Talbot County Public Schools is on the precipice of a big change. The headlines have been full of articles on the impact the end of all pandemic funding will have on local education agencies such as TCPs. We use some of our funding to meet the early pandemic needs, such as increase the cleaning at our schools and on our buses, improving air filtration, providing Internet access in rural areas of our county during the months of virtual and hybrid instruction. But we also used these Esser and Maryland Leads grant federal funds to up our game instructionally. We finally created some of the coaching positions we've needed for so long. We purchased and rolled out the science of reading curriculum. We expanded our Grow Your Own program to include our support staff pursuing further degrees, and we supplemented our technology budget. The loss of these federal funds and the need to continue the work begun with that seed money is the reason behind our additional ask to the county council this year. We anticipate approximately $12 million in grant funding next year. This is a decrease of 4.9 million from the current year. We examined every position and activity being supported by our expiring grants and we identified the positions and programs which will have the greatest impact on our students as ones to be continued. So, looking at our budget from the standpoint of both our unrestricted and our grant funding, our overall operating budget, including these restricted grant funds and unrestricted funds, is $3,021,000 greater than our fiscal year 24 budget. $3,021,000 is a 3.4% increase over our current budget. So our increase of 3.4% is right in line with the 3.4% increase in CPI inflation for this region of the United States between January of 2023 and January 2024. Our Board approved our budget for fiscal year 25 in February. This budget is 89 pages long and is linked with this presentation. It hopefully provides a significant level of detail without being overwhelming because we want to be transparent. But rather than walk through the budget as it's presented in the budget book, budget category by category, we thought it would be more useful in this presentation if we broke down our request into the main reasons for the increase. We are requesting to provide a better understanding of what is driving our needs in these areas. Because of that, we won't be talking about the areas where we are relatively flat in our spending, such as plant operations or plant maintenance or transportation outside of the purchase of buses. As I mentioned previously, our overall budget increase is 7.9 million. Approximately 2 million of that will be covered by increases in our per pupil funding, primarily in areas of pre k english learners and concentration of poverty community schools. That leaves a $5.9 million gap between the funding provided through the state aid funding formulas and the needs of our budget. That is what we are requesting Talbot county include when forming their budget for fiscal year 25 for Talbot County Public schools. Let's start with the biggest item, salary increases. Our most significant budgetary increase is in providing an increase for our staff. Our lowest starting teacher salary right now is $52,919, which we will need to increase by 13.4% over the next three years to reach the $60,000 target set in the blueprint. We've included a placeholder in our budget that moves us to close that gap, and we are currently in the process of negotiating with Talbot County Education Association. Dr. Einhorn will now discuss some specifics of our staffing needs in order to maintain the work we have implemented to improve learning. We have prioritized seven grant funded positions that are expiring but are imperative to continue in our fiscal year 25 budget. Through grant funding, we were able to implement a new teacher mentor program. We dedicated five highly effective educators to provide intensive support to first year teachers. Teaching is difficult every day, but especially as you are entering the profession. Our mentors provide nonevaluative support in instructional planning, classroom management, data analysis, family communication, and a long list of other areas. Our data from two years of implementation clearly demonstrates the value added. Over 90% of new teachers identify mentoring as positively impacting their teaching, and the mentoring program has been recognized as our highest leveraged strategy for recruiting new teachers to TCPs. We have been able to secure new grant funding to maintain three of the positions and are asking for funding in our local budget for two mentor positions. As is evident in our enrollment and demographic data, we need to continue to support our multilingual learners and students with special education needs, thus preserving the grant funded ESOL and infants and toddler special education teachers. Aligned with strategic priority two. Maintaining the mental health services we have implemented in our schools is essential for a safe and supportive learning environment. If we are not meeting the mental health needs of our students, they will not be able to access the learning we provide them. The expanded requirements for data security and technology needs that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic required us to add a network administrator. Those requirements did not end with the end of the pandemic, so we must continue to have someone do this vital work. This position assists in administrating the server infrastructure as well as server and cloud applications of TCPS's two data centers housing 70 servers and supporting 500 users. With the national teacher shortage, all states are vying to recruit the best teacher candidates. Our recruitment and retention facilitator coordinates that effort as well as works with both human resources, teaching and learning and our mentors to support new hires. This position will also be assuming some of the responsibilities for blueprint expectations for the career ladder and national board certification. There is a significant amount of coordination and reporting mandated that we will not be able to fulfill without this position. We know that just maintaining our efforts is not sufficient to meet our student achievement goals. Thus, we have several new staffing positions that are needed to actualize our strategic priorities and blueprint expectations. Second only to the effectiveness of the classroom teacher, principal leadership is directly correlated to greater student achievement. My role includes spending the majority of my time in our eight schools, conducting learning walks, observing principal teacher conferences, and looking for evidence to match principal leadership standards. For this reason, we are requesting a director of teaching and learning to be responsible for leading the curricular work and grant responsibilities as well as state and federal mandates. This position will facilitate my ability to work side by side with our building leadership to build their capacity to serve their vital role. We are requesting two reading teachers to support the blueprint expectation that students will be college and career ready and our district priority that students are reading by grade three, one will be at the elementary level and one will be for the middle school. We have never been able to provide reading support to secondary students and this would allow us to address this learning imperative. We are requesting two additional ESAU teachers to meet the increased student needs seen in our demographic and achievement data. We're requesting two additional secretaries to support our school administrative needs specific to special education and bilingual families. We are requesting a special education supervisor. This position will support the additional state and federal mandates required for our grant funding and strategies for meeting individualized student learning needs. Without this position, we are in jeopardy of not maintaining compliance and thus losing grant funds. We are in need of a technology specialist to support our growing it needs. The additional tech will provide training and support for building based technicians and lead client deployments with our management tools. This will be the first time since 2009 that a tech has been added to the TCPS IT department, despite our having added one to one devices in grades K to six in that time and further integrating technology into our instruction. At our January joint meeting between the Talbot County Council and Talbot County Board of Education, we made a presentation to introduce community schools, which are new under the blueprint. Community schools are implemented at schools with high concentrations of poverty. As Dr. Einhorn has mentioned, Easton elementary first qualified as a community school three years ago. Community school staff have been delivering wraparound mental health support services to students and have been supporting our english learner families while developing a comprehensive plan for the future to provide the services deemed most important to students, their families, and the neighborhood surrounding Easton E lementary. Implementation of that plan begins next year, fiscal year 25, and includes bilingual supports within the school to assist families and students, better access to healthy food for families and vision screening. The implementation is a shared cost between the state and our county. Also, Easton Middle School has qualified starting next year to begin its development of a plan for community schools with all state funding. So, with the implementation phase of Easton Elementary kicking in and the new qualification of Easton Middle School, our community school cost will be increasing $550,000. This funding is very specific. It can only be used at our two Community Schools and for purposes directly related to providing needed services. We are sustaining our one to one device program in our information technology budget, which provides new iPads or laptops for students in the second 6th and 9th grades. We have added to our one to one program the pre K class, and also we now provide devices to all instructional assistants, which we didn't do in the past. Fiscal year 25 includes an infrequent cost, but a significant one to replace our edge router, which connects our network to the Internet at a cost of over $200,000. The support for our existing router is expiring and this is a key component to our network and its security. We are planning to replace an outdated computer lab at Easton High School at a cost of $63,000 for our Engineering CTE program students, and we will be replacing ten security cameras that are approximately ten years old. In the past few years, our software costs have increased as we try to rise to prevent ever evolving security threats. K-12 school districts have been increasingly subject to ransomware attacks, and we've certainly seen this in Maryland. We want to reduce our risk of a significant security breach by continuing all the security measures we've put in place, in large part with grant funding up until now. We also are implementing changes to comply with the Maryland Department of IT state minimum cybersecurity standards, also known as Senate Bill 754. Other Instructional Cost there are four supports we are including in our budget next year that are the primary reason for the $218,000 increase in this category. We've been conducting tutoring at the middle school level with grant support that is expiring we don't have any specific Blueprint funding tied to tutoring our middle school age students, but feel it's important to continue that additional reinforcement of classroom instruction for them. We are required to pay any registration fees for our teachers who are pursuing their national board certification and these costs have previously been handled through the Maryland Leads grant. SAT day is being held this week at both high schools. All of our high school juniors are able to take the SAT in school at no cost. For many students, this may be the only time they will take the test, so this is an important opportunity we are able to provide them during their first few years with us. Students'reading skills are assessed at regular intervals to determine their baseline progress and areas where additional support is needed. Again, these assessments have been previously grant funded but are now included in our fiscal year 25 budget due to the ending of those grants. Public and private placement tuition in Maryland each of the 24 school districts is responsible for the cost of educating students who reside or would normally attend school in their district. Sometimes TCPS students attend school in other public school districts because perhaps they are living with a relative or are in foster care. In those situations, we're invoiced at the end of the school year by the district where that student attended to cover their educational cost. This can be a fluid population and it is hard to predict what our cost in that area will be, but our cost last year rose from $36,000 in the previous two years to $102,000. We have split the difference and budgeted $65,000 for fiscal year 25, which is an increase of $30,000 over this year's budget. Talbot County Public Schools also incur cost to educate a small group of our students with highly specialized needs in non public schools that focus on their educational and developmental needs. Examples of these types of schools are Maryland School for the Deaf, Maryland School for the Blind, and Benedictine, among others. While only a small number of our special education students receive these services, the cost can be significant and can vary greatly from school to school based on the level of services provided per each child's individualized education plan, which is a legal requirement. In fiscal year 22, we experienced a 50% increase and then in fiscal year 23, a 23% decrease over the prior year's non public tuition cost. So it can really vary from year to year. Based on what we know now about students and placements likely to be in effect in fiscal year 25, we are predicting an increase in our public placement cost of $421,000. We do receive partial reimbursement of these non public school cost and therefore would expect an increase in that reimbursement to offset our cost. That reimbursement is reflected in our fiscal year 25. Revenue bus leases are increasing $295,000 in fiscal year 25. Comar's education article section 784 requires replacement of a school bus within 15 years from the date it is placed in service. In 2024. we are facing a bubble in our fleet retirement schedule and need to replace nine of our 44 buses because they have reached that 15 year mark in fiscal year 25. We will need to make lease payments on those nine replacement buses along with continued payments on two other, more mature bus leases for purchases we made in prior years. Just as Talbot County offers post employment health insurance coverage to its retired staff or OPEB benefits, TCPS offers these same benefits to our retirees. We actually belong to the same MACo OPEB trust as the trustee of our assets which invest our assets. Talbot County government in earlier years contributed consistently to the MACo OPEB Trust and has a net unfunded liability as of June 2022 of $12.6 million. TCPS for many years did not make contributions to the OPEB trust due to budgetary constraints, so we currently have an unfunded liability of $70 million for our members. We've made contributions in the past few years to help decrease our underfunded position, totaling $1.4 million. These have been made out of fund balance for the most part. For example, there is no line item in our current fiscal year 24 budget for any OPEB contribution, but we need to commit funds as part of our regular operating budget each and every year toward funding this net OPEB liability so that these assets can grow with the trustee and reduce the gap between our OPEB investments and our obligations. Thus, we are asking for $250,000 in our fiscal year 25 budget, which is modest in light of our $70 million net obligation. We prepared our budget with the assumption that health insurance cost will rise by 6% in fiscal year 25 through January. We were seeing with our fiscal year 24 actual claims an increase closer to 8%, and these claims drive the contributions we are required to make for fiscal year 25. We hope that the average this year will drop in the second half and help keep us in the 6% range we have budgeted for next year. Our staff participates in two plans under the Maryland state retirement system. We make contributions on behalf of our staff at the rates they prescribe. As our payroll costs are expected to increase, the contribution to state retirement and FICA tax will increase as well. This is a summary of our fiscal year 25 budget, by expense type or by object. It is found on page 72 of the budget book linked to this presentation. Salaries and wages expense of 49.8 million show an increase next year due to the placeholder we've put in for salary increases for staff, the seven positions we are adding from grants which are being discontinued, and the nine new positions we need to help meet our district priorities. Contracted services of 3.6 million include costs for software as well as professional fees such as legal and audit, and all maintenance performed by outside contractors. There is an additional 218,000 in other instructional cost I mentioned earlier for the middle school tutoring, SAT day reading assessments and NBC fees. Additionally, we need to expand our elementary age tutoring and to do that we've budgeted an additional $50,000. The costs for our current year athletic training contractor were handled with prior year funds and were excluded from this year FY 24s budget. Thus, our fiscal year 25 athletic training budget has increased by $47,000. These athletic trainers attend high school team practices and games and work with players injured to assess concussions and other injuries. Supplies and materials expense is increasing approximately $20,000 for inflationary factors, 61,000 for materials related to our expanded community schools program and $41,000 for additional materials of instruction for our special education program. The biggest component of other charges is employee benefits, which we refer to as fixed charges, so health insurance, pension, employment taxes are included in that other charges category. 1.4 million of the increase in other charges is due to that 6% increase we're projecting for health care cost, the other postemployment benefits contribution, and the impact on employment taxes and state retirement system cost from salary increases. Also in other charges are the public tuition and non public tuition, which combined we expect to see rise by $451,000. And finally, the cost of our cyber insurance and some other insurance coverages has increased by about $30,000. Land, buildings and equipment of just under $2 million mainly include our bus lease payments which are increasing $295,000 for those additional nine buses we've purchased, and it hardware, which we mentioned will be increasing by $639,000. We need to replace the carpet in the band and chorus rooms at Easton High School for $24,000 and replenish and replace older broken chairs that can no longer be used for students. We don't anticipate needing to make any interfund transfers to the construction fund in fiscal year 25. That was an unusual item in our fiscal Year 24 budget on this next slide, there is an additional summary of our expenses from a slightly different lens, which is by category of expenditure. This detailed information can be found on page 73 of our budget book. Dr. Pepukayi shared some of our demographics with you earlier in our presentation because those demographics are part of the fabric of our schools and can be determining factors in the needs of our students. But our enrollment and the counts of certain student groups within our enrollment also determine our funding. We developed our budget differently. For fiscal year 25, we've been using the analogy of a layer cake for each school. To demonstrate how schools are now funded. We look at the over enrollment at each school and the enrollments of each subgroup, such as struggling learners or english learners, students who've met college and career readiness standards, and pre K students. Some of those enrollments were taken this past fall. Some are three year average enrollments. Some are based on test scores from last spring. We take these student counts, multiply them by a per pupil amount specified in Comar to come up with revenue for each of the educational aid programs for each school. Add it all together is the funding by school for the district. The goal is to ensure that at least 75% of the funds based on a school's funding formula stay at that school, with the district having discretion to redistribute up to 25%. That 25% is used for things like the excess cost of our special education and college and career readiness programs that aren't fully funded based on the education formulas. It is also used to cover things like student services which are not school based but are required by law and very necessary to run our school system. This slide shows how the enrollments from the previous slide were used to determine the funding available for our schools. The bottom right corner shows some other sources of unrestricted revenue that are tied to particular purposes but not particular schools. This next slide presents the same information, slightly varied because it includes community schools funding allocated to Easton Elementary and Easton Middle School. The $9.5 million in funding in the last line of this chart that is labeled as money at the district level is money that will be spread across the district at various schools and also supports district wide activities. This slide is a three year look at our revenue from fiscal year 23 to fiscal Year 25. The columns on the far right reflect our fiscal Year 25 funding request to the county and to the state, and the difference between the sum of those amounts and the fiscal year 24 current year budget. On the top row, all the way down to the row labeled national board certification, NBC we show appropriations that are derived from our enrollments and the per pupil amounts. In other words, the funding formula revenue that summarizes our request for funding totaling $79.9 million. Our final slide of this presentation are our capital requests. There have been updates at our Board of education meetings regarding the construction project at Chapel. There have also been discussions regarding the turf field installation. The auditorium lighting system has reached its life expectancy at Easton High School. Easton Elementary has over 100 students, which makes it challenging during recess time for students. The basketball court installation will give students an additional activity while outside at recess. The stadium lights are a conversion from an old system to led lighting, which ultimately will save money in energy. Finally, the playground at St. Michael's Elementary School line item shows an increase due to the rubber surfacing needed. Through this presentation, you have heard and hopefully better understand our story. The setting- 8 schools located in Cordova, Easton, Trappe, St. Michael's and Tilghman. The characters- 4504 students and a little over 700 staff. The Climax- formulating a fiscal year 25 budget to continue our momentum and essential work around our Priorities and the Blueprint while losing 4.8 million in grant funding. We appreciate all of our partnerships, both community and government, and we're striving for a happy ending to this story so we can continue to transform and perform each day.