 So you guys just, you're both here for the same reason. Yeah, I'm just listening. Great, listening. Mr. Liner, welcome to Senate Education. We're looking at age 461 in act related to miscellaneous changes. And Ms. Yang brought before us some language which is in our folders. This is draft language to amend education harassment statutes. Right, that's actually, I drafted that language. Right. But it's language that I had worked on with for in relation to Ms. Yang's approval. Yes, in relation to a house bill introduced by Representative Christie. Right. And why don't you then take us through it and then we have Amanda and Bo here with us in case they want to weigh in. We were thinking about attaching it to our miscellaneous education bill. And unless you see a concern with that, we would probably do that. And we can always talk to Ms. St. James about it as well. Sure. Great. Thank you for the record, Damian Leonard, Office of Legislative Counsel. Committee of Languages, right in your folder. So if you take a look at the language beginning on page one in subdivision 26A. Before you do that. Yep. Pretend we're in an elevator and we're just going one floor. Right. What does this do? So what this does. Two floors. What this does is it changes the standard for showing that you've been discriminated against or in this case harassed in an educational setting as a student from the current standard where you have to show that the discriminatory harassment met the severe or pervasive standard to just showing that you have been subject to discriminatory harassment. So that's really what we're getting at here is if you're requiring someone to show that they've been subjected to discriminatory harassment, what do they have to show to meet that requirement? Okay. Any questions on that before we move forward? Please, thank you. That's helpful. Very helpful. So in doing that in subdivision 26A, this is something that Moore testified to last week when she was in front of the committee. The first piece here is we've defined harassment under current law to mean that it's something that has the purpose or effect of objectively and substantially undermining or detracting from or interfering with a student's educational performance or access to school resources or creating an objectively intimidating hostile or offensive environment. The first part of that sentence, substantially undermining and detracting from or interfering and then with the student's educational performance means that you have to show a substantial impact on the student's educational performance, not just their education. So in other words, if the student maintains their A minus average, you have an argument that there wasn't a substantial impact on their educational performance. So what this would do is would say, change that to just undermining and detracting from or interfering with the student's education. Right. So that's just changing what we're looking at there. Is it interfering with their education? Their experience in the classroom, whether or not they're comfortable going into the classroom, all those kinds of things, okay. Right. It's the experience with getting the education versus their ability to perform at school. Okay. So that's the first change here. And Mr. Leonard, is this new territory in the United States or are we kind of following suit with other states? So this is relatively new territory. New York state and the district of Columbia have adopted this in some of their anti-discrimination laws and feel up to forgiving my experiences primarily in the employment sector. So I can't speak as much to the educational harassment. And then California and one other state, I believe it's Delaware, but four would know better. Four is indicating that I'm correct it is Delaware. Have made changes without specifically addressing the severe pervasive standard or specifically taking repealing that standard. They've made changes in the law to say we want the law to be applied this way. And then New York City, more than a decade ago, they didn't explicitly reference the severe pervasive standard, but what they said is we want our human rights law to be applied in the broadest possible manner, regardless of what the existing precedent is. And so the New York state courts, when they looked at that, they said what they're saying here is we're not going to severe pervasive, we're going to blest their discrimination. And so that's probably the oldest example I'm aware of. Okay, yeah, please, I'm just looking through. I just personally have to say, I think tying harassment, manifestation to educational performance is to me so bizarre. I just have to say it. I mean, having observed children as a teacher for a long time, every person could potentially deal with harm in such a different way. And I can totally see some people becoming hyper-focused on performance and studying. So I just want to say I'm in support of this. It seems to make sense to me. Yeah, I'm really glad you said that. I mean, you've been in the classroom with anybody here for sure, and I agree. See where somebody can become hyper-focused, like this is what I'm going to do to sort of deal with this issue, yeah. So that's the first piece of this. The second piece really gets at the severe pervasive piece. It says notwithstanding any court precedent to the contrary, conduct doesn't need to be severe or pervasive to constitute harassment. And instead, it says this is how we want the courts to look at what's harassment. So if you turn to page two, it says determination shall be made on the basis of the record of as a whole, according to the totality of the circumstances and a single incident might constitute harassment. So what this allows basically says to the courts is look at the whole picture, not just events in isolation, and also consider that if you have a single serious event, that by itself could be harassment under the statute. You don't have to have a series of events stretching out over months at a time or something like that. And then the next piece is incidents shall be considered in the aggregate with varying types of conduct or conduct based on multiple characteristics, unit and totality rather than isolation. The example I always get with this is someone who's targeted because of their national origin, their race and their religion at different times. Instead of saying we're going to look at your race, your national origin and your religion separately, we're looking at that as three different manifestations of the same harassment. And then we're determining if it was unlawful harassment based on that conduct as a whole. And then the third is saying conduct can constitute unlawful harassment regardless of the following. So the first is the complaining student is the person being harassed. So what this contemplates is if the student is present when someone who shares that characteristic is being targeted for harassment, but it's not the student themselves. So say you have a Jewish student who's present when another student is the subject of anti-Semitic slurs. They could feel harassed in that situation and threatened by that conduct. The next is the complaining student acquiesced or otherwise submitted to or participated in the conduct. So this would be hazing or something like that where the student is afraid to stand out and they go along with the conduct even though it's personally damaging. The third is the conduct is experienced by others outside of the protected class involved in the conduct. So maybe you have conduct that's broadly discriminatory, but they happen to be one of several people who experiences it. Or you have conduct where the jokes are made and you have people from various different protected classes present, that particular student because of the way the conduct affected them and based on their protected class feels harassed even though there might have been a diverse group present for the conduct. The complaining student was able to continue the student's education or access to school resources. This gets back to educational performance. The student was able to continue accessing the school's resources even though they were the subject of harassment. The conduct resulted in physical or psychological injury. Again, this goes back to a really old theory in law that at one point you needed to show that you suffered in some jurisdictions that you suffered some sort of physical or psychological or emotional harm as a result of tortuous conduct. So conduct that was targeting you and so this is saying you don't need to go back to that old fashioned piece here where you'd have to show that you developed an ulcer or you developed a psychological or emotional condition or something like that in order to, you don't in order to prove that you were discriminated against. And I wanna just touch on the use of the term psychological here. I know Senator Hashim last week brought this up during testimony. An emotional injury would be an appropriate term. It's more commonly used in the Vermont statutes. We went with psychological here because that was what was used when we updated the fair housing laws last year. So it's keeping it consistent with the language that's in S103 and the language that passed last year. If you did wanna go with emotional injury, we could do that in concert with a change in 103 but I'd be concerned about going with two separate terms just because of questions that might arise about whether we intended something different in the educational realm rather than the employment and public accommodations realm. I mean, if the effect is the same thing, I would think that there's any point in changing it. I read the effect as being the same but I think emotional injury is more commonly used but when we drafted this, we were looking at a different state's laws and model. And then the conduct occurred outside the complaining students' school. So this really gets at things like harassment that spreads to social media or harassment that may be occurring at school but it's also occurring at sporting events outside of school or other community events. And so the harassment which has got its nexus at school has spread to these areas outside of school but the focus is still related to what's happening at school. So if you turn to page three now, so we've kind of set out the guidelines for how to find us and we've said it doesn't need to be severe or pervasive by the same token conduct that a reasonable person with the same protective characteristic would consider to be a petty slight or a trivial inconvenience would not constitute harassment. So what are we getting at here? What we're looking at is was it was it someone being short tempered rather than discriminatory? Was it that great on a quiz that is not part of a targeted pattern of grading someone down based on their characteristics. And I may not be giving the best examples here but we're looking at things that would be considered a petty slight that would be normal in being at school and a reasonable person with the same characteristic wouldn't find it to be discriminatory. You can't just simply say I have this protective characteristic. I have this event that I didn't like. If a reasonable person wouldn't also find it to be discriminatory conduct, the court can draw the line there and say that doesn't need the standard. Did any examples come up in prior testimony that you can think of just drawn now? Off the top of my head, I'm drawing some blanks here. I'm sure that your other witnesses here based on their practice in this area could provide you with better examples than I can. So the next section here would amend 16 BSA 570F and this gets to what happens when the school's internal process of addressing harassment, when you reach the end of that harassment or that process and the individual is not satisfied with the outcome and then they're bringing a case under the Public Accommodations Act. So when you get to the end of that process or if engaging in that process would be futile. So you, for example, the person engaging in the harassment is the person that you have to bring the complaint to. So you can show that that would be futile. Then you have the option to bring a case under the Public Accommodations Act. And so under existing law, in order to do that, you would first have to show that the unwelcome conduct was based on the student or their family member's actual or perceived membership in a protected class and then that the conduct was either pervasive or severe under existing law. And what this would do is strike that severe or pervasive requirement. And then it would otherwise leave that provision the same as it is currently. So the process would be the same, but your standard for showing discrimination would be the new standard where you're not required to show that it was severe or pervasive. The one other thing that's not in this amendment that would need to change is S103 left the Senate with a provision and if that specifically says that new definition of harassment for the Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act would not apply a lawsuit brought under the section. Monday, S103. That's the anti-discrimination bill that allows. Okay. Yes, your colleagues committee next door. So if you decide to put this in the miscellaneous education bill, I would encourage you to reach out to House General that has S103 right now and ask them to just strike that exclusion because otherwise you're gonna end up with, you're gonna end up with a strange dichotomy where you have the Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act saying the identical definition of harassment doesn't apply to education even though you've updated the definition of harassment in education. And this is where we get into just the instances where we have to make sure if it's going into separate bills that the bills are gonna match together cleanly in terms of terminology and any sort of carve outs. Great. Any questions? Senator Weeks. So for the slow student in Rome, just kind of catch up. This is an amendment to the House Education Miscellaneous Bill, right? So I can't just ask a couple of questions. So, I noticed- I could just preface it, sorry, by saying if that's what the committee wants to do, it seems like Ms. Yang and Ms. Gars is, you'd like this to move this year, why wait? That's a vehicle. If we start a different bill, it wouldn't make all the way through the process. Please. Thanks. Little bit clearer about it. Okay, so in this bill, as in many bills, to see a lot of reference to raised creed, color, national origin, nervous status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability, you seem to be constantly dropping out, recently dropping out, religion. And I'm not a very religious guy, so don't take this from the wrong perspective. But we've had instances in our country's memory or global memory or global genocide based on religion. Any notion of as this was developed of why religion is not one of these kind of harassment scenarios? This uses creed as an old fashioned term for religion. And so religious discrimination is covered under creed here. This is actually something we were discussing in the House. But it is clearly spelled out in other harassment legislation. It depends on the timing for when they were adopted and what the language was. So we actually see it phrased three different ways. We see it phrased as creed. We see it phrased as religious creed. And then we see it phrased in the newest phrasing as religion. And so creed is an older Western term, primarily out of the Christian tradition for the different denominations of religion. So the newer terminology would be and the better terminology probably would be religion. And they were actually discussing in House General last week about whether they want to include just a changeover to religion across the board so that there's consistency. Instead of saying, and they were coming across it where our Public Accommodations Act says creed and our Fair Housing Act says religious creed. And so they were saying, well, is there a difference or should we just say religion so that it's clear that we mean the same thing because they're at side by side with in a paragraph of each other. So in here, our religious discrimination would be covered under creed, but that's something you could consider as really a technical amendment to my mind just to update the terminology. That's all. Yeah. Each couple. Yeah. That was a very good point. Is the intent? If it, and I know you're not an intent guy, but you've heard of the other deliberations. This is targeted harassment from student to student, teacher to student. So this targets harassment of a student. So... So all the above. As I understand it, it could include harassment by a staff member or a fellow student. And then the other bill 103 covers harassment of employees. And so there you have the workplace. The employer has a duty to keep the workplace free from discrimination. And this deals with the school's duty to keep the educational learning environment free from this kind of harassment. Good. Stop. Please. No, it's okay. Okay, so, certainly it seems to lower lower a press of what harassment exists. Fairly clear. It just seems that, and I think actually in your verbal explanation, it highlights that even like one act can constitute harassment. And that could happen under existing law. Okay. So yeah, the, so it's worth noting on page, on page two, that list under little Roman numeral three there. So from lines nine through 19. All of those, the regardless of weather list, that's all actually taken from existing case law. So what Vermont would be saying here is that we agree with the precedents in these cases here. Because what's happened over time is that because judges are human, what you have is the precedent diverges a little bit over time. And so some cases will say the complaining student must be the person being harassed and others will say it's regardless of whether they're harassed. And so you get some confusion in the precedent and this is basically the state saying we're going to follow these precedents going forward. And so that's what this is doing. You were specifically asking about something though, could you remind me? Because I lost track of one act. So the one act there. So under existing law, one act could be sufficient, sufficiently severe by itself to constitute a long-term harassment order. You remove the words. Right. So under existing law, one act could already do it if it met the sufficiently severe standard. And then under this, you'd remove the severe standard but one discriminatory act could still meet the unlawful discrimination standard. So what you get out of, what changes here is that with that one act, you're not asking was it sufficiently severe to constitute unlawful discrimination and then you have to look at where the severe standard's been set in prior cases. You just have to ask, was that a discriminatory act? And it's a policy question for you about whether you wanna set the, where you wanna set the bar on these cases. But that's what would change. So with sexual harassment, which is something that I deal with more frequently in the employment law sector, unwelcome groping of someone's sexual body parts would clearly be a single act. Whereas in the past, you've had inappropriate comments where that's had to meet a pervasive standard rather than a severe standard. And so you'll see this dichotomy where the courts say, well, this is clearly severe enough, but that I need to see repeated instances before I'm going to see that, even though the court might say, clearly this was inappropriate, but it wasn't sufficiently pervasive to be actionable. And so that's what removing the severe pervasive standard would do is it would allow courts to find something violated the law, even if it wasn't either pervasive or severe. You keep mentioning the court. So if there are two students that are having, one student's harassing another student, assuming those situations, correct me if I'm wrong, it depends on what's on the book and that's a provisory union as to how it's handled. So just like in employment law, the schools have a policy against harassment the same way an employer would have a policy against discrimination and sexual harassment. And so the first and ideally the best line or place for these issues to be dealt with is in the workplace or in the school where the school sets clear standards, they enforce their rules fairly, they enforce them promptly, they do thorough investigations and they enforce things in an even-handed manner. What the law basically provides is, first it says this is the standard that you need to enforce, and then second it says if you don't enforce this standard then there's this backstop where you can go to the Human Rights Commission, you can file a claimant court, et cetera. So and that's the same thing in employment. So here at the State House for example, we have policies against sexual harassment in the House and Senate and both of those policies set a standard that is below severe pervasive with the idea being that any sort of sexual harassment will get addressed before it rises the level of being unlawful. And so different employers set their standards and write their policies differently and that's a decision that the General Assembly is made to establish a working environment that's free from that kind of harassment. And it's sort of a preemptive approach. With this change in the law that would become the legal standard there is that any sort of harassment would be unlawful and it would, so right now for schools they have to enforce at least a severe pervasive standard. And the concern that first came up last biennium when this was first considered, there was no proposed change to Title 16. And so schools said wait, you're asking us to adopt policies with a severe pervasive standard but then you'd be letting us be sued under a law that doesn't have that standard. There's clearly a disconnect. This proposes to address that disconnect by eliminating the severe pervasive standard for schools too. Again, this is obviously a policy decision for you to decide whether that's the appropriate way to proceed but the enforcement is always in the first instance at the school or at the workplace and that it's only if that fails that you then find yourself in front of the Human Rights Commission or in the courts. So you're taking the language of the amendment that the determining of whether something is a petty slight or trivial inconvenience. Is that first educated at the school level or at the classroom level? I mean, to go up to the Human Rights Commission and the court, I mean, it just seems the bar's really low and it's so we hope to draw a line here. Right, so this would be something that first the schools would be would be called on to determine if something grows above that level or didn't. And then there would certainly be, I imagine, just like there are right now with the severe pervasive standard, there'll be instances where a student disagrees with the school on whether something past that level of being a petty slight or a trivial inconvenience or being actual discrimination. And then you'll see that case potentially go up in a set, a set basically a standard that provides guidance in future cases. So what happens now for an employment lawyer like myself or for an HR director or for whoever handles disciplinary matters at a school is they're going to talk presumably with counsel and say, this is the fact pattern I've got. To me, it's a close call. What is the precedent say on this? And that's where they'll look at the prior decision and say, well, in 2024, the Human Rights Commission had a case on this and this is how their ruling came out and applying that ruling to this case, I think it's clear that this was a petty slight or no, it's clear that this is probably exceeds that bar because this is very similar to that case. And so that it's gonna develop the same way the severe pervasive standard has developed over the last 37 years or so that it's been around. And the question is, each time you get one of these cases you say, does this rise the level of being discrimination as their protected class was the behavior discriminatory? Was it adverse behavior based on that protected class? And then if you're looking at, is there legal liability? Was it severe or pervasive? And so these are all things that you already asked. You're just going to be asking it at this different level of was it clearly discriminatory? Or was it so small as to just be a petty slight or a trivial inconvenience for the individual affected? So I don't know if that's a satisfactory answer for you but it wouldn't change the way we approach this except that would change that standard to a different standard. Are we required or reasonable where we have to provide train? Is it going to be a policy of a re? So my understanding and this is where hearing from my colleague Beth St. James would be better. My understanding is that right now schools are required to have a policy on harassment. So they would need to update their policies to reflect any change in the law. I can't speak before the schools on what sort of burden that might be. Or whether they might need more time to do this and to get trained. Those are all questions that you would need to direct to the school boards and the principals, et cetera. It's a great question. And so that's something where as far as training can't really speak to that. The right now the employment bill is scheduled to take effect July 1, 2023. But there are always questions about transitioning and allowing time for policies to be updated. So that's a valid, if you decide to move forward with this policy question of whether you want to push out the effective date or something like that is always a valid policy question. I can't speak for either side as to the time example I'm on. Sir, thank you. Thank you. I'm generally in favor of this. I do have a few thoughts that I wanted to share. One being that I am a little concerned that this is going to have a, you know end up having like a very punitive, potentially punitive effect, especially for school districts that don't have a robust restorative justice or restorative program in place. I'm concerned about the prison to school, the prison pipeline. Where I live, a lot of kids who are would be part of these protected classes take a lot of their cues from social media on how to behave and how to interact with peers and that's not always a good thing. So I absolutely 100% want to protect students from harm. I'm also, I also very well much know that kids frontal lobes are not fully developed and they make lots of mistakes. And sadly, many are now taking cues from sources that are not necessarily. Productive or positive. So I guess that's my reservation. I think a school that has a robust restorative process or culture, this is probably wonderful. But if it doesn't, if the resources are already stressed in that regard, I guess I'm worried that this could not be positive for all our kids. Yeah, I think that all of a sudden you get suspended, irritated somebody that was on TikTok, saying you're home for a couple of days, you get behind your work, you can see where things snowball and become a real problem. All right, so we can hear from some witnesses on this yes and or she. I don't know if this question is a bit of a reach, but so I'm looking at severe pervasive and harassment and then my mind then goes to intentional infliction of emotional distress. So is the standard that the one instance of harassment, if it is one instance, does it have to be extreme and outrageous similar to what's expected, similar to the same standard under intentional infliction of emotional distress or how is that determined? So it is not the same intentional standard as intentional infliction of emotional distress. There's extensive case law right now on what constitutes severe or pervasive harassment and I'm trying to think of off my head, of course I'm not thinking of cases to give you a good example, but the case law provides a lot of guidance on where the severe conduct falls, but I think it's not quite the same as the extreme and outrageous conduct that you would need for intentional infliction of emotional distress and a lot of it looks at sort of the particular conduct, the context of it, et cetera. And so when you're looking at it, it's a little bit different standard overall. So it's not quite the same as the actionable intentional torts. So if it need not be severe and pervasive and isolated by itself, the definition or the threshold for harassment, what is that threshold then if it's not severe and pervasive? And you may have already explained this one. So the examples here could include things like racial slurs, jokes made about someone based on their gender, gender identity, notes, pictures. Could include various derogatory comments. It could include adverse actions that are taken based on someone's characteristic. And so I mean, one of the important things to keep in mind is because of the variety of characteristics that are protected, the conduct that we're talking about could vary greatly. So sexual harassment can include things like derogatory comments or jokes based on someone's gender. It doesn't have to be like sexually propositioning someone. So is it basically, we'll know it when we see it? Is that? So the question is, is it discriminatory? And so, and rather than asking, is this pervasive discriminatory conduct? We're asking, is it discriminatory conduct? So that I think is the key. So it's not a, we'll know it when we'll see it. It's, is it discriminatory conduct period? Not, is it, is this severely discriminatory or pervasive discriminatory conduct? That's what I was about, thank you. Yeah. Would this law be, or would this be applicable to all schools in Vermont, so private schools and recognized schools and it's a, et cetera, et cetera? I would have to ask this. Okay. On that. So that's a good question. I don't know exactly the extent of the school harassment law here. So I would either defer to or who receives these claims or to Beth who has much more knowledge about the extent of the education law. Okay. And what about grades, is this pre-K through 12? I, it applies to all the students who are subject to these harassment requirements, which I think is pre-K through 12, but I would need to double check with Beth again on that. In our weeks. Yeah, so I agree with the comments here about protecting students from harm and understanding the intent of the bill. Certainly support creating clean learning environments, but my caution is that we're creating a, potentially creating a scenario of just hypersensitivity where one instance of perceived harassment is becomes, they become by de facto severe and pervasive with different language there with its harassment. So it's, so I'm just a little, still uncomfortable with the intended environment we're trying to create by, and in fact creating an environment which becomes hypersensitive, which creates an entirely new problem. That's my point. I share the concern. I'm just trying to put myself on the other end of it also where it's you're a student of color, somebody calls you something horrific. What that does to that student, what we're trying to do I think is that would elevate it to have that conversation. You're not going to court. No matter what, you're not going to court. Somebody uses, God forbid, the N word. You're not going to court because of it. You're going to, the school is dealing with it. Is that accurate? Yeah, the first step in all of these is through the school. Right, so. So think about being asked to have received on the receiving end of that school is gonna deal with it. If the school ignores it, then it's elevated. Right, so the schools are already required to have a policy and a procedure in place for dealing with it. The big change under this is the standard for what is actionable is changing. So this would, so rather than schools being liable only if they failed to deal with something that was severe or pervasive harassment based on one of these protected characteristics, they could be liable if they failed to deal with something that was harassment based on one of these characteristics provided it exceeded that heavy slight or trivial inconvenience. I'm legit, and so I am not super familiar with the process for how schools deal with us. And so that's something where if you need to know more about that process and what these cases look like, I suggest hearing from the Human Rights Commission and from practitioners who work in that environment. I can't really speak to the current school policies and what an investigation of an allegation out of school looks like right now and how that process is getting out. But just to go back to what Senator Week said about prevention, a lot of people don't know that this law will even exist. So in a lot of children learn from hope. So how are we gonna educate them unless it's a required subject that already has to go? Yeah, so you raised that also earlier around is there, do we give people time to get to institute something like this? Is there training so that students, faculty, and staff are all up? Then the question around the independent school and then the questions also around is this a pre-K through 12 standard policy or all things? You mean if you do it and you know what you're doing is wrong, that's different than doing it non-knowingly. And I just wanna say, I just feel strange. I just wanna acknowledge that I said, used even this expression I used of the N word just seems like such a strange, just doesn't set with me after I said it and to just wanted to say that for the record. Anything else, please? My last comment is just that I am worried this is gonna unintentionally harm new American kids in my district. Unintentionally. Yeah, unintentionally. I think that's why the national origin issues and it gets intended to protect. I know, but I'm worried it's gonna have the opposite effect. How? I mean, I already stated that I just feel as though they're navigating a new world a lot of times and they are taking cues from areas that I mentioned social media, for example, and that if we don't give them the opportunity to learn in a restorative environment, I'm concerned that this could snowball. Thank you, Mr. Leonard. Why don't we take just five minutes and we'll hear from Ms. Yang. Do you mind jumping in right after this? Okay, seems like a good time. Thank you. Welcome back to Senate Education. We have with us now for Yang and Boar's gonna just tell us a little bit about why, again, this language is important. You've been sitting here listening to our testimony. Anything you can help us with would be great. And thanks for being with us. Thank you for the record. Boar Yang, Executive Director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission. And I just want to address a couple of the things that have come up during the walkthrough with Damian Leonard, your legislative council on this bill. The first part of it is a question that was brought up about are we creating a standard here that is really about, that is hypersensitive, right? And I just want to first point you out to the language around petty slates and triviality and conveniences. That language was added so that we didn't do that. So that we didn't have hypersensitivity around harassment. And so, it's possible that you might have a student being called the N word in 2023. And a court might say that word is so offensive, so outdated that any person would find that beyond trivial inconvenience and a petty slight. But you might have a student with a disability called Dom once and a court would say that's probably trivial inconvenience and petty slight. So this language is here so that a court had the ability to say that we're changing the bar, we're correcting a bar, we're strengthening our anti-discrimination laws. But it's not no bar. We're still having a bar here that people still enjoy freedom as beach, people can make mistakes, and kids can occasionally engage in bad behavior, but it's not going to hold a school responsible. This is a bill that changes how schools look at harassment and when schools will be held responsible. This is not a bill that addresses how kids are held responsible. It is the disciplinary rules that are in place at each school district that addresses whether kids are suspended or expelled or corrected or whether a school puts trainings into place or safety plans into place or how to address kids. Not this, and this law, changing this law does not change those rules around discipline. And I want to, because I'm really sensitive to the school to prison, school to prison pipeline as well. And we want to be very thoughtful about how schools approach kids who make mistakes or who are also learning. But this bill does not change how a school addresses things. And remember how a school approaches things is going to be different from age groups, different from age groups. So for example, if you have a kindergartner who heard the N word and says it, how a school addresses that is entirely different from your senior in high school that uses the N word knowingly against another student and repeats that. And also how we address it for the first time in a school versus hearing the N word repeatedly by a student over and over again or the F word for LGBTQ kids or other like derogatory language that are used against girls in schools as well. And I want to talk about this idea of punishment, right? We do generally have a false belief in our society that to correct harassment, we have to take a punitive stance. We have to punish kids. And the reason why we believe that is because we think that there are bad actors. We think there are bad people and we are reluctant to, this happens in the employment arena. If someone engages in bad behavior, sexual harassment, we fire them or we demote them and we say that's a bad actor and nothing to do with us, right? But we're reluctant to do the same thing with kids because we're going, they're mourning and so forth. The reality is, is that we're all responsible for the cure. We're all responsible for training. We're all responsible for creating a culture and a climate that is inclusive and welcoming. And that's why punishment doesn't make sense or expulsions or suspensions do not make sense across the board. And this doesn't necessarily do anything with regards to that. What we need is effective trainings for schools to understand how to address when kids misbehave and kids use derogatory language or harmful language. We need to find training for teachers to validate the kid that has been harmed by that language and that behavior. And we need to find tools for teachers and social workers and principals to address the student that is in need of learning when they use that language too. But that's about training. That is about how do we effectively train administrators and principals and social workers and guidance sponsors and teachers on how to address kids in the appropriate age range. And that training is gonna be different. That training is different from K through six. That training is different from middle school where these things happen a lot and that training is absolutely different in high school. Or does it happen now, the training? To some extent, but it's more of a... It's compliance. Right now the training is oftentimes about compliance. It is compliant with the law. The training says harassment is severe or pervasive. That's when you need to take action. And it's not good training. It's not great training. It happens and in some districts it's happening more than other districts. But it's not preventative training. It's not necessarily best practices training. And it's certainly not a training on how to, it's not a training that is specific to necessarily different age groups. But that can happen. That's very possible that that can happen. And something that was brought up around like restorative justice and restorative process. That's also not a perfect process to address harassment in schools. There are probably many paths on how to address it. And I mentioned some of those last time is a safety plan, right? Like we know that oftentimes kids harm and hurt each other verbally when there's no adults around. A safety plan is putting extra adults around, right? Rather than suspension or expulsions. A safety plan might be changing kids a bus stop or changing buses for kids, asking a bus driver to actually go a different route to pick up a kid so that the same kids are not on the same bus all the time. So that doesn't mean suspension or expulsion. That's about being creative about how we do that. That is all part of the training. Not anything that has to do with this bill. But this bill, what this bill will do is it's gonna capture those cases. Not the hypersensitivity kids. It's gonna capture the cases that existing law has said no go. It's gonna capture the kid that is in those multiple protected classes and has had to separately prove that she was subjected to discrimination on each of those instances. While Damian mentioned that there was some case law that would find that one instance of groping would be sufficiently severe under existing law, though our case law that says one instance of groping is not severe. And this law, this is saying one instance might get in the door. And that's what this is about. And the last thing I wanna say is that this is a bill about holding a school responsible, but it isn't going to automatically hold them responsible because we're changing the standard. Remember that in order for a student to sue under even this law as it's changed, they still have to prove that the behavior is because of their membership and protected class. That's really hard. That's really hard to prove. If you have a kid with a disability who's getting beaten up on the playground and you happen to see that this kid is being picked on a lot, that's not enough to get in the door. We might as adults view that and go, why is this kid being picked on? And we might assume that it's because this kid has a disability, but that's not enough under the legal standard. That kid still has to prove under existing law and this new change that it is because of the membership and protected class. So we're still looking for slurs, we're derogatory statements, we're still looking for things that kids are doing to this particular student that shows the reason you're getting picked on is because you're a student with a disability, you're a person with a disability. The other prong of a case is that you have to prove a school knew about it. You still have to show the school knew and the school failed to do nothing. And I will say our schools are like, they try to be on top of things. They are trying to address these things. And so it's hard to hold a school responsible if they can demonstrate that they actually try hard, right? And so- I just asked what's really in such- Yes, please. You know, it was a while ago since I was in school, but when- Me too. When I went home, if I had been in trouble, Yeah. I figured going home more than being dealt with at school. Yeah. So at what point is the policy going to be to bring parents into this? Yeah. I mean, because there's a possibility, maybe the kids are a Trump parent. Yeah. And that, you know, silence is concurrence and maybe they're condoning that. It's not kids fault, let's say. Right, right. And again, oftentimes it's not the fault of the, this is where I want to go back to, it's oftentimes all of our faults that harassment occurs. So it's not, it could be the parents, it could be the classroom, it could be other students that they're learning from. And so I want to get away from fault and kind of address that we can still address the behavior and not fault necessarily that student. Because we can go, wow, we need to do more training or we need to do some learning in this classroom around this particular issue. Or, you know, this is an opportunity to do more inclusive book reading, looking for books on how to address this in first grade or second grade around diversity and equity issues. But most HHB policies, hazing harassment, bullying policies require notice to parents. And so they will be on notice. And so parents have really an intimate involvement in the whole process. This bill does nothing to address that. Again, that goes down, that comes back to what are the policies that are in place? Senator Williams? Yeah, we could just to kind of piggyback on Senator Williams' question, but you did use the words holding the school responsible. And I concur that it's a much bigger problem than any school environment. It's community norms, it's parents directly. I just sense that we're putting more, I understand the intent of the bill. I really do, but we're putting more on us on the conduct of the school and not the conduct of the parent or the society, the community. And I fear that we're kind of misaligning responsibility. That's my, this is a comment. I really appreciate that comment. And I would say that the onus is on each of us if we have power or authority over that climate. The reason why the onus is on schools because it's in educational system. The onus is on employers in the workplace. The onus is on a business owner when it's happening in their restaurant and it's happening in their business. And the onus is on me at the Human Rights Commission to address harassment with the six people that work there, right? So like we have, the onus is always on us when we have authority or power over the environment. And the reason why the onus is on the schools under Title 16 is because the schools have power over that school environment. Now, remember that. So Senator Williams, I'm wondering, for Senator Weeks, are you proposing that floating the idea that really the buck should stop with the parents and maybe it's handling truancy? In other words, if your kids aren't going to school, we're gonna follow up with you. You could be fine, whatever. Your kid is harassing someone. Okay, we're gonna, it's more on the parents than on the school in terms of- I'm not sure the solution. I just fear that knowing a lot of educators and being married to an educator that we may be mis-assigning responsibility. Right, right. No, I'm just asking what you're kind of thinking. I'm not sure what I'm thinking yet. I just know that I'm a little bit of a shock because I'm not sure this, I understand what the problem is, but I don't really believe this is a fully vetted solution. I'm just not sure it's got the right, it creates the right environment at the right time. Remember, Paul. At least no, go ahead, Paul, and then we'll go in there. Remember that existing law already puts the onus on schools. So you're not changing that perspective. The onus is already on schools to address it. That's not working. And it's beyond those. But that's, okay, so I wanna talk about cause and I wanna talk about response. The onus is on schools to respond to harassment when they see it, even if they didn't cause the harassment to occur in the first place. Just like an employer or supervisor or manager has a duty to address harassment, even if they're not the ones creating the harassment, right, so, and by the way, there are many instances in which kids engage in harassing behavior, but their parents don't. Because of social media, I think that was brought up because of other kids, because that is information that is readily available to everybody all the time. So you might have a kid whose home is like, and this is true of all of us, by the way, I'm the HRC executive director. My kids could potentially be engaged in harassment because of things that they see on social media. It's not necessarily like even a parenting issue, and so I don't even wanna put like discrimination and harassment on parents. It's a societal issue, but the onus is on each of us in our respective workplace to address it, right, even if we're not the cause of it. So it goes back to, you know, each school may have the discretion to deal with it in a different way. A teacher may see it and just brush it under the rug or try and take immediate action to deal with it on the spot, but this may have already been the fifth or sixth time that this individual student's experienced it. At some point, you have to establish what's discretionary and acceptable and what is it. That's what I'm saying, my original point about the training that every school should be on the same team. I agree, 100%, and that's the guidance that should come from the AOB, the Agency of Education, creating a model HHB policy so that all schools have a model to look to, and they do have a responsibility to do that under Title 15. And schools, of course, don't have to necessarily adopt that, but they do often use that as the model, and you're right. We should be creating a situation where we have clear training. That training should be specific to different age groups. That's training should be specific to teachers and social workers and principals because you have people who are responsible for investigations, and then you have teachers who are in the classroom who are responsible for reporting, right? So the training for how to report and what to report is different from the training for how do you investigate and effectively investigate and give notice. Senator Harshee. Yeah, I just wanted to get back to the conversation point about legislating what we can legislate. We can make rules that involve schools. We can't make rules that determine how a parent raises their kid. You know, I mean, let's say we hypothetically made a bill that says, all right, it's now illegal to be racist in general, that's not gonna work. But there are different steps that you can take when it comes to employment law, education law, and in our courtrooms and bias training and that sort of thing as a response to what is an unfortunate cultural undercurrent that does require us to try to make some changes, but that's something that society has to evolve out of over time, and we don't have a magic wand to just make it all go away unfortunately, but yeah, so just my random dream of thought on this. So what are you thinking about the bill? I think it's fine. We talked a little bit about unintended consequences in this. Can you think of any, this is, well, we talked about new Americans. Right. You know, specifically unintended consequences. Yeah. We already shared a bunch of unintended consequences that we're concerned about, but can you think about? I don't see this bill as harming new Americans, and I, because I don't see this bill as, because I don't necessarily think that new Americans are particularly vulnerable to engaging in harassment behavior more than any other individual. And so, yes, are they learning about what to do? You know, culture, completely different culture. But yes, but what you're learning is not what, the suggestion I think that a new American is learning about appropriate behavior and needing to learn appropriate behavior is different from do they just need to learn about customs and culture and so forth is different. And we don't have any evidence or data to suggest that new Americans are the ones who are subjected to perpetrating harassment more than any other person. In fact, that's probably the opposite. That's probably not true. New Americans are often subjected to harassment as the target, not the perpetrator of harassment. So I- I just wanna go to Senator Sheen while we're here. Yeah. Just a point to that. Yeah. You know, when I think of that situation, I go back to page two when I look at, starting at line one, line three, the totality of the circumstances. And if you have a new American and there's a group of kids who think it's funny to teach them a swear word that's very bad and he goes around saying it, I would trust that the teachers would pick up on that and realize, all right, this group of kids told the new American to say this word. Obviously it doesn't rise to the level of harassment. He's just kids doing stupid stuff. Yeah. That's where I go to when I look at that. So somewhat along those lines and what Senator Williams is talking about, should anything, if we were to move this, accompany this bill around mandating training, anything updated, you know, we do have a hazing harassing bullying statute on the books. Basically, you may recall a few years ago, the agency said, everybody has to adopt their own. You don't adopt your own. You have to adopt the agency. So that's out there, but anything in terms of education, training that should accompany this, or even as I think Senator Williams at the time, giving, you know, maybe it gets implemented in a year, just a few ideas. I don't have a strong opinion on the time. I think that anytime we're changing the laws, the people that have to comply with them are going to put out new trainings. Just like you change sexual harassment laws in the workplace, employers are out there changing the policies and doing trainings immediately. The HHB policy as it exists already requires the schools undergo trainings and have training programs in place. And I do know that while some districts are much better at trainings than others, is that if you change this law, there will be new training. And in fact, that's what we want. We actually want to encourage that. And so this law being passed would actually encourage more training around what that means, right? Yes. So for you, does that mean we need to appropriate money for that training? Because if we don't, it'll just be taken away from the classroom. Right now they're already doing the training. So all you're really doing is you're not, you're not saying more trainings. You're just saying the training that you're doing right now adjusted, correct it to existing law. Instead of teaching severe and pervasive, you're saying, let's pay attention to totality of the circumstances. Let's pay attention to single incidents. Let's teach our teachers to report even single incidents whether or not they know it's harassment. And let's teach our investigators in the schools to investigate whether or not it immediately appears that way. And then let's teach our principals and our vice principals, our assistant principals to address, to learn the disciplinary rules and how to address that in the context of HHB policy. And so the training already is in place and the money is in place. I don't think this bill requires any money attached to it. Ms. Garces, did you wanna say something? Are you trying to? I do, and I wanna tell you that you have to go test it back. In five minutes, yes, yes. But I do wanna say and- And I don't want you to rush. We can always have you back before, but. I would love to be back. Because I am part of the Boolean Harassment Council. Yes. As part of that work, we have been talking and talking, there have been a lot of backing forth that we need to assist, so we're not there, because a lot. There's a lot of families who would wanna testify around this. A lot of students who are going through this. And I run specifically more thinking about the training and what schools are doing and what are not doing and all the challenges that they have, not as, again, the challenges around training and who gets the training, that in addition, you put the turnover of teachers and administrators that are taking the training and moving to another school and what that process looks like. The Agency of Education has been working on amending the policy and procedure right now. But now that we have this shift, we have a meeting coming up as a council and we'll be talking about the things and the role of the council and how we're pushing that forward. So I would look to come back, perhaps spring the chair of the HHP council to share about the work that we've been doing and also bring some families to share in about their process in this whole conversation. Yeah, we have, we're gonna adjourn in a month. Yeah. Almost exactly. We can meet for another, I'd say three and a half weeks this committee, but we need to move this, we don't have a lot of time. Yeah. So what we can do is Friday, we're gonna hear from the superintendents and principals and all those folks. We can hear from Ms. Garces on Friday also, and then if we could also hear from the AOE on Friday and then I think we should just make a decision at that point as to whether or not we wanna include this in the miscellaneous episode. Yeah. If I could just close with one last comment. If you don't move this bill and S-103 passes. Yeah. You're saying that teachers who are harassed in the workplace is now subjected to a different standard, but kids have a harder, harsher standard to meet. And that seems fundamentally unfair and inconsistent. Yeah. And I just wanna remind everyone one of the reasons, so S-103, which came out of our economic development committee, this was sort of missed at one point, this part, so that's one of the reasons it's before us now. And that is a great reminder. And we'll hear from the NEA and others on Friday. You've asked great questions and I hope I've answered them. And I thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And for your continued commitment to doing this. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, as soon as Ms. St. James arrives, we'll get started on workplace development. Welcome back to Senate Education. April 18th, 2023, 302. Following up on our conversation that we just had with Damien Leonard and others on, that's what was the actual title. Thank you, Sexual Harassment. Not sexual, it's draft language to amend. Yeah, draft language to amend harassment statutes. Thank you very much. We had a couple of questions, Ms. St. James, that other council thought you might be better to address them. One was independent schools. And Senator Gulick's, well correct me if I'm wrong, does this apply to all independent schools? Approve, not approve. What's the other sort of? Folding private schools. Yeah, who's captured in this and who's not? Sure. Beth St. James Office of Legislative Council. So when you say fully private school, the only options in Vermont, if a child wants to satisfy the compulsory attendance requirement are approved and recognized independent schools. So there's no other option for the education that will be recognized as a student attending. So I am looking at, so the harassment, hazing, and billing prevention policies statute is section 570. And then there's other sections after that. But, well, so the way this is worded is the statute requires I'm not sure where to go over there. We're following up on Senator Gulick's question on harassment from the last one. The amendment that would go on for 61, that's correct. Please. So the statute requires each school board to develop, adopt, and ensure the enforcement of, and make available, and the manner described in section 563. One of this title, harassment, hazing, and billing prevention policies that shall be at least as stringent as model policies developed by the secretary. And then school board is defined as the board of directors or other governing body of an educational institution when referring to an independent school. Oh, educational institutions in school mean a public school or an approved and recognized independent school, so all three. So everybody's covered. Correct. In certain circumstances in public, so it would be the supervisory union that would. No, it's the school districts. OK. Senator Gulick, follow up. OK, thanks. Thank you for that answer, Mr. Secretary. And just to confirm, the independence also, you have to follow hazing, harassing, and bullying policies that the state put forward. Under what I just laid out. Under the hazing, harassing, bullying policies that we put forward two years ago. That's what I just said. That's what I just said. I thought that's what we were talking about. Is that what we were talking about? Yes, that's what we were talking about. So the answer is yes? Yes. OK. Yes. I think we're good. OK. Anything else? OK. Floor zeroes for economic development? Sure. So you should have in front of you excerpts from H-494, which is the big bill this year. And this is the language as passed by the House. The first page should be page 105. And all of this is, I just included this for reference, really, these are just some of the appropriations that go along with the language we're about to walk through. So the language we're about to walk through starts on page 223, line 16, section F3. And it's the creation of the Vermont Teacher Forgivable Loan Incentive Program. It's added to page 223, line 17. OK. Sure. It is added to chapter 87 is the Grants, Scholarship, and Education Loan Programs chapter in title 16. And so this is adding a new loan to this chapter. And so it starts on page 224 with some definitions. Corporation means the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation. Eligible individual means individual to satisfy the eligibility requirements under this section for forgivable loan. Eligible school means an approved post-secondary education institution as defined under section 2822 of this title, which is the definition section for this chapter. Forgivable loan means a loan awarded under this section covering tuition, which may also include room, board, and the cost of required books and supplies for up to full-time attendance in an undergraduate or graduate program at an eligible school. And program means the Vermont Teacher Forgivable Loan Incentive Program created under this section. And then there's creation language in subsection B online 13 on page 224. The program provides forgivable, so the program is created and it's administered by VSAC. The program provides forgivable loans to students enrolled in an eligible school who commit to working as a teacher in a Vermont public school and who meet the eligibility requirements in subsection D of this section. The intent of the program is to encourage students to enter teaching professions with an emphasis on encouraging Black, Indigenous, and persons of color Vermonters, New Americans, and other historically underrepresented communities in an effort to diversify the educator workforce. So that's the program language. And then on page 225, line one there, the corporation shall discharge forgivable loan funds under the program on behalf of eligible individuals subject to the appropriation of funds by the General Assembly for this purpose. And then the eligibility requirements are in subsection D. To be eligible for a forgivable loan under the program, an individual, whether a resident or non-resident of Vermont, shall satisfy all of the following requirements. Be enrolled in a teaching program at an eligible school. Maintain good standing at the eligible school at which the individual is enrolled. Agree to work as a teacher in Vermont, employed directly by a public school, located in Vermont for a minimum of one year, following licensure for each year of forgivable loan awarded. Yes, Narasheen. I'm just curious, I mean, I think this is great. I'm just curious about the residency requirement because I know things can get tricky when you're talking about economic benefits and tacking on residency requirements for that. Is that, are there any potential issues there? So, there's no residency requirement. It's requiring the recipient to work as a teacher in Vermont. Okay, after. Right, okay. After they graduate. Yeah. Okay, got it. Thank you. So this is like post-paid. It's not prepaid in that they're getting the loan that's being forgiven after the education is complete. Correct, it's a loan that they take out so funds are dispersed to them. And if they work as a teacher. But is it before they get their certification or after their certification? When you say certification, do you mean licensure through the state of the teacher? Licensure, yes, yes, ma'am. So they would have to be licensed to work as a teacher in the school. Okay, so they're assuming that they're, in this case, it's assuming that they still maintain a loan, a student education loan of some type. This is the loan. So this program is the loan program. So VSAC will distribute funds that have been earmarked for this program only to students who agree to do all of these things. But they're, but it's before they start their education and they get a loan to start their education. Correct. Not afterwards. They have an outstanding loan. Can they sign up for this program? Say they're in New York, they want to work in, they have a education loan outstanding. They want to work in Vermont. They signed this agreement. The loan's forgiven if they sign for the year for year. I don't think so the way this is worded. If you look on page 225, line seven. Yeah, that's exactly what I was... One of the first eligibility requirement is that the recipient of the loan has to be enrolled in a teaching program at an eligible school. I believe what's contemplated in the way this is drafted is someone who's in school applies for a loan to pay for the schooling that they are undergoing. So it doesn't matter if they're in the beginning or the end, it's just whenever. I'm gonna shoot, I'm gonna move to Mr. Robinson if you don't mind. Tell us a little bit about why you were involved in this. This could be helpful I think. Yeah, sure. For the record, Tom Robinson from Monty A, is a practical matter, the, please correct me if I'm wrong. The majority of this language is modeled directly off of the nursing loan forgiveness program that the legislature passed last year originating in the Senate. And this language herein is modeled off after that specifically for teachers. It does envision VESAC being the administrator of this program for folks who are choosing to pursue a degree and a profession as a licensed teacher. And so it is geared toward the front end of people pursuing the profession, not for folks who have already completed a teacher education program looking for loan forgiveness. As it's written, I believe it would and there's conversation in the House Committee on this language, House Education Committee on this language. It would contemplate both undergraduate as well as graduate degrees. So if you're somebody who got a bachelor's through being in biology who then wanted to go back and get a master's in education so you could be a biology teacher, you could be eligible for this for your master's in education program as well as somebody who is pursuing an elementary education degree in your traditional kind of for your matriculation type of program. So let's just take that example for a second. You have your bachelor's in biology, you wanna do the master's, what are you going to get then during this process and when do you get it? Yeah, so that was the criteria that Beth was going through. And again, I think one of the reasons why the House went in this direction is because VESAC has already stood up a program like this for nurses. So in conversations with Scott Giles and other folks at VESAC, they said, oh yeah, we did this for nurses, easy for us to do this for teachers as well. So it gives them some space to build out that program within these specific parameters. So how it's actually operationalized, of course, is within their purview within the contours of the statute. So, but it would be forgivable. And one of the conversations we had with VESAC was to go to Senator Weeks's question, the grant versus the loan construct, right? Do you get a grant to pursue a career in teaching that by saying they're gonna commit to teaching Vermont for five years? And what we heard from VESAC is actually, it's hard to convert a grant to a loan after the fact. If you give them somebody a grant saying, I will commit to teaching Vermont for five years, to then, if they don't fulfill those obligations, how do you get it, right? How do you charge them? Right, so their recommendation was to go with this model to build out a forgivable loan construct where there are these benchmarks of accountability to accurately calibrate loan forgiveness based upon the criteria as established in statute and as they build out in the details of the program. Great, Senator Ashima in the center of the lounge. One thing I'm curious about is, and this might be a question for VESAC, curious about income, income levels. Somebody, what the threshold would be if somebody's making 100 grand a year, are they eligible for this or is there going to be different tiered levels based on your income? Or is that highlighted, or is that explained in section G? I think we're so desperate for teachers. I think I'm looking at Mr. Robson, we'll take what we get, no matter what the income bill, but I'm going to please Senator, yeah, future Senator Robson. Unless you live in Martins District. I would tend to, forget it, if you're not ready to switch to a friend. So you might remember back in January, February, I was here talking about teacher salaries, starting teacher salaries. And the lowest starting teacher salary in Vermont is $36,000 annually with the average being in the 40s. So we're talking about providing loan forgiveness to folks, professionals who choose to make their career in Vermont, who are just starting out their career. And I'm just going to venture a guess, if you're somebody who is taking out loans for your educational needs, you're probably not somebody who's coming from means or has capacity to pay for your education to other monies, right? So I think by virtue of kind of the construct in who accesses loans to pursue higher education as well as the specific career path that this is targeting, it's not going to be drawn in high wealth or high income. Folks, yeah. I was using 100 grand as an exaggeration example, but I was just curious, you know, what the different levels might be, but from, you know, what I'm seeing, looks like in subsection GBSEC is going to be a group or the organization that determines who's eligible and who's not based on their income. So that's what I was curious about. Shem Lynch. Just put my in here, it's on display here. If somebody's a communication maker and they've already downed in two years, can they still transfer their credits to this program and take advantage of this to become a teacher? So the short answer is, I believe it would obviously depend on the institution of higher education and their credit requirements. But as a general matter, of course, I think we're all familiar with folks who choose to shift their majors throughout, of course, their education. And so again, in the conversations with VSAC, there was some specific discussion of a situation where often those first two years of education, folks might be trying a couple different things and it might not be until, to your point, Senator Williams, you know, kind of the third year where they're really crystallized and they're like, oh, actually, I do wanna be a teacher or I do wanna be an engineer. And this would be accessible to folks who choose at that point to become an educator. From there forward or from the beginning? I don't know. That would be within VSAC's purview, I think, to figure out, but I think the intent is outlined in here would be, I would imagine, specific to their time pursuing their degree and to be a teacher. Any other questions before we go back to Ms. St. James? Is there any help? Yes, please, Mr. President. One final point, the 2.5 million is the exact appropriation that was made from nurses in this construct last year by the Senate and then the House. So, please. I believe we were on, we just watched through the language on page 225, subdivision three, lines 10 through 12, so we're gonna go to subdivision four. So we're still talking about the eligibility, they have the requirements an eligible individual has to follow. So they also have to execute a credit agreement or a promise or a note that will reduce the individuals for a giveable loan benefit in whole or in part pursuant to subsection F with this section if the individual fails to complete the period of service required in this subsection. So if they start out by saying, of course I'll do it and then they don't, there's a provision for that later on. And again, remind me, how many years are they committing to? It's each year, so it would be each year of forgivable loan awarded. One year for one for one. Thank you. Yes, Senator, we can see if I can. Thanks. Yeah. So just out of curiosity, if they fail, if they take a loan, they go for a year, they begin a program, they decide that it's not the major they want, the state has to look for what, one year of repayment? I think we should walk through, wait to walk through the language that addresses that. Okay. So subdivision five, they also have to complete the program's application form, the FAFSA, and for Vermont residents, the Vermont grant application, each academic year of enrollment in accordance with a schedule determined by VSAC. And they also have to provide other documentations that corporation may require. So if an individual, if an eligible individual fails to serve as a teacher in Vermont, I think Senator Weeks, this is going to walk through what your question, for a period that would entitle the individual to the full forgivable loan benefit received by the individual, other than for good cause is determined by the corporation, then the individual self shall receive only partial loan forgiveness for a prorate portion of the loan, pursuant to the terms of the interest, free credit agreement or promissory note signed by the individual at the time of entering the program. So they have to pay back what they're not. So there's no time, it's not a, there's not a time requirement, it's a money requirement for payback. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by time requirement. Well, they don't have to work in Vermont for a year for a year, it's just money, they just pay back a month. Yeah, we can't force someone to work in Vermont. So the only other option is to recoup the costs of the loan. On line 10, there shall be no deadline to apply for a forgivable loan under this section. Forgivable loans shall be awarded on a rolling basis as long as funds are available. Any funds remaining at the end of a fiscal year shall roll over and shall be available to the corporation in the following fiscal year to award additional forgivable loans a step forth in this section. And then subsection G, you're absolutely right. This section allows VSAC to adopt policies, procedures, and guidelines necessary to implement the provisions of this section, including maximum forgivable loan amounts. The corporation shall not use more than 7% of the funds appropriated for the program for its cost of administration. Maybe recoup its reasonable costs of collecting the forgivable loans in repayment. So that is, and Colin was absolutely right. This is almost verbatim, the language from the giant workforce bill from last year. I forget the act name, but the bill was S11. And this is almost exact language from the Nursing Forgivable Loan Program with obvious changes for the teaching profession. So we didn't benefit from the conversation about the nursing forgivable loan program. So it's curious if VSAC established a maximum forgivable loan for nurses in their program? I don't know. Would you repeat that? I'm starting to hear that. I was wondering, so it says there's a section about including a maximum forgivable loan amount that VSAC establishes. I was wondering if the nursing program had a maximum count. But I'm just kind of curious for the value of the program. It's kind of what I was looking to say. I would, similarly, I haven't heard a specific number, but I'm sure that VSAC could provide that information. And they have built up a program for the past nine months or so. We're going to move on to the next section. So we're on page 227, section F4, Emerging Pathways to Teaching. Senator Campion, this language will be familiar to you. This is language-based off of the peer review grant support program that Senate Ed worked on last year. So the purpose, on line two there, the purpose of this section is to encourage and support the development and retention of qualified and effective Vermont educators to combat the growing educator shortage throughout the state and meet the needs of Vermont students and is necessary to invest in non-traditional educator training programs. So one second, this is grow your own, not really. It is. Okay, that's a point. Yes. Thanks. Grow your own, you know, this was targeted, we did it over the past couple of years at people who would likely sort of almost self-identified as teachers, let's say you're administrative assistant in a school, you're in a school. I mean, you have a job maybe in a school that our educators a great example. You've identified yourself as wanting to work with kids, you want to be in a school. Is there a way for us to invest in you to kind of grow our own to get you in the classroom? Good. So this is a grant program as opposed to the loan program that we just walked through. So on line eight on page 227 is the program creation. And you'll notice that this is session law. So the loan program is being put into title 16, which is the green books. And this is being put into session law. They have the same legal effect and would continue in perpetuity unless the legislature takes action. In fiscal year 2024, there is established the emerging pathways grant program to be administered by AOE to provide grants to expand support, mentoring and professional development to prospective educators seeking licensure through AOE's emerging pathways, including peer review and apprentice pathways with the goal of increased program completion rates and increased rates of licensure of underrepresented demographics. AOE shall adopt policies, procedures and guidelines necessary for implementation of the program. Eligibility criteria, the agency shall issue grants to organizations, school districts or a group of school districts for the development and administration of programs and program coordinators designed to provide prospective educators and emerging pathways to teaching with the support necessary for successful entry into the educator workforce. So this is a grant program for the organizations or people that are going to be supporting the prospective teachers. Not, it's not money going into the pocket of the prospective teacher. Right. From page 228 now, recruitment, support and retention of prospective educator candidates shall focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Support provided through the program may include support through the practice exam process, local educator led seminars designed around the Vermont licensure portfolio themes, local educator mentors, support in completing the peer review portfolio and licensing process and continued professional development support within the first year of licensure. And there's a reporting requirement here. Yes, Senator Gilligan. In all of these cases, support means financial, correct? No. I mean, it may, but I don't think that's what's contemplated by the language. I think it's literal. Like support through the practice exam might mean helping with practice exams, quizzing you on the subjects. But I believe that there's nothing in here that would prohibit financial support in the way of perhaps a life-paying for a licensing fee or something like that. If you wanna ask? No, I just want to follow up on this one. Yeah. Oh, go for it. Yes. Thanks. Honourables and providing aid. So as a general concept, as Bestie and James said and as Senator Campion said, the construct here is that a school district, a group of school districts and entity might wanna come together to help support folks, as Senator Campion said, who are interested in becoming teachers who already have a bachelor's degree because you have to have a bachelor's degree in order to become a teacher in Vermont, pursue a career in education through an alternative pathway, including things like the peer review process, which is an alternative pathway to get licensure other than pursuing it through an institution of higher education. And so this is for entities to apply for that grant through the Agency of Education to facilitate that process. Senator Campion, some of the language here, I think expanded in slight and small ways from some of the language that this committee worked on last year. And for point of reference for the committee last year, Vermont NEA, my colleague Dr. Juliette Longchamp, who's our director of professional programs, a 30-year educator in Vermont schools, was approached by seven school districts in the Northeast Kingdom, because right now we have over 1,200 teachers in our schools working on emergency provisional licenses. And so she was approached by them to basically build out a pathway to support those folks to get permanent licensures. She currently has over 100 folks enrolled in that program that she is directly supporting going through the peer review process, you can call it, it's called PROVTED. And the peer review process is something run through the Agency of Education, the actual licensing, but individuals who do it on their own, there's about a 40% completion rate, but if you're supporting that process, about 100%, right? And so this year is intended to create space and resources for other entities to apply to the Agency to build out those types of programs or analogous types of programs to support community members who are interested in becoming licensed teachers. Yeah, sir. I'm not sure who to direct quite to, because it seems like this is a new program or a continuation of a whole program? I mean, it's kind of a combination, isn't it? I mean, you're sort of building off of... This would be a new program in Vermont law that the state supported. Okay, it just seems a little unusual given the severity of the teacher population problem that we're not putting any money in. It's all about support. And I agree with my colleague that when it's only words, mentoring is effective, but when it's only words, it's a little hollow. Well, it seems like there is money, but it's going to an entity rather than directly to the person. To the teachers themselves. Yeah. That's where a group of supervisors who used to get together, they could use these funds to actually... Support. Two and a half million dollars going to it is what I'm reading on the first page. Let's teach her a forgivable loan and send it to different funds that are in the grant. In the grant. 500,000. I didn't see it. 500,000, okay. So 500,000 is put into this program. And then two and five for the other. Right. Put the 500,000. Again, we put some... Did we do it in a similar way last year? It was Mr. Robinson. So your committee cast out language as best as it was very similar. It did ultimately pass the legislature. Did the house not take it up? You know, I wasn't close enough to the details at that moment to remember exactly. I think it ultimately actually did come down to the source of the funding. Okay. It was educational fund versus general fund money. Thank you. And I think that was the sticky wicket. This does, this is general fund money, I believe. But... What did the house pass last year? Might be an easier... They did something on this. No, no they didn't. No. But after this conversation happened in this committee last year, the secretary took the language your committee had passed. This committee had passed. That's what it was. And he commited money. Operationalized it using ESSER money. That's right. And he put down a $100,000 fee for OCS. Thank you. Okay. And that's how the Grove ETA program is going right now. Got it. Thank you. Yeah, it's in our weeks. Thanks, sir. So page 228, sorry, I'm lying too. Just curious on the shell, shell focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Does that mean that's a priority in your interpretation or kind of an exclusion? Or is that a policy question? The plain language requires that the retention of prospective educators focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So it would be in looking for prospective educators and retaining prospective educator candidates. That search and that retention shall focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I'm not quite sure I understand your question. Yeah, well, I know. It's kind of a big word, you know, shell focus. I'm wondering if it means that, okay, the priority is diversion, equity, and inclusion, or that's what the program's for. It's for those who experience, you know, we all have enough experience of what diversity, equity, and inclusion means. Just wondering if that's, it just kind of prioritizes members of those subsets, or if it's kind of exclusionary, meaning that it's not for all interested, pseudo educators trying to pursue a permanent education. I think I can speak a bit to that. Last year, I was on a superintendent search committee in Wyndham County, and, you know, the conversations, there's definitely this understanding that we wanted to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it's asking the questions of, you know, where did we advertise this job, and what are we taking into consideration when we're looking at somebody's resume and giving the yes or no decision on it? It's not, you know, we didn't have a line in our, you know, that says we shall focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, but, you know, it was a part of the conversation, and I mean, it was brought up multiple times, so I think it really just involves the way you advertise these sorts of things, and, yeah, yeah, let's... Okay, well, what if the candidate is not in the subset of, you know, historically diverse, inclusionary, or reputable, you know, if they've been, you know, is their candidacy then nullified? I mean, they can't, this program's not for... Well, in my experience, no, that doesn't nullify the candidate. It just seems like, I don't know. But this is something different, so I'm trying to share my own experience from when we talked about DEI stuff with the hiring process. So I don't know how closely connected it is to a loan program, but just trying to share something that's somewhat connected to your question. Mr. Robinson, you were in the other committees. Can you say a few words about this? Yeah, sure. As I remember the discussion and house education on this, the process for this language in front of you, there was a symbiotic conversation between house education and house commerce, because house commerce held the whole bill. So there were some liaisons between the committees during all these conversations. And if I remember correctly, that intention here was more of a sort of, it was not to be exclusion of people, but it was basically to say, hey, we need to do, make sure that we're diversifying our education workforce. And as these programs build out, let's have that in mind and make sure that we're intentional in creating space in pursuing and supporting candidates who were in that space. But it wasn't the intention to make it exclusive to a particular population of folks who might be person of education. That was how I understood the conversation and committee. More along the lines of what Senator- It seems, I agree, but I agree that that would be the likely intent, but I'm curious if from a legal perspective, that's program or if in fact, it's just the opposite and includes an exclusionary part. I believe, so if you look at the, I mean, first of all, if we were to spend all this money and get more teachers, I'll be really psyched, I think, but please go ahead. If you look at the program creation, there's nothing in there excluding, there's no exclusionary language in there. This language appears in the eligibility criteria. So it's not the focus of the program, it's the eligibility criteria. And one of the things I like to do when everyone's debating what a word means is look up the definition. Shell focus is all in focus. Right, so Shell, so focus, one of the definitions that just popped up when I Googled it from the Oxford dictionary is pay particular attention to. So, I don't read this language as excluding anyone. What I read it as is a directive to AOE who has to, by this language, develop the policies and procedures for the program, sorry. So AOE is administering the program, they have to adopt the policies, procedures, and guidelines necessary for implementation. So I see this as a directive to AOE in setting those criteria, you know, what does that look like? And also a directive, what does that look like for the plans, the interested programs are gonna put forward to qualify for the grant, and then also a directive to the programs themselves when they're looking at recruitment support and retention of those prospective educators that they are there to support, focusing, paying particular attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but I don't read that to mean that's the only purpose of the program. Okay, thank you very much. However, you will get a report back on this, so you will have data to look at how that language is implemented. We don't always ask for a report back here, so this is nice to help you see how that language is actually used in the field. So AOE has to report back by next January 15th on the status of the implementation of the Emerging Cowsways grant program in a summary and performance review of the programs to which grants were awarded. The reports shall include any metrics used in the performance review, the number of program participants, endorsement areas of participants, feedback from participants and mentors and any recommendation for a legislative action. And that's the Emerging Cowsways program. This next one, H229, section F5, is a teacher licensing fee suspension. So notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary, peer review process, one-time licensure fee requirements are suspended during fiscal years 2024 through 2029. In fiscal year 2024, the estimated fees that would have been collected under that licensure fee shall be accounted for through funds appropriated to the AOE from the general fund. You will notice that there is not a specific appropriation for that on the first page there. I'll take 105 of that. There is a fancy because they're taking into account fees that would have come into the state in a special fund. There's a fancy way that JFO accounts for that. So it's not accounted for through a specific appropriation. It's not urgent. This might be a question for Colin, but I was wondering if there's any background as to why we'd get rid of the fees for five years. And I mean, in my head, I'm just thinking, we're allocating all this money and then also getting rid of fees, which presumably would have gone into the same fund that this money's coming out of. So just thinking about balancing and wondering what the background is. Yes. So real quick baseline on teacher licensing. So it is, as I understand it, sort of like many fees kind of self-funded part of the agency. Of course, Vermont teachers have to be licensed in public schools. And they have to be re-licensed every five years. So this is not the initial licensing fee that a teacher gets when they first come out of school. It's not the renewal fee. It's specific to what we briefly mentioned earlier, the peer review fee, which is an alternative path to licensure. So this is for somebody to say fee of $1,200. So it's the biggest of the fees. Normally, if you're just in your initial license or re-licensing, you're talking about $300 or so. It's $50 every year plus baseline, $50. This is for somebody who is going through a specific peer review process who already has the bachelor's degree to become a licensed educator in Vermont. And it's a large chunk of money at $1,200. And so that was the focus here. Let's remove that barrier, that financial barrier, for folks who are maybe choosing a second career. Maybe they've been in the private sector. They're in their 40s and they wanna become a teacher. They go through this peer review process and they get to the end of the row and have to write a big check for $1,200. Let's eliminate that barrier to folks. So that's what this specifically does. I believe is a practical matter. We're talking about around $100,000 or so. I'm looking at Beth if she remembers this person off. It was not a large number. I think the reason, there was, how's education spends some time and talk about the totality of licensing fees for teachers and maybe doing something with others and they zeroed in on this because it was not only the biggest on the front end, but actually it was one of the lowest in terms of the total amount within the agency's budget, the places that you budget at $100,000. And again, you're rollin' out, making $36,000 probably, right? Yeah, yeah. Because this is a good start to so much more we could be doing for teachers, yeah. I ask a question about a part we've already come over. I'm sure I would wait till the end. No, why don't you go ahead? With the Loan Forgiveness Program, does that hold true for, for example, speech and language pathologists or school nurses or any of those folks? They have to be enrolled in a, they have to be enrolled in a 225 line seven. They have to be enrolled in a teaching program in an eligible school to qualify for the loan. So no, the answer's no. Well, I can't say no because I don't know if there are specific programs that involve teaching and speech, language pathology or specific programs that involve, I don't think so, but I don't, I can't say no, so. Is there a shortage there too? Yeah. Yeah. Mr. Robinson. Yeah, I would say, I would agree with Beth in the, it's reading this. Obviously, on the nursing side, that individual might be able to access the nursing program that was sort of last year, depending on when and how they're pursuing their, is at some point or another they would become a nurse. So, but SLPs, I'm not sure where they might fit into this constellation because it does just for, so everybody knows, obviously I think Senators, who it knows, school nurses, school social workers, school counselors, a little different. SLPs, they in order to work in a school have to receive a teacher license specific to that field in addition to having the credentials they're in. And so they, to your point, they might not be going through a education degree program the same way you think of a third grade teacher or high school English teacher or something like that. The language also lines 10 through 12 is specific to working as a teacher in Vermont. It's too bad, okay. You say too bad? Yeah. Because I mean they are teachers, they, you know, they have a license. Yeah, they're licensed. They're licensed insiders and, yeah, okay. You can wanna flag it and see if there's, because the other thing that we can also do is have a conversation with Jane. Okay. If you and I wanna go down. Okay. We'll open to that and see if there's something else. Yeah, please go ahead and put the same chance. Sure, I'm just gonna say I don't know that I don't know that there was a universal definition for a teacher in Title 16. It's something that I will look into. But I'm not sure that there are lots of people that provide services in schools that aren't teachers. And so I'm not sure that the term teacher encompasses nurses or speech language sociologists or school social workers, et cetera. They're providing a service in the school but they're not a teacher. They may have to have an endorsement to be in the educational setting. So if you are interested in expanding the eligibility of that program, we would need to look at very specific language. I'm not averse to that. If there's, I think we're just having that conversation. Yes, I'm your right. I will say just as a practical matter, if you are, if you're working in a public school and you hold a teacher license to the AMC of Education, you are part of the Vermont State Teacher's Retirement System and by statute, you're required to be part of that. So if you're a licensed teacher, and a college holds them on, you would have access to that. So just the point that Beth was making, there's probably a way to, well, maybe she wasn't saying this, but it feels like there's ways that this could be captured. Given that context. Okay. You wanna look at the last section? Page 229, line eight, section F6, Educator Workforce Diversity. Again, this is another piece of special law. Subsection A, Educator Demographics, in order to understand and improve the longstanding and well-documented issue of underrepresentation in the Vermont Educator Workforce, including underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Color, New Americans and other historically underrepresented communities, the agency of education shall collect demographic information from educators and report such information in its annual teacher and staff full-time equivalencies report. The agency shall submit the Educator Demographic Information section of the report annually to the General Assembly on or before each January 15th. Subsection B is the creation of another grant program. So, the historically underrepresented Educator Affinity Groups Grant Program. Does everyone know what an affinity group is? Why don't you review it? It's just a group of like-minded people or people with a similar interest. There is created the historically underrepresented Educator Affinity Groups Grant Program for the purpose of providing grants for the support of existing in the development of new Educator Affinity Groups for historically underrepresented groups. The agency of education shall administer the program. AOE shall adopt policies, procedures, and guidelines necessary for the implementation of the program established pursuant to this subsection B. And that's it, section F7 is not language that I drafted, it's related to corrections, but that was the end of the Educator piece that House Education took a look at and that I drafted. So this is just, this is just data collection? The first piece is data collection, subsection A, and then starting on line 18 is a grant program. There it is. Where AOE, and the appropriation for this section is $30,000. Where AOE is administering this grant program for grants to Educator Affinity Groups for historically underrepresented groups. So is that $30,000, does it say what you can do with it? It requires AOE to adopt policies, procedures, and guidelines necessary for the implementation of the program. So if AOE is gonna put, it does allow AOE to put parameters on what that money could be used for, but the legislative language doesn't spell that out. Correct. Are there, to your knowledge, any good examples of parallel to a affinity group that's funded by the government like this? Oh, funded by the government like this? I don't know, and I wouldn't say that this would fund them, it would be... $30,000 worth of funding that's funded. There are affinity groups that exist right now that would fit this category. I am not the best person to speak to who they are, and I have not done any research on other state programs like this. Mr. Robinson, back to Senator Gulick's question about, I would just say, school counselors, nurses, is their language, if we went down to approach and said, could we do something along the lines of, are there school personnel? I mean, to keep it broad, you know what I'm trying to, I mean, I'm thinking of this group, but there could be other people that we're not thinking of and set aside. Yeah, I do know that I may have helped appropriations find a little money. Maybe we could use that money. Sure. I don't know. Yeah, I would say two things. One is, obviously, if you want to pursue a different but specific program for this, go forward with the funds you have found and the catch-push it. Right. Absolutely. I am also literally drafting an email to the folks at VSAC right now, and I'm CCing Senator Gulick, asking their thoughts on this question, because, of course, you know, school nurses, SLP school counselors, school psychologists, social workers, among perhaps others, there is a cadre of folks who are licensed teachers who work in our schools, who wouldn't matriculate through a education program in the exact same way. Right. Yeah, so many shortages. Yes. Again, we're not talking about people graduating and making $3,000 a year right now. And probably take, if you're a counselor in a school versus opening up your own practice, hanging a shingle, and you're not making as much. So I would say there's something we can do this year. I'm happy to talk to Senator Kitchell about it. Would you like me to include you on this? No. Thanks, though. Senator Gulick will let me know if we should go down. Yeah, thanks. Any questions for Ms. St. James, for Mr. Robinson? So this was going to go to economic development, but they said no, this section, of course, is going to be here. But economic development has asked me to come in and give the committee's impressions tomorrow morning. So I'm looking for the committee's impressions on this piece of workforce development. And then they will take it and give our impressions and their impressions of the rest of the workforce development bill to the committee on appropriations. Just looking for, please, Senator Gulick. I think it looks great. I think it's really targeting some areas that have been in need of some support, including the historically underrepresented educator affinity groups grant program, because we may be able to hire folks from historically marginalized communities, but we want to retain them once they are here. And if having an affinity group is something that makes their experience more positive, then I think it's great. Senator Sheen, impressions? On the whole thing? Yeah. I think it's good. What I appreciate the most is the student loan forgiveness term of one year in Vermont, one year goes away. It's my understanding after somebody has been here for a couple of years, they're much more likely to set up routes, have a social circle, buy a house, and those are the types of things that... Run for office. Yeah, run for office. Those are the types of things that keep people in the long run. So, and that's what we want. Senator Williams, impressions, thoughts? Can you turn it away? I'll take it. Good. Okay, so, Senator Weeks. I'm just curious the experience from the nursing program. I'd like to hear a testimony about something we've already done. If it addressed, if it really addressed the problem, if it provided solutions, it addressed the problem, we'd go from there. That actually was another point, but I forgot to... I'm curious about the statistics. You know, how many nurses finish the program and stay in Vermont versus how many decide to crop out of the program and they have to recoup the losses. Might ask them that it'd be set. I can... The nursing piece also, that would be great. That would save us a step and then they can get back to us and let us know. Please. One other sort of final point. Just for context, I don't think this will be a surprise to any of you, but these types of programs exist for various professions and states and other places. And while I'm not close to the details on those, the sort of construction concept is not unique to Vermont and not unique to this moment. I know New York State has one specifically for teachers that's been on the books for a while. I'm not familiar with any sort of data and outcomes, but I imagine these programs would continue to exist if they find themselves or produce useful results. And if it doesn't work, this data ends up with more money. Right, which we don't want actually in this case. Yeah, sort of weeks. No, just curious, you know, is it an off? Is it too much? Was it effective? Just a lot of questions, which, you know, just throwing money at a problem isn't a solution to understand what the problem is and to make sure this is a solution that it is. Another thing I'd be curious about is how we would advertise this. You know, what I've heard a lot this year is how many things exist that we've done that people just don't know about. And it would be a shame to prop up a program that hopefully we all think is awesome and put all this money into it. And then, you know, there's people who want to do something about it, but they don't even know it exists. So, yeah, I think the advertising piece is also important. That's a great point. So, Mr. Robinson is ready to be sat now, and if you don't mind, that'd be great. The advertising piece. I'm CCing center. Yeah, in the center to look at it. Look back, first one. I'm gonna be paid for now. See how many weeks go. Big pressure. Anything else before we take a five minute break and then at the Vermont State College is it? They're here. They're coming in person. They're just around the corner. They're on their way. Sounds good? Yeah. Okay, we'll take maybe 10 minute break and then we'll come back in. We're a little early and then we'll. 10 minutes, wow. Yeah, and then we'll head right up. Wonderful. Good afternoon, welcome back to Senate Education. It is Tuesday, April 18th. And we, the last item on our agenda today is to talk a little bit about the future of the Vermont State Colleges. The Vermont State College Systems has been in to talk to us multiple times this year, including a little bit early on about the transformation and how things are going. But time travels in an odd way in this building. And so in some ways it seems like yesterday and in some ways it seems like years ago. So we thought we would have you back in and give you, well I would say provide us if you don't mind. And update how things are going. I think one of the outstanding questions is as you're all starting to make changes and alter the landscape in different ways, which we understand you need to do, what might we expect things to look like in five years? And I think that's for me almost that elevator speech. We know that the competition out there is incredible. I want to acknowledge that years and years and years ago, 30 years ago, I know you pulled a lot of students from the upstate New York area, New Jersey. Then their state said, hey, we're going to give free community college. We're going to do free this. Therefore students stayed sometimes in those states. I also see a lot of competition from Southern New Hampshire University and different online programs. So I know it's just to recognize that it's a really changing and challenging demographic out there. So we'd love to know what you're thinking. How do you survive it? Not only survive it, how do you thrive in it? And so what does that look like in the next year? So I hope that sets the table of some of the things that we've been talking about. And we'd love to hear from all of you. Yeah, that would be great. So thank you so much for having us back. We're always happy to come and tell you what we're up to. I think to understand where we're going, it's really important to understand where we've come from and why we're on this particular path. So this isn't something that just came about like in the last couple of weeks, but it's really important to understand how we got here. And so one of the reasons we provided the binders here is really to just show you really what we've been doing and the path that we've been on. And it's really critical to understand that the financial challenges that the system has been facing have been decades in the making. So since the 1980s, when we were funded about 50% of our revenue came from the state, we've really been on a trajectory downwards from that. We saw enrollment increases in the early 2000s since 2008 and the recession. Really, we've been, again, very challenging circumstances. And I would say that on the whole, the Vermont State Colleges didn't always understand, I think, how dire the financial situation was. And we've really been able to, since 2020, really get our arms around that and really have a much better understanding. So I just wanna sort of take us back a little bit in time. So in August of 2019, the then chancellor issued a white paper, which again is in tab one here. And the white paper, I believe it's in white paper, yes. It's the serving Vermont students by securing the future of the Vermont State Colleges system. The white paper really looked at the disruption across higher education. And as you mentioned, very, very challenging environment that we're in, there were a number of Vermont colleges and universities that closed. And so the white paper was intended to really enable internally and externally for everyone to understand what the challenges were that we were confronting in the hope that once everyone understood what the challenges were, we would then be in a better position collectively to figure out where we needed to get to. So that really, again, really encouraged you to read all the material in here, but particularly read the white paper. That looked at the historically weak demographics that we face, looking at the 25% decrease in high school graduates between 2008 and 2018. And obviously that's continued. We're also looking ahead to a demographic cliff in 2026, which is the outcome of the 2008 recession. And remembering that our students primarily are coming from Vermont. So that pipeline, again, the decreasing number of high school graduates has a direct impact on us. Bottom rank state support, I'm not gonna dwell on that, but historically, as many of you may know, we did not receive significant funding from the state as compared to neighboring states and nationally. And we're very thankful for the support we've had over the past three years that has really made an enormous difference to us. You mentioned things like the Southern New Hampshire University pricing pressure has been enormous. Again, there's more competition for a smaller pool of students. That's driven up discounting, which is when institutions have a sticker price, but they're actually then offering significant cuts on scholarships, whatever made to reduce the price. And that really is a sort of race to the bottom for a lot of colleges. That's the reason a lot of the private colleges in particular have gone under. Facing competition from things like Southern New Hampshire University, again, changing technologies, changing students' needs and what they're interested in. And then, yeah, just generally the disruptive technology and the delivery of higher education. So these were all things that were identified back in 2019, so no surprise pre-pandemic. Obviously when COVID hit in 2020, that only accelerated the challenges we were facing. And at that point, we were really looking at not being able to make payroll. I mean, we just got to a crunch very quickly, in part because we sent students home in March of 2020. And we knew we needed to refund room and board to those students, right? And that was going to be a significant multi-million dollar cost that then was going to impact our ability to move forward financially. So what happened was the state stepped in and commissioned some reports. So the legislature commissioned a couple of reports. And one was the state treasurer's report, which again is included under tab one. And that was a report on the state of our finances. I think it was really important. I think at that time, you know, people come in and tell you, we really need money. We really need money. It's important for the state to at least understand how dire our financial situation was. And Beth Pierce and her team put together a report for the general assembly to really describe the situation that we were in. The joint fiscal office also commissioned a report on the funding for the Vermont State Colleges. That was prepared by Jim Page, who's the former chancellor of the University of Maine system. And he kind of worked with the treasurer's office looking at that data and provided information to the joint fiscal office and to the legislature. And I wanted to just pull out something from that particular report. So he acknowledged, he had a number of observations in there. And one was that a nationally accepted benchmark for a state to be competitive in the national economy requires 60% of its adult working population having a two or four year degree or a market recognized credential of value. And here in Vermont, we'd set the target at 70%. And we've made some progress. So the number of working age Vermonters 25 to 64 who met that target increased from 43.6% in 2008 to 51.2% in 2018 as compared to the national average of 32.9% in 2008 and 48.4% in 2008. However, it's arithmetically impossible to reach the 70% goal in the next 10 years using the K through 12 pipeline alone. There simply are not enough Vermont children. The other point that he made in his report, which I think is valuable, is really recognizing the value of rural institutions. And so he noted, let me see if I can find that here. So I think it's a helpful one as well. Rural public colleges and universities are often among an economically challenged region's last and most important anchor institutions. Experience in Maine, which is where he was based, has shown that the relatively small cost savings accrued by closing one of these institutions would be outweighed by the economic and social costs to the families, businesses and communities served by these institutions. Nevertheless, this cannot be taken as an endorsement at the status quo. Maintaining operations may require wholesale change in how an institution provides these services. So I'm providing that again, the background, the recognition of the state of the situation that was confronting the Vermont State Colleges. The legislature created a select committee on the future of public higher education in Vermont. And it rapidly pivoted from being public higher education to really being focused on the Vermont State Colleges. That committee, and again, that's the very first thing under tab one in here, that's really the blueprint, so to speak, of what's put us on this road and what we're looking at doing right now. They took into account a lot of feedback. So there were a number of groups that came forward in the summer of 2020 to share their thoughts on what should happen with the Vermont State College system. So there was, our labor unions got together and had a labor task force. We had folks in the northern part of the state had a group called DRIVE, individual institutions that have been on the chopping block, created internal committees to look at what they could do. The board of trustees created a VSCS forward task force. So there were a number of different entities that were all looking at what the future could look like. And all that information was fed into the select committee along with significant input, interviews, focus groups, et cetera, with business leaders, local communities, and everyone else in Vermont. And they came up with a number of really key recommendations. So increased legislative support was one of them. Looking at a multi-year transformation, five years to reduce our structural deficit, bringing together Carleton University, Northern Vermont University and Vermont Technical College into a single university, and keeping the community college of Vermont separate. Aggressive coordination of administrative services and really developing a service-oriented organization within the system that is nimble, flexible, and competent, addressing affordability for our students, analyzing the inventory of our physical facilities and repurposing our underutilized spaces, providing greater focus on the workforce development to meet the needs of the state, and then greater accountability for our board to more deliberately and effectively exercise its leadership and oversight role. And those are things that the board has done. So moving ahead in February of 2021, the board went ahead and adopted the key recommendations that came out of the select committee. Prior to that, the board had created a long-range planning committee, which had also been involved in the work around the white paper. And in the fall of 2020, they had developed the strategic priorities for the board of trustees, and those were affordability, accessibility, quality of programs, and relevance of our programs. So in December of 2021, they had asked us, as the chancellor and my team, to conduct due diligence on the recommendations out of the select committee, which is what we did. And then the board essentially adopted that proposal. And those things are included in tab two of your, tab two and tab three of the notebook. So when we were looking at the change that was recommended by the select committee, we were focused on three particular questions as we thought about how to change. So does the change meet the needs of our students? Does it meet the needs of the state? And does it contribute to the overall financial sustainability of the system? And there were three foundational principles that student success would be our singular goal. Education is for life and a lifetime. And Vermont is our community. And then the list of the transformation goals and the steps to accomplish each of those is contained in the notebook here. We provided, so coming out of that, it was really critical given the scale of the change we were contemplating to really look at doing a professional project management approach for that. So we went ahead and provided extensive trainings to senior leadership on what project management looks like. We then hired a director of transformation projects and we provided extensive training to everybody. I mean, anyone that was involved in transformation teams but they were open to everybody across the system. We held town halls, we did virtual presentations, we had virtual office drop-ins. And we provided regular and detailed transformation updates to our board of trustees and that information is in tab 10, provides examples of some of those updates. We've provided, as a chancellor, I've provided weekly, bi-weekly, every two weeks updates to everybody and the entire community, including CCV because again, a lot of this is system transformation, not just Vermont State University. So again, just extensive communications with folks bringing people in, making sure that our board meetings and materials were transparent. We developed a transformation website where all the information was posted. We undertook in the spring of 21, we started an academic program optimization which was really looking at the three institutions and all the programs that were offered and how can we optimize all those programs. So for example, we had three education programs. So help reduce the duplication and then make sure that we had the best of our academic programs moving forward and really thinking about getting rid of some of the lower enrolled programs and concentration. So that work kicked off in the spring of 2021. We had a number of faculty, almost all faculty working on that through the summer of 21 and that continued through to fall of just recently in December of 22. We were able to get some outside funding to help support faculty doing that work. One of the other, so there's a tab four has some of the program optimization work on it. Tab five accreditation, we're accredited by the New England Commission for Higher Education in April of 22. So last April, we submitted what was called a substantive change proposal to the commission and that lays out how this new university is going to meet the accreditation standards. So just so everyone's aware, the accreditation is really about quality control and there are standards that you're required to meet. So those are also a really good source of information because it lays out how we anticipate meeting all the standards for the new university as we move forward. And then most. I'm sorry, could I interrupt and just say that the committee heard from Professor Schulls and Professor Reard at the University and Reard at on the education program array. A while back he may remember they came in, we assumed to talk about the education unification and how educators were taught to educate in this committee but that was a special testimony that this committee got. It was reflected that the program optimization work, right? And so most recently we provided, naturally asked us to keep providing progress updates. So we provided one in September of 22 and we just provided one in March that actually is before the commission. They meet starting tomorrow, Wednesday. So that's also a really helpful resource. Again, particularly I just wanna draw your attention to tab number five and then towards the back of tab number five is our most recent progress report to NETCHI and as far as the strategic plan, I just wanted to flag that for you. It's on page 11 and 12 in that second progress report and that lays out what's being proposed for the strategic planning. So there's a process being developed right now and I can loop back to that at the end because I think that more directly answers your question Senator Campion. But just so you're aware, the strategic plan that's being developed right now for Vermont State University will be going to our board of trustees, their committee on education personnel and student life in May and then it will go before the full board in June. So that's one of the deliverables that we have to NETCHI that we have to meet before the July 1st launch date. So I just wanted to flag that. Section six in here is extensive and the reason we've included this is really to share all the huge amount of work that all the different folks on our campuses have been worked on. So we've had transformation teams working on all these different aspects. So again, admissions, advising, athletics, business intelligence, career development, they're all listed on the front here on the table of contents. And there are some examples of these and what these are is we went through the transformation process. Each of the teams was asked to come up but they did discovery initially like what are we currently doing? And then they were asked what's the best practice out there around the country? And then from that, they came up with individual design proposals. So again, this is all involved work from the experts on the ground, from faculty and staff that are involved in each of these particular areas. And then the governance structure for that was their design proposals came to the chancellor and to the presidents of the different institutions to review and then they moved forward with the actual design process and then the planning and moving forward to implementation. So again, these weren't necessarily, they're not the decision makers but they're making the proposals that have come from the folks in the field that really understand the particular areas. And then those then get considered by the presidents and senior leaders and obviously any final decisions come out of that group. There was a shift this year as we moved towards having Vermont State University. Many of these particular areas, particularly around enrollment and admissions, student success, retention, academic programs really belong to the new university. They're not for the whole system. And so the governance for those then shifted over to the new university and the leadership structure there. And then we developed a shared services model to look at the administrative operations and then the workforce piece because those are really more system focused. So again, these are recommendations and they're reflective of the enormous amount of work that people provided. So with that, I'm going to actually turn it over to Sharon to talk about the next sessions, which are focused on the facilities planning as well as the finances. I just have to ask this because it's been such a hot topic. Is the plan for the libraries in here anywhere? So the library's plan is in here. It's an initial plan under tab six. There's been a considerable amount of additional work done since then. As you doubtless know, a library's plan was released in February that was not identical to the plan that's in here. Since then, there was a refined plan that was proposed and the library sub team has come back together and has been working on that refined plan. So right now, and again, that's made up of library staff, librarians. There's a faculty member on that. And again, the director of the library system. So those proposals, once President Smith is on the ground, he will be having an opportunity to look through that and we'll be coming back with recommendations to our board of trustees on it. So this, I think, is reflective and I don't have the date here, I will find it, but I have to open it right there. I'm just going to add a little bit to that. Well, so if he's looking for that piece of information, my name is Sharon Scott and for the record, I just want to make sure that you all know that. The design documents that are here are proposals that were made by the team. There was never an expectation or intent that all of the proposals would be adopted in the whole and that in most cases, in nearly every case, the majority of the recommendations in each of the proposals have been adopted and accepted. The libraries is no exception to that. Much of what's in the library proposal was adopted, not the elements related to circulation, but the elements related to how to work with faculty and with students, how to be able to engage with learners in some ways. Many of those elements of the proposal were adopted and that is the same across all of the proposals. Some proposals were too expensive to adopt immediately. We asked individuals to dream big. We didn't want them to limit themselves to the resources that were available immediately. We wanted them to really look at best practices and have that identifying way to be able to look at projects and not limit themselves. A problem with the Vermont State Colleges historically has been isolate and limit yourself to just this little bit and we really wanted individuals to dream and think because we needed to be able to think creatively and do things very differently than we have in the past. So it is in here. So the presentation was in June 15th of 2022 and I know the libraries came back with that proposed plan I believe it was in November of 2022. So this is really, again, more the principles of what they were looking to do. So it is in there from June of 2021. Do you mind taking another question before us? When did the transition begin? It was 2021, right? Well, again, just I've recapped. I mean, we really started looking at things, right, from the get go once the crisis happened. We had all these groups looking. We had our own internal group that the board created called VSCS Forward. So we started down that path ahead of the select committee. So a lot of that work already began, I mean, literally as soon as the crisis happened, including on the campuses. So it's been going for two years. So why are we still at $25 million that we have to come? That was what the legislature has asked us to do. So we are just finishing up the second year of that. So we've done, right? So we've got FY24, we'll have achieved the first $10 million and we have $50 million left. We've got three million. So here's $50 million. 15. Right. That's what we have left out of the 25. And we still talk about the 25 because it is, it is a large goal that we place here for us. Yeah. Okay. I prepared one. I actually have one written here. Sure. Many campus positions have been eliminated or reclassified. Is central services are shared? Central services one of the main means of savings? That is one of them. We've been looking across the whole system. So one of the things we've done, again, I just was mentioning before in terms of reducing our physical footprint in the Chancellor's Office. But again, one of the main recommendations that came out of the select committee was this aggressive administrative consolidation. What came out of the Jim Page report was that, although we're a system, we really function as a federation. And so there was a recognition we could really achieve some savings through economies of scale if we started coordinating our procurement. I mean, just common sense things, but things we hadn't done before. And then certain areas, so finance, human resources, information technology, a number of these areas moving to a shared services model. So what had happened in the past was some of those functions were being carried out in the Chancellor's Office, but not all of them, but really pulling them together. So information technology, I think, is really one of the best examples because it absolutely makes no sense to have different institutions within the system coming up with their own IT policies and purchasing structures and maintenance and cybersecurity, so that area has already launched. So we actually haven't cut any people in that because one of the benefits of bringing together all the IT people is we can now have a much more robust service catalog where we've got more people providing support because not each campus could manage to have experts in everything. So we're able to take the existing IT staff and then assign them to different teams and really provide a much more robust service to everybody for IT, because again, IT is so critical to everything that we do. So as we move forward to any positions that have become vacant, so for example, we had a director of facilities who retired last summer. Once we're down to two institutions, we do not need a central director of facilities who historically was involved when there were big projects on campuses. So we haven't replaced that position. So we're always looking at how can we be delivering services, high quality services out to the colleges and also making sure we're doing it as efficiently effectively as possible. So with the shared services model, actually the presidents will have far more insight into how those operate than they've had historically because now those functions are going to report collectively to the chancellor and to the presidents and needs to say the presidents have their own budgets to worry about. So we have constant queries about how can we bring down this cost? How can we bring that cost down? So really, I think we're going, even something as simple as on the IT front, once all the information came forward and for example, CCV realized how much it costs to maintain all the existing computers, they realized they didn't need half the computers they had. So they're just going to take them offline and repurpose them. So like once people have an understanding of what everything's actually costing, it's enabling people to make much better decisions and we can be just much more effective and efficient as we move forward. So you established a policy, right? A poison. So right now we have a poison in the athletics and the libraries, not the whole of transformation. Everything else is moving forward. So does the plan stop the layoffs? So right now, the board has directed a pause and the expectation is that the president will bring a new plan back to the board. And so there is again, folks have been working on what that plan looks like moving forward and what the staffing implications of that plan will be. So right now, I mean the RIF notices are still in place but we're going to have to figure out what the staffing needs will be to implement whatever the final plan is that they will be coming to the board. So they're on the layoff? They, no, they were given notices back in February for a layoff of June 30th. So no one's been laid off. Ms. Scott, would you like to join us up here? Would you like to do, however you'd like to do it. I like to do it whenever it's possible. And if the chancellor just wants to move over, that's fine too since you'll probably be backed up. Are you sure? Yeah. You're happy to take a backseat for a moment. So you'd ask, you know, where are we heading and what are we doing? And so I want to talk a little bit about facilities. That's tab number seven here. And if we look at our facilities within the Vermont State Colleges, we spent significant time between 2021 and 2022 looking at the size and scope of our facilities and the condition of them. It is a significant cost driver, as you know. Maintaining buildings, the roofs, the windows, the grounds, et cetera, is a significant cost driver. And so as part of that work, we implemented two studies. One was a return on physical assets study that really looked at how, what is the condition of our existing facilities? How well are we maintaining them? And really what do we need to do to maintain them better? What we learned is that our deferred maintenance profile is really large. And we also learned that we should be spending about $9 million a year in terms of not improving our facilities, but essentially treading water to maintain our facilities. And we spent somewhere between $3 and $4 million. And those funds largely come from you in the form of capital appropriation. We really focus those funds on life safety, so making sure that our buildings are safe and secure. And not on improvements to the buildings. And yet if you walk around our campuses, you will see spaces in every single campus facility where the carpets are ripped, the walls might be crumbling, there are cracks in some places that you can even find areas where the wind comes through the windows. And you can see snow come in. It's not a great thing. But that's the condition and that's really where we have been as a Vermont State College because we've under-invested in our capital infrastructure. The second thing that we learned related to facilities is that we undertook a space utilization study. And we asked a firm to take a look at how well our facilities used for academics. So we looked at every academic space, every classroom, every lab, every teaching facility. And we said, tell us how well we're using them. And what we learned was a really startling and stark statistic. And that is that in no space on any one of our campus are we using the space more than 30 to 35% of the time in any block between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday in any 15 minute block. That is a startling number. And that's every single location. So every single location. Caston, Johnson, Linden, everywhere. We are not using the space more than 30 to 35% of the time in any 15 minute block. That is all of it. So that is so about 30 to 35% of the time we are using all the space. But the rest of the time, the space is empty or many of the spaces are empty. And for institutions of our size and how rural we are. So an urban institution with a lot of students, you tend to see very high utilization rates. And you spend to see very low utilization rates in very science intensive, lab intensive type courses. But for our type of institutions, largely general education, people that are taking humanities and other related things, what we would see for institutions of our size and where we are from a rural location is somewhere in the 65 to 75% range. And so what it tells us is that minimally we are over resourced in our physical space at least 25 to 35%. That is really important for us to understand. Like 25% is it over resourced? Over resourced by at least 25 to 35%. In fact, we could probably say that it's higher, but without looking at things more fully looking at the residential space and co-curricular space as well, we don't wanna go beyond saying somewhere in that 25 to 35% range. That's a pretty large number. If you walked around the state house and you saw 25 to 35% of your space or put it another way, 30 to 35% of your space being used fully only in let's say two hours a day, you would say, wow, the state house is too big. And what we know about us is that the Vermont State College locations, we have too much space. And so one of the things that we have to be looking for as we move forward is how do we shrink the size of our footprint to match the number of students that we have and make sure that the campus locations are vibrant. And there are lots of ways that we can do that. We can look at selling spaces. We can look at bringing businesses in to partner with us. And so a key goal of Vermont State University is really to find those ways to offer clear opportunities for students to engage with businesses and to be able to engage in ways that are really meaningful. That's an action. Quick question, I'm just thinking about all the other overarching crises that we have. Are there any of these buildings that can be used for housing? So we have explored the opportunity to look at housing and we are always interested in partnering with whomever is interested in looking at us. The challenge for some of our residential spaces is that they are group restrooms. You might remember from your own college days. So that can be a little challenging for families. And most of our residential halls do not have elevators, which makes it also a little bit challenging. That being said, we know that housing is a huge issue in all of the communities that we serve today. And so as we look forward, if there are ways that we can partner, those would be things that we would be really interested in finding ways to do that. So as we look ahead, yes. I just wanted to add, and for the record capital ambassador, director of external government affairs, I don't think I said that earlier. But we have had a couple of short-term contracts for housing that have been really interesting. One has been with Vermont Law School, housing students at the Randolph location when they had too many first year students to house in South Royalton. We've had some visiting nurses who are working at Gifford, live in Randolph campus as well. And currently we have, or they might be gone by now. I think they just left. They just left. Over the winter, we had a number of international students that were working at Smuggler's Notch Resort for the winter season, their summer season, but living in the residence halls at NB and Johnson. And so we've been able to explore some of those shorter-term opportunities with the residence space that we do have available. Additionally, we have a couple of faculty and staff members that have stated in a couple of rooms short-term. I'm thinking, in particular, one individual who lives in Saratoga Springs four days a week and comes and lives on campus three days a week and does some splitting-up time there. We've had another person that's struggled to find housing in Vermont like a lot of folks do and so has done a less split-living option like that as well. And then as Sharon was just sharing, part of the facility's strategic planning and long-term planning is exploring with some of the part organizations in the state, like what of our facilities, if the residence halls wouldn't be a good fit to convert to apartment housing, for example, what other buildings do we have that might need? And so I apologize for interrupting. No, no, that's great. So, Ms. Scott, just so you're talking, much smaller footprint needed. Much smaller footprint. And it sounds like there are, there are also gonna be additional cuts. There... I mean, there's gonna be big changes between now and the next several years. There will be... Huge changes in order for... Big changes necessary. For you to become the nimble, thriving, important institution involved. Absolutely. Absolutely. So from a facility's perspective, there very much will be significant changes that we need to anticipate. It is necessary in order for us to be able to survive and our next step in that process is launching the master plan. We recently hired Dumont and Janks and they are beginning the master planning process which will have significant collaborative and inclusive components for faculty, staff, students and constituents to move forward and help understand exactly what we need for enhancements but also what we need to do to consider divestment and where can we consider areas for partnership. Space is really hugely important in higher education. It very much is a symbol of who we are as institutions. And so we have to understand that that's likely to come forward as a significant issue for people. If you move next to tab eight, another key element as we move forward, as Sophie mentioned, is really looking at the... Head a little too fast. Really looking ahead to how to make sure that we meet the strategic goals of the Board of Trustees. And those are affordability for our students, the quality of our academic programs, the relevance of our programs and the accessibility of those programs. And Vermont State University made an enormous jump and I'm really grateful to the Board of Trustees for their leadership for approving that, which is to reduce the tuition for Vermont State University starting this fall. It was a very significant change. I've worked for the Vermont State College for 20 years and in that time, not once have we reduced tuition. We've held firm, we've held the line, but not reduced. And this was an attempt to really recognize that affordability for students comes first with what is that sticker price. Our sticker price for Vermonters especially was too high. And so we really wanted to make sure that there was truth in advertising related to that price. And so the price is just under $10,000 for the base undergraduate program. There's an additional tuition fee for some of our programs that require greater one-to-one resources, but we also took a really large step of making a 20% to 25% depending on the institution reduction in out-of-state tuition. And one might say, why would you do that for a Vermont institution? Well, and that's because we were massively discounting the out-of-state student tuition. And so there wasn't truth in advertising and our tuition at base tuition for out-of-state students at $28,000 or more plus room and board for another $14,000 put us in the $40,000 plus range to attend the Vermont State Colleges and it was scaring people away. And I like to think- What range again? The $40,000 range. And I have to say, I like to think about as state students as future Vermonters and we want those students to think of Vermont as an affordable option and to be able to move forward. We want the students to come to all of our campus locations because it's the right thing to do. So that change in tuition is a huge stride forward for us in terms of affordability and being able to make sure that our students, our Vermonters and the students that come to us from out-of-state can afford to attend our institution. It doesn't come without risk. And Chair Dickinson of our board is here with us today and they took an enormous risk to reduce tuition recognizing that it's gonna be a little bit of a hurdle to make up the difference in that tuition as we move forward. But we recognize that it's the right thing to do in order to be able to make sure that these are affordable institutions. Chair Williams. Going back to your slides that were presented Friday, one of your goals is eliminate duplicate positions. You have a firm number and how many positions are actually duplicate? Well, I don't know that I have a firm number on what, but I will say, so I come from one of the colleges originally. So I'm Chief Financial Officer now, but I previously was the Dean of Administration for Northern Vermont University. And prior to that, I was the Dean of Administration for Johnson State College. Well, at that time when I was at Johnson, there were five deans of administration. There are now two financial, Chief Financial or Chief Business Officers for the institutions, in addition to the financial staff. Previously for the institution that will become Vermont State University, there were three presidents and prior to the merger of Northern Vermont University, there were four. There will now be one. So those are many of the administrative, executive level consolidations that have occurred. I don't have an exact number for you though, right now. How about the costs? How much do you use, sir? Well, we have accrued some of those savings over the course of the last two years as individual positions have removed. So I don't have that immediately in front of me. That's probably why the five million for the past two years come from this electrician and vacancy savings. So if you and I were to jump on an elevator and go six floors, what would you say this place, the state colleges in particular, gonna look like in five years? And really, are we, and you can keep it as simple as, we're looking to be more like Southern New Hampshire University. We're looking to be more like Pennington College or we're just, you know, what's that message? Well, you would, because that would just help us in our understanding when things happen like the library or all of a sudden something else were to close or the space conversation. Just if we could get that in our minds, well, if I could get that in my mind, that would be helpful. So from my perspective, and I think this is probably a Chancellor question, I think perhaps you want to answer. Please, Chancellor. I think it being a statewide hybrid university, right? And so it will be both physical campuses, again, maintaining all the five current physical campuses, but also offering programs in a flexible format. So students can choose to take their courses in person, but they can also choose to access their courses remotely. So that might be remotely synchronously where they're coming in from another campus and that they're live and, you know, like now if you've got someone coming in as you often do, either on Friday or you could have asynchronous courses where someone's doing the course in the evenings or the weekends. So it's really, as we move forward, the goal is to provide as much flexibility as possible for students. So I'm making sure for particular programs that could look like different things, right? So I know we cite this all the time. So not so much an academic program, but the apprenticeship program, you know, for plumbing and electrical. When that went online, which it had to do during COVID, we actually were able to double the number of students that we had in it because it turns out a lot of students prefer to just be able to take the courses remotely. They're an academic piece of the program rather than having to get in the car and drive somewhere and do it. Because these are all people that are working at the same time. So really trying to build that flexibility in as we move forward. So it's not Southern New Hampshire University. It's not Bennington College. It will be something different. But again, being as innovative as we can be moving forward and making sure that students, wherever they are, have the ability to access the programs, access the resources. We do have this pilot program that's in play right now. This one-to-one device that's been going on for this academic year and is continuing forward. But really experimenting with how you can use digital equity, but making sure everyone has the same tools. So I see an iPad here. It would provide the opportunity, for example, to have all the students in the room with the iPad, with headphones, a pen, a keyboard. Faculty member has the same thing as do the students that are participating remotely. So it's a way that you can actually have everybody participate at the same time on an equal footing. Because often when you're doing the mix between being in the room and being on the screen, it doesn't feel the same. And so we've had tremendous excitement from the faculty that have been working on that. So again, it's trying to be creative as we move forward in how we're delivering programs. So just two more questions. What would admissions look like in five years? In other words, what number would you all be happy with in terms of the number of students, graduate and undergraduate combined? I know at Bennington College, we always talk. We've been at 700 really for decades and decades. And we do think, okay, there's a plan to get to 900. Slowly. So you must have some kind of optimal number in your mind. And then, well, actually, I'll just leave it at that in terms of admission numbers. I think the key as we move forward is really to think around the mix of students. So I think our traditional campus-based sort of undergraduate students, we expect that those numbers are not really going to grow significantly. But where we'll be picking students up will be more, again, re-skilling, up-skilling, more high job numbers. So did we get programs in the M.S. program? There's one piece that we tend to forget when we talk about our current enrollment, our current student numbers, is we serve over 3,671, is that the right number? It's about 3,000. Of workforce folks, right, that weren't as part of our degree programs. So I think it's just important to remember that we serve a lot of Vermonters that may not necessarily be showing up in regular enrollment numbers. It's important for us to hear. Senator Weeks. Yeah, just to follow up on the various questions. So you have a risk ahead of you to self-impose risk, to drop tuition. To drop tuition, you have to increase student numbers to the Senator Campion's point. Does he start? There's got to be like a metric. You start dropping tuition, you're hoping to escalate numbers of students. What's that student number look like? It's got to be over 10 students. I'm going to take this part of the question. So with the change in tuition, we were able to do two things. As I mentioned earlier, for example, out-of-state tuition, we were substantially discounting out-of-state tuition. So the sticker price might have been $28,000 for an out-of-state tuition, but we may have been giving students a 15 or $20,000 discount off the face of that value. So by changing the sticker price. That discount for everybody, that's discounted. It's not as though the Mellon Foundation is giving you that 15,000. We call it institutional aid. Right, right, which is really important for people to know. It's a scholarship expense. So we make an expense related to that. So basically we're giving a discount to a student that might have been $15,000. By lowering the sticker price by $8,000 to $10,000, we're able to dramatically reduce the discount that we provide for that. So our expectation is that, assuming we can maintain enrollment, there should be no loss. That being said, it's a big assumption in an environment where demographics are going, if they're declining for us. So the great news is we don't have to necessarily make up on volume because we make the adjustment in the discount to the students as much as possible. But there's a risk in that, what if students that come are, maybe they're interested in that lower sticker price, but they still want to see a $15,000 discount before they'll arrive to us. That's the danger, which is accelerating the amount of discounting that we're doing. The plan that the Board of Trustees approved allows us to be able to make some swaps so that hopefully, fingers crossed, there would be no negative impact on it. But it's still risky. As I said, we've never seen a decline in the sticker price of our tuition in Vermont State Colleges. That's always a risky maneuver. We always want to advocate, move the sticker price up. But when you're taking that same sticker price and you're increasing it, only to discount it again to the students. At a certain point, there's a value that just doesn't work. The value proposition no longer works for the student. We had a former Chancellor who used to say you can't sell $3 shoes for $2 and make it up on volume, right? And so that's part of the problem, right? You still need to get net student revenue. And if you've discounted your way to the point where it's actually costing you more to educate somebody, it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. Right. So Friday, you were mentioning the budding CCB tuition in half. Is that really sustainable? The proposal would be funded if it's approved by the State General Fund. So a one-time general fund appropriation. And that would be a pilot to see if that boosts enrollment. What we have seen through critical occupations that were funded by the legislature and workforce development initiatives that were funded with previous scholarship programs is that price really makes a difference for Vermonters and particularly makes a difference for Vermonters who are first generation college students or are coming from low income backgrounds. It makes an enormous difference in their willingness to even consider higher education. So that particular proposal would actually allow students to see a path forward, much like Vermont State University making the decision to lower its tuition. This would allow CCB to pilot that with the one-time funding if that's approved. So $25 million in a five-year plan. Do you really think that with that amount of money, you're gonna be able to accomplish admission right now? I mean, what's gotta change? Are we anticipating the increase in tuition students that's gonna help get us on a path to prosperity? Did you ever consider coming back to the legislature and saying, you know, think about the optics of what we're dealing with at the universities that's closing the libraries? If we came back and said, well, if we didn't have to pay $5 million a year that we might be able to think about the PR, think about the optics of what's happening. So the challenge that we're facing right now is not the imposition of $5 million a year from the legislature. That's not the problem. The problem that we're facing is that we have a structural deficit that we cannot close. We have an obligation, the Board of Trustees, as the fiduciary for the corporation that is the Vermont State Colleges, and I as the Chief Financial Officer have an obligation to make sure that our debts are paid, that our faculty and staff are paid and that our vendors are paid. If we don't have, if we don't find a way and a path forward to reduce our structural deficit and reduce our expenditures or increase our revenues conventionally, we are not able to do that. There are only two sources of revenues, really, for the Vermont State Colleges. Students and the tuition that they pay for room and board, tuition and fees, and state appropriation. That's the challenge that we face without a commensurate increase to say we will receive an additional commensurate amount of appropriation, we have to make these cuts. It's not the imposition from the legislature. You saying we need to cut $5 million a year is not the problem. The problem is the structural components of the Vermont State Colleges. Just looking a little after five questions, please keep up the conversation. Just a quick question. I'm not trying to cut off debate or discussion. You alluded to the master plan. Is the master plan in here? Yes. So you'll see the master plan at the very end of tab seven. That's the RFP for it. So we haven't written the master plan. That was the request for proposal. We just hired the firm to help us with that work. This is only facilities. We're talking about the master plan. So to Senator Kempin's point, the 25 year, the 10 year, the 20 year vision. So that's not a documented year. So the strategic plan, a little bit more carefully. Yeah, the strategic plan is something that the Vermont State University has to develop and provide ahead of the launch of Vermont State University on July 1st. So that's the plan I talked about at the beginning that's in the NETCHI. There's not a draft in here about this. There's an outline in this page. Here's the teaser. Page 11 and 12 of the second progress report on unification for the Vermont State University and which is in the NETCHI tab, the accreditation tab. And that lists out, it's got four primary goals there. So one we just talked about, become the nation's first state wide hybrid university that expands access, increases affordability and improves student achievement. The last tab of section, the last part of section five. That's the second. The second, become a university that produces career-ready, civic-minded students. The third, become a community-engaged university that serves as a catalyst for rural advancement. And the fourth, becomes an employee-centric university. So that is being worked on right now at Vermont State University and that proposal, that strategic plan with the metrics that will go with that will be coming to the EPSOL Committee of the Board of Trustees in May and then we'll go to the full board for approval in June. Yeah. Board of Trustees, come in. Do you have any perspective on this part of this? Representative Dickinson. Yeah, so Representative Lynn Dickinson of the Chair of the Trustees of the Vermont State College of the Legislative Trustee of Iowa in New York represents that on this tab. And do you want to repeat that question again? Have you got to, can you add some perspective to where you think we're going? Yes, we are, our priorities right now are urgency. We have a little bit under 11 weeks left to go before we launch this new university. We've been working on it for three years. Really intensely for the past two, though it's started three years ago. We want to go and really see a transformation that is successful, where we continue to work on these things, all of the things that the administration talked about are things that are really important to do. And a lot of people have worked really long and hard with the project management, with all of the other work, the faculty, the staff, students who've been involved. It's been a very intense program by them and our board has also been very intense. They have gone and they have had monthly meetings. Zoom really was the success story for our board because instead of people having to drive two hours one way, we were able to go on our meetings to get a lot done. You had once a month, we have our many meetings. There's a full form or pretty close to a, more than a full form. And we are really involved and we have the best board we've ever had. From a variety of geographic areas, from a variety of occupations and skills. And so we're involved in the transformation as well. We are very supportive of our administrative team and all the other people who've done it because they're just working 24 hours a day to practice whatever and how they do it. And the third thing, of course, is that we're trying to figure out how to go and financially make it more stable with this $25 million reduction in our structural deficit. We have a plan. We have already gone through examples of how we can do it. We've had a consolidation for our administration. We've had, we did do a consolidation with MVU and Lyndon and Johnson previously. It wasn't a complete transformation. It wasn't as successful as we hoped, but we learned a lot from it and that has really come in handy with this. So we are really hoping that all the adults in the room on all of these campuses, all of the people that are going to have to hopefully save their jobs will come together and work with the administration on the board so that we can go and make these successful students. We have problems that are absolutely essential to the state of Vermont. Our healthcare industry would just collapse without the state colleges. There's all kinds of things in manufacturing and mental health counselors. I mean, you name it, we've had people apprenticeships. We have an incredible source of workforce that we need to work on and this is really, really vital. And I showed you the demographics, the graph that we get from JFO that we've gotten over the years of the legislature. For a school that accepts, for schools that are looking at 80 to 90% of their students coming from Vermont, that has really been a major factor, devastating, quite frankly, to lose all those students and not have them available to us. And it's not just us. We've had seven colleges close in this state in the past few years. Most of them are private, but there are some that are still living on the edge. So this is incredibly important. Thank you. Any questions or comments? Thank you. Okay, Sam. You said one more. Yeah, no. This is a moment. I like the demographic graph that you shared. But I believe in the Chancellor's testimony, you alluded to a 2025 demographic cliff coming up. What's the future? I haven't seen those numbers. And I'm curious if you, no, no, it's beyond 2025. I wanted to know what, like- And so what it is, is that from the recession in 2008, there were just a lot of children that weren't- Right, right. But do you have any data? Is there office have something to show what that, because that's critical to some of these conversations that we're having. I'm personally very curious. I'm sure that data is available. I mean, because we know how many students were born in 2008, so how many fewer of them are going to be available to be coming to college. We would start to look at that, right? We were, and there's information related to how many students are currently in high school right now. So we're looking at 2026 as the next demographic cliff that we will see a reduction. It does stabilize after that. Right, I get all the words. I'm just wondering if there is a data. I don't have it right here. Yes. If I may, Senator Kippic, I think one thing that we talk about a lot, but maybe we haven't talked about here because we've been so data focused, is the students that we serve. And I think about them a lot, because some of them are my family members. Some of them are our friends and neighbors, but we serve over 10,000 students a year on the academic side, and those 3,000 students on the workforce side. And for a lot of students, their opportunity to pursue a higher or continuing education happens because of the Vermont State College and their community. There are many of our students that look at a traditional big four-year out-of-state university experience, and that is terrifying. It is financially out of reach for their family, and they start to cut off their dreams and their future opportunities before they even start because the prospect is so daunting. And for so many of those students, it's one course at a time when the Vermont State College is, it is the one-on-one attention from the professors that makes the difference for them, and it's those personal, individual experiences, and that's something that I think we are all committed to carrying through to the new university. It's those opportunities and those professors and those interactions that pull students forward and pull them across the finish line. So many of our students take a little bit longer than four years to finish college. It may be that they dropped into part-time to take care of a family member. It may be that balancing their work and their academic obligations became too complicated and they had to drop off their class schedule a little bit, but that's the jewel of the Vermont State Colleges that I see us carrying forward with the new institution with enhanced flexibility. So using myself as an example, I took a couple of graduate school courses through MDUL mine and I took those asynchronous courses that you can do on your own time because as you all know, the legislative schedule is very predictable and I couldn't commit to a class time every week. So I took asynchronous courses and was able to improve a couple of graduate credits that way for myself. And there are so many students that pursue opportunities that way. There are others that need the school in their neighborhood and next door and they need that in-person experience. And I think about students like my brother who needed to be in-person at Vermont Technical College sitting down with a professor to get himself across the finish line for his degree. And I see the best of both worlds. I think so much of the conversation around transformation focuses a lot on that 25 million and focuses a lot on what's going away. But one thing that I wanna leave you with and that I like to think about a lot is what's the future and what's there when we go forward. And it's more of these enhanced academic opportunities that you've heard about. It's more of these meeting students where they are with what they need because at the end of the day, we're here because we love Vermont, we're doing this work because we think it's the right thing to do. And all of our faculty, all of our staff, everybody who's working on this with us, you know, we're all trying to roll in the same direction. So I apologize if that was a slightly off topic, but I just, I wanted to make sure that I spoke a little bit about where we're built into as well and not just what made me go in the way. This is about her chance to listen to that. Thank you so much for having us in. We're always happy to come. Any other questions, you know? We appreciate it. We appreciate it. But we're happy to provide it. Any other final thoughts? Just something else. I'm sure you want to talk about it now. Thank you. Committee, anything else for today? Yes. I have to go to a meeting. Please go ahead. Thank you. Can you repeat 30 seconds? Yeah. So I'm proposing that we send a letter to the Center of Kitchens, the Center of Corporations Committee, in reference to the Mont State College system with an action required that we first we request the committee repeal legislative mandate for the state colleges cutting $5 million per year for five years for a total of $25 million, by reducing the amount of cost savings to instead of $5 million, $4.5 million for fiscal years 24, 25, and 26. And second, that we request that the Vermont State College system be directed to staff and operate the universities at the same level as they were operated in January 1, 2023, until six times the newly appointed B.S.C.S. president has time to remodel the system's strategic plan. So it's not a $5 million issue, it's a $1.5 million issue for three fiscal years only to allow this situation to settle until a new president comes on board on his time to reflect on the real-world impact fiscal stability of the university. I would think that before making that ask, I mean, you know, we heard to the contrary just a few minutes ago that changing the $5 million a year is not what the problem is. And I would think that we wanna take a look at that, also get their opinion on it. If we're going to make an ask that makes substantial changes to what's guiding them right now. Yeah, and I would just say, and I've been a little public about this in some conversations with people, if I prefer if this is the direction, go and go forth, perhaps get other names and not have it be a committee position, having a little conversation with different people and see who might sign on and see if you can get some time to sort of, so that's my request. So I would welcome your involvement. Okay, thank you. You've been in the house, but I understood. It is a very significant challenge that the college system is encountering. It's not just about, it's not just one library issue. The attempt here is to alleviate one of the issues which is currently on the floor. Got a motion, a claim to show. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, everybody. Anything else? Okay, I think we're finished.