[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Today is Monday, April 6, 2026, and we are in the Howard Alden Memorial Chambers, Medford City Hall, and via remote participation. This meeting is being recorded. The meeting can be viewed live on the Medford Public Schools YouTube channel, through Medford Community Media, on your local cable channel, Comcast Channel 9, 8, or 22, and Verizon Channel 43, 45, or 47. Since the meeting will be held remotely, participants can log or call in by using the following information. Zoom link is on our website and the city website, and the meeting ID is 997-8708-3285. Roll call, member Rousseau, please. Thank you.
[Paul Ruseau]: Member Graham? Here. Member Mastroboni? Here. Member Olapade is absent, but shortly he'll be here. Member Parks? Here. Member Reinfeld? Present. Member Ruseau, present. Mayor Longo, here.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: President, six present, one absent for now. Thank you to our student rep for joining us tonight early, the earliest one here. If we could all please rise to salute the flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We have executive session pursuant to chapters 30A, section 21-2. to conduct strategy in preparation for non-union personnel or contract negotiations with non-union personnel, specifically but not limited to the superintendent, assistant superintendent of academics and instruction, chief operations officer, director of student services, director of human services and resources, elementary school principals, four of them, middle school principals, two, principal of the high school, executive director of Medford Vocational Technical High School, and the principal of Curtis Tufts High School. The Medford School Committee will convene in public session immediately following the conclusion of the executive session approximately at 6 p.m. Is there a motion to go into executive session? By Member Reinfeld, seconded by Member Mastromoni. All those in favor, roll call.
[Paul Ruseau]: Member Graham? Member Mastroboni? Yes. Member Lopate is absent. Member Parks? Yes. Member Reinfeldt? Yes. Member Sado? Yes. Mayor Longo, Karen?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Six in the affirmative, one absent. Motion is approved to go into executive session. Be back as close to six as possible.
[Unidentified]: Thank you. OK, we'll get started.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: We've got lots of kiddos in here. Thank you for your patience, everybody. We're going to get through a few things, and we're going to go right to the Mustang moment. We have the consent agenda, approval of bill and payroll, approval of budget transfers, journal entry 20749, $2,673.50, journal entry 20750, 4,278.43, journal entry 20751, $650. Journal Entry 20752, $103,798.18. Journal Entry 20761, $13,272.57. And Journal Entry 20767, for $2,737.61. We also have approval of donations. First one of $4,000 by J.S. Lim Foundation for MHS, MVTHS, J.S. Lim Science and Mathematics Prizes. Donation of $2,250 by Arthur C. Mabbitt of Mabbitt Associates for 2026 MHS, MVTHS Science and Technology Engineering Exposition. Approval of field trips, Mount Cardigan, State Forest, New Hampshire, Stacy Shulman and Emily Winskowski. Approval of meeting minutes, regular meeting, March 16th, 2026. Is there a motion on the floor?
[Kenneth Lord]: Motion to approve.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: By member Olapade, seconded by? Second. Member Mastroboni, all those in favor? Aye. Motion passes. I'm going to turn it over to our superintendent, Suzanne Galussi, for our Mustang moment.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Good evening, everybody. This is my absolute favorite part of the school committee agenda. So tonight, we are making up for some time. We have three Mustang moments this evening. And so I'm going to introduce each one. First, we're going to hear from the Missituk School Council. And to provide a little bit of context, we have fifth grade teacher Ms. Frank here, who will come up and give us a little bit of context before we hear from the students.
[Unidentified]: Usually Cat that does it in the back.
[SPEAKER_30]: Oh, there we go, yep.
[SPEAKER_09]: Okay, thanks Cat. All right, good evening. My name is Ms. Frank and I'm in charge of the Missituk Student Council. The Student Council is a group of students elected by their classmates. Our goal is to create a school community that is inclusive, respectful, and kind, where every student voice is heard. This is the Missituk Student Council. Starting with Treasurer Yara, Student Rep Vera, and Student Rep Val. And next slide.
[SPEAKER_27]: The Student Council of Mystic Elementary is a group of students elected by their classmates to represent their views and interests.
[SPEAKER_26]: We are committed to promoting the principles of the school's culture and ensuring that every student's voice is heard.
[SPEAKER_17]: Our goal is to create a school community that is inclusive, respectful, and kind. Our student council does its best to ensure that student voices are heard and valued in all aspects of school life.
[SPEAKER_09]: Next slide. Secretary Addy, student rep Luke, student rep Lucas.
[SPEAKER_24]: The Mississauga Student Council has one president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer from fifth grade, one class representative from each fourth grade class, and two class representatives from each fifth grade class.
[SPEAKER_18]: As members of the student council, we have several responsibilities, including.
[SPEAKER_16]: Representing the views and interests of our classmates, attending student council meetings, and contributing to discussions, working with our classmates and reporting back to them on the work of the student council, working on initiatives and projects that promote the values of our school, and supporting the school in creating an inclusive, kind, and respectful environment.
[SPEAKER_09]: President Lillian, Vice President Nora.
[SPEAKER_19]: We are responsible for creating and leading school-wide responsive classroom assembly.
[SPEAKER_25]: This helps build public speaking confidence. Luke and Lucas.
[SPEAKER_24]: New Hampshire State Representative Dr. Jennifer Mandeboa has Monday, April 13th.
[SPEAKER_18]: Professor of Public Health at Tufts, expert in community organization, listens to consensuance. More speakers to come.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yara.
[SPEAKER_17]: We fundraised for two Gaga Pits. We have raised $291 in direct donation. We raised $1,002 in popcorn sales, but we only got to keep half. We have raised enough money to reach our goal of $500. Lily and Anora.
[SPEAKER_19]: Each upper grade student is paired up with one or two lower grade students.
[SPEAKER_25]: Students meet with their buddies twice a month. Fifth grade is paired with second grade, fourth grade is paired with first grade, and third grade is paired with kindergarten.
[SPEAKER_16]: Addie. Buddies create belonging. Meeting with buddies helps create a larger sense of belonging within Missittook community. Wherever students are in the building, they will know someone. I love how we get to meet with them and get to know them and help them learn from a fifth grade student.
[SPEAKER_09]: Student reps Robley and student rep Trudeau.
[SPEAKER_20]: Buddies belonging, poetry. These are examples of buddies doing the poetry with their buddies in fifth grade. Next slide.
[SPEAKER_24]: These are examples of buddies doing poetry.
[SPEAKER_20]: These are more pictures of buddies reading together. These are fourth graders reading with their buddies.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Don't sit down yet. I'm not sure if there are any questions before we take a picture.
[Alachie Yeager]: Hello. I just wanted to say I think it's amazing that you guys are starting doing this work. So we're the high school student Councilors. We're non-voting members of the school committee. We come up here and we sort of try and provide feedback on legislature, try to provide an opinion. And we actually do presentations occasionally on student voice and sort of. what opinions we gather through surveys and other means. We're actually doing one tonight. So it's super amazing to see that you guys are starting on this so early. Please continue to do this throughout your school careers. Stay informed, stay active. This is really how we make a positive change. It's really important, really inspiring. And I bet you one of you might be sitting up in this seat in a few years. So thank you so much for coming and for doing this.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Yeah. Well, you've got our microphone. What advice do you have for us? What does the Mississippi Council want to tell the school committee? Anyone? Not to put anyone on the spot, of course.
[SPEAKER_09]: No? They would like fewer standardized tests. Okay.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you, love that answer. Thank you. Okay, you want a picture? No, okay. Do you want them to come up?
[Suzanne Galusi]: So we're just going to have Ms. Frank and the student council come in here for a quick picture. That way the caregivers can get ready with their cameras. All right. Our next Mustang moment, we are going to have the advisors to the Unified Program at Medford High School come on up. They're going to do some framing for this wonderful opportunity. And they have some students with them that will be talking about their experiences in the program.
[Unidentified]: Hi everybody.
[Carla Andre]: We are here to talk about Unified PE tonight. Unified PE, much like Unified Sports, is an initiative set forth by the Special Olympics. It brings students both with and without disabilities together to participate, in this case, in a PE, a physical education curriculum that is rooted in teamwork.
[Matthew Galusi]: This is our third year, I think, doing it. And we're really starting to hit our stride. We have unbelievable kids, as you'll see in a second. And our high school helper kids are great. So it's not about us. It's about them. We're going to have them tell you all about it.
[Carla Andre]: So we have Nolan, Ruby, Ella, Kelly, and Andrea up with us. And you can take it away.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right. Okay. Unified physical education brings students with and without disabilities together, fostering inclusion, respect and teamwork through shared physical activities, creating a supportive environment for all.
[SPEAKER_37]: So why Unified PE? It builds empathy and students learn to understand and appreciate differences while also connecting through similarities. It increases activity. Everyone participates, leading to improved health for all. It improves community. Unified PE fosters friendships and reduces isolation among peers, and it promotes teamwork. Students collaborate, enhancing respect and communication skills.
[Carla Andre]: So we have two videos to show you from what happens in our class. There is no sound on it, so you just have to watch. Oh, this is Hungry, Hungry Hippos.
[Matthew Galusi]: That's right. Human Hungry, Hungry Hippos.
[SPEAKER_32]: No one's watching it.
[Matthew Galusi]: You were there. I saw Michael. This is kind of like a human bowling. We just worked on balancing on scooters and we got to knock stuff over. Everyone likes to break things.
[SPEAKER_32]: That's you. I know her. Are you sure about that?
[Carla Andre]: We're going to have our students share some of their experiences.
[SPEAKER_22]: All right. I like playing basketball with my friends. I like looking forward to seeing my friends in the gym. It makes me feel great. I like Unifying PE. I like Unifying PE because I like to play basketball. Coming to the Unifying PE class makes me happy and excited to play games like basketball and play football.
[SPEAKER_32]: I like to see some of my friends. We play basketball with other friends. What the hell? Sports. But they get me to follow directions, show me how to do it. Welcome.
[Carla Andre]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_22]: Do you have any questions?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Which sport besides basketball did you like? I heard you say basketball a few times.
[SPEAKER_21]: I like to play flag football, and doing some juggling, and sports, and if you like, capture the chicken, the hungry, hungry hippo, and like, the hair man bowling.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Great, good answer. Yep, member Graham. Is everything else you want to ask? Do you have any questions? Yes, member Graham has a question for you.
[Jenny Graham]: I have a question. I wondered if we could be invited the next time you play Hungry Hungry Hippos.
[SPEAKER_21]: Can we come? Can we come?
[Jenny Graham]: Can you let us know the next time you play? Can we play with you? Yeah. Awesome, thank you.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Great, thank you. Could I just, could the advisors, so I think you explained this at the beginning, but I just think it's important to note. So Carla, Andre, do you mind explaining what your position is? And then Macalusi, will you please explain what your position is so that everyone is aware, even joining at home, what the collaboration is like for this course?
[Matthew Galusi]: Sure, so I'm a high school physical education teacher. Yeah, that's my job.
[Carla Andre]: I am the district-wide adapted physical education teacher, and I also am the unified coach. And so like I said before, it is an initiative put forth by the Special Olympics that we've adopted into our district. And unified PE kind of creates that opportunity, the accessibility for students who might not be able to participate in a sport after school. It creates that whole school environment that the Special Olympics and unified really seeks to capture.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Perfect, thank you. And Carla's position is district-wide. So there's huge impact throughout the district, but this is just a really wonderful demonstration of what unified means to our students and our overall community for belonging. So thank you both for everything you do. And wonderful job. Was there another question before we do a picture? I think member Olapade has a question.
[Aaron Olapade]: Just a quick question. Thank you so much for this. This is wonderful. This is one of my favorite programs that we do here in the district. The question for, I just, for the whole district and for families at home, is there an application process to get involved? Is it student by student? Like how do you guys roll that out so we can have more and more people join in the district?
[Matthew Galusi]: With high school helpers, it's junior and seniors. We go through course selection. And we really want kids that want to be there. With the CHOICE program, it's working great. But sometimes if you have a kid that doesn't want to be there, it could be an obstacle. But our high school helpers are tremendous. We have some of the best kids in school. Every last period, Tuesday, Thursday, it's one of the highlights of my week. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Yes. And I was just wondering what this looks like at other schools.
[Carla Andre]: That is a good question. I think we are looking in the coming years to do this at the middle school level. That would be, so we started with unified sports and now we have unified PE at the high school level and then we started with unified sports at the middle school level and so the next step would be unified PE at the middle school level. So I'm hoping the next two years we'll get that going.
[Erika Reinfeld]: And is there any talk of kind of expanding it even beyond athletics?
[Carla Andre]: Yeah, so I, in particular, I do the athletics. So I guess, yeah, that would be outside my realm. But I know that there's a Best Buddies program now. And so I think we are expanding with inclusivity as a whole through Medford, which is great to see.
[Erika Reinfeld]: And we saw that the Best Buddies was our Mustang moment a few meetings ago.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Thank you so much. We could get you those details. I know that director Suzanne Fee is also, if it's not in place already, is working on unified art. up at the high school, so we can get those specifics for you. Ready for a picture? OK. Three times a charm. There's one more Mustang moment. It is our honor to welcome. We're going to invite the adults up to talk about a Massachusetts youth contest that one of our students won. So we're going to get a little bit of framing about what that contest was before we hear from the student about her why in. her poster. OK.
[Maria]: Good evening. I'm Margie Daniels. I'm the executive director of Massachusetts Partnerships for Youth. We're a nonprofit organization that serves school districts across the Commonwealth. And first of all, I want to thank you for the privilege of being here tonight in front of you. You have such a wonderful school system. And you've been so involved with our organization for many years. We have a theme every year for a poster project. And this year, our theme was kind people are the best kind of people. And I'm happy to tell you we had 151 entries from across the Commonwealth, and to have an honorable mention in the Medford Public Schools is such an honor when there were so many students, and you have one. So I'm here with very good news that we are recognizing Nora Shaw tonight. Do you want to hold it? Show them your picture. Beautiful? Yeah. Thank you. And we have a gift for you. Would you like to unwrap it? First, there's a certificate. So open up the ribbon and take a look at the certificate first. Maybe you could show the audience the people sitting here.
[SPEAKER_32]: Thank you.
[Maria]: And maybe we could get a picture with you holding the certificate. And please step up with us.
[Suzanne Galusi]: We can do a picture in one moment. So I do want to say that we're joined by also Principal Skane and art teacher Pete Gallagher. And I do want to, I'm not sure if any adults also want to speak or if we could hear from the student too. Just speak into the microphone.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: I coached her when she was way little, way little.
[Nora Shaw]: So when I was working on this project, I was thinking about sometimes how all schools have positive posters. And when I look at them, sometimes when I'm having a rough day, it does make my day better. So I like seeing them. And when I was working on my poster, I was trying to think about that and put that into my poster. So thank you for having me.
[Maria]: And Nora, just so you know, the judges, our school superintendents, police chiefs, community members, school Councilors, we have a very multidisciplinary group and they just loved your poster. They thought it was beautiful. Now there was something else there, huh?
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a gift for you. Where is my gift?
[SPEAKER_32]: Thank you so much.
[Maria]: You're welcome. You're welcome. Maybe you'll buy some art supplies. You're very talented. So thank you again. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. Congratulations.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Wonderful. Great. Let's move through this. Then it'll be dinner time. Yep. We are going to meet Ina Williams, our new district wide transportation director. I'm going to turn it over to you, Dr. Galussi, for the official welcome.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Thank you so much. Ina J. Williams is our new transportation manager. I am so happy and thrilled. Ina comes to us with a lot of expertise and experience in school transportation. She has worked for Medway Public Schools, Asabet Valley Collaborative. She has a lot of experience in which I think she'll be able to make a lot of positive change and improvements for Medford Public Schools. She has a wonderful way about her, and I think she's got a skill in building community, which is everything that Medford Public Schools is striving for. So she's had a nice welcome. She's been meeting with school leaders as well as our bus transportation partners, NRT and Eastern Bus. And so I just wanted to have the opportunity to be able to welcome her formally at the school committee meeting so you could all see her. I think it's very important for the community to also have an introduction to Ina so that they can also see the face that's behind the phone call or the email sometimes as we know transportation goes. So I don't know Ina if you.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I just wanted to say thank you all for giving me the opportunity. I'm really looking forward to working with the district. As Dr. Lucia said, I've had the chance to meet with some of the bus vendors and the administrators. And I've had a few students that have popped in to ask some questions that I was able to find the answers for rather quickly. So I'm just really looking forward to it. It's a wonderful community and a very welcoming environment.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[Suzanne Galusi]: We're very excited. Yeah, we're happy you're here.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Ruseau?
[Paul Ruseau]: I just wanted to say thank you. It's a really hard job, I'm sure you're well aware, so I'm very grateful that you're still smiling as well, which is, you know, when I hear about what this job is like, I'm just like, people have passions, not necessarily the same as everybody else, but I'm glad you're into it, so thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much. Thank you all. Have a good evening. Thank you very much.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: And we have a report on the fiscal year 27 preliminary budget recommendations. Noelle Velez, our Director of Finance, and Gerry McCue, our Budget Analyst. And welcome, come on up. And I'll turn it over to Dr. Galusi.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Thank you. I do just want to start with a little bit of framing. So good evening, Honorable Members of School Committee and Madam Mayor. So tonight's meeting serves to formally present our preliminary projections, expenditures, and identified school and department needs. Our finance director, Noelle Velez, and our budget analyst, Gerry McCue, will walk you through the results of extensive collaborative sessions with school and department leaders. These meetings, as highlighted a little bit in the previous school committee meeting, were instrumental in identifying the critical needs and strategic requests that have emerged from our classroom and operations. I want to stress that this is a deeply iterative process, and the data shared tonight will also highlight a range of initial asks that we're still actively reviewing, while the presentation will also show proactive areas that we've identified some meaningful savings. Our team will also explain some unanticipated expenses that arose throughout this fiscal year. And through this process, we will continue to refine and sharpen our budget projections and align our resources. I think it also is important to note that with the new leadership team that has been working together this year at central office, With that comes a little level of auditing within their respective portfolios. And this initial review is anchoring the structural and visionary work required to ensure that our fiscal footprint allows authentically and intentionally with our district core values and the evolving needs of our students, our staff, and our community. Although our work is far from finished, tonight's presentation is a testament to the consistency and coherence we are working to establish as through lines across every level of the district. We're moving towards a unified vision that ensures every dollar supports our shared educational goals. I really want to extend my sincere gratitude to Jerry and Noel for their tireless efforts and work in preparing the budget and for their commitment to transparency, as you will see this evening. Their hard work, as well as everyone involved in this process, provides the solid foundation we need to move forward together to finalize a budget that serves all of our students and the community. So thank you very much.
[Noel Velez]: Oh, I'm sorry about that. Thank you much, Superintendent, for those kind words. I also want to give a special thanks to Lisa Malone and Joanne Allen, who scheduled approximately 57 meetings during this budget process. So that was very kind of them. And also to Dr. Talbot, who also attended a lot of our meetings with us. Really appreciated that to give us a better insight. of what finance and curriculum and how they are so important come together hand in hand. So as we'll start off right now, you'll see we kind of have a summary of our budget proposal here in page two. So this is a total summary of the presentation we'll be giving tonight. We've broken it out into what we feel are five categories. that properly explain everything we're about to go through and also discuss each category in detail regarding what Gerald and myself, as we met with principals, directors, and the needs and the wants of Metro Public Schools for fiscal year 27. If you want to go through the numbers real quick, as you know, we started off our general fund. at $85,490,000. We have from our voting from the Medford community, we have our stabilization fund, which will up us approximately $1,085,549 for a total budget appropriation based budget of $86,575,549. Currently estimated salary step increases, stipend increases and contingency Based off where we were last year, fiscal year 26 into fiscal year 27, we estimate $3.3 million. In unavoidable cost increases, which we'll go over in more detail later, we have calculated $3,059,160. In request new increased school base from our principals and directors, we have $987,000. For request increased facilities and operational spending, we have $554,000. And then just based on our observation, reviewing, and certain programs that we've already paid for that we won't need to pay for next year, we have an identified savings of 400. $90,991, which gives us a total budget proposal of $94,032,696. And through this presentation, we'll walk you through these numbers and get to that number. So first up, we want to go over some unavoidable cost increases. These cost increases, so we have two starting off the bat. We have two teachers at the Curtis Tufts who have been hitting a short tuition revolving fund line. That reserve will be done regarding how much funding is left in it as of 6-30-2026. So we will have to absorb $198,560 in salary. Throughout the fiscal year, we had to hire or add eight additional paraprofessionals to the budget. I'm sorry, I apologize, I went a little too close. We have eight current paraprofessionals currently on before and after school revolving fund that we would like to move back onto the general fund. As you remember over the past couple years, we've been removing paras little by little off the after school and before school revolving fund, and we're hoping these will be the last state that we remove. Their salaries next year total $344,000. We have, we're hoping to also move some of the salaries regarding where they were being charged to community schools. As of July of 2022, the athletic director and the administrative assistant of the athletic department were being directly charged to community schools. Our goal is to move those salaries over. For the Administrative Assistant, we're hoping to move 20% of their salary into five different categories. Athletics Revolving, Athletics General Fund, Edgley Field, PE and community schools as we believe that properly represents that employee in all the categories that that employee currently works in. And with the athletic director, our goal is to move 50% of the salary to the athletic general fund and keep 50% of the salary in community schools. Another thing we have here is through our CSHS grant, We purchased a software program that is no longer eligible to be charged to that grant. That grant, while it is a year-to-year grant, it allows only for one-time expenses on software and programs, so every year you have to change what you're gonna be charging to that grant. And since we purchased it in fiscal year 26 through our CHS grant, we wanna move that to our general ledger next year, as it will no longer be eligible to be purchased through that grant. Next up we have what we looked at as unavoidable cost increases. Due to enrollment, we'll be creating an access program at the McGlynn Elementary School. So we'll need a teacher and a para for that classroom. Throughout fiscal year 26, we had an additional eight one-on-one paras that we had to hire due to existing IEPs for students new to the district. We had one at the high school, three at McGlynn Middle, one at McGlynn Elementary, and three at the Mississippi who have moved in as of September of 2025. Along with those costs of the eight move-ins, some of them came with transportation costs connected to them, as well as increasing rates for special education transportation as a whole, which we believe approximately will be $476,177. We also have special education paras, one at the McGlynn and one at the Roberts Elementary for classroom coverage based on student programs and needs. And we'll also need an additional teacher and para for a fourth kindergarten class at the Missittuck based on what we projected enrollments. At the next slide here, we have a few more who we believe are unavoidable cost increases. We have our janitorial contract, which is the cleaning of the high school and the McGlynn. The new contract will come in at $209,130. And that is also based off of last year's was year one. We're going into year two in July. We have the year two of our leasing payment for Motorola, all the new key fobs that we've added at $60,300. And year two of our yellow bus elementary schools, and also to accommodate new arrival dismissal times and increased rates, we have $110,000, $140,000 to be added to our budget. To including with enrollment, we're also going to be needing the creation of an access program at the McGlynn Middle School. Based on the enrollment numbers, it originally was a combined access slash connections classroom, but we'll need to separate that in fiscal year 27. So we'll need another teacher and para added to that. We'll be adding a second project transition teacher due to the program enrollment at the high school, and we put in a number of $84,260 for that salary. We need to increase for extended year programming due to student participation, which will put us at $140,200. We also, through our AED audit, our goal is to replace 17 AEDs that are 20 years old. Which comes in at $25,000, sorry. And then last, we've got here some malware servers and hyper servers coming in at approximately $40,000 for cloud computing. Got a few more items regarding just what we're projecting and what we're looking at. So for heating electricity, we believe we'll have to increase the budget by $197,000 based on fiscal year 25 spending, fiscal year 26 projections, and what we believe the increase will be next year. Another $50,000 for custodial supplies. Unemployment at $35,000. Another $6,000 added to the high school graduation budget to continue with the amazing job that they do and with the cost of some of the, the new cost and the higher cost of some of the rental and leases programs we do. For the athletic program, we're gonna have a extra $84,000 in coaches stipends based on the CBA. We have $50,000 in transportation based on fiscal year one of the, of the contract cost, and then we'll be in year two of the contract cost. And other expenses that the athletic director believes will equal about $11,894. And we'd also like to add another $50,000 to the substitute teacher account. So in summary, we have a total of $11,894. We broke down here the $3 million into existing funds that are no longer available or sustainable at $662,000. Spending in fiscal year 26 that was unanticipated at $1.5 million. Unavoidable spending occurring in fiscal year 27 at $400,000. and a fiscal year 27 budget increase based on recent spending history at $478,294 equaling $3,059,160.
[Gerry McCue]: I'm going to go over the school-based needs. These are proposals that were requested from principals and directors and our assistant superintendent. Before I start, there was a number of requests from the high school for additional staff electives that we chose not to go forward with right now, except for a selected few that we'll talk about. And mainly that's because this is really the first year that they've had sufficient time to work with the new schedule. Last year, the contract got settled late. They were a little bit behind in the development of the schedule. So we wanted them to have the time now to see if some of those electives can be incorporated into the schedule without the need for additional staff. However, we do have, some proposals. One would be an arts teacher for the high school. Because of the new schedule, a lot of students were able to choose an art class. And so this enrollment is driving the need for this additional arts teacher. I will say, you should have gotten your email. a description by principals and directors about their program. It's designed to be kind of a one-page narrative and provide supplemental information for you as you deliberate on the budget. And this is certainly highlighted. in the arts program. The second teacher is currently an elementary band teacher that is not a full-time teacher at the elementary schools, and we would propose to turn that position into a full-time And that person would be able to come up to the high school in the afternoon and provide additional courses, course selections in period six and seven. Similarly, we are proposing to add another technology teacher. at the high school to broaden out those technology offerings. And this would require us to outfit a existing classroom as a tech lab for that teacher to teach from. We're also proposing an additional translator because of the volume of translations we have, mainly from the EL program but also that services all district-wide translation needs. And then an additional EL teacher at the McGlynn to provide pullout services for the newcomers program at that school. There was also several proposals made by department heads to increase the quality of instructional materials that we use. So the state provides a list of high quality instructional supplies and materials that can be purchased and we think this is going to help. increase the rigor in all our programs. And I won't repeat what's on the slide, but there's a variety of requests for supplies, kit replacements are very important. materials for challenge courses and electives. There's a textbook replacement request in social studies for psychology. Textbooks are quite dated. And testing and assessment materials for the World Language Program. Another area that is not that much money in the big scheme of things, but we feel it's very important to increase our commitment to professional development. And just as a benchmark, the foundation budget is calculated to include 1.7% of the total budget for PD. Now, schools aren't obligated to spend that much on PD, but it's just a benchmark. asking for something that's much smaller here. The other thing, the other part of this initiative is to distribute the implementation of the program of professional development into the program so that directors are responsible for a program for their staff that's uniquely focused on their departments in order to better meet the needs of the staff that's in those departments. Another data point is that 81% of our teaching staff are in step five or higher, so they're not having to participate in postgraduate courses and other courses to maintain or achieve their licensure. So this is really going to be the only source of training for those teachers. And it will be about a third of 1% of the budget if this proposal goes through. It's an increase. Currently the budget is about $112,000. We're proposing to increase that by $165,000 for a budget of $277,000. And that's outside of tuition reimbursements. Then the next few slides will give you an idea of what each department is requesting. I won't read you the slide, but it's, sometimes it's curriculum development. Sometimes it's training funds to bring in a subject matter expert during PD days. It could be training and implementing certain parts of the curriculum or using The supplies materials we'll be providing. Some for conference attendance as well. Some directors expressed an interest in sending more teachers to conferences and that conferences can be a great way to pick up new information from a peer group in that department. Other requests we have are for new curriculums. The science department piloted a new robotics curriculum in FY26. And I believe some students came up and gave a demonstration to the committee earlier this year. that the director was very creative in kind of cobbling together funds from federal grants and his own department budget and some middle school principals chipped in with some funds that they had to get the program off the ground. The program's basically a very sophisticated computer program, and it's based on the number of seats that we have. So the cost of that particular curriculum is $75,000. And then we're also looking to implement a formal ELA curriculum in the middle school. And we estimate that to be $30,000, although during the course of the year, a staff-led committee will, a stakeholder committee will, will evaluate different curriculums and come up with proposals. on what best meets the needs of Medford Public Schools. We also have to increase our budget for NWEA map assessments. And we've been utilizing Open Architects Dashboard, which is a program that gathers information from different databases that we operate. school brains and DESI information and just puts that in a digestible format for teachers to use. It's been very well received by our staff. So the cost of that, we're using it for free this year and the cost going forward would be $19,500. We'd like to increase the band transportation budget so our bands can attend more competitions. We also are way behind in implementing interactive panels throughout the school districts. We do have them in different classrooms and we have excluded the high school in this proposal because we expect that all those classrooms will have this technology. This cost, $180,000, would allow us to install 60 interactive panels this year. And it's a five-year program to get the whole district outfitted with interactive panels. We also are looking to purchase software that will improve our content protection for our students. So it's a platform that has a more robust contact prevention functionality more than we have now. It has some functionality for classroom teachers to monitor use in their classroom. And finally, $2,000 for Curtis Tufts. They'd like to have a graduation ceremony going forward. So this provides some funding for them to do that. So to sum up the school-based needs, new positions, increased funding for supplies, increased PD, and other school requests, and that total is $987,000.
[Noel Velez]: Next up, we're going to go over our facilities and operational needs.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Noel, before you continue, can I just ask a general question? What is the percent increase over 2026 budget? It's around 9%. So is this like everybody's wish list, or how are we going to pare this down a bit?
[Gerry McCue]: They're not wish list, they're identified spending and there's some, we recognize that, you know, we may not be able to get this amount of money. There are some costs identified here that, you know, are not, are kind of bottom line, the collector bargaining for one. real some of the IEP spending. There might be a little bit of wiggle room to defer some of the spending into 28. We've pretty much screened out the spending that we thought were a little more wish list than actual need. You know, for facilities, you know, we'll, as always, deferred maintenance is kind of a tried and true method when you don't have sufficient funds. But we could rely, for instance, for special ed transportation, we could rely more heavily on circuit breaker funds. So we're trying, we're trying to strike a balance as how much circuit breaker we need, we use in one fiscal year and how much we want to save following fiscal year. Um, there's money in, uh, uh, the homeless transportation reimbursement account that we could tap, uh, to try to reduce the budget. But, um,
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, I mean, we can only tax at 2.5%, so. Yeah. And we got health insurance that went up 10%. We have the debt we have to repay, starting to repay for the McGlynn and the Andrews HVAC work. So the money's just not there.
[Gerry McCue]: Yeah. Well, this is a starting point, and then we will. We will absolutely present, you know, in the final budget. So, you know, in our budget development policy, this is a preliminary budget. It will be eventually a final budget and that budget will be balanced.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Thank you, Mr. McHugh. That was the only thing I was just going to clarify which is why I wanted to frame at the beginning that this is preliminary as part of the school committee policy and just wanted to be very transparent about what the asks were. What is presented here tonight does align to our instructional vision, our strategic initiatives and our core values. But we know, as I said, it's very iterative and still there's refining to do.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, yeah, this is $5 million off. I mean, I have to wipe out half the city departments to pay for this. I don't know which one you want me to get rid of.
[Noel Velez]: Yeah. Next up, we're going to go over facilities and operational needs. After some extensive talk with myself, superintendent, and our new COO, Ken Lord, we reviewed a few areas and facilities that we really want to address and work hard on. First step here is we were at a fourth carpenter slash maintenance worker. Based on the amount of work in the schools and the amount of overtime we're paying to the maintenance workers, we believe that we can get a lot accomplished with adding an extra employee who can really bang out a lot of things. As you know, we currently have three maintenance workers who oversee all the school departments, which is just, can backlog a lot of areas. Based off of our fiscal year 25 invoice analysis and our fiscal year 26 projections, we're looking to increase the contract and maintenance lines by $359,000. We have from the Habeeb and Associates assessment project, hoping to increase the extraordinary maintenance line by $70,000 to replace the water heater tank, number two at the Roberts Elementary School, and $7,000 in increase for equipment repair line items. Over in our technology department, we're hoping to add a little bit more technology infrastructure. We're currently with a cybersecurity package that includes other software increases at $52,000. So in total, based on our facility needs and technology needs, we believe $554,255 would be the increase. On the next slide here, you have just an idea of some of the maintenance services that the Metropublic Schools uses throughout the year, from pest management to concrete repairs, heating, HVAC, fire extinguisher inspections. Those numbers can get up there pretty quickly, but we just wanted to give an idea of exactly everything Ken Lord does for us in overseas. Next up we have some identified savings. So with the enrollment of the special needs programs at the Brooks Elementary School, we would go from five classrooms to four classrooms. We would have two learning groups and two language based groups. There would be no FTE losses as we have a teacher who's retiring and that position would not be filled. And then the parent in their classroom would be absorbed into a vacant position at the end of the fiscal year. We have our ELA curriculum payment for Houghton Mifflin. We just finished paying off our third payment this fiscal year, so that is completely done. Our new contracts for telephone and copier lease save us approximately $95,000 to $62,000. We have our NEASC accreditation expenses, which we completed this year. So that's another $30,000 from last year's budget that we would take off. And then just miscellaneous line items are whether it's little things that we purchased this year or just balancing from positives in one area and negatives in one area, we came up with a $14,000 savings. Total identified savings of $490,991. And we have here a few no-cost proposals. We'd like to add two AM, PM, meet classrooms at the Brooks. Convert to full day. Yes, I'm sorry about that. Yep. Convert to full day. We currently have a vacancy for a literacy coach. We'd like to convert that position to a math coach for fiscal year 27. And then we will be piloting a composting program at the high school in the Mississippi, but only the back end of the kitchen. So that's where all the cooking is done. And that would be covered on the food service department budget. And then we have here is just our summary based on our first slide. As we spoke about earlier, our general fund and stabilization fund, which total $86 million, and then our estimated salary step increases, our unavoidable cost increases, the request from principals and directors, the request from our facilities and our identified savings comes in at $94,032,696. And on the next slide, you'll just get an idea of what the increases and decreases would look like based on actual numbers. From our appropriation general fund, our stabilization fund that we would add next year, that's 750,000, which gets us to our total number, $94,032,696. Thank you all for your time. That is our presentation. Of course, we're here to answer any and all questions you have.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Ruseau.
[Paul Ruseau]: Thank you. Do we have a line item for device replenishment, or is that not in the budget this year at all?
[Noel Velez]: What was that?
[Paul Ruseau]: Could I hear that? For computers replenishment for students?
[SPEAKER_30]: Yes. OK. So that's why it's not on this slide. It's just a standard line item. Thank you.
[Gerry McCue]: So these are what was the increases to base budget. So that's in our base budget.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Graham, then Member Mastropone.
[Jenny Graham]: Thank you. I know that the state budget is still making its way through the process, but we are once again a minimum aid city and the governor's budget proposed minimum aid at $75 a student. Is that correct? Was it 75 or 70? Has the House or the Senate budget been released yet? I know that they always tend to move that number a little bit.
[Gerry McCue]: Not since yesterday. OK. And last year the minimum was $150 per student.
[Jenny Graham]: Right. And I think they're grappling with some of the same challenges all around. So I think that's something to look for. So this is like year seven of the Student Opportunity Act. There was only one year where we received more than minimum aid. And this is another minimum aid year. So presuming that the you know any change to minimum aid would be a boost to our you know to our numbers. I assume that some so I just think from a grounding perspective. This is a picture of like the starting point of a budget request that says for us to meet the objectives of the district and to do to meet our obligations contractually. This is what the numbers look like and we'll approve. some version of this at our next meeting coming up, and then that will go to the mayor and the council as a request. And then once the council and the mayor determine what those numbers actually are, to your point, Jerry, before we end the fiscal year, hopefully, there would be another conversation to say like, is if there is a gap, how do we close that gap and potentially like another public hearing? So between now and then, I assume there will be lots of things going on from a funding perspective, like from a like analysis of funding options that might be outside of just a direct ask from the city, is that true?
[Gerry McCue]: Yes. We do have an obligation to schedule a public hearing before the vote on the budget.
[Jenny Graham]: Yes and then I think the other question I had which was on page. 18 for facilities and operations. One of the things that this outlines is an increase in our contracted maintenance line items. Can you is that because we will save money by contracting folks in these spaces? Are we already spending this money or has like had the cost just like risen dramatically like if we if we don't do this what happens I think is part of my question but I mean three people for a district of this size is like super anemic and it's not shocking that we have the maintenance issues that we have because we've been staffed this way forever and I know that one of the things that we've been talking about as we continue to negotiate with our bargaining partners is how do we you know how do we set up that unit in a productive way. But I'm just curious, like, what the balance of internal staff to contracted services really should be for a district of our size? And, like, how does this proposal fit into, like, moving towards something that is more ideal?
[Gerry McCue]: I'm gonna turn it over to Ken Lord in a second, but if you remember last year, I think just for starters, our maintenance budget was woefully underfunded. We proposed a more realistic budget last year, and in the final negotiations of the budget, We were given some stabilization fund money for specific projects, which we're grateful for. That helped a lot. But we had to reduce our maintenance ask by an equivalent amount. So that's kind of how we negotiated the gap last year. while we were able to get some money for projects, we didn't really move the maintenance budgets forward, which we will ask for now. And basically, the mix of in-house versus private, you know, varies from district to district and based on your capacity, your in-house capacity. the type of systems you have. But I'll let Ken expand on this.
[Kenneth Lord]: Yes, exactly what Jerry was just saying. We use our in-house staff to do all the tasks that we feel we are qualified and capable of doing up to the limit of the staff time that we have. So we do farm out work that we could potentially do in-house if we had more staff in-house, and we could do it more economically with in-house staff because you always pay more for bringing in somebody from the outside. There are quite a few tasks that we just don't have the skill nor should we to do in-house, you know, some real heavy repairs. We don't have licensed electricians on staff. We need certain kind of, you know, people to do different kinds of work that will kind of always farm out inspections, elevator, you know, those kinds of things. We're really struggling to keep up with the load of things that we can do in-house with the staff that we have. They work incredibly hard. They're incredibly skilled. There's just not enough of them. And what I did to build the amount of contract services in the request this year is I looked at all the expenses from last year, told them up in different categories, and then we broke it up in each sum. We did it a little differently in the budget, so we really identified which type of contract we would have, and that's going to enable me to go out to bid for contractors, whereas now we really rely on the state tradesmen contracts to do it piecemeal. I hope that answers all your questions.
[Jenny Graham]: It does.
[Kenneth Lord]: Thank you.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Mastroboni?
[Paul Ruseau]: Yes. Oh, member Rousseau. Thank you. And I think you said this last year, but I've already forgotten. Sorry. What is a typical number of maintenance workers with this many buildings in a district?
[Kenneth Lord]: It really varies. I tried to do some study around some surrounding cities and towns. They really vary wildly just based upon what they farm out. And it's really kind of a function of what you can afford to do internally in the age of some of your buildings. You know, the older buildings take a lot more maintenance, a lot more upkeep, but they are often more easily done in-house because their older systems are not as complex. So, for instance, the newer HVAC systems that we're installing really need to be farmed out stuff. You know, we really need to be able to, you know, have people that are expert in those systems that we're installing now maintain them. So, you're going to see things that our crews can handle internally need to be done externally moving forward.
[Paul Ruseau]: So, it's. really outside, you know, if you had one of those bell curves, is it like one of those little tiny numbers way at the end, and you're like, hey, we can't find us there.
[Kenneth Lord]: Yeah, my initial reaction, and the one, this is my seventh month in, is confirmed after being seven months, is we are woefully understaffed. I can't keep up with basic stuff that we can do. And, you know, just to bring in an outside contractor, it costs you a thousand dollars just to have them walk in the door, you know, so. Okay, thanks.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: We're in the same boat on the city side. Member Mastroboni.
[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Excuse me. Thank you. So I think the phrase unavoidable cost is bugging me a little bit. I think there's a combination of a lot of things in there.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Reinfeld, if you could shut yours off. Everybody shut it off. Thank you. Member Mastroboni, you have the floor.
[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Thanks, Ken. I mean, I think it varies, right, from things that would look like compliance, right, special ed resources. There's a lot of budget right sizing, which I think is great. That's, you know, shows that you all are looking backwards to move forwards. I also think there's some choices in there. You know, I think I wholeheartedly support. moving paras off revolving funds, right, in concept, but that feels like a choice at this time. So, you know, this is a great list of needs. It's not surprising. There's a lot going on and there's a lot of work to do and a lot of improvements to make. Mayor Lincoln Kern also talked about a $5 million gap. So I'm wondering what the process is behind the scenes that you all and with the superintendent are undertaking over the course of the next month to identify what's highest priority of these marginal changes, what's highest priority of our existing expenditures to understand, to identify the least painful reductions here. These are a lot of great ideas. Where do we go from here, I think is my question. pair.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: And just to piggyback on that, to put something before us that's $5 million, it just makes the community, whoever's watching, it makes it seem like we're as bad off as other local cities and towns that have just lost a big override, two of whom touch us. So it just makes us look bad, and we'll talk Wednesday about, you know, the deficit that I'll handle on the city side, but cutting city budgets to give a little more to the schools, like I always do it, and I'll do it again, but when you bring something that's five million over, it just seems like, some of that job could have been done before tonight. Member Ruseau.
[Paul Ruseau]: Thank you. In June of 2024, we approved our budget preparation schedule and very much the point of that was to have this exact conversation. If the answer was it was another $40 million to accomplish the goals of the district, then that's the answer. The time to talk about what we have to cut is is in the schedule and we have to do it. And there's no, nobody imagines we're gonna find all this money. But to not tell the public and just treat them like adults, that hey, to operate the district at, well, this is minimum. If you looked at the total new ads, it was like 500,000 here and 400,000 like. Those are not numbers that make you think we're dramatically improving the district at all. They are not. So This, this budget does not, in my mind, move the district particularly forward. This keeps the district afloat. This, this budget request, this isn't the budget, this is the budget request. And I think we have to tell the public what it actually costs to do the job they think we're doing or want us to be doing. And then we can have the, the other adult conversation when we have to figure out, okay, we have to cut. Whether it's 5 million or 4 million or 3 million, there's no cutting that kind of money without laying people off. I'm gonna be the first to say it. Like, I looked at those numbers. We're gonna not, not pay electricity. We're not gonna not pay for, you know, all the other things that aren't people. 85% or something of our budget is people. So, when we go from what we believe we need to what we actually have, we're, There's no scenario where that does not include layoffs. So I mean, unless I'm really bad at math, which is possible. But this process we, we vetted and approved in 2024 specifically so the public would know what we as a body believe it would cost to perform the duty that we're elected to perform and that the professionals are hired to to execute on, so I think that's, I agree it's incredibly awkward to be saying this, like, that's a lot more money than we're gonna have, and we're gonna have some ugly conversations, and I hope the school committee's involved in those, not just the administration, we like magically come back with here's the new number, but we have to tell the public the truth. This is our needs assessment to do, frankly, no more in Medford Public Schools than we did this year.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Master Boney.
[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Briefly, members, I totally agree 100 percent. I'm not asking for cuts. I'm asking to understand the process by which you all decide what's level service, what's service expansion in this big list, what's mostly tied to our district goals, right, so that we can make sure to explain those to residents. And that, so that I can understand the work that you all are doing to identify the risks and trade-offs of different choices that we're gonna make. So, you know, when I see a big list, my eyes kinda glaze over, right? I wanna understand, again, like, you know, where, summarizing where we're investing, what's compliance, what's level service, what's expansion, what's catching back up from something that we learned throughout the course of the year, again, sort of in a summary, this list. It's tough to digest it, even in the couple times I've looked at it since we got it. So, that's the kind of information I'm looking at. And again, not to cut, but to understand where we're at in terms of priorities.
[Gerry McCue]: Do you want to? Well, we, I think. That will, when we come back to the committee, we will show you how we reduce the budget. One thing that is ongoing, the superintendent did say that we continue to polish these numbers. We've identified pockets of very low class size in some schools, so we're going to be talking to principals about that. That could provide some savings. And then we'll let the high school finish their scheduling to see how that shakes out. So this budget, you know, we tried to, with the exception of that one special needs classroom at the Brooks, which was very clear, we didn't want to talk about personnel right now. But certainly, we have to look at that, you know, to get down to this number. I will say that, you know, the supplies and materials requests are based on the assistant superintendent's initiative to make our instructional offerings more robust, more rigorous. And so we have to buy, you know, better quality materials to make that happen. But I hear what you're saying, so we'll try to address that when we come back for at least a public hearing or maybe before then.
[Suzanne Galusi]: If I may. Dr. Lucey. I do want to just comment. So the ongoing conversations that we're having as central leadership with school leaders with the department leaders. As I said we're having conversations about what the priorities are and where are those places that we can reduce and where are those places that we want to be able to kind of hold firm in order to meet our instructional vision. It's never, I think that's why I started this evening with a little bit of framing. It's never, ever my intention to come to a school committee meeting and present something that I feel is going to divide a community. Rather, there's been lots of messaging around transparency and what are those costs. And so, I just wanted to make sure. in this process that we provided that level of transparency. As mentioned by some school committee members as well as Jerry and Noel, there are pieces on there that maybe we're trying to move, let's, when we're talking about the revolving, revolving accounts. Things around materials to enhance curriculum. There's also pieces around some of our entitlement grants that Dr. Talbot and I have been having conversations around, making sure that we're maybe being a little bit more strategic about leveraging that. We also are in talks. We have applied, I'm not quite sure yet of the award, but we have applied for our second round of bar grant funding. That also will drastically inform this budget in terms of what we can put on that bar foundation grant and what we cannot. So between grant funding and our revolving accounts and just making some of those choices that member Masturbone is talking about. This tonight is just to show you what it would take to operationalize completely and fully without having to rely on any sort of grant funding or entitlements. It's certainly not at all to cause any sort of turmoil or stress or division. I apologize if, if that impact hit for people in the community. But this is just, as I said, this is a new team. And so sometimes pushing through to, to make some change and add some structures where there haven't been any, or places where there have been some underfunding. Right now you are seeing some pieces in, that are needed for operationally as well as educationally. But this is not the end. And we will be settling in the uncomfortable work. But I just wanted to make that known.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Reinfeld?
[Erika Reinfeld]: Thank you. So I have all kinds of nitpicky questions, things like, is that the theater teacher we've been talking about for the last two years? But what I really want to ask you about here in this, what is essentially our budget committee of the whole, just as much as it is a regular meeting, some of these Costs for software, instructional materials, curricula, all of those. What I'm not seeing in this summary is, are those expected to be the same costs year upon year, or is this, or are these one-time costs that we won't have to, is it investing in buying the software, or is it a subscription that we're gonna be paying year after year? So there are, I think, one, two, three, four, five, six things that I flagged as wondering whether those are year upon year. And things like the 360 boards, right? You said this is a five year process. Are we front loading it? Are we pacing it out evenly? I would love to understand more about that for these items. The eHealth software, the transitioning the servers, the instructional materials, robotics and ELA, the open architecture and technology upgrades.
[SPEAKER_23]: I got it, yeah.
[Noel Velez]: So regarding what you were talking about curriculum, for most of those, those would be a yearly cost. Robotics specifically, we know it would be a yearly cost, a program that complex that we want to continue it. It wouldn't be something like a Holt-Mifflin where we pay three years for it and we get to keep it. That would be a yearly cost. Another thing you had mentioned was the ELA program for the middle school. I believe that's still being reviewed on right now, but again.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Right, I know there wasn't a specific number on that.
[Noel Velez]: There wasn't a specific, yeah, curriculum. Yeah, that would, again, I would defer to Superintendent Dr. Talbot on that a little bit more when it comes to curriculum, but I know that they differ. Some are yearly costs, some are you buy the program for three years and you get to keep it. So in that area, but there are some that are definitely a yearly cost that we're hoping to add to the baseline of the budget.
[Erika Reinfeld]: That's important to know. And then my other question is I'm wondering about some of these additional costs. I also wasn't sure about the term unavoidable but. things that are either coming off of revolving accounts or there are some things that I understood to have been included in the infusion of override funds that were then going to progress things like transportation, some of the CBA stipend type adjustments, all of those. And so I'm wondering with the anticipation that there would be a two and a half percent increase every year, why those are, additional that we hadn't planned on before kind of above and beyond 2.5 percent.
[Gerry McCue]: So we. Well first of all the the first bucket of unavoidable expenses was unavoidable and including unsustainable. So for the for some of them. And I take the full responsibility for some of the confusion, but I just felt it was easier to kind of fold them in to that category. But those are certainly, some of that spending can be pushed off to a future fiscal year. It's not unavoidable in the same way that collective bargaining increases are. There was some spending in FY25 that was associated with the collective bargaining contract that got signed for the teachers. Paraprofessionals came later in FY26. And we utilized money that we have in our base budget for collective bargaining.
[Erika Reinfeld]: That's the undistributed funds? Yes.
[Gerry McCue]: So any contracts that aren't settled yet, we anticipate what we think the eventual result of that bargaining is and that gets distributed. And we utilized over a million dollars in stabilization fund to help support that as well. So those funds got spent, and they've become part of the base budget now. So going forward in 27, we're seeing increases over and above the current fiscal year. And we did have the plan in utilizing stabilization funds. We were able to create a fund of a little over $2 million. for the three years that the teacher's contract would be in effect. And then we are slowly reducing that so we don't, we have, because that, they are part of our base budget. We have to replace those funds. And if we used all $2 million in FY26, we'd be faced with replacing $2 million this year. So we do have to replace about $335,000. That's shifting from stabilization fund into general fund in FY27. But hopefully that answers your question about why we have increases in 27.
[Erika Reinfeld]: So I guess it was a question around the carryover and when you, you mentioned reserve in here and what that, is reserve the same thing as the undistributed or is there a separate reserve fund?
[Gerry McCue]: Well the stabilization fund is a reserve. It's to, I mean we might, we may call undistributed funds reserves too but the stabilization fund was designed to help fund the teacher's contract through the three years of their contract.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Okay. And the other thing that would be helpful to see in addition to whether this is a piece of a whole or going forward. Oh no, now I just lost it. was actually this is probably my homework to go back and look at it side by side with the spending. Because I recognize there's a lot of right sizing here and particularly on the revolving funds. I know it wasn't entirely fair to mention those because this is really the first time we've looked rigorously at those funds and where things are coming from and to on that. I may have more questions but I see more red lights so I will sort through my notes.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Olapade, then Member Graham, then Member Parks.
[Aaron Olapade]: Thank you. This is actually to go a little bit off of what Member Ryenfield was mentioning. And I know, I recognize that the unanticipated costs are in that, unanticipated or, you know, under, under expected. That being said, I think $1.5 million cost to the FY26 budget is quite large. And I think that going forward, are there things that we can be doing to kind of plan accordingly, you know, based off of what's changed? A lot of these are, district needs, so they're not things that, you know, again, they're just based off of what's growingly needed by our students and, and our faculty. So, it's hard to kind of pre-plan, but is there budget forecast that we can do? Are there things that we might be able to implement going forward to kind of maybe ideally plan for that?
[Gerry McCue]: Well, that, that's what I Budget meetings are designed to do with principals and directors. So I think what we've listed out are things that we were not able to predict. But to the extent we can, we try to identify those. So that's part of why we do enrollment projections. why we do class size estimates to help us understand do we need to add staff? Can we shift staff from one area to another? But in some of these cases, these were people moving into MedFed with identified needs. and or a mix of students. There was a couple, you know, a student in special needs can require a certain amount of services in grade 2 and that may change dramatically in grade 3, you know, as they grow older. those are the things that kind of pop up once they occur. And then particularly in the area of special needs where there's IEPs, those are contracts between the school department and the parent. And so they have to, we have to make sure that we are providing the services that are necessary on those documents.
[Aaron Olapade]: Thank you. My second question goes to the professional development that was noted I think on slide 13. It's recommending or it's noting that one-third of 1% of the total budget is going to be going towards PD or like that increase. Is that what is the general norm? Is there a best practice that we're following when it comes to that? Do we have the numbers on that? I'm not quite sure.
[Gerry McCue]: Well, I think every school system is different but what we did say during the presentation is that for foundation budget, the budget that DESE puts together for MedFed and for any other district, they have an allocation for professional development and it's 1.7 percent of the budget. I'm not aware of any district that spends up to that amount of money, but it's certainly, you know, we're not close to that area. And it wasn't too long ago that we didn't have any budget for professional development in the general fund. We more or less relied on some of the title grants to provide, you know, minimum amount. There should be like an ongoing resources to develop professional development plans and those, the needs of our teachers could, can vary from year to year. We identify, you know, in analyzing data, we might identify gaps that we have to close and that might require training as well. I know in the case of the arts that the director wants a, you know, has identified the need for more robust program at the elementary schools. So that kind of takes development, you know, acquisition of curriculum and then we have to train our teachers to be able to implement it with fidelity.
[Aaron Olapade]: Absolutely. Thank you. And then my final question for the moment. On slide 19, when we talk about the technology infrastructure, that cybersecurity upgrade package, is that recognized because of an emergent issue that came, that the district came aware of, or is that just an ongoing IT, you know, increase or upgrade that we've been working towards?
[Kenneth Lord]: Can you talk to it? So that was an assessment that I did when I got here compared to what I'm used to and what I feel is really needed is to have increased cybersecurity protection so that this is what's called a managed detection response system. So as opposed to a system that just passively sits in the background and we have to monitor and check, this is a company that watches these systems and they take action immediately upon sensing a cybersecurity threat. That's what that system is.
[Aaron Olapade]: Thank you so much.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Graham and then Member Parks, I think it was, and then Member Ruseau.
[Jenny Graham]: Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you to this team for doing this work. When we started working with this revised budget process maybe three years ago now. I think it has allowed us to really have a different kind of conversation both with the community and with our partners at the city council and the mayor's office and It's the kind of transparency I think we all talk about and want and desire. And I think one of the things that Medford is seeing and feeling right now is that transparency comes with discomfort. It's easier to just be mad about somebody doing something behind closed doors than to have to sit in the discomfort of, we don't have that answer just yet, right? That's uncomfortable for people, and I totally get that. I think it allows people to engage with the process in a in a completely different way and I think we're all better for that. And I recognize that that is a lot of work for you all because essentially you're you're preparing like multiple iterations of a budget. So I just wanted to say thank you because I think transparency really matters to people in Medford. And it's a work in progress in terms of how we get there. But like it starts with all of you telling us plainly like what is going to help us meet our instructional vision and what are the obligations that we have to students. So I just wanted to say thank you for all of that. I think it's really really really important. And you know I just like. mark in my calendar that April through June is going to be uncomfortable. Because it is. And it is every year, like good times, bad times. It doesn't matter, because the truth is our students always deserve more than we can give them. That's just sort of how this works. I wish it weren't. And I look forward to all the ways that government can work together federally, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, federally, federally. And increase funding for things that matter like educating our future. So I just wanted to say thank you for the work.
[Gerry McCue]: Thank you. I you know I just want to say that the you know we every every budget has a story to it. And the story of this one was the unusually high number of unavoidable costs that we got tagged with this year. and looking into next year. So hopefully that's not the new normal. But that has the potential of squeezing out all the other good things that directors need, that Ken Lord needs as well. So that's another reason of trying to get everything on the table so we can work collectively to come to a reasonable bottom line.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Parks.
[Jessica Parks]: Thank you. Just for clarification, the page 5, the I mean, or six, but really I was just more looking at the addition of eight paraprofessionals, the special education, transportation, but it could apply to any of these. These are actual costs that were unanticipated this past year that arose that are going to be carried forward in next year's budget. But we're not accounting for potential new costs that could arise or doing some percentage allocation. into the requested budget, is that correct? And I'll finish my question after that. That is correct.
[Gerry McCue]: Well, there could be one thing now that we have our new transportation coordinator on board, what we want to do is go through an exercise of placing all our students into, onto transportation and to see so frequently what happens when you get new students in, it can be difficult to get them assigned transportation with the current provider that we have. Just because they're all booked up or they don't want to hire additional drivers depending on what time of the year it is. So it forces us to go out and look for independent contractors to fill that need. Now, there could be opportunities to get those students into transportation we're already buying. What mainly we tried for new costs that we haven't taken into account, we always try to keep a balance of circuit breaker funds on tap that's unallocated. We want to use it for a future year, but if we have to use it in the current year to meet new students, then that's our kind of safety net for that.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Member Ruseau?
[Paul Ruseau]: Thank you. You know, the professional development line item is fascinating in 2001. The state budget actually had a mandatory spending, which would have put us, adjusted for inflation, at spending almost a million dollars this year on professional development. The 1.7 would put us at 1.46 million. That's for last year's budget, by the way. A lot of the stuff that we want to do in the district requires professional development. A few years ago, I was going on about restorative justice, which is a massive professional development effort, multi-year professional development effort. And I know there's some of that going on, but we can't pretend that for a quarter of a million dollars, we're actually training up 800 employees in a way that would meet the goals of these providers of this instructional material. So I just wanted to point out that, I mean, I don't know what the professional development budgets are everywhere. I'm sure in 2001, A lot of communities lost their minds when they were required to spend that much money because if after 25 years we're still only coming to a quarter of what they thought was a good idea in 2001, that tells me that we are, it's sort of like our maintenance staff, it's like way out on the, end of a bell curve of what's appropriate spending. The other, I just wanted to make that point. The other thing though about how we deal with these unanticipated expenses, like the way a district that is well funded and does that is they actually budget more than they need and they put that into a stabilization fund and it sits there. And then just like with, you know, like we don't have a snowstorm for a decade and then you have snowmageddon. And if you budget for the amount of snow you typically get, then you're really in trouble when snowmageddon hits. So we're still in my mind. far away from being able to set up stabilization funds where we sit on millions of dollars waiting for the day when there's unanticipated expenses. I hope we can get there because as everyone in this room knows, when you have a surprise 20 students that need a lot of stuff, We will provide that even if the consequence is laying off staff. Like, we don't have a choice but to provide that, and we shouldn't have a choice. But without that stabilization option, we would perhaps come to city council, or we would have a mid-year deficit and have to close it, which is a horrible idea, to have to go through that. I do hope that this is not the new normal. I feel like we won't know. My question though, I did have a question somewhere in all that, was are any of these things, these unanticipated expenses, well, let me rephrase that. Does the size of these unanticipated expenses, any of that related to tariffs or inflation? That you know, I mean. No, okay.
[Gerry McCue]: Well, good. I should say too that the spending is occurring all throughout the year. So what we presented tonight is the fully annualized cost of that spending. And that is not the hit on this year's budget. Although we're having to address that, you know, in our budget projections.
[Paul Ruseau]: Yeah, I mean, the way I feel like we typically are also solving this is we're not hiring critical positions we need because we won't have the money if we do. And, you know, we have school district, school committee and we have superintendent goals. And a lot of that hiring is a big part of meeting those goals. So not hiring people because we're gonna run out of money. because of unanticipated costs is really pushing us, you know, is not meeting our goals. And it's really hard to you know, when we look at the actual budget book, we'll see a number of positions that say, you know, unfilled or whatever the, the language is. And I think that like, we don't really have time to get into that level of detail in these meetings. But like, the consequence of not having those people is real. If it wasn't, we wouldn't even budget for them, right? Like, we're not hiring extra staff to stand around. So, I don't know where I was going with that exactly. It's getting late and I'm hungry. So, thank you.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Okay, are we ready to go on to number four, gone green billing, fiscal year 25? Kenneth Lord, Chief Operating Officer, and Noah Velez, Director of Finance.
[Noel Velez]: Hey everyone, it's me again. Welcome back. Here with my best friend, Ken.
[Kenneth Lord]: A few weeks ago, we received a series of invoices from Gone Green, which is our electrical subcontractor who comes in and does a lot of the work. These are from fiscal 25. They're a series of invoices that were not processed on our end for payment, but they were received. And so we're here seeking permission to submit those to payment for this fiscal year. So we do need your approval and city council's approval in order to pay something out of this fiscal year that occurred in the last fiscal year. These invoices, it's not entirely clear to us where the failure was. We know what happened. The invoice was received and we're not processed for payment. We've put new systems in place and there were some systems already put in place to try to prevent this in the future. We're not entirely sure why the vendor didn't, you know, It was more loudly complaining. They have some issues on their end of billing, but they were sent in promptly after their work was done at the time and just not processed.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah. Is there interest on the bills?
[Kenneth Lord]: No.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Member Ruseau.
[Paul Ruseau]: Thank you. I appreciate this. I do know that like some gone green invoices have been getting paid because I see them. So I'm sure you've You've got a great handle on this. I'll make a motion to approve.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Can you just... Second. Just before the roll is called, can you just outline the cost, the total cost?
[Kenneth Lord]: Sure. It's $48,665.51. And how many bills total was that? You know, you would ask me that. It's probably 25 or so invoices. I don't have the exact number. I can get that for you though.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: So they put in a folder by someone or something? How did a 25 invoices from one company?
[Kenneth Lord]: And it's unclear whether they were processed by facilities or not processed by accounts payable. I can't technically find out because they were sent by email because the process is invoices received, it's printed, it's manually signed off and then it's manually sent over to accounts payable for them to enter into the billing system. So I can't prove where that failed. And during that time when these occurred, there were several staffing changes. The people in these departments are not here anymore. So we're kind of, you know, a little bit of a loss of how this could happen at this magnitude.
[Suzanne Galusi]: I was just going to, I'm sorry if you already said point of clarification was that this invoice is primarily occurred between August of 2024 and January of 2025. Correct.
[Erika Reinfeld]: So our leadership team looked very different at that point. And I just am hoping you can state for the record. what's being done to make sure this doesn't happen again. Yeah.
[Kenneth Lord]: A couple of things have changed. The administrative assistant who processes these invoices in her second year and she actually now tracks the actual invoice numbers and notes what's been done. I'm looking to implement a tighter process as far as verifying work and verifying the invoices that it's been processed. We're also have much more increased con much more. It's not ready. a greater communication with vendors to make sure that they are sending us their bills in a timely fashion, so that not only makes closing the fiscal year more appropriate, but also making sure we don't miss anything. So we are actively and proactively contacting vendors on a regular basis, saying, do we have all your invoices? Has this been paid? Are you looking for anything outstanding? Trying to make sure that we're not missing something on our end that they may have just not sent in, or sent in incorrectly, or got in the wrong place. Because some of that always happens, as far as I know.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Great. And thank you to the people doing that work because it's it spends it takes a lot more time than one thinks to chase people down. Yes.
[Kenneth Lord]: Amazingly it's not uncommon for us to have to chase a vendor to give us an invoice. It's like we want to pay you. You know I don't know why but sometimes it happens.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: OK. There's a motion for approval by a member so second by member Graham. Do you want to roll call please.
[Paul Ruseau]: Member Graham? Yes. Member Mastraboni? Yes. Member Olapade? Yes. Member Parks? Yes. Member Reinfeld?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes.
[Paul Ruseau]: Member Risseau? Yes. Mayor Longo?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes. Seven in the affirmative, zero in the negative. Paper passes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Presentations of Student Advisory Council Student Survey on Lunch and Transportation. Welcome.
[Alachie Yeager]: Hello everyone we'll try to be a bit quick because we know how late it is but it's also an important thing to talk about so I don't think that we want to rush too much. We sent a survey a couple weeks ago just sort of trying to gauge the positive student opinion on the state of buses on the state of school lunch in light of the schedule changes for this year as well as the implementation of bus barriers. continued implementation of bus barriers. We just wanted to see how these changes sort of affected schools, students in the district as well as sort of evaluate what changes needed to be made, could be made or what concerns may or may not already be being addressed in the district. So starting with maybe lunch, our lunch survey. These were two separate surveys. We should have the response numbers on these. So we just started, we wanted to sort of see what, how, how much kids were getting school lunch. And a pretty sizable portion of students get school lunch every day. So that means that anything that affects the quality of. going to be affecting a really large portion of Medford High School students. If you go to the next slide, it's a bit more clear. We sort of broke it down into ranges just to be a bit more readable rather than each number 1 through 10 being in a separate category. But this is the same data as the graph before.
[Jayden Vil]: Yeah, so on this slide, we asked students, to what extent do you feel lunch lines are overcrowded? And it's interesting, we have a key that says not crowded, and 0% of students said the lunch lines were not crowded at all. 50% said they were very crowded, 29.7% said crowded, so crowding is a big issue in the lunch lines. And even just a few days ago, I forget what the lunch was exactly, but there was a lot of hype around it, causing a lot of pushing and shoving and crowding. And so that's definitely something we want to address in the future.
[Alachie Yeager]: This is obviously a very triangular distribution here. It might be more normal. Yeah, there's not a ton that we gleaned here. We just wanted to see if there was any real trend that we saw. We see that most of the crowding is moderate. So we're not seeing students that are extremely distraught. Most students are fine. Although, of course, if kids are getting punched or kids are having extremely negative physical experiences, at least it's good to know that that is maybe the minority in our sample here. I guess this is along the same lines, so I'll go again. So yeah, we see, again, the majority of students are subject to sort of the effects of crowding. They're subject to this unwanted physical contact or like shoving or whatnot in the last two weeks. This is, again, not as concerning as maybe some of our other data points, but we're still seeing, you know, 67% of students being subject to that, which is obviously not what we want to be able to see. And that means that, you know, this is a thing that needs to be addressed.
[Jayden Vil]: And now for this question, we asked students how often they've been unable to eat lunch due to time constraints. And you see that while that between about 75% of students on either 1 to 10 days have had been unable to eat the lunch they wanted to eat because of time constraints. And 25% of students said they were fine. If you just sum up all of those points from 1 to 10, you see 75% of students were unable to eat all the food they wanted due to time constraints.
[Alachie Yeager]: Yeah, and, and really this is a, a really important slide to look at here because we see that 25, almost 26% of students every day in the last two weeks were, were unable to eat all the food that they wanted. Not because of the, the school lunch didn't provide the food for them, but because students have very limited time. And we saw that with the decrease in time in the schedule. We've also seen, especially I've looked at a couple of student complaints and talked to other members of student representatives. One of the concerns that we've seen is that Because lunch times are shorter, students have to go into the line earlier into the lunch to get their food to have time to eat, which means that the lunch line is longer at a time, which means kids have to get there earlier, which means the lunch line is longer. And so we see this sort of confounding effect that makes it more difficult. And that was some of the things that we heard in maybe the open response sections of this that inform this question.
[Jayden Vil]: Yeah, then we asked students, would they think railings or belt barriers would improve the state of the lunch lines? Because currently it's kind of just this bottleneck that happens where you have, like, at minimum three different lines kind of going into the narrow doorway, with people coming in from all angles trying to get lunch in time so they can't have time to eat all their lunch. We see about 73% of students said no, they don't think it would improve the state. And then 26% of students said they would improve the state.
[Alachie Yeager]: So again, this doesn't seem like the best solution, at least by popular opinion. So we would be looking at maybe other possible answers to this issue. And we heard a couple of them in open response. I think what are some final main takeaways we took for student loans? Of course, there was complaints of food and all of that sort of stuff. But we also understand that that is not really the things that we'd be looking at to solve in the short term, things that are, you know, We want to look at things that are obtainable. We want to identify where the real problems areas are. We want to try to enable a better lunch experience for students of Medford High. And so looking at our data, looking at all the open response questions, I think I'd really, again, like to accentuate the fact that because of purely time constraints, students aren't able to eat the food that is provided to them. It's not that we're not providing students with enough food necessarily, but that they just simply cannot consume it in the time that's provided. And maybe that's because they're talking to their friends and they're not doing the things that they should be doing during lunch. It's possible that there are other issues. But we believe that that really needs addressing because 26% is just unacceptable in my opinion.
[Jayden Vil]: Yeah, and so these next few slides will go into the bus schedule survey we put out. At first, here are just a few demographics about how students get to school. With most students taking the bus, either the yellow bus, like the MBTA, in the morning with 60% of students. And then walking is 10%, car or carpool is like 51%, bike 4.8%, and then some others, just 1%. You can select multiple ways you get to school.
[Alachie Yeager]: Yes. We saw, again, an increase in bus ridership on the way home. This, of course, makes sense. Parents are not available to get their kids to school in the evening a lot of the time. So that just should be probably an area of greater focus, looking into those results in the evening than it is in the morning. We again wanted to just get a pulse on general bus ridership. And again, four to five days, you know, 68, 70% of students, roughly 70% is again a decent portion of the student base at Medford High School. So this, you know, fixes changes to this would be changes to, to the lives, improvement of the lives of most students at Medford High School. And we can see that, you know, almost 90% of students take buses, utilize the buses that are provided, which is, again, a significant portion, even if it's not every day.
[Jayden Vil]: Then this is just looking at the demographics in which buses are the most popular to take, with the 134 being the most of 41.9% of students, and then the yellow bus being the least of 21.5% of students. And a lot of this goes into our consideration on ways to organize the bus pickup area. For instance, having maybe designated spots that are closer to the sidewalk or just closer to like the crosswalk that are more, is more open, which would allow like for like the 134 and 101, a greater amount of students who take that, take those buses, they can have more space to line up, whereas maybe the yellow bus or the 95 can, have spots further along the sidewalk where there's less space but also less students. And so just trying to find ways to better coordinate the bus.
[Alachie Yeager]: I want to make two clarifications just for the data on this slide show. This question, there's less responses because of course the students that do not take buses cannot answer this question. In fact, they weren't served this question. But then also, there are the students that are taking buses only one or two days a week or less than one day a week to go to the library or whatnot. may mess up these results because these aren't weighted by how many days students take buses. So this might be some of the reason why the 134 is higher just because it goes by Manfred Square and the library, but we still think that it's generally representative based off of other data. Also just for representatives that haven't surveyed the way that the bus system works just in front of our school, haven't been there because I think that I'm not sure. just who is aware. There's a bus lane on the, if you're coming up the hill on the left side of the school, where all the buses will go through. And there are currently in place aluminum barriers that we put up this year to sort of prevent students from falling into the buses or into the road. But we see that they also cause, you know, that might be safer inherently because they're not falling into the dangerous moving vehicles. But there's also a crowding issue which is introduced which we'll get to later. And so currently these buses don't have designated spots. They just sort of go through and park. And so all the students need to run to their bus when it shows up. which causes some issues. So we just want to make sure that we're on the same page of what the current situation is like. So when we talk about addressing these issues, we have sort of a united thinking. This question was added late. So we do not believe that this data is necessarily representative. Again, 26 is just not enough. It's just not enough. But we still see that 76, 77 percent of students that at least responded to this question wanted to, would utilize a late bus. This other was like probably. The reality of the situation is if there's 70% of students, even if this is a very small sample, statistically it's likely that still a significant amount of students would be willing to use a late bus even if the error bars are larger than we'd want. So I think it's still a helpful question. And there's a lot of, we didn't bother including all of the other responses because students could select other. But a lot of them were just a mix, you can see. Very few of them were actually alternative locations, so we just didn't necessarily bother. But we saw, you know, most of the demand for late bus locations, if we are talking about this, because we understand it would be a budgetary ask, because currently, you know, students that can take a car, students that can take a bike, students that are maybe more advantaged in terms monetary basis for their families, are able to access the extracurricular activities, are able to stay after with their teachers, are able to do all of these things. We do not have a late bus, and so with some exceptions, students that have to ride the bus, students that live farther away from the school, because our school is in a more affluent part of Medford. are put at not only a disadvantage from all the other factors in their life, but also a disadvantage academically. Like, we are able to come after school on Thursdays and, you know, participate in student involvement and be here. But, like, you take the car, your parents drive you, or you drive you most of the time. I, you know, it's a 20-minute walk. It's not short, but I can do it. And so, like, we see this selection in our school, in our clubs, in our after-school activities, and we really just want to try and maintain an equitable learning environment. So even if this doesn't get addressed this fiscal year with the budgetary constraints that we just spent, you know, time talking about, we do think that the lack of a late bus is really hurting our disadvantaged population at Medford High School.
[Jayden Vil]: Yeah, and so recently around things like December, January added a second bus railing as a way because before with only one bus railing, then all the buses would then park in front of that one bus railing to cause a lot of congestion. And so now there's a second bus railing where generally like the 134 and like 95, for instance, can park at the two of them. And we asked students, had this improved the bus departure time crowding or safety? And it was a resounding 61% or 62% said that it did not help a lot at all. because there's still, and part of that reason could be because one, like, the buses still can only park in front of them, at least that's how that's being coordinated currently. And so there's still a lot of crowding. That's like one of the big things we saw in the responses, how. There's a lot of crowding, a lot of bottlenecks that happen at those two railings. And we also see that even if a student's bus isn't the one that's pulled up, they still want to stand in front of that railing to make sure that they have a spot for when their bus comes. And so there's a lot of congestion, a lot of human body density that happens at the bus railings currently.
[Alachie Yeager]: Yes, and again, because the buses don't have designated spots, if students want to have first positions on their bus, be able to sit comfortably down, which of course the students want to do on their long bus rides home. They need to be ready by the bus railings. They don't know which bus is going to come. They don't know where the buses are going to park. And so when, you know, I saw today, literally outside the school when I was leaving, the 134, I believe, no, 101 was very late. And so you had a bunch of the kids sitting around, and then when the bus pulled up to one of the railings, they had, they like, this sort of cloud of kids ran into the other people that were waiting for the 134. because they don't have designated spots and so students just have to sort of move as a group to the location. And so in these sort of other categories we saw either sentiment of like it didn't improve significantly or we saw that like there was still significant crowding because of these issues that I just talked about. These were the main sort of other responses in this category. We couldn't include them all but those were generally the sum of what they were talking about. Here, going along with this idea, we see a significant quantity of students think that individual locations would help. And this is with still bus railings, which the students were saying were not beneficial before. So that negative percentage, we believe, is at least significantly attributed to students that were previously saying that they didn't want bus railings. And almost all of the other category here were people saying, yes, individual locations are good. We just do not want the bus railings present there. And so we think that we would like to do another version of the survey, just without the railings, ask about individual locations. But based off of, you know, anecdotal student opinions, we've talked to a couple other students and just based off the results of this forum, we feel like as, you know, a lower cost option here, of course, require coordination with the MBTA. But just like in the middle schools, If we can just designate certain portions of that, of the sidewalk area to the, outside the, what is it called? Like that courtyard? Yeah. The west courtyard? The west courtyard. If we can, if we can allocate specific areas for the four different buses outside the west courtyard, I think we and most other students believe that that would significantly help aid in a lot of issues we see with buses as sort of a more easily implemented solution.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you. I love that you did a survey and are telling us what the students feel is necessary and issues and concerns. I really appreciate the presentation. If there's any questions, Member Reinfeld?
[Erika Reinfeld]: Not questions so much, just to say we just met our new transportation manager. Obviously, she's new. I assume you've met with her, but some of this on the bus front certainly seems like it could be very quickly pilotable. And I would love to see the results, because we've, the late bus, we talked about that on a, I think it was our Zoom only meeting. So I'm excited to see that analysis once our new transportation manager kind of gets feet under her. I don't want to throw everything at her the first week. So I'm excited about that there's really clear actionable things. My question on the, not a question, I promise, on the, No, it's a question. I'm going to ask it. So there are questions of time. There's questions of space. Time turns out to be one of those really complicated things with lots of ripple effect. But the space question is interesting. I think we heard some strong feelings about railings, particularly in cafeterias. I have all kinds of questions about how this applies at the elementary school. But the question for you is, we are currently thinking about a new high school in Medford. There's an opportunity. And so I guess my question is, what advice would you have to the design team, knowing that we are still in that collecting input phase? Or maybe this is something you could write up and send separately. But what would the student body of Medford High School want to see in the cafeteria? Or maybe you've already had that conversation with the architects. I don't know. But this seems like a great opportunity to look at the space that's needed. And are there ways to improve that traffic, that crowding, physical contact by changing the layout.
[Alachie Yeager]: Yeah, I mean we definitely want to do, I think we'd want to do another plebiscite, another survey, because The cafeteria question is hard. If it was easy and it wasn't cost prohibitive, then it would not be a problem. And some of the issue of the cafeteria is the design of the cafeteria space. That is most certainly true. Students have to go to the far side, and then when they come out of the cafeteria line, they have to intersect back with the crowd that's already there. So there isn't capability for smooth flow.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Sounds like the driveways at the high school. Sure.
[Alachie Yeager]: Yes, that is an apt comparison. And then I think this is, you know, it's maybe, I think buses are a bit easier to talk about just because the student opinion has been more united in terms of possible solutions. I think we always have a dissenting opinion whenever we do anything like this. It's just how it works, but.
[Erika Reinfeld]: We don't know what that's like on school committee at all.
[Alachie Yeager]: Sure. Of course, never heard a negative voice ever. No, but, you know, I think that buses are a bit of an easier problem to address and that also goes into traffic and the traffic flow conversation because if we're expecting you know buses to be lining up. In parallel, like, at this, like, on the bus lane at the same time, which we do see, but they not, they might need to pass each other, right? That's a whole nother consideration. I mean, they do that at, you know, the Andrews to some extent, but it's just, I think, I think the current causeway is wide enough. There are considerations, of course. I think that it is difficult to give you concrete stuff right now after a preliminary survey, but that is certainly, I think, important feedback that could be provided, and we would love to, I think, provide a write-up or something.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Thank you, and then the other piece I would just urge you to keep in mind with the buses and transportation is thinking about the safety components of people who aren't taking buses and walking, biking, and all of that.
[Alachie Yeager]: I think the good thing about the way our school is currently set up is that the west courtyard is not the only exit the students can take off the campus. In fact, I don't even think it's the least, like, It's not even, in many cases, the closest exit to the bottom of the hill. So students that are walking, students that are taking their bike often exit out of the front entrance of the school, because then they do not have to deal with the crowd. Make that more explicit is probably a good idea. I think that, you know, it is certainly an issue. There is a choke point, you know, at the... would be the south corner of the west courtyard, like trying to triangulate, but the corner closer to the main street because that's where the buses pull up, students have to sit there. So we just want to try and, I think when you talk about bus ridership, and this is the reason why we did this question in the beginning, it's like we want to move the higher volume buses into the court, is the inner two spots, is the middle two spots next to the courtyard so that those students are in that, you know, location that can hide some more rather than just being on the sidewalk which is, you know, rather skinny and could provide congestion issues. But yet safety is very important. That's why the bus railings were there in the first place and so we still have a bit mixed feelings on that because even if they're causing worse crowding, if they stop students from, you know, getting their foot run over by a bus, I know that that was a problem, you know, a couple years back. Maybe they're still worth it to have in place.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Okay, thank you so much for the presentation. Dr. Golosi?
[Suzanne Galusi]: I just have one quick question. You mentioned maybe potentially doing another survey. On this original survey, do we get a sense of what, did you, was there a question that asked the grade span? I noticed participation for the lunch varied between 118 to 128 responses. Do we know what that breakdown was across the 1,200 students? Like was one particular grade?
[Alachie Yeager]: Actually, we could pull that information. I think we didn't explicitly. We can actually pull some of that information. We didn't include it on the slideshow because we didn't think it was particularly insightful. In fact, there were quite a few questions that weren't necessarily included. But one of the things that we sort of asked was if students felt that the lunch lines were longer or shorter or meaningfully different from previous years. We saw very mixed results on some of that because a lot of the students Of course, generally along the consensus. But we, you know, there was of course an option for students that didn't go to school last year. So we can certainly pull the ninth graders out. But yes, that is something we'd like to do sort of going forward is look at those demographics. But no, unfortunately on this survey we do not have the information. But that would be a consideration for follow-ups. And I think that is important. So thank you for bringing that to our attention.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you. Thank you. Do not have any presentations of the public. We do have continued business. MSBA project update. Member Graham, chair of the Medford Comprehensive High School Building Committee. I'll turn it to you.
[Jenny Graham]: Thank you. I will try to be brief and thorough at the same time. So we'll see how it goes. OK. So the first thing I wanted to cover was some conversation around the process where we are the option selection etc. So as I think you all know, the MSBA asked us to move more quickly from 29 to 3 to 5 options or so than we originally anticipated. So we have done that. We have notified the MSBA. They've acknowledged that they received that. And they are now working through providing their feedback on our PDP submission. So all of that is happening and we're expecting answers from the MSBA in the coming days. One of the things that I think is noteworthy about the six options is that I don't think there was any clear favorite in all the discussion. I don't think there is a clear winner of any of these options if you are just thinking about the thing that looks like it's going to work the best for us, because it's a really complicated site. What the six options do, though, is pretty comprehensively allow us to explore all the facets of what's possible on the site. So I'm excited about that. We did hear from the committee lots of questions about things like, could you explore this without needing modulars? Could you explore this option to look a little bit more like this other option that couldn't go forward, which is all like, exactly what happens at this phase of design. Earlier today I did send a form out for the building committee to provide that kind of input to the project team so that the project team can either integrate that into their next iteration of design or provide some documentation about why it can't or it's not possible or it can't. So all of that is happening right now from a selection perspective. We don't have plans to to pair down from six before we get to one. So we'll go from six to one as our next plan. Between now and then, a couple of other important things will be happening. First, we have also today asked for the building committee to provide any suggestions that they have for space changes, whether that is adding or subtracting from the space summary. And those proposals will be collected up and provided and noticed on the agenda for our meeting on the 27th where we will be considering and voting on anything that might change the space allocation as it was originally envisioned. Based on whatever is approved in that meeting on the 27th. A revised request will go to the two estimators on the project for a second round of costing where more things are known about these options and they can get a little bit more. precise although I say a little bit because I think we're still at the a little bit phase when it comes to cost. But that next round again is really intended to help us compare the options to each other. And you know I think we'll see some combination of like changes to space on the 27th. and yet another combination of options because whatever we eliminate on the 27th is gone forever. We also have options to carry forward options which you saw some of that in our last costing and we can continue to do that at this phase so that we have sort of all the options on the table. The group is also slated to come to our meeting here on May 4th with an update and in particular if there are any edits or comments from the MSBA about the ed plan which again is the purview of this committee. I would envision that I would envision those being surfaced on the 4th. We do have a series of upcoming community events scheduled. The next one is on the 15th. Last week I also spent some time in the recording studio with our CTE students and Matt and we actually went and did like a a little like you know virtual walking tour of each of the six options and we sort of talked a little bit about what's to come for each of these options. So what is the option. What is it. What are we seeing in the picture. What is possible. What's not possible. Just to give people an orientation of the six if they haven't tuned in yet so that people can watch those RCT students are editing and preparing those now. So you should see those in the coming days which is super exciting. We also are working on in addition to our community forums a list of events across the spring where we will be out in various places in the community so people can come and ask their live questions. We are planning a trip to the senior center the senior center and mailer that will go to every household in Medford. And then I think the sort of last bucket is maybe like a catch all and just a couple of other things happening last week. Thanks to suggestion and some guidance from David to disco who is a resident. We put in a federal grant request for three million dollars to fund The Medford family network space in the welcome center at least I think substantially based on the current numbers and whether that goes forward this year or perhaps like primes the pump for next year I think either way. I will take $3 million. We did meet with Medford REC today and we were talking about the pool and the options for the pool and some of the things from a more visionary perspective that our pool experts here in Medford would like to see us think about and consider. And Kevin graciously also offered to begin looking for grant funding for the pool. So we'll take that as well. So that more to come there. We did also talk with Kevin from a really preliminary contingency planning space and we start talking about the things that will be impacted on the site during construction. How do we start to make sure that our full cadre of programming can continue. through construction. So if for example we pick a design that builds something on the field that means we'll be displacing soccer and lacrosse and where do they go. So we're having all those conversations and there's some related work that the city is contemplating around Hormel Stadium so that it can be ready to receive students if it comes to that. We did also talk with Kevin about you know other alternatives like the Tufts pool etc. I think we've had a lot of conversations about the pool and we are exploring every avenue to make the priority of the pool remain a priority but not drive the entirety of the design decision making about the high school project. And I don't have any answers for that yet just questions and conversation that we're having particularly with our state delegation. Our state delegation was in a week and a half ago where we gave them an update on the project and we had lunch at Bistro 489. And we talked with them about any variety of things on the docket in terms of the project. We also talked about, you know, my desire to see the state increase reimbursement when you're building vocational programs. Vocational programs are expensive. They are the future. They are the thing that at the state level everyone is talking about, and yet there's like no additional reimbursement. And in fact, there is a bill, there are multiple bills that seem to have stripped out the additional reimbursement for vocational programs, which is sad and not aligned with, I think, the future of education. So hopeful that we can continue to have that conversation with them. We are also talking with them because we are in conversation with DCR, who is our biggest, largest neighbor by far, and they all but surround us, actually, on the site when you look at a map. And we are talking to them about, as well as Friends of the Fells, about both construction, post-construction needs that we have and share with them, like access to the site in a way that is not just the main sort of access road right now, which would, we think would be mutually beneficial with DCR. But obviously that brings up lots of planning and permitting sort of questions that create a long tail potentially depending on what, where we go with all of those options in collaboration with DCR. So we wanted to make sure our state delegation was, aware of and involved in that discussion early on. They were extremely supportive and excited about the project. They raved about the blueberry bread pudding at the bistro and it was a very excellent dessert topping I guess I would say. And it was it was a good conversation and they're eager to help any way that they can which I think is great. I think other than that's sort of like a and as fast as possible like roundup of everything that's going on. But there's like literally tons and tons of planning going on. I know that the SMMA is talking to the city's traffic engineer about some exciting things that the traffic engineer is suggesting in terms of. The entrance and exit, this next phase of design will also allow us to look more carefully at circulation around the building, which will improve traffic flow on and off the site. It will plan for things like where do buses go, where do people go, where do cars go, where do bikes go, et cetera, so much to the point of the conversation that our students were just having with us. Our site was not planned for any of these things in mind, and I think the most exciting thing that I heard today was that after a pretty thorough walkthrough of our pool space, if the pool remains in its current location, there are some options to still improve that back corner of the building if circulation around the back corner remains an issue. that I don't think anybody was really thinking about before this detailed walkthrough. So that was exciting. And it would not impact the size of the pool, et cetera. So much more to come on all of this. But just mark your calendar. The 415 is our next community forum. 427 is where we'll take up space change considerations and proposals. And then the team will be here on May 4 to talk about any feedback on the ed plan. Questions?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: No, thank you for the presentation. Do you have a question? We don't have any new businesses or reports requested, but we do have a couple of condolences. The members of the Medford School Committee expressed its sincerest condolences to the family of David P. Skerry, Medford High School social studies teacher, best buddy's advisor, unified basketball coach, and former varsity basketball coach John Skerry's father. And the members of the Medford School Committee express their sincere condolences to the family of Lot Max Parisian. Lot Max graduated from Medford High School in 1978 and served the Medford High School community for many years, most recently as a security monitor from 2019 to 2024. If we all may rise for a moment of silence, please. Thank you. Our next regular meeting will be next Monday, April 13th, 2026, here in the Alden Memorial Chambers and via Zoom.
[Erika Reinfeld]: Motion to adjourn.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Motion to adjourn by Member Reinfeld, seconded by Member Mastroboni.
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