Oct 21, 2025 City Council on 2025-10-21 12:00 PM (Joint Special Called Meeting with Denton ISD Board of Directors)

(overlapping chatter) - Each day is Tuesday, October 21st. The time is 12 to 1. We have a quorum of council present. So I'll call the city council portion of this meeting to order and then hand it off to the president. - And I will call the Board of Trustees that I will speak to order at 12 and 19 as well. - And just for housekeeping, this meeting is being recorded. The mics we have are sort of in the ceiling, so speak up a little when you speak, but just also know when we say, we'll be picked up by the mics, including the whispers. I've listened to those readings before. The first item on the agenda is a public hearing. So I'm gonna open the public hearing. This public hearing is item A, ID 251864. Call the public hearing pursuant to requirements of chapter 26 of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Code at one. There is no feasible and prudent alternatives to change in use approximately 9.4 acres of land located within South Lakes Park in the city of Denton, Texas, from a park to a public school for the construction of Denton independent school district recreation facilities. And two, finding that all reasonable planning has been done to minimize harm to the land of the park and providing an effective date. Parks and Recreation Board and Beautification Board recommends approval once above 7 o'clock. - All right, good afternoon. Gary Patrick, Director of Parks and Recreation, Hatton Hill and Mead. Today we wanna have a prior to some information for a public hearing. We see direction regarding potential land exchange between the city of Denton and DISD. They involve three parcels. One is the city of Denton at South Lakes. We'll have some maps here in the next couple of slides. And two, at the former Calhouni Middle School. We've done chapter 26 before through city council. Same process, we have to identify there's no feasible, prudent alternative taking of the land. The project has also include all reasonable planning to minimize any impact on the land. And then we also have to post and have a public hearing to be done in those dates that it's been posted. So from a DISD standpoint, former Calhouni Middle School, there's two parcels. Parcel one is the area where there's the football field on the track across the street from Calhoun. And then the parcel, basically the courts west of the school itself. Total of 3.4 plus acres. Appraisal came in at 2.5 acres. Appraisals were conducted by DISD. City of Denton, South Lakes Park, parcel one. This is located on the northwest side, south side of McMath Middle School where the existing track and open space, a little field space there that DISD has used since 1998 and made those improvements. So current conditions, DISD has not enough land to build a new track and open space on their parcel for student recreation. Therefore, DISD has built and maintained nine plus acres of recreational space in South Lakes Park. And they've leased that since 1998, joint agreement. The public can utilize that space today so they can go out there and use it outside of school times. And DISD does have approved bond funding for improvements that is proposed. The proposed conditions, approximately nine acres of land adjacent to McMath Middle School. It's convenient for the students. It would not require any busing of students not by location that they had to build an open space or a track somewhere else. And it does not require additional land, obviously, to purchase by DISD. DISD has not developed land as I mentioned on campus for any new facilities outside of the city property that we're talking about. DISD will provide limited access to the track and field. So the track right now is open to the general public and DISD can chime in on this. The improvements that DISD will make will be fenced in and that'll be rentable. So it'll still be available to the public after the rental process. And then the open space will be maintained and open to the public as it is today. The trails that are in the park obviously provide recreational opportunities for people to exercise similar to the track. So that's obviously a good alternative for people to walk, exercise, and job. And then from an aspect of harm tending the land, that's non-existent because DISD is actually gonna be making improvements to it. So it's actually being enhanced. From a value to our city of Denton park system, we use a trust for public land as a way to track accessibility to our parks for our residents. Our goal is 100% accessibility. That's a big challenge. But we use the TPL website to identify where the hotspots are, where we're not meeting those goals. The Calhoun area neighborhood has been a hotspot for us since we started the program. So it's been on our radar and I know you guys have been working through rebuilding schools and all that. So this is something that we've been talking about for a while. The area in yellow is the half mile or 10 minute walk from that park. And you can go on the website and create this analysis. The green area is the park property that we're talking about that's at Calhoun. And then behind it, you'll see the purple and dark purple. The darker the purple, the more need there is. So by us acquiring this in this transaction, we would increase our accessibility by two to a neighborhood park. And that is identified in our land plan, which is an exhibit in today's agenda. So overall benefits to the city. It provides immediate access to a property that's not accessible. So if this is approved and happened, we would make sure the property is set up to our standards and open up for the general public to use. It would also provide a future opportunity for a neighborhood park. This process is just regarding land acquisition, not any improvements to the general facility. That would be addressed in kind of phase two. The access to the open space at South Lake Park, again, would remain unchanged and open to the public. The track and field would be available for public rent, obviously a much higher level of design and availability. And then we'd continue to partner with, the other benefit is continue to partner with EISD in collaboration, as well as supports efficient use of land for both the city and the EISD parking together. So next steps, we've had two public meetings. The checkbox, the ones that have been completed. We also took this to our parks, recreation, and beautification board in early October, and they approved it, recommended a five to zero vote. And then today we're here at a public hearing for both the city and eventually the EISD. And then city council would consider an interlocal agreement sometime in the near future, and then closing probably in the time of quarter two of 2026. So at that time, I'll pause and ask for any questions. - Thank you, Gary. I do wanna just make a comment that I've talked to my constituents who live in the area of the Old Calhoun Middle School, and they've been really appreciative of all the work and the time that you've put into all of this. It's been a few years, right? The process to get to this point has been a few years. So I really appreciate the coordination between city staff, EISD, and our residents. Any questions for Gary? Seeing none, this is a public hearing. I don't have any cards to speak. Is anyone here to speak on this item? All right, seeing none, I'll close the public hearing. So the next item on the agenda is item for individual consideration. Item A, ID 251964. Consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of Denton making a finding pursuant to the requirements of Chapter 26 of the Texas Parks Model and Code that one, there is no feasible and prudent (coughing drowns out speaker) to the changing use of approximately 9.4 acres of city park land located within South Lakes Park in the city of Denton, Denton County, Texas, from a park to a public school for the construction of Denton Independent School District Recreation Facilities, and two, finding that all reasonable planning has been done to minimize harm to the land as a park and providing an effective date. The Park Recreation Board and Beautification Board recommends approval of a vote in life. Only the city council will be voting on this item. The school board will be voting on a separate date. We will be doing a roll call vote. We want to hear a motion from a city council member on that. Any motion from council member Bet? - I move approval as the item as presented by staff. - Second? - Second. - I think council member Holloway just announced. All right, so we're gonna do a roll call vote. Council member, oh sorry, council member for place five, how do you vote? - I. - Council member for district, or place six? - I. - Council member for district four? - I. - Council member for district one? - I. - Council member for district two? - I. - And council member for district three is an I as well. That passes six, zero. Next item on the agenda is B8, ID 25153. We report on city of Denton's instructional projects surrounding Denton Ice and campuses. - All right. Good afternoon board members and council members. My name is Seth Garcia. I'm the director of capital projects here for the city of Denton. I'm gonna provide a contemporary update for projects around the ISE schools. So the first area we're gonna focus on is near Denton High School in the new Reeves Elementary. So we're gonna specifically look at Westgate, Bonnie Bray Six, and Rhynie Road East. So the first projects, this Bonnie Bray Six, again this had a high impact to Reeves Elementary School. So we were able to work with our contractor to re-sequence this project on the city of Denton side to put a lot of resources onto Rhynie Road for the opening of Reeves. So we almost made it. We were about a week late. But again, for my staff, I know they did their very best. So you can see there on the right, the picture of the fully widened section with sidewalks. The remaining pieces that we have will be built with the intersection there at Bronco Way and Rhynie Road and Bonnie Bray. We're still on track to be complete with this project in totality in Q2 of 2027. So if you've driven the corridor, you've seen a lot of ongoing improvements with drainage infrastructure. So we're gonna be building those southbound lanes, moving traffic to the new southbound lanes, and then ultimately coming back and reconstructing the northbound lanes. So there's a lot of progress that you'll see over the next 12 or so months on that one. So the second piece of it is the remainder of Rhynie Road. So this is our Rhynie Road east project. This is essentially going from the east side of the Reeves Elementary School back towards US 77. We're gonna be doing paving, some trail improvements, as well as installing a trail through the North Lakes Park that's gonna provide students access coming into the backside of Reeves Elementary. Good news on this, we opened bids last week, and they actually came in under budget for the majority of them. So we're going through our evaluation process and looking at bringing a contract to council in December or January. So again, probably a late quarter one start for that project, and we're anticipating being complete in Q4 of 2016. So the third project that we have here at the high school is the Westgate Road phase one. So we broke Westgate into two phases, kind of the east-west portion that connects to Bronco Way, and then the north-south piece that will be done with the Windsor Connector. So phase one of Westgate, that east-west portion is currently under construction. I've got some good news that hopefully we're gonna have some traffic on that right around Thanksgiving. So about one more month, we'll be able to alleviate some of that traffic at Flint High School by providing that access to the service road. Again, we're anticipating probably about three more months we'll be done with construction on that piece. We are waiting for some funding for the north-south portion to be able to acquire real estate the right way that we need, and then we'll move into construction here in the next year or so. So that's why that construction completion date looks a little bit further out. That's more towards the north-south piece of Westgate. So neighborhood 206 is a part of our 2019 PON program. It is a large neighborhood package that had approximately 120 street segments with a construction value of just over $80 million. So I wanna highlight the area around the old Calhoun Middle School with Congress Street, Mounts, and Denton, and then as well as Cordell Street up to the north that's near the new Calhoun site. So we recently just finished Congress Street. So if you've seen that, it's been paved. So I know we've been getting a lot of complaints about that. So we provided access there. And then the remainder streets around the old Calhoun site and Cordell Street north of the new Calhoun site is planned to be completed over the next few months. So this package continues on well into 2026 for the totality, but hopefully around the Denton ISD schools, we're gonna be out of your hair within the next few months. So lastly, wanted to hit a couple of our safe routes to schools. These are our sidewalk programs that we have going on around quite a few of the elementary schools. So the first one there at the top is Nettie Schultz. A lot of those improvements have been completed. We're waiting on a couple pieces for ATLAS to do some relocations for some conflicts we found during construction. So they're actively working on those. Once they are complete, we'll be out there and finish those sidewalk enhancements. The second piece is Popper's Page, and they actually started this week. So they're gonna be clearing right away and providing that sidewalk that's there on the north side of Popper's Page. That'll go towards the Concrete Elementary. The other two elementary schools that are in the Safe Routes package are Jennings and Alexander. I know Jennings is under construction, but we see a lot of Strickland kids that come down those sidewalks. So a majority of that is complete right now. There's a few leave out pieces that we're working through, but the majority of that segment, all along Stewart, has been completed. And then Alexander, we're currently working on the section of Lattermore. It's gonna be followed by the piece on the south at Mulkey, and then followed by Audra last. So again, part of those sidewalk projects are all in a larger package. We are anticipating to have all the work done near the Denton ISD pieces by summer of next year. With that, I'd be happy to have any questions. - Jennings, follow us out. That's a member for District Two. - Thank you. I have a couple questions. We know that there's, well, we'll charitably call it changes at the federal level. Has any of those changes at the federal level impacted any of our projects or timelines, especially for these things related to the school district? - No, sir, not right now. So a lot of the things that we have currently going on were locked up in agreements, and so as far as federal funding, all of that has been honored so far today with our reimbursements. - Okay, great. Given, again, the nature of the school district interactions, especially in some of the stuff in the north around Reeves, a little bit around the Calhoun area, some of the coordination of sidewalks and streets, all the projects in these segments have both streets and sidewalks, is that correct? Or just streets? - So both, yes, sir. - And the four routes to school, not just generic sidewalks, that's particularly important to make sure that those segments, you alluded to Stuart Road having some segments that are still outlying. How's our coordination with these segments on routes to school for these surrounding neighborhoods? - Yeah, definitely, so the project team, along with our inspectors, try to take into account as we see children or students going to the different school sites. The last thing that we wanna do is put students in a position that is more unsafe than what was currently there, or there before. So again, we're very cognizant of that. Again, we have rules and guidelines to where if it's not ADA compliant, if it's not, again, a safety deal, the last thing we want is to put students through an active construction zone without proper protections. So we do our best, unfortunately, sometimes without other infrastructure around, in the case of Reeves, there's nothing else out there. We have to accommodate the best we can. So that's where you'll see temporary asphalt sidewalks or flex-based paths or different avenues that we try to create something for the students to be able to access to get there as we go through the construction process. - Okay, yeah, I guess I can just encourage you to do the best you can because there's a lot of feedback coming to me through portions of district two and three that involve a lot of these schools that we're talking about that I'm getting a lot of feedback about concerns, not just from members of our boards and commissions, but from a community writ large, especially around Calhoun and Reeves. The last question I'll ask is, it kind of leaps directly off of that. And then this is something I brought up in our mobility committee. I think you and I have talked about it when we talked to some of the folks in the Old North neighborhood, but what opportunities are there to increase communication with our constituency so that they're aware of not just monthly or quarterly changes and timelines, but say 48-hour timelines so that they can make plans, especially for walkers in pedestrian facilities? - Yeah, no, great question. So as a whole, right now Capital Projects is looking at everything we do communication-wise. We're finding that a lot of the avenues and routes that we were taking are not reaching the greatest number of people. So again, that's something that we're currently actively working on. We're working with our contractors to get more door-to-door communications out for those people who are impacted within those areas. Like you said, sometimes it's the roadways, sometimes it's the adjacent roadways. They get missed where we're not working, but they're still impacted getting to schools. So we're currently working with our MarCom team on things on our Disgusted and Platform. We're trying to get more videos and public notices out through social media avenues, whether that be Facebook, Instagram, again, trying to point back to that Disgusted and the page that we update very frequently on the majority of our projects. But again, those are some of the smaller steps that we're taking. I know MarCom has a new platform coming out to where we're hoping to be able to engage even further as far as potentially text messaging or different pieces to where we can notify, again, residents within the neighborhoods that are gonna be impacted in total instead of just the streets that we're actively working on. So again, we see it as an area that we can improve on. And definitely Denton ISD has been a great partner with us to where when we're impacting schools, relaying that to a key couple of people at Denton ISD and then them also disseminating that information to principals and parents. So we've used that avenue as well in the case of Reeves and some of the others. - Okay, I appreciate that. That's all my questions, we're pretend. - Thank you. I appreciate the work on Congress Street. I look forward to Scripture Street, the extension of that. Tell me about, and I always wanna say Armadillo, but it's Amarillo Street. - Amarillo Street, yeah. Yeah, so currently we're just finishing up the hilly replacements and so they've milled off the roadway and essentially we're starting that subgrade work, which will be followed by concrete flatwork and then asphalt paving. So we're in the last half of that segment, if you will. Again, if we can get some of this weather to hold off, I'm anticipating being done in the next month or month and a half. - Okay, okay. And, and I'm gonna get this wrong, Alexander is a unique campus in that kids only get there by walking or bus drop-off, is that right? - I do not know. - I live over there near that area. - Is that not correct? - Walk, bus or parent drop-off, parent drop-off. - There was a unique, as I recall, there was a unique get-to-school thing about Alexander. Am I, am I? - I don't recall that. - Then I beg your pardon, thank you. - Newton Razor recently had a big bike to school event, but-- - In a previous life, I dealt with him. I dealt with this, but I've slept since then, so. (laughing) - Yeah, we improved some sidewalks when we did North Street. - Did we bus? - The neighborhood that was east. - My recollection was that kids could only get to school on a bus. Again, again, I thought that. - Any other questions? Y'all can't let Seth off this easy, no, not yet. (laughing) All right, and this one's for Seth. Can you expound on the routing and where exactly the southern trail entrance will be to Reeves? I've had some constituents asking about like, I guess there's maybe a small bridge that needs to be built, and I'm not really familiar with where exactly all this routing can be. - Yeah, so essentially we're gonna grab it from where the playground structure and pavilion is near North Lakes Park, extended around the soccer fields. It'll run almost in between the soccer and football fields, and then once you get to the east side, excuse me, the west side of the football fields, it's gonna come north, essentially in front of the parking lot, cross the drainage channel, and towards, into the back of campus. So, I'm sorry I don't have a map, but for those who are familiar with that area, that's the general vicinity it's gonna be. - Sure, so the residents and the kids that live in sort of the North Lakes neighborhood, I guess they would go, they would cross Windsor, it's kind of take the trails in a bit of a roundabout way and then sort of access from the, what is that? - Correct, so you'll come through the sidewalk along the existing playgrounds, and then we're essentially grabbing it at the very north end of that and extending it to the elementary school. - Does anyone have any final questions? All right, thank you so much, Seth. - Thank y'all. - Next item on the agenda, BID 25-1594, receive a report and hold a discussion regarding debt and ISD's upcoming tax selection. - Dr. Thompson, our deputy superintendent is gonna provide that update. First one. - Unfortunately, I've seen this presentation a few times, Dr. O'Berry and I, so we're gonna give you the abridged version, but definitely if you have questions, we'd love to answer those. So you might've heard we're out for a Prop A, which is a vader, a voter approval tax ratification election. And so we always leave with this, mostly as a reminder for us to make sure that what we're sharing is information only. We're not advocating for or against, just sharing the information about where we are as a district and why we're in this scenario. I'm gonna switch it up just a little bit, and I was thinking about this this morning, and we'll go back to this slide. So a very quick school finance parameter, if you'll allow. Our funding, again, as a public institution, really comes to us, our revenue comes to us in two buckets. So there's much discussion about these buckets and a lot of misunderstanding about how school funding works, largely as funded by property taxes, right, from the local perspective. And I'm gonna start with the INS bucket. The interest in sinking bucket is effectively like our mortgage. It pays for long-term capital debt like all bonds. It is largely, that particular bucket is largely filled up with local property taxes. There are some school districts, particularly property poor school districts, who get a little bit of state funding. We get a little bit of state funding now, particularly in terms of hold harmless kinds of funding that comes, but largely the INS bucket is fully decided upon by local property taxpayers and largely funded by local property taxpayers. So that bucket is our mortgage payment, if you will. The M&O bucket is what we're talking about specifically now. The maintenance and operation bucket is what pays for all of our day-to-day operations from teacher salaries to the electric bill. And we can't use INS dollars for any of that. So when we get the comments online about, well, if you weren't building all these things, then you could pay teachers more. And the reality is we can't use the money that build the things to pay for the teachers. And so that's a requirement of those two buckets. So the maintenance and operations part of our budget and the bucket is the revenue that we're talking about. And so with that, I'm going to go back a slide. And so if you will imagine this as a bucket or a glass of our maintenance and operations funding. And so generically, when we talk about property taxes and we'll talk about our tax rate, you are aware that the property taxes we pay are a function of the rates of the taxing entities and the appraised values of the property that are being taxed. And so the more local property taxes we collect, which in spite of whatever the rates have been, probably most of us are paying more in property taxes. And so the misconception is, is the more property taxes I'm paying locally, the more the school district must be getting or the city or the other taxing entities. In the school district's case, that is not the case. The more local property taxes we collect, the more of our glass that's filled with local property taxes, the less the state has to contribute. The size of our glass or our bucket is entirely determined by our student population. And not just the students that are enrolled, but the students that are in attendance. So we look at an average daily attendance, Texas is one of six states that's funded on attendance as opposed to enrollment. Our budget is built on enrollment, 100%, but we are only funded on the attendance. Yes, ma'am. - And can you help remind me, is this both the interest in sinking as well as the maintenance? Are we, when we talk about this slide? - This is really just the maintenance and operations bucket. - Thank you very much. - The interest in sinking bucket does have a small amount of blue in some districts and cities. There are some existing debt allotments and a few state fundings that go toward facilities, but it's very minimal. And so there's some hold harmless dollars that are there, but the INS bucket doesn't work this same way. The state doesn't fill up our INS bucket, the INS bucket is filled up by local property taxpayers and voted upon by local property taxpayers. The maintenance and operations bucket is this sliding scale. The more we collect locally, it doesn't mean the more we receive as a school district, the more we collect locally, the less the state has to put in. And if you were in a situation where locally we collected enough orange to overfill our cup, we don't get to keep that. That overflow goes back to the state, ostensibly to be used primarily to fill up other property poor districts cups, so that are unable to collect them up locally. But once everybody's cup in the state is full on the M&O side, that overflow remains at the state level, it doesn't come back in the public school system. So that's part of what contributes to that statewide surplus. So the challenge for us as we share this information is to convince folks that the more property taxes they pay doesn't necessarily mean the more school dollars we receive. It is the case now in Denton ISD that 100% of the property taxes that are paid locally come to us. And as that orange level rises, it just means the state has to contribute less to fill up our cup. And the size of our cup is entirely determined by our student population and those who are in attendance on average. So when we look at where we stand from a tax rate perspective, compared to our colleagues in Denton County, our tax rate ranks dead last as far as size. And so you will see here the two components that make up the size of our M&O tax rate. One is MCR tier one and MCR stands for maximum compressed rate. So it was true in the old days that our local school boards had some jurisdiction, some discretion about where to set that M&O tax rate that's not the case anymore. TEA sends us a letter every August that says, here's what your maximum compressed tier one tax rate can be. And so this gets very complex and I really try to stay out of the weeds, although I'm an old math teacher, so it's very hard for me not to go too far off in the distance, but the size of our glass, the amount of entitlement is the word that is used, the amount of revenue we're entitled to from the state is based on our student attendance and it's based on a function of what's called the basic allotment and amount per student that is funded, which started in 2019 was $6,160 at a base level. It had not changed since 2019 until this last spring and it went up $55 to 2015. And that determines the size of our entitlement and the MCR tier one level is set by the state and it is set because if you look at our tier one levels, we're pretty much the same as everybody else in this area because our property values are very similar to our neighbors and that MCR, that maximum compressed rate is set by the state relative to a statewide property growth percentage. So the state determines what is statewide property growth look like. If your local county exceeds that, then your local property tax rate is compressed by the state and so that happens on an annual basis, our property growth compared to the state. That's tier one, that's the foundational level of funding and that is determined by our student population. The tier two level for maintenance and operations is an enrichment level. And so statute allows for every school district to receive up to 17 pennies on the tax rate of enrichment. And initially when that was set in statute a few years back, the state gave us access to four of those pennies for free. We did not have to go out for voter approval, but any of the additional pennies had to receive voter approval. Denton ISD went out in 2017 for TRE, similar to our property that we have now, and got two pennies. And so Denton ISD has had six pennies for really several years. The states come back and given us five pennies for free, we got to keep the one that we had. And so Denton ISD has a tier two rate of six pennies. Some of our neighbors have all the way up to 17 pennies. And so this is the only other lever besides additional students that will allow our cut to get bigger. So the foundational level is established for our student population. The tier two level will allow us to enlarge that. That's the only other way we can potentially generate revenue and it's based on voter approval. You might look at those in Denton County and say, well, Denton ISD is not really like Ponder or Crum or Aubrey. So we look also at a peer group of districts that are similar in size and student demographics to us. And so we're dead last in Denton County as far as the size of our tax rate. If you look at our peer group, we're next to last. The three that are below us have one penny lower on their tier two rate and we're at six cents. Our Prop A is asking for five additional enrichment pennies in the tier two allotment. If you look at either one of these lists, if Prop A were to pass in a couple of weeks, we would move up one space on each one of these lists. And so there are additional enrichment dollars that have gone to those districts that are above us annually as a part of this process. I won't go through the details on this. We've talked about it quite a lot. We've had a lot of financial impact, both loss of revenue and increased expenditures over the last several years, but particularly in the last couple that have contributed to more than $32 million worth of financial impact to us. We talked about the lack of increased funding since 2019. Y'all probably noticed as well that inflation has gone up precipitously since those COVID days. And so costs of everything have gone up, but our revenues, our foundational revenues stayed the same. We lost some federal dollars through SHARS. We have to provide services to kids in special education, occupational health and therapy and those sorts of things that were required to provide. And we were receiving some reimbursement. We've lost five to $7 million worth of federal dollars in the last couple of years for SHARS. Transportation has traditionally been underfunded. Safety and security, you're familiar with House Bill 3 from a session ago where we were mandated by law to provide an armed security officer at every campus. We've certainly partnered with the city for SROs, but we now have SSO, school security officers that we have at every campus. I think it's a great idea. A problem is, is it was funded at about 20% of the cost of that program when it first was passed. And so we talked to our legislators in between the last two sessions and they're like, "Yeah, we were way underfunded that." And so they doubled that funding for that House Bill 3 requirements. And now they're funding 40% of the cost of those SSOs. And so we were asked, where do you get the additional money for that? It comes out of our M&O budget. And so that cost, all of these other costs have contributed to more than $30 million. What have we done to address it? We have two ways to increase revenue. We've talked about those. So how do we cut expenditures? Our budget is 80% people. And so that's the lion's share. We've done all the other things we can do to try to create efficiencies to cut out places where we could decrease spending that are non-personnel. But going into last year, 24, 25, we reduced 104 and a half positions, all through attrition, mostly through attrition, through folks that have left voluntarily. My nickname in the district for the last 20 months has become Dr. No, because people don't make eye contact 'cause they're afraid they might lose their job or get somebody else's. And that's the challenge that we've been in in the last little bit. But we've really tried to protect the classroom as much as possible. And so last year, going into last year, we did add nine and a half positions at an elementary across the district. We opened Martinez a year ago. So we opened a whole new campus. We only added nine and a half elementary FTEs. And so if you start counting up the things that we couldn't move, like a principal and assistant principal and a nurse and PE and art, we filled that campus with moving from other places. And we cut 104 non-classroom positions. That got us almost $5 million of savings going into 24, 25. That was not enough. We did the same thing over the course of the last year coming into 25, 26 and cut an additional 144 and a half positions. This time we did have to go into the classroom level. We increased class size ratios across all levels. Opened two elementary campuses this year and still cut 40 positions. And so that's beginning to now have an impact at the classroom level as well. So over the last two, this saved us about $8 million. So cut 249 positions, saved $13 million in the last couple of years of personnel expenditures. You might've heard, we got record level funding from the legislature this year. And that is true. We did have a significant amount of dollars that came to the public school system. We started, we passed a budget. Our board passed a budget in June based on current law at the time, prior to the House bill to additional dollars. That revenue and expenditures were at the top and left us with about a $19 million deficit. House bill two revenue came in, we got $19 million worth of new money. Seems like a pretty puzzle piece solution. The problem is, is that of that $19 million of new revenue, almost 12 million of it was already spent for us. On great things, we're all about paying teachers more. But 12 million of those dollars that came to us were tagged already for teacher and other support staff raises, which again, we applaud or are thankful for the revenues to be able to do that. And certainly very, very deserving. But when you take the 19 minus 12, that left us with $7 million of discretionary funding to address our $19 million deficit budget. And our board, we appreciated our board because we were not able to give a raise to anybody and get NYSD in 24, 25. Our board came back and said, we're going to use some of those dollars to give a 3% raise to all of the people who were not mandated to receive one from the legislature. And that cost us another $3 million. So that left us with, out of the $19 million of new money, left us with $4 million of discretionary revenue to offset that $19 million budget. I'm gonna jump through these quickly. What's changed? We've talked about teacher and staff resources, not only just classroom student and teacher ratios, but many of the support staff, interventionist and reading recovery teachers, and other folks that support teachers and mentor teachers have had to be reduced. And those resources definitely have been felt at the classroom level. We've talked about the House Bill 3 safety mandates that were required, but not fully funded. And then just student programs in general. We've cut back Latin, we've lost some whole languages, some CTE reshuffling. And so we've really tried to look at what would have the least amount of impact in the classroom and affect the least number of kids, but it still affects kids and it still affects teachers. We put together a 1925 advisory committee last fall, had a group of a significant number of community and parents and teachers and folks that were involved in this process. 1925, some name, because we were building a fiscal year 25 budget on fiscal year 19 funding. So we went through the process, much like we would have with a bond proposal in other years. A lot of education, a lot of advocacy, explaining where we were and soliciting feedback about where could we begin to cut and what could we begin to do to address these situations. And so that group met through December of last year. We took a break while the legislature was in session to see what happened. We brought them back in May and met again, to ask what their recommendations were, and they came to our board in May or June and recommended to our board that we pursue a voter approval tax ratification election, which is why we're here with Prop A. So our budget deficit following House Bill Two dollars that have come our way, we're currently sitting on about a $15 million deficit budget, and that's not the first year we've had a deficit budget in the last two or three. With five cents of tier two additional enrichment dollars, or pennies, we would receive almost $27 million of new funding, which is substantive. And so that would leave us, if Prop A were to pass with an $11 million in change surplus budget for this school year, and would it give us some ability, some breathing room going forward. What would we do with that? Well, we would try to begin to move back in the direction of restoring some of the things that we've had to cut, specifically looking at teacher and staff support, safety and security, and student programs and enrichment. So I'm gonna move forward to talk about that here. If you look at our starting salary, we, looking again at our peer group of districts, we're at the bottom of that list as well. And so it's very challenging for us to recruit and retain high quality instructors when we're challenged with starting pay, and that's definitely a function of our revenue source as well, and so in a lot of places in our district, we're very close to other districts who are on this list who can recruit our teachers away. And so one of the things that we wanna do is to try to get back to be competitive. We don't wanna be last on this list. And so that's one of the areas that we would address. So as we talk to taxpayers about this, because it is a five cent tax rate increase, it's very clear that's what we're asking for. But if you look at the portion of the tax bill that we have some control over, our tax rate is what you see here, model since 2016-17, and it has gone down, our tier one tax rate has gone down over 38 cents since 2017-18. And if you could go back a couple of years back on this slide, you could add another 50 cents to that, because the blue and the yellow line are the tier one and tier two rates that fill up our M&O bucket. The green bar at the top is our INS, and it has remained at 48 cents since 2017-18, and it's remained steady in our INS bucket. But the blue and the yellow are our tier one and tier two rates, and those have declined precipitously over the last several years. And so the last two bars on the right are the scenarios without Prop A, which would leave us at $1.15.69 for $100 of taxable value. With Prop A, it would take us to $1.20. We go through this process. It's a five-cent tax rate increase, but if you look at year over year for this current year and last year, you take an average taxable home in 2024, is certified by DCAP. We've tracked out the $100,000 of homestead exemption that's currently law. Last year at $1.15.69, and you compare that to what we project will be the case in 2025. We know we have certified values for an average home in Denton ISD, less what we assume will be $140,000 of homestead exemption. We're pretty confident that's gonna pass in this election. And so when you reduce the higher homestead exemption, and if you assume that the Prop A were to pass at $1.20.69 being our rate, it still is a net lower tax bill for folks in an average homestead from 2025 over 2024. I wanna be clear, it's still a tax rate increase, but in this particular year, the homestead exemption reduction would offset for many, many homeowners, a five cent tax rate increase for the district. Yeah, still a five cent tax rate increase. So we point folks back to the DCAD. We don't really want, we're not tax assessors and don't wanna get in the business of calculating people's tax bills. So we point this QR code on the left takes to the DCAD. Excuse me, on the right takes to the DCAD. And the elections were in day two of early voting. And we have a pretty extensive Prop A website as well that has additional answers and other FAQs over there. Happy to take any questions. I went through that about as fast as I could go, I think, which was still probably twice as long as you wanted it to be, but. Yes, sir. - How many classroom teachers are there in DISD? And an approximate number is fine. - About 2,500. - About 2,500, I think. - We have almost 5,000 employees, about 2,500 of our teachers. - And how many of that 2,500 are getting starting salary? - Two teachers. - Did you know that, Joseph? - Like zero here, teachers probably under the 200. 'Cause we have provisional teachers too that are filling classrooms as they work on their certification. So that group really is our five percent. - Yes, yep, okay. (speaking faintly) Good, thank you. - On the end. - One comment to that though. I know the slide he showed was the starting salary. It looks about the same. If you look anywhere in our salary schedule, 10-year teachers, five-year teachers, there is a commonality across the entire salary schedule. (speaking faintly) - Thank you. I know in one of the slides you were talking about how the 2-1 rate kind of in today's dollars dropped to 0.6 from one. And with the additional $12 million, if the bond or the property passes, you expect to recover some of the cuts and losses. What would it take to completely bring us back to whole and best practices and teacher levels? Is it the five cents minus the 40 cent drop? Is it 35 cents? - So most calculations that we saw going into this last legislative session said the $6,160 that was a basic allotment per student that was set back in 2019, inflation adjusted to keep that constant just to make it even, that basic allotment needed to jump up $1,400 or so to keep us whole from a state-level funding standpoint. We got $55 instead of $1,400. So it would take, we don't have enough tax rate to be able to offset that. And so five pennies on the INS rate, there are more pennies that we could have gone out for, but we really tried to listen to our 1925 committee. Our board has been very conservative about not asking like many other districts have had to or have already done. So we tried to balance what our needs are to get our nose back above water, so to speak, also with what we felt like taxpayers. We wanna be good stewards of those taxpayer dollars. And so we didn't ask for all the pennies that are out there. Obviously, we joke about it internally that the CFO would love to have more revenue to be able to offset it. And I flipped to a slide that's in our appendix to kind of illustrate this answer. But the short answer is I don't know how many pennies it would take to get us back, but here's where we are. The Texas Education Agency and other government accounting entities recommend that we keep three months of operating expenses in our fund balance, our savings, our reserves. And so if you go back to our monthly, we're the second largest employer in Denton behind UNT, our monthly operating expenses are about $35 million a month. So for us, we need to keep about 105 million or so in our fund balance to be healthy from a financial standpoint. If you go back to 21, 22, this bar, we were at 108 million. So we were pretty spot on, this blue line shows you how many months we have in reserves. So that's our measure. We were about there in 21, 22. You can see what's happened to our fund balance precipitously dropped over the last three years because we're using savings to keep our maintenance and operations budget afloat. It's not audited just yet, but we're very close to about $60 million. We're projected to be at $60 million as the end of last fiscal year, end of June 30th, which for us is about three quarters of a month of operating expenses. With Prop A, we was about back up to almost 72 million, which would put us a little over one and a half months. Without Prop A, this year, we maintain the $15 million deficit budget that we have. We projected to be at about $44 million at the end of this year, which is right over a third of a month of operating, which is not just about having a rainy day fund in case something bad happens. It's really a cashflow issue for us. We don't get a monthly paycheck from the state. We get 60% of our state funding in the months of September and October. We've gotten those, and we won't get another check from TEA until next August, where we'll get the balance of that. And so this fund balance serves really as a cashflow tool for us as well. And so we will, one way or the other, have to solve our budget deficit crisis by the end of this fiscal year, because we don't have a choice. We don't have enough reserves to continue this process of using our savings to pay advance in operations side. So five pennies, we'll get our nose back above water. The other thing I would say is, you might say, well, $11 million surplus, that's pretty high. We were funded to give raises for a big chunk of our employees this year, and our board graciously gave raises to the others. For us to give a 3% raise in Denton ISD cost about $10 million. So that $11 million could provide us one more year of cost of living salary increases for everybody in the district one more time, pending additional revenue. So it will, ultimately, the reality is, it will not be enough dollars to solve our long-term problems. It will remedy the situation we're in right now. But we not only need to meet the budget that we have right now, but we need to begin to refill our fund balance as well in order to be a financially healthy operation. - All right, I appreciate that. Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you, Mr. President. How does that voucher situation affect our number of kids who are in school, plays a lot to the amount that we're getting back? - Absolutely. - Talk to us a little bit about how that affects us. - Yes, it remains to be seen as that will go into effect next school year. And so-- - Oh, okay, that's right. - School choice is not new. School choice has been available all along. But a billion dollars of public funds going to another program is new. And so that's the potential concerns associated with that. We still feel like the public school system and then it's the best game in town. We're very proud of what we do. And we're still, regardless of school choice, believe we will educate the lion's share of kids that go through the school system. The challenge is the funding, right? And so, and Dr. Rivera speaks more coherently about this than me because I'm relatively new to Denton, but we do lose kids out of our system to charters and to private schools, and we always have. People have that option to choose and have always availed themselves of that. Home school is a choice that has grown, possibly tripled in the last five years since COVID. And prior to that, I would say generically, home school was kind of a choice for religious or other kinds of reasons like that. Now we're seeing it more and more as a choice of convenience because people were able to stay home for a period of time. And so we're seeing that happen more and more. And there's some folks that are doing that really well also. Definitely don't have a problem with that. And I still feel like even when we've lost some kids who've chosen other options, oftentimes we get them back because they realize the grass maybe wasn't green or somewhere else, or just, again, we provide transportation, we provide special ed services, we provide all of it, and we take all. And so we still feel like we're gonna be the best game in town and we feel like we'll be able to survive that. The challenge is, is that billion dollars that's already been assigned to those voucher programs, is a billion dollars that could have come to us to help alleviate this situation. It's just not gonna come to our taxpayers to ask for a sacrifice on their part to give us additional dollars. - I'd like to share, Dr. Thompson, one of the things that when we've been providing these informational settings, it often is asked of us, 'cause we share what will we do with Prop A, and it's often asked what would we do without Prop A. So when Prop A passes, the benefits are we even out this year's deficit, and we have 11 million to contribute either back to fund balance, prioritize teacher pay, reduce class sizes back to the state recommended levels, whatnot. Without Prop A, we still have a $15 million deficit. And Dr. Thompson went through to absorb 250 positions, 249.5 positions, saved us 13 million on the budget. So without Prop A, in order to have a balanced budget, we're going to have to reduce at least 250 additional positions, which looks like larger class sizes. It looks like additional teaching blocks at middle and high schools. And the last lever we have to pull is campus closure. And we have about four campuses, four elementary campuses, that have less than 450 students in them. They're built for about 750. People will say that's not efficient to operate a campus at that level, but if I bought my house so that my child could walk to that school, I want that school to remain open. So the reality is those are the circumstances we're facing. As Dr. Thompson shared in the fund balance slides, we don't have the potential to not have a balanced budget next year. So we've got some really hard conversations to face. And quite honestly, with Prop A, we're going to have to prioritize what we've lost that is most important to regain first, because the circumstances are just as such that we can't immediately recoup everything. One of the other things that I joke often when we present, this wasn't the best time to apply for this position, superintendent of schools. But one of the things that I started asking Dr. Thompson very soon as CFO is how come our budget is in this circumstance and some neighboring districts or some of those peer districts deficit doesn't look like ours. And if you look at that tier two tax rate to some of our peer districts, they've been receiving some of them 17 cents of revenue additional for five or more years. So if you put that in context with the five cents that's on our Prop A, 26 million even for only five pennies, not what 17 would have generated over five years for us historically would have kept us out of the deficit that we're in now and all the reductions. But the reality is, we are fast growth, we have had to ask our community for bonds and so we've tried to be extremely conservative in asking our taxpayers for additional rate increase 'cause the simple fact is it is a tax rate increase. And so that's a little behind the curtain of how we're here. - We just have. - I'd like to add a little to what you just said. If we have to cut, cutting 250 positions, these are math specialists, reading specialists, these are people who actually make the difference between some kids being successful or not. And the first thing when we saw how much money we were gonna get, even though it's not enough, first thing in my mind is oh boy, we can hire some of these people back because we're about to get clobbered with test scores on kids who could have, which is a couple of points difference, passed. And the status being really relentless and calculating and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze and then punish us when we just barely missed the cut. And it's how everybody can see that because it's really hard. As Dr. O'Baron just said, there are other districts that jumped up there and got the 17 cents years ago. That'd be, for us, it would be about $70 million or so. We would be in really great shape and we were in really good shape five years ago. But the state has cut it, cut it, cut it, squeeze it, squeeze it, squeeze it. And we're down to the point that the juice is not worth the squeeze, maybe. - Additionally, when Councilwoman Byrd spoke on the vouchers, even when parents make that choice to take their kids to a charter school, if those charter schools don't have the accommodations for special ed and some of the programs that public school offers, then they have to come back to the public school. So they'll take them to another funding source, but they'll come back to us and use our resources that they're not fully funding us on. So it's not a win-win. And they can pick and choose if they wanna do special ed and all the things, so. - Ms. Fry. - Just wanna share a little bit. Several people had mentioned instructional resources, teacher support, and why not just are we focusing on classroom teachers, but also those wraparound services. And from a personal example, I'm gonna share my story about my kiddos. Ma, I have a, I've got one at all three campus levels, elementary, middle school, and high school. I've got a elementary kiddo who was in first grade last year, and we have first grade. One of our board goals is to have kids reading on grade level by third grade, 'cause it's a huge indicator of their successors later, right? First grade, he came into first grade, summer slide, he came into first grade reading on an early kindergarten grade level. They do, you know, part of their planning and learning committees, they recommend students for additional intervention. He was recommended for additional reading intervention. He did not get accepted into additional reading intervention because his campus only has a quarter of a reading interventionist. Fast forward a little bit, he has an amazing first grade teacher who has several years under her belt and has some of the tools, her own tool belt to be able to do that differentiated instruction. And I'll fast forward to the end of the story. He saw a year and a half of growth in first grade, came into second grade, we just had parent-teacher conference. He's on second grade leading reading level, but all that to say he did that. A success story, he has an involved parent, he had a multi-year experienced teacher that could provide the differentiated instruction without those interventionist or instructional coaches and an experienced teacher. I don't know if that would have been the same, right? So there's a lot of variables there that go into not just the classroom teacher, that those instructional coaches and reading interventionist are hugely important. So we threw out those and the importance of them. I just wanted to kind of share a real life story of the why. Any questions? - I just have one point of clarification. I think it was slide 10 with all the FTEs. I just want to make sure I'm fully understanding what I'm looking at. Yes, so when I see elementary, is that, or middle or high school, is that only teachers or is that any employee potentially in the classroom reductions? Okay, so those are teacher-teachers. And then non-classroom could be in an elementary, middle or high school, but they're just not in the classroom. Just to make sure, the non-classroom, yes, could be. Those are primarily, you're outside the classroom support. So like what Ms. Wright was just talking about, reading recovery instructional coaches or non-campus. So everyone on executive cabinet, my executive cabinet that's here has picked up some extra responsibility. So any position that we separated, they resigned, retired, we absorbed and redistributed the duties. So that last category is a combination of both. Some campus-based that aren't in classroom and the majority of them are non-campus-based professionals. - Thank you. - Okay, see no other questions. The next time that we meet, does anybody have any items that you would want to discuss whenever the next time we meet? (mumbles) (laughing) Any items you'd like to pick up? If somebody doesn't have an idea today. - Yes, we usually work with the superintendent's office and we create each other ideas and create an agenda, just to know if it's somebody that (mumbles) - If I could get a burning topic you wanna talk about at a future date? All right. (mumbles) (mumbles) - And the Denton City Council meeting is adjourned as one of. Thank y'all.