Apr 01, 2025 City Council on 2025-04-01 11:00 AM (Joint Special Called Meeting with Denton ISD Board of Directors)

I guess we'll call us and then go grab lunch and then come back in sort of like it. Okay, great. So today is so first hello everyone and today is Tuesday, April 1 2025 it is 1106 am and so I will call this joints, the city council portion of this joint meeting. And I will call this joint meeting with the board of trustees. Great. Okay. First order business let's eat. So foods out there so we'll grab that come back in and get started with the work sessions if that's okay. So, yes, a form is present, and likewise form is present for the city council. Okay. We'll be adjourned for a number of minutes, we come back. Okay, so we will reconvene at 1115. And our first item is a ID to 5244 report home discussion get regarding city of didn't construction projects surrounding didn't ISP campuses. Good morning board members council members set Garcia interim director capital projects. So some of these projects you guys have seen some of them are new that we're going to be covering that are going into construction. So again, everybody's favorite the Bonnie Bray area, so we're gonna get three separate projects on embrace six rainy road east and north south and east west west gate. So of course the biggest of these is the Bonnie Bray six project with this for widening from a four lane and two lane rule section up on the north to a four lane divided section. We've got some enhanced pedestrian facilities, some utility installations, as well as traffic signals in life. So currently we are under construction. Finally, we started last month, they're working on the water line on riding road east right now to be able to provide the prominent service to grieves. We do anticipate construction complete and quarter to 27. Providing that permanent water service is critical for us right now. So we're aiming for the next few weeks in April to provide that for reuse. And then we'll be working with it nicely folks for traffic control and paving. Once the school opens in August. So the next section is running road east. That is a continuation of the project all the way over the US 77 with that. We've got some roadway widening pedestrian facilities, utility installation. I'm sorry relocations and then also a part trail that part trail is going to provide connectivity through North Lakes Park. So, from the subdivisions to the south of Windsor, up to the new grieves elementary through the park percent design on that. We're anticipating construction to start in Q3 of 2025 and have a completion date of quarter to 2026 trail. That's going to be providing access to the school through the park. We're also reviewing some potential traffic crossings to ensure student safety from the north side of running road from the apartments and the town homes down to the south. So, the last of these three is the Westgate project. So, the East West portion of Westgate is currently out to bid. We're expecting to close bids next Wednesday and get that into construction this summer. We're expediting that portion just that East West portion to try and provide connectivity to Bronco way as fast as possible. I would expect to see some sort of lane configuration open in the fall of 2025. The remainder of the North South piece in the Windsor portion is currently under design. We're required acquiring driveway as well as we speak those initial offer letters are about to go out. Overall construction coordination and start dates. As I said, we're aiming to shoot for construction in Q2 of 2025 and be completed with all sections there by Q4 of 2027. Again, we know this is providing major impacts to didn't ISD didn't high school. So, again, we're expediting West piece as quickly as possible to get some sort of traffic flow. So neighborhood two and six is a part of our 2019 bond program. It's our largest package in our street rehab portion. It's roughly 120 segments broken across three guaranteed maximum prices with this project. We're doing full roadway reconstruction, some enhanced pedestrian facilities, and then full utility replacements. We've been ongoing in construction since quarter three of 2023. We just executed our last guaranteed mass maximum price. That's going to push the final completion date to Q4 of 2026. So, for didn't ISD, we have Newton razor elementary bus routes and some school traffic that's going to be impacted as we reconstruct along Cordell and near the school, as well as the old Calvin site. We're going to be reconstructing Congress mounts Camarillo didn't street all the way around there. So there will be some ongoing donation efforts for staff or anybody that's still utilizing. So neighborhood one B is another seamar package that we just executed in our starting construction on this week. Again, it's roughly 40 roadway segments that are getting full reconstruction, some pedestrian facilities and utility replacements. Again, we started construction this week, so Q1 2025, and then we're anticipating being complete Q4 of 2026. This is near again, Jennings elementary. So we will have a small amount of impact to local traffic as they're trying to get to the school. We'll advertise those street closures and make sure any sidewalk closures were coordinating well in advance to provide safe access for students to elementary school. So the last two are safe routes to school projects. We've got concrete, many Schultz again. This contract was just awarded here recently in March. So we're going to be working with the contractor on schedule and being able to prioritize as many of these sidewalk segments during the summer as we can upcoming. This is installing new 5 foot sidewalks to these schools. We're anticipating the full project to be done by Q4 of 2026. Keep in mind this project did have quite a few sidewalk segments that aren't near the schools. So when you see that completion date, please don't freak out. We're going to expedite the ones near the schools into the summer timeframe to have those complete hopefully by August September of this year. And then the last two schools that were a part of that is Jennings Alexander. So again, 5 foot sidewalks being installed here again with the prioritization of this summer to be able to get as much of that infrastructure installed as possible. So again, you can see a little bit of overlap on Stewart Road with the neighborhood 1B project. We'll make sure those two contractors are coordinating that we're not having sidewalk closures at the same time we're doing some of the street construction that's going to interrupt. And then for Alexander, you can see the sections that we're going to be doing there, leading up to the school that are a little bit further away. So, overall, those are all the construction projects we've got ongoing that are going to be impacting. Again, my name is Seth Garcia interim director here and happy to answer any questions. Okay, any questions? I appreciate this and those do it impact, but anywhere that you have construction and road closures impacts our district because our buses have to pick up children all over and drive. So I'm just curious because it seems like a lot to me, but how many projects do you have going within the city resulting in diversion or road closures right now? Yeah, so great question. So currently my team is tracking roughly 80 projects that are in construction or design of some portion of that. We have about 15 and active construction that could have detours or closures. Again, that's not accounting anything that's happening on the development side on the franchise utility side, or any other internal city departments. So that's just on the capital side. I would say for residents we try and get out that communication as much as possible. Our street closure report is a great example of ways to look at it. We send those out to all our partners. We also have a great website that I want to plug discussed it and dot com. So for a lot of these major projects as funny brain such as primary phase six, you can sign up for regular email updates. And with that, when we have a big street closure, you need a notification of some sort of change. Thank you. I just, you referred to Jennings a couple of times and I'm making an assumption. You all know, we'll be closing Jennings construction. So, after May 23rd. Sidewalks, particularly around many Schultz Emerson and blend would are those sidewalks on both sides of the street or only one side. Let me go back. So, it looks, it looks like it's on the what would that be though. So, this is correct. That is the connection on the south side there's existing sidewalk on these segments here on the north side, we will up to Glenwood, and then on Glenwood, it's going to be on the west side. I'm curious why, with the opportunity to put it on either side, I guess, why you're going to make the kids cross the street twice to get to get from to get from the south side of Emerson to the north side of the west side of. Yes, yeah, so we had to acquire a little bit of right away on this parcel. There's also some great differences on Emerson there to pass it up higher. So again, building retaining walls we saw a lot of challenges as to building a two or three foot variable height retaining wall along some of those properties where the south side provided an easier flier. I get that. Okay, thank you. Let's take a look at Alexander, I think that was the last one. And I'm not, I can't really. Oh, you're down here. That more. Oh, that more. Okay. That's what I was trying to see. I'm over here. And then what is that other street that's going at the bottom that's going north. This is Haseley. No, I'm sorry it's going north debris. This is monkey. Okay, okay. Great. All right. Okay. Well, I'm glad to see that those are on the list. Yes. And so it's that I thought you were closer to Alexander elementary that's why I was getting a little confused. But you're up there by the Virginia, the child development center. Okay, thank you. Any other questions. I just had the, do we know the friends and family. When they'll start construction. I said south of where we'll be working but do we have a feel for any. I do not. So that we can sync up and not have to do things twice or mindful of construction traffic. If the school's going to have a feel for any of that. I do not currently, but we'll work with development services to make sure that we're coordinating overlap, if any. Okay, and for those tracking on what is the timing on reams. It's just south. So, so it's reeds elementary field right currently, and then their property or am I missing something. I think you're correct. Yeah, I was trying to figure it out. That it's just south of your drive your construction driveway, and between our driveway to the parks property so right between there and usually from memory. Okay, got it. Okay. And then lastly, the superintendent mentioned it. What is the timing on our work and then Jennings will be closed as for reveal for so you said two years. So what's the timing. We should be done by the time there. Yeah, so specifically neighborhood one beat we rescheduled some of the street segments to stay away so we're starting research, you know in Camelot here in the next couple weeks, where we're not going to impact Sun Valley or any of the close ones until summertime. As far as the safe routes to school project here coming up Stewart, we're anticipating summer, so hopefully all the students will be gone, we'll get in there with the sidewalk construction, and then when they come back, it'll be there ready for the news. Okay, is that timing 27 is that ideally. Okay, I understand. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. That takes us to item ID to five to four five receiver report, hold a discussion regarding the status of didn't I see legislative parties, and finally, we're going to tag team this, we'll see how successfully it goes. My name is Jeremy Thompson of the deputy superintendent at my Steve in the district now for just over a year. Previous to that was imponder superintendent and several other years of superintendent thing and so I'll hit heavy on the kind of the finance side and all that Darren interviews. I'm general counsel and I've been here about five years, spend a lot of time on our legislative issues our policy control as you know, school districts are a creature statue so everything that happens in Austin impacts us directly. And so we're always trying to keep up with what's going on and of course, try to provide good information, where possible, regarding regarding policies, and while we have a lot of other interests in what's going on with the legislature. The legislature is heavily dominated by finance at this point. So that's pretty heavy on our minds and that will be reflected in our slides today as well but there are there are allegedly other things that are happening besides school. But that's a, that's a big part of, of what we're focusing on so Dr. Vera has charged us all to remember that we get so caught up in the what and how that we remember to explain the why. So we're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about why we got to where we, where we got with the didn't. priorities. And so first off our underlying why which of course is a text constitution, which requires text legislature to establish and make suitable provision for support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free school so of course it's a constitutional mandate some folks may or may not know that whenever Texas left declared independence from Mexico. One of the reasons given was because Mexico had never set up a system of public schools across the state so that was one of the reasons that we left Mexico and one of the things ended up in our constitution. One of the things we've talked about also that's not really on the slide but we talked a lot recently about that and I think it's relevant for this meeting is public school certainly our primary focus is education, but there's a significant economic impact to our community, and to every community based on the public school, not only the fact that we pay a significant amount of, you know, we have 45 4600 employees that we pay, we have families that shopping and are entertained in this community, but we're also providing the workforce for all of the businesses that are coming to this community and so it's really not just education, although that's our primary focus but there's a significant economic impact for public schools across the state and in my experience in small rural schools, sometimes the school is the primary focus of the community and that's true in many respects but sometimes it's Friday night lights in the school and they are the largest employer in most of the rural communities so that's a theme that will run through this. We were a large district 186 square miles and so we kind of didn't proper but a lot of other communities that we work with the joy of working a lot of municipalities and a variety of construction opportunities and, and just a lot of things that are happening and my first experience and didn't I see when I first got here was to drive out to the dedication of cheap middle school, which is in Prosper. And so, if you haven't driven 380 in a while that direction. It takes a minute to get out to that eastern side, and then there's development that's happening all over as you guys will know and so it's a large districts 45 now soon to be 47 campuses, and we're up for a large employer and and over 33,000 students almost 33,400 at this point and continuing to grow. So didn't I see we are for trustees adopted six board goals that really we try to use the basis to make our decision making every day. Students will graduate so cut so two of them are about three of them are about engagement three of them are about about curricular excellence and so the curricular excellence we're talking about. Students will demonstrate evidence of reading on grade level by the end of third grade. Students will demonstrate evidence of mastery about through one by the end of ninth grade, and our main primary in goal or for our substantive decision is students will graduate college career or military ready which is really what we're trying to do we want our, our kiddos to get out and go to college be ready for college. They just get through like the LeBron for example, and go right into the workforce or be ready to enter the military. So that's, those are our charging or driving factors. And then of course on the other side we want our, our staff members to be highly engaged because studies show that when staff members are engaged student learning actually improves. We want our families and communities to be highly engaged so with that if anybody here would like to volunteer at any point in time, please let us know because we're always looking for volunteers to come to our schools and do stuff. So we want our students to be engaged. Their studies also show that students that are in extracurricular and co curricular activities actually perform better they have better attendance it's, it's a driving factor for students and particularly the secondary, secondary grades and so it's really something that we want all kids to be involved. So I promise not to get far off in the weeds on this but it's always surprising to me how many folks do not understand how school finance works and so for us largely we talk about it in terms of buckets. We have a maintenance and operations bucket which is where all of our teacher salaries and we pay the electric bill and all of the operational things running the school day to day come out of the M&O bucket and that's a large place where we're focusing our interest in the legislative world right now. But the other side of that's our IMS interest in sinking bucket and that is entirely for long term debt. That's our mortgage payment if you will and that's the only thing we can use that for, for capital expenditure. So we have in recent days passed bonds that from which we purchased school buses. So those bonds are structured differently to match the life of a school bus and also some technology infrastructure as well. So, we would not be able to operate in a one to one environment for kids and to have the things that we have technologically were it not for the ability to use that IMS bucket but by and large that's our mortgage payment. We can't use, we can't pass bonds and give teacher raises. And so the M&O bucket, the size of that bucket and it's highlighted here and really the main point I want to make here is that the size of that bucket, the amount of revenue we receive from education operations is a joint venture between us and the state, by us I mean our local property taxes, and then the state funding that comes to fill that bucket up but neither one of those determine the size of the bucket. The size of our bucket, the amount of revenue we have to operate a school is entirely based on our student population. But, attendance in school each day and so we look at enrollment as a starting point but then we have to look at our attendance rates which have dropped about two or two and a half percent since COVID. And so that has a significant negative impact on the money that we receive, but folks generally feel like it's a challenge for them to understand why we would be in a deficit when their property taxes continue to go up. And so if you look at, and I think we have a slide here that will talk about our tax rate as a school district has precipitously dropped over the last eight years or so or more. But the amount of property taxes we collect locally doesn't make our bucket get bigger, it just fills up our bucket more with local property taxes and it means the state has less to contribute to fill our bucket up. The size of our bucket only grows if we have more students, or if we have more weighted students. So this shows our historical impact of the DIT and ISD Board of Trustees, how they've lowered the tax rate over the last decade. So we continue to see this go down. And what Dr. Thompson was talking about is regardless of what our property taxes do, or what this tax rate does, the state of Texas sets a level of funding that we get. So the state of Texas decides how much funding we get per student. And then at the end of the day that class is set at whatever size the state sets it at. And so the way the system works is the state starts filling it up with property taxes. And then whatever is left over, the state funds that with state funding. And so to give you an idea, I grew up in West Texas, let's call it the 1900s, a whole century ago, and back then the state of Texas paid about 70 to 75 percent of my education, and the local property tax payers paid for about 25 to 30. Well, we've seen that flip now. So across the state, the average is reversed, but in Denton, the state of Texas only pays about 18 percent of our budget. So the vast majority is due to property taxes. But that does not change the amount of revenue, it just changes the source of revenue. So what you see on the screen as far as our tax rate is concerned, that $1.15.69 per $100 of value is a combined tax rate of our M&O tax rate and our INS tax rate. Our INS tax rate is determined based on voter approval of the bonds that were in our most recent ones, a fairly large one. And so we're capped at $0.50 on the INS tax rate. That's as high as we can go. And we're pretty close to that. On the other side, the M&O tax rate that we set as a district in the old days, our board would have some local discretion about how to set that tax rate. We really don't have any discretion about how to set that tax rate anymore. TEA will come out each August and tell us what our maximum compressed rate is. And so it has been compressed. If you're keeping up with the legislature at all recently, as we talk about reducing property taxes, which is a big focus of the legislature. And I'm all for that as property taxpayer, but they accomplish reducing those property taxes either by compressing our local tax rate that they set for us or by increasing the homestead exemption, which has happened a couple of times or both. And both of those are on the table at this point to continue to reduce that. And so I will say our legislature will at some point in the near future, wave the flag again about contributing more dollars to public education. And that's true. But a big chunk of those dollars in the last legislative session and possibly in the one to come, we'll see, are dollars that are leaving the state and coming to public education. But they're not making our bucket any bigger. They're offsetting the reduction in property taxes. And so I illustrate the bucket or the glass with two hoses. And one of them is state funding and one of them is local property taxes. And the more we fill our bucket up with local property taxes, the less the state has to contribute. And so when they lower our property tax collection, when the level of that glass goes down because they've reduced property taxes, they have to contribute more to fill the bucket up. That's money that's coming from the state to public education, but it's not new money for us. It's just filling our bucket back up. And again, our bucket doesn't get any bigger unless our student population grows or changes. And the state likes to really talk about this being new money for public education. It's new state money. It's not new money to schools. It's really important to understand that distinction. You're going to have schools. So we see different numbers. Texas, you know, we all know that Texas is a large economy in the world. We're bigger than Canada and Russia, but we're funded across all 50 states. We're 46 in funding. I've seen different numbers, so I'm not going to argue whether 46 is accurate, but the highest I've ever seen is 38. So in any way, shape, or form, we're in the bottom 30 percent of funding when it comes to states across the US per pupil. So we have a big number. If you talk about how much we spend on educational funding across the state, it's a big number, but you really have to look at per pupil because that's really the only way to compare us to Massachusetts or say Oregon, something like that. And so one of the things that we always talk about is when you talk about our funding level versus our outcomes on the NAPE scores and nationally, the national scores, we actually perform much better than our funding shows, and folks don't quite realize that. And in particular, we score typically in the 20s and 30s on NAPE scores, but if you adjust that for low socioeconomic impacts, so for example, everybody should know the two highest negative impacts on student achievement are mobility and low socioeconomics. And of course, we're in a high growth area with 50 to 60 percent low socioeconomic, so we've got a lot of risk factors involved. When you adjust our NAPE scores compared to that, we're actually in the top 10 in everything. And the reason for that is, for example, I mentioned Oregon. Oregon has about 18 percent of students that are low socioeconomic, whereas Texas has about 60. So clearly, you can't compare that. So again, we've talked a little bit about this. Our basic allotment, the basic building block is $6,160 per student. If you see reports that are out there, that number is often highly inflated. And it's not that those dollars don't come to the school district, but our basic funding building block, the basic allotment is $61.60. So not only students who come to us, but one of the things that State of Texas does a great job of is it does recognize that some students cost more to educate than others. And so a variety of students will receive differing weights based on whatever their circumstances are. Maybe they're in special education or they're an English language learner, and those are weighted more. Maybe they're in a career and technology class or they're gifted and talented. And so those students receive weights. And so they're all different varying weights. And so we look at average daily attendance, students who are enrolled and in school today. And so that's a big number that we look at because that drives our funding. But it's really driven by weighted ADA or what we call WADA. And that weighted ADA is really what drives the formula for us. And so we have about $33,000 in change students enrolled. Our average daily attendance at about 94.5% attendance is somewhere in the neighborhood of $31,000. And so that's our average daily attendance currently. But our weighted ADA is up around $41,000 or $42,000. And so it's like, even though we only have $31,000 in average daily attendance, we get funded like we have $41,000 or $42,000 because of those additional weights. And so that's an awesome thing that the state of Texas does. It makes our formulas very convoluted, but it also is really what drives. And so for us, our big push to the legislature is we really need that basic allotment to be increased because that's what drives all of it. And this hasn't gone up since 2019. Inflation has increased significantly since then. And so our basic funding block is not increased in that time, which is part of what's putting the squeeze on us financially. Can I add to that? The 6,160 is a basic allotment. So that's our general funding number. But just keep in mind what Jeremy said is not our attendance rates about 94%. So really our basic allotment is 94% of 6,100. It is not $6,100. So that's the way to look at it. We're one of Texas is one of five or six states across the nation that fund on attendance rather than enrollment. So just an idea of just throwing this like, for example, I believe it might have been representative Hayes who asked me what would it what would the difference be to didn't I see if we were funding on enrollment? And right off the bat, that change in enrollment would probably be an additional 17 million dollars for that night. That would not cost the state extra money because it's already budgeted to us. They just don't send it to us. Does that make sense? Because they only send us how many students are actually in class. So it's money that's budgeted, but they don't send to us. It would be a big boon if we went to enrollment, for example. Definitely. So this is a slide we use in various presentations. You can see the dashed line there is that basic allotment of 6,160. When you add in all of the operational weights, we receive about eighty six hundred and ninety dollars per student for operational purposes. That doesn't include our mortgage payment in the I.N.S. bucket. It doesn't include federal programs. This is just state revenues per kid based on our weights. And so that's really the number that we operate off of. And so there's again a lot of numbers that are thrown out there. This comes directly from our facts. And so we really try to pare it down so that we can back this number up. And that's essentially what we're operating off of, not ten or fifteen thousand dollars as touted at other places. So just talking about inflation, we all know we've had record inflation over the last five or six years in twenty nineteen. The reason that's an important number is because before the legislative session in twenty nineteen, the state put together. Y'all may remember Public School Finance Commission, where they met for during the interim and determined what they believe the level of funding should be per student. And the magic number that the state legislature came out with is sixty one sixty. And that's it. And at that point in time, in twenty nineteen, they raised the basic allotment from fifty one sixty to sixty one sixty. And so that's why it's important, because that is what the state determined six years ago. Schools needed to fund students. Well, if we were to move that out and adjust for inflation, that basic allotment would need to be about seventy five hundred dollars now to in order to make up for inflation. But we're still at sixty one sixty. So clearly we've got a huge negative impact due to inflationary pressures over what we were receiving back in twenty nineteen. I'm just going to leave the facts as they stand here. This is the makeup of our district. By and large, our staff is about just more than half teachers. And that's where our focus is, is on instruction and what's going on in the classroom. Certainly it's not teachers alone who do that work, but that's our primary focus. Seventeen percent paraprofessionals who are support for those teachers and primarily auxiliary staff, bus drivers and folks that work in the cafeteria and custodians and on and on. Also very important. Oftentimes those are thankless jobs until you need a bus driver or until you need a custodian. And then, you know, then we definitely realize how important that they are. Three percent are campus administration. Note that one percent is district administration. So there's a lot of claims that we sort of take offense at that we're top heavy. And the reality is a lot of the reason why we need the administration we have to some degree is because there's a lot of mandates that come down every time the legislature meets. There's going to be a new set of rules. We talked about rule heavy. And so our best hope outside of hopefully sending us a little bit more money is that they don't do anything else because we're we're doing good. That's one of the mandates that we have. Just real quickly. You all have this hand out and just, you know, one side of it. One side is about the district's legislative priorities. The other side is these are state numbers. These are not in ISD numbers, but it's a really it's a really handy flyer that was put together about how how much spending is actually done in the classroom. The priority, the main priority of all schools is in classroom spending. And I'll point out that across the state, the average amount spent on central administration is 2.7%. We're about half that in ISD. We're pretty thin up top. And then I also want to just point out because someone mentioned the other day, I was watching a committee hearing and someone mentioned the growth in administrators and that's one of their concerns at the state level. And I always think about bad facts make bad law, of course. And so one of the things that I want to point out is if you look at the state increase in administrators, somewhere between 2022 and 2023, their numbers showed a 15%, about a 15% increase in administrators across the state. But what we figured out is that a recalculated instructional coaches and made them administrators. And if you know anything about education, instructional coaches are, by definition, not administrators, they can't be administrators. They do not. They don't have the news of the administrator. They can't perform the functions administrator. They are just there to coach teachers and help them get better. And so that that is the when you look at current numbers, you see a large jump. It's because of that, that difference in the way decided to define. Yeah, so real quickly, I'm sure you all heard did nice. He's had a budget crunch. And so there's some things that have impacted our budget since the 2324 school year. The 1st, 1 is a school health related services. So without going too far in, these are these are services that we have to provide students under the idea, which is the, the, our, our, the law, the federal law that requires us to prep certain services to special education students. And so we received some. So these are services we have to provide, but the federal government would provide us a little bit of reimbursement for some of those things. So, I think occupational therapy or speech therapy, things like that the federal government would provide us some reimbursement for those services that we have to by law provide. And because of some, we'll just call it a tiff between the state government and the federal government. We saw 6 and a half million dollar impact loss of funding for shards. Seven and a half million dollars for transportation funding gap. I do always say that transportation is not a mandate. That is not an unfunded mandate. We're not required necessarily to have transportation. We are funding on attendance. So clearly that's really important. And the simple fact is we've got 180 square miles, not providing, not providing, not providing transportation is something that we don't really think is an option. Four and a half million dollars safety and security requirements. So back in 2023, House Bill 3 was passed. It's a huge safety and security bill. And let me just first make sure everybody hears it. It's a great bill. The things in the bill are fantastic. The problem is the funding was inadequate. And so what we see is what's required of us is about five and a half million dollars. The funding we received is about a million dollars. So we're about four and a half million dollars upside down just on that one, on that one bill. Ditton County, Ditton CAD costs, I'm sure you all felt that too, $256,000. Utilities increase of two and a half million. That's a little dated. That's probably a lot more by now, Paul, I'm guessing. And property casualty, I'm sure you all have seen this too. Property casualty keeps going up. We've had a billion and a half dollar increase in that. And then in 2023, just so everybody knows, the state budget adopt, the state budget has had $4 billion extra funds for schools in 2023. And so we were assured by everyone that it was just a question of when not if that money was going to flow to schools. As everyone knows, the legislature bogged down and they essentially was told if there weren't vouchers, they wouldn't get that money would not come from the state. So we never saw those funds. But based on the promises that were made, our board of trustees decided to provide an increase for our staff. And that cost us, a 3% raise cost us about $10 million. And so we've got a $10 million hit from just providing raises at a time when we were told we would get more money. So the net of that, we've done a lot in the, for sure in my tenure here as far as, I think I showed up at the wrong time, I'm not sure. But they affectionately refer to me as Dr. No in the building. And it's just unfortunate that I look forward to the day when we can say yes again to the things that we want to do for kids. But the reality is given those budget shortfalls, and that $10 million raise is not a one time, that's annually, right? Once we once the board did that right by our teachers, that's something we're carrying forward. And so we worked really hard to get our budget deficit for this year under 20 million. And the reality is it's not there now because things keep costing and things keep happening, but we're working really hard now to pare down to say no to some things that we don't want to say no to, but we don't have any choice at this point. We're at a place in our budget where given the circumstances, we can't, we can't continue to operate on we hope some more money comes down because we did that before and it's burned us. And so we're at a place now where we're operating under current law and we're preparing for 2526 budget as we speak. We've got to make this deficit up. We cannot continue the plane, the nose of the plane can't keep going down. So that's just the reality where we are. And so some really hard discussions already and more to come where we're having to say no to things that we feel like are important and valuable. But, but we have to, we're having to pull our tent in to some degree and take care of those essentials at this point to keep the big boat afloat. And so that's just the challenge that we're in right now. And the struggle is, go back to the earlier slide, that's not because everybody's property taxes went down. Our rates gone down, but people's bill didn't necessarily go down or maybe it did for a year, but then it goes back up. And so there's a, there's a dichotomy there of property taxes have been reduced, but not significantly. But, you know, revenue has not gone up because our basic building block hasn't been addressed through 20 plus percent inflation and a variety of other things that were kind of outside of our control. So it's a, it's a challenge. We're not the only ones that are facing it, but it's definitely hitting close to home. Okay, just real quickly. I want to show you a few deficit areas. So on the left, we've got the Denton I-State deficits and on the right, the Texas as a whole deficit. I want to show you this because it's not just Denton I-State, right? Every district across certainly across Denton, the County of Denton, every district that is whatever the adjustment is for size, it's a very proportionate deficit area. So, so pre-K programming, we've got a 2.5 million dollar deficit in that. And just so everyone knows, every educator I've ever spoken to says that the closest thing to a silver bullet in education is early, is high quality early pre-K. And so we believe in early pre-K. We believe in full day pre-K. Do not misunderstand me. In 2019, the state of Texas required full day pre-K, but they maintained funding at half day pre-K. So, so they, our funding is the same, but our costs doubled overnight in 2019. So be sure you hear me. We're, we're all for full day pre-K. That is what is best for our kiddos. Simply put, over half of all students that go through pre-K show up to kindergarten, kindergarten ready, and about a third of students that don't go to pre-K show up ready. So think about that. Think about the difference of one third of your students coming into your kindergarten classroom not prepared in any way for educational learning, for math, for standing in line, self-regulating. So it's a, it's huge for us. And so that's really important across the state. There's a big number, special education. It has an asterisk because we received funding for both the state and the federal government on that. Across Texas is about 2.1 billion dollar deficit. For us, it's about 9.8 million. And I want to make sure everybody understands when we talk about special education, these are services we are, we are required by law to provide. This is not discretionary spending. We can't cut our spending. Like that is what we have to do by law. And so we've got a 9.8 million dollar deficit in that. Transportation, we've already talked about across the state. You can see everybody's in the same boat. And then of course, safety and security again across the state, 750 million dollar lack of funding. Okay. So another one on the other side of that handy dandy handout is our legislative priorities. Historically, we've focused on a lot of different things because frankly, I feel like there's a lot of statutes that we could make education better if we make some tweaks to a few statutes. But this year, the board of trustees really said we, we really need to narrow it down because at the end of the day, we felt what the funding crisis has done to us and to our student, not just our teachers, but our student, their experience within our schools is we're seeing, we're seeing programs that are, they're having to be diminished or cut. And so we don't want that. We know that funding is really is really primary to what we're concerned with. So, of course, funding is one of our biggest issues. And one thing that I want to mention is because of the way the law works in House Bill 3 of 2019, the law, the law states and any new funding has to be spent a certain way. So, when we talk about the importance of the basic allotment, I showed right here, if we were to raise the basic allotment up to 1340 by to meet the number that the state set in 2019, adjusted for inflation, that would automatically increase teachers compensation by $5,000. By law, it would automatically increase our teacher compensation by $5,000. It would automatically increase special ed funding by 8.7 million and it would automatically increase our safety allotment by 816,000. So, the quickest and easiest way to get everybody paid to make up for special education and to, of course, get school safety is to increase the basic law. Then, down the bottom, we've got our deficits again, sensible accountability. We think that too much emphasis is put on high-stakes testing. The simple fact is, as a parent, our accountability system does not make sense. I think it is vastly understood and I will give you an example. I see quite often on Facebook or other places where somebody says 70% of students in Texas can't read on a third grade level and that's actually absolutely untrue. What they're thinking is that the approaches grade level on the reading exam does not meet grade level. That's not true. That is passive. Approaches grade level means you're ready for fourth grade. I know this firsthand because when my daughter was in third grade, she got approaches and I had to ask the principal, what does that mean? It means she passed. She did great. You're good. The average person doesn't know that, and so it doesn't make sense for us to have an accountability system that we're supposed to tell people how we're doing when nobody really understands what it means. Then, of course, finally, we've got student discipline. One of the biggest issues that we hear from, particularly from teachers, is about the inability to control large disruptive students or students that are largely disruptive to the classroom. I don't mean student conflict, which has always happened and will always happen. I'm talking about students that cause us to stop down in class, could create a danger to themselves or others, and we are very limited on what we can do. Folks don't always understand that our hands are really tied in most situations of how we handle that. That's a primary concern of teachers, and frankly, a lot of teachers don't understand. For example, we've worked on finding different placements for students, and at the end of the day, if TEA, the Texas Education Agency, does not like what we're doing, we will get downgraded on that. They will come back at us and they will make us do a bunch of stuff and spend a bunch of money because they disagree with it. It's not things that are based in law. It's not always. Sometimes it is, but mainly it's just TEA's opinion of how we should do things. That's really what we need is more local control to handle our own discipline matters here on the campus level. Our big push, amongst other things, is I fund schools first. We've met with our local representatives, and Dr. Rivera has said to each one of them on more than one occasion. If you guys discuss the voucher or ESA or whatever you want to call it, we're not fighting that battle here. School choice exists. We're fine with competition because we believe we're the best game in town. At the end of the day, regardless of what happens, we know that public education is still going to educate the lion's share of our students and thus our future workforce. We're not going away regardless. There may be less of us given the funding crisis that we're in, but the reality is public school is still going to be the key indicator of how we flourish as a state and how well our population is educated. But at the end of the day, whatever happens with whatever other battles are being fought out there that are outside of our purview, what we're asking is that you fund us appropriately so that we can do at least the things that we've been mandated to do by law. That's the challenge is school safety is a great example. Nobody's really arguing, "Hey, it's great. We love having an armed security guard at every campus," but 20% of that mandate was funded. And so the reality is, and one of our representatives asked us, "Where do you find the money to make up the difference?" Well, we have to take it out of our budget someplace else, and ultimately it impacts the classroom. And that's not good. It's not ultimately sustainable for our profession, and it's not good for our state. And so ultimately our push has been to fund schools first. This, I think, was started in Plano. Several schools got together, and so this fund schools first website has really been our push to say, "Hey, take care of our basic allotment. Whatever happens when school choice happens, we have opinions about that, but we're not fighting that fight. We're asking for equitable funding for public school students because we think it matters not just for our profession, but for really our communities and our state." So, again, this just goes back to what I mentioned a while ago. The basic allotment, by law, will increase all these numbers. So if the basic allotment were to raise, we've already talked about this a little bit, $1,340, you would see our teachers get a $5,500 raise, and then, of course, these are all statewide numbers that would increase all these funding levels. And this differs from the earlier slide because this is from the fund schools first website, looking at it statewide, and we looked at it internally as well. We also are transparent, much like you guys in the city. We're re-owning up taxpayer dollars, and so we're not trying to hide anything. We want to focus on transparency. We had what we call the 1925 committee last fall that was building a fiscal year '25 budget on fiscal year '19 funding. And so some really great discussions with our community and many members from our schools, and any of that information that went through that process, some of you were part of that, is on our DentISD.org/1925 page. So all you wanted to know and more about school funding, and particularly the way that it was done in ISD. Open it up to any questions. Representative from District 3. Thank you so much for all that. Before we get into two days of, hopefully, incredibly persuasive advocacy, how would you, at this moment, assess the prospects for getting an increase in the basic allotment? So, being recorded, so I think it's very good. I think that it's a, I think we will see an increase in the basic allotment. Now, is it enough? Is it as much as we probably need? It probably won't be, but they are going to raise the basic allotment. They're going to also increase several of our weights. One of the things that they're talking about, for example, is going into intensity-based funding for special education, meaning that students that need more intense services will receive more money, which makes sense. That's a great idea. The problem, of course, for us, is that really the basic allotment, there's some disconnect between what I believe the legislatures understand how our funding is spent versus how it's actually spent. And I mentioned the increase in, they believe, based on TEA information, that there was a large increase in administrators, which there wasn't. So, for example, they're afraid, some of them don't want to put a lot of money in the basic allotment simply because they don't have good information. And so, we see our charges trying to provide the best information possible so that they can make intelligent decisions. And where we're at in the bills that I've seen at this point, and again, it's still early days because we're still arm wrestling over that, is somewhere between $220 and $355 to the basic allotment. And again, part of those dollars have strings attached to them because of the way statute is set up. And so, we're all about funding that will address our shortfalls in safety and security and transportation and special education and pre-K because any of those dollars that come to those things will help free up some dollars. But what we really need is some discretionary funding to make up the differences. We need certainly to address those areas. We're all about teacher raises, and I think we'll see that for sure, whether it comes through the basic allotment or through standalone funding. But standalone funding with strings attached also ties our hands about how we want to spend it. And so, our hope is that the basic allotment increases greatly enough that we have some local discretion to use some of those funds to offset our current crisis. - Yeah, and specifically, the committee substitute for House Bill 2, which is the education funding bill, came out over the weekend, and they're talking about increasing the basic allotment to $6,500. So that, you know, about $400. - I was going to say, one of the initial Senate bills talked about teacher pay rates. Again, we're all for teacher pay rates, but it leaves us in the predicament of that is unique to teachers. And you saw on the slide how much of our personnel that won't impact. So we weren't able to give raises last year, so we're going to have to provide raises across the board just because of the sheer cost of living increase everyone's suffering. So that's why we lean towards the basic allotment, because the very formula of that will raise teacher pay raise, but it will also allow us to take care of our auxiliary staff, our paraprofessional staff, support staff, and what not. - That Senate Bill 26, and one of the things we talked about is that it is very specific only to classroom teachers. And one of the things we talked about is we absolutely want our teachers to get a raise, but a bill like that will provide our teachers a raise with less support. So they may have more kiddos in the classroom, they will have less support because there's less money to go outside the classroom. It really needs a basic allotment, rising tide, folks all votes. - Representative from District 6, then 1. - So on the 1925 committee, they talked about what levers there are. And some of the levers would be increasing the number of students in classes, increasing the number of classes each teacher takes, stop landscaping. I mean, there's all kinds of things being considered. With the numbers across the state of Texas, it seems very difficult to ignore that there has to be something. All of these school districts can't just go bankrupt. Are there other levers within the legal parameters, and how can the city help, and what can we do? - There are other levers. I'm going to let... I know Dr. Tulsi is going to get to the other levers. - You're good. - So I'll let him share that. But a couple of things to keep in mind, because we did talk about those different levers. Class size ratios, we're planning on current year law. So every class size for next year, we have calculated on an increased ratio. So our elementary is at 24 to 1, our middles and highs at 28 to 1. Those historically have been 22 and 25 respectively. Part of the problem, part of the reason we're in that situation is not only we're planning for current year, current law, but we also have had to utilize fund balance. Each year we're in a deficit. So we're also in the position of not only, layman's terms, getting right with the world in terms of, you know, passing a balanced budget for next year, but we also need to return back to our fund balance and revisit that. And that is a huge obligation of ours. And so even if, and it's one of the things I tell our teachers when I talk to them, even if we see an improvement in the basic allotment, we still will have to operate very, very tight for the next couple of years, even pulling some of those levers, because we need to return our fund balance to where it once was, or at least get very close. You will hear reduction of programs. So we are analyzing every program based on student interest. So student course cards went out in the winter. We now know what students have opted to sign up for for next year and we're looking at enrollment to figure out which programs to eliminate for next year. So some of those levers, even if we get the additional funding, we're still going to have to use those. Then, of course, there's, and you probably heard it on our 1925 committee, Jill was a part of, but one of the very first meetings, we had a community member say, couldn't we just do a tax ratification election and remedy this? Yes, it won't remedy, but it would provide us a tremendous amount of additional resource. Of course, that's dependent upon our community and our taxpayers passing that, but that is likely a conversation that we'll have to continue. We did ask the community member that asked, give us a minute, let's talk about every other option, because we're responsible to our taxpayers and we take that very seriously. But we are looking at every possible way to save and generate more revenue. So we shared with 1925 what the revenue at TRE could generate. Dr. Thompson? And I do want to plug those materials. I've already pointed people to the materials on the DISD website from the 1925 committee and it is complicated how funding works and doesn't work and what can be done. And the graphs and all of the work that went into that, I've already pointed people to that as a way to explain it and explain our situation because I've heard some of the same things that you're saying here today. And I was able to say, no, that's not the case. It's not all just administration. It's not all, you know, so anyways, just a plug for that for anyone listening as well. Well, I will share on that, just administration. We have intentionally absorbed every vacancy that's become available from a non-campus position. Really since about, I'm going to say, 14 months ago, unless it was absolutely essential, like our Director of Safety and Security, we've absorbed the position. So we don't have fewer mandates. We don't have fewer compliance requirements, but we have fewer people doing those. And you can see the looks of their faces at the end of the table looking a little worn out, but we simply are, every vacancy we have, we're absorbing it and not replacing it. I appreciate you saying that. And as educators, we're teachers first, but I feel like our best chance to survive is more people to be educated about how this works so that they can say, oh, that's not true or this is true. And so I'll just say just a bit because don't get an opportunity with U.S. community leaders to just give you a little bit about a voter approval tax ratification election or a vaguer. Think of it like a bond on the INS side, but we can use the dollars of a TRE to give teacher raises or to pay the light bill and those sorts of things. And so the state, I said earlier, sets our M&O tax rate every August. So we get a maximum compressed rate every August and that is the maximum that our tax rate can be. But they provided a provision for what they call enrichment pennies above and beyond the tax rate. But the only way we can get those enrichment pennies is to go out to our voters like we would in a bond and be authorized to raise our maintenance and operation rate on that side of the bucket. And so there's an opportunity to get up to 17 additional pennies on the M&O side with voter approval against the VATRE. So the first eight of those pennies are labeled golden pennies because they're more valuable than our local pennies typically are. They were originally based off of Austin ISD's yield per penny. Now it's not tied to Austin ISD, but they're significantly more valuable and they yield more dollars for us. And so the state originally gave us four golden pennies for free. So our maximum compressed rate plus those four, now it's five. At one point, Denton ISD got authorized for two golden pennies. We kind of lost that authorization for one of them, but we still have one above those five. So Denton ISD already has our max compressed rate plus six pennies and those six are golden. There's two more golden pennies we could go get with voter approval and there's nine more copper pennies in theory we could go get. And nothing has been decided at this point. We haven't even really, outside of just discussing it in theory because we want to see what the legislature does because we, Denton ISD has been really conservative and has tried to protect the taxpayer. But we're at a place where those golden pennies will generate, depending on what the yield ends up being after this legislative session, somewhere around five or six million dollars. So if we were to be authorized for the remaining two golden pennies, and you only have to get authorized once as long as you keep your rate there, we could get another somewhere between 10 and 12 million dollars for the two golden. When you move, and those golden pennies are also golden because they're not subject to recapture. So what we have referred to affectionately is Robin Hood. The wealthy districts, if your bucket overflows you don't get to keep the overflow it goes to the state and ostensibly to go to poorer districts but at some point when everybody's buckets full that overflow stays at the state level, right so they're not continuing to maintain a static level of state contribution. So those golden pennies are not subject to recapture we get to keep all of that at home. We are right on the line of being a property wealthy district or wealth per student. And so our last calculation our first copper penny were we to be authorized for that would be subject to recapture. And we would probably end up having to send part of that back to the state but the copper pennies are still valuable to us as well. And so, in theory, you could go, and we wouldn't advocate for that much again the conservative approach of our board and leadership has been to protect their local taxpayer. And the reality is, I haven't served on a board but I've sat with many boards. And the reality is the boards used to be able to use their own local discretion to protect their local taxpayers and to do the things that they needed to do locally, because the NISD is different than what happens in El Paso and Texarkana and Beaumont. So there should be some local discretion and local control. And that's where if we do get to a point where we have to go back out to our voters then we certainly would solicit your help in educating folks about what does this mean and ultimately our goal would be, depending on what other mandates are handed down. It's really a matter of keeping our vote afloat, if and when we get to that point. And so again, I think I can confidently say we wouldn't try to go get all 17 pennies because we are going to really try to be conservative about what we need. At this point, I've been in the district about 14 months and so that's kind of been my reality here and it's not unique to us, but it's a challenge because I've gone through this a couple of times in other districts and people don't want to make eye contact with you because they're afraid either they're going to lose their job or they're going to get somebody else on top of theirs. And it just creates a culture, like we want our teachers and our people to be excited to come to work and to go work with our kids because there's a joy in this calling. But man, this is, it's hard to be, to suck the life out of every room. I kind of feel like we've done today a little bit because it's depressing a little bit because this is our future that we believe in. And so if and when the time comes, we certainly would solicit your help in educating our community about the need for those additional pennies that we're not going out flippantly, that we're not going out to get luxury items, we're just trying to keep our base together. I want to say to real quick because Joe was pointing you back to the 1925 resources. There's a slide in the, I believe it's the November meeting that shows districts around us and districts like us that have gone after their golden and copper pennies. And Denton is, I'm going to restate what Dr. Thompson said. We have been highly conservative. Our board has been highly conservative and asking our voters for this for a number of years. And when we went out and studied districts like us, we found ourselves to be very unique and not pursuing the golden and copper sooner. But that's been a commitment of our board to our local taxpayers. And so I was pleased to see where we were. At the same time, we may have to come out and ask for help with that. Representative of District 1. Thank you. With all of that talk, I just seemed like my question was just so basic right now. I know that there's a question out there, if not for anyone else but me, that along the 380 corridor, we have built a number of schools out that way. And there's because the Cheeks, I think that's our further schools, are we still obligated, are we still going to be obligated to continue to build out that way? Because there's so much built up. It goes back to everything that we've been talking about. More schools, more teachers, more money, more this, more transportation. Where are we in building schools out on the 380 corridor? Well, we're in the process of starting high school number five that's out there. And again, we build schools based on the need, and it's based on growth. I will say in the last year or so, we've tried to slow our roll a little bit, but everything that we're building now was authorized in previous bonds based on needs and based on a really a collaborative effort that our district does with this community. And we maintain a bond committee meeting that looks at bond progress, both before leading up to and then following those bond authorizations. And so we are continuing with the projects that are there because there was a need for students there. But we are evaluating along with many other districts who are closing schools because their enrollment is going down. So we are looking at our model as we prepare for future growth to make sure that we're not building schools we don't need. And I guess I was connecting it to the fact that there's so many other large, larger cities, you know, like McKinney and I think this cheek school is in Prosper. Prosper, Frisco, McKinney are all there. But those kids that live in our zone, we're responsible. And that's one of the challenges for our budgeting. Even though we know we're only going to be funded at 94.5% of our enrollment, we still have to build and be prepared to serve 100%. So our budget has to be for 100% because you can't stand up to school overnight. And so we have to be prepared with teachers and facilities and materials for 100% of the kids who live in our district. They may choose to go elsewhere, they may choose to enroll in that kind of school. We still have to turn the lights on, regardless of how full the class is, if that makes sense. Can I add something real quick? Dr. Thompson mentioned High School 5. Well, just to give you an idea, Braswell is by far our largest high school. There's over 3,000 kiddos in that. That is a really large 6A high school. And so we're getting close to capacity there. So High School 5 is necessary. The reason we build is because kiddos show up. So for example, if you look right across the road from Cheat Middle School is Sandrock Ranch Elementary School. What is Sandrock? About 900 students. They're busing at the same time, 900 students. So by law, if somebody moves into Sandrock Ranch and they show up at our doorstep, we have to educate them. We don't really have an option. Now we might can say we can't. We don't have room for you here. We got to bus you over to, you know, Cross Oaks or wherever, but we have to educate them. And so that's what we're seeing. We've seen exponential growth in the corridor, as we like to call it, the Braswell zone. We have seen it. We have seen it start to level off. And we also want to be extremely mindful. If you look at anything that our board has done for the past 20 years have been very fiscally conservative. And so one of the things that we want to be very mindful of is we do not want to end up in a place like, not that Lewisville, they did not do anything wrong. So do not misunderstand me. But we want to make sure that we're being very mindful about our growth. We have to have a place for every kiddo, but we also don't want to grow too fast. Now we're still, what, 60, we're probably 30%, 40% left to build out. So we're going to see growth and we just got to make sure that we were real mindful about it. Is that fair? Yes. Yeah. So we're watching very closely and I would applaud our board and our district for being very mindful about that going forward. But the current circumstances have caused us to even put a pause in that. And again, what we're building now was already authorized and it's accommodating. We have a lot of schools that are busting at the seams and the ones we don't, we've dealt with in rezoning, which is, that's a painful process as well for our staff and for the people who go through that because they bought a house and they want to go to school here. But we have to look at how do we allocate our resources. One of the things Dr. O'Barris says a lot that I quote almost every day, are we allocating our resources to our areas of greatest need? And that's true in facilities. It's true with materials. It's true with staff. It's true with dollars. Are we allocating our resources, whatever they may be, to our areas of greatest need? And we were being highly, highly intentional about that, thankfully so, to make sure that we're stretching every taxpayer dollar because we're transparent about that and we're happy to be that way. But it's so important that we use those resources well now because we just don't have that many resources to spread then any longer. Correct question. Representative from the district, Reed and then Newell. Mitchell. Thank you. I was just trying to track, you know, the impact of the pennies of various metals. And if I caught you right, and this is a good question to you, even if you went for all of it, it would cover about half the shortfall. Is that about right? So I haven't calculated all the way out, but we would, our two golden pennies are worth between five and six million dollars a penny based on current yield. There's some things being discussed currently, but five and six million dollars. We would gain an additional six million from the first copper penny, but a chunk of that would go back to the state. And so a TRE wouldn't completely solve our issues. It would go a long way. So we're trying to look at it in coupling with all of the cuts we've made to the expenditure side. We are trying to go out and bring kids back in. And it is the case now that there's a lot of homes that are being sold. You know, a starter home now is not what a starter home used to be. And so young families with children sometimes can't afford to buy a $450,000 home to start with. So a lot of the neighborhoods where we know building is happening is not necessarily being inhabited by kids, by families with kids in school. And there's a lot of people who might have chosen to move out of their environment where their elementary school or their middle school was. But because mortgage rates in the current circumstances there, they're not leaving. And so that's happening in a lot of other districts, too, where neighborhoods are aging out a little bit. And so that all comes back to the things that we're trying to do to cut expenditures. And the reality is is a TRE has to be like a bond election. And so that's not a guarantee. So we can't budget based on a potential TRE. That's why we're not even really talking about it now. The earliest TRE could impact us in the coming fiscal year, but we can't budget on it. And so it would be something that would really be for the fiscal year 26, 27 there. And so the copper pennies also there's there's a question about how would local taxpayers feel about increasing our local property taxes and sending 40 or plus percent back to the state that may or may not fill up anybody's bucket. And so we were very mindful of that as well. And I can't speak for the board, but I think they would say the same thing. We don't want to raise a lot of local taxes that we're sending someplace else either. And so we're trying to look at every lever and every level you pull that saves some money has a consequence on the other side. And so we're trying to weigh that against protecting what's going on in the classroom. Hope that answers your question. Just a reminder, as basic allotment goes up, the fear of having to be a recapture district goes down, right? The higher the basic allotment, the less likely you are to be a recapture district. I just have a comment. What you may hear or have heard in the past is why do they have such a big reserve fund, which is an essence sort of our savings account. Well, the reason is we really needed that this past year since we didn't get funding. We've made it in other years where the legislature keeps holding sessions into the summer when we need our budget to pass. We need to pay our employees, so we've had to dip into it for that, too. The state doesn't always come through with the funds that we need. So that's why we've had to have a reserve fund that's significant, because it keeps our schools open. Well, and it also supports a positive bond rating for us. And that, again, is in service to our taxpayers, because that allows us to continue to use our resources most effectively. It's not just a nice to have. It's not a slush fund. And then on top of that, folks may not realize, of course, when we think about state accountability for public education, we think about the star exam, but we're also we have a financial accountability system as well. And we won the A rating on that for 22 straight years, I believe. And that actually requires, so in order to have the A rated financial district, one of the requirements is to have a fund balance. And so we have to have enough fund balance to go three months, is that right? Yeah, so we're required to have a fund balance as part of what we do being good business students. Okay, any other questions? So is attendance, is that attendance counting, is that statutorily prescribed, or how does that work? It is, yeah. So the reason I ask is because specifically, I just try to get my head around it, right? Like if you're in by nine, you count. If you're in after, and I'm round numbers, that could be absolutely wrong, nine-ish. Yeah, and then you're out. But if you get there ten, then you're not counted. But I don't want kids coming to school if you have 150 temperature, but you know, all the things, right? And so just try and understand how that, that now works. And if you get it at ten, with the doctor's note, you might count. I mean, it's highly complicated, truly, it really is. And then all of that ties back to your budget, right? So just try and understand that. So we do try to track kids down, but one of the things we talked about in the discipline, the chapter 37 that was taken away from us is really the ability to chase after truancy as well. But you're right. In the old days, we used to raffle off bikes and whatever else to get kids to come, and so parents were sending sick kids to school, which was counterproductive. And so we're one of six states, I believe, in the nation that is funded based on attendance. But the reality is we have to budget for 100% of them, whether they come or don't. But we have an attendance accounting handbook that outlines all of those ins and outs, and our secretaries of attendance work diligently to keep that track. And attendance is down overall about two and a half percent for Denton ISD since COVID, but Denton ISD is not unique. The entire state of Texas has declined, probably greater than two and a half percent when you look at the overall numbers. And they said it early on, the state has to budget for 100% attendance. So they budget for 100% attendance, but the average attendance across the state, I want to say is 90 or 92. So that's eight to 10% of what was budgeted that is never, the mechanisms never created for it to get to the school districts anyway. Got it. Okay. And then I do want to mention that my haircut is sponsored by LaGrona County. I didn't go there Thursday, and I want more people to go there. It's an amazing resource. Our community has, everything that the LaGrona Academy does is really impactful. When I'm going out and talking to people, and you're kind of apples to apples in different school districts, you have smaller school districts, whatever ratings, whatever, all those things. So, hey, but do they have this real cool thing? Right? And those kind of, so I do appreciate. We will have a second Advanced Technology Center accompanying high school five, which will serve our Braswell zone and high school number five and other students as well. So it's a second one that's coming soon. It is our very purpose, right? It is provide, I mean, you go back to the board super six. We have our students earned over thirty, three hundred licensure certificates, professional certificates last year alone. That is our sole purpose is to provide for the future of our community and our students. And we're so caught up in this. Sure. Sure. That's why I went back to the slide because I was remiss. I didn't, you know, in all the talk about budgets and all the things that we want me, there's still great things going on in the United States. You know, we still are our graduates had over fifty eight million dollars in scholarships last year. I said for twenty three hundred graduating seniors, it's amazing. Thirty one hundred certificates are pass rate on certifications, I believe, is at eighty two percent. So think about that eight out of ten kids are taking a test to get a certification. They're passing that thing. I mean, however, there are great things that our teachers are going to get amazing things. Yeah. And then one last thing I want to give you an opportunity to speak on is because this comes to us a lot. Is there a financing mechanism or planning, you know, kind of as you look to analyze the numbers, single family home versus multifamily development. Is there does that affect your math? How do you approach those things? Because those come to us regularly and we want I personally want to be a good partner and want to be mindful of those things. So multifamily homes obviously precipitate the need ultimately for more schools, because even if you look at the demographers, as they look at different types of housing, multifamily homes or complexes, those sorts of things are typically produced students out of there on a ratio at a higher rate, which then causes us to need to go back to our bond progress council and build more schools. So again, we welcome all kids to come our way. But right now, it's easier for us to keep pace and to make better decisions if that growth is steady and slow. And so a lot of times with multifamily homes, again, no knock on those things, but it does precipitate a need for more schools and more resources. And in a time when we have limited resources, it is concerning. Thank you very much. Representative from district four. Thank you. In a previous life, I spent my Mondays dealing with attendance issues. And I and I loved it. I want you know, I love it sincerely. But I was always I was always impressed with the number of people that came before me that live just inside the two mile radius and were ineligible for bus service. And I've and I've always wondered if that were to be tightened up to a mile radius or a mile and a half radius, if that increase of attendance would pay for itself with with with bus transfer. That is the million dollar question. And we talked about that. We talked about that a lot. We actually are in the process right now of kind of analyzing our routes and how we provide that service. The two mile radius, I wouldn't there's not a legal requirement. They already spoke to it, but that is very standard. One of the levers going back to what Jill talked about. We talked about what if we go two and a half mile? What if we go three mile? Well, we were perpetuating a problem, right? We're providing less instead of more. It is a money saver. We have not talked about going reducing below two, but we have started looking at how are we defining hazardous routes. So I'm going to go to Myers. In shady shores, there's not good sidewalk. You can be at this time. I think it's part of their development plan as well, but you can be inside two mile, but it's not safe to get there. And so that's I'm going to look down to Dr. Rainey that consumes about the first six weeks of school is having one on one conversations with families about how can we help you get to school if it's there's not an eligible route for you. So we're in the process right now of studying that Dr. Thompson and Mr. Anders are leading that so they may want to talk about it. We've just added a route in that particular area. And the reason for the two miles is because inside of two miles, we don't we don't get a lot of transportation funding to start with. That formula hasn't really was modified recently, but before that hadn't been updated since 1987, but the two mile radius is set because inside of two miles, the only way we receive funding for those students is if we declare those routes hazardous. And so we have a process for that, but we receive funding. But we receive funding for kids outside of two miles, but the theory was, I'm sure back in the day, you could ride your bike and walk to school. And sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's not safe to do that. And so we do have several routes that are declared hazardous inside of two miles, but there's a limit to how much hazardous transportation funding we can receive as well. So we could absolutely pick up every kid, but the reality is we wouldn't receive funding to offset that. And what I'll say is when I first started buying school buses many years ago, I think I spent $35,000 for the first one didn't have air conditioning or seat belts that weren't required at the time. Now it's about $160,000 to buy a school bus with. And that's not counting all the technology that goes inside of them. So the reality is adding a route. We have to weigh can we afford the bus? Can we find a driver whose license in the federal government's made it exceedingly more difficult to get your CDL license? And so we were a shortage of drivers right now. drivers right now and so one of our costs in transportation is overtime because anybody who's got a CDL gets commissioned in the service and so there's a lot of factors that go into that you're right to assume that potentially if we were able to run more routes we could pick up more kids and they would come to school because there are a lot of socioeconomically disadvantaged families who can't because they're at work or whatever provide that but there's a significant cost on our side to do that so we have to weigh all of that we are looking at it for sure. And I also think back to your Monday mornings I do think society has changed in terms of convenience as well since COVID and that is one of the major impacts we've seen to school attendance is not as many families are working outside the home and so it's it may be easier to take a vacation you know your schedule can be more flexible so those are other things other than transportation that are drastically influencing our attendance is just people didn't return to work in the traditional sense and so it's easier for their children to stay home or not go today or from a positive position always say whoever said earlier we're glad you're keeping the child with a hundred degree temperature home right we used to send them because we wanted that ribbon or that bike raffle or whatever so that is a positive out of COVID is people generally will keep sick children home more readily than they did before but at the same time there's also a convenience factor that's keeping them out. Well very good well thank you all very much and very very informative great information and I and give them credit credits too to echo one of the points you made about the board and its fiscal focus on taxpayer money I was encouraged to read well first RIP A.O. Calhoun Cuders and welcome to Colts but but but I was encouraged to read there that from a just a cost and painting perspective hey it's it's more it makes sense to not repaint an entire school leverage what we have add to that enhance that and so those those type creative decisions you're making are but I we are we appreciate the efforts and the focus y'all make on those attentions to details and taxpayer money it's great and so thank you very much for that so that'll take us to our last item that we're gonna go through and then we're gonna go across the street and start back up at 2 so it's item C ID 25503 receive report hold discussion regarding the city of Denton's legislative priorities thank you mayor council and trustees I'm Christy Fogel chief of staff here at the city of Denton to give you kind of a high-level overview of the city's legislative priorities and kind of which ones we're seeing some movement on for time's sake I'll keep it high level and if there's follow-up questions I'll follow up with anyone via email afterwards so a quick overview session by the numbers we are on day 78 of the legislative session a little bit of over halfway we have around 8800 bills filed which is about 600 more than the then last session which broke the record for the most bills filed last session and then our bills tracked by the city we are over 500 now with the addition of some bills over the last week and roughly 60 or 70 of those are related to our legislative priorities document which you have in front of you the blue and white paper and then in comparison the Texas Municipal League is tracking over 2,000 bills 2,000 bills of 8,000 bills roughly for a fourth of the bills are related to municipalities and cities in some way so our legislative program is broken out into sections the city you know has quite a few departments it does a lot of different diverse work so where the school district has had to kind of understandably and narrowly focus on funding we kind of have to broaden our focus and look at things through different sections our first section and something that was really important to the city whenever develop being this agenda was focusing on our community and how we can support our community partners like didn't ISD the county and CTC TW UNT and DCTA so last fall we started meeting with the staff from each of these organizations as well as some of our surrounding city partners and talked about how we could support each other in developing our legislative programs and support each other throughout session and so that's where these bullet points really were born out of the one bullet point that we've seen movement on is that third one protecting the autonomy of local officials to make decisions in their best interests we know that's something that is important to the school district as well and we recently our council at our last meeting added that sell bullet point opposing restrictions on city's use of contracts with registered lobbyists so we it was important to our council that as that bill is moving through the process that we be clear on what our position is on that our next session is related to city services the first or the second item there representative Patterson has a bill that would require the ethical sourcing of pets and pet stores this would be an excellent opportunity for our animal services to partner with local pet stores and get pets in homes quicker so it's a win-win for everybody and we're tracking that closely other than that the other item that we've seen movement on is that last one restricting libraries authority to make decisions regarding materials impose a state rating system and prohibit libraries from hosting community events there are some bills and we know that that's something that the detonized D and other school districts have struggled with in the past so we are closely monitoring that as well land use and development is probably one of the biggest and hottest topics for us to track this session especially as important as it is for a growing community like Denton and we've seen bill filings and movement on most of these items especially in relation to establishing lot sizing parking requirements and accessory dwelling units and as well as you know the ETJ and our ability to work with with our ETJ and developments there we haven't seen a lot of movement on any of these items related to our municipal court but there have been some positive bills filed relating to expanding translation services for the courts to use which would be a great benefit to our city our municipal court does have translation services but any support the state can give us in that regard is always welcome and then taxation and financial strategies is another large one that there's been quite a few bills passed or filed and heard and committees related to our use of certificates of obligation which is one of the ways that the city funds infrastructure projects and positively there's been a bill passed out of the Senate committee increasing the competitive bidding threshold from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand which would give cities a much more flexible use of of that transportation aviation the transportation committees in both the Senate and the house have really only just started meeting this week so we haven't seen a lot of movement on these but there are several resolutions that would lead to constitutional amendments to raise funding for transit projects which we think would be positive and then we're looking for any sort of creative funding for our airport Denton has the fifth busiest airport in the state with over 200,000 operations that's takeoffs and touchdowns so that's pretty amazing and it's fast growing out there as well so we want to make sure that we are supporting our airport growth and then utilities these first three bullet points or first two bullet points are related to water water we're really excited that the governor and lieutenant governor and speaker of the house have deemed water and increased funding and access to water as a priority senator Perry has been working on quite a number of bills related to this he chairs the Senate water and agriculture committee and so we're supportive of that and then the following four bullet points are related to our municipal electric and they have are tracking all of these bills separately but one thing that is their priority is a bill by Senator tan Parker that would change an outdated rule for them on the Railroad Commission so they're tracking that so with that some important deadlines coming up with session the last day of session is June 2nd the governor will then have until June 22nd to sign or veto bills and then a lot of the bills that we're tracking their effective date would be September 1st so just because of the session ends doesn't mean you know our work ends just I know you guys know that you'll have stuff to implement by September 1 as well and so with that I'm happy to stand for any questions okay thank you very much I appreciate it and if you didn't know and you'll see it this week if Chris you're going to Austin right yeah she knows every third person in the city of Austin no doubt about it I've seen it firsthand it's an amazing skill set so we're grateful to have her and her she's a wealth of knowledge again those relationships as well so thank you okay that is the last thing on our agenda if I'm not missing anything so I'll turn it over to you if you'll include the school board side I'll do the same and the city city council's meeting will be adjourned at 1247