 Welcome to Senate Education. This is Valentine's Day, February 14th at 1.30. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Happy Valentine's Day. We're looking for our candy. Do you want me to go steal some from another room? No, I think it might be effective. That's true. That's not the right reaction to it. Oh, that's right. We're going to look at SWP6 today, which many of you are familiar with. This is the pre-K bill. And this is something that we're just still learning a little bit about. We had some overview from last week with, maybe it was the week prior, Sarah Kenney and Allison Westman. Richard. Richard, thank you. Allie Richards. And so we're going to start with that. We're going to hear from Heather, and we're going to have a couple of people in to start to just understand the pre-K impact that some providers might experience. Our jurisdiction, if we so choose to work on it this term, which I think people will want to in some capacity, is pre-K piece, the part that unites with public schools. I'll look to the review also for anything that I want to lay in on it. And I think Senator Gulick is serving as the liaison between the two committees. I don't know if it's, I think it's a paid position. I don't know for sure. Certainly a paid position. Thanks for the call. So, no. So everybody, we can sort of go back and forth. And everybody can share what they're interested in. Then we're going to hear from any, anyhow. We're going to close some loops on the educational quality standards which have come up a number of times in committee. Dr. Sharon Howe is coming back at Senator Gulick's request to talk about her questions regarding educational quality standards in F173. And then we are going to, everyone should know, the libraries at Vermont State Colleges. I know everybody's been getting a lot of emails about those. The President and Provost will be waning in and kind of giving us an update on what's happening there. And then we will shift to Senator Gulick and she will take us through a little bit of her school construction bill. And with chairs meetings and a bunch of other meetings that's happening there. Ms. St. James. Committee, in your folders you will find a copy of S-56, the section that we have jurisdiction over. So with that, if you would give us a kind of an overview, I'd say medium level. Not super high, but some detail. And we'll then hear from, we have people coming in, I think from Wyndham County, Bennington, and Addison County. With that, Ms. St. James. Thank you. About St. James Office of Legislative Council, would it be helpful for the committee to understand how pre-K works now? Or is that something that you're all familiar with? Why don't you fill us in? Okay, just very high level. The pre-K section in Title 16 is in the same chapter as the town tuition program. It's section 829. And currently it allows, it provides for publicly funded pre-Kindergarten education for students, for children between the ages of three and five, if they are not yet enrolled in Kindergarten, for 10 hours a week during the school year. And that money can be used in a public pre-K program that is run by the school district, or it can be used in a private pre-K program that qualifies as a pre-qualified pre-Kindergarten education provider. So that's very basic. So right now, 10 hours a week during the school year. And it can be either public or private. And money follows the children's, the child's. So for example, in my acronym saying if you can bring your kid to, if there's one right near your office, there are no district lines. No, there is a provision in current law that allows for there to be geographical limitations created on where children can obtain their pre-Kindergarten education. I am not aware from the field whether that section is in use, whether there are any of those geographical areas. They are called, you'll see it's a large section of this bill. There's a strikeout of all of that language. But it's called Geographic Limitations and it allows school boards to limit the geographic boundaries. School boards themselves. So again, it goes through our tuition program, which of course we'll be learning more about as we delve into other bills. But this is similar to our school choice program. There are some similarities. When you say school choice, do you mean high school choice or the town tuition program? Town tuition program. I hesitate to say yes, but yes, in that parents get to choose where their children go. Within some limitations, right? It has to be a pre-qualified pre-Kindergarten education provider, so there is some regulation of them. It's not just any program. Can it be a religious place? If they are... Pre-approved. Pre-approved. Okay. Ten hours during the school year and then private programs can charge, you know, they have to... They have financial provisions in there about how that money is allocated to the private programs and how it's spread throughout... How private programs can charge families for the rest of the school year if they're there. It also, current law is for children ages three to five if they're not yet in kindergarten. Yes, in weeks. Is there a federal poverty level index associated with the funding? Every student in the school district from three to five qualifies for ten hours a week. And the rate is set, it's not... In current law, it is not the same as the town tuition program where it's per pupil spending or an average per pupil spending if you're going to a private school. It's a rate that's specifically set and updated based on an inflator. And that's just again, just for ten hours a week during the school year. So that's Pre-K now. Very, very high level. Pre-K has also historically been regulated because of the allowance of private providers. Has been regulated jointly between AOE and DCF. Okay. This bill, S56, I've suggested that Aiden link to the poll bill because I do think it's important to have the context. But I will be walking you through the first, oh, 24-ish pages today. And that's what we have in front of us this evening. So yeah, I also provided just those pages for the printout. What this bill does at a very high level, and I will walk you through not line by line, but kind of concept by concept, is it proposes to do a bunch of different things related to the Department of Children and Family Services that we are not going to talk about today. I actually only worked on the most of the section we are going to be talking about today. The rest of this bill, actually the whole bill was really drafted by Katie McClinn. So if you're interested in anything other than what we're talking about today, I highly, highly recommend having her here. We'd like to appear together at all possible times, but we are unable to make that work this week. If I may, just to give people some historical context. I was on the committee when we passed this in the House, which must have been 12, 13 years ago. And I'm looking to Ms. Kenny, if you want to weigh in if I get in this wrong. Our intention at that point was completely exactly what kind of rolled out the 10 hours. I think the part that kind of surprised some of us or speaking for myself is that it ended up not always helping low income Vermonters, because a lot of people didn't just need 10 hours, they needed a lot more than that. And so, again, just my little, some anecdotal comments I remember hearing from families and others was, you know, if you can afford the 20 or 30, then yeah, you're getting an extra 10, which is great. But if you can't afford anything, this might not, the 10 itself might not be reaching as many people as it needs to. Ms. Kenny, do you want to say anything about that? I don't know. And that's just sort of some committee experience sort of pre and post. Yeah, I'll let you all talk through the details of the bill. I think you're right, it was in 2013 when the decision passed to the effect of 2014, particularly in 2016, restrictive for some families. I don't know, lower income families can qualify for childcare financial assistance program support to be able to layer on top of that, at a private partner program. Okay, that's helpful. Okay, thank you. So at a very high level, what this bill proposes to do to pre-kindergarten education is, and I'm going to just simplify it very basically, it redefines pre-kindergarten education as for four through five year olds, again, five if you're not yet in kindergarten. And it requires every school district to either provide a pre-K program or to pay tuition to another public pre-K program in a different school district for the entire school year, for a whole school day. So pre-K required to happen or required to be either maintained or tuitioned out whole school year, whole school day. What's the timeframe considered by definition for a full school day? Excellent question. So it's in the bill, but I will just answer that quickly. Section 1071 of Title 16 requires that students in public schools be in attendance for 175 days a year, 175 days of student attendance. And then it allows the State Board of Education to set the minimum for the school day, the length of the school day. And the State Board does that by different grade levels, right? A full day for a kindergarten may look different than a full day for an 18 year old. And then it allows school districts working with that minimum to set the length of the day for their school district. So they can't go below the minimum, but it's up to the school district to set the day. So that's as specific as the law gets. So it is kind of eight then? I will say that is as specific as the law gets. If you look at the State Board of Education rules, I believe for kindergarten right now, the minimum amount of time that a child can be in school and it counts as a student attendance day is two hours a day or 10 hours a week and a good day. That's the minimum. Now each school district is going to define what a kindergarten day is for their district working with that minimum. So if we start on page two, there's some, it starts with a kind of a conforming change to Section 11 in Title 16, which is the big definition section. So it's amending the definition of early childhood education to exclude pre-kindergarten education from that definition. And then it's defining pre-kindergarten education and referring to Section 829, which is the pre-kindergarten education section which will have the definitions in it. The other big piece of the pre-k section is that it proposes to create a new deputy secretary within the Agency of Education to solely manage the division of student support services which will govern special education, early education and multi-tiered systems of support. So that would be a brand new position and a brand new division of responsibility within AOE. There is a conforming change on page three. This was in the Access to Criminal Records section that applies to schools and this is removing this language because it was with respect to private pre-kindergarten programs. And this bill doesn't do away with them. It allows a private provider to have a private pre-kindergarten program but it wouldn't be publicly funded and it would be not referred to as pre-kindergarten education. It would be early education. So parents can still send their children to a private program under this bill. They would just be paying out of pocket for that. So section four on page four is the meat of this proposed changes. So section 829 as I mentioned is the pre-kindergarten education section in title 16. This is really it for pre-k. Not like it spans multiple different sections in title 16. So you'll see that it starts with a definition section and there's a bunch of amendments proposed. So the first amendment is to the definition of pre-kindergarten child. So you can see that it was formerly three or four years of age or five but not yet in kindergarten and this is proposing to change it to four to five. I'm not going to go over every specific change so if you see new language or language that is struck through that I am not speaking to please let me know if you want to go over it. But the big change here is the definition of public pre-kindergarten education program. So we're repealing pre-qualified private provider because that's not a thing anymore in this section. So public pre-kindergarten education means the provision of high quality publicly funded full day pre-kindergarten education at a public school which is available to pre-kindergarten children and then a child's district of residence or paid for by a child's district of residence if the district does not maintain an elementary school. Thank you. As a legal legislative counsel is it in this definition of public pre-kindergarten education program? In that definition they introduce the concept of high quality but without caveat. But I know from our other committee that's a meaty topic and I'm just curious if it's appropriate to introduce that kind of measure without introducing its ramifications. That would be a policy choice. There's nothing legally wrong with ambiguous terms. That's fair. It would be, this bill does not define high quality so that would be a policy choice on how granular you get with that. Thank you. So this bill doesn't define high quality but high quality is defined in somewhere else. Are you asking or telling me? I'm asking. I don't know the answer to that. If it were it would be referenced. Yeah but we went over that and held them over. I'm picking up the STARS program. Yeah but STARS goes away with this. Okay, gotcha. So we can't reference that when they're going to reveal. Okay, gotcha. That's helpful. Senator Williams. There are other requirements you'll see built in. I'm just saying that the term high quality is not defined in section 829 whether it's defined in DCF rules or is a part of another requirement. I can't speak to you today. But those two, that phrase is not defined in this section specifically. So subsection B on page four, line 19, is accessed to, it used to be publicly funded pre-kindergarten education program. And this subsection will spell out kind of what parents, what children have access to. And so you'll see that there's a proposed amendment that we're taking publicly funded out and we're labeling it a public pre-kindergarten education program. So each school district that maintains an elementary school for its resident students shall maintain a full-time public pre-kindergarten education program which shall be available to each pre-kindergarten child whom a parent or guardian wishes to enroll. Each public pre-kindergarten education program shall operate for the school year as defined in section 1071 of this title. That goes back to 175 days a year, student attendance. A school district that does not maintain an elementary school and does not maintain a public pre-kindergarten education program shall pay tuition for its resident students to attend a public pre-k program outside the district. So if you are a school district that maintains an elementary school, you have a brick and mortar. This bill requires you to also add pre-k to that. And if you don't have a brick and mortar, it requires you to pay tuition. You'll see later that there is also a provision that allows a school district that does not maintain an elementary school to make the choice to stand up a pre-k program on its own without having to pay tuition. I'm just curious. We're out of the definition. No, we're still in the definition section. No, we're in the access section. I'm just curious, to what extent this mandates, how many students, because a mandate would be served by this program? Every student in the district. So where's the private? This is public-private. Where's the private? This bill takes away the private option. Only public. For public-friendly pre-k. Again, I am not speaking to any of the childcare components to this bill today. Would you all cover in health and welfare, as I suspect? So this again is four-year-olds and five-year-olds pre-k program, public. And again, it would preclude somebody from using their own dollars to go to an independent private pre-k program. We'll hear from some of those folks. But this would end the days of using those public dollars to go to private pre-k providers. Foreign providers. Correct. So we're going to put those private providers out of this? Well, I don't know if you've taken any testimony on this in health and welfare. This issue? Yeah. So we will hear from some of those today. I hear your question. But there's still the K to four-year-olds. I mean the K. Zero. The birth to four-year-olds who will need childcare. Yeah. Not K. Correct. It's different. Ms. A. James, I'm also looking at Ms. Henning because I didn't schedule enough time for this obviously. How much time do you think you need to walk us through this? Because we do. It's interesting with childcare and early childhood educators, kids are waking up from naps, kids need to be fed, and so they are on a different kind of schedule. Yes. So you have the general idea of this? Yeah. I would say, again, depending on questions, another 20 minutes to walk through all of the language. Okay. But the main takeaway is creating a new deputy secretary within AOE and a new division, new responsibilities there. Yeah. And changing the program from 10 hours a week in public or private of choice. Yeah. To for three to five-year-olds to public funds can only be used for ages four to five if you're not yet in kindergarten in publicly funded and established pre-K programs. And it requires school districts who already have an elementary school to start the pre-K program in their district. And if they don't have an elementary school they tuition out similar to the town tuition program. Yeah. But there is a provision that allows non-operating districts to stand up a pre-K program. That's the big overarching program. That's helpful. There's smaller nuances. We will absolutely have some questions on the overarching. Yeah. So I have a vague question because I received a vague concern from somebody. But there was some questions as to the definition as it relates to federal funding that comes into the state. And I was wondering if you know anything about that because I wasn't able to get much detail. I don't. I think that would be a great question for my colleague Katie who really works in this area and has drafted the bulk of this bill. I don't know if there are any conversations around that. Oh, thank you. So do we have enough teachers to do this? I mean, that's a, that's my concern is where are they going to take people that are wrong in private daycare and put them in an employer at elementary school? We know we got teachers short. Yeah. That's a legitimate question. I would, if something like this were to go through and I'm hearing just anecdotally, it could take years to put something like this in place but we haven't taken testimony. We would have to kind of maybe simultaneously ramp up with UVM state colleges and other people. Yeah. Good question. Yeah. I think to that point that was something I was thinking about too. But I think, you know, we have been here. There's a lot of different things that go into the mix of creating the teacher shortage. And I think that when it comes to the workforce in general, the two major things are housing and childcare. And I think that when you start, when there's greater opportunity for teachers who have kids to send them to pre-K, you know, it creates a little bit more of a draw to come to Vermont. Yeah. Good point. The other big piece that I want to mention is that this bill also proposes changing the weight for a pre-kindergarten child for education funding. So have you had education funding 101? Okay. So you'll know that different grades are weighted differently. In current law, pre-K is weighted kind of negatively. Every pre-K child is given 0.54 weight. Elementary school students through grade five are neutral. They're weighted one. So this bill proposes to put them on par with the elementary students and weight them at one. Okay. So to repeal the negative 0.54 weight and just make them on par with elementary students. Page 19. Yeah. We'll find 20 minutes, hopefully tomorrow. We'll do the more detailed walkthrough. But that's a very helpful overview. And would you bring Ms. Otis and Ms. Chris and Ms. Jen or Ian? Thanks. Thank you. It's very helpful. Hey, Allison. Hello. Hello. How are you? Good. Good. Good to see you. Oh, hello. There we go. It's like the Brady Bunch. The order we have on here is we have Stacey Otis and Allison and then Linda. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Otis and Allison and then Linda. Ms. Otis, I understand that you have kids waking up from naps. And so we want to go to you first and hear your thoughts, your early thoughts on the pre-kindergarten piece of this bill. Hi, everyone. Thank you for allowing me to go first. Such little insight into everything. I'm Stacey Otis and I've operated a registered family for 17 years and have been a public pre-k partner with the local school district for almost 10 years. I opened my childcare out of necessity as my husband and I had four children, three of which were under six years old who needed childcare and we could no longer afford childcare. We both had worked outside of the home and received CCFAT funds for several years when we qualified to 80% coverage. The state had done an update on the cost of care and the cost of care was going to be $315 and I was bringing home $330 a week. So I originally was only going to run my childcare until my youngest went to kindergarten and she is now a sophomore in college so I have stayed. I obtained my associate's degree in early childhood education through CCB while working almost 60 hours a week raising a family and will continue to do so. I am a member of the Vermont task force for advancing a profession and have worked hard to advocate for changes in the childcare system so I would like to thank you for putting a bill forward with a focus on childcare because of the crisis for families and early childhood educators that we are currently having. Having a property tax break for family childcare homes would be a huge help for families and early childhood educators. As when families don't qualify I often take a cut and pay because I know how hard it is when they can't afford to pay childcare. And this is why access for families is so important. So the 450% of federal poverty level adjustment just doesn't seem enough. It needs to be raised to 500% for the middle income from a huge cliff. Universal pre-K works best in a mixed delivery system as we have it now in Vermont and I have a close relationship with my community public school that is fostered by the licensed teacher who comes into my program as my UPK mentor. This system provides families with many options as they decide what type of care they want for their children. As some prefer the smaller groups often pick up in one place before and after work. They don't have to worry about finding care for snow days, school vacations and in-service days and especially for the summer as we would have the full-time care. We often find this issue already in my town with the Head Start program we start getting frantic phone calls in April for parents looking for childcare in the summer for their children and we just can't take them. We don't have to worry about having a four-year-old or under school age and of those six only two can be under the age of two. If we lose four-year-olds from our care we can't just replace them with babies and having all four-year-olds in a public school would have a drastic negative effect on programs like mine. The numbers just don't work and could lead to closures of programs not being able to fill slots. And I know that's the opposite of that. I know that's the opposite of that but I think we need to be notified so that we can provide this service to our families. Although it is only required to offer 10 hours a pre-care week pre-care learning exists in everything we do all day long. Even for the younger kids as they're learning from watching the older kids and oftentimes the older children will imitate what we have done during pre-care with the high-quality care that we provide in family child care and it would be detrimental to our program to lose four-year-olds. So again I would like to express my appreciation for putting a child care bill forward and thank you for your time today. Yes and I believe this is your senator. Springfield right at the board Senator White and Clarkson and McCormick but for Windsor but my thought after hearing this maybe this is something we can talk about but can private pre-K businesses contract with schools that may not have capacity or may not have the staff to open up their own pre-K's in the schools. That's something that we can explore for the purpose of trying to keep as many private pre-K facilities open. So you're saying if you're elementary school A you would contract with Miss Otis's center as a public pre-K option. I don't think that would be allowed under the bill but we can I'm certainly open to it. Because the last thing I would want to see is a collateral consequence of this bill is to have any pre-K or any child care providers go under. It's fair to say it's not written that way currently. Right. But something to talk about. I heard Tess when we had me thinking about it. It kind of goes back to what I said before about if these people can't compete or don't work for them what are you going to do with them? Do it. Thank you. Could some pre-K private pre-K providers become certified to be pre-K teachers in a public school? Yes? Are you answering them? Yeah, I wanted to actually partially answer possibly to Stacey's point so Stacey went out and got an associate's degree to be able to run her center. The new bill requires I believe this is correct her to have a vouchers to run the center. Doesn't believe a vouchers? That's high quality. That's the goal, but the bill does not require that. Part two is the supporting people to move to advance their credentials. Right, so it does have a good professional development to it. But to Stacey's circumstances she worked out for hours, she got her associates, now she's out of business because she needs a voucher. She's almost got her vouchers. She's almost got her vouchers. I'm just saying that it's a point of what requirements there are to run these centers versus proposed versus correct? Ms. Owens has actually been part of the group that's working on that, so she might be a great person to speak to what the move to potential start-ups around the education. Do you want to say something about that, Ms. Owens? I'm sorry, I didn't catch the last bit of that, I'm sorry. Credentialing, so you move to, you're finishing a bachelor's degree right now. Can you just say something, maybe what motivated you to get the bachelor's degree? This is just, not just, but it's this part of your sort of professional personal development. Is it in any way connected to your program itself and the quality that you offer? Can you say something about your motivation? Sure, I mean, it's a little bit of all of that. To go to school, finish my bachelor's, it was always a thing that I told my children, college, you need these papers sometimes for certain jobs, and I had never done that, so I did that now, and I'm working with advancing as a profession where we're really trying to get the high quality and showing that associate's degrees, bachelor's degrees, to run our programs to do this and knowing that potentially this is where it was leading. So my degree is an early childhood studies, and it doesn't lead straight to licensure for teacher licensure, so that it would be another process that I would have to do through currently what Vermont has as the peer review system if I wanted to go that route with getting a license. So I believe that's what's required, that's what's required to run a full pre-K program on my own, which is why I mentor with a licensed teacher right now as a smaller program. And it's not easy to go back to school, especially when we're working, as a small program it's just me, I'm the only one working here, and I'm working 50, 60 hours a week just with children. So that doesn't include the college courses I'm doing, the curriculum setting and the planning and all of that stuff. So it's not easy for everyone to do especially if you're not used to online courses, which can be tough. Down in Springfield we don't have any colleges close to me that I could go in person too, so it was with an online course is all I could do. Which I think is most of Vermont and many places in Vermont anyway. So I don't know if that answers quite your question, I do believe that that is the route we're going, and I know in my area, the network that I run, there's 14 of us in the network, and over half have already obtained their associates and a quarter of us are working on our bachelors. So we know this is what we want to do, we want to provide the best care possible for the children and in order to compete also and keep our businesses with centers or even with the school districts. Yes. That was one of the concerns one of my constituents came to me with, is that they keep changing the rules. So they meet the requirement and then they puff the end and now she can't just one individual that had to close it. So she had it in her home, it's a movement tired. What we appreciate, I mean your concern is that if we were to move to public pre-k it would negatively impact what you're offering right now and could of course unintentionally force your closure. And it sounds like for learning environment having those four and five year olds is also very key to model behavior and all that kind of thing. Correct. I mean last year I had an opening and I already had my infant slots filled. Like I said, I can only have two kids under the age of two and all I was getting for phone calls were four month olds. So I had an opening for several months that I could not fill because of that. So if we're taking out a whole another age group that does make it that much harder for us to fill those slots are six slots filled. Okay. As we recognize you probably have kids waking up right now so we will go to I think Allison you are next but feel free to stay on Stacy if you'd like. Okay, thank you very much. Great, Allison. Hi, I did just want to make one note that you had mentioned in your discussion there. Maybe the public school systems can partner with these private programs. That is what is happening right now. The public school systems don't have the capacity to serve all four and five, three, four and five year olds. And so they're partnering with programs. We become qualified through the agency of education to be a pre-K partner and we are serving those three and four and five year olds in our programs. So I just wanted to make that clarifying point and now I'll get into my testimony which I did send over to Hayden so hopefully he has shared that with all of you. Thank you for this opportunity to share my story with you today. My name is Allison Grisb. I have worked in the field of early childhood education for over 25 years. I have a master's degree in early childhood education and I hold a Vermont level two teaching license birth through six. I am currently the director of the Bennington Early Childhood Center in Bennington. We are a pre-qualified pre-K partner site through the agency of education. And we are a five stars quality early childhood education program through the Child Development Division of the Agency of Human Services. We partner with both the Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union and the Bennington Rutland Supervisory Union. We serve 70 children in our community and this year 39 of those 70 students are receiving universal pre-K funds. 23 of those students are four-year-olds and 16 are three-year-olds. We have been partnering with public school systems since 2008. Our program is open 7.30 to 5.00 each day with options to attend as few as three mornings per week or as much as five full days per week. Our program does run on a school year schedule so we're open September through June closed for school vacation weeks but we offer camps on those vacation weeks and camps throughout the summer so families who do need year-round care are able to get it. Our high quality program is sought after by many families in our area including those that work at Bennington College and Southwest Vermont Medical Center. Our program is child and family centered offering a variety of hands-on learning experiences and the introduction of the scientific method to encourage our students to become independent thinkers and instill a life-long love of learning. Currently our pre-K students are learning about the properties of matter. They're writing their own stories and mastering 300 piece jigsaw puzzles just to name a few things. They're going home and sharing their knowledge with family members and are excited and eager to come to school every day. Today I'm here to talk to you about how universal pre-K has impacted our program as a business and as well as how it benefits our families. Universal pre-K funds help to keep our program afloat financially. This financial benefit comes around in two different ways. First the state's rate per hour pre-K is higher than what we charge for our other hours during the day and so subsequently we're able to pay our teachers a little bit more because we have more money coming in although it's still not enough and secondly families who start at our program as one year olds or two year olds often come for just three mornings or three days and then when they hit that three year old mark and they start getting funding from universal pre-K for those 10 hours they up the ante because they're used to paying whatever it is a couple hundred dollars a week now that time is being covered by the state and so they pay for or they add on a couple hours or a couple days per week and continue paying the same amount that they were paying. So that helps our enrollment I'm sorry my phone is ringing. Being a pre-K partner site is not only financially advantageous for us but it also provides us with a network of other pre-K partner programs to share ideas with and it offers us professional development opportunities through the supervisory unions that often are of greater quality and certainly of greater cost than we would be able to provide our staff with. Over these past 15 years of being a pre-K partner we have built strong relationships with our local supervisory unions we work closely with them to provide special education services to our students and we work with them to help make the transition to kindergarten as smooth as possible. So in our state's current mixed delivery system of universal pre-K we best meet the needs of their family. Some families need year round care. Some families need full day care. Some families don't need care but they want their children to get the social and academic benefits of a high quality pre-K program. High quality programs can be found in a variety of settings. They can be found in elementary schools. They can be found in private licensed programs like mine and Linda's. They can be found in family child care home programs like Stacy's. I do believe some changes should be made to the current universal pre-K program such as increasing the hours of the current system beyond 10 hours per week and greater consistency between the private partner programs and the public school programs as far as hours are preferred or number of hours children are served. But I do not believe that three-year-olds should be removed from the universal pre-K system and I do not believe that families options should be limited to just public schools. We need to do what is best for the children in our state and supporting high quality programs that are getting the job done successfully for their personal situations would do just that. Some might say that if four-year-olds moved out of private early childhood education programs then there would be more room for infants and toddlers which is very much needed. But the situation isn't as simple as that. Would there be more physical space in our programs? Yes, but that space would not necessarily be appropriate for infants and toddlers. The ratio of children to staff for infants is capped at 4 to 1 and for toddlers at 5 to 1 whereas the ratio for preschool students is capped at 10 to 1 which means infants and toddlers need more staff per group of children. Our current regulations also limit the number of infants in one room to 8, toddlers to 10 and preschoolers to 20. If we try to turn spaces that once held 15 to 20 preschoolers into infants or toddler rooms then we would either have to put large amounts of money into reconstructing our rooms so that the center can still accept as many students as it did before or run our programs with fewer students. Both options would be financially damaging to programs. I know part of the intent of child care is to increase child care capacity and support the financial viability of child care programs. However, I fear that this proposed change to the universal pre-K program would have the opposite effect. As you are working through this long awaited, much needed child care bill, I urge you to consider how changes to the current system could adversely affect both families to meet their needs and programs abilities to effectively operate. It is not an easy task to overhaul our current child care system in a way that will make early childhood education both affordable and accessible to all families and to fairly compensate and support early childhood educators. I hope that listening to stories like ours today will help you to make informed decisions. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for joining us. Any immediate questions for this question? I think it's consistent with what we've heard. Ms. January, you have sent extensive and it looks incredibly thoughtful and I say this in every positive way. Testimony, do you have time to go through for you to read it? If you could give us the highlights that would be helpful and needed to us to review it. Usually we think of witnesses about five minutes or so five to seven minutes each. Does that work for you? Are you comfortable with that? Yeah, that works. But first, please introduce yourself and where's Outer Creek Child Care Center? I'm Linda January, the executive director of Outer Creek Child Center in Middlebury, Vermont. We serve children birth through preschool and we are also a universal pre-qualified pre-K partner. So as you can tell by what I submitted, it was hard to kind of narrow it down. There's a lot in here. And I think for me, I will I think an important point is that as an early childhood educator provider who's also pre-qualified UPK partner, it's very difficult to silo out UPK from the full system. UPK is one layer of multi-revenue sources that make Outer Creek's budget work. And for families, UPK is often one layer of many that can include discount scholarships, the Child Care Financial Assistance Program that makes their monthly budgets work. For better or worse, UPK as it seems today is an integrated vital part of many early care and education programs. And it's one piece of the funding puzzle that makes early care and education programs affordable to families. My concerns with the changes laid out in S56 with pre-K are kind of summarized in five different themes that have emerged from me as I've been reading and watching and listening to all things S56 related. It's becoming all consuming these last few weeks. So I'll just touch on those five themes and Allison and Stacy also touched on them briefly. So the first is that the UPK system is complex and no one likes it and it is complex. It's complex on both ends of it. As a private provider currently we partner with four districts which means there's four contracts, four invoices systems, four payment schedules and in Addison County school districts are partnering with over 30 pre-qualified programs. It is a lot of paperwork but the important thing to know is that we're making it work. On the ground private and public programs have created effective systems that are working together and we've been doing this since Act 166 was passed in 2014 and actually many of us have been doing it long before the current system was in place. The second theme I'm hearing is this idea that private programs don't like the AOE involved and public programs don't like human services, the agency of human services and I agree that that dual oversight of the system makes it complex and that there are complaints on both sides but what I will say is when you drill down to the local partnership level it is working. Relationships are being built between private and public programs and we are meeting the needs of families and children. Where it's not working and where frustration lies with the field is at the highest level of management directly between the agency of education and the agency of human services. As a pre qualified UPK program my biggest frustration comes when communication to the field isn't direct. When questions go unanswered and when new mandates are created without adequate resources or supports for programs to meet those mandates. It's not with my local partnership with my local supervisory union. Excuse me. Another theme is these changes will alleviate the dual oversight and simplify the system. This is a system analysis that I hope you all are aware of that was completed in the summer of 2022 and that system analysis recommendation was to create a new unit of state government that is focused entirely on early childhood with a single empowered leader with oversight of a core cluster of key early childhood programs. This proposal goes directly against that recommendation and as a private program it doesn't get rid of that dual oversight as a program you would still be caring for three year olds and three year olds who would be receiving early essential education we would still be required to meet education laws rules and mandates by serving those children. It just silos the system further without actually making it less complicated. Alison touched on this next one is that if four year olds leave the private sector it will fix the capacity issues for infants and toddlers and I will just say it again as clearly as possible a preschool space does not equal an infant toddler space in any way that you examine it. They are not the same. And the last theme is around this idea that families can still choose to access the private sector for their four year olds and in theory yes there will be space for families to still access the private sectors but my fear is that with the changes to UPK along with changes to CCFAP that families above 450% of the federal poverty level will be priced out of the system. When I examine the potentials of what the new system would be I found that families between 500 and 800% of the federal poverty level could possibly pay between 24% and 39% of their income towards full-time year-round care and that's for an infant and a four year old that's a potentially a $4400 monthly payment. There's no family currently at Otter Creek who could afford that and that would affect 40% of our current population that could potentially be priced out and and so there is a lovely quote here from a family at Otter Creek there's also I'm the co-leader of the Addison County Directors Network and in that network we've been talking a lot about S-56 and concerns there's real concerns for small programs that are UPK pre-qualified programs that are school year just serving preschool children huge concerns for their viability if these changes take effect. As I quoted here Sue White who's the teaching director of Corey Hill she said that Corey Hill they are not equipped or qualified or really interested in providing quality care and programming for younger children so they would have to make huge decisions about their programming Ashley was set the director of Evergreen Preschool in Virginia her first response to me after reading S-56 was I think I'm out of a job and if those smaller programs close then there will be a larger capacity issue for three-year-olds in Addison County and I have a list of pondering questions that I hope you go through and think about and then I just really hope that at the very least you think about these things consider and study the full financial impact that public schools will shoulder by converting classroom space into age-appropriate space for pre-kindergarten age children an appropriate classroom space for a sixth grader does not equal an appropriate space for a pre-K student just as you consider the financial impact on the public sector do the same for the private sector how many programs will close what are the added expenses that programs will face in order to shift to serve younger children is there enough of a population of three-year-olds to sustain the system study the impacts the changes will have on the workforce how many more licensed teachers will the public sector need what are the qualification educators will need to meet NACI accreditation standards are there enough early childhood professionals to meet the demand study the impacts on the workforce and then talk with families and examine the financial impacts that the and the logistical complication these changes will create for four-year-olds and one of the things that I keep thinking about is from testimony that was given last Friday in the senate health and welfare committee and he was speaking about the vision of Vermont that Vermont has for the early childhood system he said to accomplish Vermont's a lot of vision it is critical to expand subsidy eligibility to be universal or near universal and to have a mixed delivery preschool system the absence of these policy elements will not so much have unintended negative consequences as have predictable consequences that hurt the very people you're trying to help I cannot stop thinking about this quote in the predictable negative consequences S56 will have on the early childhood system and I implore you to continue to think about what those possible negative consequences are and as you move forward to make changes to S56 and realize that you can move forward on things like CCFAP as well supports for early childhood professionals and tax relief for providers while at the same time slowing down on changes to UBK are deciding to separate UBK from S56 and create a separate bill that will allow you to take a deeper dive into all the possible predictable negative consequences changes to UBK could have an early childhood system Ms. January, I think we're going to have to take some questions now I appreciate your passion I appreciate everything you're saying I think one of the things that you mentioned that I hadn't thought about was if all of a sudden some of these some of this policy change were to force some closures that we would be opening up some real problems for finding spots for the youngest Vermonters among us the birth to three-year-olds and I guess that's just something I hadn't really thought much about I don't know if that's come up in your committee in the morning but not as clear as this yeah okay yeah please so I just wanted to thank Allison and Linda for their testimony it's a really quite compelling so what I as I kind of try to get my head around this I'm looking at the stated problem of essentially 9,000 there's a gap of 9,000 seats for early child care not necessarily four year olds but somewhere in that order and I'm just curious you both seem to be successful in your pursuits I'm wondering what's inhibiting you from either expanding your current business or creating satellites to mirror what you're doing but do it in a different village or a different part of the city or what have you just wonder if you can comment on that for a second Allison do you want to take a stab at that first sure it's there are a lot of factors at play one I think I would die if I had to run two different programs because it's hard enough to run one program but I do understand what you're saying and I do know that there are some people that are successful at doing that I just don't know if I personally could do it as far as expanding I would love to expand my program we are at our max capacity for our wastewater permit we have a septic system we do not have sewers accessible to us and so we cannot expand to any more children than what we currently serve funny question because for the past I don't know seven years I have been working on a huge expansion project for Otter Creek in partnership with Middlebury College and we are very hopeful to break ground this calendar year but it has taken so long because of the massive undertaking we would if our plans go as are now we will increase capacity by 77 daily slots and those are infants through preschool slots it is a $10 million project we are adding to do that and to do it well we are adding a 12 I think it is over 12,000 square feet to our existing building we will go from four classrooms to possibly 13 classrooms it is a huge undertaking and it has taken literally a village to make it happen we have some funding coming that we are excited about and we will be applying for other great opportunities but the amount of capital required to expand and to create truly developmentally appropriate space is just yeah and like wastewater we are on sewer I don't have to deal with wastewater but I have to do an environmental review that is costing us $40,000 that has historical preservation and archeologists and we have to study bats and all this other stuff so it is really all and if I didn't have the partnership with Middlebury College it would not be possible this has been incredibly helpful to us as we just jump in today to the pre-K question and I think you have helped us all to understand some of the impacts that if we were to move to a public pre-K system some of the things that I think some of us may not have been considering for myself so thank you both we are just in the beginnings of this and I don't know if you heard me say it when we first started this is the piece of the bill the pre-K the part that would end up in our public schools that this committee has jurisdiction over so I suspect you'll be back over or be invited to housing welfare where the rest of the bill is and whether it's good or bad at this point half that committee is on this committee and so there's some overlap so thank you both for joining us very much appreciated and please stay in touch thank you thank you so committee first impressions before we take a five minute break in terms of let me put it this way I'm going to be asked to report back sometime sooner rather than later whether or not this committee wants to move to universal pre-K in the public schools and in some ways possibly it can be defined or I think removed from other providers or do people want to generally keep it here I mean no big decision right now but I'm just wondering any sort of first impressions I don't think we know what we don't know how many people how many pre-K is it going to affect so does anybody have a handle on someone must know how many daycares and pre-K there are in the state and how much it's going to how is it going to affect them and do we have the capacity in the school districts to take it out I mean I think I can't remember if it was covered already but my first question goes to the amount of demand that there is for childcare and if it does go to the public or if it doesn't become universal pre-K in the schools is there really that low of a population that there won't be new kids to go to these other private locations that are concerned and I feel like they did mention something along the lines I feel like maybe they did mention that but maybe I just missed it so I'll probably have to just re-watch the thing but I mean that's just that was one of my first thoughts I think it's a great point Senator Doolik, what do you think about the idea of moving forward with pre-K and taking it away from the centers is really the question on the table oh I mean that's generally going around first impressions based on the scale I mean I live in Burlington and I know that Sarah can agree with me on this it works well in Burlington our mixed delivery system I think we have a good a good relationship between the schools and the private providers but we've also been increasing our capacity in our schools for pre-K which has been really nice because we had some room in Sustainability Academy I think and the Integrated Arts Academy and also Flynn school which is the school out in my way out in the North End so we've been able to grow those which has been great I love the idea of having pre-K delivered teachers who are certified and who reap the benefits of working in a public school which is healthcare and sometimes there are some of the best paid folks in the community depending on where you are in the state so for me those are pluses yeah I mean I still I still have questions about the bill that I have not been answered including the oversight piece so I want that to be fleshed out a little bit more so I mean I'm going to solve this problem and if this helps solve the problem then I'm all for it but again I'm still learning yeah so am I I was again and I'll say and I think this is somewhat similar what Senator Hashim said is if we do if we do say to these folks you're not going to get public funding for four or five year olds is the unintended consequence they close because they cannot keep going financially and then that does make a bigger problem with the infant to three and a half year old that's what's kind of interesting about and I would just say if we were to go to the system we would need to look at how could we address that problem is there something we could do either combine some centers I don't have the answer to that how would we address that because that is a big concern I'm concerned that we don't know the demographics like in my school district the population is increasing so is there capacity to have both so because we don't really know if the economy starts to come back we start to get more people they don't have to have more more programs yeah and I've seen a little bit of an uptick in particular that started a pre-K program recently yeah at the local elementary school and I think that was I'm guessing school board decision okay this is helpful there are some districts like South Burlington that their elementary schools are bursting at the seams as far as I know that's what I've heard is it that good? no don't think so it's good to be in a growth area yeah it's a good problem to have it's been in Burlington I know of all of us elementary school has a pre-K program they make a private full-time and they all seem to get along and work together yeah I can of course only speak to Allison's program which has got a great program it's been around for a while and it seems to have good relationships and I think everybody probably does with their district also let's take five minutes and we'll come back to sorry under secretary Boucher we're running a little behind Dr. Boucher it's great to see you it's great to see Vermont bigger behind you welcome back to senate education Tuesday Bell and Penn State 251 education quality standards according to my notes Senator Pulick raised a concern and I think it's one that we all have around educational quality standards as it relates to our independent schools in particular and we have St. John's Berry Academy coming back in to answer Senator Pulick's questions but before we do that I thought we might just take a moment and just understand educational quality standards in general in the state one of the things that some people may say we do too much of or not enough of this committee and I think it's true of health and welfare and natural resources also there's so much policy and there's so much that has to be taken in institutions go boss I mean let's be honest what do they really do I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding now I'm scared to stop my institutions you're going to get me in trouble but this is heavy policy so anything you can help us with with E2S would be great sure happy to be back here for the record Dr. Heather Boucher for education here by the way I'm not sure I said this I'm in my eighth year as the deputy secretary congratulations I think sure I love it it's good work I think we have a fantastic education system I'm not sure I actually had a chance to kind of tell you that you know I've been working in this area for quite some time now so I thankfully thought that kind of an overview of the education quality standards might be what you were looking for I know that you had Amanda Garcia and Diego who are on the F1 Amanda is the chair of the F1 working group and I actually had prepared this presentation an earlier version of this for that group to kind of walk through what exactly are education standards and where do they come from what do they mean to all those questions and I think that you will see a couple of slides that are probably familiar to you given that last week's testimony I am actually a member of the F1 working group too so that creates a nice I think interface for us to make sure we're doing things kind of according to the I'm at work group according to the process for support In your interview if you could just somehow mesh are they one in the same talk about act one and EQS where do they come together sure so they're not the same so act one was a particular law that was passed I believe 3 session 4 4 years ago that did a variety of things but the primary piece was to form a working group with a set body of different entities stakeholders around the state who could all inform the conversation about what we call ethnic studies also related to things like social justice really what this was about was how do we ensure that our education system is meeting the needs fully for all of our students in particular students who come from what we might term historically marginalized backgrounds we actually met yesterday and we had a really rich discussion about what are these terms that we use and so I'm kind of like thinking we didn't come up with anything that we want to use because we're still having that conversation but at the time we would say historically marginalized sometimes either students of color BIPOC populations and so for many folks just as an aside those don't really seem to resonate with them individually and that's kind of what we were having that conversation about last night but I said that was an aside so act one really was about how do we actually and it was framed around a couple of studies in Vermont and then some national work that had shown the education sphere is one where we really need to make sure that all students feel welcome feel safe feel that they see themselves in the instruction in the curriculum that they're taught every day so in a nutshell that's what act one is and I'm doing it I'm sure quite short shrift so EQS is what the State Board of Education and I'll talk about this in just a sec what the State Board of Education developed the first version of it was back in the early 1980s I believe 84-85 and it was in response to Title 16 like a real core aspect of Title 16 which actually said the State Board is responsible for the quality of education and so they went through a process where they actually came up with rules which is what the EQS are their 2200 rule series that actually spelled out at that time you know here's what the State Board of Education for Vermont is requiring in terms of our education quality for the whole system and then over time the last version of the EQS was that so over time with rules and this is the part where I'm not sure you've actually had some of that introduction to literally as basic as here's how laws are made what happens to them afterwards and that's some of the slides I have but so rules like law occasionally need to be or regularly need to be updated and so that's what happens with what's happening with the EQS as well the last time they were updated was 2015 how they interface which is a great question is that and I can talk about this a little bit in the presentation the act one part of what was required of the act one working group was to look at the education standards and then also to look at to the extent feasible to look at practices in local school districts local policies those kinds of things so this is the act one working group is a great collective collaborative of a lot of folks from the community and so they are not as steeped even as any of us in kind of like this kind of stuff like a lot of the work that we'll do is of course very it's not plain English so they needed you know most people would you know my entire family would not understand what the heck I do if they actually looked at what I write every day so we spent a lot of time actually making sure that all members of act one understood this process and that's where this presentation initially started from so because of that the working group started with the state education standards because again that is sort of the marching orders for all of our LEAs from the state from the state board of education here's what thou shall do in terms of provisioning quality for education so it made sense for the working group to say alright let's start there we want to make sure that we have a lens that is really framed around equity and framed around making sure all students are you know covered addressed taken care of in these education standards so that's kind of a broader background I thought I might jump into it's not a very long presentation I'm going to jump in and just kind of walk through some of those pieces if that's okay sure and you're talking about this presentation yes yes I also provided a link I think Maureen sent separately a link to the actual education quality standards and so you can actually see from a more concrete perspective what actually is in them and then at the end I'll talk about where we currently are at because right now they're not open officially which is a thing and I'll talk about what that means but there's work happening on them because of Act 1 so the second slide there is really a little bit of just a high order of like how is state education policy developed and you know I can't really speak to other spheres it might be different all I can speak to is education ideally this is what happens and this list goes from more general to more specific as you go down these bullets so the general assembly passes a statute passes a law then the state board of education typically is asked to enact rules based on that statute sometimes not if the law is so crystal clear that you don't need rules to go along with it but more often than not particularly in education it's complex and so there are often a need for rules to actually really spell out how that would look so one of the things that I and I don't think anyone knows that we've asked is how did we get proficiency learning let's counsel says it's not in a field so what I'm wondering and I did invite former secretary Colcomb she said and I understand she thinks perhaps just to careless might be better when Jess is back but it's we've heard from teachers and parents that have some concerns about it where did it come from who's so erected whom the state board of education directed proficiency based graduation requirements which was their purview okay they didn't do anything wrong we're just trying to get to the where did it come from because it's a big impact it's had a big impact whether people want some positive or negative I don't know but those kinds of things happen and it's important for us to understand how they sort of get out there and that's kind of what I said ideally this is the way the process works but in the context of how the laws were entitled 16 that does have its own authority and also probably at the time like right like its own mandate given what was happening in the state contextually there was a lot of work going on with proficiency based learning it was tied very closely with flexible pathways we don't talk about that would it take the secretary of education to say I want you all to look at this proficiency based learning and move forward or is it they can just at that time at that time and this is also another layer of complexity so at that time the state board of education would tell the commissioner at that time what to do because the commissioner of education was actually employed by the state board of education the flexible pathways were done by secretary Holcomb but this work started during that transition to her so at the same time she came in and we became a secretary the role became a secretary and was part of the administration and I will say that happened but it's still taking us some time and we're still not even I think 100% there of actually cleaning up all of the legislation that we keep finding little tiny things every now and then where it's like oh we're no longer a department of education so there was a period of time where it was a bit of a gray area of who was on first so I know that my predecessor John Fisher was who was really a strong leader in terms of proficiency based learning and flexible pathways so I think it was both coming from at that time the department of education and also the state board of ed but the state board of ed they decided we're going to go with proficiency based graduation requirements and so then our obligation was okay that's in rule meaning our obligation of at that critical moment when it was probably passed I can't remember department slash agency and then to be the agency because we were in that transition it was still our role to then translate that for the field and so a lot of the work that Jess has done is all of that translation which is under the state education of the state agency of education in the third bullet developing of guidance and technical assistance and the best practice examples and professional development and learning all of that stuff so could this still happen under the new structure the state board of education says we're going to move in a certain direction whether voters or there's no legislative process can that still well right now we're in another kind of interesting space and so part of the interesting thing about our agency is that the rest of the agencies all have to my knowledge the rest of the agencies in our Vermont government system have their own rulemaking authority as an agency we never had that so that was one of those funny things that was still under this board of education and this is where the district quality standards piece came in so that is the agency of educations first foray into now as an agency we're doing rulemaking so we will run the whole process of rulemaking which is a process you have to take lots of stakeholder feedback you have to actually get approval through two ICAR and LCAR committees that are I think within the bowels of the governmental system and I think also they might have they might have we have all of those so so so right now we're still working under EQS that are owned by the state board of education and you'll see when we start I think we're going to come and give an update on the DQS with our district quality standards and you'll see sort of how both of us the state board of ed and agency of ed we've worked together have been have thought of that conceptually because I don't think anyone is interested in a heavy divorce between these two that doesn't that's not good for our education system in general we want to be working together always okay good Joey Donovan represent I mean I was against any kind of divorce and then when they Shumlin and Donovan and others said no we've got to move to the secretary I was like I don't know and now I get it and I like moving more my instinct sort of important that I think that's a little bit of a different divorce that was like divorce phase one and I'm talking about the if we are going to have a state board of ed which I think we are committed to at this point and it's important that the agency of education continue working very closely with that state board of ed does that help it's all murky it's very murky so I hope that I'm providing some clarity for this and then the LEAs that lingo you've probably heard it so that's the local education agencies for us that basically needs the districts technically supervisory districts because we're interesting in Vermont but basically it's districts and they develop then as a result of all of the guidance the technical assistance they develop their own policies that are aligned with the law the rule and the technical assistance ideally that they've received the state agency of education is typically not mandatory so it's more guidance and technical assistance you saw though I mean I could just wax poetic on this so stop me off but so you saw though when we had the covid state of emergency I don't know if you'll remember this the because the governor declared a state of emergency it allowed the secretary at that time to actually have the word of law not law but the word of rule that said you know this is what we're going to do it's mandated so without that state of emergency that's that's not what the agency has the authority to do and this comes up quite a lot because you know we're often in a spot where folks get frustrated rightfully so with the agency and they're why can't you do this why can't you you know why can't you fix this and often we say we understand that would need a new law or that would need new rule because we you know I could think of an example of some other time to share about that but so it's kind of heady stuff but I think it's important to kind of just keep in mind there's a lot of different players there's a lot of different roles and responsibilities for folks and then I just give you an example of that back to oh gosh why would I use this as the example right pre-k this was at one sixty six there's a lot going on in pre-k as we know I'm on now on slide four and I was trying to use this to explain that the act one work and this really gets at your question Mr. Chair the act one work was really about the working group actually carrying out their charge that was in act one and starting by looking at the state board of education rules and there are many different rules EQS is one set of rules I will say right off the bat the current instantiation of EQS does not pertain to independent schools it pertains only to public schools it doesn't pertain to approved independent schools it only pertains to public schools and so part of what the recommendations were from the act one working group and I'll move into that now so can you just give us an example then of something that the public should be required to do under EQS that the independent schools just class size so that we have in some of the EQS there are there's a little sort of not really a formula but it has and I don't have it memorized but it has the student teacher ratio that is I don't even know if it's required but it's strongly suggested in that rule there are similar ratios for student counselor to teacher excuse me to student ratios those kinds of things so another complexity the whole aspect of licensure but that's actually not the state board of education just to clarify and confuse things even more that's actually the standard school separate entity so there are a variety of things like that all of this so for instance no independent school will be required to set up a multi tiered system of support which is really critical to act 173 which you might heard of so since 2015 that instantiation of the EQS really was heavy on MTSS and so that's when that was required and we then we built up a team in the agency we have an MTSS team they've done a lot of work and they really help local both districts and schools build up that system is that helpful yeah and just to refresh my memory that's 173 actually 173 we passed largely having to do with special education correct correct okay we did hear from the fellow from St. John's Berry on this a little bit last week I just want to keep all my acts you know and that's I think an interesting thing too so another piece and this is actually believing more into federal regulation but our independent schools are not related to partake in our state assessments however our four academies historically public high schools so that would be St. J which you've heard testimony on LI the Linden Institute, Fetford Academy and Burr and Burton Academy have always decided that they actually want to do assessments like the public and so that's another funny and interesting practical layer that a lot of the I shouldn't say a lot some of the independent schools actually want to do what's in the EQS they might feel differently if it was mandated okay thank you yeah so there are a bunch of different and maybe it might make sense to actually look at the EQS and just walk through because I think that will give you a flavor of what is in them and then also I'm not going to steal my boss's thunder but I could give you a little prelude about why the DQS are coming and might be necessary great so we have so you want to shift to this stuff yeah I kind of mapped out the high level in that power plant presentation the first section is the statutory authority this is for the 2000 series so as I said it really stems from right up front in 16 VSA 164 and 165 it really kind of jumps into the core of our education system so you can see some kind of required non-discrimination language up front then there's a whole section on definitions and by the way this document is what is currently sitting a revived version of this is currently sitting with a subcommittee of the State Board of Ed and I'm not going to speak to that because that would not be my purview but that might be a really great thing for you if you would like to hear testimony from the co-chairs of that subcommittee, Tanekul Bey and Ken Gleason because they are now taking the recommendations from the ACLA working group and working them through and taking a lot of their own testimony on what makes sense to do and we have provided some technical corrections to them on some of that but in general we're in agreement with a lot of I mean I was working on it myself so there's been a lot of cross talk between our entities, the ACLA working group and the agency so I'm showing you what's currently on the books these are actually going to change in the next year based on what the ACLA working group has put in place I don't necessarily think and again I want to be careful because they're not we don't own the agency of education I don't know necessarily if the structure is going to change you're going to probably have the same structures with some additions but you will see that it will have a lot more focus on those pieces that I talked about with ensuring that all students from diverse, varied backgrounds are feeling at home in the curriculum and instructional practice in a lot of this so I think the first section and I'm just going to do high level is what we might anticipate which is curriculum and instruction so this is 21-20 and it is on page 4 of the EQS document so here's where you start to see and it's not proficiency based learning but it does get personalization comes in instructional practices shall promote personalization this is where they first came in to my knowledge in this 2015 version of the EQS so personalization and this notion that really students should be thriving, they're learning, they should really be engaged and part of that is to actually personalize to the extent we can the lessons that they're exposed to and sort of like allowing them to kind of craft and create their own unique types of ways of showing proficiency and of also incorporating material that really speaks to them into things like projects and into papers and those kinds of things just as one example you start to see that personalization flexible pathways actually is a direct link to statute because at the same time Act 77 was passed by y'all which is Act 77 of I believe 2013 and so this follows that process that I was talking about so Act 77 was passed then here under curriculum and instruction is a whole section that's teeing up we've got these things flexible pathways now and we're speaking to them and it lists them out just as Act 77 does Career and Technical Education comes next just as one example of how this process is iterative we recommended that Act 77 in the statute actually incorporate Career and Technical Education into it because on the ground and with Act 77 originally it talked about CTE as one of the flexible pathways so the General Assembly agreed with us and so they're now under this broader umbrella of Act 77 flexible pathways so there still is a separate section certainly because there needs to be given its complexity for Career and Technical Education but the idea was we want to actually make sure that these are seen not as kind of specific issues so a flexible pathway would be CTE would also be Adult Education Adult Basic Education and I know a lot is going on in CTE and I'm happy to talk at another time about that I'm happy to talk about anything out of anything Personalized Learning Plans was brand new so folks have heard of PLPs they are not the same thing as Individualized Education Plans which are required by Federal law for students who are on Individualized Education Plans that was a big piece of professional work we had to do in the field because people were actually conflating the two and saying oh they've got a PLP so they don't need an IEP and we were like absolutely not these are not the same you know they're not like one is definitely required by Federal law PLPs are required by State law and PLPs are for all students so that's a really accurate but any idea of how it's going in the field I think it's we do assurances every year and so largely meaning like they have to assure that they're 7 through 12 graders which is what's in rule actually in law I believe that one I have to go back and check but I think it's in law actually so the 7 through 12 graders have to have personalized learning plans as you might imagine the first couple of years they needed a lot of supports to get there the first couple of years it ended up being almost like kind of a checklist which was not great so it was kind of like that's not really the whole point of a personalized learning plan is so that kids are having conversations with adults that can care about them and inform them and actually help them make choices through high school, late middle school and high school to get to what they're looking for afterwards so I would say certainly COVID you know COVID just put like a halt to a lot of things so in particular we would I'm very curious to see what our assurances and when I say assurances every superintendent has to basically sign off and agree to a variety of federal and state mandates and laws and obligations and this is one of them every year and so they have to say like I can assure that all of my 7 through 12 grade students have a personalized learning plan we've never had 100% on that I think sometimes that's because we've had a lot of turn over in terms of leadership as you've probably heard as well at the administrative level but I think that there's been incredible progress and so I you know again we need to re-look at that now that we've been through COVID and see like okay this still really is something that's important we made a lot of effort to make to ensure that for instance you have to have a PLP if you're going to do do an enrollment because that's how it links to the rest of your experiences if you're doing early college you should have a PLP if you are in CTE you should have a PLP so we tried to kind of like bring these pieces together from the agency because again it was kind of just this like checklist thing like okay at some point they talked about their interests in their 4 years they talked about I think any of us the general assembly or the state board or the at the time department we really wanted things to be rich ownership around their education like you said have some good conversations with not only faculty but people outside the building and parents and parents absolutely so you know as you might imagine I think the more resourced districts had no problem with this you know they had the resources for something new in and kind of go with it they might have had multiple school counselors already that could build this into their system a lot of folks ended up using teacher advisories which has been a really nice model throughout the state particularly in some of our more rural areas where even before our crunch on workforce they weren't able to have maybe not be fully staffed with a full time school counselor by the way it's not guidance come from anymore school counselor just so you know I will make that mistake and I get that because they do a lot more now than guidance that's for sure so curriculum content is the next piece is this completely boring you all or is this helpful this is helpful to me just to understand again what it is what really does fall I mean I've only been the chair for a little over two years so I'm still completely taking it in and this is particularly helpful I just wanted to check in as a teacher because it's not this one is really I think important though because this one can get confusing so the curriculum content lays out here and this will you'll see from what I can tell from what is happening with the current the deliberation on EQS right now it's more it's more adding to what's in here and fleshing out some things but this is where things get a little confusing and so the EQS say here's the curriculum content you have to have literacy you have to have math content practices you have to have scientific and Korean content knowledge you have to have global citizenship you have to actually have phys ed and health education by the way many places do actually do mental health and health education they can talk about that because I know that you had some testimony on that and I'd be happy for us to come back and talk more about that arts our expression then on top of that we actually and this is not in this is within the purview of the state board of education's authority so it didn't have to come through the state but the state board of education adopted specific academic state standards so they adopted the common core state standards for English literacy ELA and math and the next generation standards for science and the C3 standards for social studies and so that's a little confusing because that's not listed out in the EQS but it was part of the deliberative process of the state board and they took testimony and had stakeholder engagement on those as well Is common core listed anywhere in this? No, it would be listed in the minutes and the meeting logs of the year that we as a state adopted them and so that's exactly what I'm saying like the rules are not that specific intentionally and then I don't know how teachers keep it I mean this it's Byzantine it's just a lot of levels it's a lot of levels of stuff and I'm not here to endorse nor does anybody have any questions for Dr. Boucher in terms of what we've heard and lack of understanding or an understanding now of the EQS because I think what we'll hear from what I think Dr. Boucher, is it Dr. Kulick or is it Professor Kulick or Senator Kulick? Some people do want to call me doctor and or doc but it's just, no, there's no there's no doctor I think I hope this is helpful in terms of understanding some of what you want to talk to the head of St. John'sbury Academy it helps me to understand again sort of what's there I think it's going to make for a more interesting conversation I don't know to what extent they're even familiar with the EQS I really don't stick around it doesn't pertain to that they may have it doesn't legally they have their own their separate process which is they go through NEASC to get approval which this looks Byzantine well that's good to know because we have a very agenda we know there are 11 public schools that do NEASC should everybody do NEASC or should we, you know, that kind of so I have I have them they're in a file in my office if anyone wants to know what they are because they're not required when they come to me I have just said great, great, public school X, I'm just going to have this and people, they've decided to do that extra level of it is more laborious than going through EQS to do NEASC, there's no question about it that's interesting I mean you have to do self-studies literally page is long college is something similar similar to national associations which now Meachin used to be they used to be both maybe I'll stick around sorry, Haley would you my time management seems to skank lately I feel like I'm taking double my time no, it's very helpful Dr. Hill, nice to see you again I can expect you to come in person but please join us at the table we'll show up when you guys are here come back yeah, I just got one too well, again hi, good to see you, it's been I think a couple of weeks and appreciate you coming back Gullit couldn't be here for the first time you were here and so some questions did come up I'm not sure if it was I think it was probably after your visit around and Senator Gullit can direct these questions better generally around education policy standards and the academy and those kinds of things so am I articulating that pretty well or do you want to I don't want to speak for you okay, please go ahead Senator Gullit, nice to meet you so my question was around EQS generally speaking as a state we decided that EQS is sort of the model that we live by is sort of our ethos so to speak we don't have a regents exam like New York we don't have curriculum requirements or a mandated curriculum so this is what we have and my question to you is as something that we've all agreed upon and we're all going to follow this the set of guidelines or as I said ethos how is it or why is it that you, that St. John's grave doesn't follow EQS you are a school that receives public dollars yes thanks for the question I've been thinking a lot about how about this Dr. Hall, I just want to make sure everybody who's watching you are the headmaster at St. John's grave so I don't know if you've heard from people in the ASC the accrediting body we had an overview one day about what it looks like the house vows I'm happy to talk about it it's the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and they accredited schools that are tiny and Harvard so they have a lot of scope, wide scope in the state and in New England generally so independent schools all over New England trust Niasque, we've been accredited by Niasque it's really quite a rigorous process so it's on a 10-year cycle and the first part of the cycle is a self-study that every school will do and it is based on 15 standards that these are the standards that we feel are appropriate for us they're built for independent schools and they are from operations and employee policies to school program and I'm happy to leave this if that's helpful because that as a first step for a school to actually include a lot of people in understanding how they are feeling about how the school is running faculty and staff are really important there and they ask for a lot of material so they ask for budgets and for policies and handbooks and lots of data and that evaluation so the committee formed visiting committee it's usually about 10 people and it appears from independent schools and that committee does two visits the first visit is really for operations so I just did this down in Massachusetts at the learning center for the deaf in so you go in with a little bit of a smaller group just to talk to facilities the F.O. and the admissions and HR to kind of cover the operations piece and then write a short report and then a couple of months later the visiting committee in full comes and spends two days on campus from pick up to drop off one day or drop off to pick up one day just to see how the school runs and talk to all the constituencies there and observe classes and talk to parents it's really a very fulsome and then the committee goes back looks at this self-study thinks about what they've observed and what the data is that they see and then writes up reports and makes really clear and focused recommendations about what what the school might do to improve obviously if there are big things that need to be fixed they're going to point to that the school has a chance to respond to for inaccuracies not to make their argument but then that report is completed and it either adds up to being accredited being accredited conditionally or being denied after two years there's another report it's very brief but it's really meant to track progress and recommendations so it's looking at those it's actually 14 standards for us and just briefly like what have you done to address them the five year report which we just completed and actually the AOE we gave it to the AOE that is more comprehensive and asks us to talk about real things that have changed and the ways that we're thinking and planning it asks for some strategic planning thinking so that's where we are right now we submitted that in April of 2022 and I just realized that we're going to have to start our whole self-study process in 2025 because then they'd come in 2026 so can I and in 2010 I didn't ask I was teaching it as a high school and we did the full so I helped write a portion of our large document that we submitted so I'm very familiar but it was a good overview to hear it again so thank you I think they have done some when was it the two they have made some adjustments that's what I heard they're overall pretty positive it seems like they're in touch more often now which I think is a great thing with the school itself it used to be like 10 years then 10 years but now it's so how does this all connect them to EQS or I mean it's not really connected to EQS but it's you know it's because as senator said you don't have to follow the EQS it's maybe one way to ask are St. John's Berry kids not getting something that the public schools are getting because you're not that might be a way for me to think about it I have no idea because I don't know what's going on in all the schools and I'm not I am an independent school person so I'm not an expert on those standards but I guess what I would say is they're both these are both systems of accountability mechanisms to be held accountable for the things that you're being asked to do and the things that you say you do according to your mission so the EQS as far as I can tell is a very helpful set of standards for the public schools and there are a lot of things that we do that are very similar to any school and I really want to be careful not to make it seem like I don't like public schools I respect and admire and want to work with public schools but the when you ask accreditation process and that whole set of standards is our accountability mechanism right so it's those are the standards that we have been using they do need adjustment sometimes I met with the I actually met with the state board of education maybe in December and they were asking about this and you know one of the things they were focusing on was the kind of diversity, equity and inclusion work ethnic studies is a piece of what you're talking about these days but they were concerned that we weren't going to be held accountable to these standards that the state had said this is what we want to make sure is happening in every classroom we want to make sure that kids are learning accurate history and that they're being they're belonging and feeling like they belong and they're being treated equitably right so so we talked with with the state board and Niasque was there and you know one of the things that was suggested was a Vermont state that could go into the Niasque process for Vermont schools that really addresses very specifically and we would work on it it wouldn't be sort of wholesale from EQS I don't think but we would work on creating an agenda that made sure that everybody felt comfortable was we are accountable to do these things with our students and make sure that our institution is doing A, B, and Z so one was one of the things I think you raised was what is happening around maybe my mother's memory I generally remember things that other people say would have this wrong please I'm not accurate ethnic studies DEI what is happening at the academy so I just want to set the record straight please I'm not sure how this misapprehension got out there but I'm hearing that there's some sense that the academy is refusing to teach ethnic studies I think there was something maybe an article that perhaps a digger article that was also referenced in the committee so I just want to make your mother's memory is better than mine I think now that you mentioned it that was part of what happened and I remember the feeling that's absolutely not it was just not the case we not only teach I was just talking to my academic dean today saying can I get up to date on what exactly we're doing and we just approved the AP Black History course and the AP world course that has a new set of standards around multicultural subjects so I mean we really already unequivocally are committed to making sure that kids are getting this information and are learning how to find the truth and to speak to each other in ways that will get them to the truth and we also want to help our folks who've been on the staff for a long time and who have reflexes about what they do like hiring and like discipline to take a look at those processes and policies and so we did hire a consultant for the year and she is looking at across the board at everything that we do as a school and I know there are a few different elements to it so the policy and practice institutional policy and practice is one piece the helping students in the moment to feel the community education how do we make this the most equitable school faculty board and the board is just absolutely all in on this so I think you can't really make any progress if you don't have some energy from the top which is why the state standards I think it's exciting that that's happening so then there's the curriculum so we're looking at all of those things and have already made some progress in terms of student leadership and faculty leadership and one thing that I appreciate a lot of things about being about an intended school and I have a lot of them written here that I appreciate and one of them the big one really is the flexibility that we have to create programs that respond to whatever it is that we're dealing with in the moment I think DEI is sort of a cottage industry right now so there are a lot of people who are practitioners and schools are under a lot of pressure to hire DEI coordinators or directors and we're in a very different place I mean Vermont is very white but the Northeast Kingdom is particularly white we have and that presents its own own issues but it means really that our our big ism that we're steeped in is classism in the Northeast Kingdom so it's socioeconomic diversity that is really the most important to focus on for us not to say that racial diversity so LGBT aren't important because we've been working on all of that so the reason I mention it is because we have some flexibility to hire somebody who is going to be able to focus on what we what we want to create that position yeah so I just think from my point of view where the dichotomy sits is that many of our schools public schools I mean it sounds like your institution out of you know goodwill is deciding to sort of follow the ethnic standards bill and some of the other things which is fantastic but there are other schools that obviously they don't have the luxury of goodwill right they're held accountable to certain standards and certain rules and policies and I think there's a bit of a dichotomy there I also want to speak a little bit to and I don't want to speak out of turn so we can get this fact checked if I'm wrong and I also don't want to go with a transit of property here but I do think when that house got testimony from me ask one of the questions they ask is do you do you work with and certify schools that are not do not follow diversity and equity standards and that also may discriminate against LGBTQ students and so forth and he was not able to answer that question so you know that's something that again in terms of like setting a standard yeah I that doesn't sit well necessarily I understand that for sure I think that's one of the reasons that at the state board we talked about doing Vermont specific addendum and that would be and you know I do think that that would cover just what you're talking about and make sure that the Vermont schools that are approved by me ask and accredited by me ask have this standard to hold schools to following up on that it's correct me if I'm wrong would that be captured in the 2200 series it would that's how I'm trying to think about it is you know that the 2200 series is really meant for the independent schools and then EQS is meant for public schools and you know I'm not like for or against EQS because you know I'm but I'm for and against standards so the fact that we have these two mechanisms you know to me making a transition to EQS is just it doesn't make sense for us structurally and also just in terms of restructuring our transitioning to a new accountability mechanism. Yeah so just to follow up then because I think you covered this a little bit when you were in 2200 series is basically saying you cannot take public funds if you're discriminating against LGBTQ and we passed a bill last year that has passed that you know we tried this we heard from some people that that needed to be stood up even stronger that's why we passed it so I just want to make sure that that's already there that is there and then the other thing I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind saying a word about admissions because the other thing out there and I think we talked about this a little bit is can you tell us about the selectivity I mean who goes who doesn't go from the district I mean I'm talking about could you serve as a high school yes and I do want to mention and I think I just sort of went straight at classism but we also have 188 boarding students and many of them are international students so we also do have a lot of racial diversity that we are attending to so Senator you will have to stand there to keep an eye on me don't let it don't let it fair enough so I'll just we accept all comers that is just full stock our admissions materials and our application used to ask questions that were interpretable as questions that would affect your admission like do you have a disability and how much what's your socioeconomic status so they used to ask those questions but now we have none of those questions basically because it's not a factor those things are not a factor in our admission they're a factor in enrollment when we want to support a student but essentially any student that a public school would take we will take only those who are a danger to themselves and others or who have needs that are beyond what we can provide medical needs or other kinds of needs and those are the students who I think that's why the therapeutic schools are also in the part of the conversation because they are really really important to us and to public schools so in terms of admission I don't know what more there is to say about it we bring them in and we find we want to understand the best way to serve them and have a special service if special services is kind of at the center of this which I think it often is we have beefed up our special services in ways that so we actually can serve students that we wouldn't have been able to serve five or six years ago with the reading and writing lab and with interventions that are very specific with one on one paras we just didn't have that oh thank you Mr. Fannin you've joined us you've popped in some times at times that you might want to weigh in if you have some constructive criticism for St. John's very kind of me I didn't know he was back no thank you no constructive criticism great thank you Miss Pelosi you're here as well you don't always pop in but I think the two of you are working together yes I represent St. John's very kind thank you thanks thank you so much for coming back in it does make a difference frankly when you can come in in person as I get to drive in the country thank you media four o'clock we are hearing from the president of the state colleges oh we would love to keep that yeah please that's great I'm going to pass a great December and the provost on the library announcement so hopefully what we can do is start to pull apart what exactly they're planning on doing I know everybody's inbox is filling up on this issue so we will come back yes if you want me to squeeze my testimony in right now I could we could also wait I want to gear up I've got a bunch of questions I'm going to use the bathroom and I want to just yeah alright thank you welcome back to the senate education today we're going to wrap up our day we're looking we have two final deadlines one is the library that wants to be a college and then we're just going to hear from the senator who hasn't been working on the school construction bill that I'm going to have a look at and take some testimony on tomorrow and probably load it down with Friday thanks for talking to me if not senator today but we are hearing everybody knows we've read it in the press I know people's inboxes have been filling up concerns and questions about the libraries of the Vermont State College and to help us better understand there what's going on we have the president and the provost I don't know why we have underneath here S30 but that doesn't matter okay no problem at all I just want to make sure I know Mr. President and the provost are you there yes I am here this is the one I was talking about and is the president with you as well he was just connected I see that he's disconnected I would expect him to reconnect here very short so welcome Dr. Atkins to senate education I think this may be your first time joining us at least this year we're pleased to have you what we're just really hoping for from you and president is an understanding of really what the plan is with regard to the libraries as I may have heard me say our inboxes are filling up and there's a lot of press so we're just looking for the facts and if you could provide them to us that would be great yes I would be happy too but I see that president Graywall is now connected and we'll follow his lead okay how are you not really and we definitely cannot see you president Graywall can you see us and hear us we don't hear you I don't know if it's possible Dr. Atkins for you to take the lead on this given that president Graywall is not coming through actually he's just on the hall I'm gonna go grab president Graywall and he can come down and speak through my connection if that's okay with you all sure just give me a couple seconds and I'll get him connected yeah in the meantime the question's been asked we have a nice crowd of folks here and do you want to just go around and say your name and maybe if you're connected to the university or maybe Thomas Randall I went to Johnson State before I was a frequent user of the library welcome my name's Peter Cristiano I don't have a connection to the library with BSEA of Marcia Employees Association yes please Leslie I'm with BSEA from Bruce King also with BSEA okay sir I'm Brian Morse with BSEA great first vice president of BSEA great perfect Mr. President thanks for joining us can you hear us okay yes I can hear you okay sorry for the mishap I started to join it through my office I've been on the zoom all day as you know but for some reason this connection was not working sorry for the delay would you mind as we've been talking about telling us what the plan is for the libraries yes absolutely thank you for having me and as you all know that we are undergoing a major transformation and it is through the agreement in a way of the select committee report we are building a hybrid university that will be the first statewide hybrid university the idea for that is to expand access to the university's program and resources services to the students who cannot afford to come and live on campus who join us through our online programs and through the satellite sites that we have we serve the entire state with 17 or so sites where are nursing students and in fillington and other places where they join us so in line with that we are we have announced that we will be building a digital library because to align with our strategic priority but also based on the information that the use of the physical material that include books include other physical material has declined substantially nationally now at our university libraries about 96% of the material that's requested is electronically requested only 4% only requested that means physical books and or other materials so based on that our emphasis would be to build our capacity so that we could go serve more students more staff and faculty and efficiently through a digital library so that does not mean that we will eliminate all the books or high value materials from the library as you know that we have donated materials also in the libraries and we would keep the most frequently used materials that include books and other items in our libraries but weed out are not being used and have not been used for say last 20-30 years by doing so how we will do that how we will kind of select what we need to keep we propose engagement with our faculty and different departments to determine what is essential for each and every department to serve their students what academic programs they run and then we have also proposed that we will work with students we will work with our campus communities to transform those laboratory the lab spaces library spaces to create more learning spaces that could be for individual students and or for them to do group work we will also enhance technology we will not only maintain the computers and printers that we provide in the libraries currently but we will further increase those opportunities we would also work with you know our community to create more like a community commons type of spaces and add student services to the libraries so it's basically modernizing the library enhancing access of the library information the material to all our students whether they are on campus or not and keeping certain frequently used materials in the libraries in a smaller portion that is basically our proposal for the libraries moving forward we have a question a few questions I'm going to serve a senator and then senator machine thank you very much chair thank you for being here today I was a librarian for quite a few years and I completely understand that weeding is a part of good curation of a collection and it's the job of a librarian to do some weeding so when I heard you say that it resonated with me I did a massive weeding at one of my libraries we had books that were written for example about Nixon before water date that said what a great guy he was so that kind of book we also had books that never circulated they also were taking up really valuable space that I wanted to use for student engagement student interactions we made a maker space for example so I understand that physical books can really take up a lot of space having said that I don't know if you've spoken to Champlain College but about I think it was 20 years ago they did a massive update of their library and removed almost all of the books and went to a digital library and over the course of some years they ended up bringing some physical books back in because they just saw that there was actually space for that and a need in the community for students faculty etc so if you haven't spoken with them I hope you do because I think that would be really important and I also was just hoping you could speak to are you doing a weeding is that what is happening or is it something bigger than that if you could just speak a little bit more to that that would be helpful that's a very very good question and thank you for the suggestion especially for me to reach out to Champlain College to hear their experience with that absolutely you are correct that weeding is a normal part of the library work every year that is being done on you know most libraries this project would be a little bit bigger than just the weeding part that we normally do because moving forward we have to be very conscious because we are under 25 million dollars in structural deficit we are going to be acquiring more and more or serving students through digital means so the reduction here could be bigger than just the normal weeding but it will be in consultation with the faculty it will be data driven that means those materials that are more frequently utilized or relied upon those would be maintained and others we would not continue to keep our data also shows that maintenance of our physical resources the books is about 30% of the cost of our budget for the library so that is also kind of the books to sitting they are not used are also is a cost thank you thank you president gray well so I have a whole lot of questions I don't think I will be able to fit them in 5 minutes so I will just try to stick with a few so I am kind of confused is this expanding the hybridization or is this reducing the library capacity I am kind of unclear as to what is actually happening so we are proposing both we have to expand the digitization that component so that we could provide the materials as more and more students and everybody wants it the second piece is that we have books from a lot of books that are not being used so we will go systematically working with faculty in each department to reduce the number of those books that are not being utilized so it is kind of a two prong approach and since this is kind of an expansion is this going to be creating more jobs for anyone so the jobs will shift in a way that less and less physical work physical maintenance and or books that are catalogued in a physical way but more additions would be more towards the digitization because 96% of our material is requested that way and we will keep our librarians every campus will have at least one professional librarian who will continue to serve our students who will continue to work with faculty and on top of that our mission moving forward is also that these librarians work with their faculty to find open access resources to replace the expensive textbooks as you know affordability is one of the key components of the new university and the board really highlights that aspect so we would be reducing the cost of our textbooks by working with faculty in each department that would be this librarian so just on the job space is it safe to say no one is losing their job or getting laid off is that safe to say no that's not safe to say because we based on our proposal we would need to eliminate 7 full-time jobs and 3 part-time positions or temporary positions and those are not professional librarians but staff that have been supporting this physical work we have notified them and we have also encouraged them to apply for jobs from the institution that are currently open and jobs that we will be opening as we move forward with our staffing decisions and one last question from the viewpoint of the students what type of weight are you giving their views when it comes to this decision right so I have gotten information from the students we did a small survey of the students but more importantly I've been going to every campus and listening to the students and the faculty and staff about this decision most students that I have spoken to they have highlighted that the ambience of the library is important the use of that space is important for them sometimes not even reading the books but to do their work but they have also highlighted that I need a physical book I learn better with a particular physical material so and some have highlighted that I have some learning disability I don't do as well using digitized material so we have I have heard them and our response to that is that we are going to be keeping most important most commonly used books for every discipline we would also by law also required that we have to meet if somebody has a disability to if they need a physical book then we would provide that physical book to them thank you thank you good afternoon Mr. President so just first off thank you for the overview it's very helpful if you can articulate just briefly what you intend that the current library facility will evolve into if this plan moves forward right so as you can imagine the library will still the library building we want to keep it as a library and call it as a library as well library and learning center perhaps and a librarian will be in there as well so the new configuration of the space would be finding nationally renowned renovations that have occurred in different libraries and coming up with better places for students to learn individual students group students putting in more technology innovative spaces and creating a community commons type of environment it will stay as the heart of the campus on each campus and it will actually further attract students to these spaces in the library they will be able to access physical books that will still be there but at the same time connect digitally and do their work as they tend to do one student sitting in Casserton the other day when I just finished this session with the students in person sent me an email that I'm sitting in Casserton library right now and I have logged in more hours than any other person in this library because I use it so much but yes I agree with you he told me that this space needs to be innovation is needed we need to improve the library are the hours of operation going to stay the same as the alumni still going to be able to access those physical books yes absolutely we will keep the library hours open because as you know residential students also come and you know go in and out another part to the library is hiring lots of work study students who work in these places we would not only maintain those positions we would actually expand the number of students that could be hired in different departments that's one of our other goals because we know students that have employment on the university campus they have a higher success rate they are retained better they graduate on time they get lots of applied learning experience thank you for that very well you're welcome any other questions right now or concerns as it relates to this issue you're good thank you thank you Mr. President we appreciate your time and better understanding the situation I think we'll leave it there for now and then of course if anything else arises if we have a question we will certainly reach out to you and your staff right absolutely and as you can imagine this is one of our major decisions it's a hard decision and you know that we have to make some hard decisions in order to meet our budget requirements as well we are using this opportunity to address both issues in a way of realigning the budget but also enhancing the space and student experience enhance accessibility and affordability thank you thank you very much have a good afternoon you're welcome Vince I did see that they have the loosey papers that were stored at Johnson up for sale on eBay I went in at $2 but time will tell thank you we'll be in touch thank you very much you're welcome why don't we thank you I think the library closure something we could talk about a bit more it's disconcerting to know there's a dozen or so people who are probably going to lose their job and from a lot of students who have voiced concern it's I think it might be worth discussing a little bit more we have somebody in particular that you'd like to hear from related to that one thing I can just tell you from where I'm sitting and I don't know if the community agrees with this or not we generally don't legislate get involved with the day-to-day operations for example UBM last year we eliminated certain programs from the liberal arts curriculum there was a push for us to intervene and say we need those programs the Latin program, whatever it was and we didn't so that's what I hesitate that being said if there are people that you would like to hear from on this issue that would be helpful please if the door is closed from us possibly legislating anything to keep the libraries as they are to help them expand I wouldn't want to waste time but if there is something that we can do potentially could be worthwhile exploring as is but also trying to go along with what the president is trying to accomplish because I think it makes sense to also expand hybridization which is great for students who are on different satellite campuses or far away from a library but I mean yeah my question that wasn't asked was how much are you saving I thought that was going to come from you I didn't ask he did say 25 million that's what that was his answer not that he'd quantify this particular line but he has a 25 million dollar deficit which we well know you could give him some money what? yeah that's part of what you're wondering is there a way for us to work with them to kind of keep keep the employees there and still be innovative etc that's what I'd like to explore yeah I mean I don't want to just say I don't want to tell the president what you're doing is wrong I want to try working and collaborating to figure out what we can do I don't want to grandstand but you would like to repeat thank you that the president mentioned his 96% of material all being retrieved electronically to me that resonated that's not something I've heard before today but anyway that's just something to reflect on we repeat that 96% of materials at the library for electronically retrieved not physically retrieved didn't know that that's what's that I don't want to profess to have any answers but I do last I knew there was a dearth of school librarians so I'm not again I'm not saying this could be a solution but there is a possibility of other jobs possibly available out in the ecosystem for librarians who just maybe within their own campus maybe yeah I don't have a line of the sand or anything based on feedback the very energetic feedback I've gotten from people that just seems yeah you might ask and I again wish I had it sounds like you can apply so you're losing your job but you can apply for a new position is there anything they can do to help that transition are we talking about if you take a different position that kind of thing so I think which typically happens is the rumor got out there there was an overreaction maybe some misinformation I think what I heard today really clarifies what's going on the physical building is going to stay there it's going to be open people can still go in and take books out that are going to be pulled out he's going to donate from what I read to other librarians in here and I believe you sent a link to the VPR piece I haven't heard of it but I think he might very much the same very much the same yeah take this hot seal use yourself for the record Senator Hewlett Vice Chair Senate Education hello everyone so I'm here you have a copy of it's not even complete yet but it's a beginning draft that Rebecca Wasserman has been helping me with and it was sort of created at the best the state our treasurer and some other folks because so you know I'm pretty passionate about school buildings I feel that at the very least we need to have safe accessible buildings for our students and our faculty and staff who are sometimes the biggest employers in our regions very often they are actually so safe accessible good air quality we could go on and on lighting etc etc so this is where this is sort of where this is coming from I do want to remind you all that we had really good testimony from Rhode Island as a model of one way to sort of crack this nut and get things moving and I don't know about you all but I was pretty daunted by the work that they have had to do to really fix their schools I mean it seemed like a massive undertaking that takes years and years but it seems like they are making progress and so as much as I was daunted by that testimony I was also sort of excited and you know just looking forward to how we could maybe try to make it work for us or make parts of it work for us so I mean Act 72 is something that's already in place and if you haven't read it I recommend that you do because it lays out a lot of work around school construction and what it will look like yeah so the piece that was missing really was around the task force which is an important piece of the work so you can read this feel free to read it but my question to you really at this point is if you look at the makeup of the task force you know who's missing who would you like to see on the task force I think that's something that maybe we should think about and consider and then I was hoping and I think the treasurer agrees with this and hopefully the secretary of education agrees that this task force might even be able to start getting together and convening this summer so that in October when that bill comes out people can sort of hit the ground running and start digging into the meat of the work what does the task force do exactly is that looking for funding is it it's in here but the task force basically will take that report that comes out in October and really run with it on all the various levels so develop like a strategic plan I know it's big work I thought that the report was going to be I know the Act 72 report it will have some of that it will have a lot of findings in it but the strategic the task force is what we heard from Rhode Island that group and they have a really massive group with all kinds of I mean you guys remember it was like I don't know like the governor and senators and reps and all kinds of folks in the community and they meet regularly to do everything from look at the needs you know who is at the top of the list for needs and if that should change and what kinds of accessibility requirements need to go in or don't need to go in you know they're all weighing in from their various points of view on how how to tackle the problem so that is and frankly it's something that our treasurer really wants so I feel like we should probably go with that I'm just concerned that we may be reproducing effort is is there anything in Act 72 that weighs this out? I think this is what maybe is missing from Act 72 is that accurate it might have been either maybe an oversight on the legislature's part or something but it sounds like Rhode Island has this piece and it was when Act 72 doesn't have this group of people correct me if I'm wrong that would take the plan and kind of run with it yeah and I wasn't here when Act 72 came into being but was it modeled was this modeled after Rhode Island? You know I don't remember any testimony I don't think so right I don't think so so I do think the task force is a piece of the Rhode Island process that yeah I like it but the only thing I got is that you just want to make sure we don't do right well not without but I had my barber is on the school board in the local school district he's just he's concerned about the evaluation when it comes out who's going to pay for it oh sure no questions and we're all yeah absolutely so how are you going to prioritize which school needs it more the next right task force has a good mission and I think we'll see in Act 72 I could be wrong we could ask the council we'll see like a prioritization of like what buildings I think need it right and by the way next week we are going to hear from the agency of natural resources and energy Matt Chapman is going to be in for an update on where things are with PCB testing and as you'll learn it's well that's an intro if they find PCBs how are we going to pay them mitigate so I guess my ask to our committee is just to really be thinking about who should be on the task force and make sure we sort of really think deeply about do we have all the right stakeholders in there and is there anyone else that we should be thinking about and we're going to hear from the bees tomorrow on this so that will also be the bees the Vermont association of principal superintendent and that's what we generally and they have a copy of this okay okay thanks how do they do yeah first time so we're good