 Today, we have asked Secretary of French, Secretary of Education, and our Ledge Council, Jim Demeray, to come in and walk us through the proposals that the governor put forward, as well as have committee questions and discussion. Very happy to have our House counterparts with us, and without a doubt that will lead to a richer, better discussion. So thank you all, thank you, Representative Webb, for taking the time to join us. So with that, I thought I would turn it over to Secretary of French. Secretary of French, thank you for joining us today, we appreciate it. I suspect you had a bit of an inside scoop on what was going to be proposed, and what would be helpful to us, and Representative Webb, please feel free to add or edit this accordingly, is just to take us through the governor's proposals, give us some the genesis for them, you know, what everyone is thinking, why they were put forward, any other relevant information that you think we should know before we start digging into them in our separate committee, during our separate committee times, and then afterward we'll hear a little bit of additional detail from Ledge Council. Committee members, if you have a question, I think perhaps the best thing to do is I will certainly keep an eye open regularly for people raising their hands, if possible, you could do both a combination, if you see that we're not calling on you a combination of the virtual hand as well as your actual physical hand, and I will take a look and survey the screen so as to make certain that nobody left out. So with that, Mr. Secretary, thank you. Yeah, good afternoon. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with the committee. I hope you're all doing well, both committees, and I think we have an hour, a lot, or on my count, I have an hour, so I think we have a lot of time for discussion. I did put together sort of an outline that summarizes some of the major ideas. I don't know, Genie, I do have the ability to share my screen, so I'm going to go ahead and put that on the screen. I think you all might have received a copy of this in advance, but I think the probably the easiest thing to do is for me to go through the whole thing and then open it up to questions at the end, if that's okay. Great, thank you. So starting and sort of to back up a little bit, because I think the budget addresses, as you know, an important milestone in sharing sort of the administration's perspective on policy concepts, but we were, as you know, very actively involved in our pandemic response. And particularly in education, I think there's been an acknowledgement from the very beginning in the response that as much as we were actively responding to an unprecedented emergency that people started to notice fairly early on that perhaps there was opportunity here as well. I think, you know, particularly the use of technology, which is something many have observed, had transformed other aspects of our society more rapidly, but in education was on a slower trajectory. And I think we can all say is imperfect as remote learning has been and has certainly accelerated our use of technology and exposed many deficiencies in that, but there's not all bad news there as well. So at any rate, sort of striking this balance between, you know, making some observations about the response, but also the opportunities. I think to that end, it's hard for me not to put some emphasis on the COVID-19 response as I talk about the sort of policy vision, if you will. But certainly starting with this idea and our commitment to all students. And then we have arguably one of the best education systems in the country, but it's working better for some students as compared to others. And in particular, sort of the second bullet acknowledging that this moment in history that we're in is really about the personal learning needs of students and the ability to perhaps deliver for the first time in our history on focusing the system around their aspirations. But importantly, as we've, you know, we travel around the state, I've worked statewide, but particularly as we've done sort of our capital for a day excursions out to each part of Vermont. We also know that we have some work to do to ensure that students in all parts of the state have access to a high quality education system. There is a certain amount of unevenness from region to region of the state. And I think I think that's going to be a challenge for all rural states going forward is how do we not only ensure equity, but also that quality between first century learning environment for all students, regardless of where they live, and particularly from students in our more rural areas. But then lastly, just sort of this disposition, I think we've ingrained in our response from the COVID-19, this idea of being nimble, being alert. There's opportunities here, perhaps. And we sometimes think about a risk of the system, I think naturally wanting to bring back to where it was prior to COVID, and that there might be some lessons learned that we don't want to lose. So that's sort of the general introduction, sort of the policy context. As we were working in the middle of the response and through the summer heading into the budget proposal, if you will, we started with a lot of different policy ideas. We work on an interdisciplinary basis among the different agencies, particularly the COVID response that's required us to do that. I think that's been a key aspect of our success to a certain extent. But we look at many of the ideas that emerge, and it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that education figures prominently, both from an economic standpoint and a social standpoint as a key strategy of policy today in the world of a knowledge-based economy. So the policy ideas that we've generated fall into six buckets, if you will. So firstly, this idea of giving every student off to a good start, ensuring equal opportunity for all students is something that certainly has always been part of our Constitution. It's part of our ethos, I think, in Vermont. But certainly in the last year, some of the things we see nationally in terms of police brutality, some of the hate that's been emerging more randomly in our country, has put new emphasis on this idea. And it's one I think we're trying to shift more into taking action as opposed to sort of admiring the issues, if you will. There's more work we can do here, and we want to move more aggressively into that domain. Expanding learning opportunities for students, as I mentioned, it's really going to be one of the great challenges, I think, for all rural states to ensure that all students have access to a true high-quality 21st century learning environment. And we talk a lot about that in different ways. But one, in particular, I can just share with you, one that's been weighing on my mind a lot in the last four weeks is music in the arts. We've struggled, I think, probably the area that's been most difficult for us to develop a path forward in our COVID-19 guidance for schools has been the arts. Unfortunately, there was quite a bit of research done early on with some chorus events, chorales internationally, and the link between singing and the aspiration of the spread of the virus. So there's quite a bit of research about the dangers of music. In fact, just as these experts have been somewhat reluctant to move forward in that area, it's something we're still hoping to do. But when I think about this in the context of learning opportunities, it's not just about technology or access to curriculum. Even as we speak about the arts, and what does it mean if you're a student in a rural community that doesn't have an ensemble to learn from, to play with, to interact with? We talk about this often from the perspective of AP courses and so forth. But it's important to acknowledge that artistic talent and ability is probably fairly equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And these are, once again, some of the challenges, I think, for all rural states. That's one we should endeavor to take a look at. Number four, this issue of I'll call pipeline issues is one I think we haven't spent enough attention on to my satisfaction, I think, as a rural state, particularly with our demographic challenges. We're going to have to spend more time on this topic. What's our pipeline development for teachers, particularly as we're contemplating potential contraction of our state college infrastructure, which historically is one of our primary pipelines for developing new teachers? Do we have to address issues of reciprocity, which is an idea I'll mention here in a minute, meaning how difficult is it for teachers from other states to come to Vermont? So I think this is an area I don't think we spend enough time on, but one we're very interested in due to the demographic challenges that are in front of us. Improving pathways between high schools and CTE centers, a perennial issue, and we have some ideas on that. Once again, in some places of the state, this is less of a concern than others, but it's certainly not equal across the state. And in some places, the barriers for students to move among those programs can be quite challenging. And lastly, opportunities to modernize the system. And this is an area I think it's, as you heard in the governor's budget address, some interest in addressing infrastructure issues, technical debt, if you will. But also I know both committees have expressed interest in the agency's capacity. And certainly, I mean, for my observation, one of the places we can go in terms of increasing that capacity is not just the case of adding staff, but also looking at our processes, our regulations and so forth to see if they can be streamlined. And there's a couple of areas of the year that I'll highlight, but I think would not only modernize our approach, but also add capacity to the agency's ability to support our school districts. So those are the major themes and I'll sort of walk into a little more detail now under each of those. And once again, I'm happy to, we can have a general conversation or a specific conversation about any of these things towards the end. Getting every child off to a good start. A centerpiece of what we'll be wanting to discuss is literacy reform. This is a topic, you know, nationally there's a lot of interest in this. Our data points to, it should be a concern for us as a state in an area of targeted intervention. We suspect as a result of COVID, this is an area that is a good area for us to seek some improvement. Our excursion on this started with Act 173 and the research behind Act 173, which is arguably about special ed reform, but also highlighted the fact that particularly in grades pre-K through three or K through three that by the end of grade three, our student outcomes aren't that great. Basically about half of our students are proficient in ELL or language. At the end of grade three, we're starting to see a disturbing trend in our NAPE data as well as the national assessment of education progress that the average scale score in NAPE has been dropping fairly consistently over the last several years, but perhaps more disturbingly when we disaggregate that data it shows that many of our students are doing just fine, but some of our more vulnerable populations, their achievement levels are declining. So we have some real equity issues. So I think also when we start thinking about early education and how to improve outcomes there because we have quite a bit of research that shows that's probably one of our best investments to make as an education system, how it's a very complex policy area, how to get into from a data perspective and outcome perspective, I think here too literacy provides a very convenient way for us to think about all the effort and activity that goes through birth through three and then three through five. We can use literacy perhaps as a proxy for healthy brain development, nutrition, social-emotional development as well as academic success. It's something we could measure quite well and the measurements we do have right now indicate that we have some room for improvement. And I think particularly when we start to see the equity issue show up in the data, here too becomes a place where we can focus our efforts. Any initiative will be bringing forward in literacy for your consideration as comparable to one we had became involved in last year. So in many cases, not new ideas, more or less some of the same thinking that we had brought forward previously. We have a structural proposal to bring over the childcare functions of the CDD to the agency of education. The governor mentioned this in the inaugural address. This is more complex I think from a structural standpoint we're just, we think it's time to take this conversation on as by the complexity and look forward to working with the committee's legislative leaders, stakeholder groups to consider this. From my perspective, my thinking originally started thinking about Act 166 as possibly the place we should work first and then worry about the structure later on. But after a couple of years of working in this structural piece, I think it's getting coherence on a structural side with aid with the policy. We've spent quite a bit of time inside of state government just bringing the two agencies together. And we have issues with federal funding that sort of fall across those boundaries and data quality assurance that fall across the agency boundaries. I think it would be very useful to bring these together under one agency supervision. This is not about having a public education system become early involved in learning care. This is just about bringing those teams together under one agency. Many other states do it this way. I would say more states do it the way we have it. So it doesn't necessarily guarantee a major transformation but I think it sets the stage for that transformation which is integrated policy zero to zero five. So that's a conversation we look forward to having with you. We acknowledge that's a complex conversation but one is time to have I think. This last one property tax exemption for pre-k centers is fairly, I would say simple from a policy standpoint. It is exactly what it sounds like. It's fairly straightforward tax. Our tax department has done some analysis on this. This would be private pre-k centers. We promote property tax exemption for them. One tool we think we might have to offer them some financial stability or to help them with their business models. The liability on that from a property tax perspective is somewhere around $500,000. I think I think grand list. But once again, we think it's something we can try to do to help them in that regard. All students being well supported. This first item is just to highlight that the General Assembly launched this initiative last year and we think it's a really important one. This work is just getting started. The afterschool task force, we think it's very important to think about full service schools, wraparound services for schools. And I think as a state, we were once again as part of our rural sort of understanding, we were heading down this path anyway. But I think particularly with COVID recovery work in front of us. And then also probably some interest on the part of the Biden administration to focus on this area would be of us to really just acknowledge that this could be a potential asset for us to understand as a state and to leverage particularly as we come out of the COVID emergency. So to think more broadly about the use of time, how afterschool programs can function on multiple levels, not just for academic support, but also for recovery support, the engagement support that we think students will need as a result of COVID. So it's just, just want to sort of put a pin in it if you will, but we think it's a major strategy that we've worked with the General Assembly to get moving. And I think it's one that's, we just don't want to lose sight of. So nothing new to do there, just puts an emphasis on it that we think it's going to be useful to leverage us going forward. A key one for us, I think both in terms of agency capacity and just improving our ability to support all students is, and it almost falls in the modernization bucket, but to look at the restructuring of responsibilities between the agency and the state board of education. This is a bit of a, I would call legacy work to a certain extent that we have, as you know, elevated commissioner to a secretary of education. So the secretary reports directly to the governor, the agency of education, theoretically then has responsibility for regulation, but we've never finished sort of that next piece of the work, which is to look at regulation. And there's been some challenges in this area in terms of our capacity. We spend quite a bit of time at the agency supporting the state board appropriately, but it could be considered duplicative in some cases. And arguably in the last five years, we've been working on very complex policies, not to say they haven't always been that complex, but honestly, special ed reform is probably one of the most complex areas. And we have a major special ed reform in front of us with Act 173. General Assembly's given quite a bit of authority to the state board in this area. State board's been working really hard to get up the speed on special education and so forth, but it's been a huge lift for everyone involved. So we'd like to pick this conversation back up. We kind of made some progress on it last year, but we think it's one that needs to be addressed sooner and later. And I think there are issues here, particularly around education quality. We haven't necessarily had the best connection between statutory policy goals and regulation. We've had a couple of areas and the one I'd highlight right now is this idea of education quality, where most states right now are operating under federal education policy. It's called the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. Prior to that, it was the No Child Left Behind Act. States are required to have a state accountability plan, essentially, under federal law, which is our major oversight function in terms of ensuring the quality of our schools. Our state ESSA plan in Vermont was never signed by the governor, was never approved by the state board of education and never approved by the general assembly. Many of the structural elements in that, such as integrated field reviews and so forth, do not exist anywhere in regulation. So we have a real disconnect from what should be a statutory direction on our responsibility, our accountability, and our regulation. So we are sort of operating in almost a no man's land, so to speak, in terms of an accountability system to improve our schools. And that's unfortunately the major, one of the major tools in our toolbox right now. So those kinds of issues, I think it's, I understand how they ended up the way they did, but I just have to point out the obvious that we need to leverage our regulation if we're gonna make progress on addressing both quality and equity for our students. Regulation is a major tool in the toolbox. And right now, there's a bit of a disconnect. So anyway, we think that's a major area of emphasis and work. We've been spending a lot of time in state government, as I mentioned, largely sort of the national climate, but we knew as a state, we have some work to do in this area, as all states do. You know, we have our first ever state equity quarters, is Anna Davis. She's been doing a lot of work at the state level. We have a larger state plan to move once again, state more in an action disposition towards some of these issues. We've sort of pivoted off that work a bit to offer some ideas in education, which I think represent to a certain extent some of the work that's already going on in some places and among our school districts, but it's time we think to elevate that to a policy emphasis that all districts are moving forward. So this first one, curriculum required to address hate issues. We would do this through the promulgation of a model curriculum. So we've had a delicate balance in our state that the State Board of Education promulgates standards, but the locals have curriculum. We still are endeavoring to preserve that balance, but in this case, we would promulgate a model curriculum for locals to consider. And this first bullet grew out of some review of national work. It's sort of also related to the work of the Act One or Ethnic Studies Group that's we've been meeting, but we also notice districts taking on issues of mascots and so forth. And this is where we think there should be a broader framework. It isn't just subjects of the local political forces, but the state should have a little more guidance for districts on how to engage on some of these activities and what help, I think, communities work through that more productively. Similarly, we think it's time for a mandatory policy on racial equity for school boards. This would elevate the issue of racial equity to the same level as bullying and harassment where there are mandatory policy requirements for school board. So we think school boards through a model policy that we would create that would require them to engage on this topic of racial equity, which is from our model policy that we would develop and our proposal would include hiring a very broad, would address curriculum instruction issues as well. A task force on school disciplinary procedures. I know there's a bill that's already been induced on this in a parallel way. I think this is, we acknowledge as well as one we'd like to see some work done on. I think the difference between what we're going to propose is the, not so much emphasis on gathering the data. We think the data is certainly there and it could be improved, but we already know enough about what are our best practices in discipline and we'd like to focus, not spend a lot more time gathering the data, but just to start with what are the best practices in discipline and non-exclusionary discipline practices in particular, restorative justice and so forth and identify those best practices and just sort of skip the steps of gathering data and go right to the best practice that's out there in research and so forth and then create a process by which those best practices can be broadly disseminated across the state. Lastly, an interest in school facilities and this was an issue we were working on last year in the General Assembly in cooperation, particularly with the Superintendents Association. I think it gets into two pieces. One is school construction, which is to do an assessment of the, potentially of the facility so that that would inform some sort of modification or resurrection of a school construction program for which there's been a moratorium for a number of years. We understand that's a complex topic and it's one that probably needs some new policy thinking on, but then we also have the issue of deferred maintenance in schools, which is not necessarily construction and this is an area where we'd like to see what we could do and put some more effort on helping schools improve their basic safety and health and wellbeing. And this is, I just sort of draw that distinction between maintenance and construction. Under the law, school boards are largely charged with maintaining their facilities, but we have, as we've seen with lead and drinking water and PCBs most recently, we have some issues that sort of transcend the school board authority in that regard and ones the state would probably should come in on a more helpful basis that don't really rise to the level of construction per se. So we'd like to work a little bit more on this issue of deferred maintenance and see what we can do to help districts sort of tackle that as a starting point while at the same time we're doing an assessment of the construction facilities needs. I would just observe that all these fall into, for us into this category of equal opportunity for students is there's a direct connection between quality facilities and opportunity as there are with these essential social conditions for students, all students to be successful. And they do require, I think, more state involvement in these areas to ensure that equal opportunity. So that's why we've sort of put them together with this one category. Expanding learning opportunities for students. First one, simplifying our home study regulations. We had a essentially over a hundred percent increase in home study as a result of COVID-19 and that exposed for us a couple of things. One is we had to scramble to allocate more staff to this area from other aspects of our agency. But it also exposed part of the reason we had to do that is because our regulations are very complex. They're arguably some of the most complex home study regulations I've encountered. I've been pulling them down from different states, particularly among New England states. So this is labeled as simplifying home study regulations. It'll provoke a conversation about, what is the role of the state in home study versus what is the role of parent? But also just to look at, frankly, agency capacity in this area. One of the reasons we struggle with capacity on this is that the regulations are exceedingly complex. So we're happy to show some of that analysis that we've done compared looking at what other states have. We think we have some room for improvement here, starting with a statutory framework for home study. And we think we'll have some broad support for this as well. VTVLC is the Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative. It's essentially our virtual school in Vermont. We've been building this platform out over the years. With COVID-19, we use our federal or state dollars to expand their access. And many of the remote learning programs that schools have enacted are built on top of the VTVLC platform and expertise. So this program is housed in Springfield at the Springfield Technical Center. They offer a lot of professional development for teachers to learn how to teach online and so forth. And then very successful in offering courses and expanding the curriculum that's available to all Vermont students. So we'd like to see that leveraged. This is an example of something after COVID-19. We'd like to see more remote learning are used certainly better than what we experienced last spring, but we still think there's a major role for remote learning in a rural state like Vermont, particularly as we contemplate expanding curriculum and learning opportunities for students. For some students in the state, remote learning is a really good option for providing additional access to curriculum. We have a mechanism in the current law about the ability of supervised readings to contract with each other for services. And it just sort of ends at that. So we, supervised readings can contract with each other for different services. And we've seen that play out over the years. Sometimes supervised readings will contract with each other to share a teacher, to provide accounting services, you name it. We'd like to see sort of more of that conversation focused around enrollment exchange of students. I wanna say school choice per se, but we have a essentially a school choice law now in Vermont that works on a lottery basis. During COVID, it emerged there's a pattern. We had a couple of districts that we're struggling with, particularly teachers who lived in one district but they're taught in another district and they wanted to be able to take their students with them to work in the other district. And we didn't really have good models of how to enable that from a contracting standpoint, basically how to do a cost neutral swap, if you will, of the money. And we think we can probably add a little bit more incentive or clarity to this area of contracting without really talking about restructuring how we deal with money following students or not. But we'd like to see districts, not having barriers essentially to engage in these kinds of conversations. Similarly, we think there's some room, particularly with remote learning to talk more about sort of a la carte course taking exchanges. If I wanna take a course in another district, how do I do that? And we saw quite a bit of that with, particularly with VTVLC, with districts standing up their own virtual academies. We saw districts interested or students interested in taking courses in other districts because of courses weren't being offered in their district and it was all remote anyway. So is there a way to do that? So we'd like to explore that through the supervisory and contracting mechanism that's already in the lot. In terms of the pipeline piece, a teacher licensure and availability of staff due to our demographic challenges, the first one, we have an approach to what's called reciprocity, which allows teachers or educators from other states to come to Vermont. But once here too, we have a pretty rigid process that requires an evaluation of a transcript alignment, of course, syllabi with standards and so forth. That's not true reciprocity. And we know there's some work going on among states to make this easier to happen, but we'd like to basically create a process where a teacher who was licensed in another state would say if you're a high school English teacher, you'd automatically qualify for a provisional Vermont high school English teacher license, which would at least get you in the door and then you'd have a couple of years to work on making sure you met all our requirements. So a provisional license in Vermont gives an individual two years to obtain the regular license. So we think the automatic granting of a provisional license, if the individual had a license in another state is the way to go. So we'd like to make that more seamless. Once again, we think that we're gonna be relying increasingly on teachers coming from out of state for pipeline needs. And so we wanna attend to this issue and look to see what we can to eliminate some of the barriers around reciprocity. This has been a perennial issue over the years and many principal superintendents noticed the challenges in this area. We'd like to eliminate an online teaching endorsement. This was created, it's a separate sequence of courses required for teachers. If they wanna teach online, they have to have a separate teaching endorsement to do that in addition to their regular teaching endorsement. We certainly believe there's a lot of professional development necessary to teach online successfully just like there is to teach successfully in any context. But we don't think it's appropriate to have a separate teaching endorsement for this, particularly when there's only really one place a teacher in Vermont could get that endorsement and that's through an online academy through one organization. So we think, as we've learned through COVID we've had the Standards Board waive this requirement and then the legislature extended that in August through the rest of this year. We think there's really no need to have this as a separate licensing requirement. Once again, it's not to say we need to have quality control and professional development to do this, but it doesn't rise to the level needing to require a separate endorsement. This last one is more focused on the quality piece of this bucket or heading, not necessarily the pipeline end. And this was based on our experience attunicating the revocation of a license with the Burlington Guidance Counselor a year or so ago. So first time that process was taken to the end of the process which was an appeal to the State Board in my memory anyway. And it exposed some flaws I think with the process both the Attorney General's office and the Secretary of State's office and I would notice that this process could be improved. Basically when you get to that last phase of the appeal we have to start all over and prepare the State Board as a panel of lay people to go through that process and required them to have additional legal support so forth separate from the agency's typical legal support. So what this proposal would do is transfer that last phase of the appeal to the Secretary of State's office and we call the office of professional regulation which is where the appeals for all of the professional licensing goes at the end of the day. Essentially there's a professional hearing officer who would still adjudicate our regulations so they still would be educator regulations but it would be overseen by a professional hearing officer who we think is in a better position to ensure new process and eliminate some of the, I think potential pitfalls and liability that the State could be exposed to through the process as we know it. CTE, this is essentially one proposal. This is more of a technical proposal, some work. We did the General Assembly authorized the pilot of CTE centers to look at their governance. We have several different configurations. These are career technical education centers. We have several that are stated alone school districts namely the one in Bennington, Springfield and in Middlebury and the Hannaford Center. Those entities are school districts unto themselves and we had given them some money to do a pilot study of looking at some of the financial challenges relative to the current system and to what extent the current financing model for CTE centers provides a disincentive for students to attend those centers or for schools to send those students to attend for the centers because right now CTE tuition shows up at a local high school's budget. So it's a cost item for them. Every student that goes to a center, they have to find a way to come up with the money to pay for it. So this was analyzed. Some of you might know Bill Talbot and Deb Brighton, Bill's former CFO of the agency. Deb spent around finance, tax issues in Vermont for quite some time. So these groups, these districts that were involved in the pilot commission to study from Bill and Deb and they've done some modeling and they've come up with a couple of different ideas of how to reform the CTE funding system. And we think one of those models in particular is more attractive and one that we'd like to bring forward for the general assembly to consider. Basically, this would remove that tuition piece. So there isn't necessarily a disincentive for a high school to send their student to a CTE center. They would establish CTE centers with their own tax rate. And also we'd come up with a, we look at their block grant basically to do that based on a regional assessment based on overall population and so forth, not based on sort of the tuition moving in and out and so forth, the student attendance. So this is a more technical concept. I don't know to what extent the general assembly is familiar with the work that Bill and Deb have done. It's still kind of, the inks kind of still drying on it, but it's well done. It's something that we should introduce, we think we should introduce into the conversation at some point. Some people would say this is a long overdue, but we have some of our districts have made an investment in the modeling and we think it should be considered and might be useful at this time when we want to ensure more access to our CTE centers. And lastly, talking about modernization. We did a, last year we did what was called an RFI, Request for Information on Statewide Student Information System. So these student information systems, each school district has their own and they use these systems to record attendance, discipline the grades, and also as the system that reports data to the state. We went out on what's called a Request for Information last year to understand what the vendors in the space would do if we tried to do this at the state level. We're pulling that analysis together. We'll be doing a presentation. I'll invite you all to sometime around February vacation, school vacation. So towards the latter part of February, we'll be putting together a presentation for stakeholders to discuss the results of the RFI. We think the next step is to go out to bid with an RFP, Request for Proposals. So we just like to bring the general assembly along in that conversation and because this is a multi-year process, but we think we can improve the quality of education data in the state and also save money by doing a statewide student information system. It's an approach that's used in other states and arguably Vermont is much smaller state where to a certain extent doesn't make sense for having all these separate systems at the local level and all the opportunity for the data quality to be less than it should be. Second one here, regional back office pilot. We're interested in, this is, I would say, related to perhaps the virtual merger provisions of Act 153, the idea of districts again working together. We'd like to incentivize some districts to agree to only one of them sort of do payroll for the other that kind of thing. So with these, the data systems that we're talking about are scalable on a much larger basis than what we currently do. So we'd like to see sort of that regionalization which would help with sort of the redundancy and expertise necessary. We wouldn't be predicated on the turnover in staff at the local level, bring more stability and perhaps introduce more efficiency into some of this. So we'd be interested in incentivizing that. And the last topic, no doubt the most glamorous topic in the entire presentation, statewide school count. So this is again, a result of our COVID-19 experience. We think this is an idea that's time has come perhaps. We think there'd be great benefit to ensuring that the schools are moving in the same direction. We had more predictability on that, certainly as you know, would allow for opportunities for professional development at the state level. We think about the work in front of us relative 173 and so forth that we had some idea or be able to predict when schools would be in session, when they would not be in session would allow us to do more of that. And the interest in starting after a Labor Day is just sort of a nod to our economy in that regard that we think that would be useful. It's, as you know, this year we through the governor's order the way to start a school and got all the schools starting at the same moment and that seemed to work out pretty well for providing that predictability to a larger economy and society. So we think this is an idea whose time has gone. So anyway, that concludes my presentation. I was sort of general outline, I'm happy to go into these ideas in more detail. I will say just on a concluding remarks that some of these we are working closely with individuals to reduce down a specific language. Others like the CDD AOE merger are basically policy concepts that are outlined with the rationale that we acknowledge we need to engage with stakeholders and the legislative leaders to really to do it well. So there are different states of readiness but we'll be happy to answer any questions and talk about these concepts in more detail. I know it's a lot. It's terrific. It's very comprehensive. It was a good presentation, I appreciate it. If you don't mind, there we go. We will take some questions and I'm just gonna start it off with a question about literacy if I may. Secretary of French, can you, the numbers are disconcerting around literacy and I'm wondering if this is a nationwide trend? Is this something we're just seeing in Vermont? What are some of the factors that are causing this situation? And then what should we be looking to all of you to do with us partnering to improve the situation? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's certainly there's some national interest in the topic. And I think I was fortunate last year to be selected as part of the national cohort of chiefs. We call ourselves chiefs because we go by different names in different states and we had a focus group down in DC on this topic and brought in some literacy experts and so forth. And I'll just on a national level make the observation that oftentimes people will say literacy is a civil right. And it's gotten to that moment I think when we consider equal opportunity in our country particularly in the knowledge-based economy that not having literacy skills particularly critical literacy skills disenfranchises individuals from opportunity. So we have that sort of broader policy trajectory. I think there's also, there's been the reading wars which has certainly added energy to this that this is a sort of a conflict most I guess overly simply represented by the idea of phonics or in a chair web can get into this far more detail than I can. But with her background in education but there's growing acknowledgement that that war is over if you will that the science is the science and there's a way to teach literacy there's a lot of data on that. And but the other observation is that our colleges of education have not embraced that there's still a lot of philosophy in what poses for philosophy as opposed to overt science-based literacy materials. So at any rate, I don't like to get involved in that is try to stay above that as best I can. My interest is starting with the outcomes and saying first let's talk about how we might measure this. I think we do as a state which arguably once again has some of the best outcomes in education. I mean, I think we can say that fairly well by looking at things like NAPE and so forth. But when we start to see the discrepancy and the results particularly for our socioeconomic students or students that are more at risk we have to dig into the data a little more closely and take notice. I think we've gotten by as a state perhaps over the last 20 years or so. And many teachers have been acknowledged our students today are more complex, have more needs. As we've started to observe those things it really requires us to have a much more directed approach on issues like literacy. And we come back to saying let's talk firstly about how to measure the outcomes let's sort of put that to bed and then say if you can get results with this curriculum that's fine but let's not debate what the results should be. And particularly with Act 173 which talks about sort of I would say getting out in front of special education because that's not a really a fair characterization of the process because special education is always a direct right if you will. But there's a lot of work we can do to ensure students don't fall behind particularly in terms of the academic discrepancy and a lot of the research around literacy is a place where we start to see sort of those patterns of students falling behind. By far and away our largest disability area is learning to say disability which often includes reading and things like of that nature language acquisition. So we just know we have some more work to do and I think from our perspective we just wanna point districts to doing that work let's talk about how to measure it get them focused on it from a policy perspective have them do a literacy plan. I think we have some expertise in the state that's pretty phenomenal that's national level expertise like the Stern Center and so forth that we could be leveraging much better across the state. So we have some work to do but I'm also thinking we have a lot of resources and a lot of interest in doing the work. Thank you. Representative Webb. Thank you Mr. Secretary. This is quite a large list. It has small little things and it has gigantic concepts to it. I am wondering if you could organize some priorities that you would see or that you would like to see that are time sensitive for this year maybe things that we can set up for another year and what might be just ongoing work. No, I appreciate that. Certainly we'll try to do that. I think we were trying to do more of that. It's been a fairly dynamic situation with COVID in particular and what I mean by that is we're trying to stay in sync with the federal assistance that's coming our way. We recently just received what's called S or two in gear two and we also, the new presidential administration wanna make sure we're moving in the same direction. So absolutely I think as those things settle in a little bit and our priorities emerge relative to those resources, we can definitely sort of lay this out on what we would see as a priority trajectory for folks. Thank you. Representative James and then Representative Conlon. Thanks, thanks for being here, Secretary French. I have questions on two different slides. Curious about just to hear a little bit more about the model curriculum on hate issues and the racial equity policy, what sort of things would the policy cover and how would the model curriculum kind of work with Act One and the work that's being done there on the standards? That was my first question. Unmute, thank you. Yes, we have, just to use an example, this is one of the ideas that we fleshed out sort of as a combination of bullets and specific policy language. So just to give you an idea in this slide basically contains four issues for us that we would put forward to give you some specificity on it. So in the first one, it's adding a new requirement that curriculum must include lessons against hate speech, hateful imagery and discrimination. So we already have, it's based on a model that's already in law around tobacco use, alcohol or drug abuse, where the AOE works with folks to develop a model curriculum. So we would extend that sort of concept to include developing and basically charging the secretary to develop a model curriculum for elementary and secondary schools to teach about these things and to include best practices and to provide professional development and technical assistance and encourage districts to work with their specific local resources. Their second strategy is to specifically expand the charge of the Act One work group. So as we knew, we're running into this sort of boundary again between promulgation of standards versus curriculum. So we would modify or expand their duties to include advising the secretary on the development of a model curriculum and best practices to teach against hate, imagery and so forth. So we would basically bring them more directly involved with this work. Thirdly, we have the, as I mentioned, the policy on racial equity. So we'd be reproducing or the General Assembly would direct the secretary to develop a model policy in that area and require school boards to develop or to adopt that policy or one equally astringent to address the issues. And so we'd be working with stakeholders to develop that model policy language. And then lastly, the task force on discipline reform as I mentioned more, I think drawing a distinction between what I've seen as a Senate bill and what we propose is to focus, go directly to the best practices, sort of skip the data collection piece. But to review the in school services and supports that are available to folks, particularly as an alternative to exclusionary discipline and to recommend some approaches that are best practice for folks and support people with dot things. Representative James, did you have a follow-up or an additional question? It's another topic. So if folks wanted to follow up on this topic, I can certainly wait. I think it's fine. Why don't you go ahead? Okay. I was just curious to understand a little bit better about the proposed restructuring on CTE financing, how their tax rate would be set and whether voters would still approve their budgets or... Yeah, as I mentioned, that's a very complex proposal, but the model that Bill and Dad produced, they produced a couple of models, but the models we think, and I think they would agree is probably the one that's the better one, basically firstly sets up CTE centers as standalone school districts, essentially from a budgetary standpoint. So they would have their own education spending, their own equalized pupils, and therefore their own tax rate. So a little different than what they go through now, it basically brings them into, let's say alignment with how school districts do their funding. But in addition to that, we still acknowledge they would need to be the block grant component, but that block grant component would be based on a regional analysis, not necessarily based on their, let's say daily or monthly attendance, which is the sort of what's in forms of tuition basis that they're under right now. So the devil's in the details on that, but basically at this point, I just say we're interested in advancing that conversation and we'll bring forward the results of that work. Representative Conlon. Thanks very much. And this is, there's some great proposals here. I just wanna ask, for four years, Governor Scott has talked about the increasing cost of our pre-K-12 educational system and the declining number of students enrolled and therefore higher per pupil spending. And I don't see anything here that really speaks to that in any substantial way. Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I think that's a fair observation. That wasn't one of the major sort of buckets. We started, I mean, once again, grounded pretty significantly in our COVID response. I think the best area that probably conforms to that is the modernization sort of bucket where we're looking particularly at the student information system. That proposal is largely based on two elements, which is to improve the quality of data and to lower costs. But we also, there's other items here in our presentation that do speak to costs and effectiveness. As I mentioned, the issue of like simplifying home study could be viewed as an example of simplifying regulation and therefore increasing agency capacity as opposed to adding staff to the agency. The CTE funding is one that I think imparts a certain amount of flexibility to the system to let student interest sort of drive change in the system as opposed to creating structural barriers. So I think there's elements there, but I think it's fair assessment that there's no direct thing, there's no direct proposal on the table to necessarily restrain a cost per se. Representative Connolly, did that answer your question? Did you have a follow-up? You're good. Okay, Senator Alliance. Thank you, and thank you, Secretary French. That was great. My question is that now that we have the outline, will you be providing us with details on one or more of your recommendations? And I would assume that some of these, as you have said, are higher priority for the administration than others. So will you be bringing in specific language for us or specific recommendations? And then some of the data that you have to support your recommendations would be extremely useful to us, I think, going forward. That's one, I've got three or four things. So why don't I enumerate those first and then we'll go from there. The recommendation on universal pre-K, will there be a recommendation to institute universal pre-K for all schools? And then my next one is, I guess it's really a comment, but there wasn't a whole lot in there about trying to improve mental health services in the school system, whether through the school nurse office, and I understand that's Department of Health or in other ways. And I'm wondering if you've had a conversation about that. And then my last comment is, thank you for the post labor day suggestion. A few years ago, I introduced an amendment on the floor of the Senate, which was passed to the other body. And I guess it died there, but I think one of the things we're all concerned about is the health and wellness of our kids. And regardless of the fact that we're moving away from agriculture in our state, I think it's really important for those, for people to be out in the summer months and then for kids to be able to work on that weekend when they can for labor day. Anyway, those are my comments and my questions. Yeah, thank you. Yes, our next step would be produce specifics for you as much as you, you know, people are interested in those topics and we have a variety of strategies. I think, you know, just to use the example again at CDD, we've been working with Let's Grow Kids and other stakeholders just to share with them what we're thinking. And but we acknowledge it's a complex policy space that requires a lot of work together with people. So that's not something we would necessarily just bring in a specific proposal on. We've done a lot of the analysis and the data that you point to. And that's certainly how we arrived at our conclusion, but it's not something we would certainly put language on the table. There are other areas where we do have language ready to go. The mental health issue is an interesting one. I just react to that as we also have a lot in flight as you know, the COVID work that we're about to do, we're calling recovery and education. We've been working closely with the mental health department to sort of conceptualize that. So I think it's not necessarily something at this point we're bringing forward a policy proposal on but it's something that's very active on our front burner in terms of the COVID response that very well could ultimately result in a policy proposal but we're happy to share that work with you. But I think right now it's just perhaps the nature of the emergency that that operating under the executive order and the state of emergency has sort of put a priority on actually sort of solving that as we're moving into this next phase of the recovery. It's not clear to me yet what the policy implications of that would be. But so far we're working very collaboratively on an integrated basis to support our schools and our communities in that area. So as you follow through with that, I think it's probably important for us to stay connected. And I'm talking now about the health and welfare committee as well because we've also been talking about that but thank you for working on that. It's so critical. Senator Perchley. Thank you, Mr. Secretary for this list of items, definitely interested in hearing the priorities and the details on a lot of them. But two ones that jumped out to me was the property tax exemption for the childcare facilities that are in homes or commercial buildings. And it's probably more ways and means of finance than education, but I was wondering if that's a proportional to the portion of the building that's being used for daycare. I'm assuming that's the proposal. And then on the infrastructure of the schools and I was wondering if specifically you talked about a kind of a second stage of our indoor air quality program that you've run and I know you've supported and found some more cares money for, which is great. And specifically looking at trying to bring up all the schools to the ASHRAE indoor air quality standard. Yeah, in terms of the property tax exemption our focus is on the private centers. We'd certainly be open to some approach with the private provider or out of the home provider, so to speak. But the analysis that was as your point out done by the tax department is really focused on the center-based businesses. See what we could do there. In terms of once again, the school facilities, we're trying to sort out in our own minds between school construction versus deferred maintenance and we've had so much of the deferred maintenance we've been dealing with as a result of COVID whether it be indoor air quality, PCBs, you name it. We think that's an area we probably can make some progress with some of the one-time money that we're receiving. So we're working actively. We want to keep an eye on the larger school construction program, but we know that's going to be a multi-year process, a complex process involving some revisional policy perhaps, but we think deferred maintenance is something very tangible and something we can really make some progress on. And we've been looking at sort of, I'm called a one-time money. I think you heard the governor refer to a lot of the federal dollars that way. We kind of apply a strategic priority to the use of those funds. So if we can use those funds in a strategic way to address something that would really advance the quality of the system, we want to try to do that. And we think there's some work we could do in deferred maintenance in that way. So we want to pursue that. HVAC, as you know, is a more complex one. And there's been some work done on that since the summer around equality and so forth. And there's also some simple accommodations we can make in terms of portable filters and so forth. But yeah, absolutely into our air quality and heating and ventilation, safety is sort of that broad category where we see deferred maintenance really being the bucket where we can make some progress. All right, thank you. If I may, Mr. Secretary, before we let you go, I'm wondering, I just want to go back to the literacy. It doesn't sound as though there is a sort of a uniform standard or way that we teach literacy in the state. So I'm wondering if you would just respond to that. And then I'm wondering the role of the common core in teaching literacy in this state. Yeah, it's definitely fair to say there's not a consistent approach to how we teach literacy. You know, I think we can, and we have some information on the different programs that people use and we know there are some programs that are more used than others in the state. But our policy proposal once again is the sort of, let's say get away from the literacy war conversation and focus on outcomes. So what we were proposing to do last year pre-COVID was to enter into a partnership with a company called MetaMetrics, which has the intellectual property behind something called Lexile Scores and Quantile Scores. They're sort of like a lingua franca of how to connect different data. Most of our literacy benchmark assessments can report out in Lexile Scores. So we've gone and joined that partnership along with many states in the last several months. So basically what this is gonna allow us to do is to report our SBAC scores out in this format. It allows us to get data from local school districts in this format. So it starts to set the stage for connecting, because we don't have state level data ingrates pre-K through three in this area. It allows us the potential to start to connect the data from pre-K to three through the three through eight that we have with SBAC. So instead of sort of going, and we still think we need to go at the professional development around using science-based literacy, but it's to really start with the data and to say here are the outcomes we're getting and to spend some time on training and supporting people to use their data and to confront the trends they're seeing in their data. Because we think honestly, that's the biggest issue. It's just people aren't perhaps looking as closely to their data as they should. Sure, and I think that also the agency is also looking at the data that's coming out of schools. For example, if you're following a school where you're noticing that the literacy rates have been declining, not dissimilar from, if somebody's leaving a doctor's office not getting the right medication or not being cured, you're then interacting with that school and kind of I'm just assuming you are and saying, hey, maybe the literacy steps that are being taken at this institution aren't what need to be done. Yeah, so the problem, it's a great theory of action. The problem is we don't have information in pre-K through three on literacy at the state level. Because the state assessment is starting grade three. Yeah. So what we're promoting is the use of this Lexi on quantile score idea. So most districts, I would argue have what we call a benchmark assessment in grades pre-K through three that they're using already, but they're not recording that information for the state. It's not required. So they have information at the local level that we wanna ensure they're using in an appropriate manner, but we don't necessarily see the data ourselves. So our starting point in this is to require them to have a policy that looks at their data, requires them to have a benchmark assessment and to look at their data to really start to identify those trends much earlier than we are now. So we essentially have a big gap in our data and the state doesn't have the information to necessarily help people in those formative stages, arguably the most important phase of literacy development. But you did start your comments, correct me if I'm wrong by saying that 50% of our students aren't reading at a certain level. So at what point are we determining that? So that's in grade three. That's the first time we collect data at the state level. And that grade three SBAC assessment for the last several years shows about 50% of our students scoring on a proficient level. So at that point, essentially it's too late to your analogy in medicine. So we want to look at the what we call benchmark assessments. Benchmark assessments are tests that are given like three times a year typically. So they're usually given in the fall, the winter and the spring. And particularly when they're given in the spring and then in the fall, it's a good indicator of almost a learning loss that might have occurred over the summertime. And also we know in December it helps us track to what extent students are making progress in some of those key developmental milestones in the early grades. But that's something that's done very unevenly across the state. We have districts with state-of-the-art benchmark assessment capacity. We have others that sort of in the stone age in that regard. But we need to find a way, I think, to help them improve their literacy assessment in that area, which will then drive their ability to intervene. Yeah, and I would say, I know what you mean by too late. I know we don't all mean too late. I mean, in third grade we would go in and we would try, I think, to, we want to make certain that those students get the attention, the teaching that they need to make certain that they do get caught up as much as possible. Any final questions? We have kept Secretary French 10 minutes over, which this has been incredibly helpful. So we appreciate it. Are you seeing any? Okay, well. Thank you, Secretary French. Great to have you. And we look forward to continuing the conversation. Senate Ed, and I believe Senate House, are you, Senate House, are you gonna continue Representative Webb with us for a little while while we talk with Ledge Council? You're muted. Sorry. And the topic, I mean, we're always so happy to be joining you. No, well, we were just going to continue this conversation a little bit just to see if there was any reaction that Jim might have, any response given everything he's heard to either things that might be popping up, legislation that might need to be drafted, that kind of thing. I would enjoy staying. We would love for you to stay. And what I thought we might do is all just take a stretch break and come back at 315. And that might give Jim also some time to collect his thoughts and we can all come back after a nice four minute stretch. Thank you. And my committee members, very happy to have you stay as well. Great. So we'll see you all in four minutes. Mr. Demeray, wonderful to have you with us. I just thought it might be a good moment to hear from you, anything that you may have heard that, and we usually do this with Michael Grady in natural resource and energy, anything you happen to hear, happen to have heard that there might be a conflict in statute, there might be a constitutional issue, there might be repetition, anything at all, just general thoughts or issues that you may have recognized. Sure. So hello everyone. I think first let me just go through some of the points that the government made and his address that weren't picked up by Secretary of French. Just to highlight them, our education related points. So he mentioned his proposal is for a 1.89 billion dollar budget for pre-K through 12. He mentioned fully funding pensions, which I assume would include teachers pensions, which would be an additional $103 million funding from last year. He mentioned expanding broadband, which would be a $20 million state budget proposal and working with the federal delegation for more federal support. He mentioned the BISAC advancement grants appropriation of budget requests of 2.9 million. And then, aside from that, he mentioned expanding the lottery to revenue to fund childcare and talks about $20 million in additional funding for domestic colleges. Then those are the points that were brought up by the government that weren't necessarily covered by Secretary of French. In terms of the points covered by Secretary of French, I just thought maybe it'd be useful to go through where we are on some of his proposals and which ones are the most complex. Just thinking about how you want to resource your time. So the most complex ones, I think, are the restructuring of duties and responsibilities between the State Board of Education and AOE. That was in S-166 last year, passed by the Senate. So there's a good place to start there, but I think the Secretary's idea is to re-cursor that and go back and look at the whole thing again. Second one that seemed very complex to me at least was moving various functions of the CDD to AOE. So figuring out the whole pre-K, sorry, the whole childcare regulatory system and shifting of functions between the two agencies would be very complex. The third one that seemed complex to me was CTE financing, the idea of creating school districts for CTE centers and how that would work. The few that you have made, so I've done already that he mentioned obviously are the after-school task force that's in place from last session. You have literacy reform, which there's a bill in house education from last session that's been updated that I'll be walking through this week. And you've got your task force on school discipline, that's in set education that he mentioned as well. So you're moving on a few of these ideas already. So aside from that, I don't have any particular conflicts or issues to raise, but they do raise different levels of complexity in terms of thinking about your time dealing with these issues. Thank you, that's very helpful. I know one of the things Representative Webb and I have talked about, and I know the governor mentioned it and we have Jeff Fannin and others working with AOE and other partners on is this sort of post COVID educational opportunities for students or sort of even during COVID, what that will look like. And I think that too will take up a significant amount of time. I think one of the ways I'm looking, at least my lens on a lot of this is what are the kinds of things where we really can have an impact on the lives of students? I mean, there are certain things without a doubt within the infrastructure, within the governance systems that we can examine. And just so colleagues know the way I'm looking at it are these ways that we can really have a big impact. For example, the literacy as you could tell is a big concern of mine. And I think measuring it, working on that is really important and understanding and giving teachers in our community has done a little bit of this work, giving teachers the tools that they need to make certain that they are successful. And whether or not restructuring AOE right now, in different ways, if that makes sense to get this work done, personally, I'd rather prioritize, again, things that really will look back and say, these are the things that we did to really make a difference in the lives of children during this difficult time, but also areas that seem to be lacking, such as literacy. Representative Webb, did you want to? Yes, I did wanna say that one of the things that we're looking at literacy being is a way to connect implementation of Act 173 and the use of federal dollars. So we are very excited about this as being a possibility because Act 173 has been a bit stalled. And it is the way, it is our avenue to support the students that have the most needs, the students that are struggling. So this is an important one that we are excited to be starting this week. Right. We'll be keeping you, Senator Campion, you and I will keep in touch on that one. And just so Senate Education colleagues know, tomorrow we are taking up the School Discipline Bill, the advisory group and we'll certainly keep you abreast of our work on that. Another one I think we'll make a big difference in the lives of children. The other thing I know I don't even need to say it, but just I kind of keep saying it to remind myself, we certainly have direction from our corner office, if you will, that COVID and post-COVID is our priority. And I know you have the same and I'll be talking with the pro tem after this a little bit for you to also understand if there are ways to sort of start to verge away from that or if indeed we should continue to stay focused. Just say that we will also be looking at the school facilities construction. We really appreciated the work that this committee did last year. And I was acknowledging Senator Purchlick for his work on HVAC. We did have efficiency Vermont in and I learned that I don't know what the percentage was but there are a large number of schools that their HVAC system is only to be able to open windows. So this is a bit of a concern and we will start looking at that. We did some work on it last year but it just didn't make it through the process because of COVID. So that's another one. Yes, and we've been given some direction and Senator Purchlick's work and that has been incredible and I know Senator Lyons advocating for the mental health needs as well as environmental needs and environmental protections in our schools are something that kind of Senator Lyons is working on with us in her committee and also a priority with Senator Dallin's. Senator or Representative Austin please and then Representative Brady. Representative Austin, is your hand up? Did you say Austin? Yes, I'm sorry. Yes, okay. Yep. That's okay. I thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to make a suggestion. We took testimony last week from Professor Nate Levinson who wrote the report on struggling students and he provided our committee with a pretty clear vision of what needs to happen in Vermont to address literacy in the state. And he mentioned like four different systems and cultures needing to kind of move together in order to really make a sustainable difference in moving children forward. And I just thought it might be helpful for you maybe to invite him in to the Senate Ed Committee and have him provide the same presentation he did for our committee because he has a very good handle on Vermont and Vermont governance and Vermont educational systems and local control. And I just found it very helpful to at least have a sense of where we wanna head if we wanna make a difference. Great, I appreciate that. Thank you. Representative Brady. Thank you. This is low hanging fruit but Jim when it comes to school calendar things do we have to legislate that? Or yeah, okay, everybody's nodding. I think my question's being answered. Well, the number of days is specified statute the number of days. There's no requirement to have there are requirements for a school calendar coordination but not in terms of having the same school calendar throughout the state. So I think that would require probably a piece of statute for that. Other questions, comments related? Yes, Jim, please. I put a plug for, I presented what's going on with the whole use of public tuition for religious schools and house education recently. Big issue with lots of cases moving parts such as applying dual enrollment as well. I would encourage you if you are interested to hear from the constitutional expert, Peter Teachout on that question. He's got some specific recommendations as to how to deal with that. He reached out to me today. I appreciate that. And he referenced your conversation. So I think we will have him into Senate. Thanks so much. And actually you presented to the Senate we hadn't heard it but we are definitely interested. Representative Cumber. Yeah, thanks. Jim may have just distracted me from, oh, I guess it was a process question. Okay, so for example, the Secretary talked about these changes in CTE and CTE funding and how that works. Okay, what's the next step in terms of language, let a proposal to us if nobody has put forth a bill already speaking to this. Do they get language to Jim or? Well, I heard him say for comment is that they were going to at least flesh out their proposal for detail and possibly provide language. I'm not sure about that second part. I'm not sure how with that ranks and priority for them. So they might get that down lower, I'm not sure. Anything else? Okay, well, House Education, Representative Webb, thank you so much for joining us. Do you have a Vice Chair this year? I do, where is he? There he is, Representative Tupoli. That's right, I think that's in statute. Is it not that he needs to be the Vice Chair? I've been trying to change it for years but I still have himself. But seriously, it's great to have all of you here looking forward to continuing our work together and please Representative Webb, if there are ever opportunities to collaborate, I know Ledge Council would certainly appreciate it as I'm sure agency and some of our other partners. And I think given the amount that was just put before us and the things that you're starting to work on and we're starting to work on, I very much appreciate you and me having an opportunity to talk to do some planning on how we're gonna move these things through before across our... Great, great. So Senator Dey, if you don't mind just staying on for another about five minutes, we will let our good colleagues and partners go. Yeah, thank you very much. Senator Campion, look forward to seeing you in the hallway. I look forward to seeing you as well. See you Representative. Thank you. Thank you. See Representative Harrison to still with us. Okay, great. Well, thanks everyone. We are down to today, but I thought that was a helpful albeit and very comprehensive albeit a bit overwhelming conversation and we'll look forward to digging into these things. As you know, we're hearing from, we're working on the school discipline bill tomorrow. I'm hoping that we can start and then we're hearing from on other bills on Thursday. I'm hoping we can start to generate some work. I'm gonna talk to Senator Ballant just to make sure it's okay to move a few things while we wait for AOE and partners proposals as it relates to COVID work that our students might need. Okay, unless someone has questions, chair's meeting in about 30 minutes, I think we're good for the day. Okay. Senator Camping, do you wanna? I'll stay on. Thanks everybody. Thank you.