 Good afternoon, everybody. This is Senate Education on Friday, January 22nd. Welcome. We are pleased to kick things off today with Mr. John Carroll, who is the chair of the State Board of Education. Mr. Carroll, welcome to the committee. Glad to have you here. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought we'd spend some time. We do have some new members to not only Senate Education but to the Senate and might not be as fluent in the role of the State Board of Education in our work and education policy in the state. So we thought after you introduce yourself and tell us just a bit about who you are, you would tell us a little bit about the State Board and how you would anticipate our committee interacting with all of you in the future. And then we could get into a little bit of what you're seeing on the ground as it relates to COVID and COVID needs and general education needs at this point. Thank you. With that. Thank you, Senator Campion. Thank you. Well, just by way of self introduction, I guess I served on the State Board only for the last three years, been chair for the last year and a half. In an earlier life and actually in another century, I was a member of your August body. Yes. And back in the late 80s, early 90s, all of you from Rutland know David Walk and David and I were in this, an incoming class of 16 new senators. Wow. Wow, it was really astonishing. Wow. And this was the last term of Governor Cunin's services governor. And then in our second term, Governor Snelling came in and passed away after about a year and Lieutenant Governor whom we had known pretty well because he was president of the body, became governor. You all know John, you knew John Bloomer Sr. And of course his son John Bloomer Sr. was pro tem and I was majority leader in my last term. And then in an act of apparent suicide, I after six years in the Senate, I jumped out and ran for Congress against the then incumbent Bernard Sanders. And I remember when we started, I'm sort of an upper out guy. Once I sort of figure out the basics of something I lose interest and move on. I just, it's a real defect, of course. You never get really good at anything. So I remember when we started, I had 7% name recognition and it was such a shock because I was majority leader of the Senate. You know what I thought that was really important and it was important to me and about 30 other people. And of course, Bernie had 97% name recognition. I mean, everybody but newborns knew who he was. And it turned out, and I ran, I was just itchy to do something different. And there was no point against running against Howard, he and I were tweedledom and tweedledee. You couldn't tell the difference in those days between a moderate Republican and Howard Dean. You recall he was called by my colleague, Cheryl Rivers, Dino, you know, a Democrat name. Right, right. And so John Bloomer and Howard Dean and I managed to get along with Ralph, right? And it was quite a lot of fun. But there was no point in running against Howard. I mean, he's the alien, I'm a Harvard guy and there was really no difference. They're both just two guys from away. And they're running against Bernie. And it was actually a fabulous experience. And we came sort of frighteningly close to winning. And the lesson that I took away from that was that, one, my parents never taught me, which was, you know, my parents never taught me that losing was actually okay. And that it's actually some, in many ways, a very powerful and worthwhile experience. You know, we were all taught to succeed and to, and all that. And losing was actually a terrific experience for me. It spared me the days of Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton. And imagine being in the Congress at that time. What a fabulous waste of one's life. So anyhow, so I took a huge break from all that, went back into private sector, which is where my roots are, did a lot of stuff and got to travel around the globe with a fabulous company and then retired about 11 years ago and found that I yearned to be back. And I must say, when I was at the state house with you all last January, February and March, it was, I realized it was the most fun thing I ever did in my life. Oh, that's great. Oh, I truly love the intellectual stimulus of it. It's so much learning. And I just love the people. The people are all kind of outgoing, talk to the people like myself, and it's just really, really fun. It's like being back in Ireland where I'm from. I have a question for Mr. Barrow. I wonder if you had gone to Congress, what would you have worn to the inauguration? Well, probably nothing as colorful as the Senator. You know, I gave him a lot of credit for, I mean, Brown is not exactly fashionable in Washington, D.C. Great. That was great. So anyway, I'm very happy to be back involved in a different side of policy. You're the makers of policy and I'm the helper to implement policy. The state board's primary role in that regard is rulemaking. And I guess it's a little bit like machine language versus the user interface. You people write the machine language, the sort of kind of abstract general systems about how you want systems to work and the user interface is, well, but so what am I supposed to do tomorrow? And that's what rules provide. They provide an interface between the abstractions of legislation and the need for reality about what it is we as teachers or administrators or highway workers need to know to comply with the intentions of the General Assembly. When I arrived at the state board, in fact, I pushed to get on because I felt that the state board had kind of run out of control. For a variety of reasons, the state board had started to take upon itself a creation of policy. There were just two or three key people who were driving the agenda in the state board, one of whom was a former speaker of the house. And they had really sort of hijacked the authority of the General Assembly, it seemed to me. And so I had an agenda and my agenda was to, I know this sounds bizarre, but to strip the board of some of its accumulated authorities. Because I could see, I mean, I'm a former state senator and I know that there's a distaste among legislators for anybody who seeks to usurp the legislative authority quite appropriately. And I share that even to this day, 30 years later. And so I could see that ultimately this was going to lead to very, very, this was not going to end well for the state board. They seemed, when I arrived there, they seemed to regard themselves as kind of a fourth estate of government. They didn't think of themselves as legislative or executive or judicial. They thought of themselves as something truly unique. They didn't realize that they were a creature of the General Assembly, that they existed only at the sufferance of the General Assembly. So slowly over time, we brought about some changes and I worked very closely with Senator Bruce, who in his capacity as Senator of Education was one of many people who were very alarmed by the kind of usurpation of authority. Independent schools was one where the board was creating a whole new set of rules that would profoundly change the landscape for independent schools in this state. And regardless of the merits, that seemed to me to be outside the authority of the board and so worked pretty hard to kind of rein back the board. And the sort of combination of that is a legislation that like so many other interesting pieces of legislation died a warning last year. Senator Perchlich will remember the long discussions on S-166, which four of you anyway, actually got to vote on last year and it passed out of Senator Perchlich's committee last year and was adopted unanimously by the Senate sent over to the House and then the COVID constriction happened and lots and lots of very worthwhile legislation including ours, never saw the light of day. It's our hope and expectation that it will come back this year. The chair of the House Committee has assured me that they will move it forward. And I'm also told that the Senate Committee on Government Operations and the House Committee on Government Operations are very eager to see the legislation pass. And very specifically what the legislation does is it peels out some very dangerous language, language that literally says the state board shall make policy. And that has been the hook that people have been using on the board in the past to usurp the authority of the General Assembly. And if nothing else happens with this bill, it needs to strip that language out of there. So because I'm not gonna, I'm 77, I'm not gonna do this forever. And I wanna leave behind a board that is clear about what its authorities are and what the limitations of those authorities are. So maybe I can just transition a little bit to the broader picture of what the board does and especially what we've been doing in the last year. And I sent you all a letter covering the annual report. And in the letter, and I believe Ms. Lowell has that posted in some way for you to refer to if you wish. But I'll just try to summarize it. There are about five groups of activities or functions or responsibilities of the state board. One of them is to do what you ask us to do. Facilitation of legislative initiatives. Act 46 is a great example. That was a, you all developed the architecture of the reforms that you wanted to see and you set some standards with goals of that legislation and the agency of education and the state board then examined the response of communities to those. And of course there were nearly four dozen communities that had chosen not to merge in any way and they were under a number of inducements to do so. And the state board, well, we traveled all around the state. I think we had six or seven hearings. They were very tumultuous. I remember a hearing where there were big banners that said, this is not North Vietnam, which just gives you some idea of the sentiment that we encountered. I happen to love that kind of tumult but it was hard for the board. And in the end, the board voted to adopt a whole series of recommendations largely made by the agency of education. And I happen to be in the minority on that vote. And so many, many school districts were forced to merge against their wishes. As I say, there were two of us in the minority but it's my duty to support that, of course. And another more recent example is Act 173, which is the really substantial reform of how special education is done in Vermont. And Act 173 changes the funding system. So you don't, the old funding system was sort of like our healthcare system. You get paid more for doing more to people. And it instead changed to sort of block grant system or a census grant system, which said, you've got this bunch of kids, you're gonna have these needs in all likelihood. Here's the money you're gonna need, you have to get the work done with that amount of money. The reason for that, the number of reasons for it, but one of them was that the cost of education, special education in Vermont per capita is among the highest in the nation. And yet we do not have the sickest or neediest children in the nation by any means are, if you look at the demographics, Vermont children are comparatively healthy. The incidents of socioeconomic circumstances that create special demands on schools are comparatively low, even though any teacher will tell you that special needs children, no children with challenging socioeconomic backgrounds consume a numerous amount of their time and bandwidth. Nonetheless, in terms of a national demographic, we're fairly well endowed and yet our costs were very high. So part of the goal was to get these costs, change the incentives of the system, just like healthcare, the incentives are spend more. And the idea was to, which was do more, spend more and then also to change some of the practices. You have heard from, I think you probably by now received the annual report of the advisory committee on special education. That census-based advisory group, pardon me, is the proper term. And this report should reach you soon if it hasn't already. And they're the folks that you all designated to advise the state board on the formulation of rules to implement Act 173. And they've done terrific work and they've been unbelievably hardworking people, all lay people, all citizens, stakeholders. And we have been working with them and with the agency now for a year and a half on the development of rules. And they are sort of, it makes my brain hurt sometimes to slog through these rules. They are very complicated. They need to be in order to guide the delivery of special education all around the state. And if I may, I'll just divert here with something that's more of a personal observation but I think it's shared by many board members is that we are struck by the wide variation about in the ways that education is delivered in the classroom, whether it's teaching history or English or special education. Across the state, just as our demographics vary quite widely, not racially certainly but by income, by cultural values, just the sort of issues that expose themselves with Act 46, where there were some communities where Act 46 was welcomed and other communities where it was reviled. And those cultural differences reveal themselves in all kinds of ways, of course. And they do in our schools so that what happens in Chittenden County is often radically different than what happens in Wyndham County or in St. John'sburg. And in general, I come from this enterprise background and in private enterprise, organizations that are not continuously improving disappear because of competition. And one of the tenets of continuous improvement is that variation is the enemy of quality, that there is a preferred way to do things and then there are all kinds of other ways. And I think it's a reality that there is great deal of resistance in Vermont's educational community to having imposed kind of a best practice. Everybody wants to do it their way. And sometimes their way is great. I mean, to make you cry so good. And then other times it's really inept. And so one of the things we struggle with on the board is how firm and directive shall we be? Because if we wanna see these things happen statewide, you have to be very, very prescriptive. But nobody likes prescriptive in Vermont. I mean, we're very local control oriented. So we're always struggling with that tension. And it's good tension. I mean, it's not supposed to be easy. So rulemaking and implementation of directives of the General Assembly is probably the single most demanding thing we deal with. The Board's rules probably go to three or 400 pages long. Not quite as significant as the Vermont Statute is annotated but it's sort of a kiss and cousin. Another thing that we do, of course, is give to the General Assembly our impressions about where there may be needs for changes in statute. I believe Senator Campion, your predecessor provided, I hope you provided you with a copy of my recommendation from the Board that as an example, that the General Assembly might wish to consider this business of school districts, union school districts divorcing one another. And they are able to do this on the basis of statute that long predates Act 46. And the State Board has no choice but to simply observe the requirements of statute. I mean, I'm insistent that we be obedient to statute and by being obedient, we have to basically just sign off without any significant analysis as to the consequences of this disaggregation of governance in schools. So we've written to you, Senator Campion, or your forebearer and to the House Chair to say you might wish to look at this and we've developed kind of a legislative perspective about how you might approach this. And there'll be two approaches. One is to just put a moratorium but a more nuanced approach might be to say, well, how do we wanna bring this old law that says you can get divorced into the 21st century and to reflect the values that this General Assembly developed during its work on Act 46? Is this a high priority? Well, sort of because there are gonna be a fair number of communities that already are, I'm sure you read and digger, of communities that are voting to get divorced. And right now there is the only thing that stops that is having unanimous agreement from the other communities in the union district. But if that is given, the State Board has virtually no authority to require them to think twice about no authority to insist that somehow the values of Act 46 ought to be taken into account. And it's up to you to decide if you want that or not. Otherwise we just have to do what a 20 year old statute tells us to do. I spoke about rulemaking in general, that's something that I think the Board has been neglectful of. You've got 200 or 300 pages of rules, they get out of date real easy. We still have rules that refer to the commissioner of education. There hasn't been a commissioner of education since year 2012 when I think it was Act 98 passed in which the leader of the department became a secretary and it became the agents of education. And oh, by the way, the State Board, according to the intentions of that legislation became essentially just advisory to the commissioner. In the old days the State Board was the Board of Directors of the agency. And like any corporate Board of Directors, they hired and fired the secretary or the boss, the CEO and told him what to do. Those days are long since gone, but a lot of the old members of the Board never got that memo. And part of my work has been to give the Secretary of Education the autonomy and authority that statute requires and in fact, that's a big piece of the legislation that your predecessor committee last year approved and you approved on the Senate floor. Mr. Carol, I could just ask you to pause for one moment. I just want to let new senators know what the prior structure in case you're not aware is the commissioner of education was hired and fired by the State Board of Education, but also was kind of reporting to the governor as well. I mean, it was really two bosses in some regards and those of us who were there at the time felt, if you as governor, part of my reason for it can run on issues such as transportation, healthcare, other things you should be able to run and should run on education issues and hire your own Secretary of Education and be able to fire your own Secretary of Education and see work to have a platform, if you will. And so it's quite controversial at the time. There was a compromise in the end where it's the State Board still gives the governor some candidates from which to choose for Secretary of Education. And I actually think that's been quite helpful. I think most two governors who've been under this, I think would say that's been fine. And of course he or she could always reject those candidates and go through a longer drawn out process. But again, prior to that, secretaries and commissioners felt really they had, I can't think of the expression, but really two bosses and that was complicated. And it didn't seem fair to many of us also that, Vermonters weren't electing a State Board, but they were electing a governor and not being able to elect a group of people that were having such a large impact on education also did not seem like we could do better and create a more democratic, if you will process. So I just wanted to pause there and please, Mr. Kerro, if I got any of that wrong, which I'm wrong to do, please feel free to correct me. No, you're absolutely right about it. And Act 98 was this sea change. And it was that point that a member of the Board who was quite influential politically slipped into Act 98, the language shall make policy. That one phrase got slipped in in 2012. And it was sort of them salvaging some authority, I guess. It was actually very artful, but, and it was such a simple change that apparently it was not noticed. But if, and that's the very change that I'm trying to get the heck out of the law because that's such a dangerous phrase. And, but yeah, it was a big change. And as I say, I still have on my board some people who were on the board at that time. And they still don't really get it. And of course, and to your point, we are not elected. We are appointed by the governor, of course, but we do not serve at his pleasure, which is somewhat unusual. The only grounds for which we can be removed is would be violation of our oath. You know, conflict of interest and that sort of thing. So it's very curious, we are kind of neither fish nor foul. We are part of the executive branch. We are shaped and influenced by whom the governor appoints. But once the folks are appointed there, they're really just independent citizens. And I think that's the way the board works best is to see ourselves as just laypeople, just citizens who hopefully standing in the shoes of lots of other citizens are just doing our best to make sense of what's good for the children of Vermont. And of course, also for the teachers and the communities. So we, and we, by the way, are very nonpartisan, even though I guess there are political affiliations among many of the members. For example, you know, I used to be pretty active in Republican circles and I've, I just don't do any of that anymore. And I'd sort of like to sometimes, but I just feel like that's, especially as chair, you just can't do that. I think you've got to stay, just who you are as a human being. That's all we're asking for. And one other important notice is that so many bodies that are put together by the General Assembly are kind of a smorgasbord of this interest group is represented in that special, that organization is represented and so forth. We do not have any of those provisions in the makeup of the State Board. In other words, there's not supposed to be a representative of the teachers or of the janitors or any other group. We are just 11 citizens, as simple as that. By the way, two of them are students. Oh, right. And that was created then, yes. Just a question about the length of terms. Yeah, one six-year term. One six-year term, that's all you can serve. Yeah, you might ask, so how was somebody still on the board from 2012? That person was appointed to fill out an unexpired four-year term. Okay. And then was reappointed for six. That person is about to retire. The students are in almost every case a breath of fresh air. Yeah, I bet. We have two young women now. By the way, they get, one is appointed each year. So you have one who's been on for a year and that becomes the voting member. One of them votes and one listens. Well, they don't listen. They talk to, but they just don't get the vote. It's actually similar to this committee. We just didn't get that. Dharanzini and Chittenden and Hooker, they, or I guess next year. Senator Chittenden and Dharanzini, did you get that memo? It's actually wonderful. And the two women, young women we have now are just so exciting to me. I'm an old guy. I have three daughters and lots of granddaughters. So I'm sort of a softy for this, but they really are contributors. And for example, one of our roles is to go and open up public discussions about issues that people seem to care about. Good example is proficiency-based learning. You may recall last year there was a lot of passion about that. So we convened a one-day, all-day hearing in Rutland, trying to find as central a location as we could. And it was just terrific. And the best witnesses we heard were school council members from various schools. And we were very careful to have a very broad array of stakeholders speaking to us. And to be truthful, I don't think a whole lot came out of that discussion, except maybe we were able to assure the House and Senate committees that it's complicated. Yeah, I mean, because it really is. And another example of this sort of pulse-taking that the board does is that our two students on their own initiative organized a survey of current high school students at nine schools in Washington County, Chattano County and Addison County and compiled the results. And the survey was, how's it going? What is it like for you with COVID-19 learning? And it was very, very, very interesting. And what we saw was that there's this cleavage between sort of what you might call sort of well-endowed, not necessarily wealthy, but well-supported children who come from ambitious settings. Which you might say is a quarter to a third of our students and a quarter to a third on the opposite pole who are at sea for whom school is of little interest to them. These are high school kids who aren't ambitious in a school way. They may be very ambitious about building a dune buggy or being a nurse's assistant somewhere, but in a schooling kind of way, it's not there for them. And they were having, they are having original, really marginalized experience in schooling today. And the sort of highly self-motivated ones are thriving and really exploiting the freedom they have to accelerate their learning and to just push themselves at their own rapid pace. It's, that's very exciting, but it's very troubling to see this widening of the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. And it's not purely economic, but that has a lot to do with. So anyway, our students organized this entirely on their own administered. I think they had 700 responses. They collated the results and we set aside an hour for their presentation. And it's just the best stuff. And invariably, I get to write recommendations for them as to where they'll go to college and even try to steer them to my alma mater with some success. Anyway, it's great fun. And then I guess the last thing I should speak about is the quasi-judicial responsibilities of the board. If you ever served in your community on the development review board or something like that, you know what quasi-judicial looks like. And the board is, by statute, the court of appeals of almost any action that is appealable of the secretary of education. So for example, the secretary of education early, early last year or late the year before ordered the termination of the license, the teaching license of an employee of the Burlington school system after due hearing and so forth. That individual was entitled to appeal that decision and did so and the board had to hear that appeal. Another example is the secretary sets the rates for tuition reimbursement for special education schools. And in an instance last year, the school appealed the rate that was set and the board heard the appeal. The parties reached agreement on their own and so we facilitate that sort of thing. Upcoming something that will be very, very interesting is that this relates to Valente and Vitale. I sound like I'm gonna sing a song in Italian or something. These are important cases in federal district court relating to religious affiliated education. The three families in Valente and one other family unrelated to Valente have appealed as is their right to the state board to overturn the decision of their local school board. 16 VSA 828 provides explicitly that one may appeal the decision of your local school board with regard to tuition to the state board and it says the state board decision shall be final. Those are coming to us in the next couple weeks and will be extremely complicated because of all the rapid changes in US constitutional law, case law from the Supreme Court. It involves Vermont's constitution and case law from since the last 20 years. It'll be, and for these kind of things, by the way, the board has to hire, or we choose to hire our own attorney. For routine matters and the chief attorney for the agency advises me on procedural matters and kind of routine stuff. These appeals almost always in almost all cases, the agency is either a party or at least an important witness, in which case I make the decision that their attorney cannot effectively represent us because we are the judges, we're the arbiters of this conflict. And so that has become a fairly significant drain on our budget. We have to go outside and hire extremely capable Vermont lawyers and we have a couple working on two different cases for us now, but it puts the board right in the midst of some very challenging intellectual exercises. I happen to find it quite fascinating. I think it's rather overwhelming for some of the board members at times. So those are the main, that's the main scope of what we do. That's very, very helpful, very helpful. And we will have you back, of course, for a conversation about your letter to Senator Baruch, which I also am now in receipt of. But for now, I think let's see if we have about five minutes before we move on. I'm wondering if there might be some questions. Senator Perslick. Yeah, thank you. Nice to see you again, John. Did you say that the house committee chair is going to basically take up, or not act, the S-66 as a committee bill in the house? Is that your understanding? I don't know precisely whether she will take S-166 and work from there or whether they will fashion their own. I just, I don't know. I am told by the chair of your committee on government operations, who, by the way, has an interest in this because of her capacity as chair of the Sunset Advisory Committee. And if you recall, back in October, November of 2019, the Sunset Advisory Committee said, we think the state board of education should be eliminated. And I think that was reflective of the damage that had been done by the board usurping legislative authority. And I managed to plead with them successfully that I shared their concern and I think they knew that I was determined to bring this board back into the corral where it belongs. And the passage of S-166, which was also supported by Senator White and her committee, I think it was evidence for them of that. I've been told since by Senator White that her counterparts in the house intend to introduce the essences of S-166 into a bill that they are working on that is addressing the needs identified by the Sunset Advisory Board. Okay. So I think one way or another, it's gonna come to some attention, I hope soon. Because yeah, we definitely spent a lot of hours on that and I think one of the lessons that I learned as a new senator last time is just because we reached agreement on it and passed it over, I think it was unanimous in the Senate and spent tons of hours, but then at the end, came up, it was too bad. Yeah, and there was real momentum. And then COVID comes along and everything just seized up. I'm happy to take place with Representative Webb, but I wonder Senator Perslick, if we might put in a bill here, as well to kind of, if she's not going to do it or if she doesn't think she's gonna be able to get to it, we might try to enhance it here. You can have Jim, James, and Mariette just go through it with us and see if you wanna do it as a committee bill or something. Let's see, the Godfather of the bill has joined us, by the way. So yes, thank you for your interest in that. We earnestly, I just don't want, I'm not able to keep doing this for five more years. I really wanna get this done. It'll be my, some would regard it as perverse legacy to the board to rein them in and get them focused where they need to be. Great. Well, thank you, Mr. Carroll. I really appreciate you coming in and introducing yourself as well as telling us about the state board. I'll put my cards in the table. I was one of those ones who for a couple of sessions did put a bill in to get rid of the state board. And so I feel good. I'm feeling confident and I'm delighted that you're there and look forward to working with you. Well, I did note with relief that you voted in the unanimous vote and I was relieved. So thank you, Brian. I try to always follow Senator Baruth, you know. And if you don't mind, I'd like to sit in and listen to however Ms. Lowell wants to get me off the screen or whatever, but I'd like to listen to what this is. We're thrilled you're here. And of course, feel free to come to any committee meeting and they are all taped. So you can always watch them at your leisure as well, whatever works for you. But again, thanks for being here and seeing no other questions, we will move on to Senator Baruth. Thank you very much. Thank you. Great to see you. Senator Baruth. Good to be back. It's great to have you here. So we are talking about the waiting study. Yep. And I am just pulling up the agenda here. Go bear with me for one moment. So, you know, we have, I think it's Dr. Colby and Dr. Baker both coming into today to take us through the study, but wondering if you would just talk and tee up the conversation a little bit for us, you know, your thoughts as well as your bill, and then any other, you know, sort of relevant information you might provide to us as a committee, given your history as well as Senator Perclick's history last year in working on this issue. And that would be much appreciated. So if you don't mind, we'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. If I could, I just wanted to follow up that last conversation. Please. By saying that Chair Carroll was a phenomenal partner with me in negotiating with the agency of Ed as Senator Perclick may have recounted for you. We went back and forth and back and forth. And I appreciated always John Carroll's willingness to look from above at the function of his committee without jealously guarding its portfolio. The reorganization effort actually came from him. And that's one of the reasons why it advanced as far as it did. As with all of our bills last year, the House did not act on it. So that was a loss in terms of having the agency and the board at a point of agreement. I don't know whether or not Secretary French has signed on again to the version of what we did last year, but I would hope that he would. With that said, I'll turn to S13 and the waiting study. I see Dr. Colby is here. And I'm glad to see her. We, last year, when we received the waiting study, actually it was prior to last year, I went through it. I met several times with Dr. Colby. And I think my opinion was shared universally. I never heard anyone question the methodology of her study or the results of her study. And that's fairly rare, as you know, from the legislature and paneling study groups or hiring consultants generally, there's often disagreement about what they found, the method that they used to get to their results. But I think everyone that I ever heard on all sides was in agreement that the work UVM had done was of the highest caliber and it represented a series of uncomfortable facts for the state of Vermont because the takeaway was that we had been inequitable in our means of distributing funding to schools and this for decades and decades. So the basic structure of it is that as you'll go through it at various levels of fine grain detail, the current weights, some of them were determined to be inadequate. So the waiting for English language learners for poverty were found to be too low. And then in what I think was a kind of brilliant scientific insight, Dr. Colby's group came forward with the idea that rurality itself, how rural a district we were talking about was another big factor in terms of expense for educating students. And that's currently a factor that's not represented in our waiting study, in our waiting formula at all. So in thinking about it, and it doesn't, we're all the senators here are all politicians, we know how this works, bills like this that have to do with money often develop their own coalitions according to who wins and who loses. And what I thought was interesting about this is that it joined the interests of heavily urban districts like Burlington and Manuski with the interests of the most rural districts like counties and districts in Essex Orleans would both benefit under this new formula. And that struck me as something we almost never see in the legislature. So although a change in the waiting formula was always gonna be a battle royal, it seemed that here was a way of looking at it. The science had inadvertently supplied us with a possible coalition to help move this bill forward. And in fact, that's what we've seen, Representative Sebelia among others has been uniting rural districts behind this waiting study as has the Chittenden delegation and others that are interested in English language learners and the poverty formula. With that said, we were left with a methodological question which is how should a bill approach this? And we were coming up on crossover last year. No one had yet heard the word coronavirus. And so I took what was a kind of shortcut. And that is I spoke, as I said several times with Dr. Colby and asked her which of the tables in the back of her study, which appendix was the series of new valuations that she thought was most equitable and that she stood most firmly behind. And so I put those actually into a bill and the bill called on the agency of education to create an implementation plan for those specific numbers. So in other words, not a study committee to go at the problem from the beginning again because as I began by saying the most authoritative study had just been finished. It was a question of putting into place the numbers but I did think that there was outreach that needed to be done. So what that bill did was it called on the agency of ed to come up with a glide path to implementation. And it also called on the state board to do a series of informational meetings around the state. So we passed that out of committee on the last day before crossover. So we made crossover by about five hours and then we all left the building for good. So that bill died in finance because we weren't allowed to work on anything that wasn't directly COVID related. But coming into this session, I again took a shortcut which was to take last year's bill to change the dates of implementation and put it in again in terms of starting the conversation. So to be very clear, the committee is going to do what it's going to do and there are an infinite number of solutions for any problem. But I did want the bill to go in to highlight the need for discussion and to offer at least one possible approach. The one thing I'll say about the approach that's outlined there is that obviously it calls on AOE to do the heavy lifting. And given where we are in the pandemic, that's something the committee should probably revisit are the resources at AOE sufficient to take this on as well as other things. But with that said, I'll happy to answer any questions, but that's what my institutional memory has to offer. Thank you, Senator. Questions at this point before we move into the waiting study itself. Can I just, please. Senator, it just strikes me that years ago when we did act 60, we had similar goals to make equitable the type of education that our students were getting throughout the state. I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work as well as we had hoped it would. And I'm looking forward to learning more about the waiting. Thank you. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I guess the way I would put it is I think act 60 was successful, but is always in need of, the whole system is always in need of updating and fine tuning in light of things that we discover. So, again, I credit the study committee and Dr. Colby with going down the path of rural districts, one way to say it. And I've never had a conversation about this issue where I haven't highlighted this piece. If you're from a rural district, your people have been in effect underfunded substantially for decades. And every month that goes by is further disadvantaging your people. So that's why I saw it as necessary to act quickly on it. And I think you're liable to hear from rural interests in the state house who are of that way of thinking. While we have you just before I turn it over to our researchers, there are other ways to get at this, I would suspect, block grants, other kinds of things. Why do it this way? And I don't know if that's something you want to give an opinion on, but I'm just thinking as I'm sitting here, there are other ways to get at this kind of issue. Right, and I think it can seem attractive to go the block grant route. In other words, saying, okay, rural districts are disadvantaged by the formula. So we'll create a formula out of the block grant program out of the Ed fund or out of the general fund. But I think what that does is avoid the reality of what's going on. So in other words, it creates a whole other infrastructure and bureaucracy instead of taking a screwdriver to the formula and doing a half twist and making sure that all the numbers are correct. So the other thing is that if you put in place a grant program, inevitably people will think that that's a giveaway to those districts. And it would eventually become detached from the reason you did it, which is that the formula is screwing certain districts. So I'm a big believer that if we change the formula, there won't be any need for additional government, additional bureaucracy, and no one could afterwards cut that grant program, which is what's likely to happen in lean times. That's helpful. If I could just say one other thing about a totally unrelated subject, and this is dual enrollment for parochial schools, that decision just came down, you all may have discussed it. We have. Okay, just wanted to add in one piece of institutional memory about that. The Senate committee tried for several years, I wanna say three years, to get the house to change that because we knew we were gonna lose in court. And we argued with them tooth and nail, and in fact, one year, a whole miscellaneous bill with about 13 different provisions went down because they refused to allow dual enrollment to parochial schools, even though our legal opinion was that we were liable to lose in court, and now we have lost in court. And it's not, and I told you so, but it's a way of saying that the house was very reluctant on that. So if there's a need for statutory change to that program, I feel as though it's at this point, the house's responsibility to own up to the fact that they cost the state all of those litigation fees, as well as all that wasted committee time. Well, okay, that's a- Sorry. I gotta call him. Okay. Any other final comments before you, or stop back later, if any of those institutional memories. I might recommend, Senator Booth. I know somebody up in the house said I could get you on the agenda. Oh, they love me there. They love me. Anyway. In all seriousness, this is great. And please continue to come back when you can and or talk with us. This is, as we know, everything in the Senate's a partnership in your institutional knowledge, having been on the committee for 32 years. It's, you're always welcome. So thank you. Okay. Have a good day, guys. Thanks you too. Drs. Colby and Baker, welcome to a newly formed Senate Education Committee. Please that you're with us. You certainly know, I'm sure Senator Pershalick from last year. I don't want to say this year's crowd is better, but I would have said it if- Yeah, that fills off. You'll say that, right? Was that? Yeah, that fills off the call. Right, right. No, I would have said it had he been here. But thank you for taking the time to go through this with us. Certainly an important topic. It's one that I think came up a lot. You know, it's out there. You know, it's in the air. People are talking about it. People are talking about it for the election season. It's, so we appreciate you taking the time to go through your good work and let us inform us. So why don't we go ahead and turn it over to you? And then I would say, if anybody does have questions, please, I think we strike while the iron's hot. We need it unless our two guests believe that they'd rather wait until the very end. I'd rather have people raise hands and engage after we roll off. So. That's fine. That's fine. Great, thanks. That's fine. And just by way of introductions, I know many of you, but I'm Tammy Colby. I'm an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies and I was involved in the waiting study. But also joining me today is Dr. Bruce Baker, a professor of educational policy as well, Rutgers University, but more importantly, Vermont native. Yes. Come on here, right? If I could just jump in. I'm a Rutland high school, class of 83 and going all the way back to when John Carroll was speaking earlier, he spoke of David Wolk who our fathers were partners in pediatric practice in Rutland and my mother sat on the state board in the early nineties. So if you can kind of make the Baker connections, I'm guessing at least some of you have contact with my family members over time. My parents are Burlington high school grads and our family goes back to the 1700s in the islands of Lake Champlain, Night Point State Park would be my father's mother's branch of the family. So Senator Hooker and Senator Taranzini are great senators along with Senator Calmore from that neck of the woods. Senator Hooker, would you like to? And Dr. Baker, did you have my husband in class? Did I have your husband in class? George Hooker, he taught biology at Rutland High. I did not, but my younger brother did. My younger brother had George Hooker. And our children all, our children all went to your dad. Most of the town went to my dad and to Senator Wolk at the time. Yeah, that was sweet. As you can see, we are a distinguished Mary Vance. Lots of clients. And finance researchers here in Vermont and from Vermont. So it certainly was a pleasure to get to work on this study and just, you know, the study was awarded by a competitive bid process, right? It didn't just go to University of Vermont and this team. So, and Dr. Baker is one of the foremost school finance experts in the country. So we were very privileged to have him join us on this team and certainly am thankful to have him here today. You know, there's been a number of presentations on the study last year. And as, you know, Senator Ruth mentioned we sort of hit the sort of hard stop in March on the process. So I thought maybe what might be useful today is to backtrack a little bit. And it may, some of it may be reviews, some of it may not be review, but go back a little bit just to remind us where this came from, what sort of, what the big goals were. So what maybe some of the key findings were. I'm gonna do that really fast. No, I think it's fine. And I think it's actually important. Again. I'm gonna go through that pretty fast. You know, the slides are available for other people. And then Dr. Baker, Bruce has some new information to share with the committee. And then I thought we'd stop talking a little bit and let this to be more of a free flowing conversation where we can answer specific questions. So for example, I wrote down this question around categorical aid. We should talk about that, right? And sort of what that, what are the differences between operating support and categorical aid and things on those slides. So let me take just a couple of minutes. And again, there, I have a number of slides, many of which have been certainly used in other presentations around the study. Tammy, if I could give a setup here, based I think on a question that Senator Hooker asked a few minutes ago. Like Vermont tried to start going about answering a very similar question in the immediate aftermath of the Brigham decision and adoption of Act 60. And one of the issues that kind of plays into this study, what's changed since that time? One, as was brought up, it takes revisiting, revising, re-estimating to try to figure out how to solve these very complicated political and empirical problems. Two, we've developed better, we've developed clearer conceptions of the goals, the equal opportunity goals and how to measure them in terms of kind of giving equal opportunity to achieve a given set of outcomes. And we have better data and better methods for going about how we might estimate those costs to achieve equal opportunity towards some measured outcomes. And that's really evolved. I mean, I entered the field right as Brigham and Claremont were coming down, right, in 97 and 98 Vermont and New Hampshire. And I've been able to kind of watch this really evolve over time to the point where our methods and the data available for doing the kinds of things that we've tried to do for you in this study are much further along than they were at the time when anyone could have provided advisement in the aftermath of Brigham and toward the adoption of Act 60. So that's part of what brings us to where we are. We got better methods, we got better data, we can do more, we can inform the policy more clearly toward these very specific goals of equal educational opportunity. And with that, I would hand it back to Tammy to try to explain how we did. So I just, I wanna ground the conversation just as a reminder that the study was actually a legislative request, right? And that the request for the study was actually embedded in Act 173. And some of the work that we did on the waiting study actually relates to the Census Grant Program and Act 173. A lot of the more of the conversation around the study has been with respect to the weights, but that is part of the study. And there were three goals that were laid out in legislation for the study. One, to evaluate and examine the current weights in statute for economically disadvantaged students, English language learners and secondary students, and to decide whether or not those weights should be modified. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Two, whether or not we should in the statute incorporate other cost factors in weights for other kinds of costs that are outside of district's control. And then third, whether or not the special administration Census Grant should be adjusted for differences in incidence and costs associated with students with disabilities across school districts. Today, I'm gonna focus on the first two pieces because that's a big conversation in and of itself, right? Around the weights and the equalized pupil calculation. If you'd like to have us come back and talk about the potential adjustments of the Census Grant, we're happy to do that. But I think that makes the conversation even bigger. So we'll try to keep things a little bit more narrow today. Some big ideas just to build on what Bruce just said, right? And this is also how the field has evolved over time is recognizing that states are responsible for ensuring equal educational opportunities for all students, but equal opportunity doesn't necessarily translate to equal educational resources. And why is that? Because students come to school with dissimilar learning needs. And for example, socioeconomic backgrounds that might require different types and levels of educational supports for them to achieve common outcomes. And you're gonna hear me mention that, or you'll hear Bruce mention this idea of common outcomes, right? So we're trying to think about the fact that it's gonna take different packages of resources for different kinds of students to achieve similar outcomes. And it's not just students, it also is schools operate in different contexts that may also require different levels of resources to provide equal opportunities. For example, scale and operation or the prices they must pay for key resources. And so all state funding formula nationwide include adjustment for differences in educational costs across districts. When we think about differences in costs across districts, we also try to think about differences in costs that are outside district control. We're not talking about preferences of districts for higher or lower spending. What we're talking about is differences in costs due to, again, differences in student characteristics or perhaps differences in educational context outside district control. In Vermont, a second piece is sort of, I guess, building block we have to remember is how Vermont School of Funding Policy works. And this Vermont School of Funding Policy, as I've written right now, relies on localities to make appropriate adjustments to their annual budgets for these cost factors, for these differences in costs. There's a big assumption there, right? That the budgets that are being passed by local school boards on town meeting day are already cost adjusted. That school districts are making choices about spending at a level that ensure equal educational opportunity and will move students to common outcomes. And then the job of the formula is to equalize that spending according, right? Accordingly. Our current policy does adjust for differences in costs to ways through categorical grants that provide supplemental funding for specific programs or services. And categorical grants typically we think of as appropriate when we wanna target specific dollars for specific purposes or specific students. We also have wait seats and our waiting is for districts, average daily membership for these cost factors. And then we use that weighted membership to equalize local pupils spending for the purposes of calculating local tax rates. This is really important for us to remember as we have conversations around waits in this state. Our waits do not generate additional revenue for local school districts, right? This is not a way of distributing state aid. This is a way of equalizing costs across districts in a way for the purpose of calculating local tax rate. So our waits effectively generate more or less tax capacity, but they don't generate additional state revenue like they do in a foundation formula that we might see in another state. So Vermont's education funding formula uses these weights to calculate the number of equalized pupils. And in doing so, the weights implicitly adjust for spending differences by equalizing per pupil spending across districts according to differences in costs and they impact local tax burden. Again, they do not generate additional revenue. And I'm doing all this just to level set because even in the conversation since last year there's been misinformation and misunderstanding around some of these key points. If I may just, I do want to just stop there for a second. So, and perhaps I misunderstood. So these weights are not therefore allowing for additional revenue to come in. All the weights do is impact local, how we calculate the lower homestead tax, homestead tax rate. So what they do, and if you look at this slide, so let's pretend that your school district is spending the same amount of money as it did last year. Exactly, hasn't changed, right? Your budget's the same, but the number of equalized pupils goes up. Then your costs per pupil for the district goes down, your district budget and your homestead tax rate goes down. Conversely, if you spend the same amount as last year but your equalized pupil count goes down, then your costs per pupil for your district budget goes up and you have a higher homestead tax rate. So all the weights are doing is what they're doing is they're recalibrating school budgets, right? For differences in costs across school budgets and tying that to the share of the total pie, right? Of everything that's being spent by all school districts. It ties your load, right? It ties it to your local tax rate. What is your contribution to that bigger pie? So before I- Did I see your hand up? Yes, Senator Chin and just one second if I may. So just to go back again for the committee, are we trying to put additional dollars to districts and students that need it? Or are we trying to do something for taxpayers? Well, so that's an important distinction that the committee should keep in mind. But also we have to remember though, that this equalization, right? That's part of equalizing opportunity in the state because it makes dollars more. So this whole idea around tax capacity, this is like the seesaw, right? Is this whole idea around tax capacity that's built into Act 60 and sort of the statute now? Is the theory is, is that if you lower homestead tax rates, you're doing that so people will spend at a level that they should be spending at. And we know that doesn't always happen, right? We're using tax rates to incentivize districts to spend more or less in theory. But if Dr. Colby, if they don't do it. There's no requirement in statute for them to do that. And that was one of the things I wanted to say. That's why I wanted to study? Yes, one second. If I'm wondering if this is in part, because again, for me and I think people talk about the waiting study and maybe this is misinformation, they talk about really getting additional dollars to children that are gonna need additional dollars. And the way you're presenting it, and again, correct me if I'm misunderstanding, is that it incentivizes, but it doesn't do it. And so in some regards also, if I may, it sounds like the genesis could be that what we do know from this is that we might see different taxing at certain districts that might change, but it still may not get additional dollars to children who might be studying ESL, special ed, et cetera. Is that accurate? It does not, no, right? Because the spending is dependent on the local school budget that is passed, right? And so the idea around the tax capacity in statute right now is to equalize the spending, that's all it does, equalize spending and adjust this tax capacity accordingly for differences in costs. And in doing so, there are incentives to spend higher, but there's no requirement. So this comes out in our report. So for example, if we adjust to equalize people and for some districts, the homestead tax rate goes down, the hope would be is that they can, that they use an additional tax capacity to generate additional dollars to spend on their students. There's no requirement in statute. That's really important because- Not an existing statute. And so one of the things that I've talked about, for example, with Ways and Means and with House, you are the legislature. You can put that requirement in there, right? Like you have the ability to do that, but not under this statute. Dr. B. If I could add, yeah, like in a traditional foundation formula where the goal is to ensure that each district has that cost target of funding and that they can achieve that cost target of funding with a specific tax rate or some other measure of equitable tax effort, there would be embedded in the legislation a mandate for that minimum tax effort or tax rate that would ensure that each district then has the cost-based target of funding to meet its children's needs. That then becomes also a debate in terms of what is the constitutional requirement? Is there a likelihood of future litigation? Can towns simply choose to tax themselves at a lower rate to the point where they do not provide the children of that town equal opportunity to achieve the outcomes? That that becomes a point of contention in constitutional litigation. I don't know if the effort or what extent that's even part of the discussion around the table, but the design feature of the Vermont formula is to still let the towns decide on the budget. That's right. That's a very, very important distinction. I appreciate that. And I know we wanna get to the weights, but I do find that sort of revisiting some of these key distinctions in the formula are really important for framing out this conversation because it's not that weights are gonna generate additional dollars. That said though, right? So that said this argument while the weights aren't gonna get more dollars to kids. So that argument has been passed around. The reality though is while that might be true, that doesn't mean that under current statute, the legislature doesn't have an obligation to continue to maintain a fair and efficient funding system as written. And what the study says is that the weights that are in it, right? And so this whole thing only works as intended as written if the weights are properly calibrated. So what our study says is the weights are not properly calibrated. So the existing funding formula isn't even doing what it's supposed to be doing with respect to recalibrating costs and recalibrating tax rates appropriately. Whether or not, right? The second question of tying dollars in need, that may be something that the legislature wants to take on and think about and maybe even make adjustments to the existing funding formula, that's fine. But in the meantime, the existing funding formula is not operating as intended and is not doing this calibration, right? With respect to costs. I appreciate that, I understand it. It just to me, and again, we'll continue this conversation again. It just, if I wanted to get the most dollars because special education students need them and their teachers or other students of needs, I just keep coming back to granting those dollars to go out because that would guarantee that those students would get those dollars. You can certainly do that, but that does not relieve the legislature from its obligation to maintain the funding formula, right? So these weights are what calibrate, right? Individual, town and district contributions to the ed fund, right? And so you may want to redirect dollars over here to specific purposes and special ed isn't part of this because it is a categorical program. But you may want, for example, let's talk mental health. That's something that we put out in our report. Like there may be a good case to be made for a very targeted and specific program, categorical program that provides dollars for mental health services and trauma, right? That may be, that does not relieve you of your obligation, right? To make sure that this calibration that is supposed to be right, that's supposed to be balancing, right? In equalizing spending in terms of tax effort across districts, it doesn't relieve you of the obligation to make sure that that calibration is appropriate under current statute. Right, right. So I want to be careful with either or. And frankly, this is actually an and in both, unless you fundamentally change the formula over here, right? And you change it to a foundation. But really you understand what I'm saying? Like this, these other considerations may be important and even necessary, but doesn't relieve the obligation over here to make sure that the funding formula that is in statute is operating as it should and as intended, okay? So in the existing formula, we have these three weights for economically disadvantaged is 1.25, English language learners is 1.2 and secondary students is 1.33. Those were the three weights that we evaluated. We do have pre-kindergarten weight. That's 0.46 in the case. That was not included in the study for lots of reasons because primarily that area that right is in such flux in the state. Our study design, I think it's also important to recognize what we exactly did. And there's been a lot more attention put on the quantitative analysis, rightly so, but it's also important to note that there was an extensive qualitative portion to this too, where we did a lot of stakeholder interviews. And those stakeholder interviews really provided, provide sort of this rich description of perspectives on the cost factors and weights in the existing formula, as well as these perspectives on the census block grant calculation. And while I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on those perspectives today, I would encourage the committee to read that section because I think it really provides some good boots on the ground context, as well as a fertile ground for other kinds of policy ideas that might complement this conversation around the weights. For example, targeted support for mental health, right? So the quantitative analysis, and this was led primarily led by Dr. Baker, did really three things. It identified factors, not actors, excuse me, factors that account for differences in education costs across districts. So rather than saying we think these are the things that are outside of district control that account for differences in costs, we actually use statistical techniques to identify what those are in a systematic way, right? So it's not a dartboard, which is essentially kind of how X60 ended up, right? We sort of rolled things over foundation, we said, we think it's these things, right? Like this was actually derived using extant data. Second, we estimated for each of those factors, we said, so here are the things that account for differences in costs across districts that are outside their control. Okay, then what is the cost differential? Like what does this mean? Like how big of a difference in costs does, for example, poverty account for English language learners, morality, sparsity, right? And then third, we translated those cost differentials which are really dollar amounts into weights and that translation into weights is consistent with existing statute. And that's really important, right? This is a conversation I've had with JFO, which is the way that we calculated the weights is the way that existing statute says to calculate the weights, okay? And that's important to know. So I'm gonna skip over the stakeholder perspectives that are in the slides. But let me go to the weighting portion. So remember we did that first thing, we identified cost factors. The empirical analysis resulted in identifying five factors. These are five things outside district control that are related to differences in educational costs across Vermont school districts and schools. And that is percentage of students who are economically disadvantaged, percentage of students who are English language learners, percentage of students who are enrolled in middle and secondary grades, right? And those are the three we have. And then these two others, which are indicators for geographically necessary small schools, right? Economies of scale that it costs more to operate some small schools and population density measures of sparsity. So our study shows that there are five factors that account cost and differences in costs across school districts across the state that are outside their control. Each of those, right? We then calculated a weight. And we did that again by estimating the dollar, the cost differential for each one of those and then creating a weight that is consistent with the methodology and current statute. And these are the weights. Now we did this using different samples of data, right? To triangulate on this, right? So it's not, and we ran similar models using regional and national data because oftentimes we get into that conversation. Oh, this is just Vermont, we spend too much. Now we ran it on multiple data sources and right in these both the cost factors, the differentials and the weights triangulated well across those different sources of data. So that gives us even more confidence. So on this slide, what you see are the weights. Like these are the weights that you probably have seen pop up in your email or have heard debated, but these are the weights and these are the changes in weights, right? So one of the things that's come up a number of times is boy, these changes feel big, right? And I guess the analogy that I would, there are two things to keep in mind here around this. First, the existing weights for ELL, poverty, secondary grade enrollment, they weren't empirically derived. Dr. Colby, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I see Senator Lyons, she might have a question. She just related to some of the work that you're talking about. I just have a quick question, actually. And that is the determination of lower socioeconomic class or poverty. How is poverty being defined? Is it a graded experience or is it a flat experience? And when you look at different regions across our state, we see different median incomes and we see different costs of living. So I'm just wanting to know how, and I'm sure we can ask the same question about everything else, but I'm not. Let me take this one, Tammy, if I may. Well, there are stages in the development of this report. The first of which is to figure out which versions of measures that are available seem to be the strongest predictors of variations in kids' outcomes. What are the factors that seem to predict risk? So you'll see the report itself is broken out into risk analysis and then cost analysis because what we're trying to do in a school of finance formula is provide resources to help mitigate risk, right? So if we can figure out which of the measures and how we measure poverty across settings, it matters if we use more stringent income thresholds. For example, there are a lot of settings across the United States where if we use free and reduced price lunch, the vast majority of kids across all schools qualify, we pick up no variation, we don't have a strong risk factor, almost kind of like from a statistical, epidemiological, analytic point of view. So we tested free lunch, free or reduced lunch. The AOEs poverty measure at the district level because you could get poverty, a poverty-based measure at the district level but you can't get it at the school level, although now the National Center for Health Statistics has a really cool one and we played around with it. We tested all of those and we found that at the district level and then in our final cost models at the AOEs poverty measure, which runs off of a stricter income threshold than free or reduced lunch was most useful. We were also sensitive to this issue that sometimes rural and urban poverty aren't quite the same thing, right? The way poverty measures capture variation in the quality of life, food insecurity, housing insecurity and all those other factors may differ in the Northeast kingdom than it does in Chittenden County. So we actually in our risk analysis and in early cost models tested a whole bunch of interactions between poverty and rurality, poverty and size to see if in fact there was and poverty and population density, which is a factor that came up in a Kansas analysis that where poverty increased where the population was more dense, in fact, the cost increase. We didn't find a sufficient basis in our analysis to keep going forward with that. Part of it might just be that we don't have enough schools or districts in Vermont although Vermont's got more than enough schools in district for Vermont. We didn't have enough data-wise to tease that out. So we ended up at least for driving this model and the simulations that were provided to accompany this with the, I believe it's the poverty rate measure from AOE running off a more strict income threshold than the free or reduced lunch measure. But that's yet poverty measurement. That's one of my personal obsessions in all this because we tend to use the same things and treat them, we take them for granted. Bruce, can I just add something because I know this has come up in conversations. For example, a conversation I would JFO not too long ago which is we measure poverty, but it also can be the cost differentiated that you can see cost differentials when you have concentrations of poverty. So if you think of it as school where you have a higher percentage of students living in poverty, that school operates differently. And so the question is, are there structural differences in costs? Bruce actually tested that in our models to see if not just the individual poverty rate, but whether or not we needed to also be thinking about a cost adjustment for concentrated poverty. And that did not come back as a significant predictor for differences in costs across Vermont districts and schools. It does in some states. And I think that's one of the strengths of the analysis that we're able to present back to you here today is that we really looked in Vermont and said, what is it that's accounting for differences in costs in Vermont? Right. So with that and that- Bruce, I wanted to point out the concentration because that's come up in a conversation. Yeah, thank you for that. It suggests that our equalization process is effective. Yeah. It's an agenda. I just want to be sure I understand this table. The rightmost column weights recommended by cost function models. What you're really proposing is that we no longer have a student be equal to one student with a cost adjustment for certain circumstances. Is this 0.26, 0.12? Proposing that we actually treat a student that's in a school with less than 100 students as less than one full student and only 0.26 in the weighting study? I'm trying to recognize- So in the report, we talk about weights that are centered on one versus those that aren't. And so in the table in there, that talks about that. So this would be essentially great. The lesson would be 1.26. All of these are weights that go up. In our city, we have no weights that go down. That makes more sense. But quick follow-up, I do not understand the 2.97 and the 1.58. Are you really saying that it would be 397%? Yeah, let me take that, because here's the interesting twist on this. Is that these weights really were derived out of a model that has to be packaged as a whole, right? And the practical effect, so really a better way to look at it, yeah, it does actually say it's, a kid in poverty is 2.97 above their base of one, which is 3.97 in total. But a better way to look at this to put it into context is, Tammy, if I could even just skip over to my last slide, if you could unshare, and I'm gonna share, I may even share- Do I have to unshare? Do I have to unshare? I'm stopping sharing. You gotta, yeah, you gotta stop sharing. Hand me the screen over to Bruce. I'm out of control. You don't have to do much of anything else. I just have to bring these up and, am I on here? Yep. You guys got me? Okay, so let's see. I'm just gonna skip over to some. There are, you know, do I need to do it in tenant? Yeah. The no time intended to be in combination with all other parts of the formula. And it really is interesting when we pluck them out and try to, we estimate a cost model. In that cost model, we generate a predicted cost for every school or district in the state. And then from that, we backed out a waiting system that would replicate those cost predictions. Partly because- And it's consistent with existing statute. Right. Well, well about that, because our statute has some, some tricky things that we have to do in order for the weights to comport with, with how the equalized people calculation works. So I didn't interrupt you, but that's a really important point because it throws things off. Right. I mean, you know, in an ideal world, we just take the cost targets and make that the foundation target for a policy, right? And it'd be all simpler, but to retrofit something to a state's own, we just take the cost and make it the foundation target. And then we have the, we have the cost model. So the state's use weighted pupil kind of calculations, be it for the tax rate type calculation that Vermont uses or for the purpose of a spending target for districts. So we have a second step where we back out the weights. And they do end up looking different than other weights. And the poverty weight ends up looking particularly exaggerated, even though it's effect in the end. So weights don't stand alone. The other thing is that you can't really mix and match and just take a weight from here and away from there and stick them into this formula. They're really derived from a full package. They're derived from a predicted cost estimate to achieve equal opportunity. And then we back out weights so that you can basically simulate those same cost targets using a weighted formula system. Let me go go full on this for a second. That way I can do. I can do that. I can do that. Okay. We still have you. Am I full on screen here? Okay. Good. Sometimes it doesn't jump. So effective weights. So we have nominal weights are just like that list of weights. The effective weight is, well, what does it really drive in the formula? And, you know, does it, does it really make, you know, these massive differences. I'm just going to skip over this other background and jump to here. If I take two columns from our simulation. And I take just the, just the large districts. What I get for the large districts by their poverty rate. And their total funding per pupil target is that from, you know, the lower bound to the upper bound, we go from about, you know, a little below 15,000 to the one that's way out there that goes up above 30,000, but it, it from, from one end to the other, we get to about a two to one ratio. And what we actually get practically from that is, you know, if you just, if I fit a trend line to this, I get a, I get that as we go from zero to a hundred percent poverty, the funding would go up 28,000 over a base of 12, 490, which is about a 2.27, which is still big. If I, but it's not 3.97. Right. So the practical effect of the poverty weight. And if I actually put all districts in, I took out the small districts because they tend to have other cost drivers associated with them that comes down to 1.9. It actually comes down to 1.896, which is not on the slide I said earlier, but I just went and ran it. So considering the practical effect of this poverty weight in the context of all the other weights and the formula and kind of looking at it through the lens of our simulation, I'm hoping some of you guys had a chance to play with the simulations because I think that gives the real insight as to, especially if you're a numbers geek and like spreadsheets and stuff like that, like, you know, it's kind of my life. If you walk your way column wise through those spreadsheets and see how the weighted pupil calculations work and make some of your own graphs like this, if you're as geeky as I am about it, that I think will give a better feel as to how those pieces come together that were on the slide that Tammy put up. It concerned me when I looked at those. So this is the first kind of graph I went and made. And other studies have found, you know, weights close to that 1.9 cost model studies. When I was doing a piece for the National Research Council with Laurie Taylor and colleagues back in the mid 2000s, we were seeing studies approaching similar numbers. And again, the art of this, the data available for doing this has all very much evolved. This number is smaller than I get from my national cost model. But off the top of my head, I don't have that right now. So, all right. I will, I will stop sharing and give it back to Tammy. See if I can put that table of weights back up. I was, I was winding down on where I was at anyway. But I could, why don't we put that back up and let me just go through a few, let me run through just a few of the few big conclusions from the study and then let's stop zooming and let's have a conversation. So let me just go back real quick. So, so these are the weights and Bruce really provided an excellent explanation of sort of how to understand these. But it does mean, and I think sort of the real important takeaway from what Bruce said is that easy, straightforward interpretation of 397% is, is not, you can't do that, right? Like that should be the, and I know that's part of the conversation that legislators are struggling with because it feels like that should be how you talk about it, right? And, but it's not. And that's, that's the way it works. And I know that makes your job hard, but that's, it's one of those tricks, tricks that we have to be careful about. So these are the weights. Bruce also mentioned in his conversation, a second super important point, which is these weights, because of the way they were derived are all interacted with one another, right? So you can't say, well, I like this way and I like this way and I like this way, right? And off you go. You have to think about the weights as a package and that's because they're based on regression models and the things that we've controlled for in certain models, right? And so what, what those models are doing is our partitioning out that variation or that differential, right? That's independent of everything else. And if what, if we start cherry picking or mixing and matching, then you, you wipe out all that good work of trying to identify the independent effective things. Okay. So the weights work as packages. You have to think of this almost like a policy package. This is weight, the weight, the package of weights here, Senator Chittenden. I just, I want to understand this cause it's really important, but I'm seeing 1.13 for the secondary adjustment on the existing weight. If that's 1.13 shouldn't the poverty in the, in the ELL be 1.25 and 1.20. Again, this is because some of the weights and the equalized people, the current equalized people calculation are centered on zero and some are centered on one. And that's why. And I apologize. I mean, I understand that's a point of confusion, but that really, that's why I was real clear about statute, right? So if you go to the report, there's a table in the report that actually walks through step by step by step, how all the weights are applied. The other thing is some of these weights are additive to add on to things. And some of them are multiplicative. And again, that's not by our design. That's how statute works. And so our job, that's why the first thing we did is we figured out what those dollars were like, what exactly is the cost differential? And then we had to convert those dollars into weights that comport with how the statute uses the weights. And to Bruce's point, that's why we have to be really careful about these simplified interpretations, which boy would make my life easier and everybody's life easier if we can do that, but that's not how that's, that's not how statute works. Senator Chitton and I see your hands still up. Did I answer your question? And I understand that's a complication, especially when you're talking to constituents. And I want to just acknowledge, like, let's just acknowledge that, but that's not a function of the study design. That's a function of how the statute currently lays out how the weights are used. Okay. We actually, we thought it was, and I think we at ourselves found it to be a valuable exercise, but we thought it was an important exercise. If, if we want to make sure that. The end point policy. Most precisely reflects the empirical analysis and estimates. We thought it was an important exercise to work our way. We generate those estimates of what's needed from each school to, to the next, from each town to the next, and then try to retrofit from there, how you could make the current policy design. How you could replicate or generate that. It is in that process. That we get pieces that. In isolation, look a little weird. Right. But if you go to, it's toward the end goal. I'm getting the target. And Bruce wrote a really nice appendix to the report. And in that appendix report, he actually lays out what the caught, what the cost differential is. The cost differential for these differentials. And the dollars make a lot of sense. For example, the additional number of dollars you need the cost, the cost differential for a student in poverty is about $3,500. When you think about that, that does. You're like, Oh, well, okay, that's on average the additional investment required. Right. For a student, an economically disadvantaged student to achieve a common outcome. And then you're like, Oh, well, I'm going to put that into the existing statute and how the weights are. Right. Our cat are used in existing statute. It translates into this weight. Okay. So I've been pointing legislators and people who are wrestling with getting their heads around the weights. To also go and look at that. Look at. Look at that appendix because it says like, here are the additional dollars. And then you're like, Oh, well, I'm going to put that into the existing statute. So when you, when I say $3,500 is the cost differential between, right? First, for an economically disadvantaged student, my guess is you're like. Okay. That, that, that doesn't feel like an exorbitant cost differential, but when we have to translate that cost differential into a weight that comports with how Vermont statue works, then this is how this is the weight that you get. Okay. Okay. I'm happy. You know, I'm happy and I'm sure Bruce would join me in this. Maybe Bruce, we should create a table of exactly what those dollar differences are to circulate because that might be really helpful. I think we had that somewhere there. I'm not recalling the dollar number of difference that you're giving right now. But I'll, we had a look back at that and find out again. That's one of the thought processes I was trying to go through. This was done. It's kind of relatively short window here. I'm not sure if you can see that. I'm not sure. I think I'm going to go back to college up in New England. I think, and I should just continue Northward. But. So, yeah, I mean, I was, I was trying to think about how can we convey better what these weights really mean in context. And that's where I came up with it. Trying to put that scatterplot out and show its effect. And maybe we can come up with some other devices that would help kind of. You know, I'm not sure if you can see that. I'm not sure if you can see that. I'm not sure if you can see that. But it really is about, you know, it's about trying to retrofit. You know, hitting the cost target to the design of Vermont's formula. Dollars can port with how the weights are calculated. Right. And so, and that would, by the way, that was our risk. That was one of our key tasks that we were charged to do in the study. Right. So. Very quickly. I just want to go through the studies, big, big question. And one of the biggest things that's really important to remember is that. The approach we have to adjusting for differences, like the weights that we have right now. Have not been changed for 20 years. They're essentially rolled over from the foundation formula. We had pre-brigham. Right. And so, the stagnation, right? And our funding policy has been along right. And we know that right, these weights are widely viewed as outdated and falling short of equalizing costs. And we also know that what that means is because the weights are outdated in the way they are, it means that those weights are also outdated with respect to being out of step with contemporary education policy. Right. So it's sort of like, when you don't go to the dentist for five years and they go to the dentist you have a bunch of cavities right. Is it the dentist fault that the weights have changed? I think there's been a lot that's changed since 1997. The other thing is that we have to remember is that the existing weights were not empirically derived. Not only were they rolled over, there's really not a great evidence base on what for what, how those rates were calculated pre-1997. We have no assurances that those weights ever did a good job of adjusting for costs. Right. Particularly the poverty weight, right. So our findings really suggest that it's time to that we have to incorporate these new cost factors, royally size, and weights into the funding formula into the existing funding formula. Right. The findings suggest that the weights for economically disadvantaged ELL and fall short of appropriately adjusting cut for costs for those students that we need these new cost factors for size and population density and then we've got to refine this secondary weight and break it out by middle level and secondary. It also means though, and I think this goes back to an earlier point though, that modifying the equalized people calculation may not translate into increased levels of spending in districts with higher need. That's not how the formula is designed to work. Right. The additional tax capacity that generated that's generated by adjusting the equalized people calculation may be seen as an opportunity by some districts just to reduce taxes and continue spending at less than optimal levels. Right. And our study also finds that there is a need for new categorical aid. So it's the policy questions go beyond just the weights. Like I said, unless we change the existing formula. Entirely. It doesn't there's, it doesn't relieve it doesn't relieve the legislature's obligation to maintain that funding formula as is. Right. And to maintain that funding formula as is, then the weights have to be recalibrated to appropriately adjust for differences in costs across school districts. And that's what this study is about. That's the box in which we were asked to work. It doesn't mean that these other questions and concerns that I've heard some of you've mentioned I hear JFO I hear over in the house around connecting that those are all terrific policy questions and we should go to town and have those conversations and think about that. Until we change the existing formula, we have to maintain that formula. Right. That's our constitutional obligation so it's got to be this and in both conversation, unless the intent is to throw out the entire formula and start over. Right. So, I'm just going to leave you with this and in both mindset, which is these other things are important, and we should definitely talk about them. But the policy levers that you have to pull to do these things are different than the weights over here, and the weights over here. If you don't adjust those and recalibrate them appropriately, then the funding formula that we have right now is out of compliance. Would you say something a little bit more about that for us in terms of, you know, our, when you say our constitutional obligation, I think it would be good for the committee to understand what puts, you know, that language. Sure. So under Brigham, you have to maintain a fair and efficient funding formula, right. And one of the right in this formula is what was developed in response to it. That formula is a tax equalization formula. Right. And that right. But that is the formula on the books. And until you change that formula, that's the formula you have to maintain that for our study shows unequivocally that the adjustments for differences and costs which is that primary mechanism for adjusting tax capacity which indirectly should be impacting decisions and preferences about spending that that adjustment mechanism in the existing formula is out of calibration, gross out of calibration. Bruce, you want to jump in? Yeah, if I might add. So that's right. That's if you want to kind of stay in line with what was, you know, what was interpreted as required under Brigham and what was in theory adopted under Act 60. If someone were to bring, let's say a scenario arises now where where the state does adopt these weights, which would provide each town the opportunity with equitable taxation to yield spending that provides equal opportunity for the kids to achieve these common outcome goals. Now, let's say within that mix though, because there's not a requirement that each town put up the taxes to provide that spending that yields equal opportunity for their children and one town just decides, now we're going to take this all as tax relief. And we really don't care as much about the provision of education to that standard. Certainly, the families of that town could bring that up as a as a constitutional violation. And the court in revisiting the question might look more closely as many state courts have these days about, well, is the constitutional obligation to ensure that each town is actually providing sufficient resources for their children to have equal opportunity to achieve a given level of outcomes. So, if, if the court in the future were to declare that that is the standard that not just that in theory each town has equal opportunity to put up the taxes to spend as much, but if it's really about the children's rights to have access to education to meet a certain standard. And if that's a state constitutional requirement. It really wouldn't be permissible for the state to to just allow towns to deprive the children for which they're responsible of that constitutional obligation and am I making any sense there. And that's why most states that have a need based foundation aid formula like this will have some minimum requirement. And New Jersey's minimum is actually it's not even a real minute to soft minimum, we don't have a hard minimum here. And we do have towns that are below what the state says they should be spending as a function of the towns not adopting the tax rate that is defined within the formula to get them to that target. The case of Bruce that we use the yield in the calculation as a state defined minimum. But the point is that if we have it right because that yield is that yield is not and right like we use that yield in different ways, but the yield could be a floor. It could be used as a pot if we could use that as a policy instrument. Committee. Questions. A lot there. I mean, it's this is first of all, I applaud you both I immensely grateful for your time and your effort in all of this. You know, it's interesting I'm sitting here I served on finance for four years and so much of this really does belong. I mean, you would be in finance for quite a bit if you know as we continue to work on it and pass something out. There's going to be quite a bit of time in finance. As the Education Committee though, I, I want, you know, what is the elevator speech for the parent that comes to me and says Brian this is in committee. How does this bill make education better for my child. I mean, we've talked a lot about this leaving open that it's still left to the towns but the reality is that that restructuring the waiting system in this way is still even without forcing a hard minimum or you know, is still most likely to lead to you know, giving a town greater opportunity to serve its high needs students. Yeah, is likely to lead to that town actually using at least some of that opportunity to meet the needs of its high needs students. Yeah, if you know if we let these towns with you know, dramatically kind of emerging poverty and ELL, you know, population growth, we give them much greater tax capacity to finally meet those kids needs. Yes, good chance they're going to use it. So I think when new ski is a great example here, right and let's let's let's take poverty off for a minute and just talk about the ELL way. Dr Colby I just wanted to interrupt because center lines does have her hand up I don't know where to lose that thought. No, well, as you're, as you're talking it really does suggest a need for some outcome outcomes measures that are the standardized and effective to the, and I'll use the word weights but relative to the needs of the of the district so that's a whole nother heavy lift. And so my question is, you know, did you. What's that part of your consideration how would we go about developing that link between a change in the way we allocate our resources based on weights and new, it's really new funding it's a new funding system and or modification there but how did you consider the outcomes measurements because frequently, for me, I want to know what I'm measuring at the end I want to know what the outcome is and then work back to see what I should do in the first place so. And that's an in fact that's exactly what we did in this analysis which which is absent in other approaches in other approaches, whether it be an evidence based or putting together professional judgment panels. You know, you'll have groups of people specifying what resources they believe a school needs to achieve a set of standards that those panels have been provided. We actually model statistically the relationship between an outcome index that we construct with state assessment data graduation rates and other factors, and I don't. I've been doing so many of these kinds of analyses I can't remember exactly what measures are used in this one and what target we set, but it is in the report. We have an outcome index and we estimate the cost per pupil for each district in the state to achieve the same target on that outcome index which is an aggregation of a number of student outcome measures. You know, if you raise that standard, guess what it costs more to achieve a higher standard. It costs less to achieve that standard I think we premised our Vermont report, right, shockingly. Well, but I also know places that spend an awful lot of money and don't get the benefit. That is true so one of the things and we do actually embed in the model some corrections for factors that might induce less efficient expenditure. That's part of it because that's the only way we can tease out the underlying relationship between expenditure and outcome is if we also include factors that predict the likelihood that some are doing some weird stuff and less efficient. If we don't include those factors, a little harder to tease that out. But the other so I think we also premise this report and I'd have to go back into the details on it on the fact that on average Vermont does pretty damn well. Right, Vermont has good outcomes nationally and I think we were, because we were developing a waiting system around the relative costs we we base the differences in costs on what would it cost in each district or school in the state to achieve what the average district already achieves. If you if you measure if you measure outcomes by cohort and population based outcomes under the descriptors, whatever descriptors you have based on, based on your inputs, you know, so are the, are the kids who are ELL or economically below, are they coming out equal with or better than others. I mean, are the kids coming out. Right, so they're three they're three pieces to this interconnected model of sociological mess right. We've got that we got all the student factors. We've got the schooling inputs and we got the outcomes. But so the first part of our analysis takes a look at what which of those student factors seem to be adverse most adversely affecting the outcome measures. But we also know that we have these students with different backgrounds in different school settings with different resources it's not that every school serving high poverty populations has fewer or more resources, same with the LL. So we're trying to kind of look across those three things linked up in a model. First we figure out well which of the measures of student characteristics seem most strongly adversely you know related to the student outcomes. Then we use that version of those measures and the differences in spending and other factors that might predict inefficient student spending to tease out well how much more spending. Yeah, is associated with achieving this different outcome or this target outcome, when we have this group of kids or that group of kids, it's actually teasing out that statistical relationship among those three sets of factors, and using some other kind of econometric techniques to handle the statistical issues with the fact that all this is simultaneously occurring. Right, so it is our goal to figure out how much more is needed to achieve the same target outcomes when the school has 1020 30% poverty. How much more is needed if they have 357% ELL, and how much is needed when they have different ranges of children with disabilities. And that is the basis on which we generate these kind of predicted cost targets, and then back out the waiting system so it is very much on that basis. We wanted to do this we were doing it from how much to the cost vary from school to school in other, in other settings, there might be conversation about well what's the, what's the adequate outcome we want to get and is it actually something higher than, or is it lower than what the average school or district currently achieved. If the, if what we really wanted to achieve is higher, then when we simulated our cost predictions, we move the outcome higher. And we'd find probably that the cost predictions themselves are higher, and the differentials by need might be greater that that poverty relationship outcome might actually increase when we shoot for a higher bar. That's not for a single bar in Vermont because it was just about the relative position. And on the end, it always statistically most reasonable to shoot for a single bar that's within the middle of the distribution somewhere. So, I hope that didn't go too far over the top on the set but but I love that you went there because it's, that's what we're trying to do. I have to read the report and I apologize. I'm so I'm asking really stupid questions. That was a good one. That's a great setup for us. It's a great come back right happy to come back and do some more of this to just try to clarify whatever. Yeah, so thank you and I support the bill but I think one of the things in all the discussion here rightfully so is on the weights going up for basically the students that cost more, but that will have, I think for schools and all of our districts, the impact that that'll basically they'll be able to raise less money with the same tax rates other tax rates will have to go up, which we haven't really talked about today. For some, for some schools right so if the. Oh yeah I know I'm just saying it's all about rearranging text chairs. Some towns will be able to raise more money with the same tax rate, but others will be raising less with the same text. And we just have to be prepared for that discussion. I think we're there were correct in focusing the way it is and I want to say again I support it that's what we need to do, but we just we've got to make sure we're, we're prepared for that because I think and I would assume in school districts and all of our Senate districts, that's going to be the case. Yeah, no I recently talked with the Vermont superintendents Association about this. You know, and they're sort of on the front line, and this conversation about winners and losers comes up because that's that's one way that's one construction potential construction on this and we pushed back and said, we have to remember that our formula doesn't work that way right like our formula by definition we put all the money in, and it comes back out and these are all our kids. And so I talked really, I talked for quite a while with superintendents around sort of leadership around this conversation of, let's not let's not go there around winners and losers. I mean, there will be people who want to do that but what this is just recalibrating the price certain school districts pay for the education that they have been purchasing already or they may purchase in the future. But it has, we've got to be careful about winners and losers and because. That's why I can use that term. What'd you say. That's why I did not use that. Nope. Right there with you. No, it's always a given. Yeah. Center gender. I just want to say I want to go back to Senator Lyons previous points I serve on the South Berlin City Council I feel like I say that a lot and I've seen a multiple school budgets fail with one year I think we had three and then to a year later another three failed. And so my concern with this waiting strategy rearranging these deck chairs, if it does squeeze so that the puts upward pressure on on one community or another, the taxpayers are the ones that are going to vote those budgets down which is going to lead to some very painful cuts in those I really want to gravitate around what Senator Lyons talked about, which is setting clear expectations to serve these these communities of students that that need additional supports, and I'm not saying we shouldn't do waiting. I think there's a lot of value in looking at waiting adjustments, especially when it comes to rural urban and the size of the schools, but I don't think this is the only solution to this very complex problem of school funding in Vermont. Yeah, I think it raises one of those other raises a number of questions but what it raises that other side of the policy debate around what, what can the legislature do to ease this process of letting, you know, having districts who are then squeezed by this still able to pass their budgets. Having districts who are who are going to otherwise choose to not even come close to the targets that the models would suggest to increase their budgets when the local voters may not want to I mean ultimately it is about. Yeah, it is about preserving the rights of the children to be provided equal educational opportunity. And these are you know these are the hard questions that are not part of our report but are clearly part of your lives and handling, you know how to structure the right policy toward that end. And part of that is about these really tough questions about how much, how much control do we keep in the hands of or try to kind of shift around this kind of local voter, which is a tiny subset of local population control over the eventual expenditures on schools. And are there mechanisms that would not, you know, cause complete political chaos in a Vermont context. If I may. I have overly simplified the problem with school funding in Vermont by saying we've centralized the funding but decentralized the decision making. And so that's, that's our product descriptor. I know there's a lot of mentally at our core issue, but there's not going to be a solution that we're going to come to in the next five or 20 minutes before this discussion wraps up. But I think you also hit on another point and this is related to what Bruce was saying which is so our report and what we were asked to do was this analysis. And that's our hard stop with what we were asked to do. There is another step here to, in addition to thinking about this constellation of other policy issues that intersect, which is, if in fact, the decision is to move forward with implementing the weights. What does that implementation process look like. Right. Like, so I just wanted like in addition to these other kinds of things there also is this larger question that was not addressed in our report like what would that look like what could that look like what, what would be fair. Right. There are models that other states have used around that, but that is that is also a question I think that needs to be on the table for, for legislators to be thinking about which is, so if we do go there. How do we, the question of how actually matters as well. Right. Be that circuit circuit breakers or other kind of phase down type patterns, you know, step into that. There's, there are lots of policy options there, all with trade offs. Right. And so, in addition, again, in addition to this constellation of other really important policy issues that we've talked about and you know Bruce just highlighted. There's also this question of how also this question of how that has to be addressed the report to the report is agnostic on that. That was not that was not in that was not in our scope of work. But I do want to say and I've said this publicly before, just because we are just because our report doesn't speak to it. That does not mean that anyone on the study team thinks that those questions are unimportant or necessary unnecessary. It just was not within our scope of work. And so, you know, that's what the bill does. It's a hard part to you guys. So I think the recent as less it's unchanged from last spring I haven't read it so. Any final questions or comments from the committee. Thank you both for being here. Appreciate it. We'll likely as we dive in deeper have you back, perhaps for to clarify some things with us. But I think we'll leave it there for today. Great. Thank you for inviting us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Appreciate you. I'd like to come back would love to come back when we're finally doing stuff in person again. I'd be great. I just want to tell it and say that my masters. My master's institution was Rutgers though. Awesome. So we got some good crossover here. All right. Thank you. Let's take just 10 minutes and come back and have some discussion about this and other things on our plate. So let's come back at three 40. I think we'll have Jim Demeray, who is going to be with us on Tuesday after the governor's address to talk about things that are in the budget related to our committee. I think I'll have him also just take us through Senator Bruce bill. So we can all better understand what Philip is putting forward. It's a little bit different as I recall from what we saw in finance last year. I don't think it's exactly the same, but I could be wrong. We did not end up taking it up. We had a walk through. And, but, but I am interested in just general impressions. If anybody wants to share anything at this point or. I mean, you know, Senator Taranzini, the only thing I would say to Senator Campion and the group here is I certainly need to reread that presentation because that was a tremendous amount of information to swallow and sort of absorb and understand. So I would, I would not want to take the quiz this afternoon. That's for sure. Nor would I, nor would I. The outcome would not be good. Not good. No. If I could just say that my first impression was deja vu all over again. Max 60. Yeah. So it sounded to me as if the, the responsibility. Is placed on the. The district, the towns. And, you know, how is that? And I think Dr. Colby said that, you know, there would be a way of, you know, how is this going to be done? That we need to talk about. Yeah. You know, for me, I just, I. I haven't talked to Senator Cummings about this yet, but it is where it would land before it goes to the floor and I just, but for me, I just want to. The only way I just want to move cautiously is I just don't want to look back and see, oh geez, you know, we, we made this mistake or we made that mistake or I. You know, in earlier conversations, and this is just from, you know, perhaps, you know, my own. Not having done much digging prior to becoming the chair, I was under the impression that in some ways. Yes, I understand this could be possibly get more funding for students, but it's. It also might not get more funding for students. And, and again, as at least, you know, as a member of the education committee. So I think that would be a good idea. And I think that would be a good idea. I just want to make sure to advance education and improve education for Vermont students. I thought Dr Baker's final comment was, was valid that we would be creating something that would give people, allow people to do more. But of course, you know, there, there's no guarantee center person. Like, or I'm curious to know what you're thinking, having been on the committee. Last session. I think that's where we're in here from, you know, the other test characters that we usually hear from. I think that's where some of this theory. In the study language that we heard today, which can be kind of academic. Starts making more sense. So it's a good foundation. And I think that was my experience last year. I felt pretty lost at sea at the beginning. But then as you hear from the, from the folks that are kind of quote unquote, more on the ground. And then you hear from the school board, from the superintendents. And others, then you, you kind of, it came to, it comes into focus and, and what I think, well, cause I asked a Demeray to put in a bill basically on what we passed. And he said, Oh, Bruce already done that. So I think it is pretty close to what we passed, but maybe he made some tweaks. And it is a, it's a step towards what the study recommends. And I think that's where the, the, the, the, the feeling was that we can't just implement it overnight or over one year, just maybe too different. So it's like, okay, let's get the conversation. It's too bad we lost a year on that, but it's, it is difficult for folks to understand. And I think there's, she talked about that one appendix. And when I think James Demeray has some good. Data on this too, that we got looked at last year that just kind of breaks it down more into. The, the, the, the plan goes through the data to the, the data to the plan. And then the plan is to implement it in dollars. So you, it has a chart, which I don't know if that's in the study or if that's something that much council created. That's helpful to look at. Okay. Senator shannon. I'm not against moving this forward as I read the bill today. I think we need to frame it very clearly to as your opening comments, chair, champion was that this is about equity and resource, getting students to have resources, but it's not gonna solve all of the concerns that we have in the state. My bigger concerns are where we didn't spend time on this afternoon, which we're touching upon now, which is implementation. I would love to see if the, as I read the bill, the implementation of plan that comes forward, if it passes by this December, I'd really wanna see a phased, do no harm shadow implementation. We did something similar at UVM when we drastically overhauled our budgetary model, where each department could see what under the new budgetary model, things would look like before it actually took effect. And then having a two or three year grace period where this waiting study districts would see, this is what we're doing, but if slash when we switch over to this waiting, this is how it would look at that stage. I'd really want that to be an established piece of this rollout, just so that communities could really acclimate to what the implications are of this on a ground, on the ground. So you preempted one of my comments. I think that's really a good idea. And then the other thing is, I think this is such an awesome opportunity to really actualize Brigham, because it hasn't been. And I would see our, maybe we can do some thinking about a timed rollout. So not everything is gonna be able to happen at once, not just the idea that we're modeling it one year and doing it the next, but rather maybe putting some steps in place. And I do think it will make the, it should, unless I'm speaking from ignorance here, but it sounds to me that it would make, simplify the funding formula tremendously, but at the local level. No, I look at, look at you. We would, that would be an aspiration. All right, well then we'll move forward. We'll have Jim take us through the bill. Centers can have an opportunity to look at the study itself. If you have any difficulty finding it, please let Jeannie or me know and we'll plug away and hear also from our usual suspects and get a sense of how it would work on the ground. Just so everyone knows for next week, our committee will be a little bit interrupted. Interrupted isn't the right word, but we'll postpone meeting a little bit because of the governor's budget address that starts at one. And then I did ask Jim and the secretary of education to come in after, to talk with us about things that, at least I suspect will be in the bill given the governor's inaugural address, things that'll be in the budget address that would impact our work and focus a little bit on particular things going forward. That could be wrong, but good to have them in. And we'll also have Jim take us through Senator Bruce Bill at that point. Wednesday I dedicated to hearing from on S16 which is an act relating to creation of School Discipline Advisory Council. This is Senator Sears's bill. I co-sponsored it I think last year or maybe the prior session that looks at a number of things related to school discipline and we have, as you'll see on the agenda that Jeannie has already posted a number of different witnesses in coming to talk about that. And then S37, I thought we would take Thursday to look and just get a sense. We have a couple of state college scholarship bills that were put forward. One by Senator Polina is the lead sponsor, another I believe by Senator Hardy. I think members of this committee may have co-sponsored them. So I wanna also hear from the chancellor of the state colleges to give us all a sense of what are the costs related to attending CCV and are more traditional, if you will, state colleges. I'm also invited VSAC to come in to give us an understanding particularly for new senators and understanding of their work and how it relates to scholarship dollars. And then Friday, I'm at this point just holding with the hope that Jeff Fannon and his team might be available at that point to come and talk to us and perhaps other college, senate colleagues about what they have put forward or what they would recommend as it relates to a post COVID, again, recovery, if you will. I don't really like the word, but for students that may have missed certain opportunities this year given the remote learning or hybrid models that some had to experience. So others I would think perhaps when we walk through that, perhaps appropriations might join us on that. That is it for me. I think, well, the only other thing I would say that's on our things that we've already talked about, civic education, sounds like agency of education has gone back now, they are gonna take a look to see what they have, what they offer, areas that they would like to see perhaps improved or assistance from us. And I would expect that, not for a couple of weeks given I'm sure the pressures on their schedule. So that's something out there that I think we just all need to be thinking about what would we want to do if we want to do anything around civic education? If we want to, as I said, I think the bill that Senator McCormick and others put forward, I think is a terrific conversation starter. And I for one, I'm interested in doing, I don't want to do something to do something. I think there are a range of things that could be done. And I think hearing from the agency in a couple of weeks after they've assessed, and I'm going to encourage them to watch the last couple of witnesses from yesterday, just and put them in contact with them in case there are ways for them to partner. Senator White. Senator Cummings, Campion, sorry about that. You don't look anything alike. I mean, it's fine if we do, I'm not, you know. It's a long, it's been a long week. I talked with my little group, Ledge Council and JFO the other day about having the budget information in our committee right after the budget. And I don't know that they were unsure that we would be able to sort out much. I mean, ordinarily, he has that little pamphlet that goes along with the budget, but you never really see all the details. So let's hope that there's something explicit in his speech. And maybe there will be something, I don't know how, is Jim must have have the back door in to get the information. I don't know. Well, I think it's a great point. I'm hoping Senator or Secretary French has the back door since he will hopefully know what's gonna be in there. And at the very least that afternoon, we can hear from him a little more detailed information. We can ask some questions. And then Jim can be there either he can learn with us or he might have some information that he could share on the fly as to how a particular policy might work or not. Thank you.