This will officially be reported out at next week's (May 4) meeting, but a few quick notes as there are some good things that we worked on! The agenda is here. The video is not yet up on the district YouTube channel, but you can find it on the district Facebook page.
We moved three items--day by day sub rate for retired educators; athletic trainers; and middle school sports--from F&O to considering with the FY24 budget. This basically is noting that we're two weeks out on the proposed budget for next year, that these proposals all are money proposals, and that we want to talk about them with the full committee when we deliberate the budget. In each case, the administration will report back on them at our second budget deliberation (June 15), along with any questions that arise during deliberation on June 1.
Important thing to remember on the WPS budget: while we will deliberate and pass it cost center by cost center, it isn't done until we officially pass the bottom line!
We took up a petition from Forest Grove 8th grade civics students on health vending machines. Due both to the non-compete language and the district's universal free breakfast and lunch, as you can see in the backup, this isn't something we can do.
Bob Walton, who is in charge of IT, led the look at streaming athletics. Due to the need to integrate with our calendar and the wish to include playoff games, we're essentially limited to a sole source which is NFHS Network. Many districts that use this pass the cost along to families. The administration recommendation for Worcester instead is that the district pay for the facility by facility costs ($4000 per site), allowing the streaming of Worcester-hosted high school games to be streamed for free (by anyone). You can see the considerations involved in the backup, but I'd note that this is in keeping with the Worcester schools ongoingly being dedicated to having an actual free public education.
Our monthly transportation update included not only the usual reports on drivers and on buses, but also a discussion of the athletic use of buses (we have 7 ready to go at 2:30 each day), free busing for field trips (377 and counting), a longer discussion of the coming application for electric school buses and the equipment to support those, and a brief look at possible late buses for high schools at some point in the future.
And also a reminder: we took over transportation, more than any other reason, to be able to dependably get students back and forth to school.
Finally, our budget update, in which we moved a million and a half dollars, continues to show position gaps, with the good news that hiring is ongoing (when the budget manager says that, it means we're paying new people). We touched a bit on paying for the new ELA curriculum (ESSER III 20% set aside), and spoke about timelines for more reporting. We also requested a report for the May 22 meeting on where the district is on foundation budget categories, so we can use that information to inform our FY24 budget deliberation, though as Mr. Allen noted: it also starts the information gathering for the next Foundation Budget Review Commission, which SOA said would happen every 5 years...so 2024?
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