 Adam Greshan, commissioner of finance and management. Thank you for having us in. I sense great interest in what we are going to talk about. So I appreciate you having us here. So last week or the week before when I was here, we were talking about the administration thoughts on education cost containment. And I'd mentioned three kind of our three favorites, one of which was special education that the committee has done work on, one of which was health care, statewide health care bargaining, which I know the committee has also done work on. But I also, the third I mentioned was ratios. And the comment, I think fair comment, came back. So what work have you done on that? Do you have anything to present us? Do you have language? And I said that if the committee is interested, I would get back to you on that, which I have. So we've done some work on staff, student ratios within our school buildings. And I thought it'd be appropriate to present to the committee if the chair is interested. Yes, please. So I think many of you probably know Brad James better than I, but he's done the body of work. I thought it'd be appropriate for him to present. Thank you. Welcome, Brad. Well, thank you. It's been a while since I've been here, I think. Brad James, agency of the education for the record. I need this one for Alice. Thank you, Brad. You're welcome. I do remember something, but I'm not mad. Was it a week or two ago? We were talking with Adam, and we were asked. We were discussing the staff ratios, and we were asked to come up with some preliminary proposal to increase the student to staff ratio in the state as a whole. And before I think much further, probably numerous times I'll say staff to student. I mean student to staff every time I say that inadvertently. So we're talking about student to staff ratios. So we sat, and we talked with Adam, and got some general ideas as to what people were thinking. Talked amongst ourselves at the agency, and then kind of came up with a draft proposal, which I believe is posted. And I have paper copies of folks on them. I've got mine, I like to probably put stuff on the board behind you. I've got people in the room, maybe give them tomorrow and make sure. Very good, Marsh. So what this is is just kind of what our thought process was. The subs won't change somewhat. But this is basically what I sent over to Adam, I think. That's probably mine, or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. My apologies. Never got it. We sent it out, I think I sent it over to you maybe Tuesday of last week, something like that. And so I've kind of been working on it more or less ever since. Basically what we talked about was what would be the appropriate staff members to include in this. And we discussed the various staff members. And at this point, I will pass out a list of staffing. What do you have? You're right here next to me. And the ones with the highlighter, the ones that we excluded, we took out some of the ones that are many people to contract with. So like food services, transportation, sometimes maintenance operations. We took out enterprise operations, which are self-funding. There's not many people do these things. There's one, there's an acquisition, one person in the state titled that right now. So we took out some things that they're down at the bottom, so you're not going to fire us. They're down at the bottom of the sheet right here that we took out. We also took out pre-kindergarten teachers. And that means we took out pre-kindergarten students, too, for the student count. The reason we took out pre-kindergarten teachers is because not all the school districts are doing it in the same way. They all have the pre-kindergarten student counts, but they're not all providing the kindergarten in-house to where they actually have a teacher. Oftentimes, they're sending the vast majority of kids out or all of their kids out somewhere else. So as in those races that went out back in October, we excluded the pre-kindergarten also. Isn't that also true of tuition counts, whether tuition? Yes. Is tuition more than pre-kindergarten? Yes, we'll come to that as we get through into this. I'll finish the staff first. And then we had a long discussion about special education. Special education is a federal entitlement, as you all know. You also all know that you have a policy bill that is out there dealing with special education and how to fund it. So we're working on it from that side. So we excluded the special education license staff. And so that's special education instructors, special education directors, and triple E directors. We excluded them from the county because we thought they'd be impressive. We did include the special education paraprofessionals. So all the paraprofessionals are still in there. So can you distinguish the special ed paraprofessionals from other paraprofessionals? Yes, we can. Assuming that people submit us accurate data. Which leads in one point, the numbers that we're going to be talking about very shortly are current year. The school districts were unaware this was going to happen until last week when we got to this point. And I said, what's going on with the current year data collection for teacher staff? And it was due in late December. And people have been revising it slowly and steadily since then. I sent an email out to business manager back on Thursday saying that I need to have all revisions done by the end of the day, at which point I'm going to take these numbers and then we're going to come out. And those will be the numbers that we're going to use as soon as we use numbers for this year. So business manager aware of this as a superintendent? I'm a little concerned around the special ed. The best practices recommended that we put forward in our special ed bill actually recommend that we move from paraprofessionals to special educators. So that would affect your ratios in some manner. What it would do is because one of the reasons we've included special paraprofessionals in the staffing count that we're using is because we thought that those will be being pushed down over time. And that there are probably some more special education licensed people, instructors, teachers, whatever the right terminology is. So that's what we did. And while I'm also thinking about it, because you know how scattered I am, all these folks that we're talking about here is excluding those are policy questions. So this is just what we put out here for the time being. So that kind of covers the folks that we excluded. And the very quick rationale is to why we excluded them. There's lots of work in the background that had to get done. I will mention some of them quickly. One of them is we have 15 public technical centers, regional technical centers. 12 of those have a host high school. Three of them are standalone. So I treated them differently. For those who were at the host, for those 12 that are at a host high school, I took the students who are going there and brought them into that high school, as that's where they are for those full-time equivalents as we count them. I also subtracted those counts from their ascending school enrollments. So those kids are not there for that time that they're in Texas. So what happens for a host high school is now you have a larger population that would be more analogous to if you actually want to count everybody, including the technical center, plus all the staff, so that we get the staff with those. One thing I did forget to mention, the student council we're doing just kind of goes back to your question, Mr. Chair, is we base this on enrollment. And what we, which means that those districts that are twisting everybody are not impacted by this because they have no staff. They do have staff at the supervisory union, but we took those and allocated them out based on enrollment. I'll come to that in a short period of time. So what we did is we then, we mean me. What I did, I'd rather say we. For the three standalone technical centers because I don't see budgets for them, I don't get tax rates for them. Their cost for people is allocated back out to the district so that they basically are a part of the district's budget. I took the enrollment, again, that semester coming in for those three technical centers. I apportioned the technical center's staff out to the sending school districts then and left the enrollments where they were. The reason is because I can't calculate a tax rate for one of these standalone tech centers. I can for the sending school. So I apportion them out based on how many kids are coming. And again, that can all be changed if we want to go forward with this. So those are technical centers. The other place where we have probably roughly, maybe, well, not a third, but maybe quarter of the staff is at the supervisory union level. And I allocated those folks out again back to the sending, the member districts based on enrollment, percentage of enrollment. Okay, so that's kind of how I was allocating the numbers out. So when you look at, if I was to show you here's school district X, here's the staff. You're gonna go, what? There aren't that many, but it's because I'm apportioning people in from other places at times. And from that, I then started calculating ratios. So have I lost you yet? Or do you understand what I'm talking about so far? I haven't had other people do it. I need to have that in writing. I didn't get them all the back. It's, there's a very broad overview in the first sheet of paper I sent out. I will, and it's very broad. But I will write it up in a little bit more detail. Okay, here you go. So that'll be right up at the allocation. Okay, so now going to what I did afterwards is, we're now, because I'm excluding the special education folks, I had no clue what the ratios were going to be for the state. When I did this, used FY18 numbers, enrollments and staff with these exclusions, I came out with a statewide number of 5.15 students to staff. Oh, that's old. Higher. Okay, it's higher. Which I fully expected to be because we were pulling out staff members, not students, but just staff members. I just didn't know where it was going to end up. I then calculated that for everyone and did a quick graph that was a distribution graph of where the folks are. I'll draw yours out, thank you. Okay, so it kind of, it ranges from a low of 2.99 to a high of, I think it's 7.10 students to staff. That's a fairly even distribution. Probably if I remembered how to do bell curves, it probably could be a very nice bell curve, but I don't and I didn't look it up. But the distribution is fairly regular. When you take the average of the averages, in other words the average ratio of every school district, then that comes out to be 4.77. For the state as a whole, though, which is more of a weighted average, it's 5.15. So I use 5.15 as the starting point for looking. What I then did was I set it up. Yes. Why is there a difference between 4.77? The 4.77 is if I take the ratio of every school district that I calculated and just took that average, so it's an average of an average. They're all set to one. When I look at the state as a whole, Burlington has more kids in it, so they're gonna get a bigger share of that statewide number. So the statewide figure is a weighted ratio, or weighted average part of it. Okay, and that's why it's higher. The state, if I could put it differently, correct me if I put it incorrectly, the statewide average takes all the students and all the staff, they need to divide and you get 5.15. I treat it as one, as one single entity, yes. Yeah, exactly. And the 4.77 that you take, this school, this SU and this SU and this SU and this SU, whatever their ratio is, then you average this together. That is exactly correct. And that's 4.7. That's 4.77, yep. Okay. Representative Webb has a question. And the ratio from the 3.0 to the 7.0, those represent the lowest ratio of the highest... Yes, going up. For SU? No, for school district. For school district. For school district. Okay. This was done at the school district level because in general, they're the ones more responsible hiring. Again, at the supervisor union, it's the SU board that does the hiring, but they are responding to the folks in their school and their members' school districts. So that's why I expand them out. And again, what we ended up doing, coming up to with this proposal, was trying to come up with a way that was going to make a distant center for having a low student staff ratio. Representative Miller. Is there any correlation between the 2.99 and a high spending pound? I did not look at that. I would have to look at that and see. I don't know. Any other kind of correlation? I didn't have time to look at a few correlations I was interested in, but I will. And I'll get back to the line. Can I follow up on that just since he's following up upon it on rural, as opposed to rural? And how do we define not rural? It's probably... Other than going together? Yeah, okay, I said... Because you're coming up a little bit with you. Okay. Let us have that. Okay, then we're back. Okay. I just, I want to make sure I understand this graph, Brad. How? So these are the districts that are plotted on here? Yeah. How are they arranged? Small to high? Small to high. Yeah, I just let Excel do it itself because it will do that. Basically, if I expanded this enough, each of these would be a dot. Right. Okay. And each dot represents a district, which I just got rid of down here because it's just distracting. Okay, if I had said one, two, three, four, five, six. There, I think... I want to say that 185, I think, if I recall correctly, districts in this for FY 18. So if I was to look, if I was to drill down to that point, that would be some school district. Okay. That's all this is. So it's like, it's like, it's like ranking these low to high and then just blocking them. That's all that I really did here. Okay. Okay. So we're starting with this town and it's just, it's a fairly... So that right there could be a big district or a small district or... It's not, no. Okay. So size is not... Okay. High spending or low spending? Spending or... Is there such a word? Does not count? Okay. It's just, this is just strictly... There is no domain here then. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. What was that? The other thing maybe to look at, if you can, is how many special ed kids, special education children are in these districts and is that why the ratio is so low? So the point is... I think they pulled special ed. I would not. We did not take out special ed parents. There are roughly 3,000 special ed parents and I don't remember how many special ed licensed personnel there are, but I know there aren't that many. So that probably could have an impact. Again, I did not, I have not sat here and played with this to see who's falling where. It seems to me just that a quick look, some of the larger districts tend to be up there and some of the smaller districts tend to be here, but that's not a uniform rule by any means. That's just a quick observation. The other thought is that the smaller ratio, the younger the trial, maybe that the ratio is lower for... By grades? Well, we took that brief out, but I will tell you that the lowest one is an elementary school K6. I do remember that. And it is an elementary school. It is an elementary school of grades K6. Oh, Representative Jim Batista. Brad, ratios have been a discussion since around January 18th. We heard this from the secretary of administration and at that time, we were talking about a pretty broad proposal that recommended increasing the ratio from one to, I believe it was one to 4.25 up to 1.4.45, but it looks like in the refined methodology here that the agency has been working on with the administration, we can't actually compare this proposal that you're putting forward to what was recommended by the secretary of administration in January. Is that correct? That is correct. The 4.25 was all staff members except for previous. Okay, so just one more question if I may. So the $30 million that was represented to us is a potential for savings then back in January. Those numbers don't correspond to your current proposal. So I'm just trying to get my head wrapped around are we able to save $30 million with a proposal of this nature? I'm coming to that. Okay. I'm kind of slowly but surely working my way forward. Of course, I lost where I was. So to back up what another representative said, are you going to modify this chart based on whether it's a K-6 school or a high school? I think what would happen is we started parsing it out into the various grade levels. I think we've started to get pretty small numbers. I'm not sure what validity would be there. We could certainly do it. It would take some time, but I could certainly do it. I'm just vaguely recalling you were before ways of means committee when I was on that committee some number of years ago, looking at ratios. I think that report is still on there. I think it was 2011 or something like that. And at that time, there were some, you felt like which school's forward because it was such a mishmash of so what's changed and how much does that have to do with elementary schools, act 46 school districts, larger schools. Some of the things that were made it very difficult to move forward some time ago when we looked at this when we were on the ways of means committee right now. If I recall correctly, and we're talking the way back machine here, if I recall correctly, we were looking at specific categories at the school level for that study. This is more broad. This is looking at a broader range of staff members. This is from Supervisor Union, Superintendant on down, excluding the ancillary services such as buses and food, et cetera. I think what we were asked to do is come away to design a disincentive, for lack of a better term, for having a little ratio so that folks would start to look at what their staffing was, current was, look at it. As some people are starting to do now, look at it and see what they can do through attrition as opposed to going out and handing out pink slips but looking at it through attrition, that type of thing. So I'm not sure you can draw an analogy to a direct analogy between this one and what we did six, seven years ago. I might be wrong, I have to go back and revisit that. I'm sure there's no analogy, I'm just wondering what's different, what has changed that it's gonna allow us to move forward where we felt we couldn't. I think what we're doing now is we're not talking about individual schools, we're talking about school districts. And we're talking about trying to bring the whole state-wide ratio up as a whole as opposed to individual schools. Which I think is what we're talking about over there. I think. But you're saying a blonde question. You're mentioning school districts now and I wonder how Act 46 is fitting into your scenarios that you're putting out here because we're in the process of a lot of changes around school districts and whether you have analyzed whether those school districts who actually have become operational have changed there or are in the process of changing their ratios and whether you know how many school districts have voted to merge through an Act 46 proposal and have not actually become operational so haven't had the opportunity to propose a budget yet? Yeah, no, he had a question, yes, I agree. I would say there are probably about 100 school districts, 80 to 100. I've done a number off the top of my head that will dissolve, start in July one of this year. We have a large number of new unified districts coming in for this coming year. These are FY 18 data. So really what you're looking at here is you're looking at eight unified unions and one of them is a modified unified union. You're looking at eight unified that are in their first year of operation. There are three others that are now in their second year of operation in these data. I do know that some of the two of those have, I should say, I do know for certain that one, think the second, has staff reductions due to attrition and shifting people around as opposed to hiring new people. Right now, I understand everybody wants answers about what's happening with the newly merged districts. In the first year, it's very difficult to say. In the second year, it's also difficult to say but I think we will start to see this as we start getting more years out. So do you know how many school districts, I'm sorry, can I just follow up? I'd like them to finish actually, or continue, but one more short quote. It's the same thing. I mean, how many school districts are merged but haven't even become operational after this July? I mean, there's still something. After this July. There's still some that are merging into 2019. Yes, I want to say six. Did I know five or six? I'll fudge it a little bit. Thanks. There could be a few more. And then that will also be the one state plan that comes out too for that year. So that could change that number. Thank you, but I'm sorry to stall you. That's okay. We just happen to have questions. I know, this committee's always good to have questions. I don't mind. I just lose track of where I was, so that's all right. So anyway, what I've done, what I then did was we were then trying to get to an idea of what cost savings could be or cost reductions could possibly be. And so what I did at that point was I looked at the student staff ratio data, which collects salary and benefit data. At the same time, it collects accounts of teachers of various categories. And I looked at how much was for paraprofessionals and how many paraprofessionals were it and found an average for them. And I looked at the other staff that we were including and found out what the average was for them also. I then said, okay, if we went from a state ratio of 5.15 to one to a state ratio of 5.5 to one, so we're increasing by 3,500 students per adult. What would happen? And with that, I made an assumption that 60% of the staffing reduction would be paraprofessionals and 40% would be the remainder. The regular edge care, not other staff, I guess in the proper term, but I'll just use it. It's a very broad category. When I did that, I came up with a reduction staff of about 938, roughly 60% of that for paraprofessionals is 560 and the remainder would be other staff. And I came up with a reduction in personnel staffing benefits of about $45 million. So that was kind of the starting point at which I went. The second phase would then be to say, okay, so if we're going to do this, what kind of a disincentive are we going to give the districts that have low ratios? What are we going to have them push about? The best we could come up with was a, I don't know what to call it, a fee or a penalty or a surcharge or something on their education spending before the tax rates are calculated. Pardon me? On their education spending. Before tax rates are calculated. We thought that would be more transparent than doing it like the excess spending threshold, which is a little bit convoluted and comes later on or doing it on the tax rate itself. We thought it'd be more transparent to say, your education spending is a million dollars. If you have a low student-to-staff ratio, we're going to add money to that and then we're going to calculate tax rate. We thought that would be more transparent. Which would push up, the effect of that would be to raise tax rates in communities that had low staff, low student-to-staff ratio. Correct. The methodology I came up with to do that and again, more policy decisions if we go forward. The methodology was, I said, if we're using a ratio of 5.5 to one, if your district comes in at 4.5 to one, the difference is one student per adult, that's the difference. And so the way I set it up was, for every student, if you're one student, then you get a 2% surcharge on your education spending. So if your education spending was a million dollars, your ratio came in at 4.5, the target ratio is 5.5, you'd add 2% of that to be a million and $20,000. And you'd actually be calculated on that. And again, that's policy decision. And then starting with that point, then it would just be prorated. If you're half a student's over or under the ratio, then it'd be 1%. If you're three quarters of a student, it'd be 0.75%. If you're two students, it'd be 4%. They're just prorated from that point on. Could I just make the comment? These are, we're looking at it. These are not proposals that we want to put out on the line and say, this is what the administration, we're trying to come up with ways to do this, but we haven't fully met at these. And I just want to make sure that's clear. As you move forward to consider this, I'm looking at your number of 45 million that you could save by reducing staff line 938, which would include 560 pairs in what you're saying. That would mean simply removing pairs and not accounting for the fact that there's a very good chance that there needs to be increased staff elsewhere. Yes. I can tell you that in my own district, following the work that they did with BMG, they were able to replace 21 pair educators with seven special educators. So did a great job in reducing personnel but had zero financial impact. Did a great job of improving the quality of services for kids that did not end up having a financial impact based on staffing, may have an impact on future results for that child but not on staffing. So this is really looking at if these people just left and there wasn't a replacement. It's the way these numbers are here. I'm operating on that blunt instrument thing right now. You're the numbers guy. Thank you. But yes, you're correct. That's how it's operating right now. Consider that as Adam, as your folks are thinking about policy to just keep that in mind, which really with the work that's been done with the special ed bill. I think I'll send you to tell you. We don't think this can really be realistic for this coming year, which I think is what Adam was saying is that this is a further out thing. It might be the type thing you would want to look at and kind of work up to it over the course of a couple of years and make this a five part of a five year plan or something like that. But I'll let Adam and crew make those discussions. You're welcome. So to that point, what's your timeline? We do think this is part of a comprehensive plan. In other words, this along with other discussions we've had, for example, on healthcare, for example, on special education. And we would ask to roll this out this session and take five years to let it grow. So this would be a five year plan that I think progressively over the five years we would be able to see an impact. And we would hope that we could stick with it for that long. We think, again, this is one part of a plan. I mentioned earlier that we were looking at staff ratios and I mentioned we looked at healthcare and special ed. And we think they all have to be a comprehensive plan. We don't think one, only putting one in isolation is a good way to go about it. So. So can you help me understand where $30 or $40 million of one-time income is in what is yours? That's been described, that's how we conclude this year. This is not related to one-time money. This has no bearing on it. In other words, we're not assuming any savings in fiscal 19. We are assuming savings going forward as for 20 and so on. But this has no relation to one-time. So my conundrum is that here we are, we've done what I believe is very good work and I think you supported that work on our special ed field. We've continued to work on school and quality healthcare. And we have a proposal from you to the outline of how we might deal with ratios, none of which will raise, save, money next year. So, and yet I still hear that we have to come up with $30 or $40 million before we get done here this year. So these don't help. Well, how am I gonna come up with $30 to $40 million between now and the end of the session? Fair question. So the context is our view is if we do come up with one-time money, as I believe the governor had said he was considering, it would have to be in combination with a comprehensive plan so we're not sitting in this room next year and the year after. And in addition, the fact that we need additional money to keep tax rates stable would indicate that the base is off. You know, as the chair has pointed out before, last year we kept rates stable by using a surplus in the fund. This year we're back in the same position. So what we're hoping is by putting money into stabilized tax rates and enacting a comprehensive plan to ensure that we don't have to sit here every year, that would be part of the whole package. Otherwise, you know, I'm in agreement that just, you know, putting excess money into the ed fund to stabilize rates is really not particularly helpful because next year we'll be back in the same position. So the reason we're asking for this is because we believe that it should be part of a plan that will also stabilize tax rates this year. I'm trying to listen at the same time. I haven't, I'm trying to read this proposal. Would you be able to kind of go through this proposal? We have one to three, which one? I'm seeing that the last thing that I said was the first one, but I, oh no. I'm just having a hard time reading and listening as you say. Do we have that in front of us as well? Yes. Last page. That's it. Two of the original memoirs. Thank you. And everyone's part of it. Okay, I will go through that. And again, I'll highlight where I deviated from this as I worked and ran into problems. And there were some. So the first part's the rationale. The majority of education spending is in salaries and benefits as everybody knows. It's not to say that folks shouldn't be there, but that's just the reality. If you were to decrease the overall student staff ratio in the state, then theoretically, education spending should come down. Would it be a one-to-one correlation? Probably not, because so many school districts have made such large cuts that probably some of those unanticipated expenditures in a different fashion to bring things back to the kids, but it still gives you a general idea. That's just, okay. I'm gonna jump down to the proposed staff exclusions. That's what I was talking about when I first came in. This is the group of folks that we excluded. And I put numbers in there just so you can see what they were with operation maintenance. It's just over 1,000 staff, student transportation about just under 300, food service about 500, enterprise operation staff about 68. Again, the enterprise operations where they kind of fund themselves, though they're not there anyway. They're after school sometimes. Community service, again, they're like, they're enterprise operations. They're similar enterprise operations of what business managers told me, you know, roughly 30 and one facilities and construction staff. So those are the ones we cut out. We also took out the pre-kindergarten teachers. Again, because not all school districts are operating a pre-kindergarten program even though they're responsible for providing pre-kindergarten. So we excluded them because that was another Apple to Pineapple type of thing. With special education, it's a federal entitlement. So we thought these people need to be there. We also realized that there's H-897, which is moving forward, which we supported. I believe we helped quite a bit. And so that's working on change how special education is delivered and structured. And so based on the two studies that the legislature funded, that those working together should bring costs down over time. So we excluded special education teachers. We excluded special education directors and essential education directors. Number 11, you can cross out. We did not exclude special education paraprofessionals. Again, we thought that was going to be addressed largely by some of the special education bill itself. The next one that I have, this is, again, I was doing the soft time I had when I did this that night. It's not really organized in the way I was thinking about it ultimately. But the next one I have is supervisory union staff. And especially with Act 153 and 156, a number of what used to be district staff are now at the supervisory union level, special education transportation are all spent at the supervisory union level now. So we have quite a few folks at the supervisory union level. And what we have to do is we have to allocate them back out to the member school districts of that supervisory union. We did that by basing it on enrollments. I looked at the enrollment for any given school district versus the percentage of the enrollment from its SU. And I allocated staff back out in that fashion. So if a school district had 20% of the enrollment of an SU, they got 20% of the staff added to their own staff. So that we're bringing it back down to where the tax is. Same thing with career technical education. Again, this became a little bit more involved, which I kind of went over first. I separated the 15 public regional career technical education centers into the 12 that are hosted at public high schools. Excuse me. And the three that are stand alone technical center school districts. The 12 that are under host high school, I took the most recent semester full time equivalent student, which is similar to an enrollment basis, basically. I subtracted those students from whatever school, host high school they were coming from, or sending school they were coming from. So that went down. I added those students to the host high school because that's where the staff was in the technical centers. Then for the three stand alone technical centers, I did the exact opposite. I looked at the ratio of, again, enrollment for a sending district to the total enrollment or for a semester for the stand alone technical center. I found that percentage again, call it 10%. And I gave them 10%, I gave that sending district 10% of the stand alone district staff. Because we don't, I don't directly do anything with the stand alone technical centers. So it has to go back to the folks who are making the decisions as to how many people to support. That's the sending districts. Tuitioning districts were left out of this because they don't have staff. They do have staff at the SU, but they don't have enrollment. We figured we thought that that, there was no way to get to in this way. Same thing with the independent schools. We don't do anything with them directly. So we didn't go there. We didn't try anything with that. We don't have the data to get to this level of detail. The proposal then has, again, most of these are kind of policy decisions. The pros on the last page now. The first policy decision will be determined with staffing categories to use. We made our decisions, that's what you're seeing here. We then allocated staff to the operating district based on enrollment percentages. Calculated net, you know, I'm at number three. Calculated to 2018 student staff ratios for the state as a whole and the effective student staff ratio for the operating districts. I'm using the word effective just because it's not their real staff. It's not necessarily a real enrollment because we've had these manipulations in there. I then used the student staff ratio for the state as a starting point for the target ratio. Again, that was 5.15 to one. And when I ended up going to 5.5, it's the 45 million. If the district was under the target ratio by one, i.e. a whole student per staff, then I increased education spending by 2%. And I prorated it if there were more or less. If you were over the staff, then you're just the way you are. Or the ratio, you're just the way you are. And then the rationale behind it was, we thought on number six, increase in education spending would be more transparent to voters and taxpayers than any other way we could think of. The increase would occur before the tax rate calculation. The increase in education spending would then flow, I feel like some people I don't, I never come in here and read things to you, I apologize. The increase in education spending would then flow through to the district tax rate. The increase in education spending drives up the cost for pupil and the increased cost for pupil increases the tax rate. That's how, that's the proposal that I came up with. Is it fair or appropriate to characterize this as a different kind of high spending threshold based on ratios rather than on per-pupil spending, merely on per-pupil spending? Yeah, I would say it's similar to the high spending. Yeah, it's somewhat analogous to that, based on low ratios. It's a, I don't know what you want to call it, low ratio disincentive. Yeah. We've thought about it going, being essentially the same thing in another direction. In other words, I know the way of getting half the same and maybe it would be different. Yeah. So. I think the notion that this committee has had is in replacing, I mean the high spending threshold is problematic. So thinking about new ways to do it, this being one way, I think our committee has looked at the tax consequence of each dollar rather than having a threshold. In this case, it's 5.5 to one, is that what you want? That's what I was used for modeling. Instead of having a threshold saying for each dollar over the base calculation amount or over the yield that a district chooses to spend, there's a higher tax consequence than there currently is now. That's what's in 9-11. And the notion there is that because there's a higher tax consequence for each and every dollar over the base that a school district spends, there's a higher tax consequence that people won't, school districts won't spend right up to some sort of threshold and then stop there. That it's sort of free money up to this threshold, whatever threshold we put in place, and then there's this big penalty so people don't cross over the threshold. And that's kind of what's happening with our high spending threshold currently, is that right for us? Yes, I mean, I'm one who deals with it all the time. It does get everybody's attention. It's again, kind of like what I was describing here, it's kind of a blunt instrument. It's not, to work better, it should be more tailormaged individual school districts. That would take a lot of work. I have some ideas, but I've never sat down and worked on it. But it's, when there's just a threshold, you're correct. Some districts do go right up to just below the threshold that's where they sit. So as the threshold goes up, there you are. Yes. So you're correct. Thank you. Do you have something to go on? So along those lines, do you know, or I might ask you as well, do you know the reason why some of those school districts are at seven and some are at three, the ratios? I mean, have you... No, I have not had time to parse it out. So then my question is more around sort of history of public education in Vermont. And we have, you know, I grew up here, we've always powerfully supported public education. And I would say that this year, we saw an awful lot of support coming from our districts for school budgets, 97%, I think, passed them on the first try. I think we believe deeply in, you know, supporting our public education system. This is a pretty significant shift from that. It's taking decisions that we have always strongly supported at a local level, letting local voters make decisions. We let them make decisions about curriculum. We set the standards at the state board level, but we let them make decisions around curriculum and materials at the local level. And we've always allowed that in spending. This seems like a significant shift for us, heading in this direction for Montpelier, frankly, to be taking over the staffing of our buildings. And I'm really struggling with that. Great. I mean, we spoke about this before. You know, Montpelier has taken over the taxing of our schools. So we feel that the state has a very direct interest in the operation of these schools. And, you know, I say that reluctantly, but definitively. I mean, we have a statewide tax rate. We have a statewide tax rate. So we have a direct interest in the resources we're putting in schools, so. Brett, do you have a district by district output of these, you showed the graph, so you have that in a chart form? And not with me. I have my district, not with me. Could you supply that to me? Yes. It presented well as much of a question. Where I struggled with some of this proposal, is it seems like it's focusing on a symptom as opposed to what's underlying the reason that some areas have low or high staff ratios. And that we at the state, I think, are probably wiser to focus on the whys. What's driving those ratios? And addressing what it is that's driving those ratios. It's like saying, just give everybody any biotics without finding out that actually there's an evasion of something, some disease that if you actually dealt with that, you might not need so much kind of skill. And I always get worried with the use of an analogy. Concrete steps, come to mind. Concrete steps. So when I hear this, I think that what we have been trying to do is actually focus on some of the things that are driving those costs, driving the reasons that we need to happen, that we need to look at staffing. And I'm just wondering if the best use of what we could do now would be to see out 46 through. Get the special ed bill and census model funding in place. Bring in DMG, excuse me, bring in a group similar to DMG, who could help our schools look at how to address some of our needier students. And then at the same time, acknowledge the school boards for doing what they did to not only reach the governor's goal but to surpass it substantially. That would be what I would think we have the state. That would be the best use of our energy and time as opposed to getting into the nitty gritty of accounting that like I said, we can deal with it. Get rid of 21 parent educators and hired seven pet professionals. We've just managed your thing around ratios, but we haven't done a darn thing about cost. So I just, I can see where you could certainly step up some of this counting, which I think is appropriate, and counting it maybe the way you're doing it, and then use that as a measure of how we're doing but not tying everybody to making those changes. But actually use it as a measure as opposed to a policy. So, Brad, I appreciate your work on the methodology here. I think it's pretty thorough and thoughtful. My concern is, what do we compare this to? Like, how does this compare to our private schools in the state? How does this compare to public schools in other states? Is there a way to do that? I mean, do we have an understanding that 5.5 is the right number? No. To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing quite like this national, excuse me, nationally. National and data are looking at specific categories of teachers, primarily. And they're trying to come up with a common methodology for all states so that they can actually compare them. But they have the same issues that we have trying to talk to districts sometimes and how they do things. Everybody does a little bit differently. So the federal government's working hard, and that's sometimes why it takes two years to get information out, getting comparable data between the 50 states and the outlying districts. Is there anything that's looking at overall staffing versus just teachers? Not to my knowledge. There doesn't mean that there isn't, but not to my knowledge. I have not researched it. Is there anything that has gone to the level where I just did, where I said we're going to exclude these categories? Probably not. What do we compare it to? Is that the right number? I can't answer that question. I just, I can't. What about the teacher to student ratios? That's what I sort of hear the most about. Do we know what that is in the state? Is that comparable to other states or to our private schools? That would be more comparable. Hard to believe, I'm sitting and laughing at myself now. It's hard to believe that did not actually look at the teacher staff, the direct instruction versus students. I mean, I have it set up so that I can, but it did not do it. I can tell you what that is for FY18 with the direct instruction. And then to follow along with what I said just a moment ago was I don't, off the top of my head, I do not know what the federal folks use when they're comparing across states for their staffing ratios that we see that it compares us to. But I could probably find that out. And then I could probably see where we stand. That would be helpful information, I think, for the committee. And the question that Representative Long asked earlier, I think, that was Representative Long, do we have any notion why some one school district is at 2.99 and another school district is over 7? I mean, that's enormous. It's enormous difference from one school district to another. My guess, and the answer is no, I have not looked at it. I've not taken the time to look at it because all this takes time. Time was not quite readily available for this. I'm sorry to have to tell you. I know. But I think a lot of what's going to have to do with how the supervisory unions are operated. Because remember, a lot of what we're seeing here is being pushed out from the supervisory and back down to the school district. So and then that would involve rationale from folks that I know say, why do you have these people here? Why do you have this many people? We can find all this out. Not happily because they won't be happy telling me this information. But we could find a lot of this out. Let me put it that way. But off the top of my head, I don't know. I could probably look at the towns and the districts and look at the staffing categories and the background data and come up with some reasonable ideas. But I truly don't know. I have a feeling it's going to vary from place to place to place. Well, it may. On the other hand, we might see, someone's talked about the number of unified districts that we have. If they're all in the lower half, and the ones at the very top are all districts that operate no schools and just do tuition, I don't have any reason to expect this. I'm not putting that out as an expectation. But that would tell us a whole lot about how the Act 46 process is happening or not. It would tell us whether there's a differential between public schools and tuitioning out to private institutions in-state and out-of-state. I know one of the provisions we've got from the Senate is putting some small work from striving around how we spent public dollars outside the state. So this is a good piece. It needs to have a lot more context for me to understand how we might utilize this piece in a piece of legislation. Representative Jim, the piece of the House. Are you seeking? Oh, I'm sorry. Please. I forgot to. Well, let the one go, and then you. A couple questions just raised from the proposal. Are you seeking legislation to put us on a long-term path? I know Secretary Young talked about a five-year plan toward attrition. Is this the first piece of that proposal? This would be one piece of the proposal. And so I'm wondering about this. We're trying to figure out how we conclude session in a timely fashion. And so if you're seeking part of a package of legislation for future years, have you explored the future year impact of this proposal on the general fund? We have. OK. OK. Assuming that it's something that you can support based on the proposal before us, do you feel like it's appropriate under 5A? It says that the increase can be characterized as a fine, a tax, a penalty, or a surcharge on low student-staff ratios. Do you think the best way to get at this issue of ratios and wanting a statewide policy change would be instituting a fine, a tax, a penalty? Like I said earlier, we're just trying to lay out some thoughts on this. We haven't come down on anyone. I mean, our tax code is filled with fines, penalties, taxes. We have, for example, the excess spending threshold. We have the allowable growth limits. We have, I guess if I thought fast enough, I could probably come up with a couple more. So this isn't foreign territory. But the question that we have in the administration and what we are hoping to figure out is what is the best way to do it? I was searching for a word there. I didn't have one. So I guess my only question then, if we're seeking enabling legislation this year for a five-year plan, within that legislation would the governor be supportive of a fine, a tax, or a penalty on districts that have these ratios? So is your question, the governor has said he doesn't want a new tax, and is it taxed up there? Is that what you're getting at? I'm wondering if. So we would figure out a way to not make it a tax because it's not a tax. It's a penalty. Okay, pardon me, thank you. Representative Miller. Are you watching how Act 46 is continuing to do? Do you have an update on what detects the budgets have come in at a late? The last we heard on Mark was it increased by 1.5, 2% less than a few years ago. Yes. It's 3.5, and that's saving us $28 million. Have you looked to see if it's getting any better and worse? We, I updated those numbers maybe a week or so ago, and they haven't changed significantly. The ones that came in were smaller and didn't really move with the needle at all. It's still around 1.5 for now. How many is still outbred? I think eight. How many? Eight. Eight. Eight. Well, that was a sign of incredible success. I did. Wouldn't you agree? Yes. I mean the- So if we can keep doing that, saving that $28 million each year, keeping this down, and if we can be patient and see how the hard work we did here on special education comes out, as Kate's so eloquently described, why isn't that a better idea than going into something so complicated that we proudly drive the school districts crazy? Sorry to say that. Most of what I do does. It's constant changing things for them, but Jeff, I mean they came through in such a beautiful way, but to helpful ways this year. I think they have the message. So why not let these things- Why don't we just take our time and let's see how this comes out? This may solve our problem. We're patient. Representative Joseph. This, I don't want to teach you too much about this, Adam, but this thing might be called a tax. Would this be an increase in property taxes? No, actually this proposal is to level property taxes. Oh, really? I thought the percentage increase, you're talking about percentage increases here. Those are increases that'll be realized through what? Percentage increase in property taxes? What the proposal does is it levels state with the average statewide property tax. Oh, okay, but for the people who have the ratios that are low, they're going to have an increased property tax. And for people who have ratios that are high, they will have a reduced property tax and otherwise they wouldn't have. So the average statewide property tax rate will be the same. A master of- Representative Conn. Can I ask a question? Representative Conn. So I'm going to echo the argument for patients that Representative Miller made. I'm just looking at the four Supervisory Union School Districts in my district and what happened this year. In Addison, Northeast, the district where Representative Sharp was from, they cut 16 and a half people. District I'm from, 23 people. Another district that's in my legislative district, 17 people. Another one in Addison County, 14 people over the past three or four years. So I think that, I got a little jumpy at the beginning of this when it said the proposal was to encourage districts to closely look at staffing levels and decrease them where necessary and possible. Kind of asking people to do what they're, seem to be doing a very, very good job of so far. Couldn't help but bristle at that suggestion a little bit. That's pontificating. I do want to go back to the question about enabling legislation. What is it you're talking about you're suggesting to get done for this year? In this legislative session, I'm unclear on that. You kind of said, roll something out this year. We'd be happy if the committee is interested. We'd be very happy to roll this out ASAP. And this being essentially a VAT, but in proposed bill form. Which one more thing I will say that I keep thinking about the unintended consequences. And so for example, excluding special ed staff sort of goes against our special education bill, which is really encouraging school districts to use their special education money in ways that are more effective. And sometimes that is to use specialists that who aren't necessarily special educators to help target special education. And this would sort of provide a bit of a perverse incentive to not be creative and to keep things as close as possible. I think Representative Miller. Question. In my district, we didn't come in at 1.2%. We were down by 1.2% in our budget. Our class, I check our enrollment numbers quite frequently in Jasper. Our classroom sizes are 19, 20, 21, 22. We're doing a great job keeping control of costs and providing a quality education to our kids. Instead of going after everybody and annoying everybody, why don't you look at the people who are not achieving what you want? Why don't you go and look at the exactly what he's proposing to do? Look at the 2.99. That's exactly what you're going to find out why that is. Are those the high spending caps? I mean, especially. Whatever the, are you going to do that? So that's what the proposal, that the proposal is to have a penalty for low, well, I'm not saying, I'm not saying something different. Representative Miller is saying something different. She's saying what is the reason behind these? What is the reason? As opposed to coming up here and don't do anything punishing yet. Find out why, and then we can figure out what to do. But can I also, to the member from Middlebury answer this question? I'm sorry, I didn't allow you to report. Cornwall, I'm sorry. Cornwall. You moved? You moved? You moved? It's kind of like, just because everyone drives safely doesn't mean you don't need to speed them. And those districts that are doing everything according to plan and whose plans are good, they shouldn't care. I mean, when I'm out driving, I don't care whether the speed limit is 55 or 60 because I'm a safe driver. Well, so this shouldn't. 40 million dollars at one time increase in what it was that's been described. That's how we conclude this year. This is not related to one time money. This has no bearing on this money. In other words, we're not assuming any savings in fiscal 19. We are assuming savings going forward, fiscal 20 and so on. But this has no relation to one time. So my conundrum is that here we are, we've done what I believe is very good work and I think you supported that work on our special ed field. We've continued working on school and quality healthcare. And we have a proposal from you to the outline of how we might deal with ratios, none of which will raise, save money next year. So, and yet I still hear that we have to come up with 30 or 40 million dollars before we get done here this year. So these don't help. Well, how am I gonna come up with 30 to 40 million dollars between now and the end of the session? Fair question. So the context is our view is if we do come up with one time money, as I believe the governor had said he was considering, it would have to be in combination with a comprehensive plan. So we're not sitting in this room next year and the year after. And in addition, the fact that we need additional money to keep tax rates stable would indicate that the base is off. You know, as the chair has pointed out before, last year we kept rates stable by using a surplus in the fund. This year we're back in the same position. So what we're hoping is by putting money into stabilized tax rates and enacting a comprehensive plan to ensure that we don't have to sit here every year, that would be part of the whole package. Otherwise, I'm in agreement that just putting excess money into the ed fund to stabilize rates is really not particularly helpful because next year we'll be back in the same position. So the reason we're asking for this is because we believe that it should be part of a plan that will also stabilize tax rates this year. I'm trying to listen at the same time. I haven't, I'm trying to read this proposal. Would you be able to kind of go through this proposal? We have number three. Which one? I'm seeing that. I'm just having a hard time reading and listening. I'm just going to try out. Do we have that in front of us as well? Yes. That's it. That's it. Two original memoirs. Thank you. For everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I will go through that. And again, I'll highlight where I deviated from this as I worked in random problems. And there were some. So the first part's the rationale. The majority of education spending is in salaries and benefits as everybody knows. It's not to say that folks shouldn't be there, but that's just the reality. If you were to decrease the overall student staff ratio in the state, then theoretically, education spending should come down. Would it be a one to one correlation? Probably not, because so many school districts have made such large costs. They probably use some of those unanticipated expenditures in a different fashion to bring things back to the kids. But it still gives you a general idea. That's just okay. I'm going to jump down to the proposed staff exclusions. That's what I was talking about when I first came in. This is the group of folks that we excluded. And I put numbers in there just so you can see what they were with operation maintenance. It's just over 1,000 staff, student transportation about just under 300, food service about 500, enterprise operations staff about 68. Again, the enterprise operations where they kind of fund themselves. So they're not going there anyway. They're after school sometimes. Community service, again, they're like, they're enterprise operations. They're similar enterprise operations for what business manager told me, roughly 30 and one facilities and construction staff. So those are the ones we cut out. We also took out the pre-kindergarten teachers. Again, because not all school districts are operating a pre-kindergarten program even though they're responsible for providing pre-kindergarten. So we excluded them because that was another apples to pineapples type of thing. With special education, it's a federal entitlement. So we thought these people need to be there. We also realized that there's H897, which is moving forward, which we supported. I believe we helped quite a bit. And so that's working on changing how special education is delivered and structured. And so based on the two studies that the legislature funded, that those working together should bring costs down over time. So we excluded special education teachers. We excluded special education directors and essential education directors. Number 11, you can cross out. We did not exclude special education paraprofessionals. Again, we thought that was going to be addressed largely by some of the special education bill itself. The next one that I have, this is again, I was doing the soft time I had when I did this that night. It's not really organized in the way I was thinking about it ultimately, but the next one I have is Supervisor Union staff. And especially with Act 153 and 156, a number of what used to be district staff are now at the Supervisor Union level. Special education transportation are all spent at the Supervisor Union level now. So we have quite a few folks at the Supervisor Union level. And what we have to do is we have to allocate them back out to the member school districts of that Supervisor Union. We did that by basing it on enrollments. I looked at the enrollment for any given school district versus the percentage of the enrollment from its SU. And I allocated staff back out in that fashion. So if a school district had 20% of the enrollment of an SU, they got 20% of the staff added to their own staff. So they were bringing it back down to where the tax is. Same thing with career technical education. Again, this became a little bit more involved, which I kind of went over at first. I separated the 15 public regional career technical education centers into the 12 that are hosted at public high schools, excuse me, and the three that are standalone technical center school districts. The 12 that are under host high school, I took the most recent semester full-time equivalent student, which is similar to an enrollment basis, basically. I subtracted those students from whatever school, host high school they were coming from, or sending school they were coming from, so that went down. I added those students to the host high school because that's where the staff was in the technical centers. Then for the three standalone technical centers, I did the exact opposite. I looked at the ratio of, again, enrollment for a sending district to the total enrollment or first semester for the standalone technical center. I found that percentage again, call it 10%, and I gave them 10%, I gave that sending district 10% of the standalone district staff because I don't directly do anything with the standalone technical centers. So it has to go back to the folks who are making the decisions as to how many people to support. That's the sending districts. Tuitioning districts were left out of this because they don't have staff. They do have staff at the SU, but they don't have enrollment. We figured we thought that that, there was no way to get to them in this way. Same thing with the independent schools. We don't do anything with them directly, so we didn't go there. We didn't try anything with that. We don't have the data to get to this level of detail. The proposal then has, again, most of these are kind of policy decisions. The pros on the last page now. The first policy decision will be to determine which staff and categories to use. We made our decisions, that's what you're seeing here. We then allocated staff to the operating district based on enrollment percentages. Calculated and F, I'm at number three, calculated to 2018 student staff ratios for the state as a whole and the effective student staff ratio for the operating districts. I'm using the word effective just because it's not their real staff. It's not necessarily a real enrollment because we've had these manipulations in there. I then used the student staff ratio for the state as a starting point for the target ratio. Again, that was 5.15 to one. I ended up going to 5.5, that's 45 million. If the district was under the target ratio by one, i.e. a whole student per staff, then I increased education spending by 2% and I prorated it if there were more or less. If you were over the staff, then you're just the way you are, or the ratio, you're just the way you are. And then the rationale behind it was, we thought at number six, increase in education spending would be more transparent to voters and taxpayers than any other way we could think of. The increase would occur before the tax rate calculation. The increase in education spending would then flow, I feel like some people I don't, I never come in here and read things to see what I apologize. The increase in education spending would then flow through to the district tax rate. The increased education spending drives up the cost per pupil and the increased cost per pupil increases the tax rate. That's how it works. That's the proposal that I came up with. Is it fair or appropriate to characterize this as a different kind of high spending threshold based on ratios rather than per pupil's fund, merely on per pupil spending? Yeah, I would say it's similar to the high spending. Yeah, it's somewhat analogous to that. Based on low ratios, it's a, I don't know what you want to call it, low ratio disincentive. We've thought about it going, being essentially the same thing in another direction. In other words, I know the way of getting half the same and maybe it would be different. I think the notion that this committee has had is in replacing, I mean the high spending threshold is problematic. So thinking about new ways to do it, this being one way, I think our committee has looked at the tax consequence of each dollar rather than having a threshold, in this case, it's 5.5 to one, is that what you want? That's what I was used for modeling. Instead of having a threshold saying for each dollar over the base calculation amount or over the yield that a district chooses to spend, there's a higher tax consequence than there currently is now. That's what's in 9-11. And the notion there is that because there's a higher tax consequence for each and every dollar over the base that a school district spends, there's a higher tax consequence that people won't, school districts won't spend right up to some sort of threshold and then stop there. That it's sort of free money up to this threshold, whatever threshold we put in place, and then there's this big penalty so people don't cross over the threshold. And that's kind of what's happening with our high spending threshold currently, is that right for us? Yes, I mean, I'm one of the deals with it all the time. It does get everybody's attention. It's again, kind of like what I was describing here, it's kind of a blunt instrument. It's not, to work better, it should be more tailor-made to individual school districts. That would take a lot of work. I have some ideas, but I've never sat down and worked on it. But when there's just a threshold, you're correct. Some districts do go right up to just below the threshold that's where they sit. So as the threshold goes up, there you are. Yes. So you're correct. Good, thank you. Yes, Mark, I'm going to go on. So along those lines, do you know, or I might ask you as well, do you know the reason why some of those school districts are at seven and some are at three, the ratios? I mean, have you... No, I have not had time to parse it out. So then my question is more around sort of history of public education in Vermont. And, you know, we have, you know, I grew up here. We've always powerfully supported public education and I would say that this year we saw an awful lot of support coming from our districts for school budgets, 97%, I think, passed them on the first try. I think we believe deeply in, you know, supporting our public education system. This is a pretty significant shift from that. It's taking decisions that we have always strongly supported at a local level, letting local voters make decisions. We let them make decisions about curriculum. We set the standards at the state board level, but we let them make decisions around curriculum and materials at the local level. And we've always allowed that in spending. This seems like a significant shift for us heading in this direction for Montpelier, frankly, to be taking over the staffing of our buildings. And I'm really struggling with that. Great. I mean, we spoke about this before, you know, Montpelier has taken over the taxing of our schools. So we feel that the state has a very direct interest in the operation of these schools. And, you know, I say that reluctantly, but definitively. I mean, we have a statewide tax rate. We have a statewide tax rate. So we have a direct interest in the resources we're putting in schools. So, thank you. Brett, do you have a district by district output of these? You showed the graph. So do you have that in a chart form? Not with me. Look at my district. Not with me. Could you supply that to us? Yes. I'm assuming we have such a question. Where I struggle with some of this proposal, is it seems like it's focusing on a symptom as opposed to what's underlying the reason that some areas have low or high staff ratios and that we at the state, I think, are probably wiser to focus on the whys, what's driving those ratios, and addressing what it is that's driving those ratios. It's like saying, just get everybody antibiotics without finding out that actually there's an evasion of some disease that if you actually dealt with that, you might not need so much pedestal. And I always get worried with that use of analogy. Concrete stats. Concrete volume. Concrete stats. So when I hear this, I think that what we have been trying to do is actually focus on some of the things that are driving those costs, driving the reasons that we need to look at staffing. And I'm just wondering if the best use of what we could do now would be to see out 46 through. The special ed bill and census model funding in place, bring in DMG, excuse me, bring in a group similar to DMG, who could help our schools look at how to address some of our immediate students. And then at the same time, acknowledge the school boards for doing what they did to not only reach the government's goal, but just surpass it substantially. That would be what I would think we have the state. That would be the best use of our energy and time as opposed to getting into the nitty gritty of discounting that, like I said, we can deal with it. Can't wait to have 21 parent educators and I have 27 professionals. We've just managed your thing around ratios, but we haven't done a darn thing about cost. So I can see where you could certainly set up some of this counting, which I think is appropriate, and counting it maybe the way you're doing it, and then use that as a measure of how we're doing, but not tying everybody to making those changes, but actually use it as a measure as opposed to a thing. So Brad, I appreciate your work on the methodology here. I think it's pretty thorough and thoughtful. My concern is, what do we compare this to? Like, how does this compare to our private schools in the state? How does this compare to public schools in other states? Is there a way to do that? I mean, do we have an understanding that 5.5 is the right number? No. To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing quite like this national, excuse me, nationally. National data are looking at specific categories of teachers, primarily, and they're trying to come up with a common methodology for all states so that they can actually compare them. But they have the same issues that we have trying to talk to districts sometimes and how they do things. Everybody does a little bit differently. So the federal government's working hard, and that's sometimes why it takes two years to get information out, getting comparable data between the 50 states and the outlying districts. Is there anything that's looking at overall staffing versus just teachers? Not to my knowledge. There might doesn't mean that there isn't, but not to my knowledge. I have not researched it. Is there anything that has gone to the level where I just did, where I said we're going to exclude these categories? Probably not. What do we compare it to? Is that the right number? I can't answer that question. I just, I can't. What about teacher to student ratios? That's what I sort of hear the most about. Do we know what that is in the state? And is that comparable to other states or to our private schools? That would be more comparable. I'm sitting and laughing at myself now. It's hard to believe that did not actually look at the state teacher staff, the direct instruction versus students. I mean, I have it set up so that I can, but it did not do it. I can tell you what that is for FY18 with the direct instruction. And then to follow along with what I said just a moment ago was off the top of my head, I do not know what the federal folks use when they're comparing across states for their staffing ratios that we see that it compares to. But I could probably find that out. And then I could probably see where we stand. That would be helpful information, I think, for the committee. And the questions that Representative Long asked earlier, I think, that was Representative Long. Do we have any notion why some one school district is at 2.99 and another school district is over 7? That's enormous. It's enormous difference from one school district to another. My guess and the answer is no. I have not looked at it. I've not taken the time to look at it because all this takes time. Time was not quite readily available for this. Cut it out. Tell me. I know we don't do what you're saying. But I think a lot of what's going to have to do with how the supervisory unions are operated. Because remember, a lot of what we're seeing here is being pushed out from the supervisory and back down to the school districts. And then that would involve rationale from folks that I know, say, why do you have these people here? Why do you have this many people? We can find all this out, not happily, because they won't be happy telling me this information. But we could find a lot of this out. Let me put it that way. But off the top of my head, I don't know. I could probably look at the towns and the districts and look at the staffing categories and the background data and come up with some reasonable ideas that I truly don't know. And I have the feeling it's going to vary from place to place to place. Well, it may. On the other hand, we might see, we've talked about the number of unified districts that we have. If they're all in the lower half, and the ones at the very top are all districts that operate no schools and just do tuition, I don't have any reason to expect this. I'm not putting that out as an expectation. But that would tell us a whole lot about how the Act 46 process is something or not. It would tell us whether there's a differential between public schools and tuitioning out to private institutions. In-state and out-of-state, I know one of the provisions we've got from the Senate is putting some small circumscribing around how we spent public dollars outside the state. So this is a good piece. It needs to have a lot more context for me to understand how we might utilize this piece in a piece of legislation. Representative Jim, the piece that you talked about. Are you seeking legislation to put us on a long-term path? I know Secretary Young talked about a five-year plan toward attrition. Is this the first piece of that proposal? This would be one piece of the proposal. And so I'm wondering about this, where we're trying to figure out how we conclude session in a timely fashion. And so if you're seeking part of a package of legislation for future years, have you explored the future year impact of this proposal on the general fund? We have. OK. Assuming that it's something that you can support based on the proposal before us, do you feel like it's appropriate under 5A that says that the increase can be characterized as a fine, a tax, a penalty, or a surcharge on low student staff ratios? Do you think the best way to get at this issue of ratios and wanting a statewide policy change would be instituting a fine, a tax, a penalty? Like I said earlier, we're just trying to lay out some thoughts on this. We haven't come down on anyone. I mean, our tax code is filled with fines, penalties, taxes. We have, for example, the excess spending threshold. We have the allowable growth limits. We have, I guess, if I thought fast enough, I could probably come up with a couple more. So this isn't foreign territory. But the question that we have in the administration and what we are hoping to figure out is what is the best way to do it? I was searching for a word there. I didn't really have one. So I guess my only question then, if we're seeking enabling legislation this year for a five-year plan, within that legislation would the governor be supportive of a fine, a tax, or a penalty on districts that have these ratios? So is your question, the governor has said he doesn't want a new tax? And is a tax up there? Is that what you're getting at? I'm wondering if. So we would figure out a way to not make it a tax, because it's not a tax, it's a penalty. OK, pardon me, thank you. Representative Miller. Are you watching how Act 46 is continuing to do? You have an update on what the tax, the budgets have come in at a late. The last we heard from Mark was an increase by 1.5, 2% less than a few years ago. It's 3.5, and that's saving us $28 million. And you look to see if it's getting any better or any worse. I updated those numbers maybe a week or so ago, and they haven't changed significantly. The ones that came in were smaller and didn't really move the needle at all. It's still around 1.5%. I think eight. How many? Eight. Eight. Eight. Well, that was a sign of incredible success. Would you agree? Yes. So if we can keep doing that, saving that $28 million each year, keeping this down, and if we can keep patient and see how the hard work we did here on special education comes out, as Kate Soelle and I described, why isn't that a better idea than going into something so complicated that would probably drive the school districts crazy? Sorry to say that. Most of what I do does. Constant changing things for them is just, they came through in such a beautiful way, such a hopeful way this year. I think they have the message. So why not let these things. Why don't we just take our time and let's see how this comes out. This may solve our problem. Different patient. Representative Joseph. This, I don't want to teach you too much about this, Adam, but this thing might be called the tax. Would this be an increase in property taxes? No, actually, this proposal is to level property taxes. Oh, really? I thought the percentage increase, you're talking about percentage increases here. Those are increases that will be realized through what? Percentage increase in property taxes? What the proposal does is it levels state the average statewide property tax. Oh, okay, but for the people who have the ratios that are low, they're going to have an increased property tax. And for people who have ratios that are high, they will have a reduced property tax that otherwise they wouldn't have. So, the average statewide property tax rate will be the same. A master's, a minister of bookkeeping. I have a question. Representative Connick. So I'm going to echo the argument for patients that Representative Miller made. I'm just looking at the four supervisory union school districts in my district and what happened this year in Addison, Northeast, where the district were ripped in a sharpest form. They cut 16 and a half people. District I'm from, 23 people. Another district that's in my legislative district, 17 people. Another one in Addison County, 14 people over the past three or four years. So I think that I got a little jumpy at the beginning of this when it said the proposal was to encourage districts to closely look at staffing levels and decrease them where necessary and possible. Kind of asking people to do what they're seeming to be doing a very, very good job of so far. I couldn't help but bristle at that suggestion a little bit. That's pontificating. I do want to go back to the question about enabling legislation. I mean, what is it you're talking about you're suggesting get done for this year in this legislative session? I'm unclear on that. You kind of said roll something out this year. We'd be happy if the committee is interested. We'd be very happy to roll this out ASAP. And this being essentially that, but in proposed bill form. I wish one more thing. I will say that I keep thinking about the unintended consequences. And so for example, excluding special ed staff sort of goes against our special education bill, which is really encouraging school districts to use their special education money in ways that are more effective. And sometimes that is to use specialists that who aren't necessarily special educators to help target special education. And this would sort of provide a bit of a perverse incentive to not be creative and to keep things, at least not as quo. I think Representative Miller, question. In my district, we didn't commit at 1.2%. We were down by 1.2% in our budget. Our class, I check our enrollment numbers quite frequently in Traffsbury. Our classroom sizes are 19, 20, 21, 22. We're doing a great job. Keeping control of costs and providing a quality education to our kids. Instead of going after everybody, and in knowing everybody, why don't you look at the people who are not achieving what you want? Why don't you go and look at 2.9? That's exactly what his proposal would do. Look at the 2.99. That's exactly what you're gonna find out. Why that is, are those the high spending tabs that he did, especially? Whatever the, are you going to do that? That's what the proposal is to have a penalty for low... No, I'm not saying something different. I'm not saying something different. I'm not saying something different. She's saying, what is the reason behind this? What is the reason? As opposed to coming up here. Don't do anything punishing yet. Find out why, and then we can figure out what to do. Look, I also, to the member from Middlebury, answer his question. Cornwall, Cornwall. You move? It's kind of like, just because everyone drives safely doesn't mean you don't need to speed them. And those districts that are doing everything according to plan, and whose plans are good, they shouldn't care. I mean, when I'm out driving, I don't care whether the speed limit is 55 or 60 because I'm a safe driver. Well, so this shouldn't annoy them. It shouldn't aggravate them. What we're trying to do, though, is to issue guidelines that perhaps some districts don't adhere to, and which has an impact statewide. So, anyway, thank you. Let's go present the blog. Don't we already have guidelines around student staff ratios? We have spoken about them over the years. No, no, I'm just saying in statute, we have guidelines around student staff ratios. I know there's state board rules. I believe school districts were to come up with a ratio of, like, four or five years ago. Yes, exactly, and I can't remember the exact numbers, but I do know that we already have guidelines. Every district's supposed to come up with a plan. That's right, depending on whether you're K6, K12, whatever you need. I'll come on classroom size, I think they called it. Yeah. Let's go. Could you look in this, please? I'll try it again. I'll come on classroom size. Representative, would you have the piece? I'm wondering about, in Secretary Young's memo from January, one of the five-year initiatives was to create a school consolidation commission to look at closing schools that weren't viable because of ratios. Is that a piece that you think would be advantageous to pass into law this year to start a process, to look at closing schools where districts may not be viable? I think, depending on what else passes, it may be worth looking into. But that may turn out to be superfluous, and we can get through other legislation that won't essentially have the same impact. Other questions? Thank you very much for coming. Appreciate it. Well, thank you for the opportunity. As you develop language, we'd love to see it. Poverty. And I think we'd be interested to create kind of a list of information that we'd like. I just added another one. Not that you're really interested. I was sitting around waiting for things to do. I'm sorry. I fully understand that you're busy over there in the area, and I want to appreciate your work. Thank you. It would be nice looking. I just asked if you would add poverty to that list. Yeah. Thank you very much. So if I could draw the committee's attention to age 27 for a few minutes. So I stood on the floor today to postpone for one legislative day. That means we need to take action. So I can do it again. I could do it. Sure, you can. And I can. I can, and I may have to. Depending on what you hear, obviously. The committee's thoughts are. Are we going to have a testimony? I don't think so. That's the sexual, the sexual. Yeah. Should we have testimony going on and after that? I don't see them. Is that the following? We did. We did. But since we go back on the floor, we may have had some back cancer. Oh, yeah. We're back on the floor. Yeah. Wait, there was a walkthrough of 858. Scheduled for an hour. He was like, yeah. With Jim, I just, I do a comment on Tom. The folks for age 27 are coming tomorrow at 10 o'clock. At 10 o'clock? Yeah. That's before we go to the floor. Correct. Okay. All right, so then, I'm sorry. Let's have Jim do that walkthrough. You can do that before three. We'll be back on the floor in three. He took you. Yeah. But my head's up around 27, so we're going to take testimony in the morning. But before lunch, we need to take action at 27. So read it. Decide what questions you have. We talked about it briefly on Friday. Yep. You can do that. Pause it. That's a little out of our jurisdiction. Well, just because I asked, we're too true. Well, it turns out they're pretty important right now. I guess so. And well, they should be. Well, we survived the heat wave in here, so that's a lot of work. That's nice. Right. The choices are to postpone yet another legislative meeting, to disagree and ask for a committee of comments, to agree with amendment, where we propose an amendment. We're just planning to agree. So those are our choices for tomorrow on H7. So do our homework and be ready at 10 o'clock. Yeah. Thank you. And be open-minded to the testimony. Since one is a committee, we'll have to amend it. Get up, Jeff. Yes, Jeff? Hi, Jeff Francis, Vermont Superintendent's Association. Very briefly, a lot of the educational organization looked at that bill. And there are substantive issues that our testimonies are and posted. So the legal standards associated with immunity, we ran by school attorneys, and they raised concerns that are reflected in our testimony. So you don't have to wait until tomorrow. I don't think it's down to get down. I had to move it till tomorrow's day. So it doesn't show until tomorrow. Oh, OK. Sorry. You can end it up today for us. I'll end it up today. If you want it today. Please. We'll end it up at 3 o'clock. I don't want people to be distracted away from what's about to happen next. End it up the way. OK, how are you? Marge, when tomorrow will that go up? Like 7.30, 8 o'clock? I don't know. I have to come at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. It will definitely be forced. It was good for the trip. It was a nice trip. Thank you. I can find out. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. It's very skeptical. She was the chief of staff, Deborah Brown. She works in the administration. So we had Deborah Brown's in the U.S.G. and Shriver here in the U.S.G. We got back to our desk right there. I don't know if you can see it. Actually, Brown created it. Nice try. OK, so with you, stop that. That's practical. That's amazing. I'm telling you. I have broken muscle. Here, come on. I have. Let's just do that. All right. Good luck. You're exactly right. Here you are again. OK, Jeff. Let's get started. OK, all right. OK, so for the record, we're walking through H858. And so starting with distinguished purpose. I'm going to do it. You have it up? The bill proposes to establish a process for the statewide administration of healthcare benefits for school employees and to establish traditional healthcare benefit terms for collective bargaining agreements with school employees in order to ensure consistent school employee healthcare plans in advance of the statewide negotiation of healthcare benefits. The first section, section 1 on line 17 is a purpose section which reads on December 18, 2017 the Vermont Educational Health Benefits Commission recommended that the state establish a statewide healthcare benefit to negotiate between school employees and the state in order to consistency predictability in developing healthcare plans and rates in offer parity of benefits among all school employees. However, the commission noted that the need for additional work in developing the parameters of negotiations in issues of income census similar parts that work for me. Sensitization. Thank you. The joint assembly deans have to be the best interest to establish traditional healthcare benefit terms for collective bargaining agreements with school employees to take effect on and around July 1, 2018 in order to ensure consistent school employee healthcare plans in advance of statewide negotiations of healthcare benefits in connection to and beyond. Section 2 is amendment to Title 16 which is the section that deals with collective bargaining for teachers and administrators. What it's doing is in subsection B of line 19 it's taking out from the scope of negotiations healthcare. So it says, as used in this section the term salary and related economic conditions of employment shall not include healthcare benefits for coverage. Healthcare benefits and healthcare coverage including healthcare reimbursement and savings accounts shall not be subject to collective bargaining presented to this chapter. And then likewise under the labor laws, this is section 21 I'm in section 3 now in line 3 of page 3 under the labor laws there is collective bargaining for municipal employees which includes school employees so if you're not defined as a teacher or administrator under Title 16 you're picked up as a municipal employee under this section the exact same thing. So it's taking collective bargaining out of the scope for this purpose so it says on line 8 it's including a municipal school employee as a municipal employee jumping down for section of line 18 it's defining municipal school employee being an employee of a supervisor union or a district or a union or school district that's not otherwise subject to Chapter 16 I am lost so I just jumped back to the definition of municipal school employee while you've paused did I hear you say that municipal school employees are not included in this bill? they are but they had to be picked up in two places so in Title 16 the first section, the second section we went through dealt with teachers and administrators the administrators are defined to be career senior other people like janitors and power professionals they are municipal employees and they are covered by Title 21 so we have to do the same thing in two places so on line 18 of Phase 3 it's defining the term municipal school employee means the authority of a supervisor district, supervisor union or school district that's not otherwise subject to the section we just went through so they're not otherwise a teacher or an administrator so this is where you pick up the career professionals and the janitors so career professionals, janitors bus drivers everything that's not specifically a teacher or an administrator so this is not a pre-existing definition municipal school employee we're creating this definition we're doing that because we're carving out from pressure bargaining bargaining around health care for other municipal employees like the town ones they would still bargain in health care so next page page 4 is where the cargo happens we were just in the definition section now we're going to use those definitions so section 4 line 10 says for purposes of collective bargaining related to municipal school employees as we just defined it wages, hours and conditions of employment will not include health care benefits or coverage health care benefits and coverage including health care reimbursement health services accounts shall not be subject to collective bargaining by municipal school employees because they're the same thing here as we just went through last page okay, next section 5 is transitional health care benefit terms health care benefit and coverage provisions of the collective bargaining agreement between a supervisor union or school district and school employees that take effect on or after July 1, 2018 shall contain the following one, a requirement that the supervisor union or school district provide a premium contribution to an amount equal to 80% of the premium for the V-high consumer-driven health plan with school employees responsible for the balance of the premium for the V-high plan they expect and two, requirements that the supervisor union or school district contribute towards school employees out-of-pocket expenses as follows regionally selecting a high deductible V-high plan that's eligible for a health savings account a requirement that the supervisor union or school district establish a health savings account to which it shall contribute $2,100 per an individual plan $4,200 for a two-person or parent-child plan or $3,800 for a family plan and for each enrollee selecting a V-high plan that's not eligible for a health savings account a requirement that SU or school district establish a health reimbursement arrangement to which it shall contribute $2,100 for an individual plan $4,200 for a two-person or two-parent for a two-person or parent-child plan or $3,800 for a family plan and for which the school employees will bear first-order responsibility for the full amount of the out-of-pocket expenses for which she or she is responsible. Can I go back to line three on that page? So when you use the term here school employees you're including administrators teachers superintendents janitors this new definition municipal school employees these are all included in this Yeah, so if you look on page six line one the school employee needs a teacher or administrator as defined in top 16 and a municipal school employee as defined in top 16 Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, so that's what we are actually next page so that was line one is the definition of school employee and line four is supervisor union and school district as defined in in top 16 section six creates a study committee so it is the study committee on statewide negotiations of health care benefits for school employee committee is created to determine how to transition to a single statewide health plan for all school employees for supervisor unions and school districts the commission comprises the final six members three members of the house and often the same party which will be appointed by the speaker and three members of the senate and often the same party who should be appointed by the committee of committees the member of the committee who is a member of the assembly who will be appointed the committee shall propose draft legislation that addresses the following matters concerning the transition to a single statewide health benefit plan for all school employees one, the structure and composition of parties to statewide negotiation two, a timeline for negotiations and impasse procedures three, a process for statewide ratification with the agreement resulting from the statewide negotiation and four, how income census will be decided as part of the negotiations the committee's draft legislation shows through the requirement that any fact-finding required for impact resolution should be made to the capacity of the school district the interest and welfare of the public and the financial ability of the school board to pay for increased costs of public services including the cost of labor comparisons of the wages, hours and conditions of employment of the employees involved in the dispute with the wages, hours and conditions of employment of state and municipal employees who are not employed in the school districts the overall compensation received, or currently received by the employees through direct financial benefits and continuity conditions and stability of employment and all other benefits received and the rate of growth of the economy of the state of Vermont for the year negotiation as well as during the prior period the commission would consult with the Secretary of Education and the Vermont Education Health Initiative as necessary to receive support from the Office of the Legislative Council and the report is due on November 1, 2019 to this committee among others November 15, November 1 November 15, sorry okay and the rest is standard language that's it takes effect on the passage can I ask a question yeah so this under 3 and 4 on page 7 is running on line 15 that's outside of health insurance I mean that's looking at stability of employment other benefits I'm sorry I'm on page 7 line 15 oh 15 I mean this is about health insurance but this is talking about comparing looking at the comparisons of conditions of employment is like that right so it's getting outside of the taking into consideration a much broader than just health insurance thank you other questions I've been looking at the makeup of the committee 6 members 3 members of the House not within the same political party and 3 members of the Senate can I ask another follow-up yeah please do I didn't even read this last page because it's outside of language but if this committee made up the way it is wanted they could actually make recommendations around things other than health care is that true or not I'm not sure they could I'm not sure that's expressed well I'm just reading the I went back to the state and the purpose and it's not it leaves it vague enough I think so that this could actually get out of yeah that's usually made more I'm sorry I'm thinking about recommendations that would come from that committee all the criteria we were just looking at I think all the still back on so by its terms um so on page 8 page 8 it's providing for close legislation so that leads to health care matters so by its terms no that could be brought into the since it's legislative language can we go back to the default plan which I guess starts on page 4 line 16 that's right so this sets an 80-20 for all school employees on page 5 item number 1 paragraph number 1 but then later oh it doesn't set an income sensitization default does it that's the term I believe by the committee let's determine later fair to say that the model plan that they deferred would just basically stay in effect until the committee came up with a new idea and it works such a fast it yeah well so if you look at it page 4 by 19 and 20 any I'm going to fix that on or after July 1, 18 we have to have these terms and there's no end to those terms so that would be in 151 and 12 that would be in effect do we know how many contracts this affects because it says on page 4 line 18 so this would be this would be before 19 right because doesn't the committee recommend what it's going to be for FY19 isn't that the idea here I should probably ask um I'm not I'm not sure no it doesn't actually say it will provide proposed legislation yeah by the yes by November 19 yeah so actually that would be for at the earliest fiscal year 2029 2029 2029 21 full all contracts would be up by so by 2021 the earliest that the committee's proposal could go into effect by that time all school districts would be under the default proposal is that correct I believe that's correct because last year in fact at page 5 there was a language in there around having kind of decided to terminate by a certain date yeah I believe that was December of 19 yeah so that means that when they have these recent terms but there were some districts I think that negotiated out beyond that before that came down there's probably a handful out there that are out in that window yeah it's a small number but I think there were seven or eight districts that settled before that I don't know which of them would have begun there were some so what testimony do you want to have here are we going to be getting a similar proposal that we're going to be taking testimony on as well yes there's other proposals in the works I think here's what I'm kind of thinking we have to get our miscellaneous bill miscellaneous ed bill out of this committee in the next couple days I don't think this I don't think any school employee health care plan that we devise in this committee is going to be ready in a few days nor will it make a difference on that 30 to 50 million so what I'm thinking is if we take maybe the composition of this committee we pull out of this bill the composition of this committee and a recommendation that they come back by November of 18 with a health care plan for school employees and we plot that into our miscellaneous that will give us a germane cook that we can attach and we'll continue working on a school employee health care plan that we can put in place in conference or before we're done because we have to work among ourselves about what we think a good plan is and we have to talk to the senate and we have to have conversations with the administration about what's acceptable and then in the end we put it in the miscellaneous ed bill and we get it across the finish line that's my notion in the meantime we need to take some testimony we need to move forward on school employee health care I don't think we can just let this sift so I go back to my question who do you want to hear testimony from yeah I hope that's forthcoming see where that's at I know that there was some language issues over the weekend at some point Peter and I have language regarding a statement plan that we'd like to put in front of the committee yeah that can be part of it too yeah I would I don't propose putting a justice committee in the miscellaneous ed bill because I think in an effort to avoid doing school employee health care in fact I'm thinking the other way around that I very much like to do school employee health care I just don't think we can if we hold up the miscellaneous ed bill that nothing will get to the finish line that won't get to the finish line we won't, we will have lost it so by putting this a little something in here that we can move out and move the bill forward and leave us with a place to put our plan in place to end up with it is a path forward for us so we want to hear from Scott and Peter and Peter and the school boards association and the superintendents association and the VT NEA and the AFS team sure Bihad who else pardon don't we have some of them already scheduled we may do we need to hear from a member of the commission that existed or are we moving forward we're moving beyond the commission some of those Nicole was on the union I got them down anybody else can you just explain to me again what you said about what kind of language did you say we're going to be using this or are we going to be looking at some other language and mashing them together guess what I'm doing for today what I what I just suggested was that we pluck the advisory board out of here and just ask them to come forward with the plan in November of 2018 put that into the sling etc not agreeable will you put that in the next version the sling and I hope we have a version of that tomorrow that we can go through and tie up I know we have to tie up some loose ends so we need to get those tied up all right we're due on the floor in three minutes