2026-10-20

October 20, 2026

The October general meeting was held on October 20, 2026.

All items passed unanimously.

Agenda Item 5: Presentations To The Board

We got our first real goal-monitoring session today; these will be more interesting and more in-depth as we go.

The main thing to highlight here was the tax warrant.  The tl;dr is that we can raise taxes to cover special ed costs, and we're going to do it to the tune of $17M additional dollars this year.  Due to a philosophy of never raising taxes without a referendum from a few decades ago, the district has historically been funding its special ed with way more operating funds than it should be; the state allows for this money to come from a "tuition tax" instead.  That's what we're raising in this tax warrant.

Over the past few years, we've been slowly recategorizing special ed resources so that we can properly tax for them, and this year, we've done a big push to try to fully catch up to where we need to be; the cost increases in special ed have outpaced our catchup, and we need to move a bit faster now.

In general, the average residential homeowner will see their taxes go up by $260 this year.  There are three main reasons:

1. The increase in tuition tax to cover the increased special ed costs.

2. A decrease in debt service tax (down to zero this year) because we have enough from previous years.

3. A decrease in the total taxable value of commercial property due to appeals plus a reduction in the amount that we can tax them over the residential rate (down from 2x last year to 1.85x this year thanks to the General Assembly).

Agenda Item 9.2: Policy 5.06 update

We updated the amount of money that the district has to spend before the board has to sign off on it.  It was $50K, and now it's $150K, which is in line with the state's current procurement policies.  Especially at the beginning of the year, this will allow the district to be more agile with its spending and not have to punt things a month for the board to sign-off on it.