 Good morning. Our Education Committee is back in session again this morning. It's April 9th, 2021 and our guest this morning with us is Ted Fisher from the Agency of Education and he will be giving us an update this morning. Thank you, Ted, for being with us and we look forward to hearing from you. The floor is yours. Apologies. I had myself doubly muted. Good morning, House Education Director. My name is Ted Fisher from the Vermont Agency of Education. I'm the director of communications and legislative affairs and I also manage one of the agency's COVID-19 response teams. I'm actually on the schedule for two things. So, Mr. Vice Chairman, I would like to ask what your preference would be. I'm scheduled to walk through a strong and healthy year, which is our updated safety and health guidance with the Vermont Department of Health. I'm also scheduled to give my regular, although we haven't been able to hold them for the last few weeks, COVID update briefing. So, does the committee have a preference as to which item we tackle first? I think maybe the COVID update briefing and I presume relative to school openings, etc. Thank you. Absolutely. Okay, so let me just move around my notes here for a moment. Okay, so I already said good morning and for the record, I just want to say thank you for the opportunity to provide a weekly situation report on the pandemic as it impacts education in Vermont. This is a similar briefing to one Secretary French provides on a weekly basis to Vermont superintendents and after a short oral briefing, I'll do my best to answer questions related to AOE's response and recovery efforts. If there's something I cannot answer, we'll do our best to follow up post briefing or provide more information at our next status update. So, in terms of the COVID-19 context, we haven't done one of these in a little while, so I'll just note that as you've probably seen reported in the news or heard in testimony or seen in the Governor's press conferences, we've had some pretty high case counts statewide over the past few weeks, although we are seeing some trends down a little bit in the last few days. This has come along with a large number of situations and outbreaks in schools that the Health Department, the EPI team, and the outbreak prevention response teams have been working with school districts to respond to. The state's modeling still shows a dropping cases occurring around the end of April, and this is due to the result of vaccinations, and our Vermont data mirrors national data in that we're starting to see the average case age, like the average age of cases drop, and so we're seeing more case activity in the 20 to 29 age group as older Vermonters become vaccinated. So, the B117 variant is now the dominant strain of virus, and we are still seeing very good data about vaccination working, so that's the really good news. We are continuing our surveillance testing for school staff, although as more and more education staff become vaccinated, that surveillance testing will be for staff who are remain unvaccinated. I'll just note very briefly that yesterday, because I'll go over this in the second half of my testimony today, yesterday we did release the Strong and Healthy Year, which is the new safety and health guidance for Vermont schools, and we can come back to that. What I will note is that as a result of this has happened every time, this is the third issuance of this, excuse me, the fourth issuance of this guidance. It was originally issued in June of last year. When we do updates to it, we get questions and we will then update additional documents, and I'll go over a little bit more detail about sort of what that process looks like when I testify, but there will be additional guidance forthcoming on things like, and if your activities and graduations, the return potentially of in-person school board meetings, things of that nature, which are sort of the natural follow-on questions that come as a result of updating this guidance. So we understand that the U.S. Department of Education is going to be also releasing the next volume in its operations handbook for schools in the near future. This is non-regulatory guidance. We also expect that they'll issue some additional guidance on ESSER and the ARPA, the American Recovery Plan Act, around maintenance to effort and maintenance of equity. So we're watching that carefully. We're also waiting for and hoping for additional spending guidance by the end of the month. There's still some transitions at the federal level that are going on. There's not much more on the financial side to note. FEMA did release expected guidance the other day, and we're still working with our partners to understand what that means. Schools do qualify for FEMA funds for a range of activities. So we're working to understand what the implications of that are. So the remainder of my briefing for today, I know that you've heard testimony on assessment and accountability. We posted the assessment waiver in the public comment. It's out for public comment now, and that comment period closes at the end of April. And I'll also just note that there will be some announcement at the press conference today about some of our summer work and working to make sure that every child and adolescent has access to engaging and fun work this summer. And so we'll be releasing some more details about that. And I think that I'm not the best person to speak about that in the future, but I'm sure we can bring in folks, perhaps Deputy Secretary Boucher to speak more about that in the near future. So that is my COVID status update briefing for today. I'm happy to answer questions now or transition into talking about the strong and healthy year document, whichever the chair would prefer. Do we have any questions? Representative Austin? Yep. Thank you. Just, you may not be able to answer these right now. But I just, I'm curious, I did get an email from a constituent about vaccine passports, if the educational, if the AOE is going to make any requirements about vaccine passports. I'm curious about the percent of staff that have been vaccinated thus far. And if there's any thoughts about when children can be vaccinated, if there's any, and again, I know you may not be able to answer these, but if there's going to be any guidance around children being vaccinated once it's available. Thank you. So thank you, Representative, because I realize I forgot to put into my notes something that has been working a lot on this past month, because it's actually really good news and I completely bear the lead and I apologize. So we know as of, this is actually weak old data at this point, but we know as of last week that 80% of eligible education system staff at least because there's some variability in the numbers. We're not able to perfectly capture everyone from combining multiple data sources, but at least 80% as of last week of eligible education system staff had either were either registered or had received their first dose of vaccine. So it's really excellent news. And it tracks with what we understood in terms of the interest. Now the vaccination program the state is running for school staff is sort of been merged. Originally, we were doing standalone clinics for education staff, oftentimes in schools or in community locations, very specifically. And now we're sort of moving to the streamlined where if you are an education system staff who's eligible, you will be able to access the same community clinics that anyone would. So if you're not eligible to sign up via the age fans or via another eligibility category, you wouldn't you would be able to log into the same system and register the way you would. And of course, folks continue to go to pharmacies. So at this point, what what we're really looking at is just trying to get our numbers over the line. We watch this sort of happen where, you know, there's a very quick rise in terms of the number of folks when a new category has opened up, a lot of folks go and register and get their shots and then we just sort of see the numbers creep up. So so we're looking looking and we're going to we're working with the rest of the state in terms of positive messaging to get the word out to folks encourage folks to get their shot things like that. But I would say we're very pleased with where we stand system wide, which is which is really, really good news. With regard to your question about vaccine passports, I'm not 100% sure. So and I don't want to speak for the for the state on this one, because there have been some questions about what the requirements will be in terms of vaccination in various sectors. I think right now the recommendation is that folks get vaccinated as soon as they're eligible. But there's there's no requirement to do so. I've heard mention of the term vaccine passports when it comes to travel. I will just note that from a human resources perspective, there's no requirement that folks be vaccinated as a school staff. I don't know. I don't believe that that would be a requirement in the future, but I'm not I can't I can't say what the future will hold. For students right now, we we still are in a position where and we haven't gotten to the eligibility category of 16 plus that will occur on the 19th. So a week from Monday is when 16 plus of Vermonters will be able to sign up. So the majority of students, of course, won't be eligible for a vaccine until we have an emergency youth authorization for a vaccine for children. And I and I imagine that will happen at some point, but I'm far from an expert on that area. So so I don't know what, you know, when we talk about what student vaccination looks like, we know that some of our students in our high schools will be eligible in a few weeks. We don't know what the picture will look like for students. You know, as we go into the fall, for example, thank you representative Brady. Hello. Can you say anything more about the summer details or do we have to wait till the press conference? Unfortunately, I'm not a perfect vessel for this. I just don't have more information than what I gave you. I know that there is an announcement today, and there's a lot of planning work going on. So consider that an on the record suggestion that you ask us to come back. And yeah, I apologize. I just don't I don't have more information. Well, thank you for that. And I guess we can move on, Ted, and go to your next subject. Absolutely. So I'm not going to share my screen, but Jesse has has posted to your committee website, then updated version of a strong and healthy year. This is the this is the updated strong and healthy start safety and health guidance for Vermont schools. This document was originally issued in June of 2020. And it was updated again in August of 2020 and then again in October. And schools have been operating in using the October version until yesterday when we issued a revised version for the remainder of the school year. So the most so so the theory of action here is that as we move into the spring and as we see vaccination pick up among adults and and see the anticipated and hopeful decline in case counts, we're working to make changes in this document to streamline, reduce complexity and where possible lift requirements. So part of this is that Vermont schools have nearly a full year of experience operating safely. And many of the things that needed explicit guidance at the beginning of the year no longer need emphasis. So for example, Vermont schools have done across the board a really excellent job with working with COVID coordinators to develop the systems that are needed to respond and operate during the pandemic. And we didn't need several pages of guidance on how to stand that up because the schools have that that you know lived experience under their belt. And we also now at this point have created particularly the health department's school child care branch of the health operations center has created a very large range of toolkits and specific subject matter expertise information. So it's really gone beyond the scope of the original original document. So that's an example of trying to streamline some of those requirements. We're also doing our best to redraft guidance to refer and align to other state guidance and requirements in the hope that as conditions and improved and other guidance is eased restrictions and school operations would similarly lift. So an example of this is the travel guidance. The Vermont forward plan was announced on Tuesday. It has some changes to the travel requirements which are effective today. And so our updated guidance refers to those travel requirements for school districts to use and lifts the requirement for a travel screen as part of the morning screening for folks to enter the building. With regard to specific requirements the guidance now has a three foot distance for students of all grade levels. Previously the distance was six feet for students in the secondary grades and this is an alignment with updated CDC recommendation as well as a lot of information and evidence we've seen both in the United States and internationally. There's some changes to the health screening requirements as I just alluded to that also includes vaccination considerations and moves screenings to be completed before coming to school rather than at the entry to the school building. We also relax restrictions on the use of communal space. This is something that was sort of in progress and in negotiation over the past few months working with some specific subject matter groups like music educators. But at this point there's some greater and demonstrated ability to safely use communal space. Students must still wear masks and adhere to physical distancing requirements. And then the alignment of physical education and music education we've issued separate music education guidance and the physical education will now follow applicable sports guidance for the remainder of the year. Also with the return of spring at any time folks are doing physical education the activities should continue to take place outside if at all possible because that's the safest place for physical education to occur. Two other things that are important to note is that we've ended requirements for cohorts and pods for younger students and we're allowing volunteers to return to school buildings although buildings are still close to to visitors. Oh and I should note one other additional change the CDC made some pretty large changes to their recommendations for cleaning and disinfecting. So folks who are familiar with the old standard which had a lot of use of chemical disinfectants and things will note that a lot of those have been changed the evidence really that my sort of short version understanding of this is that soap and water or detergents are sufficient in most cases to reduce risk. The only time that a really true sort of what we think of as a heavy disinfection is needed as if there is a positive case that has been in the building then you would need to do a more disinfection but if in terms of just reducing regular risk to cleaning and disinfection guidance is now to use the normal cleaning products and solvents that would be used you know in sort of pre-COVID operations. Well thank you very much Ted once again for your very comprehensive reports we appreciate it and it's certainly good information as we move forward. It will be wonderful to have our schools open again and hopefully sooner than later. Do we have any questions for Mr. Fisher this morning? Representative James. Thanks chair Coopley or vice chair Coopley. Sorry chair Webb Ted how you mentioned that and I'm sorry I didn't catch all of this you mentioned that screenings will now be done before school instead of upon arrival at school and I was wondering how that works or maybe I misheard you. No so you're absolutely right so some schools are actually doing this already and the agency in part developed a health screening tool that I'm not certain which districts are using it to allow folks to use to do this so some so I can't speak there is some flexibility we don't we don't lay out specific requirements as to how they do this but the idea would be and now I'm reading from the guidance staff and students and their families should complete an exposure and symptom screening before departing for school anyone who has been exposed to COVID-19 unless vaccinated or who has COVID-19 symptoms should not come to school and should follow the Department of Health guidance regarding quarantine and testing so really it's about do I have a temperature do I have fever do I have COVID symptoms if I don't then you shouldn't be coming to school today you shouldn't be leaving the house in general if you if you have COVID symptoms so it's moving from a checkpoint at the door which some some schools are doing it there's a range of different ways but some schools are having folks fill out a little slip and bringing it to the school building and handing it off this just says that this is something that should occur prior to people arriving in schools no longer have to check at the door to make sure that they're that they're doing that. Is it like a little online survey that you fill out and and submit or is it like the honor system just telling people this is don't come to school if you have COVID? So we developed an application that that is similar to that an online survey and some other schools are using their own versions of that they there's nothing to prevent them from continuing to do that but if a school tells their family look here are the parameters in which we want you to absolutely not come to school but you no longer need to tell us affirmatively that you don't have these symptoms that's acceptable under this guidance it's a it is a relaxation of that requirement I will just I will just say that there is there is nothing if a school determines that it is in their best interest and what they need for their community to keep a standard that's stricter than the standards in this guidance then then they're then they're able to do that of course it's a it's a conversation for them to have with their community but but the strict requirement that there be a screening is no longer enforced. Thank you. Representative Austin. I'm just wondering since we don't I don't believe we have a lot more time left in the session if it would be possible to your weekly reports to kind of update us on the summer plans and how the agency is going to you know how schools are going to address loss of learning over the summer. Yes I would I would absolutely love to either I can come and provide that or or work with Jesse and my colleagues Maureen Suzanne to schedule an appropriate person to come and update the committee if that's if that's what you'd like we don't have that. I may not be the best vehicle for that update but we certainly would love to come in and give you more information when we can. Thank you. Representative Webb. Chair Webb. Hi and thanks Ted you are getting the the needs assessments will be complete by then so you'll have an idea of what the different districts need at this point so and you are going to be reporting on that for us I believe correct or that needs to be on the schedule your update. Yes so so yes I'm I'm I'm unfortunately this morning I don't have a good picture of where where we stand with that but yes I think again it may not be me as the best person but we can certainly work to to get in the right folks to talk about that.