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The Ketchikan School Board on Wednesday will further discuss its health insurance costs and assess the scale of cuts and reductions it will need to make as it budgets for the upcoming school year.
The meeting will include a work session with employees of the district's insurance broker, USI, and a discussion about the district's budget for the upcoming school year.
The board will not consider a memorandum of agreement with the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly until next month, rather than Wednesday, due to logistical challenges.
USI work session
The board will hold a work session with two USI employees to review how it calculates projected costs: Matt Lewis, the group's vice president of employee benefits, and Gary Baldridge, its executive vice president of employee benefits.
"We'll just be reviewing with USI how they project the costs for next year and where we need to be," Board President Stephen Bradford explained Monday. "I'm doing it for a couple of reasons: One, I want the board to be well familiar with the process, but I also want it to be as transparent and as public as possible."
Bradford added that the work session is unrelated to the district's audit of its health insurance finances.
Budget discussion
Next, the board will hold a discussion on its budget for the upcoming 2024 fiscal year, which begins on July 1.
The board last week directed staff to bring back information about how much will need to be cut from the district's budget next year in order to balance the budget, and to provide "some preliminary indications of what a balanced budget might look like," per Bradford's motion on Jan. 18.
As it budgets for the next school year, the district is expecting enrollment to continue to decline and no increase to the state's per-student figure used to calculate funding for districts.
No agreement?
Notably missing from Wednesday's agenda is a memorandum of agreement between the borough and the School Board regarding the status of the district's deficit to the borough.
The School Board earlier this month declined to approve an agreement with the borough over language concerns the district's attorney expressed, instead sending the matter to a special committee to include both borough and district staff.
Last week, the board reconsidered that motion over concerns that staff on the committee would violate the Open Meetings Act by working together outside of the committee. Instead, the board directed district staff to work with the district's attorney and borough staff to address any remaining concerns over the language in the agreement, with a final revised agreement to be on Wednesday's meeting agenda.
As to why a revised agreement isn't on Wednesday's agenda, Bradford explained Monday: "We didn't have enough time between the special meeting and the cutoff to post the agenda and the agenda packet items, so we would have had to have had a version in the packet, and then make amendments to it. And that didn't seem like the appropriate way to handle it.
"The attorneys discussed it again today, and I think they are about at a point where they liked it, and then we're gonna have both staffs review it before we even get to it as an elected body," he added.
He expects the MOA to be considered as an item of new business at the board's first meeting in February.
Meeting information
Wednesday's meeting will begin at 6 p.m. in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly chambers at 1900 First Ave. The meeting will be streamed live on the borough website at kgbak.us. There will be time for public comment at the start of the meeting.
The meeting packet and supporting materials can be found on the board's website at schoolboard.kgbsd.org.