 Um, this is going to call this meeting to order. This is a joint meeting between the Senate Finance and the Senate Education Committee to get our initial run through on the pupil waiting study. This has been one of two really heavy duty studies that has been taken over the summer, and I want to thank Senator Hardy and Representative Kornhizer. The briefings I've gotten is they went above and beyond the standard and really went back into the history and the whys and the wherefore, so I appreciate that. One technical announcement for the live stream audience. It has been brought to our attention that the live streaming captions that many of the committees run are grossly incorrect can sometimes bring incorrect information and just are not overly helpful. We've also learned that the live stream within 24 hours on the live stream, you can watch these meetings with a predominantly correct closed caption. So for now I've talked to the committee, we are not going to be running the closed caption during the committee. However, if any member of the public would like to see that, contact me or contact our committee staff or any of the committee members and we will get it turned on for that day. I just watched it once when it first went up, and there was something about the Abinackie Nation and it came out as Nike as in shoes, so it was a little inaccurate and probably somewhat disrespectful. So that's my technical announcement. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Senator Hardy. I've been asked that we hold our questions. This is an hour long presentation and it's just our initial presentation. If there's time at the end, we can do questions. If not, this will not be the last time we have this discussion and we do have Senator Hardy with us every day, so we can fit some time in to ask her questions. So with that, Senator Hardy, Representative Kornheiser, the floor is yours. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks, everyone. It's good to see everybody in both committees today. So Representative Kornheiser and I have a slide deck which should be available on our website. So rather than sharing our screen, if you could all pull it up on your screen and follow along at home, literally, that would be great. We are going to sort of tag team back and forth the presentation. We gave it this morning in ways and means and it is just under an hour if we stick to our notes. So we would love to be able to get through the whole thing without questions and then as Senator Cummings said, we can come back or I'm here every day and you can ask me questions as we move through all the topics. So with that, Emily, Representative Kornheiser is going to get us started. Thanks. Really nice to be here with you all and much gratitude for the hour you're about to sit through. So thanks for your attention in advance. So the membership of the task force, as you know, was split between finance and ways and means and both Senate and House education committees. And so I want to give particular thanks to Senators Brock and Perchlich and Hooker who are all here in the room with us today who did some fantastic work with us through the summer and fall to get this done. The task force's charge was quite broad, as you may remember, when we passed Act 59 last year. And so the big picture charge that we had was to ensure all public school students have equitable access to educational opportunities. No small feat, especially during the summer. And so what was embedded in that was the conversation around waiting calculation and the values associated with that. But that was just one piece of what we were asked to look at. We were also asked to look at categorical aid possibilities, how we measure poverty, what mathematical functions we use to calculate all of these things and apply them, education quality standards, what they mean, how we apply them, transition mechanisms for whatever our proposals are, special education in the context of Act 173 block grants. We were supposed to make sure that all of our work was consistent with Act 60, 68, and 46, also no small bills, tax equity considerations generally and specifically, and the excess spending threshold. So first, I just got a text from one of you asking me, the slide deck is called the Pupil Waiting Task Force Recommendations Overview, if you're on the website. And I don't know if it's under my name, but mine or Emily's name. It's right on the finance website. Yeah, on the finance website, it is under Senator Hardy's name. I think it's about the third one down in the list. Okay, sorry, it's not on the education website. But yeah, it should be up there on the finance website. So the task force process, we were very careful to have a very organized process because we knew we had a lot to get through. We started our work in late June and ended in mid December. We had 12 official meetings that we were allotted, plus two public hearings. We were staffed by legislative operations, JFO and AOE. And Emily and I were in touch more or less every day throughout that six month period. We heard from over 50 witnesses and had over 70 public comments during our public hearings and during our regular task force meetings. We started out with really trying to understand and make sure we were all up to speed with the foundational and historical understanding of the Vermont School of Finance system going back decades. And we tried very hard to base our policy decisions and recommendations on analysis and data and not what we started to refer to as the print out wars, which is running a scenario for all school districts in the state and then looking to see what our school districts, what happened to our school districts and the making decisions based on that. We did not do that. We really dug into the policy and the data first before we did any kind of printouts or modeling. We kept in close communication with the people waiting task force report authors and had them in nearly every single meeting to testify on individual topics. We tried to approach everything with curiosity and with a desire to create the best system possible. I will note that Senator Brock often said if we were to create a new system, how would we do it? And that's something we kept in our minds all the time. We were bipartisan, collaborative and collegial. The eight of us worked really, really well together and we ended up with a comprehensive report that had universal unanimous approval of the final report. So given that taxes and public schools are two of the most controversial and emotional topics we deal with and we were operating in an environment of real increased stress and reactivity sort of globally, we really thought about core values to guide our task force work. And again, thanks to Senator Brock, we're focused on really understanding what the word equity meant to each person on the task force given that it was a word that was thrown around quite a bit in the lead up to our work and was supposed to guide so much of our work. We really focused on defining that first and had a commitment to equity for taxation and resource allocation, which are two quite different things and sometimes get used synonymously. That was a very hard word to get on my mouth. We were focused on providing equitable resources to every school district in the state. We acknowledged again that we were working in a time of crisis, both for schools and students because of COVID, but also because of really sort of the increased politicization of school systems and school boards and tax decisions. We wanted to preserve the really incredible equity that's already embedded in our current school finance system. We wanted to understand and prevent unintended consequences, which is something we always strive to do but is particularly easy in a system as complex as this. We wanted to ensure that we had appropriate accountability, evaluation and oversight over whatever we did. And the joke that I made through this was we want to do that so that we never have to meet as a task force again. A lot of the decisions that we were sitting with were decisions that had been sort of conversations that hadn't been had comprehensively in quite a while and we want to ensure those conversations are happening more regularly in the future. We wanted to improve the transparency and simplicity of our tax system that is core principles of a quality tax system and was an important part of how we were doing our work given that we have one of the most complex systems in the country. And whatever recommendations we had, we wanted to develop a fair and smooth transition to whatever those new mechanisms were so that districts who might have a reduced tax capacity could manage their budgets and tax rates as well as districts that might gain tax capacity can adequately plan how to leverage new resources. A big spike in either direction whether positive or negative can be incredibly disruptive to school systems that are already quite destabilized. So now we're going to move into actually going over our recommendations that are in the report and the report itself I believe should also be on our website, on the finance website, maybe also on the education website and it's certainly on the task force website under the JFO pages. So if you I highly recommend it, it's excellent reading if I do say so myself to read the whole report. But here's an overview of our recommendations and we started out with what we considered systemic change recommendations and we created two options and we'll go into some reasons why as we go through this. But option one was to actually introduce or recommend a set of pupil weights. This was the pupil weighting task force, it came from a pupil weighting report. And so we do have a recommendation for if we go with changes in pupil weights, what those weights should be. So adopting a general set of school level pupil weights all applied using an additive mathematical function. Currently our weights are applied using a mix of at addition and multiplication and we had a riveting conversation about the difference between how what happens when you add or or multiply a weight and we determined that it was both simpler and also fairer and better mathematically to use all additive functions. And we recommended and we'll go through the specific weights in a in a couple slides weights for students living in poverty which is a current weight, adding middle schools to the current high school weight, small weights for small schools with 100 and fewer students and then also schools with 100 to 250 students and then school districts in areas with low population density with cutoff points at 155 and 36 people per square mile. So really our very rural parts of the state. So those were the recommendations for pupil weighting. We also came up with a recommendation for a second option which we call cost equity payments. And Emily will go into a bit more detail about this but adopt a general set of cost equity payments which are derived from the pupil weight cost equivalents behind each of the pupil weights. There is a cost equivalent. We also recommended conducting further analysis to determine the specific amounts and the impact on school districts but the set of cost equity payments would cover the same set of areas of student need as the pupil weights would. So those are our two systemic change recommendations. And then regardless which of those two paths the legislature might decide to go down, both paths lead back to the same set of further recommendations to accompany systemic options. And there are many of those so bear with me for a moment. One is an English language learner's categorical aid program to create targeted funding to benefit all schools with English language students and eliminate the pupil weight for English language learners. And each of these we're going to spend a little bit more time talking about so don't worry about me being too brief. I won't be soon. Hounding students living in poverty changing how we measure students living in poverty from enrollment in SNAP which is food stamp program to free and reduced price lunch enrollment and then moving towards a universal income declaration form that some districts are already using. We propose that we eliminate the small schools grant and use weights instead as Senator Hardy just mentioned and then we maintain merger support grants for districts that don't qualify for those weights. And a little shift in the merger support grants that we'll also talk about. We recommend a series of transition mechanisms for those changes which include something like a five-year phase-in suspending the excess spending threshold during the transition and consider using education fund surplus. We also recommend the creation of an education tax advisory committee to oversee updates to either the weights or the cost equity payments and to create a consensus essentially forecasting process between AOE and JFO to have these conversations in the future and on a regular basis. So once again we never have to meet again as a task force. We also and student need can be accommodated for and thought about on a very regular basis. We recommend a comprehensive evaluation mechanism to see if the changes we made improve student outcomes and equity of opportunity and a unified moving to a unified income-based taxation system for K-12 education funding eliminating the homestead property taxes for education and replacing it with a unified local income tax system. We also have some more recommendations which we're calling additional recommendations which are pieces that sit next to this and came up and were part of our purview but are not as deeply sort of systemically tied to the financial changes or the fiscal changes we would make with the weights of the cost equity. And those include monitoring the implementation of Act 173 special education block grants, education quality standard process and oversight, corresponding property tax credits with current year tax bills instead of past year tax bills, monitoring the Act 45 child care financing study so that pre-K weights can be attended to, considering fractional weights for early college programs, students enrolled in early college programs, and exploring the creation of student mental health and trauma-informed instruction grants. So this next slide lays out a table of the actual weights that we're recommending. So if you look at the table, it has what the current weight is in our current system because we do have weights, some weights in our current system, and then our proposed weight. For those of you who've been following this issue closely, you might note that these weights are not the weights that were recommended in the original study. There are actually a number of sets of weights recommended in that study, some school-level weights, some school district-level weights, and then some regional weights. The weights that we're recommending are school-level weights, and they are not the ones in the actual study because of some changes that we are recommending, one being the additive recommendation that I mentioned moving from a mix of addition and multiplication to just using addition, and then the second change being the way that we measure poverty, and Representative Kornheiser will go into that a little bit more later. We've mentioned it before, but those two changes actually change the value of the weights. And once we made those two changes, we asked the report authors to rerun their same statistical analysis and come up with new weights for each of the categories, and those are the weights that are proposed by the task force. And they wrote us a memo dated October 28th, 2021, that includes these weights. It's the same empirical process and analysis that they use for the original weights to come up with these new weights that were changed because of those two factors. So you'll see that the poverty weight changes from the current 0.25 to a proposal of 1.03. There's no weight recommended for the ELL learners, and I'll go into more depth about that in a little bit. We add a middle school weight of 0.36, increase the secondary weight for high school students. It looks like it's a decrease from 1.13 to 0.39, but it's actually an increase because we also shift from a base of 1 to a base of 0 in calculating the weights. And so the equivalent would be 1.39, but it's actually by shifting to a base of 0 goes to 0.39. And Brad James would love to talk to you more about this. So that is an increase in the secondary weight. The pre-K weight was not part of the study, and we didn't make a recommendation on that weight. There is a child care financing study that's due out next year that hopefully we'll talk about the pre-K weight. There are new enrollment weights for small schools. As I said before, with small schools of 100 and fewer and 101 to 250, we did have a discussion about whether a school with 250 kids is a small school in the Vermont context. Some of us thought no, and some of us thought maybe, but you'll note that that weight is quite small. It's 0.7. And then the small schools' weights are also dependent on the population density weights, which are the next three categories of 36 persons per square mile, 36 to 55 and 55 to 100, and those different cutoffs for those weights. And you'll note that they get smaller, the weights get smaller as the population density increases. In order to get the small schools' weight, the schools have to be in an area of 55 persons per square mile or less. So that is the set of weights that we're recommending if we go with the route of continuing with pupil weights. And then we have this other option, which is cost equity payments. And we have a table on the next slide that's example cost equity payment amounts. We are proposing that the exact same categories of student need are compensated for using cost equity payments as we would use with the weights. But instead of creating tax capacity and equalized pupils and all of the stuff that goes with weights that we'll talk about a little bit more, we are proposing that for every student that is counted in one of these categories in a school district, the school district would receive this dollar amount for that student as part of their budgeting process. They would come before they calculate and spending at the same time that they are accounting for things like federal grants and other state aid, and it would all be part of the amount of their budget that is filled out before education spending is calculated. And so a student say that is living in poverty and is secondary grade enrolled would count in both of those categories. And the dollars that came from these cost equity payments would be used however the district saw fit. This is not a grant program with targeted funds to a specific need. It is a way of supporting districts to account for the increased cost of certain students in developing their overall budget and tax regime. The dollar amounts in the column the per pupil cost equity payment are very close we think to what the final dollar amount will be that we propose but they are in fact a placeholder. Deb Brighton estimated them based on a bunch of math and I'm going to spare you at this moment but we will share with you when and if you are ready for that really fun background and is very close we believe to calculations that the UVM team is going to deliver to us in a memo any day now which again the cost equity payments going to back up for a second here. So the UVM study they put a bunch of stuff into a statistical box and what came out of the statistical box was cost equivalencies for all of these different student factors and then they took those cost equivalencies for different student factors and they did more math and turned it into a pupil weight and what we asked them to do for these cost equity payment amounts is they have the cost equivalency that came out of the black box of statistics and we asked them to instead of turning that into a pupil weight just turn it into a cost equity payment and that's a fairly straightforward process from them and the only reason we don't have the memo yet is because of Christmas and all of the things that happen right before we start. So that's coming soon and these numbers we understand are placeholders but very close to what the real numbers would be and so very helpful in doing the modeling and understanding impacts and all of those things. So as I mentioned before we spent the first part of our time together as a task force talking about the background and Vermont school funding system and we saw our work as part of a continuum of improving our system making it more equitable making it more responsive to student needs. As you all know the landmark decision Brigham decision in the late 1990s which led to Act 60 and Act 68 really started off this this era of our school finance system with a strong and successful focus on taxpayer equity and because of Brigham and Act 60 and 68 we have one of the most equitable school funding systems in the country. We also have a state education fund which as you know is a statewide shared fund with multiple revenue sources and that is essentially self-balancing based on the school budgets that are proposed and passed at the local level and also our work in the legislature in setting the yield and the tax rates. We have strong local control of school spending decisions school boards and local voters determine school district budgets. We do not. We also have currently a combination of pupil weights which which create equalized pupils and categorical aid which either are targeted funding to address specific student needs. The most significant categorical aid currently is special education funding. Our system is a combination of complexity and collectivity which both enhances equity but also creates confusion and also means that any changes deliver ripple effects across the entire system so a decision that one school district makes in their budget has a ripple effect across every school district and every taxpayer in the state. As does any changes in the pupil weights or any changes in categorical aid or cost equity payments it impacts every single district because of our shared collective system. There were also a number of other significant pieces of legislation since Act 60 and 68 that have impacted school equity and opportunities for our students. The one that is most well known is Act 46 which changed the governance of our school districts and also improved equity across many of our school districts. There were also expansion of educational opportunities through initiatives including universal pre-k, curricular pathways and special education changes. The one key aspect of that school funding system that we sat with a lot in our work is this idea that pupil weights shift school district tax capacity not school district spending or resource allocation because of how we calculate tax capacity in our schools, in our school system and because of the local control that is absolutely intrinsic to the way we understand public education in Vermont. You all know that those pieces are a key tension in the systems that we work with but it meant that we started asking the question a month probably into our work which was essentially our weights the appropriate mechanism for creating equity in our current finance system. Weights are used across the country to deliver equitable resources to districts but they're used in a completely different system than the system that we have and so in this system that is so dependent on these ideas around tax capacity and local control do weights actually create the equitable funding streams that we would need to create equitable education opportunities for our kids? So we created a sort of list of pros and cons for each of the two approaches and I was a little hesitant to put them into two boxes of pros and cons because it really does in some ways depend on your perspectives on what is a pro and what is a con but I went ahead and did it anyway and we did it for both of them so knowing that your list may be a little bit different or everybody's list may be a little bit different the pupil weighting approach which is our current approach and these pros and cons already exist within our current system. The pros of continuing with the weighting system is that it is the current system it maintains the current system and is a familiar framework it's familiar to us it's familiar to local school districts and their budgeting process so it wouldn't be changing our system. It is dynamic to differential budget needs and of local school districts so local school districts as we've heard many times and as we know especially those of us who've put together a school district budget every district has slightly different needs and the weights sort of help balance those needs in a lot of ways. It's easier to adjust for inflation you don't have to build in an inflationary adjustment to weights and it maintains local control spending decisions and priorities which be given that that is such an inherent thing in the history of school finance in Vermont is a pro it maintains that sort of part of our culture. A con is that it does not guarantee that additional funds will be approved by voters or spent on the area of need. If the whole point is that some students need extra resources in order to have the same outcomes which is what the goal of the whole pupil weighting study is there's no guarantee that that will happen with weights because local schools still determine the budget and voters still need to approve the budget so the extra resources may not actually be spent on the students who are weighted in the formula. It has a magnifying impact when you apply the weights benefiting higher spending school districts more than lower spending districts. Differential weights for areas of needs means that the larger weights actually offset the impact of the smaller weights so because the poverty weight is the largest weight it offsets the impact of the small schools weights and the grade level weights and the rural reality or sparsity weights and so that the needs sort of cancel each other out in some ways. Equalized pupil calculations are confusing to voters. Heck they're confusing to us sometimes so it's not necessarily an obvious thing what is an equalized pupil and it may increase overall education spending the use the increase in the weights may increase overall education spending. Many of the drawbacks of the weights are true now under current law. It's just that the weights are so small right now that the distortions that they cause in the system are not something that we need to attend to in the same way the distortions that they might cause in our education finance system would be if we created if we implemented these heavier larger weights. And so and many of the pros and cons of both cost equity and people weights are the same but there are some pros to the cost equity payment approach that I'd like to talk through. One it delivers payments directly to districts that reflect the per pupil cost for different categories of need. And so this idea of one need canceling each other out is resolved in some ways because for every student need identified there's a specific payment that's delivered to correspond with that need and so we have identified it we've said it is true and then we are attending to it. It still maintains the ability for districts to spend additional funding as desired. It simplifies the formula by totally eliminating the equalized pupil calculation which I think is just so exciting. And then we just talk about average daily membership which is almost like just talking about kids it's very close the number of kids to the average daily membership number and so voters can understand that better can be talked about more easily it creates a much more transparent and accountable system both in terms of how we count per pupil spending becomes much more much more transparent and accountable to districts and how districts construct their budgets becomes much more transparent and accountable. And what we are actually delivering from the state coffers to the from the ed fund to districts also becomes much more transparent and accountable. There are some challenges though. So both the cost equity and the pupil waiting have very very similar trends in terms of the tax impact that they'll have on districts. Districts that tend to experience a loss for a reduction in tax capacity in pupil waiting tend to also experience a reduction in tax capacity under cost equity but under cost equity those changes are a little bit spikier and if you want to see the spikier versus the less spikier graphs you can find those in the appendix of the report. And if you can't find them the appendix of the report just ask one of us and we'll point you to the right page number. There are a lot of unknown unknowns about cost equity. It's one of the reasons that we recommend two paths and not just this one because it's a new idea and there's a lot more that needs to be worked through more modeling to be done more questions to be asked. It's a new idea. It is not sent it is not sensitive to the different local budget needs or marginal costs of a district. It does not benefit higher spending districts more than lower spending districts and some people see that as a challenge. It needs either in regular inflation adjustments or regular recalibration. The pupil waits also require regular recalibration but they don't require inflation adjustments and like the weights both of these scenarios may increase overall spending on education in our state. And in this scenario there's hope that we could minimize the administrative burden on districts with timely information from the agency of education and the tax commissioner. So the next slide we move into our recommendations that go with these two options. And the first one in one that we spent an enormous amount of time on and was difficult for the task force and we struggled with it was what to do with English language learning. Learn English language learners and what we ultimately decided was to recommend that we create a targeted categorical aid in order to meet the needs of this group of students. English language learners are there are a growing number of of them in our school districts and there are a growing number of school districts that have students who need English language learning services. There's currently a concentration in just a few districts 10 districts mostly in Chittenden County one in Washington County with a large number of students the largest one being the Burlington School District with over 500 students who need English language learning services. And there's a growing number of districts with a small number of students so one to five students who might need ELL services. And there's a real differential in the type of program and the type of services that are offered to students in the districts with a lot of ELL students and districts with a small number of ELL students but they all are required to provide the same services and and are struggling to do so. The pupil weight calculation and one of the things that sort of tipped us off early is that the report talks about the original report talks about how the pupil weight calculation for the ELL weight is less consistent than the other weights because of this concentration of ELL students with with most of them in 10 districts and and really most of them in one and two districts the weight was less statistically accurate than than than the other weights and the the report authors actually struggled with what to recommend and ultimately said maybe a regional weight would be better and so we picked up on this pretty early and started to look at other options for ELL students. There's a huge variation across the state on the amount of money per pupil that districts spend on ELL students and also the level of services and opportunities that districts provide. And as we've talked about the weights do not ensure that additional spending is funding is actually spent on an area of need. An ELL weight would not guarantee that the money is spent on ELL services and students but a categorical aid targeted to ELL services does make that guarantee. There's an identifiable cost for this type of program. Districts can figure out how much they spend on ELL teachers on translators on support systems on outreach on family support for this very defined program and they do so already for the federal requirements for ELL education. There's a desire for accountability to ensure that sufficient funds are spent on ELL students regardless of district location, program size, or number of ELL students. ELL students in most cases are protected class of students and we want to make sure that we are able to provide adequate and sufficient educational opportunities to these students regardless of where they go to school. It is I should know important to identify an accurate and adequate amount of a per pupil grant for ELL education. In the report we have what is really a placeholder proposal which will provide $25,000 per school district for every school district that has at least one ELL student plus a $5,000 per pupil amount per student. This would get every district at least $30,000 to hire a part-time teacher to teach even if they have only one ELL student and we derive that based on looking at budgets that current school districts use for ELL students and also comparing what other states provide as additional resources for ELL students but we are as Emily mentioned waiting for a memo from the report authors that where we asked them for a recommendation for a categorical aid amount for ELL. There are other sources of information we can use to derive an accurate and adequate amount. By having a targeted categorical aid grant program it ensures a statewide commitment to equitable education for all of our ELL students regardless of where they go to school and this includes immigrants, guest workers and refugees and as you all know we are welcoming new refugees to our state as we speak and we want to make sure that regardless of where they settle they have an equitable education and having a statewide categorical aid avoids difficult local decisions about race culture and immigration status when determining school budgets. We've seen this happen in our state and we want to avoid it and show a statewide commitment to educational equity for ELL students. We are now on the 16th slide on our journey together today. I am about to talk about changes to how we measure poverty. This is one of my favorite details of this for some reason and essentially right now we measure poverty for the purposes of people waiting and really only for the purposes of people waiting. This is the only I think time in all of the various ways we measure poverty in the state that we use this measure of poverty. As the number of families in the school system that are enrolled in food stamp programs snap benefits. We are recommending that we move to using free and reduced price lunch enrollment because that is a available data point that is available throughout the state because we report it to the feds right now for their measurement of poverty. However we know that that is still not an entirely accurate measure of poverty for a few reasons that I will talk about in a second. So we would like to while we are using free and reduced lunch as a stand in as a better measure begin the process to moving to a universal income declaration form. There are a few districts in the state that already use universal income declaration forms. Burlington is one of them. Brattleboro is one of them. I believe Montpelier is another one of them. Districts that have universal lunch programs at this point are using universal income declaration forms and we would like to extend that to the whole state. We want to do that for a few reasons. Snap enrollment is the least accurate of these three measures of poverty because enrollment in snap benefits is a process that is both rife with shame. It has a lot of geographic disparity because folks in rural areas have both a harder time getting to an economic services office to enroll and have a harder time with internet access to enroll. And folks at the margins, folks who are just barely eligible for snap often won't bother with the pretty extensive process of enrolling and so we lose all of those folks who are sort of counted at the edge. Free and reduced price lunch is a more accurate measure because you get rid of some of that geographic disparity and some of that edge but you still have a lot of shame and stigma attached to it and you as more and more districts move to universal lunch programs, there's less and less of an incentive for folks to sign up or fill out the free and reduced lunch paperwork. However, if everyone in the state is using a simplified universal income declaration form, we are asked that means that all families in a school would be filling out that paperwork which removes a lot of the shame and stigma from doing the paperwork and under federal law we're allowed to require districts to collect and allow districts are allowed to require parents to fill out the paperwork whereas we are not allowed to require free and reduced lunch paperwork of families. The next slide is about oh go Emily. Right last piece on this is that both free and reduced lunch numbers and universal income declaration numbers can be controlled and facilitated by the school district and so they can be responsible for their own counting. Snap benefits is something that's outside of the district's control because it is done by DCF and so it's hard for districts to understand why their numbers might be what they are. Back to you Ruth, sorry about that. No, no problem. Small, I'm just conscious of the time so small schools grants and merger support grants we recommend replacing the small school grants eliminating them which they seem to be universally despised so hopefully everybody's happy about that and instead creating a weight or a cost equity payment for small schools and as I went over earlier schools with fewer than 100 students and then 100 to 250 schools these schools must be in a school district where the population density is less than 55 people per school square mile so it would not include schools in downtown Burlington or even in Middlebury or Montpelier but really rural areas of the state with low population density and the weights would only apply to the pupils that are attending the actual small schools so the school that has 80 kids in it those 80 kids would get counted not the you know 500 kids that go to the high school it would only be for the small school. We would maintain merger support grants and these would be for districts that merged either through a community vote or merged through state board of education order under Act 46 and those those merger support grants would be maintained because those were previously small schools grants that were created that were changed into merger support grants but districts that qualify for the small school weight would not maintain their their merger support grants and there are some of those districts that that would qualify for both so they would get the weight not the merger support grant otherwise it would you're muted Emily. Thanks I thought I actually just you cut out at the end so I was still waiting for the rest of your sentence thank you yeah great um transition mechanisms we are on slide 18 so the task force's top concern was ensuring the districts don't experience serious disruption during this extremely difficult and stressful time but we also know that it's the most strategic time to act because federal funds are flowing to schools and the education fund has a significant surplus that could be used to lower tax rates through this transition time both paths weights and cost equity have similar impacts on district tax rates those that gain tax capacity in one model gain tax capacity in the other whether the legislature adopts weights or a cost equity model implementation must be gradual and deliberate and due to our statewide self-balancing ed fund in order for tax rates to stay constant districts can only increase their spending at another at the same speed that another district essentially adjusts down and so as we are doing modeling on this as we come to final recommendations we are thinking about a five-year timeline for implementation but really want to put a target around a five percent maximum change in rates as we sort of look at how many years this adjustment would take place so that we don't disrupt spending we also recommend that we suspend the excess spending threshold and the hold harmless provisions during the transition period while making clear what those would look like at the end of the transition period so folks can plan for it we would like to transition the property tax credit to current year to further cushion impacts and mitigate impacts we would like to pay attention through this process to statewide spending on education because changes could be a cost driver and bearing the lead move to a fully income-based education tax system in our state I shuffled around the slides Ruth in between this last presentation this one and you all have a different slide deck than I'm looking at so I'm jumping two slides ahead and you're just going to bear with me sorry I don't even know if I told you that Senator Hardy um the next slide is income tax for education funding because it seems like it belongs here better and essentially we are proposing something which we are certainly not the first folks to think of it was in the recent tax structure commission report I believe you have a bill on the wall of your committee already I'm moving to an income tick income-based education funding system but essentially 70% of Vermonters qualify for a property tax credit due to their income and therefore they already pay education taxes based on income and 30% of Vermonters are now paying on their homestead based on their primary residences and we are recommending that everyone moves to an income-based calculation for their education taxes we believe that doing this in conjunction with the move around people weights or a cost equity formula allows us to both account for those folks who might be lower income or middle income folks um sort of on the edge of middle income folks who might live in a higher spending district or a district that feels comfortable voting in higher budgets um but those individuals might not necessarily be able to afford it themselves and that example I think is a perfect place to think about how by moving to the system we can move beyond a lot of the rhetoric of winning towns and losing towns that have dominated much of this conversation up until now and think about each person paying their share of educating all of Vermont's kids so now we're on the slide of education quality standards and accountability you did you did surprise me Emily I was like wait where is she um so um that we did look at some a number of issues that will most likely be taken up by our education committee so it's great that um uh senator campion and his committee are here um one of this is one of those issues about education quality standards and accountability we really wanted to make sure that as we're improving equity hopefully um we're also ensuring that all Vermont students receive a high quality education and one way to do this is through um our um education quality standard system um and making sure that we have a continuously verified formal oversight process and measurable education quality standards um this is something that the AOE currently has it has been a bumpy few years trying to um make sure that that process is working and AOE and the state board of education are currently working together on um modifications on who has oversight of the system um we want to make sure that we provide AOE with the positions and resources necessary to support this work and to support school districts in maintaining and verifying education quality um right now we we're not convinced that they have um adequate resources necessary to do it and this is ongoing work of the AOE the state board of education school districts obviously and also our education committees um special education block grant is a similar um uh area that we hope that our uh education committees will work on uh in 2018 um act 173 was passed it actually created the pupil waiting study not the task force but the the original study um and um it it created a reimbursement census block grant system for special education as well as funding flexibility and significant professional development and best practice expectations expectations for special ed um it's been delayed twice by the legislature once because of AOE readiness to do it and the second time because of COVID um that there was an analysis in the pupil waiting factors report about possible changes to these block grants based on potential links between poverty and demand for special education services but the report also cautions that this conclusion um it may not be necessary because of causal evidence not um uh due to a lack of causal evidence and likely sufficient aid amounts so we're just recommending that our um our education committees take a look at this issue and um and follow the transition of act 173 um finally um program review and this is something that senator brock I kudos to him for bringing this up many many times to make sure um did all of this work and any changes that we make accomplish the desired outcome um so we need to from the beginning but build in an evaluation mechanism and and decide whether and to the extent which each of the goals of equity simplicity and accountability and any other goals that we might determine have been met and also how should these goals be measured um one of the concerns I personally have and others have with the pupil waiting factors report is that it's actually based on a single outcome and those that single outcome is standardized test scores which the in and of themselves are problematic so how should we measure more broadly equity and outcomes and if the goal has not been met what is the reason for the failure and what recommendations do we make to achieve that goal and what is the fiscal impact of the legislation and the and the cost of implementing those goals so there were also some other issues for further review that were very clearly very close and impacted um the cost of education and the um and school budgets in vermont but we're sort of outside of our purview but we want to name them because they really are significant drivers and challenges for um school budgets and those include the pre-kindergarten weight which is likely inadequate but um was outside of our purview of pursuing and needs to be part of the child care financing study, tuitioning and how that works and how those numbers are calculated and where how all of the money flows um and the state board of education is I understand working on that right now and so we didn't want to get ahead of their work school facilities construction um as I'm sure everyone knows there's a report pending on that that is going to have some pretty significant implications early college and potentially CTE are also areas of incentives and disincentives for student enrollment and school funding and student mental health and trauma um is likely a driver of a lot of the poverty weight and possibly the English language learning weight um that's according to the people waiting study and so are there other ways we might want to address those costs in our schools in addition to either weights or cost equity payments. So the last slide is conclusion and next steps um there's clearly more legislative analysis and um on both the updated weights recommendation and most especially on the cost equity payment option if that's a direction we decide to go in. There's additional analysis from the original report authors that is pending as we've mentioned and there is also our other education finance experts that we can turn to for additional information and updated opinions from from another perspective. They're updating modeling from all for all school districts and new modeling for individual taxpayers. The data is now available to be able to do the taxpayer analysis and we're excited to take a look at that. We can divide the components of these recommendations into the four committees of jurisdiction. Most of the individual recommendations can proceed separately so we don't have to do this all as one big package. We have to monitor the work of other study groups and um child care and facilities and the implementation of new programs like the special education block grant. Overall we need to ensure AOE has sufficient resources to support schools in critical areas. We mentioned um in the education quality standards but also in ELL that's an area where school districts have increasing needs and AOE does not have sufficient resources to address those needs. Um we need to improve equity outside of our school system too. Um school districts get burdened with trying to make up for a lot of areas in societies and a lot of the costs of of of those inequities are borne by school districts. So we want to make sure that students have adequate housing, healthcare and social programs outside of our school districts so that they when when they come to school they're ready to learn and there's not such a burden on our school districts. And overall we need to be conscious of the impact of changes on the total cost of education K-12 education in Vermont. We are one of the highest spending uh states per pupil in the country and while many of us may think that's a good thing it's also an area that we need to watch and be concerned with. And finally we have to be aware of the fatigue and stress on schools and school personnel and students and families due to the pandemic. All of us who have uh children in the school system right now know the tremendous amount of stress and anxiety and fatigue that our schools and students are feeling right now and any of our work that that adds to that burden is just really hard right now. So we have to be conscious of that moving forward. Emily do you want to say anything at the end? Okay so that concludes our our report. We did it in just about an hour so hopefully that gives you a good basis for um the work and um as senator Cummings said I I will be here every day as will um uh senator Brock and then senator Parchelik and senator Hooker in the Education Committee and hopefully we can all work together to move pieces of this forward. Thanks. Again thank you that was just an awful lot to digest senator Campion. Thanks Madam Chair. I also just want to uh echo what I'm hoping you've heard from many corners and that is just all of you that were on that committee but particular recognition to the two chairs. What an incredible lift it was during the summer during a difficult time and what a well-written well articulated product you produced. So thank you so much as well as thank you for your continued work and helping us as we uh navigate where to start each part which um you didn't sign up for the continuation but um I think uh we appreciate your willingness to do so so thank you. We are going. I'm a pleasure. So thank you uh senator Bray. Um thank you well thanks for the great report I'm gonna be reading the the print version more carefully it's gonna take me a while to take all that in um but I did have a one of the things you mentioned up front was um how important was to have a shared definition of equity and so uh I don't want to take too long but I'm wondering if you can what consensus definition did you land on so that we kind of know the lens that you ended up bringing to that question. Do you want me to take that Emily or do you want do you want to give it a shot? I really I kind of want to give it a shot but you can if you want senator. Um we didn't uh senator Bray I saw your text to me during the presentation but um we didn't actually land on a consensus definition of what equity is we did have a lot of conversations about equity and how a lot of uh how equity is really based in the fact that you can't equity and equality are different and that if you treat every every student the same then that is not equity and so therefore um recognizing that some students have higher needs than other students and that those needs have additional costs to them um creates a more equitable system and that's what we are trying to do is understand and recognize the differential needs of different types of students and different types of schools because it's not all about students it's about where the schools are located or the size of the schools and that those schools may need differential um um attention and um costs or weights um added to them so we had a lot of conversations I don't think that we didn't embed in the report anywhere our singular definition of of equity and um but we did have a lot of interesting conversations about it including visual conversations about it um and Emily I don't know if you want to add more to that yeah I would just add um that we rather than coming to consensus I think we became discerning with the use of the word and so that student equity is different from taxpayer equity which is different from tax rate equity which is different from spending equity which is different from district equity and that we became much more careful about being clear about which version of equity we were each talking about or we were using in the report because I think they all get used interchangeably and it's being discerning about which area of the education system you're talking about when talking about equity and with that and the arrival I think of your CLA conversation I'm gonna I think go home to my committee and be available for yes further questions is that is that okay for you sin um I think that's fine our next slate of witnesses is here um thanks madam chair you will say goodbye thank you for joining us thank everyone for their hard work