 Welcome back. This is still July, January 13, 2020. This is the Education Committee in the Vermont House of Representatives, and we are continuing our listening tour of how are we doing, how are the schools doing, how are the children doing. And I'm delighted to have three principles to join us. We've just listened to five superintendents. Now we're going to get to hear what's happening inside the buildings, the virtual buildings and the physical buildings in the school and very much appreciate your coming. I think we'll start with Chris Young, principal of North Country Union High School, and welcome Chris. Thank you so much. How are we doing? How are the children? The children are great. I wish we could have them all in all the time. That's what keeps us coming back. And I appreciate your reference to July. I've done the same thing several times and it kind of feels like we're doing the same thing again and again. I do appreciate the opportunity. This is my first chance, I think, to speak to the House Ed committee. And so I hope I don't watch it too badly. We'll build up with Erica and then Bob with a big finale at the end. I'm sure he's our most polished speaker for BPA. So, a little bit about myself. I'm the principal at North Country. North Country is about 700 students school up in the Northeast Kingdom. Obviously comes in geographic isolation, some poverty issues and so many parts of our state experience. I'm myself a graduate of North Country. Go Falcons 88. So I'm very, very honored to be here. This is my second year as a North Country principal. Prior to that, I was in both Crasper and Troy. This is my 19th year as a principal in Vermont, 21st overall. So that makes me feel really old just saying that. So what I thought I would do is maybe just give you a little bit of our journey since closure in March. I think it's important to go back to that a little bit. Because it does set the stage for a lot of our decisions and a lot of systems that we put into place to operate school safely beginning in September. And in what we have done, I think it's worth noting is that in the spring when we were all faced with this emergency closure, it began a problem solving exercise that has not yet ended. We are constantly faced with new guidance, new challenges. And it was immediate at that time. And the biggest problems that we faced as we approached the end of the year were really our making sure that our seniors were well supported so they had every opportunity to finish. We essentially extended the school year by two weeks all the teachers signed on for additional two weeks we compensated them to be available to help seniors sort of get past that finish line. And then we rolled right into summer school to do to do the same for underclassmen. At the same time, we did a lot of our decision making in committee form. We had committees on scheduling committees on transportation, he's on food, he's on direct services and so my point to this is that that teachers have really been at this. And we're very little great. And so, unwillingly, everyone wants to be part of the solution and to make sure that things go go super well so I'm incredibly proud of my staff and I know that's sentiments that are felt by one of my colleagues throughout the state as well. Yeah, as the guidance came out and we were processing it in our committees, it led us to believe that we could not operate school safely with all of our students all 700 students coming in. So that got us to a hybrid system. I'm sure you've heard the term. That means that half of our kids are here on Mondays and Thursdays and half are here on Tuesdays and Fridays. So Wednesday is what we call it's a remote day, but we do open the building for students who sign up for extra help or to come in for activities, and really have spent a ton of time just trying to make this as normal as possible. For the most part this has worked, our mass compliance has been excellent. Our physical distancing less so their high school students we allow them to change classes. I'm pretty confident that they do not spend any more than five minutes or so that they're not physically distance from one another, all the classes are physically distance the one share is a physically distance but when they change classes, they are not six feet apart, but that that time is limited. And again for the most part it's worked. We've had one positive case where a student was infectious at school, and we ran through the protocols. And we determined that the only close contacts for that student were part of his tech center program, and that meant that we, and our tech center is adjacent to the high school so there is certainly some some some cross pollination there between the two programs but we did not have to close. We were able to just to continue doing what we did, and just that one cohort of tech center students were pointing for two weeks and then we're back to back to our normal. But but I think that the, the problem becomes what what do we mean by it's working. You know, we have this. If you look at our data, and I don't have a hard numbers for you. I'm sure you've heard the term ghosting. If you hadn't ghosting is when students completely you was complete contact with students, and we're estimating somewhere in the 10 to 15% of our student population falls into that category. It's just a really it's heartbreaking to know that there are some students that are not accessing any educational services right now. We know that students rely on being physically in the building for mental health services for direct instruction from case managers for food security for physical safety for access to our nurse and access just to trusted parents and in a good portion of our kids are not getting that right now. We have another good chunk of kids in the 20 to 30% range who are kind of playing along and doing the minimum of what they need to be engaged and and another 50 to 60% who are doing what we would like them to do and to be available for learning as much as they possibly can. What we have learned is that that remote learning disproportionately negatively affects students who are already most vulnerable. I think that is absolutely inescapable for us and that whether that means difficult family situations or lack of it, or food insecurity whatever that means that they are the ones who are impacted most by being us being in a remote situation. So the this this ghosting this this partial engagement present excuse me present some some immediate challenges for us again we're going to be ending our first semester in just a couple weeks. We already know that we will have students who are going to not pass their classes because they have not done any work and they got attended. And we have been we've added staff to to provide more opportunities for students to engage. We are looking at a night school model to begin for the second semester where we would design that to be fully remote if that work for students we would allow students to come in if that were whatever we can do to get them back into the building and back engage we are willing to do. And so those are real issues that that we're confronting right now going back to that without problem solving mentality. The, I guess one of the things I would, I would like to share that most concerns me is that there's a bigger problem. And that is, you know what does what does remote learning and hybrid system impacts all students, not just our most vulnerable. And I'll give you an example to try to try to make my point. After Wednesdays of the last Wednesday's events. I walked into a couple of our social studies classes and, and normally they are, as you can imagine, full of opinions and banter and discussion and, and it was silent. And so it was just, it was actually it was heartbreaking to me, because this is a such a significant moment in our history. And I'd encouraged teachers, you know, we need to have these conversations with students and, and students were, they were six feet apart, they were wearing masks. Some students were on our smart board having logged in on Google classroom and we're trying to follow the discussion that was happening in class and the teacher was doing his best to elicit comments and conversations and debate. And it was just, it was just not the same. And, and so that is, I think, one of our biggest challenges going forward is is not necessarily just recovery, but really reengaging our students and what we would consider to be a valuable school experience. And, I mean, we've learned a lot. We will rethink we will never do technology the same this is been we've accelerated light years for paper, just a year ago. But our next challenge, and it's a bigger one is, is how do we, and we understand that there are some questions about recovery and some questions about what a recovery plan looks like at the state level and from our AOE. I tend to use the word reengagement rather than recovery. I think it's it's a more appropriate way to describe the task that we have in front of us. And again, I'll give you another example is it's just the night school example I just your idea just shared with you, like we know that that is unlikely to grab students who are already disengaged. We're looking at ways to create opportunities for students to redevelop meaningful relationships with their peers and adults and get at the underlying issues of why they were not attending to begin with. And then I was an elementary principal for nine years prior to coming back to the high school and, and they have a great model for the after school program and their summer program which is based on embedding academics into wellness activities and skills activities and. And so we need the flexibility to go forward with when we talk about reengagement and recovery, the ability to make some decisions based on our own context. It's something that I hope that can be discussed at the at the higher levels here where the problem really is not providing more classes of options for students just to access content. The problem is finding ways to really build, you know, rebuild those relationships and reengage students and in school. You know, I think this this idea of physical distancing is taken on a life of its own I think that now it is not just physical it's emotional distancing. And I think that's why I saw on that class and so we need to find ways to bridge that that distance. And so, I will either turn it over for questions or comments or allow my students colleagues to take it from there. I think what we'll do is we'll hear from the three principles and then open it up to conversation from there. I know that we're anxious, anxious to for questions as well. So we will go to Erica, the last one from Randolph Elementary School. Good morning. Thanks for having us it's really a privilege to be able to share with you kind of our experiences. This was not an easy task to sort of sort through what to share with you. I feel like I could have written a novel, and I needed to not because I didn't have time. I've written some remarks down and shared them with you. I understand that they're accessible to you. So, I am 16 years here at Randolph Elementary School, I live in Mendon on the other side of the mountain, but people are like why do you do the commute and it's because you build relationships and connections with staff and families and I just can't break myself from that. Here I am. I'm going to read my remarks if that's okay, just because there's so much to share. I'm just going to rain myself in reading, reading my remarks and happy to answer questions later. I just want to doubt the past 10 months in a school looks drastically different from anything we've ever seen before. Last year we wrote to our community in our town report, our elementary schools continue to engage in a process of maximizing the opportunities to learn for all students, which is what we are driven to do even this year. The only difference is that we've had to do things very differently. We came to all of our lives as a result of the pandemic brought uncertainty and fear of change, as well as the opportunity for collaboration and creativity to our schools. This year has reminded us that our schools are a vital part of the academic, social and economic webs that unite and strengthen all our communities. During Southwest School District we have the privilege of working together and we function as an elementary team, not just the administrators but the teachers. And during this crisis that team effort was never more needed or appreciated as we learn together, supported each other, celebrated our successes together, and even grieve together. This year has not been without many tears. It has been a sad hard time for everyone in our efforts to work together paid dividends. We were forced to reinvent every system and every routine in our schools from selecting teachers to teach our remote learners to accommodate family and teacher students, adjusting how we taught our students, where they ate lunch, where they engaged in learning in their unified arts classes such as art, music, library and P. How students arrived in the morning off the buses or from their parents, how they were dismissed in the afternoon. We even had to think about the movement patterns within our buildings and how students and staff would move around the building to minimize distancing or to minimize closeness and to increase distance. All this and more was no small feat. And this was not the case. This was the case in every school, and it continues to be the case, every time the modality of learning changes from week to week and sometime day to day in a week. We have learned a number of lessons while other ideas were reinforced through this pandemic. The staff and students are resilient and can adjust effectively and efficiently in a crisis situation. Teachers across our state spent an inordinate amount of time last spring, summer and fall, learning innovative ways to teach children in remote settings, and with a few days notice switch to in person learning to keep our students moving and safe. Our students learned how to better use technology as a learning tool, no matter what the content. They're often seen now teaching their family members at home how to access the school's learning hub to see their assignments and join school meetings through Google Meets or Zoom. Education has never turned on a dime like it did this year. All of our students thrived with smaller class sizes, particularly students that have a lot of stress in their lives. Those students had much more one on one time with their teachers were more relaxed and demonstrated a greater ability to focus on learning and content with peers and healthy ways. Trauma specialist Dr. Bruce Perry would tell you relational density matters. And that was evident in positive waves in our classes with fewer students during our hybrid learning sessions. Smaller class sizes contributed to our children being better emotionally regulated. So they were more available to access their learning when they were able to be in school. We learned that professional development we engaged in in our district around trauma informed practices was critical during this traumatic time. It was imperative we put those practices into play with learning what we know about kids that are experiencing ongoing toxic stress at home, and what it does to a workforce experiencing that intense stress as well. We learned that our youngest students can navigate technology tools to practice top concepts in ways we had not explored before. Teachers learned how to effectively use new technology tools and video record concepts for students to learn and review lessons. We learned some students do better with remote learning with fewer distractions and fewer transitions, while others desperately needed in person instruction with their teacher and peers to thrive. We learned remote meetings can be effective for including staff from across the districts to collaborate in our singleton teachers in our small schools did not need to go this journey alone. Teachers across schools are meeting weekly planning together reviewing stated student data together and participating in professional development together. The OSSD, we learned this a long time ago, doing this work together is better than going it alone. Well, to this point I've shared with many of the successes in this crisis, we have experienced many challenges, all of which I cannot share in the short amount of time we have together. At the forefront of those challenges are the great inequalities we see. We still have families without internet students home alone that do not have family there to support their distance learning, or to provide for their emotional needs. Supporting these students during the crisis has been of our one of our biggest challenges. Schools are faced with significant budget challenges for the remainder of this year and perhaps for years to come, due to the spending that was needed during this unforeseen crisis to open our schools and to keep us all safe. We had to purchase PPE and disinfecting supplies and additional furniture in order to distance our students, all of which were unbudgeted necessities. I find myself wondering whether we will have an accurate accounting of the impact of the coronavirus has had on our local budgets and what the tax burdens to our communities will be. Will it be clear to our communities that these hardships will be felt by the state as a whole, not just our own individual districts. Will it be clear that the tax increases are not because schools were not being fiscally responsible. That's often the rhetoric we hear. The requirements for quarantining and waiting for results. Schools are faced with not having enough staff on a day to day basis, and the shortage of available substitutes has been exacerbated by this pandemic. Schools are faced with feeding our children, providing mental health supports for them and their families. Schools are faced with staff that worried they are going to get their students ill, become ill themselves, or even bring COVID home to their loved ones. Our teachers signed up to inspire and educate the youth of our communities. I would add they did so in incredible ways. They did not sign up to go to work to put their lives at risk by being frontline essential workers, but that's where they are each and every day. It is irresponsible to expect educators to work in a congregate setting without providing them all available precautions, protections. The governor has made it a priority to get students back to in person learning as soon as possible, and should make it a priority to make sure that educators receive the vaccine with the same expeditious timeline. While schools are given guidance on safety measures, putting them into practice as a whole other matter. I challenge anyone to come into a school and to keep six year olds three feet apart. It's not possible on a consistent basis. It's not uncommon to see a child melt on a teacher's lap or to see a child show their gratitude with an enthusiastic hug to the adult that just helped them through a struggle. So I implore you to insist that school staff be given priority to receive the vaccine. Schools are faced with ambiguous and ever changing guidelines. The target keeps moving announcements at press conferences that require action by the schools without previous notice along with pushback from state and local unions regarding that guidance. A rock in a hard place does not begin to describe what it feels like much of the time. Schools are faced with shouldering the need to stay open to ensure workers can work in order to keep our economy going. The pandemic. Sorry schools have students that are depressed, anxious or stressed on a normal basis. And the pandemic has compounded these issues due to the difficulties family space, while struggling to work, pay their bills and support their children's education. Social isolation has brought about an increase in domestic violence and addiction, all of which impacts our children. We provide a safe haven for children, a place where they can socialize with other children and be educated schools shoulder the needs of our communities and often without gratitude. Despite all those challenges, we are driven to serve our communities. And in the end, we will be stronger for this. Thank you. Thank you very much and that that the written testimony is on our website if you just go under today, or under Eric's name. I think we're still going by first name on our website in terms of alphabetical order. Thank you so much. And Bob Tebow principle of Leland and Leland and Gray, middle and high school. Thank you. And thank you so much for inviting us as my professors here have mentioned. I think Chris set me up to be an eloquent speaker. I don't know if I can follow Eric and never mind Chris. So, I will say I do have some bullet points that I've shared with you guys as well. So yeah, my name is Bob Tebow. I'm in my 27th year in education, mostly in Vermont to my 12th year as a principal. And I'm currently the president of the Vermont principal association. As such, I've been involved with a lot of things the state level, including the sports restart committee, and also Secretary French's advisory committee, as well with weekly call so I've had the ability to be pretty involved in a lot of things that have been happening, which has been very interesting, giving me a lot of good insight. Leland and Gray is a is what I would say a small rural school. Unlike most in Vermont, we do have the distinction of being the alma mater of your colleague miss Emily long. So, you can pass on here in regards to her. We are located about 17 miles northwest of Brattleboro on the road route 30 that heads up to Stratton and eventually into Manchester. We have just under 300 students grades six through 12. And we serve a variety and number of commute different communities. I'll start off with a quick comment about broadband access which I know has been a topic of great conversation at the State House. We, you know of our nearly 300 kids we we only had five families that had zero access. And so it feels like that's a pretty good number. The challenge is we have probably have a third of our kids who are operating on DSL in some of our rural communities, and that access has has been stifling for a lot of families as they have multiple kids or parents working from home and trying to access education through zoom. The DSL this does not provide the ability to, to have the high speed that a lot of the other families might have so even though most of our families have it, have internet. It's not always high speed it's not always very good. And as we as well we've had we've explored opportunities to bring in boosters and do different things but all those rely typically on having cell service, which we also do not have due to the topography. We're in a very mountainous valley type region like much of Vermont and so the cell cell signals don't extend too far out of Bratiborough, or from Manchester so we're kind of in that middle area. And so that's a little bit about where we're at from broadband perspective. So we're also unique in Vermont in that Leland Gray I believe right now is the only school only public school that is still fully remote. We did not reopen live with students in the fall. And that has to do with our building and our in our school board's decision to, to really dig in deep to the, the AOE guidance on airflow to ensure that our students and staff were in the safest possible environment. Unfortunately like many many schools in the state where it's not a new building, and there's been tons of deferred maintenance as budget constraints have as a board has moved to you know keep programming but cut money to the building. So over the years that's been a conscious decision and so a lot of repair work had to be done before we can even be tested in our district for the airflow. And being said we also have three elementary schools that are part of our district. Those were obviously the priority to get the kids in there first. So the work really went, went to those schools. First that's Townsend, Newbrook and Jamaica Village School. Those schools two of the three of them are working with live students and towns and the third one is set to opens very shortly. The quality and air flow testing will be done at the last week of this month, and we're on schedule to have kids in the building, using that hybrid model that was referenced earlier by February 8, with the exception of our sixth grade which will be here four days a week. So that's where we're as far as our building goes. We have also developed a full time remote Academy for the spring semester for families who are opting to stay remote, but we have been remote since March. And that obviously the impacts that Chris and Erica talked about from the spring that for us has been a nonstop reality since then. So, just so folks aware of that impact. Chris mentioned the term ghosting I think that's a great descriptor of the lack of engagement that we have seen from students. Erica pointed out that some students do better than this and that's absolutely true we've seen at the high high middle school level as well. There certainly has been this sort of slow decline of engagement I would, I would define that since March, we up ticked again and in the beginning of September. And then as it starts to decline of engagement and then there's a little bit of tick and then vacations kind of starts to decline again. Students as you guys look at a zoom screen and now you have all faces on your zoom screen I think if you were to ask a teacher in Vermont what they would see they might see a face or two, and a lot of names. They might see Aaron nodding as an educator you can you can speak to that. There, there's a lot of black screens kids will put stuff in the chat, maybe, but they, there's not a lot of engagement, even in those virtual classes as they go. The teachers as pointed out by Erica and Chris are working their tails off to do their best to try to engage using all sorts of different strategies and techniques, technologies, but that struggle is real. And the kids, the kids are sort of fading from that so it's really essential to have them in in the classroom. We have had over the course of the fall seven students drop out of our high school population about 180. So seven as a number doesn't seem exceptionally large but I have 180. It's a pretty good percentage. These are all students who are all in poverty. They all either needed to get jobs or had to had or have jobs. And they were students as you might expect it, weren't exactly, you know, hitting the ball out of the park, the prior. But this really just pushed them was a straw that broke the tent with the camel's back early push them on the top and we're working to try to figure out how to get them access to either high school completion program gd programs, or in some situations to try to re engage them with us in some flexible pathway model with the work based learning or other types of things to get them engaged, even a little bit to get some credits and keep them on track. We have done as a admin and counseling team, well over 100 home visits, which again, if you think about we only have we have less than 300 kids. That's a lot of home visits, a lot of them have been unsuccessful, a lot of been repeat visits. I have seen some things in where kids live and how they live. And I hope wouldn't shock you because you're legislators and Vermont but it might shock you some of them pretty shocking to me, and I've been around for a while here. Kids living in in tar covered shocks to crepit trailers up long, long winding, non maintained roads off of secondary and tertiary roads up in the hills. And so it's really, it's really pretty sad when you get to see that firsthand. And you understand really why struggle to engage is real for these kids. I'm going to leave you at the end of my my testimony here with a little anecdote about one particular individual. I just also mentioned staffing challenges. We had a flurry of resignations retirements in in June. And I'm sure I know other districts have had that happen over the summer, as well as as the reality of live instruction. You know, hit a teacher who was maybe very close would make the decision to just go because they'd be worried about their health. We have had one mid year resignation. We have no subs on our sub list for when we do start live. And I would say the staff morale is particularly entering a budget season is not super high. We're doing our best to keep it light and keep them happy to workforce is is ultra important I think Erica highlight this I want to highlight it again. We're very near Stratton and Mount snow and as my teachers report their hearing stories about ski instructors getting vaccinated. That is heart wrenching and heartbreaking to my staff. We've heard of mental health workers who are doing strictly remote work, getting vaccinated, and yet the teachers who are on the front lines are not in that priority list and my understand the challenge of prioritizing who gets it who doesn't I mean that's an incredibly hard thing and this based on the medical expertise at the governor's office and with the Department of Health but it's, I can just tell you that that has been a gut punch to the to the faculty and staff of my building and I'm sure across the state. So that's one thing I wanted to make sure I mentioned academic gaps we talked a little bit about this and I loved Chris's expression about not using the word recovery is really about reengagement. You know we're still dealing with students that didn't complete things from spring. In our hope we had a whole system set up to run in the fall but then when we couldn't open, you're trying to reengage kids to complete in completes using a using virtual learning when the reason they had complete the first phase was virtual learning is, you know, is nonsensical so we're really struggling with how to do that we have developed a summer program for this year, coming up. And, you know, we're really hoping that we can engage kids through our flex time during the school year in the spring once they're here live but to try to engage and make up work when they're remote is next to impossible. We do also another plan in place to try to bring back and reengage from those students who have dropped out who are on the fringe, and potentially use some extra money to do that, and we're exploring that right now. So we'll say this we Chris was on the call we do a weekly principles call the VPA organizes and there was some conversation about offering. Reduce if you will to high schoolers who would choose to do redo junior year or redo senior year, and what the implications of that could be and should be around ADM and everything else and that's just something to be thinking about. Because if you're if you're, you know, really worried about your junior year being such an important for college consideration, the option to redo that might be something that families might wish to do so we're in considerations around those sorts of those sorts of things around reengagement. I'll leave you with some stuff again about poverty so our community nears 50% free reduced lunch rate. And that's obviously higher than state average. Some visits have led to a little ray of sunshine for us because as we've connected families with resources one of the big. We have some local churches that have helped out but also the Stratton Foundation want to make sure I mentioned their name they have done an incredible amount of work, giving for in our community. We have a lot of Stratton as they call it gift cards and presence and we have toys for taught campaign we even had a book campaign where our high school students to our leadership course, collected use books and gifted them to the elementary students so every elementary student are just received a package of books at the holidays gift wrapped and collected by our high school kids. And that was an incredible thing. And we did this one particular thing that I want to come back to as we arrived to convince the student who's a special education student to not drop out. He pointed at his own house and described, well, I'm kind of poor you know you can see from my house. And this is his grasp of that was pretty was pretty amazing. This is what we can do for you this is what we can offer we have this job set up for you in a restaurant we do work based learning we have this weekend we're going to be in school for two days a week anyways and so on so as we described it he turned to us and he said, this struck me it really, really took me a few minutes to kind of respond to this and he said, Why are you guys so obsessed with keeping me in school. And I thought, What a great line. And you know, I think that you guys have educators across your state right now, who are obsessed with keeping kids engaged in their in the daily lessons, keeping kids engaged in their school in general, and for this kid to keep him actually from dropping out. I think the work is being done in every community across our state, and doing that I just. That was just a really powerful act that I want to leave you with but that is all I have. Thank you guys so much again for inviting us here. Thank you. It'll be open for questions I just have a quick one for Bob first, you are participating with the secretary and a group on advising and participating in the development of guidance is that correct. So there's a weekly call that he does with what he calls the advisory committee and there's representation from VSA VSBA VPA obviously the budget a we folks and special administrators and I mean it's really everybody in the field. I'm involved in that there's a separate subgroup of that that actually develops the guidance I'm not on that particular group, but but the feedback that we give goes into should go into developing of that guidance as it goes forth, and you feel heard. I would say, in that group, I would say generally yes. I mean to be completely honest. My cell phone is ringing here. I would say that the sports committee piece has been a little bit tougher the restart there. The doctors in that committee have been amazing. There's definitely been a push from the top the governor's office to to start sports and I absolutely understand why and I think it speaks to the mental health needs of our kids and the needs to engage. But I would say that some of us on that committee have felt not heard based on our concerns around what could be perceived as the inconsistencies between sports and what's the academic situation so for example, my students can't come and learn math for days a week, but they can go into a gym and have basketball practice. And dichotomy of those two things has been challenging to explain when people ask it I just say I don't have an answer for that. But I guess that's the best way to answer that question. Thank you representative couplay and then representative to thank you madam chair. That was going to be one of my questions what is the, how are you dealing with the sports activities but thank you for your answer. I'm the other the other thing that I'm hearing are that students are checking in in the morning. So that they're counted there for the day. And after they check in, they leave for the day, as you refer to the blank screens etc. is this is that one of the reasons for your home visits. Does that is that have I think it's happening, perhaps all over the state but I can't speak to that. I suspect that it probably is and the teachers talk about how they wait when the class entity whose black screen is still there. And that's how you tell who isn't really engaged. Yes, our home visits were were really two fold one around the kids that weren't engaging at all that the teachers wouldn't even hear from wouldn't see on the screen wouldn't get any work from. So obviously our priority targets, and then the secondary group was a group who were there, but not engaging in any work or not engaging in conversation so those became like, let's just check in and make sure we're okay. So yeah those were sort of the two tiers of the home visits. Just to follow up to that. Do these students are they aware that if they missed X number of days that they may not be eligible for graduation or going on to further their days in another year of schooling. Sure, well we you know we in front now have the proficiency system so the actual like time on learning isn't as essential as what is demonstrating that they have learned. But even even with that said yes I think kids are struggling with that I think that's real for them it's, you know teenagers are if you remember back I mean we as he is we didn't really recognize the long term impacts of our actions. I think these kids are going through that in the middle of the, the depression and the, the struggles they're having a lot of them with their families I think that's just shutting us out shutting the schools out is a is a in some ways a coping mechanism some levels to. Thank you. Representative to thank you madam chair and thank you everyone to come in I just want to mention to to Erica representative Hooper did text me and say apologize he couldn't make it any as a home energy audit today. And so he's going to be watching this later he'll probably reach out to you. My questions along the same lines as representative Coopley is there and then we also have educators in the committee so I'd be happy to hear from them as well but with this ghosting is there like a requirement for having their screen on or they can just it's. They don't have to, there's no requirement they don't have to, they just have to basically log in and. I mean I can let I can let Chris talk about that from the other standpoint but for us for the remote kids yes there is a requirement. And they're marked off through their habits of learning grades that they aren't demonstrating that they're engaged, but that doesn't necessarily prevent the kids from turning in the actual assignments as well so you get multiple kind of problems with that but. I want to jump on to that in a little in some instances it shouldn't be a requirement. We've got kids living in hotels, and they don't want you to see that they're living in a hotel or they don't want their classmates to see that they're living in a hotel or in a shack with a tarp on top so there has to be some sensitivity to that as well that teachers are navigating every day. Yeah like a fine line yeah. Okay I'm sorry. I apologize for that I guess I'm at the end of comment. Good morning and I apologize for having one of those blank screens but I've got an unstable internet. Could you talk a little bit at the elementary level and at the high school level what you think given or assuming that we're all vaccinated come September. Clearly engagement, but just a little bit about what you think it'll look like how it might look different from a traditional normal year of schooling. How am I starting, I would say first in the forefront of my mind is kids have been isolated in ways never they have before. And so their socialization and being around multiple people is going to be a challenge and just regulating for them. You know, as an elementary school I have 330 kiddos and so my class sizes are pretty pretty big for elementary classes like they can range from 18 to 22. And having half of a class of nine or 10 kids in the room has definitely shown me a lot of regulation. In terms of their body and ability to access learning when I put 20 kids in a room after they've all been isolated. They're going to be dysregulated. And as you know with the brain science if you're dysregulated feeling nervous or unsafe, you're not thinking and you're not focusing and so there's going to be a lot of challenge, getting kids to understand how their body is feeling, getting them to feel regulated so that they can access their prefrontal cortex for best learning. So I think that's going to be a big challenge and we have to remember that when we have the kiddos in those, you know, there's often an education role we talk about the first six weeks of school. There's probably going to need to be the first 12 weeks or more of that really building community and trust and feelings of safety. It looks very similar at the high school level. Our freshmen at the end of this year will only have experienced hybrid learning in high school. You know sophomores will have experienced two thirds of their high school career in either a full closure or remote setting. So that's a that's a real problem when you start talking about a school community a healthy and well school community. And so our efforts are going to be almost entirely focused on rebuilding those connections and rebuilding that school community so that we can really start to dig in on where some of the academic issues may lie as a result of not having access to in person instruction for so long. So what's your, what's your staff background and experience and professional development in terms of social emotional learning wasn't biased those various issues of concern. I have had we've had extensive sorry Chris go ahead. And it was this, we have we've started. We started last year with a focus on trauma informed instruction and have built what we call our wellness team, our wellness team consists of social worker, a school counselor to therapists and a substance abuse counselor as well as a five enrichment coordinator. That's in addition to our regular school counseling staff who are more focused on college and career preparation. Then that just started last year and if we didn't have them. I would feel so much less confident that our students were being supported where they are with the social emotional learning. So they are taking the lead on much of the school wellness planning. I should also mention that they actually piloted and convinced me, which I think is a great idea that we do step we do student advisories as many as schools do where students have time set aside every day or at least a couple times a week to connect with both teachers as well as peers that aren't necessarily in our classes. This has been invaluable to us to have this these these connections built into the day when students are in person. And this gets to the staff wellness piece where it's time carved out every week. We actually for Wednesdays, we have students come in just a little bit later so that teachers have a half an hour Wednesday morning to get together with their advisory group and and just talk. What are their challenges and that that is that has really been a huge help to the staff to maintain some level of wellness for themselves also so long answer to your question I represented whether the we have spent quite a bit of time attending to increasing teachers capacity to address the social emotional learning in school. And Erica, you wanted to add something. Yeah, I would say in the last two and a half years, my district we've, we do it all together. We've done two and a half years of course work around the neurobiology of stress, the impacts of that on our staff and students, including the vicarious trauma that our that our staff experience working with high poverty at risk students just because they care about them so much that it impacts them. But that's not the case across the state. So, if you asked 100 principles you might get 100 different answers. And so there's going to be some school communities that are more equipped at supporting students and families than than others. Thank you. Thank you. 100% of Brady. It looks like Bob was going to say something related there so go please go ahead. I'm sorry I just wanted to add on to what Erica was saying that my school also has had the same training that she's had for the last three years and but she's right that the disparity is out there, and a similar point to that. So, even when you think about the services that are available outside of schools for for students and families that is also greatly varied across the state mental health agencies are different from from region to region as you know. And of course with what the capacity of DCF is within your region is also going to vary so. Yeah, those things will also create quite a variance. Thank you. I apologize there's a remote band class in the background at at my house because we have, but my kids are doing quite well they have a lot of opportunities in this that I know are not universal across the experiences. I just want to thank all three of you your, I was emotional at times listening to that testimony and I teach in a high school so none of this is news to me. It's just a way that you raised some very succinct and important points. I think particularly thinking of middle and high school as reengagement. Much of that maps very much on to my experience I had to jump off this morning and teach a class to mostly blank screens, and I'm a socialized teacher so we've discussed a lot of the events of the last week and like you said, Chris it's, it's a very one way right now in many ways a lot of the sort of best practices we know about teaching kind of got thrown out this year and we had to go to some very traditional practices and I worry that won't go away overnight. My question really is about what you think it will take. I think we heard some important points this morning from the superintendents about nothing new. This isn't the time for new policies and you know new things from the state. But what it will take to do to do the old to do, you know, school again in a, in a way that we're more accustomed to, because my fear is that there will be this sort of just back to normal next year and that means one or two days of in service you open the doors, you write your schedule as you used to. And, you know, I think one thing we had going for us this year was that that delayed start having, I can't imagine how we would have opened Colchester High School without those 12 days to really get ready for a very different physical and educational experience. And that probably won't happen again. So I guess I really worry about what, how do we prepare what do schools need in order to not just sort of revert back to everything as usual in the fall when there's, there's no way that's where kids and teachers really are. That's a really good question. And certainly one I would want to talk about with the staff, but I would concur with you that having those days in advance was maybe the first time in my entire educational career that we could be extremely planned, thoughtful, and have time to learn and work together because in education, we're always flying the plane while we're building it. And it's not effective or efficient. But this was and our teachers are rocking it because we've had that time in advance for planning. And even we built in some sort of early release days, so that we can have that continuous planning along the way and so with hands down I would, I would agree with you and we would need that time in advance. The problem is, often in Vermont, every district is having to negotiate all of those same things. We all spin our wheels about the same things. And I was begging in the spring, could we just have some common agreements across the state, so that all efforts and the local level isn't like negotiating these side deals with their local unions. But, but that's how we do it. And it's, it's hard. So if we, if that was a gift that we could have where we would have time in advance of the school year where everyone had that would be amazing. It'd be a really great start. I would just add to I think definitely no new stuff is going to be important to consider. I think whatever you guys can do legislatively around the tax relief stuff around the funding formula I think it's going to be important because as we all know that with a loss of revenue from meals and sales that the Ed fund is taking a beating on that. And so we just can't, we can't think short-sighted that that's that now is the time to really slash and burn what's happening at the individual school and district level because now we're going to need the resources the most as we just described. But so things like for me in my region things like the weighting study are going to have could potentially have a significant impact on tax relief that wouldn't rely on cutting programs at the time when we need the most things like that I think would be what I would ask for. I can just chime in very quickly I agree with both Bob and Erica. I have my thinking has not extended beyond summer at this point. So I, and that's a stretch. I worry about the impact of of of trying to schedule students in a way that that meets them where they are and what impact that's going to have on staffing. I think that's a real problem. I'll just give you a quick quick anecdote about one thing that would help is about three weeks ago. I got the letter a letter from a we have from my superintendent notifying us that our graduation rate had dropped more than what was considered acceptable. And, and I'm like, you got to be kidding me. I know it dropped. I know exactly who the students are. I know where they live. We've done so much work to try to engage them. And then we went through the data and it was, the data was wrong. We found nine students that have been here honestly come to this not very good. And so, any anything that can be done that removes what in retrospect now might be somewhat artificial or superficial indicators of student engagement and success and achievement. Well, maybe we can look at those a little differently than we have in the past. Thanks Chair Web. We heard testimony earlier today that in some schools anyway harassment and hazing and bullying was down. And I wondered if that was your experience as well. And whether it's you know, simply because students aren't spending as much time together. Or whether I mean I know that so much of that takes place online, whether, hopefully, they're experiencing any kind of up to the top uptick and empathy because they're, you know, having a common experience I was just curious about your, your take on that. To start we've had hardly any discipline problems at all. And we do. We have investigated several online bullying and harassment incidents. It has been less than previous years. And I wish I could attribute it to an increase in empathy I don't, I don't know. My guess is it goes back to my anecdote about the classes that I think kids are just kind of numb. And I think that Bob's point about his home visits and students shielding themselves from school I think. I think it more has to do with that than necessarily any change in their thinking around everything. I would say at the elementary level, we have had a significant decrease like hardly any discipline problems as well in terms of when they're in the building. I think the class size, the small class size matters a lot. If you ever have a chance to listen any of Bruce Dr Bruce Perry's work he's an, I think an international speaker frankly and he talks a lot about the relational milieu and how we are lacking that in our current days. I remember that the olden days when you would have several family members living in the home, you'd have grandma and grandpa right next door, or the aunts and uncles that were nearby, and all of those relationships matter to the success and the well being of the family. Now you see a lot of homes with a single parents and multiple children or, you know, adults coming and going or working multiple jobs and so they don't have that relational connection like they had yours and yours past and that matters to our society today. What was so obvious when we had half the class that decrease in challenge and behaviors was what I believe attest attesting to that increase of relationship with teacher and connection. And online the same they have regular meets with the at the elementary level throughout their day with their teachers, you do see the children spaces on the at the elementary level and they're so happy to be there. And we have great supervision at the school levels with like go guardian where they can supervise the children's electronics. We have very quick responses when a kid starts googling some inappropriate content that's been our bigger challenge than it is the inappropriateness between peers. Are there any other questions. I don't have Jay here right now, but I actually returned about half an hour 20 minutes ago so I apologize for being absent this sounds like it was a really productive and important conversation which I'm going to review later on so long as. Maybe Jesse can send me a link but I was busy with a home energy audit, and it turns out that maybe I should have voted for the legislative pay increase because I think it's going to get expensive but just thank you for. Thank you today. Glad that we're able to be here for at least part of it and please do I think that we've had some very important testimony given giving us an idea as to what is happening in the field we are still going to be hearing from the school boards we're going to be hearing from the teachers and we have some guidance to talk with us, which is very important and if you could work with your association to help organize that into a concise list of the things you would like us to do. And also the things you want to make sure that we don't do if we all of a sudden get so excitedly creative about something that's going to take us down at just a terrible trash which we have been known to do. So if you if you wouldn't mind working with with with the principal's association to to have him ready with your with a concise list that would be most appreciated. It's significantly harder to work under these conditions than we do when I have have the folks coming into the committee and we're checking in at now and then so a printed list is very helpful for those of us with aging memory anyway. And this has been very informative, really appreciated hearing from the from the principals and superintendents, and I think we're going forward with some very interesting ideas. The good news is I'll say to you is we do have some more money coming in. I think it's about 130 million I can't remember 127 million I think for pre K 12 with some extra money that the governor can spend where we will be taking a look at how we might be able to relate the work of act 173 to learning loss and what are you calling it now I like that better learning recovery what was the other one. I think it's about re engagement. Yes, re engagement, re engagement of learners to see if there's a way that we can draw together some of those, those concepts, we will be looking at at financing as we always do I know some folks have brought up the concern about the excess spending threshold. I think we're going to be seeing something about that as well. This is clearly a very unusual year. I personally take your, your warnings and your, your recommendations seriously and, and please do keep us informed. Thank you. And we can, we can go off live. Thank you.