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MINUTES

WATERTOWN BOARD OF EDUCATION REGULAR MEETING

Watertown High School

Technology Center

Monday, January 26, 2009 – 7:30 PM

Members Present: Joseph Apicella

Gina Calabrese, Chairman

Mary Colangelo, Secretary

Kevin Killeen

Thomas Lambert

Janice Pond

Richard Mazzamaro, Vice Chairman

Others Present: Karen Baldwin, Superintendent of Schools

Thad Hasbrouck, Director of Curriculum & Professional Services

Gary Miller – Interim Director of District Operations

Richard Mastroianni, Student Council Representative

Matt Geary, Principal Watertown High School

Diane Rigby, 2009 Teacher of the Year

Joanne Chenkus

Marylu Lerz

Russell Erickson – Tower Rd. resident

Dr. Peter Prowda

James Perucci, Reporter from the Town Times

Other interested guests

Absent: Todd Griffin

Mary Dzioba

A. Convene Regular Meeting - 7:30 PM

B. Salute to the Flag

Ms. Calabrese led the Pledge of Allegiance

C. Recognition

The Board wishes to recognize Watertown’s 2009 Teacher of the Year, Ms. Diane Rigby, Family & Consumer Science Teacher at Swift Middle School.

Ms. Baldwin: It gives me great pleasure this evening to introduce to the Watertown community formally our 2009 Teacher of the Year in Watertown, Diane Rigby. As I’m sure the board and staff members are aware, Teacher of the Year recognition is probably the most valued and honored award that the school system announces each year. It’s really about excellence in education and about service to the community and always keeping first in line the needs of all our children. The process that we undertake in Watertown is rigorous in terms of nominations and committee review and ultimately teacher selection. Diane was recognized in the state ceremony in November, one of 169 Teachers of the Year. That’s an excellent opportunity for all of us to come together in the state of Connecticut at Central Connecticut State University and participate in a really wonderful program that is celebrating the service of public education. I’m very pleased tonight to introduce Diane Rigby, a family and consumer science teacher at Swift Middle School and I have for her a series of awards and recognitions. The first is a Celebration of Excellence Certificate. It says, “Awarded to Diane Rigby for Watertown’s 2009 Teacher of the Year, presented by Watertown Board of Education, Monday, January 26, 2009.” It’s signed by the Board Chair, Mrs. Calabrese and myself. Congratulations. Those of you who may not know Diane, she actually came to the school system in August of 2007 as a family and consumer science teacher. She worked formally in the West Hartford as well in the Bristol Public Schools and she wrote in her application process to the state for the Teacher of the Year award that her decision to pursue a teaching certification in a master’s degree in education was to provide her an opportunity to share her love and skills of cooking, sewing and working with children. She believed that her enthusiasm would be contagious and her joy would make a difference in a young person’s life. While teaching, she found this statement to be very true. What we have for her is an engraved clock saying, “Watertown Teacher of the Year presented to Diane Rigby”. We took an excerpt from her essay from the state and she wrote, “My role in strengthening and improving the teaching profession is to ignite the desire to learn in each student.” Presented by the Watertown Board of Education January 26, 2009. No recognition ceremony would be completed without the awarding of a bouquet of flowers. I give my sincere gratitude and thanks for your fine efforts and contributions to children and families of Swift Middle School, so thank you Diane Rigby.

Ms. Rigby: I want to say thank you. This is an amazing honor. I’m still in amazement every time I think about it because I’m doing what I love to do. I personally feel that I’m one of many outstanding educators in the Watertown School District. When I look at the talent that’s around me every day, I feel that I don’t know how I stand out because I see so many wonderful people. I thank the Swift Administration as well as my fellow teachers because they share so much knowledge and inspiration with me everyday on an ongoing basis. It’s just amazing what I can grab and take from other people so I’m very fortunate for that. I also want to thank the Board of Ed and the communities of Watertown and Oakville for the support of the unified arts programs. As somebody who left teaching at one point a couple of years ago, because of a program cut, it means a lot to me to know that our program is important. I not only love the subjects that I teach, but I know it’s important for the kids to have real life situations to use the math, the English and the writing and the science they get from other classes. I think for them to see it in real life situations helps them to understand the value of what they’re learning and helps them to understand it’s real, it’s not just something in a textbook. Teaching for me is a passion. It’s a passion about what I am teaching, it’s a passion for working with the kids, and the thought that I get paid for what I love to do, it’s just wonderful, so I thank you for your support and for this honor.

D. Report from Student Council Representative – Richard Mastroianni

Mr. Mastroianni: Thank you Madam Chair, Superintendent Baldwin, members of the Board of Education and everyone in this room this evening. Midterms which took place all last week have officially ended today. We start school tomorrow with a clean slate so to speak. Our second semester, for many like myself, this is the final semester at Watertown High School. That is essentially bittersweet. We are anxious to start the next chapter of our lives, yet hesitant to leave the building we have grown so accustomed to over the past 4 years. However, don’t worry, there is still much time left in the year and we as a student body plan to make the second half of our year just as good, if not better than the first. To avoid any redundancy from what I have reported in the last few meetings, I will quickly report just three major events that will be unfolding in the coming weeks, which will truly help us start this semester off well. These include Battle of the Beards, Mr. Watertown and the musical, “Once on This Island”.

First Battle of the Beards is being held by the Interact Club in order to raise money for cancer research. In this event, select students and teachers will grow a beard. Donations of money in lieu of betting are placed on the contestant who students feel will grow the best beard. The competitors have all stopped shaving and within the next few weeks, their progress will be monitored. It’s a fun and creative way for students and teachers to improve that very important bond, which, unfortunately, in many cases it’s hard to come by, but it’s easy to come by in Watertown High School. Never the less, that hardly compares to the creativity involved in the Mr. Watertown competition, which will be held on February 26th in the gymnasium. This year there are 12 contestants and even Mrs. MontiBovi, the director herself, said that this year we may encounter some of the most bizarre yet entertaining acts yet. The guys will sing, dance and even answer some personal questions. Tickets will be $5.00 for adults, teens and children. Finally rehearsal for the musical, “Once on This Island” took place here in the Tech Center this afternoon. Students familiarized themselves with the script and were then coached solely on vocals by Mr. Sean Lewis. In the next few months, students will be engaged in a combination of singing, dancing and harsh practice in order to be ready for opening night, which will be tentatively at the end of March. Directors are Mrs. Chenkus, Mr. Foster Reece and Mr. Sean Lewis. As always, I will continue to inform you of what is happening at our high school today. All I hear about in the school is the construction, and although that is important, I want you to understand that that is not what we are all about. Watertown High School students continue to maintain good grades and immerse themselves in extra-curricular activities. Not only do we do this for fun but for the benefit of Watertown and Oakville as a community. Thank you.

E. Public Participation

None

F. Budget Summary – (Information Only – No Action Required)

Ms. Calabrese: This evening, the budget summary was distributed to the board at the meeting. Usually, it’s in the board packet, but here it is this evening. Are there any questions or comments?

Ms. Baldwin: It might be beneficial to ask Mr. Miller to walk the board through it rather than try and (inaudible).

Mr. Miller: It’s a little different format than you’re used to. This one hopefully will give you a lot more information than the printout that you normally get because this goes a long way towards showing you where we are starting to (inaudible) we’re going to be finishing the year. Rather than giving you a report that shows 13 million dollars, whatever the bottom line, because salaries aren’t encumbered and a variety of other things, I’ve gone to the trouble of not only showing what the expenses are to date, but also the column that’s (inaudible) and forecast, in those numbers are purchase orders that are currently encumbered. We’re waiting for bills; we’re waiting for the goods and services to happen. In some cases where we’ve planned out through the year and where we have not covered the monies through this year, I have gone through all the lines and made at this point, an educated guess, in some cases to where we are. Those of you who have seen the charts and things I do for health insurance and utilities, I’m basing these figures on actual performance and particularly in the case of utilities and the heat, it’ll get even better when we get through the heating season. I’ll continue to monitor with Shirley (inaudible) throughout the year, so you’ll get a much better executive level picture, what is the status of the budget, what’s the health of the financial situation for the board. The (inaudible) will continue to point out to you those areas where we think things are going fine, where we see a potential savings, where we see or know that we’re going to have a deficit and what we’re planning on doing about it.

Ms. Calabrese: Are there any questions or comments?

Ms. Colangelo: I do have a question. Is this something that we’re going to receive with our packets?

Mr. Miller: Yes, all the budget work that we’ve been doing. I’ve been working on this as late as this afternoon. There’s a new format. That will be our goal for the February.

G. Committee Reports:

1. Advertising Committee – Mary Colangelo

No report

2. Athletics Committee – Joseph Apicella

No Report

3. Budget Committee – Thomas Lambert

We will have another Budget Committee meeting Tuesday, 6:00 pm, John Trumbull Primary School. I hope that anybody who can make it, will be there as we continue to work on our budget as pertained to current service and we move forward.

4. Curriculum & Instruction Committee – Kevin Killeen

No Report

5. Facilities Committee – Richard Mazzamaro

There is no report, but I do want to say that I intend to get the Facilities Committee together; I had a chance to look through the 10-year capital improvement plan from Wethersfield. I think it’s an excellent document. I think it’s something that this board should look at and in the coming weeks, we should get the Facilities Committee together and start the process.

6. Policy and Labor Committee – Mary Colangelo

No Report

7. Cablevision – Mary Dzioba

Ms. Dzioba is not here this evening.

8. PBC Representative – Richard Mazzamaro

No Report

9. Education Connection Representative – Janice Pond

No Report

H. Communications - Secretary

None

I. Minutes

1. Regular Board of Education Meeting – January 12, 2009

MOTION made by Ms. Colangelo, sec. by Mr. Mazzamaro

To approve the minutes of the regular Board of Education meeting of January 12, 2009.

MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY

J. Superintendent's Recommendations and Report

Ms. Baldwin: Thank you very much. I would just point out to you that on item #1, section A, we were able to fill the English teacher vacancy that was vacant at the start of the August 2008 and we found a young, eager graduate student who finished her student teaching and started on a part time basis effective January 14th, but will be with us in the classroom starting tomorrow. We transitioned her well and I provided her with a lot of support as she begins her tenure here with Watertown. We’re excited about that. Item #2 of the report is again every day business of the board. We’ve been able to transfer a custodian at Swift, due to the project and posting of new positions, so that is just confirming the work that we’ve done.

1. Appointments – (Information Only – No Action Required)

a. Ms. Jennifer Mecca to the position of English Teacher at Watertown High School, effective January 14, 2009, being hired on Step 2 of the Watertown Teachers’ Contract, with a Masters Degree, at a contractual annual salary of $41,168.00 prorated.

2. Transfers – (Information Only – No Action Required)

a. Mr. Edward Stack from the position of second shift custodian at Watertown High School to the position of custodian 2nd shift, Main Level – Area C 7th Grade Wing at Swift Middle School, effective December 29, 2008, for 8.0 hours paid per day, at an hourly rate of $19.18.

3. Three School Project Update – (Information Only – No Action Required)

Administration will present an update on the three-school project.

Ms. Baldwin: We’ll start with Watertown High School. We continue with the duct piping and installation work in area a, continuing with our electrical roughens also in that area and also have started work and will continue with this work on the sprinklers. Area E, the foundations in the courtyard are almost complete, and that’s exciting and you can see when you drive in the steel and the structure, it’s beginning to look like a renovated Watertown High School. We are also moving forward with a selection of a privacy fence which is part of our site work here, is included in the plans and that privacy fence, I think is in large measure a response to try to pay attention to our neighbors here. I did speak with the architects with Kaestle Boos Assoc just confirming about this privacy fence which will go along the perimeter here in the Tower Rd. area, confirming the height of that fence. They were uncertain, but did believe that it was in conformance with the planning and zoning and that it was 6 feet high. We are responsive to that and I see that Mr. Erickson is here and he and I have had conversations relative to the fence and I think the issue with the neighbors now, I think we’ve moved forward with the initial operation and construction. Construction is not impacting neighbors. It’s just the everyday functions of living next to a high school that has impacted the neighbors in terms of arrival and dismissal and children who sometimes choose to make poor decisions and that impacts the neighborhood. I know that in my own community in Hartford, we try not to put up too many fences, I do think that sometimes in many schools in Connecticut, you’ll see in large comprehensive high school, perimeter fencing and so we are working on that and we believe that will be part of the installation probably in July, when most of the site work is done. But that’s another piece of our progress and once KBA informs us of more specifics of that plan design, I will make that public so that we can hopefully work together with the neighbors and ameliorate any concerns that still exist. Overall the construction is going very well here.

I was also at Judson and did a walk through of the project at 11:00 this morning with Mr. Porter, the Chairperson of the Public Building Committee and also with Freddie Khericha with KBA. I can say that we saw significant progress from the January 10th walk through and I was surprised by that because they had indicated on the 10th if you showed up 2 weeks later, you wouldn’t see that much progress. There was significant progress. The crane was actually moving the steel today to get it ready for installation. They’re hoping to have the steel up by the end of the week. The masons are on site with concrete walls, the water sprinkler work is in progress and near completion and the board should know that I played phone tag with Mike Brennan with O & G relative to his communication back to me about the Board’s concerns about the timeline and the progress. He and I will probably set up bi-monthly meetings so that we can pay close attention to the progress at Judson. I think there will be a meeting on February 14th or a walk through opportunity on Saturday the 14th and we will try and see if we can get that here as well at the high school. That might be exciting for the Board to see that as well.

And also, just an update at Polk, last Wednesday, we were able to get approvals from the neighbor on 23 Clyde Street for our work that needs to get done in terms of putting a culvert there for the 500 year flood zone and the water and sewer authority also gave approval for that work so we will move forward to wetlands with this request and I did speak on Friday to the Department of Environmental Protection and they informed me that the Polk project is #2 on a priority list. Hopefully we will still be on time for bids and getting this project underway in July. This is a tight timeline for Polk, but we’ll continue to monitor that and I’ll keep you undated.

4. 10 Year Enrollment Projections

Dr. Peter Prowda will give a presentation on the 10 Year Enrollment Projections.

Ms. Baldwin: At this time I’m very pleased to introduce to the Board, Dr. Peter Prowda. He’s a retired consultant from the State Department of Education working specifically with enrollment projections across the state. We engaged him in November 2008 to help us get a handle on our enrollment moving forward. It’s so pivotal looking at budget projections and operating budgets. Dr. Prowda has provided us with a comprehensive report and he is here tonight to give us an overview of that and answer any questions that the board may have. Thank you Dr. Prowda.

Dr. Prowda: When I do these, people say that you’re going on 10 years, 2018, how can you do that? We’re going to start with enrollment history and go through projections by level, contributing factors, show you how some prior projections for the town worked. I like to be interrupted during the course of things. All that means to me is I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. If you’ve got a question, I’ll try to pay attention and look up and help you out. This is your enrollment history from 1970 to date, so when you see numbers that show the decline coming up, you can say you’re no stranger to it. It’s a fairly typical pattern for the state. Many places in the state had a peak right around there, 1991. Your peak was 4649. Practically everybody went through a dip in here. Your bottom is 2971. Many places have gone to a secondary peak, somewhere in this interval. You went up to 3617 and we’re going to start the projection off of this year’s number of 3332. We’re going to get right into where I think you’re going. These first eleven numbers were on the prior graph, but it’s a ten-year time frame here. Ten years ago, 3557, went up to 3617, down to 3332. In that 10-year period your enrollment was down 6.3%. That will give you an idea of how similar towns which claims comparison to DRG D, which is your DRG. North Haven grew by 9.2%, Southington grew by 5.9%, Clinton grew 2.9% and Berlin and New Milford grew by a little less than 1%. There will declines in both Bethel by 4.1%; there was a decline in Wallingford, 4.7%. That’s not all of DRG D. I tried to get the DRG D towns as close to you as I can. What do I see coming up? Next year, a decline of between 70 and 75 children. 2018, 472 student decline, which would be 14.2% over ten years. Statewide, I’m thinking there is going to be a 4% decline.

These students in your public schools are not the only places where Watertown students go. Last year, which is the last year I have completed information, you had 605 in the (inaudible) on public schools, 13 students in regional magnets, 100 students in other public schools. That could be a vo-ag center, technical school and you reported 3 students that are home-schooled.

Your elementary school is John Trumbull Primary School. Ten years ago, 911, you grew in 2 years to 967, and then you’ve been going downward to 753. Next year, not much change. As a matter of fact, I’m going to call this whole period relatively flat. They are going to go up 1.2%; I guess that’s an increase, but not much. I think for planning purposes, if you’re comfortable today, you’re comfortable ten years from now. If we do have a 1.2% increase in the state, that’s a little bigger than the state’s projection. State (inaudible) I’m projecting 0.9% even though I’m not with the state, I do get the state numbers through a few friends and I run my projection methodology on that.

In 3-5 we see a pattern. In this period, about six years, fairly low. 879 to a peak of 887 and then we’re heading down and we’re at 739. You’ve got two 3-5 schools I believe. Next year (inaudible). I think enrollment is going to decline through the year 2013. I think you could lose roughly 80-85 students (inaudible). You’ll get to a low somewhere around 650 and then start to inch up, but I think we can call the 2013 – 2018 period fairly level. You folks in the last ten years lost 15.9% decline, the state in grades 3-5 in that period was down 4.4%. This decline from this year over to here is 11.1% and statewide 3-5 should be down (inaudible).

Grades 6-8, Swift Middle School, started at 844 students, peaked at 927 in the year 2006 and has lost students in the last two years. It’s now at 864. For the past ten years, when you look at it going up and down, you’re still up 2.4%. Statewide enrollment was up 4.2% in that period. Next year, big decline. 864 down to 780 and you all know you’ve got a big grade 8 class in there now. When that moves up to the high school, two things are going to happen. Grade 8 is going decline enrollment and the high school, well it might be offset, I’ve got to look at the next slide. Over ten years, down 1780 student, pretty good decline of 21.1% and statewide expect a 6.2% decline.

High school has been going generally upward starting ten years ago, 923, got as low as 905, as high as 995 and now your 976 students. Next year, you’re not going to get that big a bump. Some 8th graders choose other high schools, but you are going to up around 15-20 students to a peak of 990. I expect that next year will be your peak at the high school. By 2018 you’re going to be at somewhere around 760 students I believe and that’s down 210-220 from where we are now. That’s a 22.2% decline. That’s pretty steep. The state is expecting a 9.1% decline.

Let’s see if we can figure out why this is going to happen. This is sort of the key stuff here. This is your current enrollment by grade and there’s a couple things you should see here that will explain a lot. When I saw this I wondered what the heck was going on. That’s sort of an unusual pattern and an unusual grade and what I did is that I looked back through the grades and through the statistics and found out that was your largest birth cohort, 1994. A large number of kids were born that year, so that does make sense, as those students move up into the high school, you’re going to see a temporary bulge and the other pattern I see is look at this trend right through here. These numbers are lower than these numbers which are lower than these numbers which are in the middle of that. To give you an idea, the average high school grade is 244 students, the average middle school grade is about 288 and that’s going to change next year as that 307 students moves on. The average 3-5 is 246 and the average K-2 is 220. As each of these cohorts moves up, I’m projecting a decline. It’s not very magical but fewer kids in the earlier grades and as they move up, they’re going to bring the projection downward. To give you an idea, this year’s current class of the kindergarten class of 2008, if current conditions hold, which means roughly the same housing, roughly the same percentage of students move in, transfer in, transfer out, non-public school stay roughly the same, that class has got 207 students, will have roughly 212 in grade 3 in 2011, and this year’s grade 3 has, not 212, but 263. That kindergarten class when they enter the middle school in grade 6 in 2014, if current numbers hold, they’ll have 218 students. Your grade six now has 266 and when that class enters high school in grade 9 in 2017, if things could stay the same, 196 students compared to 248. That is the basis of decline. This is your history of births in town, 1980 – 2013. We use births to predict kindergarten, here’s your 8th grade class. Births trended upward from 1980 – 1994, then started to decline, it was 273 births and there were 201 reported in 2007 by the State Department of Public Health. I think, this is my estimate, based on some regression methodology that I use, that’s you’re going to have 207 births in 2008. The data, when I ran this from the town clerk, I’m a little nervous about this 207 births because you had 90 births from the end of June in 2008 compared to 95 in 2007. One of my methods is to look at midyear over a period of time to the end of the year births. The relationship is not high enough for me to feel comfortable. Even though mid year births are down, I’m a little conservative in saying births are going to increase in (inaudible). I project births from data provided from the Connecticut State data center, women of child bearing age and then I compute fertility rates for women, not for this town, but for DRG D. You need a bigger number than for this town. I use all the women in DRG D based on the births in 2005 and the state data center’s estimate of women in childbearing age in all those towns. The interesting thing, the state’s data center projects a decline of women in childbearing age, this is 15-44. Statistically, they said you had, according to the census, there are 5409 women of child bearing age in 2000, the state data center predicts 4350 in 2005, 4250 in 2010, 4200 in 2015. My gut is that they’re a little low. They’re a higher data authority than I am and it’s sometimes good to anchor your data with some other source.

Let me give you an idea, the current K-4 kids who are in school now in grades K-4, they were born for the most part 1999 – 2004. There was an average number of births in those five-year periods of 217 births per year. That’s 99 – 2003. The next five-year stat which is roughly in here the average number of births is 206. That’s four years of actual, one year 2008 of a guess, but a pretty reasonable guess. You can see there’s not a lot of kids in the pipeline for the next five years. My motto for the 2009-2013, births average 207. It looks like the decline, if things hold, we can see where it’s going to end.

The next thing I look at is birth to kindergarten growth. This is a little tricky because it’s five years worth of (inaudible). From the time a child is born to the time they are in kindergarten and I also do something a little different, I look at parent holdouts. That’s a parent who holds their child out to age 6. I incorporate that in my model. That’s typically your, (inaudible) babies, October, November and December, mostly boys, mostly in need of another year of maturity. I would compare the 5 year olds entering kindergarten for the first time in 2007, plus the 6 year old entering kindergarten for the first time in 2008, compare that number to 2002 births and that would be this cohort right here. The numbers are roughly equal, very little migration. You’ve got some competing in the non public schools, so you’ve probably got some (inaudible) here, but look what you have back here. That’s going to reflect the in migration in the 92-96 period and from there it has come downward. I did do some projections for the town years ago and if I were doing a projection in this period, I’m going to project a pretty good growth from birth to kindergarten much more so than in here. The most recent estimate, birth to kindergarten growth or yield is 99% for 2003 birth cohort and the model uses 5 years worth of data so I’m using 100.6% growth from birth to kindergarten and you retain a few children in kindergarten. It’s been roughly 3.3% over the past five year. One of the good things is our model is using 100.6% and I’ve been in some towns where this number is just bouncing all over the place. Look at that in those years. It’s been fairly stable. We’ve got maybe a half a year of recession under the belt, the model, we’ve four – 4 ½ pretty decent years. We can’t predict what’s going to happen out here.

Here’s your estimated student migration. What I do with this is I make an adjustment with students who go off to other public schools. If they’re attending a magnet school or something like that, I make the adjustment to show you roughly what’s going on in town, movement with so many non-public students. It might be worthwhile to do a calculation of public and non-public combined to see what it looks like. That’s not too difficult to do. The numbers have ranged from a high of 3.1% and that’s going to be between October 2004 and October 2005 to a low of -.7% between 97 and 98 and 96 and 97. This past year, despite the fact that it wasn’t the greatest of years, you still have a 1% increase. I think economically, one of the things you might postulate is that some parents might pull their kids out of a non-public situation and come to public. They are going to make that decision probably in June or July and so I don’t think the economic collapse that’s happened recently is fully reflected in here. Using this calculation is that happens, it is going to show an increase. It’s possible the town wide figure may show a decrease. I(inaudible) are going to move because this recession is not just in the Waterbury area, but Connecticut and the nation. There’s no place to run and hide.

New housing, usually housing does begat kids one way or another. You had 110 new housing units approved in 1997, this is an estimate from the state housing department. You’re town housing might be a little different. This is not if someone built a house and demolished something else. It is not demolitions. In 2007, 45. Ouch. In 2008, through October, that was the latest data available when we ran this, there were 33 housing permits issued through October 2008 compared to 41 through October 2007. Guess what? 2008 when the numbers come in finally, are likely going to be lower than the 45 you see here. The model doesn’t build housing in. whenever you start to look at these factors, new house, migration, non-public, sale of existing homes, any other statistic you can look at. You say, the housing is going up, you’ll see student migration go up, if the housing going down, you aren’t going to see student migration going down. Guess what, it’s not clean. When I show you this, this is not directly built into the projection. The thing that’s built into it is an offshoot, which is people with children moving in, attending the public schools. The projection assumes, and I hate this methodology, an average of 54 new house being built, you didn’t hit it in 06, you didn’t hit it in 07, in 08 it’s going to be even lower. What that means to me, unless there’s some interchange going on from non public, the projection is (inaudible) in the short, the odds are there are a little more optimistic than pessimistic because we’re not sure yet 2008 data aren’t in for non public and we don’t know (inaudible) what we’ll do for 2009. It’s something you should watch if you start to get transfers and inquiries over the summer that could offset some of this.

Ms. Calabrese: Dr. Prowda, When you were talking about enrollment of other districts in the DRG, I noticed the examples you used showed enrollment going up as opposed to our enrollment going down. Can you give a reason for that?

Dr. Prowda: (inaudible) it’s a normal pattern I see of dispersion among the DRG’s (inaudible) towns within the DRG’s. It’s going to depend on who’s building houses and a lot of it is just (inaudible) as to when the growth happened. It’s like (inaudible) statistics in some cases, if your growth period is this ten years and someone’s happened in a different part of the cycle and they’re off 2 years, then you’re going to see some differences. It doesn’t shock me. You’re not the lowest, middle, lower third.

Mr. Killeen: I guess my question to that would be, what did you base your projection on? Present trends. With that in mind, if I look at the 3-5th grade enrollment in 2008, it’s roughly 739, if I project out to the same number of years, 6 years to be in 9 – 12th grade for this similar age group, it goes up as much as 840 or so. I don’t get how we could have that substantial increase in trending when it seems to be going down at that point.

Dr. Prowda: Let’s think about what’s going on. Number 1, 3-5 is three grades, 9-12 is four, so you’ve got to make that. Number 2 and I don’t have the number with me, but I’m going to bet that you lose 9th graders to non public schools, it’s been a pattern, the big unknown here is what is the recession going to do to that. I didn’t bring my overall projection, but I know that it’s in,…Gary do you have it?

Mr. Miller: No, I didn’t bring it.

Dr. Prowda: You didn’t bring it, Karen? It’s in the back there. The key number to look there is the grade 8-9, appendix b, 8-9 growth and if I can recall, it is a negative, it’s like (inaudible) that is not atypical. If you look at the high school, what are you going to see, you’re going to see a big 8th grade class come in and exit. Not all of them are going to (inaudible) the high school. You’ve got a bunch of factors going on. You’ve got in migration coming in at 1% per year, 1% applied over 3-5 population , it’s going to work out. Take a look when you get a chance, at the (inaudible) and follow the classes through. So look at 3rd grade in 2008, then look at 4th grade in 2009, 5th grade 2010, 6th 2011, see if that clears it up for you. If it doesn’t, my phone number is on here, give me a call.

Mr. Killeen: Well I do see that the graphs are similar. It doesn’t project, and I’m trying to resolve the issue, maybe for the board, that if we took the 3-5 enrollment, I believe that’s in slide 6 and project it to 9,10, and 11 , that there’s actually an increase of nearly 100 students if we project out. That’s the part that I’m kind of struggling with.

Dr. Prowda: So you’ve got 3-5…

Mr. Killeen: Look at our 08 year, 739

Dr. Prowda: so we’ve got to go…

Mr. Killeen: Add 6 years…

Dr. Prowda: I’ve got to do this on the fly, thank you. Six years and we’re going somewhere in here?

Mr. Killeen: We’re at 840, let’s say. Nearly 100 more.

Dr. Prowda: Well, you’ve got 4 grades here versus three. First I’ve got to make that adjustment. You want to do 3-5, you’ve got to do 3-6 or 2-5.

Mr. Killeen: If you look at one four year, which would be the 12th year, then it would stand to be even more students than less.

Dr. Prowda: We’ve got this trend here. You got a trend downward and we’re observing that trend. It’s not going change. This downward trend is going to go eventually into the high school and when you look at the pattern, let’s look at the peaks. I’ve got a peak in 2000 for K-2, I’ve got a peak in 2003 for 3-5, I’ve got a peak in 2006 for 6-8 and I’ve got a peak in high school, that’s a nasty peak. But where we see the peak is right out here, 2009. If you follow the peaks, I think it pretty much follows. I think if we follow the tails, you’ll see the same thing. Go to the (inaudible), go to appendix b and look at the growth, grade to grade, check the grade, 8-9 growth, that’s one of your keys and see if it makes sense to you. If it doesn’t, you’ve got my number.

Mr. Killeen: Thanks.

Dr. Prowda: Sales of existing units, I do see this number in the paper, and I don’t know where people get it cause I haven’t seen it printed. I think it comes from some of the realtors have access to it. I estimated, I take the number of total of sales reported by the (inaudible) group, commercial records, subtract off the number of new housing units. It’s a rough estimate and what we see is the number of 97 was 296 sales of existing homes. It went up to 431 in 05, 315, 263, making the mortgage crisis a little real and based on sales through October, I think 08 is going to look like 220. The projection assumes, because it’s based on 5 years sales of existing houses, 326. It depends on what the housing turnover is in your town and that’s a very very, the nature of the people who buy and sell houses. In some communities you have a natural progression, people stay in town, age in place, move sometimes south, sell their house, to a younger family. Younger families eventually either bring children with them or they have children once they’re in town. When this number goes down, I think it (inaudible) that becomes stagnant, you don’t get the growth, the number the projection is based 1% growth. That could be slightly tenuous. If the growth goes to zero that would not shock me at all.

Here’s your non-public enrollment, a low of 537, this is 97-2007. 2008 usually isn’t available until April or May from the state. Peaked at 623, it is now 605. The interesting thing to me is that what I do is that I compare this to a total of public and non-public count. The non-public represented 15.9% of public and non-public students in 2007 and it was 13.1% ten years ago. It grew. 15.1% is shall I say, healthy. It’s a good size number.

How have I done? These are my projections. The same type of methodology, it was a really good value back then, an infinite value as a matter of fact. I did 4 projections between 1999 and 2006, they had a one-year (inaudible) rate of 1%. The 3 projections, we did 99 and 2003 and average 5-year rate of 1.7% which is 0.34 annually. That’s good. That doesn’t mean (inaudible) good. That means your town’s good. I apply a methodology and what it means is that there’s stability, a degree of predictability in the town. That’s all it means. I’d love to take credit for it, but quite frankly I can’t. My last projection in Watertown was done in 2006, right now that one is running 2.9% high after 2 years. That’s a little high. That projection was done in a period of greater economic prosperity. What am I worried about? My method looks at the last five year of data and I do a weighting. I weight this 2008 data a little higher than 7,6,5 and 4. Some other people weight them equally. The fact that I do weight it gives a greater weight to this current year, which wasn’t as good a year, it’s some aspects, the leading aspects of the decline that we all expect. There are four years of history that were more prosperous. A projection by it’s nature is going to flatten out trends. If I were a betting person, I would guess that for the next two years, that the projection may run a little high, but I can’t tell you, as a matter of fact, nobody that Obama has hired can tell you when this thing is going to end. If you anticipate another year, year and a half of this, a little carry over effect, my guess the projections might run a little high rather than low. The thing that we don’t know in that is what will happen in non-publics kids? There’s two decisions for parents to make. That’s the high school decision, whether they want to go to a private school, whether they’re going to continue in a more expensive parochial high schools. If you lose a job, there’s going to some families who pull their kids out of parochial schools too. I can’t tell you what it’s going to look like. We can guess, but we don’t know. That’s going to be a great moderator for the public schools, I think. It maybe why you don’t take a big dip and have the (inaudible) because on the up side some of the parents, again, might choose to divert their kids to non public schools when they have the resources. This is speculation, but I don’t see anybody shaking their head this way. That means that you folks who live it every day think that it could be plausible. I think we’re fairly close long term. I think it gives you a good five-year perspective. I think it gives you reasonable perspective on what you can expect on your upcoming budget deliberations. Are there any questions?

5. Superintendent’s Recommended Budget FY 2009-2010

Superintendent Karen Baldwin will give a Personnel and Benefits Presentation for the FY 2009-2010 operating budget.

Ms. Baldwin: Tonight, I’m going to present to you a (inaudible) at the personnel and benefits budget in the 2009-2010 requested operating budget. The budget and finance sub committee decided this is good model for us to follow. You see it in the overall budget request and now over the next several board meetings, we will drill down different areas and tonight is the personnel and benefits area. Again, just a reminder that the superintendent’s recommended budget proposes an increase of 5.9%, a little more than 2 million dollars, totaling a $37,283,050.00 operating budget for 2009-2010. You’ve seen this slide before. You saw it two weeks ago. Tonight, we’re really going to talk about the big piece of the pie, the salaries and wages and the employee benefits piece. Again, this represents over 81% of that 37 million dollar request. 30.4 million dollars is in salaries and 6.3 million dollars is in benefits. It’s all about the people and the benefits, the positions that help us to meet the core learning needs of our children across the school system so we need to pay close attention and that’s the purpose of tonight’s presentation, is to help you better understand what’s in this budget in terms of salaries and wages and also what’s not in this budget. Ultimately this budget does reflect our core values. What’s important to us for all children to learn to know, to be able to do from the pre-K level all the way through 12th grade at Watertown High School.

This slide represents the certified salaries and wages. There’s six expenditure categories in this certified staff. Those categories are central office administration, that’s 2.88% of the certified staff account, student advisors and stipends is .47% of the certified staff account, the school physician, .12%. Certified staff are those individuals who hold a certificate from the state department of education, school psychologists, principals, teachers, central office administration. Those are certified staff positions. These are the six expenditure categories that make up the certified staff. The piece of the pie is the teaching staff. We have over 250 full time equivalents. That represents 88% of our requests. That’s 16.1 million dollars right here in green and it’s up 2.7% from last year. Again, that’s due to, we finished bargaining with the teachers and as the board recalls, we instituted a step freeze for 2009-2010 and a general wage increase of 3.25% for 2009-2010. This certified account is up only 2.7% and that’s basically due to our cost savings and the hiring process that we just went through. And so what we thought that account, it doesn’t read 3.25 because the teachers that we brought in form July until the start of the school year were less expensive than the teachers that we built the collective bargaining (inaudible) on.

The principals and the administrators account, that is all the building based administrators, also the supervisor of special ed, now that account is 6.09% of the certified staff account. But overall, the increase in that account is also very low. It’s at 3.9%. The board negotiated a 1% general wage increase for the administrators association 2009-2010. You might ask well why is not that account only up 1%. It’s because there’s step increase in the contract. We have a relatively young administrative team in the building ranks and so there is step movement in place and so when you factor in step costs overall, the percentage increase in that account is about 3.9% increase.

Early retirement is this purple piece. It represents 2.12% of the certified staff account and that is the residual effect of a clause in the teacher’s contract where they would receive a severance buy out if they were hired before May of 1997 and that severance buy out it 50% of their accumulated sick time which you may recall there wasn’t a cap on sick time for awhile, so the board made some efforts in contract negotiations. There is an increase here of $62,000, $62,979 is part of that increase and that’s just to fill our contractual obligations in that early retirement. Unfortunately the board will see this effect for quite some time. This will have impact in the future budget proposals, as well. This is, again, the certified staff accounts, and the big picture is the green piece of the pie represents all of our teachers. Certainly, Dr. Prowda’s presentation in terms of enrollment and my presentation two weeks ago in terms of eliminating a team at Swift and redeploying them. I have heavy emphasis and hopefully I can help the board and the community to understand that decision and why we’re moving in that direction. To retain this staff and redeploy them to address real needs across the school system.

This represents the non-certified staff account. The total request in this account is $5,859,134.00. It is up $350,772.00 or 6.4%. The noncertified staff has 10 expenditure categories and so you see them all represented here: custodian and maintenance, secretaries, paraprofessionals, technology staff, coaches, insurance buy backs, curriculum development and (inaudible), substitutes, tutoring and homebound and nurses. These are all the expenditure categories. Just by title you can tell that some of them are obviously contractual obligations that we have with our bargaining units and that’s what they represents. Again, when you see the percentage next to that category, for example, paraprofessional and aides, that 23.49%, that’s how much paraprofessionals are in terms of taking up the whole $5,859,000.00 requests. Paraprofessionals account for 23% of that 5 million dollar request. In terms of cost drivers in this account, one of the largest cost drivers in this account which I spoke to you about 2 weeks ago, is the substitutes account. And I have a slide a little later on in this presentation that really helps the board and the public to understand the needs in that substitute account and why we need to put a corrective in there. This substitute account is underfunded today and I think that Mr. Miller’s budget summary to the board, we are looking obviously to capture and find over $200,000.00 this year to keep our substitutes account solvent and the overall operating budget obviously healthy. We had to put $207,000.00 into this account for next year. Overall, I’ll remind you that this account is up 300 in total, the certified and non-certified staff account is up $350,000. We had to put $207,000. Into substitutes. Overall, the board should recognize that through negotiations and retention of staff, we’ve done very well to keep our costs down in our non certified staff. The big cost driver in this, this year is substitutes, $207,000.00, but overall the account if up 6.4% or $350,772.00. Think about that, if you took $207,000.00 away from the $350,000 overall, you’d only have a little more than $100,000.00 of impact in this non-certified staff account. So this is a cost driver, the substitutes and it’s absolutely necessary and I’ll explain to the board moving forward, some of the purposes of that substitute teacher account. One of the other factors in here is the paraprofessionals. We are in contract negotiations with the paraprofessionals group. We put a placeholder in this budget at a 3.5% general wage increase. If you recall, I presented this as an unknown to the board on January 12th in the operating budget, so it’s a 3.5% general wage increase as a placeholder moving forward. That is in place for the 2009-2010 custodian and maintenance. That is the collective bargaining agreement for the custodian and maintenance. It is also the collective bargaining agreement for the secretaries. That’s a placeholder. We’re moving to mediation with the paraprofessionals and that will take place within the next six weeks. We’re working on a date there. That may become a know entity to us in the near future. Again, enrollments are a bit part of this operating budget and you can see they will be a big part of our future. We need to pay close attention to this. The high school figure again, as Dr. Prowda showed, is we’re projecting an increase of just 14 students. At the middle school, that decrease across the 3 grades of 84 students and Polk is up tick of 18 children and Judson a decrease of 23 and the real story in this enrollment picture comes into play for Polk and Swift for what we’re requesting in that 2009-2010 operating budget.

Here’s the issue, in the current service, total expenditures in salary and wage is $24,031,364.00. That’s how much we would pay in salary and wage if we didn’t add my 1.4 request. A 1.0 for grade 5 Polk and .4 for Watertown High School. So the amount of increase is $888,987.00 is just current service, which represents actually a 3.4%. If you add the impact of the additional request which is 1.4 FTE, roughly $74,000.00 the total request becomes $24,105,000.00 or an increase of $883,000.00 and a 3.7% impact on the salary and wage account by adding 1.4 FTE. It’s a 3/10 of a percent increase over the current service. Again, the new personnel request is a grade 5 teacher at Polk, again Polk is a school that has not made adequate yearly progress. It’s in year 2 in need of improvement. The grade 5 issue is that we need 6 sections at 5th grade next year at Polk to help meet the needs of our children. Polk, we do anticipate being housed at Heminway Park School, we will have 18 sections of classes at Polk next, 3 at grade 6, 3 at grade 5, 3 at grade 4 and 3 at grade 3, or six. It will be tight there at Heminway Park. We want to be mindful of the work that we’ve done maintaining class size and we want to make that commitment and therefore this new request is really to maintain the efforts that we have accomplished in class size. The 4/10th FTE in art at the high school is an existing teacher. Right now he is a 2/10th teacher, but this will allow us to add ceramics, art, electives, sculpture as well as an interdisciplinary communities class which is a best practice in terms of public education at the high school level and it also does help us address accreditation standards from NEASC.

These are the new personnel requests totaling $74,000 and it represents from that previous slide overall a 3.7% impact in the salary and wage account, very limited.

Mr. Killeen: The projection and placement of the Polk teacher would address the deficiencies in AYP, in the target area?

Ms. Baldwin: Our issue at Polk is that we are having a hard time meeting the needs of our subgroups of students, specifically children who are economically disadvantaged. By maintaining a smaller class size, we are going to be better able to meet the needs of all kids including children who come from less advantaged homes. Another area of concern at Polk and across the system, actually is our subgroup performance children who have special needs. So again, with the PJ decision and children being included in the regular education curriculum, the more that we can maintain our efforts in class size, the better we will be able to serve all children. As much as I would say it will directly impact our ability to move forward with our AYP, I think it’s understood that it’s foundational in our efforts to differentiate instruction and meet the needs of all of our kids.

In our current service budget, as presented last board meeting, the current service budget is a 5.6% overall increase. We need to be mindful that almost 1% is attributed to correctives. Remember that we put in $342,000 worth of correctives which almost account for a 1% impact on current service. We have to remember that. Our current service budget is 5.6%. In this current budget, we have proposed due to the reduction of 84 children at the Swift Middle School, that one 6th grade team be eliminated at Swift and that we redeploy those 5 teachers to areas of need across the district. One of the pieces here is that this current service budget does tremendous good for children across the school system. This slide and this series of next slides will help you to understand that. By eliminating that one team at 6th grade because the 6th grade will only have 235 children projected next year. That’s two teams, one of 117, one of 118. We know we can meet the needs of our learners at the middle level with teams of that size because we have teams of that size there now in the 7th grade and in the 8th grade and those children are thriving in a team and an interdisciplinary model. We know we can do that at the 6th grade level. What we would propose in this current budget is that 2 teachers become social studies teachers on the existing grade 6 teams. Their 2 grade 6 teams will remain. One teacher will then be redeployed to John Trumbull for early intervention and reading. As the board recalls, comprehensive literacy is a focus. We need to do better. Our third graders, 26% are below proficient. We need the resources to go after this. We cannot continue to have kids go through the system who are unable to read. This does accomplish that by redeploying staff. We would also redeploy 1 teacher to the high school to focus again on reading and academic literacy. This would provide us more tiered interventions for children in grades 9 through 12. Right now we don’t have anything for them. We’re not meeting their needs, they struggle with the core content subjects. If we can provide support in academic literacy and intervention programs, we will make a world of difference for kids in Watertown. We also in this model, move one special education teacher to Watertown High School. This will balance caseloads, help to better meet the needs of our children with special needs and help to integrate them into the core curriculum here at the high school. I do want to reinforce that this budget and this redeploying of staff really gets at core needs across the system specifically comprehensive literacy and closing the achievement gap with children who have special needs and those children who may not. This is really why we moved in this direction.

Mr. Apicella: How will it be decided what teachers are reallocated?

Ms. Baldwin: The collective bargaining agreement has language that we would follow. The teacher’s contract is pretty clear as to how we would (inaudible) this. We would move in that direction (inaudible). It’s burdensome. One of the first things we would do, for example in the special education transfer, is see if anybody has interest. I would put out that faculty survey January 5th asking people, do you have any interest in a change of assignment. If yes, would you like to move to the High school or the elementary school? One of the first things we would like to find out is are there hardy volunteers who have interest in changing. That way it’s less disruptive and less emotional for members. If in fact we don’t have hardy volunteers, there’s language to tell us how we would enact this process. We would go about doing that.

Mr. Apicella: So within that language, is that the reasoning of moving a teacher from Swift to John Trumbull, rather than taking a teacher from Swift and putting them in the 5th grade position?

Ms. Baldwin: The reason that we’re taking a teacher from Swift and this level and moving them to John Trumbull is simply priority need in terms of reading services. We have a reading language arts consultant there who is basically deployed as a reading teacher. She provides direct services to children. There is one other reading teacher there and almost 800 kids and again, clearly we need to continue to do work at the k-2 level because our 3rd grade scores are absolutely showing that there’s some skill based work that we can do and some intervention work to target children and in order to do that, we need resources, which are teachers.

Mr. Apicella: I may have been unclear. In terms of not hiring someone at John Trumbull and hiring someone at 5th grade, rather than moving that Swift teacher to 5th and then hiring someone at Trumbull. Is there reasoning behind that?

Ms. Baldwin: No reason behind that per say and at the end of the day, depending upon how all of the collective bargaining language plays out, that grade 5 teacher request may in fact being a reading consultant at John Trumbull if we can’t make the collective bargaining agreement work for us. Really what this budget presentation two weeks ago and tonight is telling you is that we clearly need a 1.0 FTE, we need it at Polk for grade 5 because we’re going to have 6 section there, we’re going to eliminate positions at Swift and redeploy. If through redeployment, we can’t accomplish our core values and goals, but we can accomplish moving a Swift person to grade 5, we would do that and hire to get our core values and goals met at John Trumbull.

Mr. Apicella: Thank you.

Mr. Miller: It’s positions we’re talking about in the budget, not people. Which people end up in which positions that will all fall out as you post the positions and who applies and who wants to move? It could be five people totally unexpected place end up in those positions and the five people that you’re maybe thinking about who are moving around here, they might go someplace into those 5 positions. Somebody might decide, it’s time to retire. Then you have to hire somebody. You have to think positions and not people.

Mr. Apicella: Unfortunately, it’s the people that come up to us when we’re out.

Mr. Miller: The people will fall into the right places, but in the budget, it’s positions we’re talking about. We’re redeploying positions.

Mr. Killeen: How many positions are affected?

Ms. Baldwin: Five.

Mr. Killeen: Five total? It’s five that are affected, but a request for an impact of 6.

Mr.Miller: 6.4 in total.

Ms. Baldwin: Right, plus the .4 at the high school. The budget and finance sub-committee asked us to be a little more specific about the changes at Swift and the decision making process. There’s a spreadsheet that gave to you just before my presentation that may help you to understand this. I’ll walk you through it. We certainly had options for 2009-2010. First option is, just keep it the same as it is today. There’re four teachers on the team and each teach a section of social studies. With the enrollment decline to keep it as it is, it’s just simply not equitable. 6th grade would have 78 students on a team. What would happen is class size would look quite robust there which is a good thing, but if we look at class size not on a parallel, not keeping pace with what the gr 6 class would look like, at the middle school, it just didn’t make sense when we evaluated that in light of what our district wide needs are. Our district wide needs are tremendous, especially in early literacy and in academic literacy at the high school. That compelled us to make a change. Then the question was, we understand that there’s only 235 6th graders, so eliminate the team, but why add two of the teachers to social studies, why not just keep it same? Eliminate the team, but have 4 teachers and do the dual content area. Every teacher teaches a section of social studies. What that results in is class sizes between 30 and 33 students. That’s what that model would result in. that’s just not tenable, we can’t even consider that in light of all the work that this board has done to reduce class and now maintain it. The decision became clear for us and that became letter C, eliminate the 3rd team, but redeploy two of the teachers as social studies teachers on grade 6. Class size ticks up about 1 student per class to about 22 kids per class, to where it is today to about 21.8, it goes up to 22 or 23. This seemed to be the most thoughtful, it also effectuates a full middle school concept where we have the core content people who are trained in social studies teaching social studies. That helps, obviously and provides for a full middle school experience at Swift. That’s why we went with this decision.

This also helps to compel the decision to reallocate resources. This is the net current expenditure per pupil. On the top if Watertown, 2007-2008 data says that our current per pupil expenditure, we pay $9,743 to educate children in Watertown. Our DRG which you hear Dr. Prowda speak about in terms of enrollment, DRG is similarly situated communities, where there’s socioeconomic factors, per capital income, their enrollment broadly, similarly situated communities pay $11,688 per student and the state, and obviously we know the state is going to be skewed high because there’s large urban centers with numerous children who are in need of the state, is $12,565 per student. Perhaps if you look down below at the chart, you can understand what compels our reasoning in reallocating staff. This is where we are, $9,743 per student today, just to get to where the DRG is would require almost an infusion of $2000 to get us to the DRG, to similarly situated school districts. To eliminate those 5 positions, to not redeploy staff, to not consider this is just unconscionable. We have to redeploy staff, we have to make up ground and we have to service the needs of all of our kids. The other piece of this is there is a reality to the types of kids we have in Watertown. 5.3% of our children are English language learners, 23 different languages are spoken in Watertown, how many FTE do have going at servicing children with English language needs? .4 and it’s at John Trumbull. Those children move all the way through the school system and we are meeting their needs as best we can through our regular education core classroom teachers. They’re not children with special needs, they’re children who came from a different culture and speak a different language and we don’t have the resources to meet them. That’s the reality, 5.3%. The other reality is we have 12% of our children who quality for free and reduced lunch. (inaudible) few resources at home and folks in terms of this economic collapse, we see more and more in the schools over the past 2 months, families under tremendous stress and that they are reaching out to the school system for services, to access agencies and that also to access our food service food program in the free and reduced lunch. The numbers that I tell you today are from 07-08 but I think that it is likely that you’re all feeling this economic downturn. It is likely that the needs of our children will be even greater as we open our doors in 2209-2010 and so we think about how far behind we are. We need to keep our teachers, we need to fund 1.4 FTE in 2009-2010 and we need to continue to work hard to meet the needs of all of these children. We can no longer be second to last in the state. It is not going to work.

Again, our needs are great, you saw this slide previously as much as I wanted to ask and put in this budget request of personnel, a reading language arts consultant at John Trumbull, a behaviorist k-12 and special education, we couldn’t do it in light of the economic times, we just could not bring forward to this community a 7% budget increase which is what these positions would have amounted to. These positions are desperately needed, a nurse just to be split between the high school and the middle school, a responsible thinking classroom tutor at Swift to help us with our positive behavior supports approach and interventions. We don’t have interventions in place and tiered interventions to meet the wide range of behaviors and learning needs that present themselves. I would remind the board of what’s not in this budget.

So any unknowns in January 12th that I talked to you about. Right now, I have 3 retirements that I know of. I will send another letter out to the staff asking them if they’re even considering it and what’s making impacting delay in their decision and I believe it may in fact be the economy. Everybody’s investment accounts are looking a little bleak and it may in fact be limiting people’s ability to say that they’re ready to leave Watertown Public Schools. 3 retirements, we can obviously take reductions in those accounts at some point. We have not made any changes yet, this is what we know. Last year we had over 8 retirements and so this may change and a letter will go out this week and we’ll see if we can find out any more information from the staff. The substitute account, we did put a corrective in this account of $207,780 to more accurately reflect the current level of expenditures in this account. I think overall, sometimes people think, this is such a high figure, how can this be? It is not, I would remind the board that the substitute account is for certified professional as well as non certified professionals, so paraprofessionals, school nurses, which are very expensive by the way to find substitutes for and understandably so. It’s complex work being a school nurse professional. Secretaries as well as teachers. Certainly teachers drive this account, but it’s because we also conduct initiatives throughout the school systems that requires teachers are absent from their classroom, not often, but a couple of days a year, whether it’s a curriculum writing initiative, whether it’s technology training, also planning placement team meetings. If they take place during the day, we have to hire sometimes half day subs to cover the regular teacher who’s going to attend the PPT, other times that sub gets deployed full time. There is a lot of activity across the school system that requires that substitutes fill in for people. We certainly cannot leave our classrooms vacant while teachers are in technology training, curriculum writing, or PPT meeting and we also do substitute obviously our paraprofessionals and teacher aides across the school system. We need to accurately fund this account and I understand why it’s underfunded because the board has had to take cuts at almost a draconian level and certainly you take cuts that are farthest away from children and so that substitute account is the place that the board has gone to. I tell you we continue to monitor our 08-09 operating budget across all accounts so that we can make up that deficit. Remember one of the first ways we typically make up that deficit is to put a freeze on supplies. When supplies have already been cut at such drastic levels, to bring a budget in and then the first thing we do is freeze it, we need to save money to fund the substitute account, it’s a vicious cycle and we have to stop that cycle, fund it correctly and engage support for our work.

Ms. Colangelo: Ms. Baldwin, are custodians included in the substitute accounts?

Ms. Baldwin: They are not. Custodians are absent due to sick, personal or even vacation. That gets covered through overtime. We don’t have a strong substitute system for them. They work additional time and cover.

Ms. Colangelo: Wouldn’t it be cheaper if you did have a list of subs?

Ms. Baldwin: It may become a collective bargaining issue. It’s something certainly we could look at in terms of would their agreement be reached, right now it’s probably a collective bargaining issue.

Mr. Miller: It’s hard with the machinery that’s being used and the chemicals and things like that to bring somebody in which you don’t use on a regular basis. If you had like some permanent people or recent retirees or someone willing to go back to work that knew the operation, it would be different.

Ms. Colangelo: It might be something to look into.

Mr. Killeen: If it comes down to negotiating towards a budget end and it’s something that would save us some money that would definitely something that could be an advantage.

Ms. Baldwin: In terms of employee benefits, the benefits category has 10 expenditure areas and some of these expenditure areas are driven by the collective bargaining process. The collective bargaining process, health and dental insurance is part of bargaining, life and long term disability is part of bargaining and the custodian lunches category is actually part of collective bargaining. All of this is included when you look at your detailed analysis of benefits these are 3 of the 10 expenditure categories that are part of the collective bargaining process. The other expenditure categories in employee benefits are social security, Medicare, insurance settlements, the town pension plan and unemployment. They all make up the employee benefits category. We are a self-insured environment in terms of health insurance and so this slide gives you a 12-month claim history and you can see this is actual December of 08 and the red is the board. We in December averaged about $420,000 worth of insurance claims. The town made up the difference, maybe 180 or so. But you can see that since the start which I think this is July, July was peaking at almost 500 and then august dropped and then September, October, November and December we saw a slight uptick. Our claims experience over the past 12 months have been good. That means that our employees are relatively healthy, their families, dependent children who might me on health care are staying healthy and so this is good and actually bodes quite well for our health insurance renewal. We received a very positive preliminary renewal from USI and tom Coalchik and we are hopeful that once he is able to negotiate with Anthem blue cross/blue shield on our network access fees and our administration fees that perhaps we may be able to even take a little more of a reduction in our health insurance account. In terms of collective bargaining, the board will recall this fall, the teachers, we made some significant (inaudible) with the prescription drug formulary increasing the three tiers and costs that teachers pay for that. We also changed (inaudible) design, eliminated a (inaudible) blue care program and overall saved about $150,000 through our health insurance proposal and we’ve taken all of that out of our request. So that’s fantastic news. The town pension plan is less positive news. That account, our contribution is up 82.1%. We have put in $68,598 into that account. This town pension account represents the board’s obligation to fund the retirement for non-certified employees. It’s still a projected figure. We have not heard from Mr. Nardelli from the town any real numbers from the actuaries. This shows the bleak picture in the overall economy in terms of our investments and what we’re each seeing individually and we are being advised to fund this. We were advised to fund it almost 100%, which would be an $82,000 infusion, which we just couldn’t afford. So we’ve right now put $68,598 into this account. This is a major cost driver in the employee benefits section and it’s still a projected figure. We can keep our fingers crossed that this figure will go down. We don’t know. It’s very much projected.

Worker’s compensation is also up. The account overall, a funding level of $345,000 is up 15.5%. Again, we are self-insured. The rates are calculated on a three-year period so sometimes what happens is you replace a good year with a bad year and it’s the severity of claims. It’s not the frequency of claims that’s hurting us. I think we have a pretty good site management program in place in terms of making sure that we don’t have teachers standing on chairs replacing light bulbs and custodians know how to lift object properly. All that is in place. I think we have a good work environment supporting our self-insured worker’s comp environment. This is also a projected figure of 15.5%. We hope to learn more about this as this budget process continues. That’s what’s hard about the timing of this board’s budget. So many figures in the benefits section are still projected figures. Overall the past January 12th and also tonight, this is talking about moving the Watertown Public schools forward towards its mission and certainly student performance goals. The context of this budget request is directly related to previous years budget requests to the 1.2 million that we reduced last year to programs that we couldn’t move forward last year to teachers that we couldn’t hire. Factors impacting this budget certainly are enrollment. We know that. There is a modest decline in 09-10’s system wide but certainly 84 students in the middle school, that’s a big part of our budget story. Certainly the economic collapse is also a big part of our budget story, that the state is projecting a $922 million deficit as of last Friday. We know that there will be declining revenues from the state. This all plays into our request. Employee benefits is a big part of this 2009-2010 budget, but I will tell you it is because of the town pension plan. It is not because of the work that we’ve done in collective bargaining. As a matter of fact, in insurance buybacks, we’ve reduced that by over $26,000 because again through the teacher’s contract we eliminated that provision. We are being impacted by the economic collapse and that is driving our benefits because we do need to fund the town pension.

The last piece is special services and the reduced funding of the excess cost sharing grant and how that will impact our operating budget. At our next meeting, Andy Lees will give a presentation relative to the special services component of this budget so that the board can get a better understanding of what’s in that budget, how we’re meeting the needs of all of our kids and also how this grant is affecting us. The one piece on the slide that you can’t see is comprehensive literacy. That is a factor that is driving this. We need to intervene on behalf of all of our kids, so we need to redeploy staff. The fact that 26% of our 3rd graders are below the proficient level certainly informs this budget request, and so comprehensive literacy is a factor in the 2009-2010-budget proposal as are correctives. We had to make almost 1% of your current service budget 5.6%, almost 1% is attributed to correctives system wide. If you have questions, I’d be happy to answer questions.

Ms. Calabrese: Thank you. Very thorough report.

6. NEASC Update

Ms. Baldwin: The next item on our agenda is just the NEASC update. The Board was provided in your packet the February 1 letter to Dr. Pamela Gray -Bennett. As the board may recall on December 8th, Mr. Geary, Principal of Watertown High School, the assistant principals as well as all of the department leaders, the teacher leaders gave a very thorough presentation about the work that we’ve been undertaking to be responsive to this February 1 NEASC update and we are thrilled about the positive energy around the work and the progress to date. Curriculum and Instruction sub committee has had an opportunity to look at all the curriculum documents and the revised mission and academic expectations. We have put together what we believe is a very positive statement of our work today of our ability to make progress in these areas and we are hoping it will be very well received by NEASC. This is conjunction with our 4/10 FTE art request, it is moving forward incrementally. You can see the work that administration has done and it is (inaudible) work in terms of leading this initiative making progress and getting ownership to this. I don’t know if the board has any questions on this. Mr. Geary is here and could answer your questions.

Attached is a copy of the February 1, 2009 progress letter to NEASC. Watertown High School Administration is present tonight to answer any questions. (See Attachment A.)

7. School Lunch Report – (Information Only – No Action Required)

Ms. Baldwin: Also included in the board’s packet is the school lunch report. If you had a chance to view it, overall, it’s fairly positive. Each school for the most part operating in October and November at a profit, some at a greater profit than others. We’re pleased thus far with the status of the food service program and if you have questions, Mr. Miller or I would entertain them. I know Mr. Miller meets with the Mrs. Dreher, the Director of Food Service.

Mr. Killeen: I have a question. I’m just looking at Polk operating at a loss, (inaudible) reasonable increases. My question is on Polk’s loss of October 08.

Ms. Baldwin: I think that might be related to need and how many people are actually purchasing from the food service program there. I think that’s a correlation there.

Mr. Killeen: OK.

Attached for your information are the Watertown School Lunch Reports for October 2008 and November 2008. (Please see Attachments B and C.)

K. Report from the Chairman

Ms. Calabrese: Superintendent Karen Baldwin and the Board of Education have presented a budget figure that accurately represents what it costs to maintain current services in Watertown schools. Additionally, we’re asking for a .4 teacher at Watertown High School. This amounts to throwing a small crumb toward NEASC to show that we continue to take steps in the direction of having the high school’s warning status removed in regard to curriculum and instruction. We are confident that upon completion of the three school building project, NEASC will remove the warning status our high school received as a result of the building’s poor condition. We are also asking for a 5th grade teacher at Polk school to prevent class sizes there from approaching 30 children per classroom. These are undoubtedly the worst economic times in recent memory. It’s important to note, however, that the Watertown School district has been continuously underfunded even during significantly better economic times, for almost two decades due to imposed cuts and budget defeats. Through attrition, positions have been eliminated; various programs have been either reduced or cut all together. Maintenance budgets have been decimated. Since the early 90’s we’ve been falling further and further down a deep dark well. Our needs don’t go away. It becomes increasingly more difficult and more expensive to climb out of that well with each passing year. NEASC’s evaluation of the high school was a huge wake up call we could not ignore. The board of education is obligated to truthfully inform the public about the school district’s needs and the costs of addressing those needs, knowing that this news won’t be met with great joy by the public, this year perhaps more than any other. We can only urge only those who believe in the intrinsic value of an excellent education as well as the quality of life only an excellent educational system can bring to a community to vigorously and vocally support this budget and to ensure that our schools are not allowed to fall any deeper into the well.

L. Action Items – Adoption of Items to be Approved by Consent

MOTION made by Ms. Colangelo, sec., by Mr. Lambert

1. Consideration of the Approval of Job Description – Supervisor of Financial services

It is recommended that the Board approve of the attached job description for the position of Supervisor of Financial Services. (Please see Attachment D.)

MOTION made by Ms. Colangelo, sec. by Mr. Lambert

MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY

2. Consideration of the Approval of the Acceptance of Gift

Mr. Matthew Baker would like to donate a Stereo System with an estimated value of $650.00, and a Camcorder with an estimated value of $600.00 to the band at Watertown High School.

It is recommended that the Board accept this generous donation and a letter of thanks to be sent to the donor.

Motion made by Mr. Rich Mazzamaro, seconded by Ms. Colangelo, to approve of the acceptance of gift.

MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY

3. Consideration of the Approval of Childbearing Leave of Absence

Ms. Laura Meka, Assistant Principal at John Trumbull Primary School, requests a Childbearing Leave of Absence, commencing February 13, 2009, returning to work in May 2009, with use of accumulated sick time and a medical doctor’s note to return.

It is recommended that the Board approve of a Childbearing Leave of Absence for Ms. Laura Meka, Assistant Principal at John Trumbull Primary School, commencing February 13, 2009, returning to work in May 2009, with use of accumulated sick time and a medical doctor’s note to return.

Motion made by Ms. Mary Colangelo, seconded by Mr. Thomas Lambert, to approve of a Childrearing Leave of Absence for Ms. Laura Meka.

MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY

M. Future Agenda Items and Board Members’ Comments

None

N. Public Participation

None

O. Executive Session

MOTION made by Ms. Colangelo, sec. by Mr. Mazzamaro

Personnel Matter

To go into executive session with the Board Members, the Superintendent and Mr. Hasbrouck at 9:30 pm.

MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY

P. Regular Session

Discussion and possible action on personnel matter.

MOTION made by Ms. Colangelo, sec. Mr. Mazzamaro

To approve the settlement of the grievance arbitration case currently pending between the Board and the Watertown Federation of Paraprofessionals concerning an employee’s separation from employment.

MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY

Q. Adjournment

MOTION made by Mr. Lambert, sec. Mr. Killeen to adjourn the meeting at 9:50 p.m.

Meeting adjourned at 9:50 p.m.

MOTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY

Respectfully submitted,

Mary Colangelo, Secretary

Board of Education

Patricia A. Barber, Minutes Secretary

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