pieces. Okay. Thank you. Councilor Latter, any questions? I have a few very pertinent to our conversation tonight. We're talking about three unrelated. We're talking about other housing issues. So it's good that you bring the numbers up tonight. And to piggyback a little bit, you said it's 60-kid in the gardeners and 165 graduates. 125. 125. So from those numbers, how many are actually residents of Narragansett? Do you know? I do know, actually. Perfect. So, of the graduating class, I can tell you this year, roughly, I would say about 25 of them are career and tech students. Okay, so about 100, how about that kindergarten number of 60? They're all Narragansons. All Narragansons, that's fantastic. So if you could, if you have the number total for the high school, middle school, and elementary, Narragansons students. Sure, as of October 1 is the date that we use for enrollment. That's generally used by the state. Okay. So as of October 1st of 23, we were at 343 for the elementary school, 288 for the middle school, and 427 for the high school. Okay. And do you have those? The data aid, we don't have any students tuition ahead. Correct. There's no CTE programs in the aid. So someone could pay our full tuition and then here, but we have zero with the elementary school, zero at the middle school. So all of our district tuition aid is only a high school. Okay. So number four, four of 27, how many then are there against the residents? So all of our district is only a night school. So number four, 27, how many are there against the residents? So all of the four, 27, we have roughly 70 students from out of district. Okay. Thank you. And that includes Jamestown. And so remember we do have the partnership with Jamestown. Jamestown students can choose either to go to North Kingston High School or to near again to the high school. Okay. The last thing that I have and maybe it's kind of for both of you is to have into consideration. I know that you do a great job with your facilities, outdoor facilities, the grass, the plowing, all of that but is there a way Jim and Pete that we could maybe combine efforts and find a more affordable solution where we could use staff. We have somebody at the schools that I think would probably be a pretty good person as a point person for many other. I know we talked about that before Jim. We could definitely explore those options like it's sit down with a superintendent and keep the school committee and the council informed. Yeah, it seems's why we're going to be doing this. And I think that's why we're going to be doing this. And I think that's why we're going to be doing this. And I think that's why we're going to be doing this. And I think that's why we're going to be doing this. And I think that's why we're going to be doing this. And I think that's all. Thank you. Councillor Ferrandi, any questions or comments? Thanks, Eva. Thank you, Mr. Cummings. It was, I'm glad I received the explanation from the school committee about the transferring of students. It's only in the high school, I guess, is the only way that we take from outside or vice versa. Is that just for the new technical programs, or is that before just a student that wants to go to the Narragans at high school also? So the way it works is that if you are a resident of Jamestown, you have the choice of either attending an arrogance at high school or North Kingston high school because they don'tats at high school or North Kingston high school because they don't have a high school. And then otherwise you do become a part of our Career and Tech program, which is essentially an elective or two a year for students and we have a wide variety of Career and Tech programs. So we have our Agro Science program, which is amazing. That's the FFA program. We have an education program where students can receive an advanced credit at URI. They're learning how to be teachers. Actually, our graduating class from that program, they all just took their exam, which is the certification test to be a teacher assistant. And they all passed, which was amazing. We have a digital media and communications program and that is relatively new. We have a lot of interest in that program. We have a plumbing program, which is just amazing. We partner with local 51 and so students walk away with their welding certifications and walk right into an apprenticeship. Oh, and our computer science program, which is amazing. And again, you can have pathways there around virtual reality, cybersecurity, cloud computing, all sorts of different pieces. So really we get a lot of students with varied interests that come to us. And when you're in one of our career and tech programs, you're able to access the wide variety of all the classes. So we have, for example, agro science students that are taking 3AP classes. And so you're really able to do the whole gamut of the school. So they are high school, they all full time students in the rest of them subjects also, or just these techniques. OK, so that's regular student. I thought it was, when you said elective, I thought maybe they would come for a portion of the classes. Oh, my question. Yeah. Nope. They are full time students. OK. The whole piece, they are involved in all sorts of activities with us. Right. And Deb, you guys asked a couple of the questions at the instant mind. But do you have any rough idea of what you're looking for as an increase or no increase for this year at all? Was that kind of still being looked at? Yeah, it's really true early to tell right now. You know, I will say that um, like with everyone else, you know, costs are going off inflation hits the schools as well. Uh, and we do have our contractual obligations. So, you know, we always work really closely with town manager to make sure it's a responsible budget. Uh, but there are a number of factors that are influencing our budgeting this year. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you, Dr. Cummings, for that overview. And thank you to our esteemed members of the school committee. Thank you for being here. So yeah, I do wanna actually reiterate the fact that our town, the funding is less than 50% when I attend the municipal meetings. Compared to other municipalities, that's really an impressive number. We see it being funded higher by other municipalities. We do want to see our school children increase. So we are doing what we can as a town council to make near against it more affordable. So that is one of our ultimate goals. And one of the things I also want to highlight of what you said, because this is my third time hearing this for this being part of the work session that we do need to fund it, whether it is 60 or 125, I think a lot of residents may feel that that should impact what the budget would be, but you still have to have, like you said, the school nurse, whether it's 60 or 125. So I definitely want to make that statement. So we do have a phenomenal school system, and I think that should be highlighted. I don't have any further questions for you, and I know today is just an overview, and we will have the opportunity to delve into the budget further in the future. So thank you. If any other council members have any additional comments, if not, open it up to any other comments from the school committee, seeing none, I think at this time we can adjourn. Thank you again for that information. Thank you for attending.