Board of Supervisors Budget Work Session #2 – School Board Funding Request and CIP   3/11/2024

Good afternoon.

Pleased to call to order this special day of the album.

We're all counting for Supervisors on this 11th of March.

We have in room 241 to the back of our building.

We're also joined by our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorneys, and Mayor, Mr. Steve Rosenberg.

Welcome.

and our clerk is called Ed Borgerson.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for what you do for our citizens every day in your service.

Thank you very much, Chair Andrews.

I'm here, Judy Lee, Chair of the School Board.

Vice Chair Kate Aikoff is here.

Also, we have in the audience, Chuck Face and Ram Page joining us here today.

Thank you.

Let's just start here briefly.

Today is the second budget board session on the county executive's fiscal year 25 recommended budget.

First, to hear from the public schools and their operating requests and to allow the board time to engage with them.

after that we would recommend a break and then we will come back and continue in general fund where we ended at the public safety chapter on Wednesday and then we'll continue from there.

With that I'll turn it back over to the chair.

Well I believe that

back to the presentation of the School Department.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for the opportunity today to make a brief presentation to you about where we currently stand with our funding requests.

After our presentation, we, members of our School Division staff, will be on hand to answer any questions you may have.

As always, this is a needs-based funding request that focuses on maintaining services for our students, as well as continues

St.

Louis, Diantha McKeel, Diantha

Thank you, Nicole.

As we wrote in our recent letter to you, the basis of any public service is to work together toward the betterment of our community.

We're very fortunate to partner with the Board of Supervisors that genuinely cares about the quality of our public schools, not only the quality of the buildings themselves, but also, and most importantly, the quality of the opportunities we provide to the students who attend them.

Variety communities are home to thriving students, and we recognize and appreciate your commitment to supporting the vision, mission, values, and goals of the Albemarle County Public Schools.

We do not want to miss this opportunity to thank you in person for your recent support of our appeal to amend our Capital Request and increased funding for our two critical projects, our new Southern Feeder Pattern Elementary School and High School Center too, which you can see in those slides.

Your partnership with us will help us address capacity needs that support student success.

In a county with growing student enrollment and where our youngest schools are more than 20 years old, and our oldest schools are nearly 90 years old, we know our capital improvement plan still faces challenges.

But we also know that we have the support of our world superiors first, and for that we sincerely thank you.

As I mentioned today, we're presenting a new needs-based funding request.

That request currently includes a sizable funding gap of $13.3 million.

We are presenting a shortfall today because our budget development process has not yet over, and this is where we are right now.

Primarily, we're awaiting updated state revenue numbers and our outlook is positive.

We also have plans for how we would make expenditure reductions should they be needed.

We'll also talk about why we have a gap, but the most important thing I want to communicate is that every budget decision thus far has been made in an effort to maintain current levels of service and sustain an upward trajectory for our learners and our employees.

Every year, we include our strategic plan and our funding request.

And we do so because our vision, commission, values, and goals provide the scaffolding for every decision that we make.

And the budget is obviously no exception.

We take care to align our budget decisions with strategic goals that focus on the well-being of students, supporting and strengthening our community, and distributing resources in a way that affects the positive change in outcomes.

While our strategic plan guides our budget decisions, we also consider the valuable feedback and guidance from our recent instructional... Thank you.

One of the recommendations from the audit involves using a planning tool called a theory of change to identify strategies, actions, and resources that can facilitate change and bring about desired outcomes.

This process includes reflecting on the various roles of the people in our school division and the influence of those roles on student success.

We're still creating our theory of change, but we're focused on the idea that we each play an important part in transforming the words of our strategic plan into actions that positively affect student learning.

It is our collective ownership, commitment, flexibility, and accountability that power our strategic plan and make it come to life.

Our budget development process is an example of our strategic plan in action.

We have five primary planning goals.

to develop a budget that advances the school division's mission, to provide a plan that supports competitive benefits and salaries and reflects market adjustments, to develop a responsive and systematic approach to operations that reflects best practices and ensures long-term financial stability, to present budget proposals that align with school division's strategic plan and school board's policies, and to incorporate metrics such as logic models and performance measures into our management and decision-making schools.

Whether we are facing decisions large or small, these are the operating principles we look to for difference.

One of the most vital components of our budget development process is community engagement.

I mentioned before that we each play an important role in transforming our strategic plans into positive impacts on student learning.

That plays out in our budget development process, which includes a variety of ways for students, staff, families, and community members to participate and provide an input.

In turn, we use that feedback to determine priorities and develop strategies in building our A.

Before we jump into the numbers, I'd like to provide a quick update on the employees and students of ACPS.

Our greatest resource is and will always be our dedicated staff members.

This year, ACPS employs 2,792 employees, half of whom are teachers.

Administrators including our principals, assistant principals, and central office leaders make up just 6% of our workforce.

Classified staff including all non-teachers and non-administrative positions such as teaching assistants, bus drivers, custodians, and office associates make up the remaining 43% of our own.

69% of our teachers have at least a master's degree.

24% of our employees are people of color.

The average age of our employees is 45, and employees have served our division for an average of eight years.

64% of our employees live in Albemarle County, 12% live in Charlottesville City, and the remaining 24% live in surrounding counties.

This school year, our 2,792 employees are serving more than 13,800 diverse learners in preschool through 12th grade, 42% of whom are students of color.

More than 1,800 students, or 13%, are eligible for special education services.

Nearly 4,200 students, or 30.4%, are economically disadvantaged, meaning that their households meet the income eligibility criteria for free or reduced price school meals.

And more than 1,600 of our students, or 11.9%, are English learners, meaning that their first language is a language other than English, and they are participating in a special program for learning English.

Our students are also internationally diverse, representing 100 counties of origin and speaking 76 home languages.

And here we are as promised, the why behind the funding gap.

You might notice a big and unusual dip in state funding in fiscal year 25.

While our funding request is growing by a modest 5% between this year and this, state revenues are decreasing by more than 11%.

As you know, the state uses local composite index for LCI to determine which school division's ability to pay education costs with local funds.

LCI is calculated using three indicators of a locality's ability to pay.

The true value of real property weighted 50%, adjusted gross income weighted at 40%, and taxable retail sales, which is weighted at 10%.

When our composite index goes up, the state estimates that our county can take on a greater share of education spending

using local donors, and it provides less funding.

For the 2024 to 2026 biennium, our LCI has been calculated at a higher rate, and the state will share less of the burden for education costs at Albemarle County.

To put that change into perspective, if we applied our new higher LCI to state funding for the current school year, we would have received about $10 million less from the state.

So our higher LCI calculation is a primary reason for the drop in state funding we're expecting for fiscal year

Here's a snapshot of anticipated revenue from all sources.

We're budgeting for a 5.3 increase in local revenues and an 11.2% drop in state funding.

That's more than $8 million less from the state.

And our federal revenues are maintaining steady at just over $600,000.

Altogether, that equals a 0.7% increase in recurring revenues, or 1.85%.

In the current fiscal year, we applied $2.2 million in one-time revenues.

We're not currently budgeting for use of one-time revenues in fiscal year 25, though it is still under consideration.

So right now, we're facing a 5% increase in expenses and a revenue stream that is approximately $350,000 less than our current operating budget.

I will point out that state revenues are based on the governor's proposed budget from December.

However, we are expecting a newly improved

funding forecast from the state news.

Our 5% expenditure increase totals just under $13 million, and includes elimination of one-time expenditures from fiscal year 24, baseline adjustments in the form of mid-year compensation changes that were applied in January, and some technical and nondiscretionary changes, including a projected increase in health care costs for fiscal year 25, which we discussed, inflationary increases in operating costs, and a transfer to bright stars to offset the decrease in state funding for the program, while also expanding in number of preschoolers we can serve.

The biggest chunk of our expenditure increase is allocated to five proposals totaling $10.4 million.

These are not proposals that will move us closer to meeting goals of our strategic plan, rather they're necessary to help us maintain current levels of service.

Speaking of maintaining services, I wanted to take a moment to point out just briefly that public schools today do more than ever to meet the social, emotional, mental, and fiscal needs of our community's children.

Over time, the role of public schools has shifted to absorb more and more responsibilities that were once considered the function of families, society, and government.

Health and fiscal education, school transportation, fine arts, school meals, preschool, afterschool programs, family life,

The list is long, but we embrace these responsibilities because we know they're necessary for students to learn and thrive.

And we are uniquely suited and committed to providing every student with these levels of security.

You will see that the proposals we've created in the funding workforce are not ambitious but necessary based on the very expectations of schools and the services we're responsible for.

Each year, our proposals, and there are five included in this request, represent the highest priorities for the division.

As part of our budget development process, we collaborated with students, staff, families, and community members to assemble a list of priorities that reflect the most significant needs and desires of our school community and set us on a path toward accomplishing the goals of our strategic plan.

Unfortunately, our funding restraints limits that we can realistically tackle and leave us unmet needs.

In alignment with our commitment to produce a needs-based funding request, we're forwarding five proposals from fiscal year 25 that help us offer a competitive and equitable compensation program, meet the growing needs of our engaged learners and students with disabilities, ensure ongoing and equitable access to our social-emotional supports, and serve the academic needs of our most at-risk learners.

Thank you, Chair Lee.

And good afternoon, Chair Andrews and members of the Board of Supervisors.

I'll go into a little more detail now about the five proposals.

The 3% compensation increase we're proposing at a cost of $5.7 million emphasizes the importance of sustainable wages, competitive pay, and standardized increases for all staff.

First and foremost, our employees must be able to adequately support themselves and their families.

More than three quarters of our employees live in either Albemarle County or Charlottesville City, where the cost of living is among the most expensive in the state.

Sustainable, however, is not enough.

Not if we want to attract higher and key exceptional employees.

Our wages must also be competitive to maintain our position in the 60th percentile of our market.

We've also committed ourselves to internal equity.

And one way to accomplish that is to standardize businesses that provide all employees with the same chance at improved wages.

Lots of Cyrus.

Two of our proposals totaling just under $500,000 each include additional staffing to serve our growing English learner and special education population.

Over the past 10 years, as you can see in the chart on the left,

We have experienced a 48% increase in the number of English learners that we serve.

And as a percentage of our total student population, English learners have grown from 8.3 to 11.9% of our total student body.

We also see unpredictable increases in this population, as evidenced by the more than 100 additional English learners we've enrolled just since our September 30th count.

Students with Disabilities is another population where we've seen significant growth.

Compared with 10 years ago, we are now serving 33% more students in our special education programs.

In that same time, students with disabilities increase from 10.1% of our student population to 13%.

Again, the growth doesn't just occur every year.

Between the September 30th and December 1st, we gained an additional 120%

But these populations aren't just increasing in number.

Their needs are also shifting.

In addition to increasing our ability to serve our growing English learner population, an additional five FTEs will help provide support to needed instruction that reflects the divisions on going equity work.

Many of these students, in addition to not having language skills, have had various body or absent education factors.

Likewise, the increase in our special ed population is marked by a significant and unpredictable increase in the students with medically complex needs.

The five FTEs we are requesting to boost special ed staffing will address the growth, the academic needs, and the increase in medical complexity of our special education students.

The fourth area is emotional, social and emotional supports.

Even before COVID, ACPS had recognized the importance of focusing on our students' social and emotional health, and it added a few staff decisions.

Then through one-time pandemic relief funding, we were able to staff each of our 24 schools with one social and emotional learning coach, or SEL coach.

beginning in the 21-22 school year.

These are specialized professionals who are committed to these quick improvements, which are sent with skills for conflict resolution, academic focus, self-awareness, emotional regulation, and stress management.

They also provide vital support in crisis situations.

With the lapse of the Federal American Rescue Plan funding,

on FY25 funding request, proposes absorbing the cost in our operating budget to maintain our current social and emotional supports and to upgrade to a differentiated staffing model that would allow us to provide additional SEL coaches at schools that demonstrate need.

This proposal adds $2.7 million to the FY25 request.

So why do we rank social and emotional supports for our priority list for a purpose?

In the aftermath of COVID-19, national studies show that many students are struggling with increased studies of stress, depressed thoughts, and anxiety.

Unfortunately, Albemarle County is not immune to this.

The results of the Virginia School Survey of Climate and Working Conditions demonstrate both the prevalence of mental health issues.

You can see in the two charts on the left, but also the importance of effective and accessible mental health and social emotional supports in our schools.

And the bottom line is that students must have their social and emotional needs that to be open to learning.

Our SEL coaches operate as part of a tiered continuum of mental health and social

emotional support that the base of this continuum or pyramid is the Tier 1, which works to provide early intervention and prevention services and to integrate those services into instructional materials and school activities.

Tier 1 is where you'll find our SEL coaches, along with our student safety coaches and our school counselors.

This tiered model calls for increasingly intensive and individualized levels of support in tiers 2 and 3.

where tier one services are supportive, but the needed services are continued by social workers, the Department of Social Services, Regent Tad, our special ed team, our school psychologists, and licensed therapists.

To give you an idea of program usage, last year we logged 24,000 interactions either in the form of providing direct services to students ranging from career counseling to crisis intervention or in the form of support of students such as helping families access basic needs in the community, making referrals to outside agencies in support of our students or consulting with parents on how to help improve student attendance.

As of last week, we've surpassed 20,000 interactions for the current year.

The last area that, in our proposal, is intervention services.

Intervention services is another area, unfortunately, impacted by shifts in federal grant funding, as well as inadequate financial assistance from its main titles.

Note that these shifts are euphemism for the loss of state and federal funding for these 10 positions.

Our funding request includes, as a result, the increase of just under a million dollars to maintain our current level of direct intervention support provided to students by reading specialists and reading and math conventionists.

Our proposal also involves taking this opportunity, I guess, of not being

to restructure our current staffing formula to allocate intervention services according to school size and need.

Our proposed model addresses a loss of six response to intervention FTEs and the loss of Title I support for four reading specialists by funding 10 intervention FTEs through our operating budget.

Again, just a little background of our level.

This chart demonstrates the incident of student need for literacy intervention services across all brave levels.

I'll bring your attention to the orange dotted line, which is our 20% line, and that's what the literature or the research tells us we should anticipate for the need for intervention for literacy.

The blue bars indicate the number of students at ACPS who scored in the high-risk band

based on our own literacy screenings, which we conduct for grades K through 3, grade 6, and grade 9.

And the green line shows the numbers of students who failed their reading SOLs in the previous year.

We cannot afford to lose 10 FTEs due to a loss in grant funding.

We need to absorb these costs locally to provide instructional support for our students in need.

And I suspect, although I have not seen the data, that the interventionists for math similarly figured.

These five needs-based proposals totaling $10.4 million account for 80 percent

of our 5% expenditure increase.

Community engagement is one of the most vital components of our annual budget development concept.

This budget season ended up with multiple advisory groups which reflected the community survey.

We hosted listening sessions for the student and staff, and we accepted public comment in our whole meetings.

One of the outcomes is this list of priorities reflecting the needs of our school community and the aspirations of our strategic plan.

We can't fund all of these.

We know that.

And even though they're important and worthy, you can see that we have bolded the five priorities that we included in our funding request.

I want to reiterate that we are approaching this tough budget year by focusing our funding efforts on the priorities most critical to helping us maintain a certain level of service.

So now we come to the summary of our funding request for $272,900,085.

We can look at our spending plan in multiple ways.

For example, the chart on the left

Organizes our total expenditures by, we're in 71.7% of our expenses are school-based, meaning we can track them to the exact school location.

This category includes our classroom teachers, classroom support staff, principal, lecturers,

Office staff, security assistants, school nurses, and custodians.

Administration makes up 5.8 percent of this budget and includes our executive services, human resources, professional development, community engagement, communications, strategic planning, fiscal services, and safety and security.

The chart on the right shows the summary of our total spending by expense type to the point that our employees, our greatest resources chart shows that almost 86% of our expenditures goes toward people in the form of benefits, salaries, and other wages.

Yet another way, I don't know if the funding graph is a seesaw, where the funding gap of $13.3 million currently separates us from our ability to maintain our current levels of service.

We're proposing a 5% increase in expenditures.

But as you know, based on the governor's proposed budget, our funding stream is shrinking.

And as you know, this preliminary funding gap is setting to new day.

It's not our final budget.

for a necessary part of the budget development process.

That is not complete, and we look forward to receiving updated funding numbers from the state mid-month as we are anticipating they will help us close the staff.

If the revenues don't improve and they don't improve enough, we've identified multiple options for addressing the funding staff.

We may apply 9.1 revenues, we may make reductions, we may reduce the timing or the magnitude of our proposals.

or some combination thereof.

which clearly our approach to addressing any funding gap will involve a plan for both revenues and expenditures.

With regard to revenues, we now expect to see the updated state budget numbers later this week.

The early numbers from the House amendments and the Senate amendments had a range of $1.7 to $6 million more.

We're hoping for in the $4 to $5 million range.

will know more this week.

And again, we may consider revenues where they also consider applying some one-time revenues.

With respect to closing the funding gap on the expenditure side, five options for finding trimming expenses on this site are under consideration.

Although an exact magnitude and pattern of trimming will be a function of the revenue gap in April when the school board

will be a function of the revenue gap in April when the school board will balance the budget.

Although we're always looking for ways, looking for efficiencies, we would revisit our efforts and look at some other areas in our work.

First, we would reduce our operating expenses, perhaps by deferring and placement thresholds, furniture, technology, footprint, and areas that don't directly impact.

East Russia.

Secondly, it's working with the department to adjust the budget to account for areas where we don't expand or miss

you know, calculated what we needed to spend.

Third, we would re-audit or organizational structures and programs which would be efficiently and effectiveness.

Then it becomes even more difficult.

We would reduce the number of budgeted positions.

This typically doesn't mean layoffs.

It means hiring freezes.

In doing this, we would want any central offers or department-based reductions to match or exceed any kind of school-based reductions.

that said such reductions would necessitate an increase in class sizes, which we know is not favorable for our students or supported by the school community.

For the last resort, we could modify our proposals to decrease costs.

For example, we might adjust the timing or the amount of our compensation increase or reduce but not eliminate the number of FTCs.

So, let's talk takeaways.

I hope this presentation has impressed upon you that, number one, this needs-based funding request focuses on named cleaning for the service in alignment with our strategic.

Two, our expenditures are growing by a 5% rate while our revenue stream is shrinking, primarily because of decreases in state funding.

The $13 million

Point 3 funding app we presented is preliminary, a budget development process.

We are awaiting updated revenues, numbers from the state that we expect to be included over our current projections, although the magnitude of that improvement is still increasing.

And we have plans and options for investing in funding app.

And we will have these, those critical conversations before we adopt the budget.

and the Tolstice Center.

And with that, the trip was fun, essentially a transformation.

And as Ms.

Lee said at the beginning of the presentation, we value your partnership, and we appreciate your complete support and out of the cash payers of the Albemarle community.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Sure, I wrote down quite a few things that I received, so I hope you don't mind if I just give you a slide.

Could you help us understand new hires?

Seems like they have a lot of different meanings.

This was on slide 18.

Right.

So I think 252 new hires for that side of the workforce seems really striking to me.

And that's just speaking mostly to that 12% retention rate or non-retention rate.

On slide 12,

Phillips up there, so we don't see here struggling.

I had to answer my question.

This is probably mostly speaking to my ignorance.

I recognize that the, and this may be more a question for Andy, I see that the local bump is larger than our bump in, say, assessment growths.

Is that coming

of their revenue sources that we're delivering.

So I'm comparing that 5.3 boosts in local revenues to, say, per increase in assessments that we're increasing.

There are a couple factors to that.

I'll start, but I'm going to ask by Akumazawa, director of budget planning to fill in.

For that local category, that includes both the local transfer from the general fund and then any all other local sources.

But the second reason that is impactful for that is last year in the leisure process, the Board of Supervisors approved directing some funding one time to capital last year, so that it would be available for ongoing operations in fiscal year 25.

Based on that strategy, that's one of the primary reasons, if not the primary reason, that that growth is larger than that 4.1% assessment because some of that ongoing growth was invested in capital 24 and is now ongoing in operations.

Please, Ms.

Yep, the transfer does make up the bulk of it, and that transfer alone is actually a 5.6% increase.

We have other local school revenues that are about $2 million.

Thank you.

You can go on the slide at 18 and just speaking the kind of the broader discussion that we have about the S&L coaches.

And I feel like it's probably important we get into this kind of thing.

I expect this is maybe one more prominent element in some budget change.

And I want to make sure we have as much data as we can.

So it sounds like we have some

Some basic information from, like, what I would feel is fair to describe as a program evaluation of appliance that has happened with SELs.

We know in excess of 20,000 interactions, is there any additional program evaluation data or insights that we gather from people that has come in with the SEL coaches?

at this, at this meeting, at this level, I don't have more granular information, but I think that's a good way to sum it up.

We have some additional, we have a director of mental health and wellness, and I know that Miles Nelson is collecting data.

I've seen data in terms of a tier two, two, tier three services, how many, tier two and tier three services as well, on how many, how many and what the breakdown in terms of

Diagnostics, or informal diagnostics are.

I know he's continuing that data because of years old.

And we have a lot of feedback from actually the counselors and principals of the schools.

We don't have, as far as I know, a formal evaluation of it.

I think slide 19 really

speaks more to that.

I heard about it in the slide back there.

To the conversation, because you've, you know, what we have found is anytime that we offer more counseling to the students, it immediately gets soaked up with student use.

And I feel that, or I don't feel, I know based on the data that we look at, that we are the number one place where students will interact with a counselor.

We even do tele-counseling now.

We allow students to, on school time, we provide a private space for them to meet with their own counselor.

In terms of the community, you can see it's just a tiny splinter of what's available.

And any conversations we've ever had over the years with families where we'll say, contact Region 10 or contact agency A, B, or C,

It's very hard to get services through any of those.

Whereas at school, a student can see a counselor, they can see an SEL coach, they can talk with them, they know they're going to be there the next day.

It's very reliable, very dependable.

So that comes down to when Miss Lee was talking about

We're uniquely situated to serve these kinds of needs for students.

On that note, I am maybe a little...

perhaps confused by the use of the word referral here on this graphic.

I look at that in my media assumptions, that means like a referral to a CSP, which seems unlikely just because of the scale.

Or therapists?

Just last, yeah.

I mean, we have a range of places where they refer.

Sometimes they refer to social services for more support.

I mean, just a total

and Attic Dot, if you indulge me, last week, well, Diantha knows, but I'm also the executive director of a organization called Partner for Mental Health and we're partners with the county on your heart program, which is a co-respondent model.

And the other day, a teenager was locked in the bathroom, not wanting to go to school, threatening suicide, they called 911, the police responded first.

The heart team came, but then our social emotional coach

and the school safety coach arrived and because they had relationships with the student, the student would talk with them and the student eventually had to be hospitalized in a presidential facility for a time, but these needs are real and they predate certainly COVID, but

With these SEL coaches and our school counselors, we're the biggest mental health provider of mental health services for children.

I appreciate that.

And I just, you know, again, want to plead my own ignorance here.

It feels like I'm sure there is some kind of KPIs that are typical in this field, something that we would put in the output section of a theory of change chart, but I just don't know what that is.

Well, what we found was, so if you look in section A of our budget, all the proposals have logic models with them.

that talk about

if they're struggling, they're yellow and if they're something that we're gonna perhaps discontinue or it hasn't been successful, it's red.

The SEL coaches in many respects are green in terms of the access that we talked about and what Dr. Aikov talked about.

We scored them yellow though because in their initial logic model, the metrics that were assigned to it weren't very, they were fuzzy, they weren't very strong.

As a result,

We did go back and take a look at how we were signing them.

You might notice from last, when we started them during the pandemic, we had the federal funding, so we just went ahead and said one for every school, regardless of the school size, regardless of the school need.

And one of the things we learned through our ongoing review of kind of the fuzzy results, we pinned down

more specific results based on things like our baseline social-emotional learning data that we do with all the elementary school students.

It's called the DESA Strengths Assessment.

We looked at student referrals, we looked at attendance, looked at an array of measurements

to then determine a differentiated model for assigning these so that some of it's based on school size, so now larger schools will have more coaches assigned, smaller schools will have a baseline of one,

and then we also looked at that other data like attendance, chronic absenteeism, student discipline referrals, and also the deaths of scores for the school and their panorama survey results for climate and use those as differentiating factors for assigning the SEL coaches to the schools.

So there wasn't an outcome of looking at, well, we've got them assigned at the schools in terms of

Taking on the funding and putting it into our base, we needed to be more specific to address the current outcomes at the schools.

When you look at the logic model going into this coming budget cycle, you'll see the data is a lot tighter.

The measurements are stronger.

The interim outcomes are we have higher expectations for those.

And we're using existing surveys like the Panorama so that we can measure the success of the program.

So whether I like it or not, it was a great thing that you said earlier that since it was federal money and it was one-time money, we do consider it a pilot.

And so this would be the opportunity if it wasn't being effective and we weren't seeing the access from the students, we would probably discontinue it.

We did anticipate having consistent levels of funding from the state.

We weren't anticipating that our adjusted gross income locally would skyrocket two years ago.

that's now tanked us for the next two years.

But since it has, we were trying hard, and we'll move a lot of things around this in our budget to prioritize it.

I appreciate all really deep diving me with this, because I'm sure it's quite heavy on a lot of my peers' heart, too.

So I appreciate that.

On slide 20, you touched on the

that dropped in Title I funding that's being used from Southern physicians.

I was actually just curious, did that shift in federal policy?

Did a school stop being classified as Title I?

Wasn't it change in the school category?

It was funding stays flat typically from year to year and has our cost increase, compensation and benefits.

Oh, thank you.

I'm actually going to jump out of the slides real quick, because I don't remember something that I made note on in the keyboard.

Funding request.

And this is very simple.

I think I mentioned it, but on page A23, where you have the master kind of charting of budgetary changes.

near the year by the departmental category.

It's very obvious that the increase in administration, it's an almost 20% increase mostly due to staffing, you know, benefits and savings.

I'm guessing that's because a lot of the positions we're talking about are coded as administration.

Great observation.

That category includes not just admin, but also attendance.

Health Physicians.

So this is probably what we're talking about, with mental health.

That was my suspicion.

I appreciate that.

A lot of this is also, first term on board, trying to make sure I

You mentioned in your mitigation plan talking about shifting one-time revenues.

I guess I would like to understand a bit more by what you need.

What tools are you potentially identifying as places to?

Did it on slide 26?

So I'm saving two minus this year.

We could apply.

We could also look to our special revenue funds.

And I think I just wanted to... Oh yeah, this is a big one.

We talked about... So this is probably best illustrated

don't launch different strategies for potentially mitigating and offsetting any shortfalls that persist after, you know, both a review by the General Assembly and review by court advisors to try and fill that gap.

It would be helpful, but maybe either you don't have it or you're not willing to share it with the machine.

So you get a sense of how much you estimate could be saved through these different strategies.

We do.

Okay.

We've had the data like every quarter of us.

We've been playing out several scenarios.

It's like a, it's like a, a dire, a moderate and a successful, you know, ranging with the, the current state, the

House version and the Senate version.

And so among those things, we look at the non-personnel reductions.

It's things like over the past five years, we have each year identified, you know, starting with kindergarten furniture replacement cycle so that we can replace dilapidated furniture and

put in furniture and casework and things like that in classrooms, it's more appropriate for students.

So that would be an example of like a one-time thing or maybe we are also looking at our technology budget and not skipping but prolonging the replacement cycle for some machines that normally would be teeing up the replacement at this time.

and then you can also apply across the board percentage reductions in budgets.

And so everybody just goes back to their departmental budget and they scrub it again to get to a different percentage of savings.

Number two is where you're just looking for low hanging fruit in areas, but it's a mixed bag because when you're scrubbing, you also find things like Maya was talking about earlier that

with the federal government.

And you notice they contribute a whopping $600,000 to our budget.

It's about 1%.

With a lot of demands that are good for kids, but still it's a lot of mandates that we have to cover.

So you will find things that you've been underspending that you need to beef up.

But you also find areas for cost savings for maybe a position or half a position that has gone unfilled for quite some time.

So you don't fill it.

And if you find those

pieces here and there and starts to add up to savings.

Organizational structures and program effectiveness.

Within the departments, we are doing a lot of work right now.

Since we're not gonna, the central office and departments has really not grown at the rate as the school staffing has over the last five years.

During the pandemic onset and after that, we really put a lot of staffing out to the schools.

That's why our class sizes are really low right now.

So rather than putting a lot into the departments, we've put that out of the schools.

But having said that, since we're not going to add, we're not planning on adding anything, we're looking at how do we solve the same issues with the staff that we have, for example, looking at some of the

positions in one department that can function in another, like community engagement, perhaps, that one of the specialists that we have in that department could go into the instructional department to be a math coach or a math lead coach so that we can work on those issues.

So you do, you try to accomplish the same goal without adding, and then we will, we're developing, we're actually starting now

A pool of frozen positions to accomplish a particular savings that might range from a million dollars give or take throughout the year that we are looking to save through central office positions

or departmental positions.

And that typically would be positions that are not directly facing students or supporting students at the school level.

And the goal is not to maintain all the same positions frozen throughout the year, but as positions come open throughout the year, you compare the pool of frozen positions to the newly opened positions, reprioritize so that you can make sure you're not

Crippling the organization in terms of the work that we need to do to support the schools.

Reducing the number of budgeted positions.

That would be budgeted positions that we're looking at going based on new revenue.

We could reduce that.

Or the last part of courses, we could take a look at those.

Proposals.

The big things you toggle are tend to be compensation and class size.

Things that go into people because that's the 86% part of the budget.

Those were all the questions.

I appreciate everyone's patience.

Yes, thank you very much.

And thank you for talking about point five, their class size reduction, which I think

It's very low.

So that the elementary school and then it's slightly higher and going into the secondary grades.

and you know what that is going in on secondary, did you say?

Well, I think it's... You speak of 22.

I think it's like 18 in elementary.

I mean, of course, it can be 20.

Sure.

You know, 10 in Japanese and 30 in development class.

High school is 20.

20.4.

Wow.

That's very impressive, frankly.

It's just really valued by our community.

You know, every year we survey, for several years, we didn't put it on the survey because it always was the first thing.

Yeah, everybody asks for that.

I understand that.

I do believe, I do like the fact that you're addressing

English Learners and Students with Disabilities.

And that wasn't so extra number of years ago.

We're not, we're not doing that.

Right.

Right.

And I can see school in class five in those situations.

But

and I really like the idea that you're supporting the school SELs with coaches rather than going to the outside, rather than going to region 10 and other agencies.

And what you're doing when you're helping children have a healthy, happy life learning, then that translates to adults.

And actually in the long run, you have fewer problems with adults.

So I really like it happening at the school site in the school setting rather than

on the outside, that's just, I'm saying that.

Your FTEs on page 18, so those are all, those are all including those administrations.

Okay, yep, so those are all, FTEs are administrative positions, because I know, I know this box, if you go back to page eight, you have 11 new hires for administrators in fact,

That would be in the current year.

That's in the current year, right, but these are the administration that's like our snapshot.

But the ones you're talking about here in the administration, the 11 new hires, those are... They're not new positions, they're just new hires.

New hires.

Okay, same position.

So one thing I would point out that's really handy is the staffing standards that are in the back of the notebook.

It's G5.

Do you have that notebook?

Or do you need it for now?

I don't think I have that.

But when you go online, one of the things I'm really proud of is that when I started out as superintendent, my goal was to have a staffing standard for every single position in the school system.

That wasn't the case.

And so when you go through here, you can find

He identified ratios for all of our positions, including administrative position, teaching positions, specials like PE and so forth.

Okay, I'm just interested, frankly, the administrative ratio.

Right.

We so annually re-review our staffing standards and when we did the review two years ago, Dr. Kaiser was two years ago.

One of the, a lot of the feedback we got was a lot of the needs that the school have.

And again, this kind of goes back to that expanding responsibilities of schools.

Ms.

Lee didn't include SOL testing for all the other types of testing that were required to do.

What we found was in the smaller schools, we would, we would assign like a part of an FTE, like a, you know, a 0.4, 0.3 and say, that's for your testing.

Okay.

But what that really means then is that the screen counselor

is going to take it on, so they're doing part-time counseling, part-time testing, or the principal takes it on, or lots of times they'll give it to a staff member and it reduces their interactions with students.

So that was just one example, and that was a request that was made by the smaller schools was to have an assistant principal.

And we have found that highly effective, like our schools like Red Hill and Scottsville,

and have a full-time assistant principal.

That's done a couple of things.

One is it has reduced the administrative burden on teachers.

So the teachers are not doing all the administrative tasks that the principal has to farm out.

For example, if they have to do out, if we can't get a substitute for them, then the teacher might do it.

And the other thing it's done is it really has increased the supervision of instruction.

One of the things we really put a lot of stock in is

We've walked through observations, nearly five million observations, and we tally those on an on-bone basis.

And we have watched those take off astronomically because there's more supervisors in the school to really help with that.

I think it's also enhanced the safety at schools.

So it's been a positive project to do that, but it has met administrative growth.

But again, we put the growth in the schools within administrators to

So over the last five years, central staff, I mean, it's different numbers that are being kicked around.

But this is a report that I had from a couple months ago that shows from 2019, we had 2,396 total staff

2013 of those were school-based, which was 84% of the staff.

Now in 2024, we have 2,289 school-based staff, and that's 85.1% of all of our staff.

So that's grown by 1.1%.

Central office in 2019 was 112, and it has grown to 126.

but it is still only 4.7% of our total staff.

So it's grown just like the other positions have in the county.

The only thing that has shrunk a bit is the operational staff and that I would say it's because we have done some right sizing in our transportation department whereas if we haven't been able to hire bus drivers, we haven't kept like having a giant

School of Staff for that, so we could use it in other areas.

But as a percentage of our total school system employees, our central office staff has not grown.

Yeah, there are no

Alvin said, correct me if I'm wrong.

And I think that answer is important.

Thank you.

Supervisor McKeel?

sticking to the same theme about our employees' snapshot.

I really am pleased to see 13% people of color, 24% people of color, 36% people of color.

That is a real improvement.

used to be we'd go a percent and then we'd lose two and we'd go another two percent and we'd lose three.

Diantha, I appreciate you saying that because we're really proud of it.

The last news is really we had a two percent bump and as you use O and I know for decades it sat at about 11 percent.

and I really want to take a nod to our Human Resources Department and the efforts they made and also our principals for really reaching out and supporting paraprofessionals to go through the new teacher certification programs that the state has adopted.

I think that's added a lot of diversity to our staff and a lot of local community members

that grew up in our schools and have been working in the schools.

They have college degrees and they want to be teachers.

So they've entered the field.

So I think there was a lot of creative work, but the goal was to fully staff.

And we started the year with less than 2% vacancy rate, which was much lower than we were pre-pandemic, our starting vacancy rate.

Mary, that's impressive.

I'm very impressed, historically, that we would have never heard that historical.

Well, I was just really pleased with that and keeping on that same thing, I guess.

and maybe because I used to be a substitute.

I'm wondering what your all situation is with substitute teachers and how you're handling that.

No, I'm glad you asked.

You don't see things in here as much now about the substitutes.

As you remember last year, we talked about a lot of things we were trying to do to settle that down.

One was significantly increasing pay for substitutes.

So enhanced pay was important.

The other thing we did was we started out a few years ago with school-based substitutes that are there every day.

And those were assigned to schools initially by the size of the school.

We have a staffing standard for those in the staffing standard section, but moving forward with that, Dr. Kaiser and the HR department looked at specific data at the schools, like the fill rates at the schools so that schools that had lower fill rates, they assigned another permanent sub to the school.

So there are still issues around substitutes.

I'm not going to say that it's magically solved, but our community has really stepped up.

We have a lot of parents, a lot of community members that are coming into the schools that they do it one day a week or some number there every day.

And having those permanent subs, I think, has really been able to lower the stress level of our teaching staff because they know

They've got someone on board and those substitutes become well known to the schools.

So that had, you know, I'm sure you all get emailed about that just like anything else.

And of course, I remember the days when the principals would come in in the morning and make 20 phone calls and you could find anybody.

The last thing I'll say about that is we centralized the substitute budget.

What we found when we scrubbed it was schools were annually planning their substitute budget and then overrunning it and spending out of other categories, which they can because it's zero base.

But what we did was we just took it all and didn't take it out of their budget.

So they have the budget.

They still have that money.

But we took it centrally.

And that was a budget initiative we did last year.

So now it all runs through central office, it doesn't come out of school funds.

Thank you.

That's awesome.

Going back one more time to, and I think we're, I'm looking at the 181 administrators, 6%, I think we're focusing on this because this is the number one question we get from the community.

We constantly hear from the community, you're bloated, we need to, we need to go after the administrative staff.

and, yeah, the administration.

Would you go through for me, just on the record, who is included one more time in that administration?

So I think that I'm going to let Ms.

Kuma Zawa tackle that one, because I think she has spent the most time looking at this category.

And I certainly understand everyone's concerned about

and so on.

So that's why we're... Well, I mean, on the slight, I guess it's not, the administration made some 5.8% of the total budget and includes executive services, human resources, which as you know, we skipped back to the law, professional development, community engagements,

communications, strategic planning, fiscal services, safety and security.

And safety and security would be our school safety coaches.

You moved those.

So the 181 includes principals, assistant principals, central office directors, assistant directors.

Okay.

And they're included by the 130.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Let me just stay here.

I asked about, sorry, I'm looking at my notes here.

Just curious, we talked a lot about the state and not knowing exactly where you are, and we all get that because we don't know where we are in some things.

Are you all, are there any dramatic new mandates that you all are facing that you're not sure about?

Sometimes there's a lot of... I'm doing, I haven't, I don't think there's anything that's got on, well, almost any mandates that come from the state are unsolvable.

I was just saying that, but nothing that I have that's

where we've had, where we've talked to the board about, it hasn't raised anything to that.

One of the additional costs is about $300,000 for pre-K.

They stop funding it the way they have, but they've also opened up more positions, more slots for us.

It's about a $300,000 range at hand.

And that's for the pre-K.

I really appreciated Mike talking about the SELs because I think we were all trying to figure that out.

And so what my takeaway is that one time funding from the pandemic, so to speak, from the fence was used in a pilot format to see how it would help.

So you figure out how to go forward with improving the social and emotional wellbeing of the kids.

and that makes sense.

Because I have to admit, I was thinking at first, one time funding is always concerning, but this makes more sense.

I really appreciate that explanation.

And you're working your way through how to organize that within the schools now to get your biggest thing from the bottom.

I'm not saying it for you, but I think that's my takeaway anyway.

Exactly.

Okay.

I will just add because CSBs

and just so the community knows, those are community service boards.

And for us, those are community service boards across the state, because a lot of people don't know this, I think.

And for us, that's Region 10, where a lot of our, I can't remember when I was on the Discipline Committee, we sent lots of families to Region 10.

Sometimes waited long, long times to get help.

I would just point out that the JLARC study that came out not this year, but last year about the community service board was very informative.

And I would think it would be a hoover us at some point to think about

are legislative packets that we share next year to really go after the JLARC recommendations, because I think for the community, it would help everybody, certainly help me with the regional jail, help you all with the schools, help everyone.

So just to put it on our tickler list is I think what I'm saying about that.

Honestly, I may be pretty close.

and I do appreciate that you all bring us a needs-based budget, which is, this is your first whack at telling us what you need, right, and it's a needs-based budget and you have some strategies, needs-based requests, but yeah, and you have some strategies.

I'm curious or maybe not curious, I think it would be who the public

for, and I think this is probably an Andy question.

Sure, so there is a formula set by the Board's financial management policies that allocates funding to school operations, county government operations, and then our shared debt and capital improvements program.

So the short version is that every kind of new net dollar or shared revenues, which is primarily tax revenue,

54% of that, or really the first 10% would go to capital and debt.

The remaining amount is 60-40, which happens to be 54% for school operations, 36% for county government operations.

Did you have a follow-up question?

Well, so help us with, so 12 million would look so to fund the 12.

I'm dragging now.

This is based on the initial school gap of $13.3 million, which obviously will change.

But just kind of for some perspective, if that were to be funded only with increases from the real estate tax rate following that split, that would be an additional 8.6 pennies on the tax rate to do so.

You know, another option, if that were to be, you know, Penny's 100% dedicated to school operations, which the board could choose to do, different from the point of view of that.

That would require an additional 4.6-dedicated.

And that's why it's just perspective, and it's good for the community here as well.

And I think all my questions from right now are comments

Great presentation and I appreciate it.

Supervisor Gallagher, thank you everyone.

What is the, can you just speak a little bit?

I'm sure you've done some direct advocacy to the General Assembly, specific to your funding gas and the loss.

Yeah, one of the most, sort of,

Hopefully, meaningful additions to the budget.

Was Amy Laffer added a phone form list to the budget as just a member request that would amount to approximately $14 million over the biennium, which would be amazing.

Obviously, we're sort of waiting to hear what gets signed.

The forecast is that there will be a little bit more work getting done before it gets signed.

You know, fingers crossed.

I think that is one of the things we pushed artists for that she added.

It's whole harmless directly for Albemarle County based on the LCI.

So it's really just related to that.

So that's something she added just to benefit us.

And so most directly, I would say that.

to answer your question.

Obviously, you know, we have done advocacy relative just to the budgets that have been proposed.

And so right now we'll make some calls and just advocating for the budget that is currently going to Governor Young and hopefully for our signature.

Ned, when we met with our legislators, we asked for the whole marvelous

Division, but we also asked at the very minimum to be notified sooner in the budgetary process when the LCI comes out, because we didn't get notice of that until we were already in budget development.

Right.

And that would be certainly a longer term concern that will continue to address over the years.

Lots of different approaches to that.

Every one of our legislators has sort of a different idea about what would be best.

Right.

But you will always have a few legislators who say,

We're not going to touch the LCI.

And I know you've heard that over the years as well.

It's anyone's guess what might actually happen.

Major fluctuations as well as it takes no account for the specific needs of the jurisdiction, like if you have 25% or

in English language, reverse your special pet.

It doesn't make any adjustment to that.

So on slide 27, I guess that's just the message.

You can listen again.

at some point, I don't know if it was a budget presentation or was that one another school board work session that I sat in on.

The comment was made that department budgets are basically you take the previous year's budget and then build your budget for that.

the next year.

So if I got 10 million one year, I immediately use 10 million as my starting point to build a budget for department budgets.

Now, if I misunderstood that explanation, then that should probably be cleared up.

But my question here is, wouldn't number two just be an annual exercise?

Yeah, building a department budget?

It's a myth that we take last year's budget and just take it out of the binder and set it over here and put it in a new binder and start from there.

We actually start from scratch from the beginning.

You're always going to use what a department spent the year before as sort of a meter as to what their needs are.

But that's part of that scrubbing process because within a budget, within a department of budget, they're going to have different categories, even though it's baseline.

And you can see what they underspent, what they overspent.

And then you make an adjustment on the budget.

for every department based on what happened the year before and the year before that.

So it's not, we don't just roll things from one year to the next.

And I appreciate you asking that because that's, like I said, I just think that's a myth that we'll hear things like zero-based budgeting.

We do a zero-based budget annually with the understanding that for the VDOE encumbers almost all of the spending that we do.

and then so there's a slim margin of that, that we have to work with, that's local dollars that are the ones that aren't making up for what we don't get from the state.

So we've just heard that it was the expenditures that we were going to be able to build on.

I had asked the budget team for the 10-year trend line for public schools based on department budgets, and that was provided, and they said over time, they've steadily increased three to seven percent per year.

Do you track what that would have been or might have been if this exercise has happened?

I think might.

because I remember you and I even having conversations many years ago when I was on the school board about, we don't tell the story about where the efficiencies have been found and realized.

So if we're saying the department budgets have increased three to seven percent per year and had that information, maybe they would have grown four to eight percent or six, something like that.

If they had matched inflation, they would have grown much more than that.

So the actual realized savings that are in those, do you track that and be able to tell that story?

Not to be acknowledged.

Look, I get that you want to hold your cards to yourself, but what does one side, like one class size increase, not like one student add at your levels, what is that cost, saving, what's the expenditure?

Mike, 3.3 million.

That's just total.

One, if you get a one over the whole of the building, not based on your remembering, oh, we'll do .5 at elementary, and we'll do one at the high school, and then you start maneuvering it.

Typically, we do maneuver.

We do try to keep the class sizes smaller, K through four, if we can, but one across the board.

All right, those are all my questions right now.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Gallaway.

Thank you.

Thank you, and very, very helpful, all of the questions that others have asked on the presentation as well.

So I've, many of mine have been asked already and answered them.

That's terrific.

The, okay, sorry.

So I guess, are there, sort of a general question I wrote at the very beginning, based on what I have heard come to me on the telephone in the grocery store, etc.

Are there budget takeaways regarding

improving the reading skills of the children that is in here somewhere that I just don't understand where to look or is there something you can tell us about?

So around the reading, the new reading curriculum, that's all adopted within this year's budget, within the current departmental budget.

Based on the Virginia Literacy Act, we needed to select a new reading curriculum for elementary schools.

And so we went through that process, community process.

Schools had all the kits.

We leaned heavily on our teachers to help us decide what we were going to pick for that.

And we chose HMH McGraw-Hill.

And so all the funding for that, though, has been covered within this year's departmental budget for instruction.

So it's not going to show up in the budget as an initiative, because that's your budget for instructional resources within that department.

I would say that in terms of reading, the other piece that we did going into the current years

Budget was we adjusted our staffing standards to allow for reading specialists at all the secondary schools and we beefed up our reading specialists and interventionists at the elementary schools as well.

Partially by putting events around differentiated staffing

and Times.

So you know, we differentiate staffing at schools based on demographics.

And so what that would typically mean was each school principal would dig into that pool that was an enhancement to their staffing.

They could use it in a variety of ways.

One of the concerns that some of our board members raised was, are they using that for intervention?

Are they using that for reading?

Are they using that for math?

And frankly, we weren't really being very transparent about it in our budget.

because it just sowed like a blob of differentiated staffing, intervention staffing.

So when you have time to go through the support section, it changed last year, but I think you'll notice a difference from what you've seen in the past where it really delineates.

And you can see the reading specialists down the column for elementary school that weren't delineated before from the differentiated staffing.

So it was a combination of two things.

One, really,

increasing our reading specialists, and then also adopting a new curriculum.

And the glue that really works to bring that all together is all the professional development funding.

Again, that's encumbered within our current budget for professional development.

So for the next budget year, there may be more investment in

people in the buildings to help individual children, sort of specialists.

In terms of professional development.

Right.

Not just beyond the homework teacher.

Right.

That's right.

Answer that.

Get the widget.

Yeah, and we're seeing that something is missing.

We are looking at the classroom level right now across the schools and seeing how they're using the reading specialist.

Some of the schools, depending on their size, will

Like Albemarle High School, for example, has four reading specialists.

At the secondary level, that's a big investment.

But they're not necessarily going to meet with individual students because of the size of the staff and student population there.

They'll hold trainings for staff.

They will work with teachers to work better with the students that the staff is working with.

And then for the kids that are all the way up in tier three, they will probably be working with them more directly.

Now, in elementary school,

Murray Elementary School that they'll have a reading specialist.

That person can work individually with the children because it's a smaller school and smaller staff.

And we're watching them.

and hopefully the more success you have with the lower levels that when they get to high school, you're working yourself on a job.

But all of us have the scars we got from high school from elementary level of reading the language classroom.

I didn't understand what the hell was going on.

And it's something I've never forgotten.

And so I understand how, and I guess my follow-up question to that is, do you perceive a connection between success and reading?

particularly, and the sort of anxiety level, the social-emotional stress that we're hearing about.

Because I think if kids are feeling on the spot and not able to perform as they're across the classroom, here's are.

And of course, their anxiety level is going to go down.

So I would love to hear more about that in the future.

OK, I'll stop talking about that.

I'm very glad they're enjoying the school so because I was a school so much in New York City.

Knowing the children because you're there all the time is such a great benefit for the subperson.

It cuts that anxiety a little bit.

So that and the kids as well.

All right.

State budget, we will just keep our fingers crossed.

And I guess within the next, well, we don't know when the governor's going to get around to be doing things.

So.

Yeah.

But I do remember, and I

I understand your challenge on this class-size thing, because back in 2010, with the recession, there was a, oh, let's just take out one or whatever, and the one ended up putting English, sort of basic English at the high school, is it like 40 kids because of the way everything happened.

It's not, I wish it were simpler for people like me to understand, but it's not, clearly.

And so I do understand that challenge.

All right, going along.

So we answered all those.

That was good.

I'm very grateful for the sweeping of the budgets and extra accountability and raising the standards.

So

If the budget is signed, there will be that 3% increase from the state, but we would have to match that in order to get it.

And I understood from something that came from David Bluth or someone else recently, that if there's a lower amount locally, then they would prorate the state as opposed to zeroing it out, which is a huge improvement over past years.

So I guess that's an option we didn't have in the past.

But I will later on ask Mr. Richardson to remind me of what he was proposing for what he signed to.

I will stop there.

to new hires for the 88% retention rate, 88% out of 1,407 teachers, 10% to 140, that's one of the 28 things.

So how about 90 new hires?

But those are the teachers that would change the student-teacher ratio.

So those are new people in the same roles, though?

OK, but 88% retention rate suggests a smaller number.

That's where I'm confused.

That's where we factor in growth.

And that's part of what we're looking at doing this year.

We had to adjust our growth from last year because we didn't meet our growth projection.

So there'll be a reduction overall in the teachers that we have in the county.

But last year, when we budgeted, we also budgeted for growth.

and then you're also budgeting for growth in special areas like the special education services, the EL services and other positions that are unique to schools that are considered instructional positions.

So it's more than just addressing the turn of.

so it's growth as well.

And would that also apply then to classified staff?

Because again, we have 30 or 20% approximately non-retained, but the number higher is 75.

20% would be 240.

So there's a big gap there again.

Honestly, I feel a little uncomfortable addressing that without the numbers in front of me.

So I think we need to dig and give you something more specific because you're the

2nd or 3rd board members answered them out.

So I think we need to break that out for us.

OK, thank you on this.

Yeah.

So they don't fit in here for this year.

They would, they would, you get that snapshot.

The EL and special education go into the teachers category.

Okay.

Oh, no, on this slide.

Okay.

But they go in there for the state category.

Okay.

And the interventionists will be in the teachers category.

Okay.

Well, yeah, that's good.

That's good.

There are interactions within the building.

I'm just like tier two or two or three low.

I think we had two years ago about five to six hundred

This is more... It's a big number.

It's a concerning number.

And I'm trying to understand how to just sort of look at it in terms of you've got 20-some schools, 24 schools with the 20K interactions this year, 100-plus school days,

We're still looking at 10 interactions a day or something like that.

So that's OK.

OK.

Thank you for excellent presentation.

Thank you.

One of the things that we all, I know everybody keeps hearing about is school absenteeism, intruency.

It used to be the name that we used to call it.

But you just helped me a little bit.

The way I would sum it up right now is that we're having a lot of success with it.

I think that's the most important thing to say is that what we talk about now, it's a newer term for this generation, they call it chronic absenteeism, which is when a student misses 10% of the school year.

So that for a student to be considered chronically absent, I think it's 17 absenteeism.

and so the state tracks that and that's one of the indicators they use for our accreditation, one of the final things for that.

But most importantly, far beyond that is when children are in school, there's so many positive outcomes that come from that.

A lot of research out there too that when you're in school, Dr. Andrews does better.

So it's not just your attendance affecting you, it's affecting all the other kids that have been in the class too, when you're there,

We have used a lot of strategies this year and last year, but most of them are functions of the SEL coaches.

So they do a lot of that work.

They've built their relationships because the students that tend to miss school are also students that have trauma or they've got other social-emotional issues to where they're not coping with coming to school day in and day out or another way to put it is they're not coping with not being at their house.

And so the SCL coaches form relationships.

I don't want to shortchange the school counselors.

I know there could be some listening.

They are the bedrock.

They are the bedrock of the work that goes on that this hasn't changed their role.

At the elementary school in particular, there's a lot of overlap of those roles.

High school, I think you see more of an academic focus among the counselors, but they still work a lot with these kids.

What we know from research is that the number one way to get a student to come to school is when a teacher, a particular teacher, could be another adult, asks for that student to come to school and lets them know that they're missed when they're not there.

and so that's the practice that we've been doing and it's not phone calls per se, it's not always emailing, it's texting and we have messaging services that translate when they arrive at families to the language that they speak or the one that they receive.

That I think has been our number one return on investment is the one-on-one interaction with families, building relationships, principals, getting out and visiting homes.

And then this year our Office of Community Engagement engaged a new practice that as a mandate for all of our schools that they host four family nights at their schools.

and they do three academic nights and then one is of their choice.

So it could be a cultural celebration or art celebration or something like that.

But the areas we were mostly concerned about with our school performance are around reading, math, science.

So they've been doing those family nights around helping parents understand the competencies that students are learning, helping them understand when you get a

Quiz that comes home or another assessment that comes home.

What does it mean?

What does it mean next?

Several of them use that opportunity to introduce families to the new reading curriculum that we were comparing for them.

But I've had a lot of positive feedback.

You'll get a Brownsville for their community nights and they'll have 400 families there.

engaging with the staff, you know, read aloud, things like that.

And it's the same all across the school system.

So that, doing those things and having a positive relationship with families rather than the punitive way we used to address it, which there is at some point you do reach that because it is the family's responsibility for the child to be at school.

But having that positive relationship has really helped us.

And you're going to see when you're looking at the numbers from last year and then you look at them shift this year, it's been very positive.

Thank you.

That was very helpful.

And the only other thing I would ask is, can we have copies of your budget or your

We have today.

So that would be great.

I think we can sprint.

Oh.

Yeah, it might go up a little bit.

Yeah, like I would ask who wants a printed one and who doesn't because I don't.

Obviously, if it may also be appropriate to have any comments, though I know that there's a lot to go before we sleep on this and a lot of things unanswered, so I don't think so.

Comments are anything more than just

where we stand right at the moment.

I don't know that I have another question.

And I'm also appreciative of the fact that I took quite a lot of time with my first round of questions.

So thank you.

I just have one question.

We have, you had mentioned 20,000 interactions and that's over 181 school dates, is that correct?

We could, we'll track that down, Bea, but I don't, I don't think that includes that.

I think it's for, well, they're all for support, I guess, but they're not, I don't think they're for discipline issues.

That answers all my questions.

I really appreciate the time you all took.

and I'm looking forward to your full budget adding to our 317 pages that we already have.

Thank you.

That was a lot of good information.

Thank you.

I just want to point, I mean, in the spirit of what we're all working on, both school side and local government side, this year we asked the county executive, believe it just came out Friday, you know, the school division brings forward a needs-based budget, which we all know that's going to occur.

However, the county executive doesn't bring forward a needs-based budget, he brings forward a balanced budget.

and given the reality of the situation since he's balancing it, that means that there are initiatives or things that aren't going to be funded that either maybe were programmed in previous years or decisions had to be made by the county executive before he comes to the supervisor.

Andy would have to fact check me, but I think without the COLA, it was between just my quick glance at it was about between $5 and $6 million worth of things on that list.

and then a COLA, 1% COLA increase is about $916,000 if our member met right from a previous work session.

So basically a million bucks.

So before we even get to doing anything with our staff,

Positions, which predominantly, Supervisor McKeel is probably more expert on this, just because I know she was talking to me about it.

Fire positions, police positions, things like that.

So it's just a matter of, I made a comment on a show Friday that it is going to require a discipline from all of us this year in this particular budget.

But the fact that we've also, you know, if the state had fully funded you, you were still looking at about five, six million dollars worth of some initiatives.

It's interesting that that number is similar to what the county is looking at if we say, well, what would our gap be if we wanted to bring forward those items?

And that's before it may increase.

So I'm just putting that out in the spirit of transparency on both sides of the school division and local government side of what we're contending with this budget.

Being mindful that all while property values have continued to increase in the county, even though the overall county wide percentage was 4% this year,

and a lot of neighborhoods and districts that was well above 13, 15%.

Thank you.

Ned, I would just add, you can find that document that Jeff presented for us, the six pages that are in front of it.

It's on the website, but we could certainly provide you a link or something to it because it is really very informative.

Thank you, Ned.

Thank you.

I gave lots of comments during my question, so I don't want to add any more of those.

But just to add to what Supervisor Galloay said, in addition to all the positions that come in, there will be things that were post-published that some of us may want to accelerate to meet community needs that have been around for a long time.

Well, thank you very much for the presentation.

Excellent presentation.

Thank you very much for talking those two questions.

I'm sure there will be a lot.

I'm sure there will be a lot for us as well.

We'll get forward and go forward in the process.

At this point, Ms.

Kelvin, we suggested a recess.

Let's just break it.

Okay.

Five minutes.

Good board.

Steele, I'm not sure who has the heart attack.

It's just about the form of the project.

It's about the form of the project.

It's about the form of the project.

It's about the form of the project.

We have different make-ups at the table.

Good afternoon to the chair and the board.

Again, I'm Andy Bowman, assistant chief financial officer.

We'll have some other staff who will introduce themselves along the way.

We're going to continue this work session with each of the regional fund expenditures where we left off from Wednesday.

And we have about a little over an hour scheduled.

So if there's anything we're not able to cover today, we can roll that into Wednesday's work session.

Just pick up because we don't want to rush any more discussion depending on where the board's energy may be on these topics.

I do want to take a moment and provide some of those modifications to our budget calendar based on topics identified by the board last week.

And again, also trying to figure out how to best support the board in their timeline.

After today's work session, we'll come back on Wednesday, March 13th in this room.

We're going to pick up some discussion started last week.

The sheriff will be here to discuss her funding request.

We'll also have our fire rescue staff to discuss some of their service proposals that are not included in the budget and any other questions the board may have.

After that, we will continue into the CIP or anything else in the general fund if we need to.

And then it needs to be determined or continued items can be picked up on Monday the 25th.

We have studied the calendar and our advertising dates and we can actually push back the advertising for the proposed tax rates and budget from the 25th to the 27th.

So staff will recommend that to give the board with more deliberation time to work through that.

So that's just really the same content with a slightly different order of operations over the next few days, all about really trying to re-sport the board and the issues of interest to them and also for the timeline and tax rates.

At the end of today, just as I did at the end of Wednesday, I kind of asked the board for their direction in terms of areas we wanted to explore in more detail, like the sheriff and fire rescue.

So again, before we break today, we'll make sure we do that same exercise.

So we are prepared in addition to the usual Q&A that has come into the stand.

So with that update, just a reminder in terms of our process, we're going to present information at a summary level, more detail in the county executive's presentation, but less so in the budget document.

We'll pause many times after every chapter, so this for any items of the board may or would you change in the budget, or those that just may be more general information requests.

And as the board mentioned earlier, for any one of the public listening, any Q&A not addressed at this meeting as posted in the website, the first couple of batches which are already listed and have been provided in the story.

Thank you, Andy.

Good afternoon, Board.

Ryan Davidson, Deputy Chief of Budgets.

We're now going to continue discussing the general fund expenditures, picking up where we left off with the health and welfare section.

That begins on page 137 for those following along at home of the FY25 recommended budget document.

and it's plunging in at approximately $30.1 million for the upcoming fiscal year.

And as a refresher, with these charts that we're going to be seeing at each section, the chart on the left illustrating what percentage of the total general fund budget for each larger functional area represents, 7% in this case.

And with the chart on the right shows what makes up that percentage and how much of the total functional area each piece makes up.

and for Health and Welfare, Health and Human Services portion of the budget makes up about 85% with some contributions to our regional and our nonprofit community partners making it through.

Looking at Health and Welfare, in the area of structural services, there was an increase in the total

and

That will be offset by approximately 33% revenue by the state and further offset by future reductions to the local transfer from for improved compliance and to help us better get our costs in line and help with the compliance and the Children's Services Act and make sure we're spending our dollars more efficiently.

Emergency Assistance Fund.

That's another area that funding was brought in-house in FY24 to replace the United Way Pathways Program with similar assistance.

It's meant to address urgent, one-time financial assistance needs.

The FY25 budget, recommended budget, continues that program at level funding from what we have in that occurring.

Broadband, Office of Broadband, Affordability and Accessibility.

We'll achieve universal broadband in 2025.

And this is one of those areas where there's not more or additional funding being added to the budget, but it's, again, about completing what we've started.

And so, of the 38,000 roughly total passings required to fully service Albemarle, there was only about 6,100 remaining, and we do expect those to be completed in FY25.

Office of Equity and Inclusion.

Again, not about new funding, but about using existing resources more effectively and efficiently.

In FY25, a part-time temporary position and inclusion and health equity program manager was converted to a regular part-time position in a cost neutral management manner in alignment with previously identified goals.

and looking at the strategic plan goals and objectives around housing.

There are a couple items I wanted to point out here.

First is a housing position.

Housing program coordinator that was previously funded on a two-year basis from the housing fund is now being moved into the general fund.

This is providing a more permanent funding stream for this position to continue that programming and that work.

Second, $2 million of otherwise unobligated FY24 fund balance is recommended to be transferred to the housing fund at the end of FY24 to support housing initiatives that are more one-time in nature and will support the county's strategic and housing goals.

Any remaining balances in the housing fund at the end of the fiscal year will be re-appropriated into FY25 for expected programming.

Currently, that's projected to be at approximately $4.7 million remaining in the housing fund reserve going from $24 million into $25 million.

Finally, the county partners with various regional and nonprofit community agencies to provide health and human service programming throughout our community.

Thank you, Mr. Davidson.

I'm going to step back in a moment to talk about the AVRT process.

This is a process of the agency budget review team.

That's not an obvious acronym.

This is a team of volunteer community members and staff who review human services nonprofit agency requests.

That group has a set of criteria that they review all of the programs by for those agencies, and they will determine evaluations from those programs from the exemplary to for range.

We have, with the Board's blessing and done something a little different this year in this process, I want to talk through how this works.

And this really begins in June of 2023, where county staff led by Chief Human Services Officer Kaki Demek presented a Albemarle Human Services Needs Assessment.

It was a data that looked at a lot of information around our community and emerging needs area.

And there were four emerging need kind of priority areas that were identified.

Family Homelessness, Adolescent Mental Health, Community Safety, and Navigation Proceedings.

So in light of that report, the board came back the following month and proposed some process changes in July of 2023.

The concept here was that community funding for human services agencies really would be prioritized for those programs that closely align with those four emerging needs areas identified in the human services needs assessment.

The idea would be that, with that higher funding, we would look to also have potential forms of agreements and contracts with them to have increased accountability.

The second bullet, the Board approved removing what had been a precedent of capping new programs at 50% of the request.

That is no longer the case, and so we would be looking to bring in new programs at greater amounts than had happened in recent history.

And the third is that, you know, this was not about eliminating the ATRT program, this was about augmenting that.

So that we would first look to invest the funding into the areas that would move forward, the board's strategic goal on human services.

What were those areas that would make the biggest difference?

After that, continuing to support the remaining existing ABRT agencies based on their program of values.

So looking to the next slide, how this plays out in terms of recommended funding this year.

First, Human Services Priority Areas.

Sorry.

Slide for the process now to the actual funding.

These slides showed the $100,000 that is for a community safety contingency.

That is being held really to address topics like gun violence in the community and it is to be really intended to be done in partnership with UVA in the city of Charlottesville who are also looking at similar funding.

Those discussions are underway as the city's budget was just released last week and that dialogue is continuing.

So staff intends to bring back a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors about how specifically that $100,000 would be recommended to be applied.

There were several applications made for use of that funding.

That's one knowing that this is a really underdevelopment staff would identify the funding, know there would be a future step.

Staff did receive applications for the other three areas, but they are not included in this.

This actually shows up on the unfunded list that Supervisor Gallaway spoke about a few minutes ago.

And then that really speaks to where we are in the human services priority areas.

The remaining agency budget review team, because the funding was intended to go there secondarily, the exemplary and solid rating programs received level funding.

If you are a fair-rated agency funding, they also receive level funding, but before we release any funding during each corner, we're going to require quarterly reports to make sure any issues in the application are on track.

And I must admit, there's a typo in the budget book where we did not identify who those agencies were.

Those are the programs for the Central Virginia Community Justice on our own and the Sexual Assault Resource Agency also known as CERF.

So those are still level funded, but we've done this before with agencies where they'll submit quarterly reports to us to make sure they're being responsive to findings in the review.

And then we would release funding assuming that everything looks okay.

And then no new programs are recommended in ABRT, again, with that intent to put funding in the human services priority area first.

So with that, that wraps up staff comments on the health and welfare chapter, and I'll turn it over to the chair for any questions or comments.

First, I do want to just get a little bit more clarity from myself about the key through just talking about specifically the community safety element that was programmed at the $100,000 levels.

Is that because we got quite a lot of specific applications and it seems like we've already had it

How to use that?

Is that because the opportunity emerged after we had already made the decision to allocate that set of funds and therefore we already had things coming in for the solicitation or were we just legally required to submit this public employee on the acronym that we already requested for funding requests?

So I guess I'm just asking like

I would say there's not so much of a legal requirement to have this.

The dialogue with UVA in the city has been going on for some time.

This was really to signal our intent to our partners that we are seeking to bring funding to leverage that as well.

I think the timing of the community safety working group wasn't quite what we had hoped when we advertised for this community safety priority area.

In hopes that we have the recommendations for immediate implementation from that group, we will do that in a form, our assessment of the active things.

That work is ongoing, so the contingency allows us to come back to that and use the recommendations to assess the application we got or ask for additional applications.

The intention being that all efforts to support community safety, I think, would be well worth it.

But the opportunity is rare to join forces with the city and UVA to fund something at a substantial level that you actually might be able to expand capacity or develop some new intervention.

Is it fair to then understand, like,

of Specific Partnership.

Absolutely.

Their interventions are a proposal that they made fit perfectly with the recommendations.

And they all fit.

They certainly will find themselves in the original recommendations from that community safety working group.

How the implementation group sort of teases out what to do first or what to do next is yet to be determined.

So I think it's possible that one of those applications, in fact,

Mageshelf Available for the larger pool of money.

And I do just want to say, in general, the increased emphasis on strategic planning and how we deploy our AVRT resources is something I'm really excited.

So I'm glad to see this going back to this, this budget.

Something I'm talking constituents about.

It really leaps off the page when you read the budget.

who historically does not feel like we're necessarily exercising full strategic control of how these very important services were deployed.

And I like this much more concentrated approach.

It gives me a lot of space.

So I just want to thank staff for the work they've done in this, in this first year.

I did have a question just in to the zone page.

How important to you then?

This might be something folks may answer bold.

Under ESS, we list the

I am not scared of that.

I think that includes state money, particularly through CSA.

It's money which kind of we spend, we pay more.

So there's lots of direct assistance that we join somebody who needs it with the funding source and we watch that happen that doesn't come through our finance office.

Thank you.

I would see, because I just recognize that,

as of the past.

Somewhere in this document, in this specific table, I would be able to find if I was looking for a little bit of a better eye for this, the federal fund.

They are in the big way.

In the annual report from the DSS advisory board, that's a showcase number because it's big.

It's like $168 million of money

And I do, unsurprisingly, I was very intrigued when the LAJCD community organizer came and talked to us about the eviction reduction fund.

And I recognize this is something that we get a probably disproportionately large impact per dollar spent.

But I don't know that I've seen any actual data on what

Do we have the ability to identify truly just how many individual disbursements there have been because I feel it's not ungenerous or inaccurate.

Prioritized based on whether there's children in the house under five, whether there's somebody who's medically frazzled in the house, those sorts of things.

And kind of further, maybe a little bit of a more complex data plus.

I recognize that in eviction prevention, there is also a cost saving that is realized for the public by also recognizing there's a wrong pockets problem there, right?

Like not everything is, not every cost saving is realized by the

Public Services, other bodies.

We have a set of costs saving for an eviction prevention for the locality.

Not for real.

We would be able to extrapolate based on data that's used at the national level, but we don't have that for ourselves.

And we don't, honestly, we don't know.

We know we've avoided your eviction in September.

My understanding is that currently we do disperse eviction prevention funds, primarily to families that are able to keep current but haven't been existing yet.

I had a catastrophe and I'm now

That this is meant to be an emergency assistance program, not a poverty solution program.

That's a hard distinction to make, doesn't feel great, but it is the distinction that this is meant to be a help you through a short-term problem and not necessarily be the long-term solution again for the September-October example.

Thank you.

You may have heard also the description around this sort of donut problem where early broadband was sort of created.

But there'd be three houses in the middle that didn't get connected.

So there'll be quite a bit of work in the last six months of that to go and identify all of those folks.

And so the economy of scale around some of the work is missing there.

So we have to do some strategic work to get them in there.

And I think we'll clarify and right speed have some of those

I mean, we're pretty dedicated to universal service.

I think we're also dedicated to problem solving whatever those doughnut holes are.

And we've certainly had that problem with past years where we

said to, for example, a provider who's agreed to provide broadband to 100 households and they get 98 done.

And so it's our job to keep track of all of those missing twos and fours and sixes and make sure that our final year we solve those problems.

OK, so the 6,100 could be part of the donut.

They certainly are.

I find myself in the middle of a donut.

And yes, my address is in that list.

Wait, where's my call point?

Okay.

It's a little bit of everybody.

There's some actual clusters, for example, you know, the Keen, as well as largely been sort of addressing former grants, but Keen in the north garden.

So there's villages sort of in that.

Thank you.

And regarding the housing fund, so we're looking at possibly giving two million for the housing fund for next fiscal year.

that number, that projected number at the end of the year does include this $2 million as well.

So it's going to be transferred in the current fiscal year.

And so that 4.7 projected that's going to be delivered to the next fiscal year includes this $2 million.

Yes, ma'am.

And we have $3.6 million in applications that are in the pipeline for that $4 million.

Yes.

The Human Services Project.

Okay, so there's part of that for gun safety.

And I just have a question regarding, and it's probably in for two.

It's gonna make you go on a roll, yeah.

You so much.

In a human services needs assessment, there were sort of two, two areas, two pieces of data that we looked at.

We looked at the number of calls that come to our adult protective services unit that actually are not protective service issues.

But seniors or friends of seniors or family of seniors who need somebody to talk to about what the senior service landscape looks like.

They don't know that they might be able to go to Java to get some of that answered, but they don't know where to start.

And so our staff at DSS spend an awful lot of time coaching and supporting folks who are not our traditional clients.

And we also have a staff that is overworked and has a lot of traditional clients.

And so there's a need to sort of push that work back into the community and not at APS.

And then we also heard a tremendous number of seniors

who were, again, friends or family of seniors who didn't know where to start.

And so we got lots of data from people saying we didn't know where we could call.

We didn't have anybody that would help us.

And we made huge, both financial and emotional mistakes in our process in terms of negotiating the complicated service system for seniors.

Could that also include the center, which could maybe reach out?

The center did not apply for those funds.

I could check up on them.

All right.

Thank you.

So let me just stick to that point.

But because we were just trying to make sure I understand because last summer when we approved the, you know, we talked about the prior to use in the

and we had homelessness, adolescent mental health, community safety and navigation for seniors.

And I've heard a little Mike's discussion and some of you know the discussion, we have been talking about community safety.

And I didn't know if they were taught, that was being discussed in a general topic or as a specific in under this, I'm not sure if that makes sense.

But I'm just trying to figure out

You were talking about how the $100,000 could be utilized later.

You're looking at how the best to use it.

And it might come back to some of these, one of these four, some of these four.

Help me here, Kathy.

Sure.

So we solicited, during the AVRT process, applications to solve or address community safety.

When you say community safety, that's one of the

We have homelessness, mental health, beauty safety, and navigation for seniors.

Along the issue for community safety, there happened to be this parallel process with the Joint UVA City County Community Safety Working Group that would emerge with a set of recommendations for implementation and how amazing would it be that we had $100,000 in our process.

that would be potentially able to join forces with funds from the city and UVA to make a bigger impact on community safety.

So we hoped that all of those things would be able to influence each other in time to come to this body and say to the budget process and say, we know exactly where we think this money should go.

That's not the way it happened.

And so this, that $100,000 is being proposed in the budget just to hide in a contingency until that community safety work working group has finished its recommendations.

That helps me a lot because I was getting hung up on the term community safety and what I was seeing with homelessness, adolescent mental health, navigation for seniors and community safety.

So I think I understand it better now.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And maybe you said it, but do you have a sense of when?

I haven't had many senses of when.

I've been wrong.

I hope so.

All right.

I guess that was really what I was trying to figure out tonight.

I really do, though, to turn to staff and thank you.

I really do like the new look.

that we're using and how you're tightening this down.

I like the idea of some of the foreigners with quarterly reports for more information.

And I just really like the way you all are farce this out and doing things differently this year.

And I really appreciate that.

Thank you.

So President Allen, the first question is one that we've

It's not a high priority, but if you could get back to me, I didn't.

It's a question I should have asked last year, but in looking at the different AVRT categories, there's basically four for OAL.

It looks like two of those came online this week, or 22.

In trying to track the monies

I was just struggling to crack it, but then I was like, oh wait, when should we break out these other three lines and are they all the same?

Sure.

So I can speak to that.

Previously, those that are showing with the zeros in FY23 were considered part of the overall ABRT contribution.

We looked at the services that they were providing and then we felt that they felt more contractual in nature.

And so those were moved from the ABRT process into this staff review process.

and so it really is a data issue to not confuse the issue of saying, but wait, I thought we contributed X amount to OAR back in 2023.

He started pulling those out separately and sharing those separately here so that we could track that data more consistently across.

And it wasn't a, but wait, we have 231 back there.

Why is it only showing 211?

And so that's really the reason for breaking those out.

And that way they've always, I could go back and look at exactly how long they've been funded.

It's probably the math behind Mr. Davidson's comment, which is spot on.

I guess that's where I struggled.

I didn't math it.

We can take a follow-up show how that looked.

Clearly, it is.

I'm not a fanatic problem.

I know in the list of unfunded items, there were two DSS positions, a human service navigator and a senior human service worker.

That was specific to our hearts.

In the description there, it does state that the position was received a 33 percent reimbursement from the state.

The cost that's included on the list of unfunded items already include that reimbursement.

So that's just pure county cost in our list, or is that before the reimbursement?

All right, so a senior humanry is ours.

It has in there is $107,599.

That's the total cost.

That's the oscillation of one time.

You're saying 33% of that would come back in that kind of fund.

Well, 33 is maybe the 105, the one-time cost.

Thank you very much.

I apologize that I have left my four pages of message home, so I will email thanks to you that I don't remember properly enough.

Following along with the unfunded list, just I guess my question about the emergency assistance program is we're contemplating putting public dollars in because the federal dollars are

Though that position will continue, but one in the do not, I mean, the unfunded list is different than what you just described.

Exactly.

So we imagine them doing different

Okay, all right, that's good news.

Very good, thank you.

And, all right, jumping to the AVR team list, procedurally, is there a number of years when one or several are having not so great analysis and yet still carried along?

When does that end?

Because there are considerable

Chunks of money, 25,000-year and there, that are going to things where the application was fair or there was no data delivered at all.

And so there are so many that didn't get any funding that we know are delivering food.

I mean, those ambitious jumps to mind because their application is exemplary and there are monstrous numbers of families who are held.

And

So anyway, that's just how that's sorted out is something I would love to learn more about when you can.

An element that I brought up every year for the last 10 is the focus on, I always look very carefully on the charts.

And thank you for all this detail because it really helps me understand the county residents who are served versus the overall.

To me, it's very important

that refocus County taxpayer dollars on services that are primarily for county residents rather than a very small amount.

You know, 15, 14, 13% of the people served being county residents does not meet the standard I hope we would have.

So I will just pass that right along because it's sort of colored the way I've looked at the chart.

In your application process somewhere,

are questions asked about the capability of the agency's staff to do the job.

And that is, what are the numbers of the turnover rate for the people on staff?

And I've heard only anecdotally about various agencies in the social service realm who have huge turnovers of people.

And you talk about churn, it's just like,

and they get half trained and then they're out the door.

So is that part of your information gathering and analysis?

And if not now, then perhaps next year would be a good thing to add.

So again, we're making sure that we are funding agencies who are capable and willing.

I know that it's really hard to be on a nonprofit board and we need a lot of people on those boards who are overs and actually get the work done.

and so I'm having an analysis of how they carry that out would be, and I'm not on it, so except the waiting board, and I should disclose it someday, but we'll talk about leave then.

I'll read the statement.

I can speak to a couple of those in response.

We do not have a specific question on turnover rate, but we do have a, I'll call a few questions.

I'll just call around organizational health to make sure they are sound operations, but that's one every year we look at the application and we can factor that into other ways we may look at that just in the changing environment we have in the labor market.

on the first question around what happens or what point is funding withdrawn.

No one scored there, but there's a or rating, and typically when anyone scores or, that is when there are significant consequences in our recommendation for funding.

I think it's been a couple of years since we've done that, but at that point really look at a defunding or a reduction to funding with a lot of contingencies around that.

the jurisdiction of origin for the clients.

Yes, that will be a piece of data that the AVRT team looks at.

We have some beneficiaries list where we have, they're required to look at their lap past your beneficiaries by zip code.

And we're specifically give them that.

So it's zip code and map overlay to verify that they're city or county beneficiaries or other beneficiaries.

And then they have to report at the end of that year how close they came to that estimate.

Well, I understand the challenge of the zip codes, and I know one goes all the way out to White Hall.

And so that really trips you up right away.

I'm glad for the map overlay.

So they're required to provide an audit.

I believe there are some questions around their board and their executive structure.

I don't have the full list of questions.

There's audit on top of that around some of the financial health things.

There is diversity of funding, making sure it's not a sole source of that.

There's a diversity of funding sources.

There's operational reserves, capital reserves that are looked at along that.

I believe there is a set of feedback.

And a 990, I would assume.

Yes.

who haven't done it for four or five years.

And so that's like, oops.

All right, well, and at some point, I will hope that you might go with the current state of disaster that the Postal Service is in, going to electronic checks for the, especially these agencies who were forced to be in a quarterly thing for some reason.

I don't understand that for the formerly municipal ban, Charlottesville ban has been funded for, I don't know, 30 years.

used to be 16,000 and when the recession came along, they were reduced to 8,000.

But they've been here, they're doing it.

And it seems like a lot of effort on staff parts has said 4,000, 2,000 checks, and one that has, that disappears at the mail.

So please consider all those kinds of wear and tear things when you go forward so that we make it easier on staff as well as on.

It's not just them.

I'm sure it is other agencies as well.

As a good example, as we head into the financial management system, a word of those processes, word of this practice, and how we can do that differently.

Is that a 20-20 something?

That's for some other time.

Thank you very much.

A lot of my questions have been answered.

We have these four priority areas, and I hope that this is just a re-solicitation that comes about next year.

We can start to focus on them the way I thought we did.

Thank you.

I'll just say, because we've covered health and welfare, because I know our Director of Job of Artiquinas here, I don't expect we'll have more questions or anything at this point, but you're of course welcome to stay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

What did you do?

All right, so moving along, next we have the Parks and Recreation and Cultural Area of our budget of roughly $11.9 million, 30% of the general funds, 43% of that being Parks and Recreation Department with the remaining 57% going to our community partners.

Within our Parks and Recreation Department, we have approximately $90,000 worth of increases that are related to operational costs related to improving our athletic field maintenance, including contract costs for additional field maintenance services, springing repairs, improvements to irrigation services, additional costs for supplies and equipment, grass seeds, fertilizers, all of those kind of things.

And as we continue

Well, I mentioned that in the next one.

Also, there's a big focus on implementing our CIP.

And there's an emphasis on this budget to move forward with the approved CIP projects, including the fields of Darden Tau, which, again, as those come online, we will continue to incorporate an ad on those additional operating costs as those new fields come on and we continue to maintain those at a higher level.

Jouett

and so we can get into more detailed questions with that.

But I just want to mention that a lot of the staff time and capacity and resources, not only in Parks and Rec but in our facilities department, other areas, I know our county attorneys involved when we're looking at land parcels and all of those things, they're going towards this project.

And finally, Biscuit Run, leading phase one improvements to open Biscuit Run for open to the park.

So those are a few of the highlights with our Parks and Recreation Operating Department.

Looking at some of our

Notable changes to the Parks, Rec, and Cultural Regional Partners, the library.

There are no services are changing.

We're just paying the county's share of existing services.

However, this does include some increases in compensation, health insurance, and the final year, the minimum wage phase in, similar to what we're facing, what our other regional partners are facing as well.

with the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

This contribution is increasing about 186,000, and it's based on our regional agreement, which is based on the actual transient occupancy tax revenues from the most recent completed year, which was FY23, and it comes out to, there's a formula that's like 5% of the 25% of the 30%, but it comes out to roughly 30% of the prior year's actuals, just for simplicity sake.

Okay.

Looking at the cultural arts and festival agencies, different criteria were used here versus these in the Human Services Agency that continued in 10.25.

Eligibility requirements didn't change.

Staff did revisit this process with the Board in July 23 and the Board approved some process modifications.

One in the past, agencies were scored by a team of staff from five different departments using 13 criteria and there was a prior organization of funding based on how they scored.

This is instead shifted focus to are you eligible and do you qualify and not go through the detailed scoring once agencies have demonstrated that they meet these minimum requirements.

This helps staff support staff capacity for a piece of the budget that's really relatively small compared to some others.

Within this process, agencies would be considered in one of the four areas, the smaller local cultural agencies, the larger programs that bring in visitors in sports, arts focused, and then recreation or educational.

The larger programs that bring in visitors to community and have economic impact, they have been historically funded at larger amounts than other agencies in this process.

And so acknowledging that there's notable differences between these categories and funding accordingly.

Third bullet speaks to creating inconsistent tiers within each category.

For example, smaller local cultural programs receiving different amounts of funding.

Staff would look at making those more consistent across the agencies that all fall within each of these tiers.

We didn't get all the way there in FY25, but it's improved from the prior year and we're continuing to work our way through that.

And then the last one speaks to a concept that is similar to the AVRT agencies, where agencies who meet the qualifications and are tended to be funded if possible, whether they were previously funded or not.

So, sorry.

I just want to begin by saying every time I hear the phrase it will be an investigative run, I have to really resist the urge to stand up in my seat.

It's very exciting, just every time I hear it.

I don't want to breeze past that incredible energy.

I hope we understand when we're, and I realize this is an issue that this board has previously litigated.

So as part of our, we can discuss this, we'll discuss this more in more detail when we look at our capital budget because we do talk about the operational impacts when we're looking at our capital budget.

But as part of this, what I was referring to there was the Darden Tau field rebuilds at one each year for four years.

And as those come online, there is a different level of maintenance that will be required with the new fields.

And so there's some irrigation costs, some

Seed, maintenance, other costs that are related to that, that will continue to increase.

Not to the level that we showed on that slide of $90,000 per year because that was a system-wide look at the improvements.

So there is a smaller incremental amount that will come on each year and we'll reevaluate that annual remaining three years of the current Darden Cow CME plan.

Yeah, we'll look at that for each of the four fields as we bring this online.

Awesome.

I do want to

I see that there's, in the unfunded list, we do have half of a trail crew technician, like what looks like half an FTE of a, I also know we have read something advertised, trail crew technician.

Is this just to bring trails online faster?

Yes, yes, to both.

Is this currently projected to be a timeline impacting item?

three-year plan for the remaining elements of this conference.

Is this expected to shift anything if we don't have the requested full complement of trail technicians?

Sure.

That's all I have.

Thank you so much for that.

I did just have, and I think I know the answer to this, but I just want to say it out loud.

My understanding is that the

and that it's not yet, I believe, captured in the CIP.

I just want to make sure that, am I correct in that?

It is.

It is not part of the operating budget.

On Wednesday, it is included in the CIP with design in year three, construction in year five, conditional, more than a few things happening.

And we'll talk, the opposite.

The thing is being city coming along.

I don't normally have the opportunity to get ahead of my reading, either in here or in the school room still.

Get it day by day, so I have not yet done my

I appreciate that.

It would be outside of the five-year period, but that is something we'd be at the earliest to use that with the evaluated libraries.

Very thorough, I appreciate it.

I don't really have any questions.

Jop up and down.

Happy, happy, happy.

Supervisor Gallo.

Yeah, no questions.

I'm just endorsing the fact that you're going to be reevaluating the field maintenance of Darden-Towell with each year to make sure that we've got the proper funding for that because this board did commit with the choice we made over there to do the proper maintenance on that to keep both the life

Lifespan and the quality to a certain level.

So if those costs are to change, that needs to be.

I mean, that's just a commitment that that that was voted on that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I don't have any questions either, but I will applaud two things.

I'm grateful that

There is a proposal for more staff in Parks and Rec because for 50 years, there have been six people during the work of planning.

And I'm really glad that there are more people on the ground everywhere to do.

And also regarding the field maintenance, there was basically none for so long that any increase in doing it right is going to look like an increase.

And so that's why based on, I agree with Ned that we need to

in doing the right amount of work to keep this really growing money.

Thank you.

If we go back one slide, I just want to clarify something.

We had actually, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves on this, but Charlottesville thought of increasing their transparency tax.

And you made a comment about how you calculate what is used for what.

And I just want to make sure I capture if there were an increase in that.

The first 5%.

That's what I thought.

That's what I want to make sure we clarify.

Moving on to community development.

Looking at 17.6 million, roughly 4% of the general fund budget.

Again, this is made up primarily of our community development department, followed by our regional transit agencies at roughly 39%, along with the economic development department and our other community development agencies.

As we look at community development departments, there are no major changes here.

And as we discussed with some of the areas on last Wednesday in our first work session, this is an area where the focus is more on continuing what we've started rather than newer additional funding, with some examples being the continuation of AC-44 and some of the various coordinates updates that are underway.

Projecting Board, Chief Financial Officer for the county.

Last Wednesday, we started the conversation about our core system modernization project.

And I'm going to take that a little bit further today as we enter the community development section of the budget.

So I am the financial officer, but I'm filling in today for our Chief Operating Officer, who typically leads this area.

So I will do my best impression of our COO.

She did leave me some great notes.

I will say.

So for several years, we've spoken with the board about the need to not just update our software, but that powers our daily operations, but to substantially overhaul them.

We call this our core systems modernization project.

There's been work to prepare for the two systems to go live in FY25, and today we'll talk a little bit more about the community development system.

This new system will launch in FY25 with a modern technology with more transparency for our customers.

You can include, as may see on the screen, a couple of sample

dashboards to include a dashboard for with my permits, my plans, my inspections, my invoices, my licenses, all in one place.

We also include requests for inspections and the ability to pay fees all in one place.

It will allow customers to upload attachments and to make corrections to their applications.

And there's also a fee estimator.

This will also provide a set of ability options such as a translator and screen reader for residents that may need those options.

Staff and CED have worked to create a 70% reduction in processes to improve processing efficiency and staff-free tooling by combining similar workflows.

This should result in reducing the overall training of both staff and our community members.

This will result in the technical platform to change significantly, and that will require significant change management for our employees and for the community.

All technology advances pull best practices from a large set of functional expertise so that technology is built with the development process in mind.

However, each system is unique.

We must learn the nuances and special exceptions of our county code and our policies.

CDD processes stand on that code, which is unique to Albemarle County.

The system that we currently procured is highly configurable, enables us to build in our code requirements without reprogramming and customizing the system.

So it's built with that flexibility.

This configuration process requires guidance from our subject matter experts.

These are the same employees that we rely on day to day to manage our routine workload, which has not slowed down in the midst of an ongoing project.

This project also requires dedicated resources from community development, information technology, and performance and strategic planning to realize all the benefits that the new system can offer.

Thank you, Jacob.

I'm going to be honest with you, our community development

Area.

We'll look at our Economic Development Office.

This is another area where the focus is more on continuing what we started rather than newer additional fundings.

For you, there are no major budget changes, but I did want to highlight two areas.

One is the updating of Project Enable, which is not about new funding, but about work plan advancement.

And the other area is the Rivanna Futures.

For Rivanna Futures, there is a small increase in the general fund, which is actually shown in the FES budget.

So there's two different layers to this, and we decided to discuss it all here of about $50,000 to cover the ongoing grounds of property maintenance and other routine operating expenses associated with that property.

In addition, the Economic Development Fund is planning to cover the FY25 expenses that have been estimated at approximately $700,000 for now for the Rivanna Futures project.

These expenses include further studying of the master plan of the property, project management support, things of that nature.

Now we're going to spend just a moment discussing our regional transport.

I want to preface this by saying that the amounts listed on the slide are not about changes in service or changes in service levels, but rather the continuation of existing services and existing service levels.

for Charlottesville Area Transit, which budgeted approximately $599,000 increase in the county contribution for existing services in FY25.

The amount of that FY25 recommended budget is based upon the five-year plan that CAT has shared with us with the county as part of previous budget processes.

At the beginning of the pandemic, CAT put together a multi-year funding plan that leveraged federal pandemic relief funding to offset the cost of services or potential revenue reduction losses, and that lowered the locality's contributions by sort of the city and the county by utilizing these dollars.

just lowered the county's contribution to around $500,000, I believe it was, at that point, and this has slowly increased each year back to the current levels over time.

I will say also, at the time of the release of the county executive's recommended budget, the city was still in the process of balancing their budget and having those discussions and deliberations with their departments, which included Charlottesville Area Transit.

So, therefore, the final amount in the CAT budget that you may see in the city budget for the county's contribution is approximately $84,000 higher than what we're showing.

While the timing for CAT is a slightly different than what we normally see for them on an annual basis, this is no different than how we would handle any of our other regional partners as they continue through the budget development process and there's budget changes as they work with their boards.

and therefore for all such changes in the county's contributions to the regional partners, whether it's CAT or a number of safety partners or a public works partners, staff will come back to the board at a later work session with those adjustments along with the plan to account for them and along with any other adjustments that the board may have or may have discussed with staff as we move through the process.

Micropat.

This fully funds the county's obligation for our second year of the MicroCat pilot program at approximately $1.7 million.

This is a $1.5 million increase from what was in the FY24 budget.

The FY24 budget contained the remainder of the county's contribution to fund the first year of the pilot program through our grant contribution we committed to.

As part of that program, we committed to two years of funding of this project.

The first year was heavily grant funded with a smaller county contribution, and the second year was 100% on the localities dot.

This number that we have in our budget represents that second year of funding that is 100% on the localities dot.

At this time, there are really no budget or programmatic decisions being asked of the board on this.

But, you know, anything as we go through this program and as we continue to look at this program, it really would be looking at the continuation of the program or service level changes that may occur in FY26.

So we would bring that back to the board at a later date for further discussion on this particular program.

as to our other regional transit partners, John has shown a slight decrease of roughly $251 from where we were last year and this fully funds the regional transit partnership and the Athena Express at $25,000 and $7,000 respectively.

And with that, that ends the community development section and we'll turn it back over for you.

Supervisor McKeel.

I think there's so many good things coming from that.

In fact, we've had, what, 8,700 people signed up for that since October.

I think that's just, this is going to be a game changer.

I'm hoping, I'm hoping.

spearheading all these things.

And with so much being in a rural area, this is what's going to enable transportation to happen.