 I welcome everyone to send an education Wednesday, April 3rd, 1.30 in the afternoon. Uh, I think we have a question here from the phone panel. Just have a blue one down there. Thank you. You're hired. Right. So you can go grab five coins. Yeah. So we are continuing yesterday. We had a walk through very comprehensive, very good walk through 8, 6, 30. This is the Board of Cooperative Education Services, also known as BOCES. Representative Busse did a great job as did Ledge Council. And now we're starting to dig in and have some testimony. So with that, Mr. Francis, Lord is yours. Thank you very much. I'm Jeffrey Francis. I'm the Executive Director for the Vermont School Superintendent Association. Happy to be here with you today. I did have the opportunity to watch your testimony nearly in its entirety yesterday. So the walk through representative Busse's comment. And I decided at that point of watching them not to give you anything in writing because not that I wouldn't stand by what I said, but it was rather conversational. And I thought it might go that way in this direction too. So I highlighted the bill in specific sections that I want to speak to. But I first wanted to start contextually. And I hope that this responds in certain ways to the conversation that you were having yesterday. First, somebody, and I don't know who to attribute this to, talked about the utilization of this legislation if it's enacted to support the year in organically growing scale and efficiency. And I thought that that was a useful comment because sometimes when we think about the education delivery system in Vermont, we don't think about the diversity of the types of school districts that we have. We've got districts that would rival I think any suburban community in the country all the way to the most rural districts you could find. And the purpose of this Boci's bill, at least as I understand it, and the Superintendents Association does support it, would to enable the collaboration of districts regionally to take advantage of their collaboration to improve both the cost and the delivery of services around nearly any element of what we try to accomplish in public education. Another way to illustrate that is as an example that I often bring up when we talk both about the diversity of the systems and also the nature of what they're trying to accomplish. And this goes back to probably 2013 or 2012 when there was a real focus on unfunded mandates, which occasionally comes up. And because the members of the Superintendents Association were so interested in that topic, we actually had a meeting over to Prospect Street, which you visited. We had about half the superintendents in the state at the meeting. There were 30 or so there. And we spent a whole day looking at the mandates. And in the morning, we looked at 15 year history of what had been asked of school districts. And then the afternoon we talked about the ability of the school districts to respond to those mandates. And I will not forget this and I won't mention the names, but I will tell you that this is true. One superintendent from the Chittany County region was very invigorated and enthusiastic. And as we went through the list of the mandates, she said, no problem with that one, no problem with that one, no problem with that one. And literally at the other end of the table, I looked and there was a superintendent who practically had their head on the table. And I said to that person, I said, what's wrong? And he said, I'm observing Elaine, now you know who it was. I talked about their ability to get all this stuff done. She said in my system, we don't have the ability to get any of it done. Now a lot of it had to do with access to resources, the density of the population, what they had for staff, perceptions in the community of what they needed for staff. Was this a rural community? Yeah, as rural as you can get, but a large system. So when you think about the notion of equity, and that came up yesterday, and what you're going to provide to kids in their systems based on the characteristics of those systems, which I think we have a tendency to underestimate, we got a real focus on equity for students. I don't think we are as focused on equity within the systems themselves. And I won't go off on a tangent on that right now, but I will say that challenge around equity is exacerbated in a year where you see 30 school district budget defeats because we've got districts that are going in the long direction in terms of the resources that they need. So when I have a district, sure, but that's really interesting as people maybe you already have that. In fact, what you said about the town's perspective on what the district may or may not need. I'm sure people are going to continue to analyze that third that went down for a long time. There's a lot there. Right, right. So with respect to the Bosie's bill, this was not initiated by the Superintendents Association. It came to my house and I'm the sponsor of the bill. We started to pay attention to it coldly when it came under serious conversation over there. And just like you will have on Friday with superintendent witnesses, they testified over there. And I took note of the witnesses that you have on Friday, and three of them are going to have very specific experience with Bosie's. And I think that this is important too in terms of how you think about this bill. So Brooke Olson Farrell, she lives in New York and she sort of came out of the New York system. She's got a lot of familiarity with Bosie's in New York and how they work. Mike Lighter, who was a superintendent in the greater Lancaster, Pennsylvania area, but is now over here at Harvard, Unified Union School District, he's got familiarity with the Pennsylvania system. And Andy Skarzinski, who was a principal in Rotland and then went over to Wyndham Southeast, Browardville, left as superintendent in Wyndham Southeast and now is employed at a Bosie's down in the Greater New Haven, Connecticut area. I think when they come in on Friday, each speak from their relative perspective. I think the point that I want to make by that is these Bosies derive their shape. And by shape, I don't mean a physical configuration, but I'll speak to that. They're shaped in terms of the services that they provide based on what the needs are, educational, operational, for the school districts they serve. To circle all the way back to the issue of equity, if the district in the Northeast Kingdom that I was referring to had been on the outer ring of Chittenden County, where a superintendent was saying we can perform all this, if there was access to a Bosie's in that region, then you really have the ability to invoke the phrase sort of rising tide floats all boats. Through collaboration, well managed collaboration, concentrated collaboration, I believe that you can get better cost efficiency and you can get better product in terms of the education that you can provide in your system through that collaboration. I don't have a script, so I can't go off script, but I'll tell you what that causes me to think about. Supervisory unions, and some of the conversation yesterday was, are we adding in a extra layer of bureaucracy? I would say if you consider supervisory unions in their current context, that is a very reasonable question. Act 46 was intended to get school district configurations, not create more elaborate supervisory union structures, and the difference is right now we've got districts that serve six, seven towns. It's a single district, one board, one administration, one central office, supervisory unions, which is I would maintain while it's still existence, and the antiquated model may have as many as in the Northeast Kingdom, one school district or supervisory union has 15 boards, hard to operate. If you put a Bosie's in to that system, then it seems like you do have too much bureaucracy and potential for additive cost. If you have a collection of school districts who have a single board and a single superintendent, the notion of collaboration gets that much stronger. The last point I'm making in terms of the overview is that when I think about Bosie's, and I want to speak specifically to some of the components in this bill, one of the things you could gain if these were well operated is an ability to respond to the plethora of new legislation that's passed every year. Because when you think about implementation of any single piece of legislation, for right now there's 56 central offices, superintendents and central offices in Vermont, when you pass legislation, they have to divert their focus to enact that legislation. They've got to deploy staff within their central office. They have to concern themselves with how they're going to follow the law. If you have a Bosie's type structure, then the responsibility for responding to that and supporting school districts and responding to that can be assigned to those Bosies. Can you give us an example? Because the way that we talked about it yesterday was just, I mean, in my mind it's like the perusing power. Maybe you become an expert in some area. I'm just thinking of, or actually we just passed the literacy bill. Is there a way that you see Bosie's helping to implement a bill like that? Yes, I do. And very deep in my testimony here, I'll try not to go on too long. One of the points that came up in the House was a concern that Bosie's would be used to allow the Agency of Education to advocate its own responsibility. It turns to professional learning, right? So to your left, Mr. Chair is Colin Robinson. They talk a lot about Act 173 and what wasn't done as well as it could have been. But if you think about literacy and teacher training as one element, if you think about the ability to provide special services to children within the region itself rather than have to send them away, if you talk about things like purchasing collaboratives, which right now if you ask business managers what the value is in purchasing collaboratives, it's a debatable point based on the efficiency of the collaboratives themselves. Bosie's, and this bill allows for this, has a lot of opportunity for the region, boards, and administrators to make decisions about how they want to deploy their collaboration based on what the pressure points are. So on the issue of application or responsibility, I mean, and I'll comment on this too, right now the Education Delivery System is in a state of flux because the field thinks that the Agency should be responding in one manner and the Agency hasn't responded that way, right? So it's not a secret that there's not a lot of confidence in the Agency right now on the part of the field. The Agency would still have a role and should, but you can imagine if you had these regional collaboratives working well that sort of the closer you get to the school system itself, the more effective your training could be, it would also be, in the case of training, directed by the school districts themselves, not by the Agency. So right now, and I think Jay, who's going to testify after I will, there are effective collaboratives right now like Champlain Valley, its Education Development, right? This the southeastern corner of the state from Hartford all the way down to Brattleboro, they've already formed up a BOCES-like entity. But so the point is, I think there's a lot of utility to this bill if it's implemented well. I think with a state system that has as much diversity and is as challenged as it is right now, I think it would, enabling legislation would be useful when you envision a more efficient and effective structure. There's some specific points in here that I'll refer to though that you might want, if you think it's a good way to proceed, you might want to lay your hands on this bill with regard to improving it. But in terms of the overall context, I think it's a useful piece of legislation and could be beneficial to achieving both responding to the findings and achieving the examples of functions that are articulated on the first four pages of the bill. Mr. Princes, I seem to agree with you that it could be really effective in a good piece of legislation. The only thing that I was thinking about this last night after we talked, and I curious some of your thoughts, there seem to be, and you alluded to, so many moving parts right now. We have a center that's like shaped state board. There's a center who might want to solve the state board. We have people in the other body that might want to go back to a commissioner. We have people who are thinking about consolidation. What I'm wondering is if, in a way, does this fall, I hate the piecemeal piece of all the things I just talked about. That's where I'm struggling. Is there more of an opportunity to take all of these issues out there and really put them together in some way that allow us to take steps forward? Does that make sense? I think there's a zillion little things out there. It makes a lot of sense. And it's rare that you hit the state. I should say, I don't know. We should dissolve the state. I'm just saying. No, no, no. Let me respond with that way. This way. You've got a piece of legislation that was well vetted in the House. I thought the conversations that I watched yesterday were indicative of the fact that you're going to give it the same kind of attention. I think that your decision around this bill ought to consider the question you just asked in terms of moving pieces. I think that something you ought to think about is if you have a bill which is enabling. I'm going to speak to the dates of implementation of this. If you've got something that is going to be construed as useful and you think that changes in the system are going to be uneven in terms of how they take hold, then I think that this would not be a bad piece of legislation to pass to have available to people as the state moves in certain ways in different regions. Now, that doesn't answer the big questions about what's the future of the education delivery system overall. But if you believe that no matter what happened, there's always going to be some number of school districts, like 50 school districts or 40 school districts, and they're going to have the general proximities that they have right now, and you're still going to be asking them to do different things every year, which I would set my last dollar that you will. Then I think that this kind of a collaborative opportunity with structure makes sense. If you said, wow, we really don't want to, we're going to flatten the whole system or potentially go to one school district only, then I think the issue of supporting the schools in that district sort of changes the context. But if we're going to have something that resembles a traditional education delivery system with some number of school districts, with some number of superintendents at central offices, then I think that this is a useful framework to have in place. I took note of the fact that in the findings, they say that Vermont's only one of nine states that have a lawsuit structure right now. That's why I think on Friday you're going to have three different superintendents, one of whom is now in Connecticut talking about what the form is there. One of the challenges that they had in the House Education Committee was Brooke Olt and Ferrell, who is going to testify here on Friday, provided that the oil spill that they're dealing with at school down there takes care of if she can get away. She'll talk about the New York system. So they have different perspectives about how it could work. I think that if you pass enabling legislation, then we'll probably get a Vermont method for how it could work. So I wouldn't, you know, I don't think you're subject to criticism. If you say we're going to wait, but I think that there's some utility to acting on it if you bring yourselves to that place. If you want, I can do it. I'm going to get into a specific point now so I can answer questions generally. I'm going to go through three disciplines. Okay. Well, we have a bunch of witnesses. Okay, not just with Mr. Francis. Okay, two quick questions. You mentioned implementation and you may not be the person to get to this, but what would that look like? I'm so unclear what implementation looks like and who would really be in charge of it. If I'm mad, the next point I was going to make speaks to that question. All right. And then I wanted to ask you a question about supervisory. Okay. So my reading of the bill allows the formers of these BOCES, which are the school districts themselves, to make determinations about the functions of the BOCES within the context of their organization agreements. So it would be the boards of the, so if you took a look at any one of your regions and had a BOCES that was formed up by, let's say, 12 school districts, each school district would have a representative on the board and they would meet as a deliberative body and make decisions about where they were going to focus the BOCES. So the authority rests with the body politic, which is the BOCES system itself. Right now, and there's a reference in section two to formation of a board of cooperative education services shall be designed to build upon geographically focused cooperative regions viewed by Vermont superintendents. Since before I arrived at the superintendent's association in the late 1990s, there were collaborations of superintendents in school districts in five regions of the state. And when the house looked at a BOCES bill, they looked at those five regions because they largely fall around geographical and transportation corridors. So there's the Champlain Valley, who you've met with as a legislator that goes from the Canadian border to Middlebury and over to the spine of the Green Mountains. And then from all the community south of Middlebury all the way down to Bennington or Powell. And then there's the Southeast region, which extends from Hartford all the way down to Bravo. And then you get that map. So those, the testimony yesterday by representative Buss implied that those were not really active entities until the pandemic. They got a lot more active in the pandemic. They were meeting every day. Prior to that, they would meet every month and they would work on issues that were common interest, but they were largely responding to what's happening in the legislature or what's happening, you know, in the collective bargaining arena and less, they focused less on implementation. The notion of the BOCES would beat that up. The region seemed to hold reasonably the reason that I went from five to seven, excuse me, and I had a, well, I discussed that with the committee was when you take a look at any one of the regions and the, the reach, like from the Canadian border to Middlebury, you've got both a long transportation, but also you've got some different community dynamics. So it was my suggestion. They had six, I said, why don't you make seven just because we're not sure when they form up, what the formation will be. So if I may respond, I, so in my mind, as I still try to imagine what this would look like. So school boards are basically as a volunteer position. We know that the trend toward like civic engagement is diminishing over time. I mean, I'm just thinking about myself on a school board, like, where would I get, where would these folks get the time to do what seems like a lot of work. And I'm also wondering if there's also extra work on the superintendent, because I heard you talk about boards and I heard you talk about superintendents. I'm sure, I mean, obviously there's a way to do it because it's being done all over the country, but I'm still having a hard time picturing how we get implemented. Yeah, we have a tough time, Ms. Senator, due to the fact that we've been finding people to run for the legislature. Yeah, so yeah, that's a great question. If you think about how what it both would do, and let's say that you had a focus on purchasing, a focus on local, but collaborative programs for special needs students, and you had an emphasis on improving the training of reading teachers. Okay. You can envision a scenario where you'd have a board of the BOCES that would make a determination that they were going to work on those three things, but the collaboration on each one of those functions, the purchasing piece would go to business managers, every school has one, like, why don't your business managers get together and figure this out? The emphasis on programs for special needs students would go to the special ed directors who currently are searching for programs to put students into, and they would say, let's build a program that looks like this. That, a similar kind of thing is happening between Essex Westford and South Burlington right now with the closure of some of the specialized schools up in Chattanooga County. And on the issue of teacher training, you'd go to the curriculum leaders that will exist still in the school districts because you still have curriculum personnel working within the school district themselves. So I think it's happening organically anyway. It could just be kind of expanding on the already organic actions that are happening. Well, it points people toward a structure where currently no structure exists. But may I just follow up on this? It seems like could there be some conflict then with school boards? In other words, I'm thinking of the teacher training piece or some of these other things. Do you see any possible conflict? I never see any possibility of conflict in any area of my life, including in this building. No, no. Yeah, they're probably so they don't govern any bodies. Yeah. So one of the things I want to talk about is the implementation dates, right? So under the current legislation by January, excuse me, July 1, 2026, school boards are supposed to make a decision. We see value in this and we want to pursue it or we don't. So I can envision a scenario where certain school districts are like, no, we're not going to do it. But other school districts will say they'll look at any one of the areas of opportunity or probably more realistically a combination of those opportunities and say we're going to move in that direction. Now here's a couple of things to ponder. One is the timing. Given the questions that you've all asked yourself about the current state of affairs for public education in Vermont, does it really make sense to ask school districts? We're sitting here. It's almost July 1, 2024. You pass this legislation. It's a real short window in the total scope of things to have people make decisions about whether they want to go there or not. So one of the notes that I have in this testimony is, I think it'd be worthwhile if you are, if you favor this approach to talk to the house and say, if we change that date, which was that data by a year or two, to let the kind of the big questions that you were contemplating settle a little bit more. I would hope they would say, if you want to change that 2027 or 2028 would be okay with that. Because I think that the shake of the delivery system is going to change under what the deliberations that are happening currently. Thank you. That was something I thought of yesterday as well in looking at the effective date. And I think that also kind of gets to the idea of how things are shaping up organically to push it out by a year. And everybody knows that there's this structure that's coming, but it's a little bit down the road. It kind of gives more of a mold for some of the organic interfacing to work with this and get ready for it as it gets to the effective date, if it's pushed for a year. I made a note on page five. Now we're just creating a board of cooperative education services organization, secretary approval, establishment of boards, when the boards of two or more union vote to explore the advisability, I wrote my margin of this is cost benefit analysis. So you would hope that school districts who are contemplating these look at this as a cost benefit analysis, whether it gains them efficiency and economy and improved service by joining of both these versus not joining of both these. I also will say, frankly, that I think some school systems right now are not, this kind of a question posed today would be paralyzing to some districts that wouldn't be able to, they couldn't know what to do. But I think if you gave them, if cost containment and whatever reconfiguration of the system we may see takes place over the next couple of years, they would presumably be better positioned to make decisions about it. Because even though the notion of creating this new structure may be challenging, I think that when you look at the statement of a tent and the kinds of things that you might gain through a bill like this, I think that the efficiencies and economies in a well developed, well implemented system are probably going to materialize. Let me just wrap up with a specific section of this that I'm a little bit confused by that I think would require more work if we're going to proceed on this bill is on page eight. It's the eight section E on page eight. And I'll just read it reads as the agency of education promotion, the agency of education shall promote the use of both these as providers of education services and programs for local school districts and supervisory unions, and shall include consideration of grant applications that include the use of education co-operates for the purpose of procuring services and programs. I was in the House Education Committee when they talked about that language. It made sense to me at the time. I read it many times over and I'm not really certain what it means today. And for starters, and this doesn't really go to what the plain meaning is of it, but I would change the word from promote to something like explain or describe because if you've got objective judgments being made by local school boards with regard to the benefit of the Bosies in their region, I think that they should probably be left to make that determination without promotion by the AOE. Because I think that ultimately the those communities are going to understand how that Bosies could work for them more so than the AOE. And when you promote, you need to promote in general terms. And I think that these service these Bosies are specific operations. They're not general operations. And I think that the second half of that sentence and shall include consideration of grant applications that include the use of co-operates for the purpose of procuring services and programs. I think what's intended there is to say that Bosies can be considered for grant proposals from the agency itself. But I would urge you and I may, you know, maybe it's so simple and I'm just missing a big point, but that's that's a section that I think would be worth getting a little bit more explanation off. Well, the word promote is modally biased. Right. And then it's going to have an effect on who gets grants and that. Yeah. Right. I agree. That's. And then on page 14, that it's the transition report. That was the section where it says honor before July 1, 2026. I wouldn't, you know, because as I already established, I don't like conflicts. I wouldn't, on my say so, change that to 2027 or 2028, but I might send the word emissary to the House Education Committee and ask if they, if they're like, would they be amenable to of later day in order to let whatever's happening with the system happy, you know, for you asked districts to make those moves. And that so in general, I think it will be useful. I totally appreciate the fact that you've got an interest and concern about the overall state of the system. Related to that, if I may, what if we worked a future legislature and I think this is coming, given everything out there, we move towards having fewer schools. Right. You know, we have well known the story for some last night also, certain school, I don't know where it is, seven students. And is this in any way would it prevent or armed? Would it sort of get in the way of closing school? I mean, how do you see that interaction? I think the services are district specific. So it's not and the and the school issues are got to be inter districts, right? You know, they're going to make considerations. Supervisory unions are a little different because you've got, you know, a lot of schools, a lot of school districts have one governing structure. But you know, I do know there's a lot of conversations going on and moving to this committee about what the future is. And if if you're going to reduce costs or the rate of increase of costs, then you need to look at what the major cost centers are. And the major cost centers are personnel, 80% of the cost of operating school systems is a personnel and another big cost center in the number of facilities that you operate. And when you've got an analysis of the facilities in the state that we have in this state with a large percent of them approaching their useful life, you've got an opportunity to make decisions. And I would have to qualify our hard decisions because this system is what it is because there's been a lot of I, you know, many instances justifiable protectionist mentality around what it is we're going to retain. And the retention always goes to human resources and the physical buildings. We also, as I alluded to in my testimony, we're additive in terms of the requirements that we put on schools. So at the same time that we lament the number of schools that we operate and the number of personnel that we employ, we're adding things to them, both in the educational sphere and in the human service sphere. You know, and we could, I could talk about that and you can too, what schools are doing and expanding mission. But I think that Ray McNulty, who was the superintendent down in Wyndham Southeast and also up in Inesburg and Franklin, he used to say, you can have anything you want, you just can't have everything you want. And that's, I think that that is the place we are in right now, collectively. Senator Gillett. Did I hear you suggest you may not have, I could be way out of base that both these could potentially replace supervisor units? No, I didn't say that. I read between some of them. Yeah, I mean, so the, their problem is the supervisory union superintendents who are watching my testimony right now. Supervisory unions are not, among the features of our delivery system, supervisory unions generally are less efficient because they've got a lot of boards with making a lot of decisions that are not necessarily consistently one another. And I think that both C's are, it's a different animal of sorts because you're not concerning yourself with the governance of the entire array of school districts. You're basically saying the school districts are going to govern themselves, but for these areas that we are specifically going after efficiency and effectiveness on, because, because we see the benefit of collaboration, we're going to collaborate and then we're going to put in the hands of both the board and professionals like a really focused pursuit of those things. It's not a governing structure. No, it's a service entity. Got it. That's actually really helpful to say it that way, service agency or entity. Yeah. It's like, what can we collaborate on? It's like a co-op. It's, you know, it's got the same sort of principle as a co-op, except it's not, it delivers services rather than goods. Just for clarity. So both C's versus, I call them super unions, but like a super supervisor union, you think that your, your recommendation is to leave super supervisory unions alone, create BOCs, let them do different one doing governance, the other doing maximizing efficiency on services. Is that kind of the approach? Yeah, I was concentrating on you talking about super supervisory unions and it, my brain almost disengaged at that point because I was, what I was, I was recollecting Act 46. So one of the purposes of Act 46 was to see supervisory unions merged into school districts and a lot of them did. Like, you know, I, I don't have the number off the top of my head, but we made tremendous progress in going from a supervisory union model to a school district model under Act 46. You then have a single governing board and you get to make decisions about how you're going to deploy the resources of that school district across the schools in that district. So I, I'm sorry, but I watched you there. What was the second half of your question? So where put your efforts, right? So consolidating supervisory unions or BOCs, right? And essentially have them serve two different functions, right? But in parallel. Right. If there was a, if there was a notion that we were going to take existing school districts and put them into a newly formed supervisory union where you would have a multitude of school districts or more than one school district with each with their own governing body and one central office superintendent and I'd say don't do that because I think that it complicates the governance picture and it complicates the life of the central office, which is now responsible for managing or overseeing not only two districts, but also two governing boards. So I wouldn't do that. I would, I would rather see, and I think that, you know, I'm speaking for myself now, but I think the association would definitely stand behind that if there was going to be further consolidation. I would say continue the Ag 46 approach of combining existing school districts into a single school district. And I'll speak specifically about that because it's been stated publicly in the conversations that the House Education Committee is having. Four years ago, the three superintendents in Addison County, so Addison Central, Addison Northeast, shooting Addison Northwest and non-aid school district, they have been with Dan French and they said we can see the trajectory of enrollment in Addison County. Our schools are all shrinking. We think that there ought to be a state-directed initiative to combine those three districts into a single district. And it was in the post-Act 46 era and a lot of blood was spilled over Act 46 and the response came back that we don't see any political appetite to do that. My point is you're going to get more efficient systems. If you merge districts into a single district with one governing body, then you would be to take any configuration of either existing school districts and supervisory unions and making bigger entities. But the concept of a vote sees if you have a larger supervisory union. Couldn't they deal with both governance and services? Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's a great question. It depends on where the voter comes in, right? So right now, in Vermont, we maintain a historic pattern of everybody votes on select poor school boards and so on and so forth. That's what we are as our culture, our history. Both sees, well, and despite the history, the complexity of the system has only expanded in terms of special program for kids, the way you try to deploy educationally. So the both sees response, and I think it probably has proven to be useful in other states, has been we're going to allow collaborative among existing districts to make decisions about what types of services they need that they can gain efficiency through the services, specifically, not necessary through governance. So I wouldn't dispute the theory. I just don't think that it's been commonly applied any place. I think it's keep the districts as sort of their own historic political or municipal entity in place and then help them collaborate in terms of the kinds of services that they, as they evolve are going to need. So I think the two, I appreciate and respect that point. I think the two concepts are different. So the old adage of which you want it bad, get it back. What was the first part? Wish it wanted bad. If you want something really bad, well, if you get it really bad, meaning that it's not fully involved, it's out there. So we have jail. So we have four weeks pushing hard, how's did a great job? They set us up and they kind of teed up a nice fly ball and we're trying to figure out, you know, we're catching where to throw the ball back. So with only four weeks left, yesterday, there was a conversation about, well, there's a study necessary. This is complicated. There's a study, a different approach. Same premise, same concept, same thoughts, all the, you know, the same people engaged. Is a study potentially the right way to go? Or should we finish this in four weeks and launch it? Your perspective? Yeah, I mean, it's my opinion. I, you know, I, you don't have studies up on that shelf. You've got statutes. You could have studies, you could find, you could flow those shelves with studies that have amounted to nothing. You know, I'm not trying to be cynical, but you could. I think that, well, let me say this, I do not, I know you won't give me, nor do I want responsibility for you acting for sympathy this week. Thanks for the testimony. That's not what's voted on a committee. I don't want you to do that because I think your process is really, really good. The intent section and the example of function section on this bill is, as well as, as good as I've seen in any bill I've ever read. I mean, it really goes to the point of what it is these policies can do. I think the better question in my mind is, what's the effect of passing this bill on a system that's under so much stress and pressure right now? True. And they change. Right. We know it's going to change. Right. But I don't think having the BOCES bill enabling legislation available for people to go get when you and they figure it out because the need for specialized placements for students, for professional learning around things like literacy, for collaborating to utilize one person in a position that will serve eight school districts, when those school districts might, and they would be inclined to do this, go get one to try to go find one for one of those people, whoever it is for the district themselves. I think that that is additive in terms of the cost structure. So if our main theme right now is to get a handle on cost and efficiency, which it always is, but we also contradict ourselves by saying, go do this too. I think that in terms of useful bills over time to support the delivery of the public education system in a more cost effective manner, I think this has promise. Senator Lames, then we should price. We have other witnesses. So I just want to make some comments. First of all, this may be a stop gap, but we've got a problem. And I think eventually the problem is going to go away. If we fix all the systems within the state of the line, the government, eventually people are going to want to move. So our diminishing student population could be just a temporary thing. So as far as the, you know, maybe as a stop gap or interim fix, we got to start thinking about merging other schools and districts, but we don't have a point. We need a vision for education in the state of Vermont. And both see right term, because that's such a New York term. But you know, that's going to be a part. And I really appreciate your sage advice and insight because you've been there for a long time. But you know, I think that we need to have a plan that says, okay, this is our situation right now. So we're going to deal with it. But eventually, in any event, you do a decision support template, the education population starts to change. Then we have a plan. We don't have a plan. You know, we're looking at a new education secretary attention. Right. So what's the issue with the term OCS? I think it's too generic. It needs to be more specific. What are we intended to do? You know, we can come up with any accurate in New York state and other states, it tends to be its hedge offer, CTE status. Right. And historically, it doesn't, people don't use it in a thoughtful way in other states. Maybe that's, yeah, I mean, I haven't had that experience, but I believe you. It's not that system in New York state. But we have a unique situation in the log. And whatever we call this, whatever we want this to be, should happen to our own brand. My switching out, Colin, go ahead and Okay, I mean, I'm not saying is there something special about that thing? I was just invited. Oh, yeah. We seem upset. Thank you for the record, Colin Robinson, Vermont, NEA. And I appreciate the conversation yesterday, the conversation you just said with Jeff Francis. I'll keep my remarks relatively, relatively brief. So I wanted for us organization, this wasn't something that we were familiar with until the bill emerged. But what was interesting, a year ago, we had an annual meeting of our members. And a year ago, our members passed a resolution saying, and specifically from special education teachers saying, we have so many students right now with significant needs, and we're not able to find places for them to get the support. We need to do something to address this challenge so we can support students, support their learning and help them to integrate back into our schools as full learners and citizens. And as soon as I saw this bill, I was like, this is the opportunity to do that. Because as was mentioned earlier, you've seen some of these nascent collaborations between Essex Westford and South Burlington. But we're hearing it from members all across the state. And I think you've heard from various constituencies about this need in the moment, which I think is indicative of all the needs across the system for districts to find ways to address complex challenges that they're all facing, that they might not be able to address in the most impactful, most efficient, most effective way in their own school district or supervisor. So that was our entry point about the kids and about how to make most effectively meet their needs. I think as Jeff said, the findings I think articulate the value of this and the value proposition of it, I think it also articulates the vision. And I think some of the conversations we're just having about what is the vision for the future of our education system? I think it is one that is rooted in deep collaboration across communities, across SUs and SDEs, about finding, cultivating that shared vision and mission across those geographic spaces, where as you see in the map in front of you, there is a historic connection. But informality, while important, doesn't always crystallize decision making, doesn't crystallize shared mission and vision for how to support our students. And I think that's the promise and hope of this. I also think that, as was mentioned earlier, there are, it also creates space for communities to elevate conversations beyond the students in their town, or the students in their district. Say, I actually want to make sure the students in the district serve by Wyndham Central or served as well as Wyndham Southeast. And the kids of Rundleman Town and Rundleman City are served just as well as each other. And I think by regionalizing some of the scope of how we support our students, it can hopefully also kind of reorient how we think about how we support it. Don't think it could do that. I mean, I had so many. I'm a total optimist. Yeah, that's good. I just thought 46 would get some more of that happening. And so maybe this will, maybe this will get people, you know, I can see where conversations can be, will be had around purchasing. But yeah, you could see then if the questions of literacy and questions of, you know, where's their online language teacher pop up. Yeah. Yeah. I think I agree. Now you can see some of that stuff out. Well, and here's another, it would be great. And as we stitch all the conversations that are going on right now together, you can see how this can become a tool for effective discussion and implementation and application of various issues. Case in point, the one I've thought about a lot beyond supporting the students that I described earlier is school facilities and school construction. Right. We've all read the report. We know we have significant needs. We know we have schools that are in various states of disrepair or need for sustainable futures. And at the same time, undertaking the process of building, studying all the things that go into figuring out if you're going to build a new school or are you going to do it with newer and fewer or what that's going to look like. That requires an actual human or humans dedicated to that task to make sure that that project is done on effective efficiently, meeting, reflecting the students and community needs. And to me, that's also a perfect place for both seas. Right. One district might not be able to hire that construction project manager for their, you know, one construction project, but maybe a both seas hires that person in service of their member districts to help facilitate those complex operational decisions across several US user SDs. Right. It's a really good example. It's really fascinating. I'll be curious on Friday if some of those states have had that kind of thing. But yeah, I think it's a real possibility for sure. And the final thing I just want to, so that's all we think there's value here. We think there's opportunity. Nothing of grand substance to add to what Jeff Francis spoke to. I did just give the conversation yesterday around page 13 on the bill goes into issues related to employment, the pension systems, et cetera, et cetera. I just want to flush that out a little bit textually for you all. Basically what we're doing there is these both seas are setting up the potential for a new public and public school employer. And all that's doing is mapping current collective bargaining statute and pension statute to these new public school employer constructs. So the organizing statute in there was kind of curious little factoid. Teachers who choose to get together for union do so under the teacher labor relations law. And that would allow teachers, should they so choose to have that right? It doesn't compel anything. It doesn't require, but if teachers who work for most of these want to, they could. Interesting. Also, if you're a school support staff member and unlicensed professional school districts, you're actually covered by the municipal labor relations law. So that's why reference is municipal. So that maps it over for, say, you know, if there was a janitorial consortium that emerged across the policies, you know, it would give those folks the ability, if they so chose to, chose to go through the normal processes through that. And it's the same thing with the VISTAs, which is a grant teacher, retirement system, and MIMERS, which is the municipal system. The municipal system is the one for unlicensed school staff. And VISTAs, the teacher system is for all licensed teachers, including superintendents for schools, et cetera, et cetera. So it's purely sort of conforming and kind of mapping those over. But I just wanted to sort of lush that out. Yeah. Thanks. Boris, this is for you all. Sorry, sounds like it's on. We didn't. So can I ask you some of the same questions? Still a job? Sure. Bosie's versus SuperUnits. Where should the effort be applied if we're going to apply only one, we're going to pull only one lever? Yeah. I mean, complex systems are identification complex and take a lot of time. And I think that's what Jack was referring to, kind of to sort of figure out what the future looks like. And I think that's what Jack was referring to around the conversation with AFPSEX. I think that the potential with Bosie's is to facilitate those regionalized conversations that perhaps, at a future point in time, lead to something like you're saying. Given the history of Vermont's education system, given our deep commitment to our local public schools and citizen and community input in those. This is a very logical and impactful step that might perhaps lead to that conversation or not. I don't, again, going back to that 46th conversation, which we quite frankly weren't as deeply engaged in as the superintendent school boards or principals. Those conversations literally tore communities apart. Yeah. And I think that this creates a space where some trust can be built, where collaboration can be developed, and perhaps a vision for the future can emerge. Okay. So, good. Yeah. Of course. Second question. Same as I asked, Jeff, study versus implementation. Study versus, you know, pause, study. I know I'm asking for it. Okay. From the end, yeah. Okay. So pause versus study, pause versus four weeks, pull, ever, and launch. I think what's exciting about this opportunity is just that it's an opportunity. It doesn't require anything. I think we have 41 other states that we know who have gone down this path. And I'm sure that some places have implemented it with incredible efficacy in other places. Perhaps there's been more of an ebb and flow. At the end of the day, they existed 41 other states because they, I presume, work, you know. And so I think creating what has to do with this bill will create the opportunity for that move forward now. I don't know that anything would necessarily, we've learned anything new from a study at this particular moment that would better inform the efficacy or opportunity or possibility of this policy that we change for now until January. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna have a job. Oh, Jeff Francis. I like that. So, so both of us said for the record, both of these responsibilities, tied of theoretical both of these responsibilities versus AOE responsibilities. And I'll just kind of like focus this on logistics, you know, supplies, requisitions, that kind of thing. Do you have a thought on whether there should be AOE responsibility versus a regional post use? Is there any kind of any kind of feedback? And if I may, just because it's in the history, we did have a good conversation about should it be an arm of the agency, but you know, the purchasing stuff. Sure. You were here. You know, I mean, again, I'm not an expert in state government, but I believe that procurement for various things goes through building and general services. And so even within state government, there is a particular, you know, I don't think AOE is purchasing its own toilet paper for example, I think it's probably going to be GS. You know, the one thing that gives me pause on kind of elevating up the AOE, and I think we saw this with again, I was convinced of this better than I can, SSDMS, the shared data management system. There was a vendor that was selected by the AOE. It ended up not being a vendor that worked well, and it caused a whole story history of kerfuffles and all the way. And so I think what is maintained with the Bosie structure is that local connectivity, even if it's a regionalized connectivity, that I think could get a little muddy if it were kind of brought up to AOE. I think collaboration between the Bosies and AOE obviously should be should be deep and lost. But I think when it comes to kind of the nimbleness and the nuance of needs, I think you're going to be able to be more responsive to that at the Bosie level. Senator Blaner has a question. This is for you. I'm thinking, you know, I like to build, we set policy, we come and go, I mean, two years potentially. So where is the continuity? You know, because I'm going to use, I'm going to use Act 217 as an example. Okay. You know, we are all dealing with something that we didn't even know was going to happen. So if we put this implementation data out, two years from now, where is the continuity to make sure that this doesn't die in the dull? Yeah, it's a good question. I think having that data out, ledge council, others will sort of keep this committee, whatever its format is, abreast the agency of educational kind of will keep its eye on it as well. Superintendents to see all those groups will work to make sure that implementation is ready by 2028. What if 808 doesn't like it? And so who's going to shepherd this thing through? Yeah, so I think that's a good question. I think, excuse me, generally groups like superintendents association, groups that it will really impact school board association, others will sort of be of our important people to touch base with during the process. And I think without a doubt whether AOE likes or not, they're going to have to follow the letter of the law, as well as respond to any concerns out there in the field if it's not being implemented. Yeah, but no, that's a good question. It's always that sort of two years. What's what's going to happen? I think I'm the only one here that is here for life. But thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you all. Thank you for the questions. All set. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good afternoon. For the record, Chief Executive Director of the Vermont Principal Association. I'm trying to not hit on the things that we're already done by chapter column. First of all, I'll say I think it's time that Vermont has a cooperative educational service agency. I did submit some written testimony, but I'm not going to follow that. I think it doesn't make sense to be looking at that this time. I did want to say that in section two, there's some comment about cost benefit analysis. I just want to say whatever process there is or that should be as simple as possible. So if there's testimony around that, sometimes people see what you're writing, especially there are these 12 resource systems and just say, we don't have time to do this. So we want to make it as simple as possible for places like that. To do that analysis. To do that analysis. Yeah, really simple. And we'd like the idea of encouraging the Bolsey system and checking in a couple of years to see how well it's going, what I'm not before doing it. And then deciding, does it need to be expanded? The N80 membership in some areas might be a possibility. Senator Williams mentioned about population concerns. So in 1997, we had 126,000, 127,000 kids. And that's before we had 3k kids in most of our buildings. And now we're around 24,000 kids if you count the kids. So in the timeline, it doesn't look good. We could be in the high 60s, low 70s in another decade. So I'd much more, I would love to see us have a problem. But oh, are we going to get through it? It's an issue. So what can we do systemically? Senator can't be a doctor before. So our tracking families here and having people stay here. One of the number one things that tracks it was our really new school's course. And along with that, of course, for the housing thing, it's like you're all the time teachers that are turning house jobs to the end, so I just want to share that with you. And the next thing to see after whenever we can get our heads around the timeline is how many people saw during the pandemic exactly, how many families, what folks are receiving around the climate. I think the plastic load, it's amazing what's happening along the coast of Massachusetts. Prices dropping and houses close to the water. People are heading to different states. So are we going to have that? Yeah, never. I think that's Senator Williams' point. Yeah, and when we first visited Syria, I've just seen this trend now for two and a half decades. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the demographics don't look good. Yeah. You know, when we look at our demographics in Vermont, our 1944 year old population is our smallest population. Percentage-wise, in terms of its percentage. We're really interested in how that's scary. Because those are the main debates, and we need more of them. So I do have that concern. I'd like to check, for instance, the comments about resources and equity in the system level. I do think we've done a pretty good job developing an educational funding model that is probably the most equitable in the nation. And it has studies that show that over and over again with Act 16 and Act 68, and the way that we try to fund people or people spending. But we still have resource-wise teachers and administrators, salary-wise major differences from community to community, and our ability to provide resources for some kids and some students still have a long ways to go. So that's a whole line of that. The voluntary system, like Olsey's, and I totally agree by the way of saying, yeah, we got to go with that. I was a teacher at Albert Olsey. What was the first part of your education? Yes. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Yes. Or entities or whatever. Yeah. And make sure you get very assertive and appropriate to the center. And let me give you an example. So I think about what I was a superintendent for in the county. A model like this could really provide economy and scale. And working at a county level was here for superintendent sharing services. And what I started thinking about was, when I left there seven years ago, it was just when we were starting to really have the issues where kids that used to have, like, workers come in from like an ancient county being a Howard Center. But in Franklin County, it was a county mental health. They would have people come in and provide extra support for these kids that needed it. Those kids now, the kids are so much more in need of those kids over that. And schools are experienced in this all the time. And yeah, we have whole places here in the month of Sunday. So if you get together some superintendents, it's the two lawyers that are deciding, you know, to be able to build their own school or own program using the existing building to service 20, 30, 40 students. And I'm going to show you the Franklin County, for example. And our system, as opposed to trying to send kids out, it's probably an economy to scale that you can save. This local school district of Berkshire County, the local school district of Berkshire County, but if you put all these county, all these schools becoming together, that could happen. It's also going to be a thing to know if you were a teacher then. We had to take a link, Daniel, think in the right. Did you hear about that? Mm-hmm. Well, that was an example of where districts got together. Essex set it up. Stress was going to pay money to it. And brought in an actual speaker. And he talked about education and innovation and things like that. We could do that for things like greed. You know, we could have groups get together and say, okay, what's the best training we're going to really provide for our T3 teams? Yeah. Let's see how all the three K3 teachers in this whole center go. And let's provide high quality professional learning for all the K3 teachers in reading instruction. And let's do it together and partner. And I think there's ways that your benefits economy needs to scale. Thank you. A couple more thoughts. I hear I'm moving the dates back. Effective dates are corresponding dates. We'll wait for that. And I agree with the one question I was going to comment on that. I had a thought about points that culminate in our regard to retirement pensions and protecting employee rights. The VDA fully supports the categories of employees that may have moved or may move from the school district that full sees. And it wants those employees' employment rights to be protected. One of the areas that there was a pushback in ACT-26 is some places where some people use that opportunity to potentially say now that you're becoming a new district, teachers might move some rights. And there's lots of anger and more of a sense we shouldn't go down that road and die at the end. And then lastly, a supervisor union did it for the truth. What? And we're years behind that. Did it for the truth? Well, where we were, I was working, we were able to essentially came up with a new master's degree and I'll teach you about how it was. But I don't know if that was true everywhere. And we weren't closely with our union to make sure that that was the case. No, I didn't think so. I know there was a place where a lot of people thought that they were lost, security or jobless. And that shouldn't happen. We have 800,000 teachers on provincial lists. So teachers that are already experienced, that's very willing to lose those folks over things like that. They're not over. And the other part of that support was unions. How do we move in the Constitution in our states? I'm not a big believer in the tiredness of the Federation. And to me, that's the difference. But the support of the union is like the tiredness of the Federation. You can all participate in it if you want to. But it doesn't really have a lot of authority. Or it's a school district that doesn't have authority. Where a supervisor union makes sense, the reason we're moving to that model, I don't know, I don't know, like the 1930s or whatever, but because as transportation came into being, they realized some of these services that needed to be provided at our school are just so long to provide. So let's have a supervisor union. That's not what one superintendent will not oversee yet. They'll take care of negotiations. Eventually, they decided we'll have a business manager that will help build budgets for each of the school districts because we don't have the expertise in every school. And that's talked about history. And we're with a lot of change. I think it's Act 153 where special educators became district employees and parents became district employees. And all I hear of that was all around the same. And that's what's for Reggie. It's not a bossy one. It is bossy like. And it's both. Here's the difference. In bossies, I don't have Act 153. We are agreeing to articles of agreement. Our three supervisor unions, three of us are joining together and we're setting up these three areas that we're working on. We decided it's going to be Thursday, K-3 teacher training. It's going to be special education accommodations for students of certain diagnosis and otherwise be sent out of the state. And it's going to be professional learning for a more willing to teach a system to pick us up. And then we go to members of agreement. We have the board of members of each of our boards and it's going to overseas us and we share our resources and we hire those employees that are going to do that and they are employees of our new entity. And that's essentially what it would look like from my perspective. Does that make any more clear about that whole thing? I don't know if we can actually do any of those issues for the next one or two years. But not Victor. He's asking. So far. That's what I said. I'm a two-toned post-heuer assistant for a union or a larger supervisory union. You know, what's your thought on the appropriate approach? I personally did not take the hand of supervisory unionist period and I definitely not hand it to a larger student. Okay, so I'm going to have supervisory districts with one board to the district. In 2005 or 2006, just in the room, we as a superintendent had a position paper that said we think the best strategy would be all the supervisory unions in the state and they would have single districts. And hopeful legislation out. 83? 83, you're going to be throwing P1,000 million out of the stuff in LLS. Came up with a compromise which was 883 which didn't make it all the way through but eventually kind of led to Act 46. Act 46 was basically a compromise. But not much even at the end. I always have you think this is a bad list. Thank you very much. Ms. Zimmerman, I don't want to cut you short. Do you think you can? Five minutes is all I think in the future he will absolutely have you first. He's not bored. Just reminding you. Perfect. What's that? All right. Ms. Zimmerman from the School Board Association. I have testimony in the last been said. It was hard writing testimony because I knew this conversation would evolve from a school board's perspective and there's added oversight. They make it into the bell through audits, and more reports, quarter of the reports, potential representation of the ability to designate appropriate representation on our reports. So we're fine with that. Timelines quite honestly from the school board's perspective, the heavy lift is going to be it's just a note is going to be on the administration. You know, I just think in terms of like kind of operationalizing this, the superintendent is going to have to work with the board chair, come up with a plan. It won't be too dissimilar probably from like in Act 46 and sort of those exploratory conversations. There's going to have to be special meetings. There's going to have to be everything that a school board does to consider this going to have to happen at the meeting, right? So there's going to have it's going to have to be given to the annual meeting. There will be some special meetings on this. So the timeline will be what the timeline will be from our perspective. But if we have the administrative arm saying timeline should probably be pushed out, I think that's fine too. So that's what I have to say on that. Center support is? Yeah, we are supported though. And then I would say like I find home through our resolutions because we've explained to you before Resolutions started this foundation for all of our work here and our members want to ensure equitable access for our students and she cost-effect medicine. Question for all four of you not to answer right now but you can ruminate on this a little bit. Mr. Francis likes to talk about the additive work that we do here which is absolutely right. If we are to implement this, what is what if anything is there that you might be able to take away? That could be helpful. It doesn't mean answer right now but it's just something that I was thinking about. Just to simplify. Maybe like easier. Okay. I'm sorry, are we out? Yeah, I did, if I could, thank you Cara. I actually want to go back to the comment that Jay made in regards to his words, manatee, wondering what your thoughts were there and why you, you know, what, wondering what your thoughts were. What are on your mind? The only thing I was saying is that a lot of times we, we had Janicles for the record, the Royal Principal Association, a lot of times we put forth ideas that don't ever fit in because nobody takes advantage of that. And it's just something I think that we need to think of as moving forward. And I'm not saying necessarily it needs to be the OCS model or SCE, but at some point, at some point, some people are having some hard decisions in the city about what's the right size for a school, what's the right size for a district or a system, what's the right size for the number of students that we should have in the class, and what steps do we need to take them to the right size given the number of students that we have. And I think that's going to come down to nobody wants to close their own school and nobody wants to make those tough decisions for our communities. I think at some point, the General Assembly is going to get the pleasure of trying to make those tough decisions. I just agree with what Mr. Janicles was saying. I think sometimes we need these conversations to communities they can really care people and, and neighborhood us apart. I think they are very contentious, very personal. We all know when it comes to talking about your own kids, you're just not in a space to be very detachment and logical. So there's that piece of it. I also think, to your point, we have to make some decisions. And I know people want to get re-elected, so they don't want to antagonize their voters. And yet, that's where the hard work is, and that's, I couldn't agree with you more. I think people are going to have to have courage going really forward. And some, you know, I can imagine all the legislature ever said having to debate for hours on school sites or proceeding in a classroom. I don't see that kind of thing happening. I mean, it's sort of, you know, maybe, but tricky. And I'm not even going to anger people. I'm talking about the research that's out there and what is the role and the responsibility of the legislature in terms of class size given. We don't want to industrialize education. We want to have a range of kids out there that are in a range of sort of needs and are going to fit into different spots. I mean, maybe somebody will say, hey, all classes have to be a certain size, or this is, you know, but yeah, it'll be interesting. Senator Williams. And I'm just wondering, how are the kind of what I'm only doing very much today. That's not where I came from. But, you know, as long as people are being taxed and having big property taxes, 18.5% of the sports state education system, they're not saying. And so until we move on to the different way of life on education, we're going to, we're going to have to go outside. This didn't remind me of any final thoughts on this. Okay, we're going to take 10 minutes and we'll come back and jump into school construction. Thank you all very much. We're going to want to take this off. Welcome back to Senate Education. I'm going to get some juice in here. First, Representative Conlon, H871. This is an act relating to development of an updated state aid to school construction program. The floor is yours. If you can give us a little overview and then we're going to switch to Edge Council. Representative Peter Conlon, chair of the House Education Committee. H871 basically continues the work that the last task force iteration did and also sort of gets things going to lay the groundwork for the program. So just a little bit of background on the task force, this last four round, it basically got a late start during the flooding, the obligations in the Charterer's office, obligations at the AOE, and it ended up really being a bit of an unwieldy committee in order to find sufficient amount of time to meet for long periods to take on big topics. So it did not produce, what's called a fully baked proposal on school construction with legislature. And it's also, frankly, pretty complicated thing to do. But so just to go through the bill quickly, it starts off to have the AOE put together and create a similar to these master plan grant programs. One of the things the task force 2023 thought about was eligibility to qualify for state aid. And that really we want every school district to do a thoughtful plan of their future based on needs, demographics, school building condition, and all of that. But understanding that a true facilities master plan is expensive, it could really be a burden for a lot of school districts. I was chair of our school district when we went through one, I think we spent $230,000. That includes robust public engagements, those sorts of things. So anyway, part of this is there's no money attached, but it's to get the facilities master grant program set up, organized, AOE would take that on. They are fully on board. They want to make it as sort of transparent, plug-in play as possible where it's like, everything's on a number, very little, no narrative, that sort of thing. But so everybody should have an understanding of how they would qualify and would they qualify? When we've been talking with the chair of approach here, one of the things that we're going to be pushing for are certain positions in AOE. Does AOE have a construction that's maybe is designated to remind me or a team? No, they have one person at one person. Yeah, it was last thing I was seeing. He looked at four doors down from me. Oh, John's, I think it is. But anyway, Richard. Richard, sorry about that. Thank you. Very embarrassing. But he has a lot going on right now, but in terms of setting this up, he and the director of operations, Jill Briggs Campbell, have said, we can make this work. We can make this happen. So there's no additional position in the house past big bill that has anything, no additional position for this. Correct. Okay. Thank you. However, that then falls to the work of part two of the bill, which is really to create a legislative task force of six, three from now is three from the Senate, one member, the Secretary of Education, are designee to essentially operate as one of our committees, take testimony, and just start making the hard decisions so that at the end of their work, legislative language and valid report will be presented. And this lays out, it's not really kind of lays out the issues for them to wrestle with. It seems like, okay. Let's say we have a funding program and it works similar to Rhode Island. Are we going to provide incentives or bonuses for, and what should they be and what is going to be top priority? Is it newer and fewer? Or is it health and safety? Or is it energy efficiency at level? The funding, the overall big bonding scheme is pretty well kind of laid out. Needs some polish, but the task force looked at the Rhode Island model especially. The treasurer's office modeled it. And in order to have the state's bonding capacity absorb, what's called a fraction of the level of need, but it's still a high level, there is a methodology which, let's say $10 million of dedicated revenue could create a half a billion dollars in bonding capacity for the state. And that's based on a program where the state doesn't just hand you 30% for your project total, it pays, it could reduce 30% to your annual cost of the bond. So that's why it needs bonding and payment plans. So anyway, the other half is really about that group and its work to come back to the legislature with those hard decisions, as well as JFO modeling revenue options to fund that, as well as sort of saying, okay, what do we want to go for? Feth is sort of walking through all that item by item. Can you ask you a question? Yeah, go. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, go for it. Is the treasurer in vote in this bill not okay? No, it's really meant to be beginning this size, just taking testimony, making the decisions and moving forward so there's a product at the end. Right, because I think we sort of know all the issues and now it's really the decision that has to happen. Great. Going to have to wait till after the election. I know, but yeah. Why? Well, the fact is, why? Oh yeah. Okay, go ahead. Representative Powell. So really, it lays out the duties of the task force. It talked very briefly about the agency of education and buildings and general services doing some work together on a list of approved contractors that let's say engineers and architects that pursue the work. Again, the decisions that they've made on the task force. One of the things that this new group we need to come up with is what's the governing body of this? So a lot of other states have a completely separate department, commission, whatever of paid staff people who do this work. They're on the ground helping schools come up with their best proposals. They're evaluating proposals, making decisions on who qualifies for what using formula and then rewarding the dollars. Do you think we should move in that direction? Well, I think that there's a lot of support for the idea that it'd be independent body outside of the AOE, not having to share staff with the AOE, something dedicated to that. The only reason I ask is it could be something that we, if you think it's heading our, if we're heading in that direction, I'm sure the Appropriations Committee could help us prepare for heading in that direction in terms of putting money aside. Yeah, I mean, I think that that would be great. It can also be funded for whatever dedicated revenue stream can define. So let's just say they're sports betting and sports betting generated $50 million a year. We said that revenue is to be used for school construction. That could also cover the cost of a standard level work. Worksheets. One word, both Cs. That's it. That's it. That's it or something. I mean, the level of, this requires a level of expertise, statewide level of expertise. Yeah. If the goal is to help schools come up with successful processes and proposals, it needs great strong expertise at the same level helping them out. So that is really the general overview and let's counsel have the details for you to go through the deadline by then. But I'll stick around for them. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you guys are done. I think I'm done. We're going to show you your committee's done. Yes. Oh, great. Okay. All right. Can I switch? Two of us. You guys up the floor. Two. As long as it passed. As long as it passed. Okay. Great. We're touching a little bit of that later today too. Chris, that's one section. You said James. Good afternoon, Beth. Thanks. You guys are on the legislative council. We are going to walk through age 871 as passed by the house. How are we on time? No, I'd love to be able to do it in about 20 minutes. You think that's possible or no? Yes. Okay. Well, we can go a little. That's not your question. If we don't ask questions, definitely. Well, you know what we're transitioning right into out here is your time with us. So we have really 30 minutes. Yeah. Okay. So section one of the bill is creating the facilities master plan grant program. And just to orient you, this is actually section one is actually proposing to flunk the master plan grant program into title 16. And then you'll see that there's a repeal fund set that would take it out of title 16 when it's no longer useful. But session law is always hard to find. And the sunset is in five years. So if folks are going to be relying on this legislation for several years, let's put it in title 16. So the intent of the grant, the master plan grant program, there's some legislative intent here, and that is that the grant program will enable supervisory unions and independent career and technical education districts to develop a supervisory union level vision for all school buildings that meets the educational needs and goals of the supervisory union. So I think that's an important framework to have is that the grant program is going to be on the SU level, not district by district. The goal of a facility master plan shall be to facilitate an evaluation of the capacity of existing facilities to deliver on identified 21st century educational goals. And it will also enable and require SUs to engage in intentional and robust conversations with a larger community that will hopefully lead to the successful passage of bonds needed to support the renovation or construction needs of the SU. It is the intent of the general assembly that awards shall be granted in accordance with this section in any manner that allows a maximum number of SUs independent career and technical education districts to successfully complete facilities master plans. So this intent language is important for several reasons. It is your intent, right? It's a general focus intent, but the grant program as we go to page two, you'll see it's administered by AOE and there is a lot of discretion here. So we're this the intent section of giving AOE some parameters within which to administer the program. So we're on page two, we're going to start off. Yep, please. Got to have a question. So this page one line 13, 21st century educational goals, who sets these goals? Is that a vision? So that is not a defined term. I believe it is a term that the education community uses quite often. And I will not be the best person to speak to that, but I believe it is a term of our that my guess is everyone sitting behind me uses. I think we should pull it apart really. In fact, it really our conversation gives some clarity to it. So on page two, line one, we're going to start with the definition section. So anytime you see the word supervisor opinion, it also means supervisory districts and independent career and technical education districts. So we don't have to repeat all three of those terms throughout the whole section. So subsection C, this is establishing the grant program. There is established the facilities master plan grant program to be administered by AOE from funds appropriated for this purpose to SUs and independent career and technical education districts to support the development of educational facilities master plans. Grant fund may be used to hire a consultant to assist in the development of the master plan with the goal of developing a final master plan that applies with C construction needs requirements. Subsection D is how are how are those funds dispersed? So the agency shall develop standards for the disbursement of grant funds in accordance with the following. They shall grant shall be awarded to applicants with the highest facilities needs. The agency shall develop a prioritization formula based on an applicant's poverty factor that is there is not defined here. We're going to leave it up to AOE to determine what the poverty factor is and the average facility condition index score. The average facility condition index score AOE already has and that is a result of the Act 72 and the inventory that was done on all of this will build into safety. The agency shall develop or choose a poverty method to use. The agency may give priority to applicants with a regionalization focus that consists of more than one supervisory union that apply as a consortium. We're on page three now. A word amount are going to be issued to measure it with the gross square footage of buildings, located in the applicants and our SU and the agency shall develop minimum requirements for what an educational facilities master plan has to include and at a minimum the agency's requirements need to include the following elements. A description of the educational mission vision and goals of the SU. A description of the educational programs and services offered by the SU. The performance of a space utilization assessment, the identification of new program needs, the development of enrollment projections, the performance of facilities assessment beyond what was done through Act 72 and information regarding the various design options explored to address the SU's identified needs. So Ms. St. James, in your opinion, is there something in here that would allow the agency to say this? The needs are too great. The needs are so great that then there's a school 700 feet to 7 miles away and this is where all those students should go. Is there that kind of? No. This is just a grant program for SU's to develop their master plan for any future construction, building maintenance, etc. That master plan may take the concepts that you are talking about as far as consolidation into account. And you'll see that that is a concept that is addressed in the task force, is something that the task force for the working group is going to have. Just curious from Senator Collin, that particular issue was addressed in your committee during your deliberation. Yes. I probably would respond just the same way Ms. St. James did in that that is part of the charge of the task force. This is really just about the facilities master plan and it could be that an SU puts together a facilities master plan and part of that is these facilities aren't even worth putting a dime into. Okay. Please continue. And then AOE is required to report back to you all on before December 31st annually while the program is up running on the implementation of the grant program. So how's the grant program running? And then section two is at some of that. So the vision is that the grant program will run for five years. So repeal on June 30th of 2019. Okay. Continue in that film, sir. Sorry. This could be for Mr. Conlon. I almost said Professor Conlon and for you, but why the sunset in 2029? I'll, I think maybe you should speak to that if it goes into the intent. Well, I think I would say two reasons. One, I think it was my impression that that sort of good government policy is that you should revisit something rather than have it be ongoing, which I think it probably can send it up. And then number two is that the idea was, is, you know, get everybody on board doing facilities master plans sooner rather than later. So if there's a deadline to it, folks will get on board. Okay. I'm off to four. Section three required AOE and VGS to work together to develop prefall application criteria for architecture and engineering firms specialized in AK through 12 school design and construction and then maintain that list to make that list available. Section four is the working group. This is the bulk of the bill. So this is a legislative working group composed of three members of the House, three members of the Senate, and the Secretary of Education or Deputy. The working group on page five line four powers and duties. The working group shall study and create a recommended plan for a statewide school construction aid program, including recommendations on implementation. Facilities, understanding of school construction, projects, and other state aid programs they need to make that site visits. And in creating those recommendations, the working group shall address the following topics and we're going to walk through those topics. Building upon the recommendations contained that have forced report from this House please come up. And are you all familiar with the status of the state aid to school construction program now? I think very puzzled. Isn't there a laboratory? Yes. So there are laws on the books. There is a whole chapter in Title 16 about state aid to school construction and it has been paused since 2007. So you'll, if I just wanted to, we're starting from scratch here. So these are the topics that the working group has to consider and I will just spoil it all for you. There is a catch all at the very end that says anything else I have not, Beth St. James has not talked about, they still get to consider. So the first topic is governance. As Rob Conlon indicated, different states do things differently. The working group is charged with recommending what the governance model for Vermont should look like, including recommendations on staffing level and a stable appropriation for the funding of the recommended governance structure. Page six, prioritization criteria. How do we figure out where the money should go? The working group has to make recommendations on state aid prioritization criteria that will thrive funding towards projects that are aligned with the state's educational policies and priorities. Eligibility criteria, who's even eligible for state aid school construction. So the working group has to consider at a minimum the following eligibility criteria. Appropriate maintenance and operations budgeting at the SU union level. A requirement for eligible SUs to have a five year capital plan. A facility in condition index maximum level that would preclude eligibility but may qualify a building for a state share percentage bonus to replace the building and we'll talk about state shares later. A requirement for an SU master planning process that would require consideration of the adaptive reuse of schools for housing or other social infrastructures. And a prohibition on exclusionary zoning regulations that would preclude lesser resourced families from living in the applicable school. State based share. The working group has to make a recommendation as to whether a state based share is appropriate and if so whether it should be based on student or community poverty factors. So the concept of a state based share, please correct me if I get too strong, is does everyone get PEN grant right off the bat? Doesn't matter if you meet any of the other eligibility criteria. Is there just a base share that the state gives to it? Did I get that right? And then the working group is also tasked with considering other factors such as local taxing capacity, student poverty data, environmental justice metrics and energy burden efforts. Page seven incentives. The working group shall consider the use of incentives or state share bonuses that align up from off educational priorities with the goal of efficient and sustainable use of taxpayers' support in school construction to approve student learning environments opportunities. So the incentives that they have to include are school safety and security, health, educational enhancement, overcrowding solutions, environmental performance, newer and fewer buildings, major renovations to improve systems educational alignment capacity, replacement of facilities with a current facility condition in depth 65% or higher in combination with other policy area incentives and schools identified with actionable levels, airborne peace to be from other identified environmental hazards and critical education. Page eight. Some of these are set up as the working group shall consider and some of them are, you have to make recommendations, but you don't get to consider whether to include this topic. And this is one of those you don't get to consider whether to include that topic assurance and certification process. So we're going to pass to make recommendations for insurance certification process. And at a minimum that process should consider a district's commitment to adequate funding for ongoing maintenance operations of any state funded improvements. A district to assure adequate training for facilities and custodial staff to properly operate and maintain systems that are received. A district to complete a full commissioning process as a requirement to the received state funds the end of the project and a clerk of the works throughout the lifespan of the project. What is a clerk of the works? And I think I've heard that. I think it's like a project manager. Yeah, just wanted to thank you. That could be someone in a BOC's The working group should also consider whether the assurance and certification process shall be eligible for state funding support as well as whether a preferred vendor list for the commissioning process. So that works. I am on the very bottom of page eight, 19 environmental hazards and contaminants. The working group shall make recommendations that approach environmental hazards and contaminants in a comprehensive manner, incorporating existing programs into the school construction aid program if they're possible. Pre-program construction aid. The working group shall consider whether and what extent state aid should be made available to school districts that begin construction prior to the establishment or renewal of a state school construction aid program. So if you all enact a bill next year, it doesn't take back until July 1, 2027. If a school district starts a construction project on July 1, 2026, is that school district eligible for those 2026 costs prior to the the state going live? I'm on page nine, slide seven, current law. The working group shall review state statutes and state board of education rules that concern or impact school construction and make recommendations to the general assembly for amendments necessary to align with the working group's proposed construction aid program. So there's already current, there's already current laws on the books to look at those. We just repeal them all from scratches. There's some useful things, but also what this section sweeps in is literally any other state law that can catch on a school construction aid project. Was any consideration given to, well, net garden zero status or I know they do that for industry? So the next topic is efficiencies. But I would say in the current category here, when I say literally every state law, if there is a state law out there about new building and efficiencies, the working group should be looking at that and seeing how that fits into the state aid for school construction aid program Act 250. Environmental, the environmental justice bill, historic preservation laws. So all these would fire and safety, all these applied to these buildings. How do they factor into this program? I assume that going back to page eight, line one, I assume that in the House committee that the whole potential conflict between continuing PCV testing and not, that this in this bill, that line one being that this incentives apply to those schools that have identified PCVs, must spend a bit of a conflict, must spend a bit of a conversation on whether they continue or pause because this is clearly an incentive to those that we have tested and found. So I would answer by saying we felt it was something that the task force should at least look at, especially if you are a school that is under the four-year EPA timeframe and you're ready to go ahead with a project, should that get a higher incentive? It's just something to consider. It's basically affecting those schools where they're not dealing, they've already been tested, they've already been found to have about the school actual level. Some comment, is there any conversation, and perhaps I understood about, you know, one of the things we've talked about in this committee are buildings that aren't PCVs that could sometimes appropriate for schools. I mean, we know they're allowed to talk about that, that wouldn't be appropriate, but there may be buildings that, gosh, it is a good fit and it, you know, people are transitioning out of it. Anything like that? Well, sorry, would you say buildings that were schools or that could become schools? I think there's something in here about looking at new construction, but I would say that that concept did not, oh, we cross our minds that there are buildings out there that could be schools that currently aren't, that just brings out flashes of apartment stores that I know. There are also some incredible historic buildings. I'm thinking in my community that, frankly, yeah, who knows, you know, and they should be at least considered perhaps. And then, of course, there are some buildings in my community that were schools, you know, that aren't schools and people are sort of repurposing some of those as well. Because it does speak to that. To that. Okay. Center weeks. No. No, okay. Going on board. Okay. Please. We are on page nine, line 12, efficiency is the work that you're trying to identify areas where timeization for efficiencies might be gained in the creation of the program, including pre-follocation of consultants in this area and cost containment strategies, such as the use of building templates for new construction. Some states literally have like a catalog for you to pick from your building template. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Page 10, fiscal modeling, the working group shall align the proposed construction aid program of fiscal modeling produced by JFO, school construction planning guide. This is a, I believe this is a document put out by the agency and it exists because we had a state aid school construction program. So the working group's task of looking at that and taking recommendations from and then a path of therapy to align with working groups proposed construction aid program. Here's the catch-all. Working group may consider any other topic factor or issue that it is relevant to its work and recommendations. And then subsection N with added through an amendment, which is why the additional consideration was not the last and that really bothers me. Population considerations. The working group shall consider and make recommendations as to whether and if so, how the unique needs of different populations shall be taken into account in the program, including the following population. Elementary students, high school students, has to use with low population density and any other population or working group being relevant to its work and recommendations. So that is, those are all of the things that the working group has to consider and make recommendations. Page 11. Can I just ask one again for Representative Collins? So in that section, page 10 at the bottom, we're talking about population considerations. It's all about students, but I'm wondering if there was any thought about where these administrative units go, where their buildings are. Typically they're all, they're kind of like on the side about a high school or what have you. Is that ever a consideration that if we, as we, as we create this plan, that their office space also needs to be considered as a population? So not specifically, however, I think when you ask a supervisor we need to do a facilities master plan, hopefully they are the ones taking that into account. Thank you. It is, the bill is set up so that this is a supervisor union level vision. So do you think that would sweep in supervisor union offices as having to be taken into account? It's not subdivided as a population, I think it should be. In this case, population, yes, I definitely hear what you're saying. I think population here is like, okay, should we have a stronger incentive for something that is, perhaps, combining three high schools. I think perhaps demographic may have been a better choice of word. I wrote this so I could criticize that. So we're going to go on page 11, subdivision two, line one. This lists entities that the working group has to consult in developing this plan. So usually when you see a working group or a task force, you just assume that they are going to take testimony from anywhere they deem relevant to their work. We are going to make the same assumptions about this working group, but we're going to also box them into hearing from these specific folks, AOE, Agency of Natural Resources, Department of Public Safety, Division of Fire Safety, Natural Resources Board, Agency of Commerce and Community Development, the Division for Historic Preservation, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, School Board's Association, the Superintendent's Association, and anyone else. Senator Sheen, I have all of actually this question that you heard about when talking about have all of these agencies or departments expressed that they want to provide input or have they taken a neutral stance that they... No, they have not, and there are sort of reasons behind each one as to why our committee felt that they should be consulted. So U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development. Well, they actually have federal funding available for schools, when you, for example, got a fair amount of money from them. Natural Resources Board, should we be looking at schools not built in flood zones, right, look at Monterey High School, you know, if you were replacing that, you build it right there in the flood zone. So each of these sort of have something that we felt should be touched on, but not necessarily an in-depth like they need to come up with their proposal for the committee. Thank you. And that dovetails nicely with the next one, the next subsection assistance. The working group, because this is a legislative working group, is going to have the administrative technical legal assistance of the Office of Legislative Counsel, the Joint Fiscal Office, and the Office of Legislative Operations. I am not an expert in Act 250. I am not an expert in historic preservation. I am not an expert. So, right, so you want all of those agencies to be able to help you. And then the working group on a page, at the very bottom of page 11, is the charge with submitting its findings and recommendations in the form of proposed legislation. So no report. Page 12, Office of Legislative Counsel, the working group has to select co-chairs from the majority of the members shall not share the form and the work here shall consist on December 31st, 2020, where he or it gets pertinent. And then section five is the appropriation. So there is $15,000 appropriated to the general fund for the purpose of providing travel by the working group and for the reimbursement. And the bill would take effect on July 1, 2020. July 1, 2020. So, not lower. Okay, so wondering on page, so definitely a good long from the school construction center. That's why I was wondering on page seven, line 15. I'm wondering what that might be a little bit of bias for the incentives towards newer and fewer versus architectural preservation. Not just the way we have it. Let's start with this. But the money because it's not outlined in your results or if there even end this question. You're not really. It's a good story about specialized groups. Most schools were from other states. I don't know what the right word is. Parapute. Parapute again. Unless they're probably constantly having to chase safe one and try, you're never getting ahead and you're not great in 21st century. I will say remember that this everything we just walked through to consider and then make recommendations on. But they may say that's nice. We consider it and no thank you. What we have and the way we have it. So just because there is a charmer concept listed here does not mean a state-based school construction program. And then we'll encompass that charmer concept. I'm wondering how it's conceived is not outlined in here anywhere where the independence from back here. But they're even in those kinds of anything special for just by the hearing of those schools for students. No special needs there for students. So we're going to make any new construction. They need to facilitate those types of students. I don't understand this question. Well, I'm just thinking as far as we're building our things that you know we're going to take all education needs into. So certainly ADA with your clients. Yes, yeah absolutely. And I know if all wanted to catch all lines and accessibility. So just because there is a charmer concept listed here does not mean a state-based school construction. Actually the background I made is from my limited experience of building our schools to be considered. Right now I would say go beyond ADA. So I think ADA far as high enough that we have a lot in our new building. We want to have this giant heatable staircase from the TOEA and after we heard from folks in the community. Make any new constructions facilitate those types of students. I don't understand your question. Well I'm just thinking as far as we're building them you know we're going to take all special education needs into consideration too. With this working. Oh, okay. I certainly think ADA with compliance. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that would fall under the catch all of you know looking at ADA compliance and accessibility. So should we have anybody in that group of people we have to receive testimony from that would be representing that group? I think it's a great idea. Can I make a suggestion? Would you mind if I made a suggestion on piggyback on that? I mean just from my limited experience of building a high school right now. I would say go beyond ADA and do like universal design. I think ADA the bar is not high enough. And we had to grapple with that a lot in our new building. We wanted to have this giant beautiful staircase in the TOEA and after we heard from folks in the community that you know that just wasn't universally accessible. So we completely redid the big lobby of the school and it's not going to be like that anymore. So I think it's that's an important point. How do they you say a word about universal design in terms of the definition? I'm not an expert in universal design. My sense is just that it really thinks about every different kind of student that could be in that building or or constituent or person and then it it has them in mind as it creates design features of the building. Yeah and I think your point's a great one to have Senator Hesheen's constituent in to talk to us about their experiences and some of the challenges they've had because yeah it's a great point. Thanks Miss St. James. Committee five minutes after they see the corner office and then we'll continue. Yes.