 Welcome to Senate Education. Wednesday, February 1st, 133 p.m., we're going to start by having a conversation around teaching salaries here in Vermont, just so we understand where things stand, what sorts of things the legislature may or may not want to do. But the overarching issue that we're looking at is a massive teacher shortage in the state of Vermont across the country. How can we be competitive? What is, you know, being competitive look like? Looks like, look like. A lot of these, all of these things are made by local school boards, etc. I think it's just important for us to have the conversation and then just ask ourselves as a state, should we set a minimum salary for teachers? I guess it'll be interesting to me personally, just to see where people are and what they think. And just kind of help us all understand that. We're then going to continue our conversations around universal meals. We're going to hear from then the deans of University of Vermont and Casselton on teacher education, and then return to teaching Vermont campaign with Mary and Cargill, who will give us a sense of, you know, how are we helping our teachers with their debt? But to kick us off, Ms. Julia Richter, a physical analyst for Joint Biscal, who does great work for all of us and we're grateful that you're here and grateful to you for taking the time to put together this presentation. So with that, Ms. Richter, it's the floor is yours. Thank you. It's nice to be in the committee. I think it's my first time testifying person this year to you all. So I'm Julia Richter with the Joint Biscal Office. I'm a fiscal analyst. I focus on the Education Fund primarily. So I was asked to come in here to talk about teacher salaries in Vermont. And so my presentation is really sort of two parts. The first is to just think about the mechanics of the Education Fund. Where do teacher salaries fall in the Education Fund? And then the second is to get a little bit more into understanding comparisons of teacher salaries, both within Vermont and then within the Northeast and the nation as a whole. Did you want me to share my slide deck? I would like you to if you would. Sure. Scott or Hayden, can you access to the big screen? Sure. Yeah. Hayden did share the Zoom link with me ahead of time. So I'm just going to log in. Thank you. For people watching at home, there is a presentation that you can download that is available under my name on the committee page. It does say please wait for the host to start the meeting. Hayden, is that something you can do? Yeah, let me try and publish it right now. Okay. Should I just get started? Okay. So I'm starting out. I do see that the committee has the slide deck in front of them. So I am on page two now. And just thinking about the mechanics of the Education Fund. I know that Brad James from AOE came and talked to you all about the Education Fund and how that works. So Hayden is just letting me in right now so I can pull up my slides. All right. So here we are on slide two. So yeah, so Brad talked to you walked you through the Education Fund, how that works. And you'll recall that each school budget, each school district builds an annual budget, right? And that requires local voters approval. And we can think about that local budget. Big picture is having sort of two primary parts. It's got the offsetting revenue. So that includes things like categorical aid. So specific aid coming from the state of Vermont or the federal government, tuition revenues, other things like that. And then it also has the other part, which is education spending. And education spending is really one of those factors that is used to adjust the local property taxes. Education spending for equalized people. You hear a lot about because that is the state, the local determined factor of how property taxes are adjusted in correspondence with the statewide deal. So unless funded by categorical aid or federal funding, personnel salaries, including teachers, fall into that district's education spending in Vermont. So as I mentioned that education spending for equalized people ultimately drives adjustments to the local homestead property tax rates. So I've got this all else equal here, because we've got the Education Fund and all these things coming and going, when we're looking at changing one thing, it's helpful to think, okay, if nothing else were to change, how would one specific change be reflected within the Education Fund? So if all else is equal, increases to teacher salaries would be borne by property taxes, right? Because that's that that adjustment that's used to make up the difference. And in a single school district, if a single school district increases its teacher salaries, its homestead property tax rate will increase accordingly all else equal. So that's sort of big picture mechanics of the Education Fund. I'll pause there if there's any questions about that before moving into comparisons. Okay. So I do want to just raise a couple of considerations when comparing and analyzing teacher salaries. I pulled some data from AOE from 20 and FY 20 and 21 and looked at average teacher salaries in Vermont, across all position, all categories, like pre K teacher, special education teacher, elementary school teacher, and I looked at what the average salary was for those different positions. And we see there's a range of about 55,500 for one category of teacher at the lowest end of the range, up to an average and the highest teacher category of 78,300. Senator hushy. Just a quick question. I'm curious how these the salary range compares to other people in Vermont. And do you happen to know what the median income is in Vermont in general? I don't have that number. I can certainly get it back. Go back to you. Great. Thank you. Senator cool. And categories not based on geography or anything like that strictly a difference in jobs. Correct. So I was aware of the committee's limited time capacity. So for the, for the the range of I, I just thought I could have also looked at geographies. I thought to look at, you know, pre K teacher versus a special education teacher. Yeah, thank you. And so there are, as you mentioned, Senator, a number of reasons why salaries may vary. It could be position, location, bargaining, agreement, experience, education level. I'm sure that the stakeholders are much better to speak to that than than I am. But it's something to keep in mind that variance of salaries. And just interrupt also, is there any guidance out there and statute that says of teacher that gives school board members and negotiators some kind of guidelines for to follow five year teachers should be at least making this is there anything in statute now around those kinds of guidelines that you're aware? I'm not aware of anything. But I would defer to my lunch council counterpart, Beth, who would be able to speak to that. Yeah. And then the other the other thing that I also in terms of considerations that I did want to raise is salary doesn't necessarily capture all compensation of an employee. Right. So teachers also receive non salary benefits like pensions and healthcare. So we also publish this data that in addition to the salaries includes benefits, benefits. So I did the same exercise that I did with salaries. And I looked at, okay, what is the average across all all teachers, including salary and benefits? And that was about 80,000. And then what is that range? And that range from 71, 900, through 101,000. So just keeping that in mind that salary is one metric when examining compensation of a of a teacher or personnel, but it's not necessarily only metric for looking at compensation. And senators, I think it's tomorrow in the next day, we are getting pension 101, just so everybody gets a sense of things are okay, great. And so then, so then keeping these in mind, I was asked to come in and talk about salaries. So I pulled from the National Education Association, they publish data that compares the average salary across the United States by state. And so yeah, so this is before adjusting for cost of living. So we have to keep in mind that, you know, living in Vermont versus living in Louisiana or California, salaries compensation might not go as far in different places. So this is before adjusting for that cost of living. So when we've got those numbers in front of us, we see that Vermont has the 19th highest average teacher salary nationally, and the third lowest in the Northeast. And I do want to include that caveat that this salary comparison doesn't include those benefits that I just spoke about. Senator George, are there any, I don't know, okay, but I think Scott will get some. Okay, very good. If anyone would like a mask, Mr. Moraz, then is there a please? Okay. So that's just to help us understand Vermont in the context of the nation, but this doesn't adjust for cost of living. So then, as an trained economist, I think, okay, well, we really should be also looking at the cost of living when comparing salaries, because that's another way to inform. So the cost of basic needs like food, childcare, everything that I know you're all well aware of, they vary by state. And so one way that you can compare salaries is using, you know, the living wage in each state. And an MIT publishes a living wage calculator, which uses the same methodology to calculate the living wage in each state. So it provides a helpful benchmark for us to think about how we can can compare salaries. So I compared, so I applied the living wage benchmark against all of the average salaries that we had published that I just I just presented in the previous slide. Um, looks as though my slide deck just went out on me. But I'm on slide six now. Okay. And I'm going to just reshare my screen. I'm trying to go through. I don't want to take into anyone else's time. You're fine. We're good. Okay. Um, you'll see my screen. Okay. Yeah, so so I just talked about adjusting for cost of living. And so then I took the same, the same numbers that we were just looking at, published by NEA, that are the average salaries across the country. And then I said, Okay, well, what if we compare for cost of living? And I didn't include any average salaries or wages on this page because that'll be kind of like comparing apples to oranges, it would be difficult to interpret. So instead, I just included the ranks. So where does Vermont rank within the nation? And where do other Northeast states rank within the nation? And then also where does Vermont rank within the Northeast? So as we saw those rankings here in slide four, we saw that one means that they had the highest New York at the highest average teacher salary in the country, right? 51 would be the lowest average teacher salary in the country. So when we come to the adjustment of cost of living, we see that Vermont has went after adjusting the 24th highest average teacher salary nationally, and then the sixth lowest in the Northeast. And once again, this is the same caveat that the salary comparison doesn't include benefits or pensions or or any of those other compensation. But that wraps up my prepared remarks. But I'm happy. Just to be honest, so from your research, did you ever touch on other pensions kind of in somewhat equilibrium between states that they're, they're kind of the same scale? That's an excellent question. I don't know. I would have to touch base with Chris, he's really the pension expert. Yeah, if you touched it. Any questions? Yes, sir. So have you seen any indication that when one school district raises the wages of teachers that there's a cascading effect that others do that? That's a that's an excellent question. I don't I don't feel that I could speak to those school districts decisions. I would defer to the people on the ground who are seeing how those school districts are making decisions. Just get a thumbnail sketch. If Vermont cost of living was like say pegged it want. How how does that relate to that New York? Like how how you know cost of living factor, you know, significantly, can you? Yes, sir. I know you use in your formula, you must have used a factor. I'm wondering how different? Yeah, so that's a great. That's a great question. I would say so the living wage, if there is a hot link, if you do go onto the website, you can play with the calculator. But essentially what the living wage is, is it says, okay, to support, you know, one adult with no children, this is the hourly rate that this hourly wage of wage earner would need to make. And then two adults are with two children. And so I pulled from the from the living wage calculator, all using the same assumptions. And then I divided that by the average salary to figure out how that broke up. And I will say I, I don't do this personally, but it our office JFO publishes a basic needs budget and a living wage report. So thinking about living wage, and what it can or cannot capture is certainly something that that JFO has thought about and worked on. So the teachers pension, is that all is that they're considered state employees? Are they all the same pension schedule? I don't want to speak with certainty. There are pension costs that are coming out of the education fund. I think it's but Mr. Robinson from the NEA is behind you Mr. Robinson, would you just mind responding to that question? Sure. First being our teachers part of are they state employees? And then yeah, so for the right, Robinson providing me a there are three pension systems and remind us the state employees pension system, the municipal employees pension system, the teachers pension system, there are three separate funds. The licensed teachers, including teachers, principals and superintendents are in the teacher system, school support staff, unlicensed school employees are in the municipal pension system. And so para educators, correct. Okay, our national pension system and then state employees are in the state system. As Julia mentioned, there are portions of the costs for the state teachers retirement system that come out of the education fund that she can speak clearly about what that looks like. I'm sure. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. This might be a question for the council. But do you know if any other states set a minimum salary for teachers? I don't know. I would need to look into it. I know that there are conversations that are happening at the federal level. But I haven't looked into that in more detail. And I guess the other question would be happy. This might be something we get might hear from our other witnesses. Is there something for the state employees where they are, you know, tagged at a certain level, they're for they manage this salary and then automatically in five years, automatically in 10 years, those kinds of increments, like a wait steps Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I would need to get back to you on on how that how that works at the state level. Would you mind doing that? Sure. Yeah, it could even be by email. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Senator Gullick. So this, you know, it's helpful. It's as we jump into this, and understanding, you know, what it's like to be a teacher, it's really helpful for us to understand what salaries look like, what the competition looks like. And like I said, we'll be digging into this with other witnesses. Do you know the lowest teaching salary in Vermont? I do not. Okay. I think Mr. Robinson may be able to share that with us. So thank you. Appreciate it. Yes. Yes, Mr. Can I get it? Let me rephrase it in my mind before I ask it. The teachers health care, they go through the same system as VLCT for the municipalities, they don't. Okay. The reason I ask that, because at the local level, part of the municipalities, you know, figuring the wages of their employees, they else, they, they have, they take their health care costs into effect. And even though they're not making a lot of money per hour, you factor in the pension or the actual pension contributions and, and the health benefits, that's significant. So I'm just trying to compare more different we have different systems. Yeah, no, you're asking the right question. It's for sure. And I thought that one slide in particular was helpful to kind of look at it from the pension help, you know, issue, you know, as a, as a compensation package, if you will. I mean, if it's a good conversation package, it might make us number one. Might. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. This was a lot of work. I really appreciate it. Yeah, happy to. I'll stay in the room in case there's any other. That would be great. Thank you. The order I have is Francis Nichols, Tinney, Robinson, you're not even out here, but whatever order you guys all want to go. Call it first. Yes. Call it in your own school meal. They eat up to the school meals. Oh, you're right. Oh, you're right. Oh, my God. That time's similar to my life. Okay, this is for Mr. Robinson. Don't worry. Oh, wow, printed copies. I know this email the last minute, but we got it printed. Appreciate it. I did. I didn't print it appreciate it. Wonderful. Mr. Robinson. Great. Thank you. So for the record, Colin Robinson, Vermont, NEA, and really appreciate the conversation, the topic. I want to sort of speak to the crux of the conversation first, but some of the other questions that have come up today, I'd be happy to speak to you as well. And I should make it clear. This is my pet question. This has been on my mind, teacher salaries, workforce development, kinds of things. So I just want to make sure that everybody. Yeah, absolutely. One of the powers of being a chairman. Absolutely. It's good. It's important conversation. So I want to start with a little bit of context and the report feel free to peruse it at your leisure. But by painting out the education workforce, and I'm going to talk about both teachers as well as school support staff. Because I think for many of the reasons that you've heard, we need to be having a conversation about both segments of our education workforce. I don't think it's going to be a surprise. Anyway, it's a female dominated workforce. 75% of teachers are female over 80% of school support staff are female. It's a highly educated workforce. According to the 2018 report that you have in front of you, about three quarters of teachers either have master's degrees or pursuing master's degrees in Vermont in Vermont. Yeah, this is Vermont. And actually nearly 50% of para educators in Vermont have bachelor's degrees. So you know, this is a highly educated workforce. As you just heard, I say they are compared to other peers with similar education levels. In Vermont, teachers are paid 86 cents on the dollar. So compared to other professionals with master's degrees, you get 86 cents on the dollar. You heard from Julius testimony, some information. The link is also referenced in my testimony to this national salary database that she utilized. But I think the key points there are that Vermont is really at kind of in the middle of the pack. When it comes to whether you're talking about average salary, but also starting salary, we ranked 26 in the country with a starting average starting salary of about 40, just over 40,000. For with the lowest starting salary in the 2021-2022 school year, being one SU or SD that had a starting teacher salary of $36,975. So that would be somebody coming in right out of school with no experience. If you aren't familiar with educator salary schedules, specifically on the teacher side, there's a whole schedule that overlays with years of experience and levels of education that folks move along as they advance in their career to reflect their years of service as well as their educational attainment. Is that like a statewide policy that everyone has to follow? No. So which brings me to kind of a final point. We have local collective bargaining in Vermont, right? We have local control, but at its base, collective bargaining is an arrangement between and a conversation and negotiation ultimately between one's employer and employees, right? And in the in Vermont's education system, we have, as we know, multiple school districts or supervisory districts and unions. And those are who the local teachers and school support staff negotiate with. So to that end, there are we have 72 local associations across the state. And each of those local associations, many of them are comprised of the support staff unit, because there's a separate bargaining unit from teachers. And they locally negotiate with their school boards over the terms and conditions of employment, including salaries and the salary schedules. I mentioned school support staff were 29th in the country in terms of our support staff wage. Annualized I didn't do all the really great sort of additional calculations that Julia did for inflationary or cost of living adjustments and the stuff and the like. Also just by way of reference on the education workforce, just generally, I think we know that the challenges the education workforce is facing predated the pandemic. Yeah. And also as a point of information, there's been a 50% decline in people pursuing degrees in education looks 50% over the past 15 years. So there are 50% fewer people entering programs in colleges and universities to become teachers. Senator Sheen, I have a question that I think is related to what you just described. I'm curious as to how much you think it's related to pay versus how much it's related to the work environment and the challenges with going into teaching because as it relates to the decline number of folks who are going into this and I mean, you know, I lived with a teacher for a number of years and just watching the amount of work that she did after hours and all the weekend and during the summer, just like it's incredible. So yeah, is it? Yeah, what's what are your thoughts on pay versus work environment? I think it's a totality of all of it. I don't think it's any one. And I think what essentially you're describing of kind of the working conditions, what we hear from our members is yes, and right, it's compensation as well as all the things that you've heard collectively as well as what you're describing, Senator. And so I think that creates a confluence of events that for folks who might be thinking about pursuing a career in education, like, okay, maybe I'm maybe I'm not, or maybe I'll pursue something that is perhaps a little different. I don't think it's any one. And to that end, I don't think that there is any single solution to how we build up our education workforce going forward. I think compensation should be a component for modernity and beliefs compensation should be a component of that. But by no means is it the totality of the solution. Senator weeks, study curiosity, just to really understand the numbers are is the ship towards para educators a strategic decision on the part of school, districts and such, or is it a reaction to the lack of teachers coming to the pipeline? I will, I think it would be great to hear from my colleagues from the principal and superintendents association since they're the ones who make personnel decisions. I do think as a general matter, school support staff and specifically para educators have provided a central role in our education system for a very, very long time. And I don't know that there's been a distinct shift one way or another. Okay, that's I do think that their student needs have become more complex. And one of the ways to ensure that students are able to access their learning is by making sure that there are folks like para educators, behavioral interventionists in the school environment to assist and support those students being able to access their learning so the teachers can provide the instruction that the students need and are there to get. And they might be able to provide some additional context for your question. Okay. So to that end, where do we go? I am really appreciative of this conversation. And I think that to Senator Campion's question earlier, there are some states that have gone the direction of kind of statutory minimum salaries. So in statute, it says in state statute says no teacher shall make less than X. I will say there is a I would say attention and potentially conflict in Vermont with that, because we have local control and we have local collective bargaining. And so what you see in my testimony is there are some states that have gone this direction, you'll see states like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, they have strong collective bargaining laws. Their statutory minimums are $18,000. I guarantee you there are no teachers in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Jersey who are making that assuming they're not some part of a full time, you know, maybe they're quarter percent or 10th percent of an FBE. Some other states have more robust salary numbers in statute because they're not collective bargaining states, right? So they have a different way of compensating teachers through non contractual arrangements that are set in statute. Now recognizing we can and historically in Vermont have set goals for our local districts to work towards most recently in the context of merging governance structures in act 46. The legislature in passing act 46 set out some specific metrics for districts to follow to attain governance consolidation and other educational quality points. And to incentivize local decision makers, local school boards and communities to make those decisions, they provided some tax benefits. So in conversations this fall with Representative Catherine Sims from the Northeast Kingdom recognizing that how do we sort of rectify this sort of tension perhaps with a desire or stated goal while recognizing local communities and local boards and local unions need to have the ability to make decisions and come to agreement locally. Could we honor that local control and local collective bargaining by setting out some statutory goals for bargaining a minimum salary of $50,000 for teachers, a minimum wage of school support staff of $20,000 that would then create if certain districts and as constructed in the conversations with Representative Sims, it would be specifically tailored towards districts that have high poverty rates and morality or sparsity that align with the new weights that are being implemented in fiscal year 20 beginning in fiscal years 25. So this concept that we're still working on I really want to thank Julia for helping Representative Sims thank that through is that for fiscal years 25, 26 and 27, the if the two parties the district and the educators at the local level through the normal collective bargaining process processes attain these minimum salary benchmarks in those targeted districts, poverty, morality, then they would be able to take a portion of the cost attributed to that salary increase and remove it from their local education spending calculation for taxing purposes. You remember the beginning of Julia's presentation she talked about kind of how things are sort of calculate education spending. So by creating a local exemption from education spending for a portion of that salary increase, it can create an additional incentive for the two parties potentially to achieve these minimum goals. So that's sort of a construct that we're working on right now and it's still in the formative stages, although I think we're getting closer to I think hopefully having something of substance that that folks can sink their teeth into. Senator Williams. So for my NEA have a strategic plan that covers anything just put through some dates up there. So we have a legislative agenda that incorporates a desire to move towards these sort of minimum thresholds through a construct like I articulated is on your web page. Yeah. And I believe it was shared with the committee when my when our Executive Director Jeff Fannin testified back to Jane Murray. Yeah, we can get you another. Yeah, those are. It was like yeah, of course, flying out. So I'm still getting there's a ton of information there. I wouldn't expect you to read through the 10 pages of things that are sort of the other associations. Do they have input into that plan or Well, I would say our legislative agenda is ours, just like their associations have theirs. But obviously, public policy conversations about things like we're here today are everybody's going to engage and I'm sure in so much as they desire to and would fully support and expect them to, you know, Senator. Yes, thank you, Chair. Thank you. I'm wondering this potential legislation that might be coming our way. Is there any kind of a precedent for that? It sounds really innovative in some ways. The I think the 46 in a way at 46. So I'm going to go under the hood here real quick. And the original construct that represents Simpson I talked about was a direct reflection of that 46, which was for folks who might not know was a a pending rate reduction over a phased in period that went from I think it's peak either eight or 10 cents down to two cents that gradually waned. In further conversations with JFO it became clear that especially with implementing new weights that particular construct could create some challenges and calculations. And so it moved to this conversation about exempting a percentage of the increase from the local education spending, which then because of how our education tax are calculated would have a positive or incentivizing effect on the local tax rates. Maybe a premature question, but curious if there's been any analysis done that if you set a minimum wage or minimum salary, teacher salary at $50,000 that the second order effect of the other teachers requesting bumps, salary bumps and what that does to the overall cost of teaching? So good question. And as a general matter, you know, as I sort of described, you have these local collective bargaining agreements, you have on the teacher side, as well as on the the non license educator side, you have a salary schedule. And usually the base does impact other parts of the salary schedule. So your question is in the correct and intuitive one, the specific impacts that would have would be part of local collective bargaining for the two parties to figure out what that would have. But might there be a financial model that based on experience that you drive minimum federal minimum wage make you drive up minimum wage and then that affects you have ripple effects goes across the spectrum of employee is record. Yeah, Julie, I think that way to pressure and is certainly something that has been looked into by people studying minimum wage for a number of different sectors, federally, state level with respect to a specific model, I would need to do a bit more research. I don't I don't know. Not it's not an ask. It's just when this if this becomes live, you know, it's it's it's not just the immediate effect. It's the second order. Yeah, for what it's worth. I think if we were to ever move in this direction, we definitely would have to really dig in and look at what the long what the implications would be. And I think it's a good point. I mean, we talked about this all the time minimum wage. If you raise somebody's salary to 15 an hour and they've been making 10, what about the guy or gal that's making 15? You know, what does that look like going forward? What does cost be? Yeah, and I think those are all absolutely fair questions worth exploration. I think some of the information that was provided by joint fiscal really points to kind of where we are in the context of the Northeast where we are in the context of the nation in terms of these salaries. And so understand there perhaps is a tension between those two. And if we're talking about attracting retaining high quality educators, in particular, in this context, we're talking about trying to do it in some of our ruralist most rural and highest poverty communities. Because this is currently constructed wouldn't necessarily be it shouldn't be accessible to some of the places where you think of educator compensation already being some of the highest in the state, right? This is an attempt to kind of level level up the one little final that let me just have Mr. Weeks jump in for 100 weeks. Oh, yeah. So just since you offered it in your in your data sheet, your your summary main stands out. It's kind of an anomaly. It's got a very high minimum. Yeah. Okay, but ranks quite low in its national average. It seems counterintuitive. I'm wondering what the experience is there that they drove it so high, but they're still it's not didn't have the resulting effect. Yeah. So great. Again, great question. It just they just went. Oh, okay. Yeah, this just happened. We don't quote me, whether it was six months ago, or 18 months ago, I don't know exactly. But it was in a very recent period of time when we're talking about being able to see these long term impacts on on data. Mr. Richter, do you have something not that you've done it, but is there something out there that you could provide center weeks and the rest of the committee with just around salary increases, minimum wage, what that would look like, you know, in a different would it look like in a different state some kind of something that you've already done for the legislature or there's something out there that just could help us start to get our heads around it. I will definitely talk to my colleagues at JFO. Okay, I don't work as much on minimum wage. Just being here. I'll touch base with a couple of our other analysts and see what we've got. Okay, thank you. And can touch base with you. My only final point and then I would gladly yield yield my time from here on out. Some of you might be familiar with former representative made it towns and she just she didn't run for reelection this year, but long time legislator. And she actually was Vermont a president back in the 1980s. And during the 80s, she to your point about sort of a strategic plan. 1980s. There is a campaign that she helped lead our members through as the president of our board called the up from 51st campaign. Because in the 1980s, Vermont's teachers were 51st in the nation. So, you know, we've obviously made a lot of progress since since that time. And but at the same time, we're still still sort of in the middle of the pack as we saw. But it's kind of an interesting little historical note. Good progress. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Great. Thank you all very much for taking the time. Yeah. Mr. Nichols. Good afternoon. Jay Nichols, executive director of Vermont principles association for the record. A couple of quick things related to what Khan said, and then I'll share any other testimony I have. So any weakening of our pension system, I think would really hurt us in terms of retaining teachers. Senator weeks asked a question about the pension system. A few years ago, maybe it was last year, we had to talk about plan that the treasurer had that was supported by the house and didn't end up going anywhere in the end. And that pension plan, we actually had shared with folks, government relations folks at the National Association of elementary and secondary school principles. And they said we would have the fifth worst pension in the United States. Have we implemented that? Now, we didn't implement it. We made some changes to I'm not sure exactly where we stack up now. There's certainly better than that. So it's something to consider. Because all the states around us have a better pension system or as good as ours. And they all have a lot better than ours. How do we go into the draconian plan that was before was we know no raises for cost of living or anything like that for people that retired from now going forward. So that that did get shattered down such as the house proposal that was house proposal last year was actually came from the treasurer, I think originally, that's right. Yeah. And Colin can talk more about that probably. But I just want to mention that. The second thing related to Collins testimony, he mentioned a number of people coming to the field. I gave you some stats on teachers teachers before coming in. If I remember right, it was around 176,000 people were coming into the teaching field into the colleges of education across the country each year. And now it's somewhere down around 86,000. Those are off the top of my head, but I gave you the actual number and testimony a week or so ago. Just want to share that. So for us on the minimum teacher pay. First of all, I put a link in here to federal legislation that someone is putting forward that would give teachers a base teacher salary of $60,000. I know if you're familiar with this or not, I don't think it's going to go anywhere. It's federal legislation. We would prefer to see something come from the feds with some federal support to pay for something like that work to come to fruition. But I put that link in there so you could read that article in Education Week. And I did mention I've discussed with this committee for my increasing concerns about the pipeline nationally and more specifically in Vermont and an increase in base teacher base certainly would be helpful to track the people of the profession and retaining some of our newer educators who I think are woefully underpaid. And that's true for parents too. I'm so supportive of the parents that I married a parent educator. That's how supportive I am with them. That's pretty supportive. However, the how we as a state would go about this without federal financial support concerns me even more than what at this point. So some of the questions I think that the General Assembly needs to consider. Where will the funds come from? If they're just added on to local budgets, it's going to increase the likelihood that budgets will be voted down. And this will especially impact the lease resource committee communities with policy worries me. Will local school districts be pressured to reduce services to students and other areas that they have to contend with increased teacher salaries? And is there some type of new revenue source that would be considered? And some thoughts, this won't be the most popular one, but maybe it's time to consider a statewide teachers contract negotiation, negotiation process on salary as we already do in healthcare. Maybe build a regional indexes that correspond with the cost of living in a given area. I know this flies in the face of local control, but with a statewide education funding system, which is what we have right now, maybe it's time we take a serious look at this. I also just did five minutes on Google and I went to Hawaii and I found out the statewide teachers contract. It's 108 pages long for the whole state for every teacher in the state. Burlington's is 80 pages long for one school district. I thought that was a little bit illustrative. We don't have anybody here from Burlington. So I just thought I would share that. So I think this is probably the longest. So that's why I picked on that. Maybe there's longer ones, but that's a pretty long one. And I think that any program that is designed should have a gradual implementation. So it's not to shock the system any more than necessary. And just want to finish by saying any questions you ask. We agree that starting teachers are underpaid in most parts of the state and calling it a good job mentioning support staff too. I didn't put that in my testimony, but he's absolutely right. That's an issue too. And whenever the economy is doing not so well and people are doing well, there's people that are out there that have other jobs that pay more money and we lose many paraprofessionals that say, you know, I can get out. For example, where I live, right next to where I live, there's a new store, a tractor supply store, and they paid more than any of the school districts do for support staff agents. So there's a number of paraeducators in those areas are saying, well, I'm going to work for tractor supply. I make more money. I got a full-time year job and I got health insurance, whereas in a school district, sometimes students do not offer full family health insurance for paraprofessionals. Many times, they only offer like a one-person plan. In some cases, they don't offer insurance at all. I also want to say that the average teacher pay in Vermont is better than the average pay of teachers in most other states nationally, but it's under the states that we compete with, of Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and excuse me, did I say Maine? I said Maine twice. It's under Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York. It shouldn't be Maine and slightly better than Maine to answer about the same. Do we have any idea? Not that I expected you to do this, but I do think our kids compete globally. It is interesting, and I know you do, too. Yeah. So what's happening in China? We did studies of Maine and Spath when everybody was doing that. Rebecca did a secretary of education, or definitely whatever she was called, commissioner. Pocke did a study and basically came out with a finding that if Vermont had been a country during that time, we would have been waking up like 10th or 11th in the whole world if we were a country. So, you know, what breaks up in terms of outcomes? In terms of outcomes, based on standardized test scores at the time, and that was based on 4th and 8th grade. I think it was SBAC and NAPE scores, but don't quote me on that, but that was an article in the paper about how that if we were a country, that's where we would have finished Vermont. So something to think about. Now, our scores have declined some in the last few years, at least as far as NAPE, and we're moving away from SBAC, so it's going to be hard to know how to compare apples to apples. And it's only one piece of data, but it's something to be mindful that Vermont always finishes. Now, Massachusetts, they're nine times than or yeah, yeah. Okay, so like Massachusetts, Vermont, I think the other one was either Pennsylvania, New Jersey, those three countries would have been in the top ten at that time, and that wasn't that many years ago. Senator Hesheen. Thank you. So, I have two questions. I'm curious about the geographic dynamics. You know, it's, you know, we're seeing that compared to the rest of the country, we're doing pretty good, but compared to our region, not doing too great. And, you know, when it comes to teachers, you know, looking for jobs and moving around, you find that they are tending to stay in the New England region, you know, like somebody from Connecticut, you know, if they're shopping around for a new job, are they looking in that area, or do you find that they're coming from all over the country or moving around a lot? I think it's a little bit of all three. I think we have, our society now is more of, in terms of jobs, it's much more mobile than it used to be, and that's true in every field. So, you see people that'll be like, well, I think I'll try teaching in Montana. I think I'll try being a nurse in Montana, or a healthcare worker in Montana, because I want to try out that place. But when we look at a region where somebody's choosing in New England and they have a choice between a job in New York and a choice between a job in Vermont, it's pretty hard for a new person, new teacher to take the job in Vermont when New York pays so much more in the retirements, you know, literally a third, at least better. You know, I have a friend who taught at Fairhaven, who was a, he's a little kiddie with my baseball camp when I was a coach, and he's now an administrator at Fairhaven, I mean, in Graniteville, New York. He went across the bridge and he got like a $30,000 raise in a couple years, and his retirements almost doubled. And so, and I don't know if we can compete with that, but whatever we can do to help, help keep people and retain people. Don, can you make a good point the other day that I always talk about attracting people, but the retention power is equal to his. Absolutely. New York doesn't tax Social Security. There are several states that don't tax Social Security. I can't be quoted on which ones. I think New York doesn't. I also think either Connecticut or Mass, one of those two doesn't. I know New York doesn't. Yeah. So that makes a big difference. It does make a big difference. Sure it does. And in my second question, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the contract negotiating because I hadn't thought of that or heard of that before. And I'm also curious what Colin might think. Colin's against it. Oh, yeah. Okay. Have many looking at it right now. You know, one of the things, one of the reasons why I think it's something we should consider is because it's a statewide education system that all kids should be given the same high level of teachers. And what happens right now is the poorer districts train teachers and they leave to the higher paying districts often, not all the time. But when I was superintendent of Essex, we wouldn't even look at a teacher that didn't have five years experience. When I was superintendent of Franklin Northeast, you know, we would grab teachers as they walked out of the college dorm or their diploma in their hand and try to, you know, throw them in the back of the car and kidnap and make them come teach for us because there were so few candidates. And so there's an advantage to places that are more resource. So I think that that is time to look at that teacher that's working in a place like Bakersfield or North Country or Albert, if anything, the job sometimes is harder in those places and it is in a place that's better resource. Yet we pay the teachers that are in better resource communities a lot more than we do teachers in less resource communities. And that doesn't really make sense to me. So I think it's time that we start looking at those things. I think that, you know, it's hard in a local control state to do that. And there's also the fear from the teachers union rightfully so that maybe then if the state's involved, the state will try to low ball teachers. And so that's a legitimate concern. We don't think teachers should be paid less. We just think it should be more equalized. A teacher that's in South Brompton that's making, let's say they're making $80,000, might be making $50,000 up where I live, and they might actually be working with more students with challenging behaviors and certainly more students that are coming from poverty backgrounds. And so there's an equity issue there too. That's one that we've never addressed as a state. He's coming in Friday. So I spent a lot of time in this new position to try to differentiate between the problem and the, and the symptom. The, the, the, the symptom that are, this is one of many symptoms that our state struggles to pay our teachers accurately in comparison to surrounding states. It's, to me, it's a symptom. The problem is that we don't, we don't have an economic engine like Connecticut and Massachusetts and New York and Rhode Island. It's difficult. It's not difficult to compare because it's, it's really, it's apples and oranges. So I, I just kind of reemphasize that I think we, we need to be taking a look at the problem and recognize the solution and recognize, recognize the symptoms, recognize solutions to the symptoms. But the real fundamental problem is the economy. And I think there's some truth to that. I also think that another factor there is, and this is a, you know, we've chosen to have really small schools in Vermont. And because of that, we have really small class sizes and smaller schools and smaller class sizes cost more money. And I'm not saying that's right or wrong. And, and we did add a necessity as a state when we first started public education in Vermont because, you know, they didn't have cars or anything like that. And as a result of that, you know, we have a lot of small schools. Act 46 has helped with that some, but we've got declining enrollment. And when you have really small schools, you know, it does cost more. And it's not like when you lose 20 students in school over a period of four or five years, you can just say, okay, we'll have one less teacher. Because those kids don't all come out of the third grade. They're spread out over the ecosystem. So that's, that's the factor there too. Yeah. Well, it might have been your testimony which kind of struck me one day is I think you mentioned historically, Vermont came from a roughly 2,000 schools. About 3,000. 3,000. Yeah. Okay. And we're down to about 480 schools. Something like that, but how you get it. What's the trend now? Is the trend like, have we kind of like hit the, what you might consider a low point in that consolidation or I don't know what the cost of consolidation, but in terms of the numbers, the census is predicting that we're going to be somewhere down to 60,000s. Right now, we get just over 80,000. So we're, we still have another 10, 12 years of losing students. Okay. So you're talking about student numbers? I'm talking student numbers, yes. Yeah. That's fair. Thank you. Well, the economic engine thing, it's real. It is. Helps us wreath sometimes sort of rethink then, all right. How do we attract teachers to this area? I mean, you know, what are, what are the highlights? That's a teacher campaign that we keep talking about. Yeah, well, that's right. The quality of life, how great this process is and those types of things. Yeah. Yeah. Which gets people here. Absolutely. It does. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes, please. So do you know the demographic of the age of teachers? I remember 15 years ago, it was predicted that we're an amazing population and that we didn't have enough healthcare workers. We didn't have enough nursing homes. And now we're here. We don't have enough. So, and I know there are a lot of people that are working in their 70s. So I guess we're going to look at the whole problem too. Is it going to get better? Because the population demographic, the age is going to change or are we going to lose another 10% of our teachers in five years? I think it was going to lose another 10% of our teachers in five years. So is it, is there data anywhere about this age demographic inside the teacher population, for example? The column might know the answer to that. I don't know. I don't know. He's not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. Ha! So you're going to say that? So I raise my hand. Oh, please, Mr. Robinson. Um, I can't speak to the specifics. However, the teachers pension system, the Vermont State Teachers Retirement System in their annual valuation does a comprehensive sort of snapshot of who's in the pension. And they're all licensed teachers in our public schools. And so there's a robust data set that talks about a bunch of demographic factors for participants in the pension system. It's not a perfect answer to your question, but I will try and find that slide in the, that'd be great valuation and send it along. That'd be helpful, yeah. Because I think, in my mind, the visualization of our population age demographic problem is this big bathtub between 20, 25 and then drops off and then rises back again about 45 or so. And I'm wondering if the teacher population to my colleagues point is similar that it's an older teaching. Right. Okay. Right. See you guys. Just, and just to weigh, weigh in on it too and comment on the retirement system, and he can correct me with my numbers around, but when I started in education, my understanding that we had something like six or seven or eight teachers for every retired teacher, and now it's almost a one-to-one relationship. So that's, that's scary too. Yeah. We definitely feels like we need some blueprint going forward, you know, bringing up with both, you know, Senator Williams said, looking at these numbers realistically, what is retirement going to look like, how can we prepare if all of a sudden things are going to boom drop off again? Yeah. Agreed. Mr. Robinson. I was just going to provide, I found one of the slides. Okay. So the average age of, according to the pension system, the average age of a teacher in the system is 45.2. And those are active members. Not, we're not talking about retirees. And that is a slight decrease from 45.3 in 2021. And if they have a nice chart looking at the ages by five year increments, and it has a nice kind of bell shape to it with the biggest kind of the 40 to 44, 45, 49, and 50 to 54 being kind of the peaks of the bell. Would you mind forwarding that to Hayden and he can share it with me? Thank you. Very well. One chair. Mr. Francis, do you think you can do this in five minutes? Is that possible? To the extent that I've ever been able to do anything in five, I'll try. I am, I'm the first witness on meals. So maybe. We're going to take a break. We're going to hear from you on this. And then we're going to take a break. We're going to come back and do about 15 minutes on meals. And then we've got to move on to some folks from UBM. Sure. That's all right. Jeff Francis from the Superintendent's Association. I'm not sure whether you'll benefit from the fact that I don't have written testimony or not. I ran out of time this morning because we had some unexpected events we had to contend with. Let me start by saying that everything that stood taking place in the conversation so far resonates with me. Because this is a relatively new topic and I didn't have a lot of context for the opinion from Superintendent's on this topic. What I did what I often do which is I went to 15 leaders in our association our 10 member Board of Trustees and five regional group presidents so that's about 30% of our total membership and I asked them what they thought and I presented them with a simple question which was a uniform standard salary for the entry level teacher. All 15 replied I had seven don't knows and this isn't in the question should we do this? Yeah, yeah. Seven don't knows two knows and six yeses. So that tells me that this is a worthwhile discussion that requires a lot more discussion. I then asked them to discuss really with themselves the advantages and disadvantages and the responses were instructive and they're consistent with what you've heard so far. There's a perception that there's a lot of inequity in our delivery system attributable to salaries and when Colin talks about communities that could be construed to be disadvantaged either because of morality or poverty. I think that that's a good point and if you if we were to map the starting teacher salaries in the state and that could relatively easily be done you'd find that the lesser salary are in the more rural areas or in communities that from my experience I know have traditionally had a hard time passing school district budgets. So the pressure on those budgets manifests itself in less access to resources and that shows up really in all aspects of what the school district is. So that's a that's a generalization but I think it would hold through if you examine it through data mapping and so on and so forth. I also wanted to comment because I'm short on time. I mean I find the notion that you would use an act 46 type incentive interesting because if you take a look at the goals of act 46 and I got them on my phone I didn't bring them with me but the conversation prompted me to look at them. The the first goal is to provide substantial equity in the quality and variety of educational opportunities statewide. That's a big aspiration for the state but I do think that when you think about the quality of the education delivery system you can draw some conclusions around the experience of the teachers and the capacity of the teachers which in some ways I think ties to salaries right. One of the things we hear and this was an argument that that the the school board association and superintendent association brought when you were talking about the bill last year for portability for teachers who had signed contracts. Yeah. And you know what we heard from places in the more rural communities was that they feared that legislation because they thought that the out migration of teachers that were in transportation proximity to centers of population would exacerbate the problem they had with retaining a high quality workforce. Right. So if you take a look at Franklin County to Chittenden County for example what we hear about is teachers will go to the northern tier Mrs. Floyd Valley and Franklin Northeast they'll gain experience and then they'll move to the Chittenden County area for dramatic salary increases. That's what we're talking about. So so the other goal of Act 46 that I wanted to mention and I'd be happy to come back and talk to you about this if you find that it's a worthwhile conversation was goal number three which says maximize operational efficiencies through increased flexibility to manage share and transfer resources with a goal of increasing the district level ratio of students to full time equivalent. My colleague Jay Nichols talked about our desire in the state to operate a lot of small schools and there's a lot of overhead associated with operating any school. So we're looking at with school facilities right now one of the challenges we have with school facilities are how do you maintain so too many buildings. So to the extent that you go down this road of discussing this and you wanted to use some sort of Act 46 type philosophy or operational practice in order to generate the money to increase pay salaries I think you can look at the systems that we have in the state and apply some kind of an efficiency test like did they do what was intended with Act 46 in terms of how they manage their organizations because places that have a larger compliment of staff even if they're serving multiple buildings have flexibility in terms of how they deploy that staff. The other thing that would be interesting to look at and I just by way of analysis is what happens with our staff with respect to declines in enrollment. Now if you ask me the question what's the current status I would say that the pressures on public education right now are so great that we're contending with a worker shortage because we don't see a need to diminish staff but if things were to normalize and you were able to pay people more to teach then you might be able to rely more on teachers and less on pair educators which is a premise of Act 173 in terms of what the overall quality of the system should be. So I mean the reason I say that this is a worthwhile discussion that needs more discussion is because just around this issue alone those are the kinds of things that you could think about and look into. In terms of sort of the simplicity what I heard from superintendents were they would favor an examination of our salaries for the most obvious reason which is you want to be able to recruit you don't want a district advantage or disadvantage on the basis of starting salary when you're trying to hire the best teachers. And and this was a point that Senator Weeks made I think the expectation should be that if you up the minimum that everything else is going to flow out of that. So you know I think the thought that I would leave you in summary is this is connected to everything else you're doing. I'm I will connect it to meals when I sweat my hats and it is tied to what's the organizational structure of the delivery system what methods we use to deploy our staff how we collectively bargain and you know if you for lack of a better way to say it now that health care is out of local bargaining if you take salaries out of local bargaining what are you then dealing with right. So one of the comments that I had from superintendents were this may seem simple but keep in mind that like some of the higher paid teachers in the state may only be working a seven hour work day and some of the lesser paid are on an eight hour work day. So you know even the length of the day comes into the conversation. I will stop here except to say if you want to pursue this further and I think it is worthwhile because we want to be competitive in the region and competitive within the systems in Vermont there's a lot to tease out and and the witnesses you've already heard from and me and people we can each bring to the table can inform the conversation but there's nothing simple about it. Committee I'm going to have to stop there just to get us back on track but I apologize we're going to take a five minute break right now then we're going to come back in the room and pick up your ideas. Yeah is it relevant to what we're talking about right now not necessarily school meals can I just make a quick comment? Yeah. Okay because I've been holding my thoughts for a while. Number one education is expensive we know that but we also know that educating kids saves money down the line right downstream we know that number one number two we like our small schools when we even whisper the word consolidation in Burlington we it's like no we love our small schools in Vermont. Number three it's really hard to have this discussion without mentioning the elephant in the room which is that when you're going to talk about declining enrollment you've got to address the fact that we have students going to private schools and we have public money going to private schools those are two things that if we're going to have this discussion we need to address as far as I'm concerned. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Okay so about five minutes and then we'll come back and we will jump in with school meals and I know we're jumping in here. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Welcome back to Senate Education this Wednesday February 1st Universal School Meals Campaign Mr. Francis eager to hear your thoughts and then Mr. Nichols and Mr. Tinney. Thank you. Jeff Francis from the Vermont Superintendent's Association thanks for having me here to take today to talk about school meals and the last testimony that I gave on the minimum salary I talked about a survey that I did because it was a topic that our organization had not delved into fully at this point Universal School Meals is something that we're well familiar with because of the deliberation debate that's ever last year. Yeah. So I tested my testimony which is simple with the same folks trustees and regional group presidents and really we're here to convey three points and I'll tell you what they are these are high level points and then I'll elaborate a bit and answer questions. The first is the position of the Superintendent's Association is that in Vermont we should continue to fund Universal School Meals at the state level. Last year we talked about whether we should be funding Universal Meals not because it's not a laudable and necessary pursuit but because of the utilization of dollars from the Ed Fund and the fact that peace school meals was in competition with some other state priorities I'll come back to that. The second point that I wanted to make is that the General Assembly should be looking for a new source of funds to pay for it so as to not put added pressure on existing revenue sources and the specific point there is last year money came from the reserves presumably this year there would be money in the reserves if you chose to use them that way but the reserves are not going to exist forever so if you rely on reserves for one or two years and then you don't have sufficient reserves to put into a focused program like Universal School Meals by definition there's going to be pressure put on other areas and because superintendents have to concern themselves with all manners of operations of local school districts it's hard for us as an association to say we're going to put this purpose above all other purposes and what our priorities are this year are facilities mental health and worker shortage we were just talking about worker shortage in the earlier session in the context of increasing salaries well if you were to increase salaries presumably the burden to do that would fall someplace so we are supportive of Universal School Meals and the provision thereof and one of the reasons why our testimony is that we should continue to fund them at the state level is and I'm going to pause here and say I do not consider myself an expert on this so people could challenge it they could amplify it they could clarify it but what I've learned in the time that I've been able to spend on the topic is that now that we've got School Meals integrated into the delivery system in Vermont and we do starting with districts that chose to fund them prior to COVID the federal resources that brought about the delivery of Universal School Meals it would be disruptive if you stop that practice in a couple of different ways one you would have places that would want to continue and if it wasn't funded at the state level it would in fact fall back onto local tax burden which we argued against in our discussions last year so that would be disruptive and there would be two some of the communities that have a harder time funding anything would be wedded to Universal School Meals that could be community pressure to stop on the basis of budgetary considerations alone that is too big a toll to take on the system for something as purposeful and useful as providing Universal School Meals so whereas last year I might have argued about a choice PCB mitigation for example versus providing Universal School Meals I think the fact that we are where we are in this process necessitates continuing what I don't want to have happen nor would my association is to not be able to achieve what needs to be achieved in terms of facilities improvements and I would include PCBs as a subset we don't know how much that is going to ultimately cost mental health which is going to require dollar investment presumably how do you contend with worker shortage so I'm not saying nor would I say elevate Universal School Meals among those other policy choices what I'm saying is we've got a good start on Universal School Meals we should continue to provide them and the General Assembly is going to have some tough decisions to make from a policy standpoint around how the funding comes ultimately where it comes from to do that so a month from now if you came in and said finite set of resources we have to make the hardest decisions what do you want to do now among Universal School Meals and some of the other priorities I'd say I've got to go back to my association and ask that but where we are today in terms of where we've come on Universal School Meals our position is continue to fund them but look for a source and I know that a source is a topic of conversation in this building and I'd encourage you to pursue that the last two points I'll make one is I know that we need to find a way to maximize the federal resources that are available and perfect the system with regard to how these meals are delivered so and I'm not an expert in this but yeah folks who are you know a piece of feedback that came from several of the superintendents when I tested those points in terms of our testimony they were like yes we still see problems with the free and reduced meal application and the following participation and how that results in title monies from a conversation that I had with Rosie Kruger it seems like we're on that in terms of figuring it out but we need to know in the field with a fair amount of authority how that's going to be done and that we can continue to maximize federal resources through however we're accounting for free and reduced meal counts and I'm not even sure I have the top terminology right but I think you know what I'm saying and the third thing is I guess it was just those main two points there's a third one I've forgotten it so I mean at this far they'll forget everything else I'll have happy to have them but a good point questions for Mr Francis I appreciate it yeah please so you mentioned going back to your constituents and potentially asking them to rank is that an exercise you think you'll do so that we can kind of get a sense of how they prioritize them? yeah I mean I we could do that I think that the way that they would prioritize though would challenge them because of the points I made about how far would come with the delivery of universal school meals right so it was a it was a there was a political contest around it last year because we were trying to utilize or trying to help the general assembly decide how to use the reserves and the Ed fund that they had available to them and that got worked out because there was larger reserve I think that direct answer to the question yes I could do that I'm hoping to not have to do it because I'm hoping that you'll find a revenue source for universal school meals and then we'll deal with the rest of it however we're going to deal with the rest of it yeah we're going to we will I mean this is going to go on I imagine for another couple weeks conversations with appropriations excess spending all that kind of thing right so but this is helpful yeah and if I might I guess my closing comment which will come as no surprise I mean we really want the general assembly to turn into facilities needs yeah because many of the arguments that are made around health safety stigma can be translated from meals to facilities including personnel in facilities like you're talking about how do we attract good teachers it's easier to attract teachers to work in a nice modern building than it is one that's antiquated mental health you know that's a very challenging issue there's going to have a lot of participants engaged and worker shortage to the extent you need money to incentivize things like teacher salaries for example it's going to require a resource so I'm not trying to be evasive I'm just saying it's a big we've got a lot of challenges Mr. Nichols do you mind jumping in I don't know thank you for the record Jay Nichols is the executive director of our principal's association again I'm not going to repeat any of the points that Mr. Francis and the superintendent just made my testimony is similar to what I was last year I'll give you a copy there essentially the principals are very supportive of universal meals for students our concern again is the funding source we do not want to see it be part of school budgets and the reason for that is because if it's a requirement it's part of a school budget and a school budget goes down schools cannot cut that so you might have a situation where you have kids who are parents have a lot of money getting universal meals while you're having to cut a reading teacher something like that so that's a concern and then in terms of off the Ed fund it's the same thing it's a property tax shift from our perspective and we think there should be a different funding source for it as we talked about last year and we are against anything being added to the Ed fund when we constantly hear pressures about spending too much money in the Ed fund spending too much money for education then let's not add things that are societal issues to the Ed fund let's pay for them out of the general fund or some other revenue source that's transparent open and straight to the point this is why we're doing this it's to pay for school meals for all students whatever that whatever that thing might be Senator I'm curious so cutting programs cutting teachers is that something that happened in the last year when this because excess funds were used for it didn't cost the school districts any money and during COVID it was paid for federally and we were hoping as was hungry for Vermont and everybody else that the feds were going to step up it was in the bill that the president put forward and it was part of the tradeoff of Joe Manchin wouldn't sign off on the the big bill on all the big bills what I call it and so I get taken out of the budget bill because in the beginning of that bill there was a whole bunch of money for school infrastructure and for paying for meals there was another bill we heard this morning an act before Congress that would do this but very little hope that it right and it'd be great if it did yeah I know that's a concern Senator Williams just wondering yeah we got to fix the problem in the state but we should probably think about how we engage the federal government yeah we'll be looking at that look yeah so this morning an act we had folks from Ballant Welton Sanders in ag talking about this issue a little bit in the farm bill and this popped up and you know of course they're sympathetic there's a bill in Congress right now that would provide universal school meals two of them voted for it last year of course Ballant wasn't there so she didn't vote for it but it's just they're not feeling terribly optimistic that it's it's gonna get through but for what it's worth the federal's allegation knows that it's something we would like to get more support on yeah January's I mean real points I mean I think joint fiscal is coming out today or tomorrow with the final numbers on what it has cost over the past couple of years yeah over the past year so that'll help guide us a little bit in terms of what's needed right absolutely I think it was estimated at 30 yeah we said like 27 28 that's what we thought but I think it's good because I think I've heard it might be less than that I don't know for sure I don't know for sure and we're willing to work with the AOA and folks on I mean Rosie on the you know the question form is universal income form or something that makes that process simpler but Jeff's got a good point Super Dennis I've talked to the same thing we want to make sure the state can draw down all the title monies that we possibly can that's a big support for a lot of our former schools the areas that have done I think California's done it New York's done it a few others this one paper that I'll share with the committee and we're going to hear from the researcher hopefully does show universal school meals and I know you're pro-universal skill school meals it's just funny do you improve test scores and has reduced incidence of bad behavior and you know Jeff made a point about facilities I teach a class on school ethics institutions and law or whatever for science and vice versa I can't think what it's calling anymore but for new people that are becoming principal before they become principal and there's a lot of research in there around lighting in buildings and attracting this of the building and how kids feel belonging and that helps to improve test scores so it's all connected could you send us some info on that yeah that'd be great for us to see yeah air quality another chance yeah I definitely could do that yeah that'd be great okay okay Mr. Tinney good afternoon for the record my name's Don Tinney 31 year veteran English teacher from South Harrow currently serving as president of Vermont NEA appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today as you consider legislation to make universal school meals permanent in all Vermont schools this important program has not only improved the health and nutrition of Vermont's children and youth but it's sent a clear message to every student we care about you I submitted formal testimony to Hayden earlier today so in the interest of time I'll summarize my main points this afternoon before war no one has ever accused me of being a fast talker we all know how important good nutrition is for good health throughout our lives and nourishing meal support adequate brain development and functioning for not just academic learning but for social interactions as well so nutritious meals are an essential part of the school day as the paper you just mentioned refers to when students are hungry they simply cannot concentrate on class activities students distracted by their hunger simply cannot learn because they cannot focus on their lessons and when students can't focus they tend to distract their peers thereby disrupting other students learning opportunities as you all know everyone involved in public education went above and beyond the call of duty to keep our students physically in school during the pandemic because we all know that school is much much more than just a place to deliver instruction students need to be in school for their mental health their social emotional well-being and their connection to the greater community all students must feel welcomed and safe and nurtured at school as I have said in earlier testimony every school must be a sanctuary for every student providing health the universal breakfast and lunch for all students is one of the most effective ways of achieving this goal because we have done this since the start of the pandemic not only do we know how important it is but we also know how doable it is at our fall district meetings around the state this year the consensus was clear that Vermont educators want to see universal school meals become permanent removing the stigma attached to the free and reduced system has made a world of difference for many of our students why would we go backward the universal school meals program is working our educators see the direct benefits in assuring that their students are not going hungry as a third grade teacher in her 23rd year of teaching said to me just this week universal school meals are a godsend nourishing our students satisfying their hunger and quenching their thirst is as important as delivering academic instruction universal school meals contribute to a student's sense of belonging to the greater school community which enhances academic achievement Vermont NEA stands in full support of universal breakfast and lunch programs in our schools because this nutrition program is as essential to the operation of a school as books, electricity, adequate staffing up to date technology and well maintained buildings we believe the cost of universal school meals needs to come out of the state education fund without attribution to any specific district then spread across the full-led fund for tax purposes our national leadership including president Becky Pringle are all working diligently at the federal level to find additional funding for universal school meals throughout the nation thank you and happy to answer any questions committee questions from Mr. Teeny should we recognize I'm under five months yeah I was yes no you go ahead no no please well I have more of a comment I apologize it's not really a question but this is such an important issue you all know I was a teacher for many many years and I completely understand the importance of food and well fed children I'm also I think the only person in this room who went through a school closure and the trauma that accompanies that I ran my campaign based on construction school construction and fixing our school buildings and I'm not gonna let that die it was extremely traumatic for our students our parents our community to lose the school and you want to talk about stigma we have kids going to school in a Macy's we have a Michael's core cafe it's called Michael's course you know album all over the place and our library is an issue department so as we really need to be thoughtful about this this is really important but so is so are buildings that are safe that are inviting and then are not stigmatizing because what we have right now is stigma kids who walk into Burlington high school feel the shame their neighbors are walking into for example CBU a nice updated school this is important stuff and we're gonna have to really dive into how we're gonna pay for this because it's extremely critical and I mean you can you can see I'm emotional about this because it was a real blow to our community and I don't want it to happen to any other community in the state so thank you for listening I was just just saying it's not I hope we're not framing this as an either or or situation and like that when we're in the mindset of scarcity that we start either or but I think we need to approach this sort of mindset of abundance as we're talking about our children all of our children and I absolutely agree that the physical building does matter and we know that to Mr. Francis's point it does matter for teacher retention that people don't want to stay in buildings that are not kept up we have we have educators who are told to use the latest technology they have one electrical outlet in their classroom right so it's that extreme like I also just hope that we can all work together on this and that we don't vilify those who might have a difference of opinion or a different way of looking at it or is someone who is in search of a different answer there's there's a lot of pressure right now and I just hope that we can all work together and and respect each other yes yeah thank you very helpful thanks yeah Mitty any other questions before Mr. Tinney departs lots of opinions thank you thank you professors Schultz in Reardon how are you good thank you very much yeah thanks for joining us professor Schultz is an associate professor of special education at Northern University Northern Vermont University and Rick Reardon is the director of Castleton Center for Schools at Castleton University and we appreciate both of you coming to senate education what we are just trying to make our way through a little bit is teacher education we've talked today a little bit in committee around teacher salaries how to attract teachers we're hearing that not as many Americans are going into the profession we're also interested in figuring out ways to maybe which already exists but streamline some of these kind of certification programs we know you can go I believe the NEA and the Principal Association to Virginia Association has directed us sometimes to these sort of portfolio reviews with colleagues all sorts of things so but we've also heard two years ago I'll be frank we had two teachers in here that said in that we never asked them what college university they went to I want to be perfectly clear for all we know they came from the University of California Los Angeles but there were two Vermont teachers that said listen folks we never learned how to really teach reading and writing and so we put together because of that and other factors a literacy bill that we're going to learn more about in the coming days but we thought the two of you could just give us a sense of what it's like to educate a teacher today in the 21st century at our Vermont institutions of higher education so with that I don't know which of you would like to start I've got Mr. Professor Schultz on the list first and I'm seeing from Ms. Lavasser who is the silent vice chair of the committee sometimes please go ahead and Mr. Professor Schultz all right thank you thank you everybody let me just preface this by saying that I tested positive for COVID this morning uh so I am not at my peak of eloquence today so please please please bear with me as I as I'm talking through this forgive forgive me any stutters so again my name is Dr. Rob Schultz I'm the professor of special education at Northern Vermont University Johnson which is soon to become the Johnson Campus of Vermont State University and I'm very pleased to speak on behalf of Vermont State in regard to our undergraduate programs in education at the university I'm going to just talk through a bit about what we offer what we're going to offer in the next in the coming years and then I would be happy to answer questions on any specifics that I didn't touch on so just as a refresher this coming summer the four former state colleges Johnson in the Moyle County Castleton and Rutland County Lyndon and Caledonia County and Vermont Tech which has multiple locations but which has its main campus in Orange County are combining into one institution of Vermont State University as part of this unification the undergraduate education programs which previously were completely separate at the different campuses with different courses of study different state Ropa approvals have combined into one unified department with one program of study which will be consistent across the campuses and I'm excited to tell you about the different education programs which will be offered to the future teachers of Vermont and what that means for our workforce so first at the elementary or kindergarten to sixth level Vermont State University is not doing separate elementary and special education training programs but rather one inclusive childhood education degree where all students will graduate with both regular and special education endorsements this is a program which has existed at the Johnson and Lyndon campuses to great success and which is being adopted across the VTSU whereas in many teacher ed programs special education is an optional credential or an add-on to an education program at Vermont State it's a core component of the education that all elementary education students receive our courses integrate special education and regular education content preparing our students to teach all of their future students in the senior year the students do a full year in public schools with time divided among regular and special education to get them hands-on experience in both areas in this way everyone benefits so our graduates are better teachers who have double the available job opportunities and with special education being an area of dire shortage in the state the pool of qualified candidates for those positions is increased and that's something that we're that we're very proud of in addition I'm sorry Professor so you're seeing an increase in applicants that's great yeah yeah our elementary numbers are are looking pretty good they're looking they're looking they're looking steady and certainly the number of graduates with special education certifications has dramatically risen since we've put this program into place at the Johnson and Linden campuses it's coming to Castleton beginning next year in a brand new program that's which is designed to begin next year with the launch of the Vermont State University we'll be introducing a complimentary program in inclusive adolescent education for teachers who are looking for endorsement at the high school level use your traditional high school math teachers high school science teachers etc the program is similar in that it integrates the special education content with the secondary instruction to prepare teachers to work with all students in their content areas which is sorely needed in Vermont schools due to the larger course needs of majoring in a content area for instance you have to be a biology major to be a biology teacher you have to have a full math major to be a math teacher in addition to the education program these students won't get a special education endorsement upon their undergraduate graduation however the program is designed so that they only will need six graduate credits after graduation to earn that endorsement meaning it's creating a clear path to adding more special educators and to steering our new teachers towards additional professional education when they're in the field and we're very excited to launch this program we feel like that's been a need we've focused on the inclusion for K-12 I'm sorry K-6 teachers for a long time and it's time that our high school teachers received this similar preparation and so we're very excited to launch this and finally aside from elementary secondary and special education Vermont state will also offer endorsement in other areas of need one is what we refer to as the unified arts these are the teachers for specialty fields such as phys ed and art these programs are not going to be offered at all campuses like the other ones that I mentioned will but they're specialized to the expertise of the faculty at different campuses so for instance phys ed and music will only be at castleton while theater arts will only be at johnson and relatedly the Vermont tech programs for industrial arts and other career and technical education programs will continue their good work from the Randolph campus and also our very successful early childhood education programs which have been extremely successful especially out of the linden campus in trying to meet those preschool both public and private needs are going to continue both again both for public preschool programs and private practice and I feel very entitled to speak for all of the education faculty at the state colleges when I say that we're excited about the unification and what our programs mean for both our students in the state our data shows that the majority of teachers in the Vermont state college teacher ed programs are from Vermont and stay in Vermont and so we in the state college system have a great deal of influence I think on how our schools are going to perform looking forward you know and we take those responsibilities seriously and our plan is to continue to graduate the best teachers we can to serve to serve the students of Vermont and so that's the overview of what we have going on and coming up in the next year for the Vermont state colleges and I'd be happy to answer any other questions or more specifics that you'd like to know well first of all thanks for doing this especially you know be feeling under the weather we really appreciate it I just want to clarify so it sounds like with the unification somebody that's going to leave Northern University Northern Vermont University or Castleton University is going to basically be the same quality of teacher same kinds of requirements same kinds of rigor all that kind of thing unlike me that we've heard main is yeah okay did you say that's the plan yeah in the past each campus had its own program and they were yeah dramatically different and they did dramatically different things but they should be they should be quite standardized and a teacher coming out of Castleton going to a Rutland school a teacher coming out of Johnson going to a Saint Alvin school they should have the same preparation and the same content did you say that people teachers that need to teach at high school whether biology or history they're getting a biology degree also yeah so for licensing purposes elementary teachers and special educators they can major in education only and that's a well that's a robot that's that's a state rule thing and they take courses in what they teach no they take history courses and and English courses but they can major in education but if you're going to be a secondary teacher you have to major in that content area and biology is a huge degree I don't know if anybody in your and your committee majored in science it takes a lot of effort and so it's it's not as much room to do additional education courses as there is for you know elementary students great professor Beardin would you like to to add a few words and then talk with us a little bit about your work certainly first Rob nice job being under the weather very similar to what's happening at Castleton so I'm the director of education at Castleton so I play two roles really there I helped to support the education faculty with the work that we do in education licensures so our pre-service work but I also direct the Castleton Center for Schools which provides professional development for practicing teachers and that's kind of the role that I wanted to kind of talk about today so our center has been around since 2002 and we offer institutes and trainings symposiums independent studies workshops and over 350 graduate level courses a year for Vermont teachers support staff and administrators and the the center is a result of a vision from our former president Dave Walk who wanted to provide some rigorous and relevant professional development opportunities for what he called the lower half of the state where he sort of felt the opportunities were scarce so we started out 20 years ago offering maybe 20 25 courses a year to a few local districts and now we have a presence in all 14 Vermont counties impacting the vast majority of the state's 300 plus schools teachers and other educators use our coursework for re-licensure they use it them to add to a teaching endorsement they might want to use them to move along their district's salary schedule which typically tends to be credit driven as well they might use them as electives to jump into a degree program and probably most importantly they use the courses that we provide to improve practice so at the center for schools we typically try to look at the provision of professional development for teachers along a continuum and that continuum starts with pre-service which Rob did a nice job of describing what typically happens for our pre-service teachers what we try to do at that point when students get hired out of our programs is to support the induction the mentoring the coaching the ongoing professional development their opportunity to earn an advanced degree through the coursework that they take and so that's the connection and we try to make we try to bridge the learning of pre-service teachers with continuing at opportunities for practicing teachers once they're hired some of the courses that we offer and the professional development that we provide are specifically intended to address things like induction and mentoring and coaching we are partnering right now the agency of education to help with the mentoring project for brand new special education teachers some of our courses are used for professional development that's typically aligned with their district's continuous improvement plans and then other courses as I said before transferred into graduate programs upon matriculation so I did want to mention the sort of working toward an advanced degree aspect of the continuum that I had mentioned previously and my center's role there because I think this part of the work we do tends to get varied in the lead when we talk about the center so there have been many occasions when in my role as director of the center I've marketed degree programs to course participants and many of them eventually decide to matriculate into one of our graduate programs in special education or educational leadership or educational research and then they transfer those courses they took with my center into those degree programs for instance in the last two years we have run a cohort of 29 teacher leaders out of the northeast kingdom in Rutland city through our master of arts in educational leadership program with principal endorsement following the connections I was able to make through the center role that I play and right now there are two additional cohorts of 21 teacher leaders out of the SVSU in Bennington and Bennington Rutland supervised reunion that are part of our current cohort of principal candidates and I would tell you that given the shortage of principals in the state we now have 58 candidates in our current leadership program at castleton we are also very proud of the professional partnerships that we have with Jay at the Vermont principal's association Chelsea and Jeff at the VSA Jeff evidence at the curriculum leaders association Darren with the special ed group many of the staff members of the agency of education are partnering with us and we have a lot of early childhood partners as well like building bright futures and let's grow kids because of the early childhood educators institute that we facilitate every year and have for the last seven years so I think what we probably do best at the center is to listen to the field and try to respond with proposed support options that meet the unique needs of of and the pressing needs in the schools so like for instance right now we're working with Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union on offering a series of five behavior support courses for a number of their staff members who are working with students with some pretty significant behavior challenges in their schools and down south in the SPSU where we facilitated some book studies and some other professional development helping their staff and administrators understand the challenges and the rewards connected with including kids with disabilities in general ed learning environments I also sit on monthly meetings with the assistant superintendents and the directors of curriculum down here in the southwest quadrant of the state those are the folks who are in charge of professional development in their districts and I try to respond to their individual and collective requests for professional development some of that professional development is offered across multiple districts we call that points of commonality and some of it is offered specifically to a school or a district with a unique need so we are convinced in our little center that the model of listening to the field and working hard to present to be to be present in the schools to get a feel for the culture of those schools and the inner workings of those schools works really well for us so we plan even with the merger to make sure that we maintain the opportunity to continue to do that and before I take questions I wanted to also sort of very quickly comment on Rob's presentation of the dual endorsement with special education I'm a 19-year special educator special ed director special ed professor myself and living in Vermont and knowing how inclusive we are the fact that our teachers will be able to leave with a dual endorsement where they're going to be able to teach kindergarten through sixth grade or kindergarten through eighth special ed is an incredible benefit for them they may not ever become special educators they may teach third grade their whole career but to have that additional knowledge base of how to support kids who struggle and differentiate scaffold learning to walk out with those additional skills is incredibly incredibly important and we're so thrilled at Castleton to be able to sort of brag about that new program as we move to becoming merged and so I love as Rob said I love the idea and I love the fact that it may make them doubly marketable but beyond that is a special educator they're better informed of what happens in general ed settings and as a general educator they're better informed about what support looks like to level the playing field so I'll stop there so with your dual role the special educator in the general education is there any recertification any plans for recertification for the ones that want to keep that certification but don't actually teach in special ed? Yeah well we're going to highly recommend that they continue to keep their certification up so when they leave they'll have current licensure for seven years and if they want to open up they want to keep their options open down the road the best thing they can do is to continue to take a course or two in special ed as they're moving their way through their career and then when it comes time to recertify they're going to recertify K6 but we also ask them to consider recertifying in that area as well Do you both be willing to send your written testimony to us? That would be very helpful as well as I don't know if it's going to be a photo copy from the course catalog but I'd like and I'd like the committee to see that trajectory from arriving as a first year student to graduation what courses you know what the options are what a what a teacher's going to graduate with whether it's elementary or high school special ed just special ed or you know the a sort of additional six credits that you've been referencing Would you like that for all programs music and you know tech too or just for the academic programs? I think just the for me just the academic programs that would give me a taste of it yeah yeah that'd be great okay any other questions for either professor Griebner-Scholls thank you both for joining us this is very helpful you're very welcome good luck for the rest of the day thanks we'll be back in touch if we have additional questions okay thank you thank you that's exciting too endorsement I like that who wants a quick ice cream break yes okay what? come back in five minutes welcome back to senate education we're going to continue our conversation now on teacher education with the dean of the University of Vermont College of Education and Social Services Professor Katie Shepard and so I see and the the chair of the department professor Kimberly Beness we really appreciate the two of you being with us what we are trying to just get our head around our heads around is what does it look like to be come a teacher here in the state of Vermont we just heard from our state colleges what their programs look like and we wanted to hear from the university as well a little bit of what that path is from arrival to graduation we've also heard it's not anecdote we've heard nationwide statistics that fewer people are going into the profession like to hear what university is seeing if that is true it doesn't seem to be true with our state colleges sounds like applications are pretty robust and then a little bit around elementary school teacher versus secondary school teacher and then special ed so with that I know you have some prepared testimony which we have in front of us and we'll turn it over to the two of you Thank you so much we really appreciate the opportunity to be here today and to share with you what we're doing at the University of Vermont and also I think to engage in potentially a longer term conversation about the issues that you're raising including how it is that we're preparing our educators and how we might approach what we do see in the field as a growing teacher shortage and I'll come back to the issue of what we're seeing in terms of applications at UVM like the state colleges we're holding pretty stable in terms of applications and interest and we have a few concerns that I'll share a little bit later so the prompt we received did ask us to give you a bit of an overview of teacher preparation and then maybe to touch more specifically on preparation as it relates to literacy across the different grade levels and bands so that's where we'll start and then we'll be glad to take questions at the end we're really interested in what you're hearing and seeing and wondering about as well so again thanks for having us here and I should say before we start that both Kimber and I are special educators by training so we happen to be in leadership positions but we both come from the field of special education and I started my career as a special educator at the Duxbury Elementary School in Duxbury, Vermont which of course no longer exists so perhaps that dates me a bit but anyway those are my roots and those are important to me as we think about teacher education so to start just at the big picture level UVM does provide state and nationally accredited teacher education programs we're the only nationally accredited program in Vermont we're accredited by the council for the accreditation of educator preparation and at the undergraduate level we have a number of licensure programs across pre-K through 12 so those include early childhood education elementary education middle level education and secondary education we also offer some additional licensure pathways through a minor in education for cultural and linguistic diversity and then we have accelerated master's programs into special education and that includes both early childhood special education and K-12 special education we are also well on our way to developing a new major in special education which we've not had before and that will cover P-K through 12 with options for students to specialize at different grade bands so we're very very excited about that our graduate level programs include programs in special education reading and literacy at technology school library and media science to name our primary ones and then we have a couple of graduate level certificate programs many of which are accessed by teachers so they don't lead to licensure and those are our resiliency based approaches certificate and our education for sustainability certificate then we have a set of master's and doctoral programs again these are not only accessed by teacher educators but they do they are accessed by some teachers and they certainly help to build our leadership pathways in Vermont so those include a master's degree in educational leadership a doctoral program in educational leadership and policy studies and a brand new PhD that will be launching this fall in social emotional behavioral health and inclusive education so you know what does it look like when our students come in they are taking typically a set of core courses for their first year and we're working on we're actually in the middle of revamping and revising and updating our core courses but those core courses bring together all of our teacher education candidates so regardless of which major they intend to pursue or claim at the time of admittance or may transfer into after a while they do get some common common content and curriculum so they currently are all taking a course having to do with students with disabilities as well as a course that talks about multilingual learners and related race and racism issues once students leave that well and along with the core courses in our college first year students are taking a range of distribution requirements across the university so the majority of our students will try to satisfy a lot of those general ed requirements in their first couple of years so that they increasingly focus on their education courses so about our students take approximately a third of their courses outside of the college of education and social services and we believe this really contributes to them being well-rounded students as well as students who develop expertise in particular content areas which of course is really important for our secondary ed students all of our licensure programs include multiple practicum opportunities so shorter term experiences in schools as well as an intensive semester long so that's 13 weeks student teaching experience in a school some of those schools are here near us in Burlington and Manuski and surrounding communities and then we have students placed out in in areas such as Mount Abraham the Bristol area Waterbury and further beyond that and we're very proud of our relationships with our school partners we've hired over the past few years someone whose sole role is to develop those partnerships and really take a look at our placements and make sure they're very high quality so our students in order to become licensed they complete all the course and internship requirements that I've just described additionally they need to pass the Vermont licensure portfolio which I'm sure you're well aware of and demonstrate satisfactory performance on measures such as the praxis or the praxis core we do have a rather significant number of students who come from out of state so that's just an important thing to remember about our programs somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 percent of our students are out of state students that's a lower level than the university as a whole but that's important for us because we do need to pay attention also to other standardized assessments that they may need to take in other states so we're attentive to that and have a director of teacher licensure who helps with that keeping track of all of that so on to a little bit more about literacy and how that works how we're preparing our teachers to engage PK through 12 students in all forms of literacy once students have taken the core courses I describe earlier they do begin to specialize according to the grade or age level that they're working with so of course our students in early education will learn different techniques and strategies around literacy than those who are secondary ed students but I think across all of those programs we emphasize the use of evidence-based programs we pay a lot of attention to ensuring that our students can differentiate between what constitutes an evidence-based program or intervention as compared to a program that may not have a robust research base Professor Shepard I just want to interrupt for a moment Senator Bullock has a question sure Hi yeah thank you for taking my question thank you chair I just wanted to ask about literacy I was on the Vermont Literacy Advisory Council and we've been talking a lot about literacy in here and I know the House is also talking about literacy and I know I'm bringing up a potential can of worms but there seems to be a general sense that whole language instruction hasn't been super successful and when you look at our literacy scores they're not great and one of the things we heard over and over again from teachers is I haven't been trained in how to teach phonics I don't know how to teach phonics and we know that that is a method that is as you said evidence based and seems to be quite successful I'm wondering if at the college level in terms of teacher training is there more training now or will there be around phonics instruction I would answer yes to both of your questions and it is something we're looking at and you know Dr. Vanessa and I are both as I said special educators by training which means as part of our training we both are well versed in phonetically based and structured language approaches to teaching literacy so that's something that's very much on our minds and where I was heading with the different levels I would say it is the case currently that our students in early education and elementary education are getting probably a larger dose of that of those approaches to reading than we are could guarantee for our middle and secondary level students partly that's because of the reading demands that are are in front of kids depending on what age level they're at so obviously early reading foundational literacy those phonetics based approaches are going to be more critical at the early education and elementary school level but that said we certainly know that not all students acquire those skills and so we are very much focused on particularly our students who are identified pre-k through 12 students who are identified as having a disability we're very much attuned to preparing our teachers to address those needs so I would say what's what is true at the at this time is that our students who also specialize in special education will get more content area around structured language and literacy programs including phonics based instruction whereas our students at the secondary level are tending to engage with literacy approaches that are more discipline focused so we are introducing I would say everyone to a broad set of skills and understandings of different approaches to teaching reading but we are not we could probably find some differences across grade levels and have those play out I want to Thank you and I just wanted to reiterate and I know you know this but it seems like it's true that reading phonics instruction should not be limited to students who have special education needs and should be available to all students because we know that not all students will learn in the whole language model so I just just want to make your plug Thank you so much No I appreciate that point and I agree and and I think you know we we are concerned about the gaps that we see in performance in our Vermont students and nationally and we're you know especially concerned because those gaps tend to differentially affect students with disabilities students who experience poverty and and to some extent multilingual students so we are very concerned about this and I think we're interested in engaging in this conversation and we've been we've had a few conversations not lots yet but we are aware of the bill that's being prepared at the house level so I'll just say a couple more things maybe about literacy so your point is very well taken I think it's also important to say that we do think about not so much whole language but a holistic approach to literacy so we are thinking about for example our multilingual learners may need some different strategies than students who whose first language is English we are we also do talk a lot with our students about the ways in which socioeconomic status culture language play into literacy development for all students and to some degree sometimes that means those students have assets that for example multilingual students have some assets that single language students don't have but we are we are asking our students to think about how a student's background and culture and home life also affects their their literacy approaches skills and acquisition levels and again as students as our students go up into the upper levels middle and secondary levels in addition to literacy and making sure that all students can actually read at the word and sentence and paragraph level and so on we are also talking about approaches that emphasize motivation executive functioning and again these critical and sociocultural views of reading so I think that is important to to to know and and yes I agree with you that you have to you have to be able to access any kind of text in order to become a very critical reader or a reader who can comprehend very complex text and one last word on sorry missed one point of my points one last word on our multi-lingual learners we do ensure that our students who pursue our minor in cultural linguistic diversity take a course in reading and writing that emphasizes the the WIDA standards that that apply to those multi-lingual learners so I think again I just want to to emphasize that we we are attuned to increasingly so really making sure that all of our teacher education candidates as well as our leadership candidates you know are I have a deep knowledge of what evidence-based approaches mean how how something is deemed to be an evidence based approach and to some degree how how our new teachers can learn how to approach perhaps a teacher in a classroom or a school-wide approach that doesn't appear to have a good evidence-based so one one thing that I think we all need to think about with you all is there are many things we do at the pre-service level or when students come back to us for graduate education but as you mentioned I think in your opening statement we've also got to think about what's going on in our schools and how we bring bring professional development to to current teachers which in turn helps our new teachers practice in the very best ways possible and we do you know along those lines another piece we are try to expose our students to and and have them placed in in schools where this is prevalent we're interested in having students understand Vermont's practice of the use of multi-systems multi-tiered systems of support and have them understand how if you've got a student who's struggling to read in your classroom and the you know what who are the people that can help you what kinds of interventions are helpful how do those interventions get delivered let's say for an older student who still needs a more direct or explicit explicit instructional approach so I think I'm getting close to the end of what I wanted to say but I do I do think it's important for you to know that we we are concerned about teacher shortages one of the things and Kimber can talk more about this we have been partnering with the agency of education with the state colleges and with some of our local administrators around the teacher shortage issue in in Vermont particularly around special education teacher shortages and one example of that is we Vermont has become technical assistant site for a federally funded project called CEDR C E E D A R I won't be able to give you the full acronym but it's collaborative and effective teacher education and but that technical assistance project has brought us some resources has brought us to the table with our partners in the state system and I think that's been a really exciting opportunity and the Vermont higher education collaborative is included in that as well and so we are trying to be creative in thinking about how we can address teacher shortages provide necessary coursework for teachers who may be on provisional licenses and do that in a way that makes it possible for those who are interested in becoming teachers in Vermont to do so efficiently without sacrificing quality so that's another sort of area that we are paying attention to it's not the university's responsibility like it isn't Middlebury's or Bennington's or St. Mike's but I am curious how much is the university in our public schools you know I mean I love we see in Boston other cities sometimes universities are really in our schools and I understand that you're in the schools by educating our teachers etc but it could be argued I'm not making the argument but any school around the University of Vermont just an incredible institution of higher education should be top notch because of the access the the standards the access the rigor just you know the the power if you will the university you know the ability to educate people yeah not being as articulate as I'd like to be but I think you get a sense of what I'm trying to get at in the United it'd be like you know what's the elementary school next to Harvard University if it's not doing well I think we should ask Harvard to get a little bit more involved I couldn't agree more and I'll let Kimber answer part of this question I'll just start us off by saying absolutely we're we're obviously quite deeply engaged with the schools where we have student teachers who are placed in those settings we also have a number of engaged research projects that are in our local schools as well as in some of our rural schools but we have many opportunities to expand those partnerships and one of the things I think is really exciting about where UVM is as an institution is I think our current administration has really emphasized our land grant mission and as challenging all of the deans frankly not not just me but all of the deans to think about what are the partnerships we creating outside of Chittenden County in particular and so you've probably seen news of the new Institute for Rural Partnerships that's been established at the university this will offer us some new ways and some new resources that I believe will help us do a better job of partnering with our schools across the state I also think that as a new dean I'm very interested in thinking about how we can partner with UVM's 11 extension offices because again we are in some parts of the state but we're not we're not as ubiquitous as we should be so I do believe there are lots of opportunities and I couldn't agree more it's core to the university's mission and you know what we do as a college to me is one of the most important things that goes on so we need to continue to ensure that we are out and about and doing really meaningful work and partnering with our school districts and communities Kimber I know I left out many examples what would you like to add to that well thank you for having us I'm Kimber Manes chair of the department of education and really appreciate your time and your invitation I I agree that it is our responsibility so I don't I think it's okay to throw that out there so we do we do a number of outreach activities to fulfill that responsibility beyond all of our hundreds of hours of practicum experiences and the student teaching so we routinely reach out to principles and superintendents and ask them what what they need from us and how we could do better with our educator preparation program we host administrators and educators to come on campus and talk to us about what's going on in the schools and what they think we could do better to meet their needs we have had some really fruitful conversations about starting grow your own programs or starting residency internship types of programs where our students might be even have access to home stays in rural communities to be able to be more integrated and we have also reached out to a number of schools and districts offering additional professional development around topic areas that they might be struggling with given the educator shortage we also try to be responsive to those things so it's one thing to be have a responsibility to be there and it's another thing yet again to do something about what we learned from being there and we have changed some of our programming as a result of the information that we get back from our community partners so we we very much agree and want to be a service to to the area and the state in that way I see it essential to the mission absolutely and I'll just add you've probably heard of it was recently renamed during the last few years but UVM's professional and continuing education area which used to be called continuing a distance education and we have been working to think about ways we can use pace the shorthand as as an arm of our college to again reach in place teachers or teachers who need retooling or people who want to enter the teaching field after they've done other things so we're currently launching or preparing to transition our master's program in special education to within a couple of years a fully online program to help extend our reach so we do take those roles very seriously and I think it's absolutely critical to the to the university's place in the state and growth and development we in relationship to literacy we've moved our program that is a literacy specialist coaching program to meet them into the state we've moved that to be online so it's has greater accessibility to more people. Professor could you speak a little bit maybe get a little closer to your computer we don't hear you quite as well as we hear Professor Shepard sure how is this testing one too it's a little better a little better it's better I think I've got my mic all the way up how about now it's better all right we have also moved our literacy coaching literacy specialist program for that coursework to be online so that it's more accessible to greater numbers of individuals in the state who may not be within driving distance that's another example I think of how important this is to us when do teachers teacher candidates enter the classroom generally they generally enter the classroom in their freshman or sophomore year depending on if they're a first time first year student coming in brand new or if they are a transfer student so we have an early and often model that we lose committee other questions please senator please so curiosity question I know that your prime focus is undergraduate and graduate level education but you both mentioned professional development and I'm wondering kind of what you know how you how you view your role in professional development and how how immersed you are in the state schools on providing professional development that may be necessary to maintain licenses or what have you yeah it's a great question I think we're quite engaged from the standpoint that we do have you know many of the students who graduate from our graduate programs or certificate programs are coming back to to refresh their knowledge or to gain new skills so we're certainly engaged that way as I mentioned we're looking for new opportunities to the professional and continuing education area of the university I think this is another growth area for us though quite frankly and you know I don't want to use the pandemic as an excuse but it's certainly the pandemic was a time when we had to sort of shrink back inwards and make sure we could get everyone in our programs through under unusual circumstances so we find ourselves now turning back outward and looking for more opportunities so again I think this is something we look forward to building out and and would look forward to partnering with some others sometimes it's a challenge for us because our full-time faculty who are engaged with our degree programs are pretty busy folks but I think we certainly have many contacts in the field that we can partner with to provide increasingly robust professional development opportunities I would add generally that professional development connection comes from the field to us more often than vice versa so although we push out and do some offerings generally it's school sites themselves that say we would like additional professional development in x, y or z math methods reading behavior management and I think we're very open to providing that individually through faculty or through it through a department and I'll just add one other thing which I failed to mention earlier because it's not really quite as specific to teacher licensure but we have we have a couple of outreach centers one focused on social work practices in the division of children and families but our our area that focuses on community sorry disability and community inclusion the cdci that center provides a lot of direct outreach to schools through the i-team which the state funds that's a team that services students with more significant disabilities and so there's a certain level of work targeted interventions and outreach that we do through those those couple of service and outreach areas as well as some institutes and then our research teams our faculty and tenure and tenure track lines and lectures and senior lecturers are often engaged in research in the schools and intervention work or training on new methods and new practices often involves professional development through that through their work to get grants from the federal government to provide services to schools this has been incredibly helpful we very much appreciate it I'm looking around to see if there are any additional questions we look forward to continuing this conversation if you find yourselves in Montpelier please let us know we'd love to see you person and if we see ourselves find ourselves at the University of Vermont we will certainly be in contact but if anything comes up in your work over the next you know several months please let us know if we can be helpful we're about to shift now to understand what we're doing for those teachers who may be graduating with debt you know what can we do to help them we're talking about this in the context of a teaching Vermont campaign and so we appreciate your partnership in any way, shape, and form so thank you both for everything you do for Vermont and for the UBM students you really it doesn't go unnoticed please thank you well and thank you so much and to your last point yes count us in we want to be part of that discussion we absolutely believe that you know the teaching profession in this country has got to make it easier for teachers to to get an education a high quality education and not to end up with lots of debt only to go into a profession that we don't yet pay people as much as they should be paid to do so we're behind you on that one for sure and really eager to talk to you in the future and we will come to Montpelier we both had rather full schedules today and couldn't manage that oh no no that wasn't that wasn't uh you know don't get me wrong I get dicks sometimes that wasn't a dick I promise yeah we we'd love to see you either on Zoom or in person thank you thank you very much okay thank you Ms. Cargo you are uh what's the expression that's what you're you're you're you know thank you thank you so much and I know you have a presentation so I wasn't even going to present I want to provide you with my the talking points I'm going to speak from um thinking kind of broadly to a bigger question how do you reduce the depth that students have especially for these teaching teachers that you're interested in and I think the first thing you do when you're trying to reduce debt is you're trying to provide enough non-debt financial aid that you don't have to take out low so that's kind of the starting point but when you're thinking about oh sorry Marilyn Cargill the last student in the Sistence Corporate you're so famous you don't even need to you know I know that apologies to all of you so you've got your grant programs your scholarship programs and you've got your forgivable loan programs those are all what I would consider access programs that's what gets students who are thinking about going to college into school and certainly you know Senator Campion that the legislature for the last few years has put a lot of emphasis on those forgivable loan programs the way a forgivable loan program works is that you are making an obligation to work in a specific field within the state of Vermont for a specific amount of time in exchange for an amount of money that that acts as a scholarship if you fulfill the work obligation and becomes a loan if you do not those programs and I'm going to show you on the next slide we've got a number of those going right now those programs can work really well for that student that knows exactly what they're going to do so we find for example that 85% of our nursing students who use forgivable loans repay them with work obligation that's exactly what we're looking for there's always some percent that end up moving out of state or doing something different and don't use don't repay them with work obligation and then there's some who are in the wrong major and they may take one of these forgivable loans and realize this is not the right path for them one of the questions I have asked if I had a chance and I knew this was not my opportunity to ask questions but I may reach out to your always if you are sitting there please know if there's something yeah but I'm curious how many students start in education as a major and change their majors because that's when forgivable loans become dangerous is way too big of a word but they become more difficult because if you take a full tuition for forgivable loan for 18 or $20,000 and then you also are given your federal staffer loans your direct loans that students get an awful lot of debt that they're carrying and if they're doing that for four years and then make a different decision they're in way worse a position than they would have been without that forgivable loan just for a minute how much debt are they now carrying so sometimes the way that you can adjust for that is perhaps forgivable loans come in in their juniors and senior years when they've had an opportunity I loved their comments about we use a frequent in the classroom start early and do it frequently I love that to hear that because I think you know sooner whether maybe you're on the right path or the wrong path for you but sometimes states do hold off we don't on any of the programs we have in Vermont right now but in some states they do hold off on awarding them until later in the program which reduces overall debt but it doesn't necessarily increase the number of people in the pipeline that are going to become teachers so there's a there's a ying and a yang to to those options grants and scholarships are the easiest way for students but they don't lock them into that work obligation which I think again the legislature has been really had found really attractive as a way to increase our workforce what if we started a fund a public private partnership where the legislature in some private industry had a fund that was either an opportunity fund for teachers or a way to actually let's say you've been teaching a couple of years that put some guidelines around start to reduce some of that debt I mean it's just it's such a big deal we're not talking about people that are going to be able to leave and make a ton of money you know at any stage really this is the career that they want absolutely so the other program I just wanted to mention that the ESAC is administering it was created last year in the legislature and we co work on this with the UDM office of engagement and that is a loan repayment program and what this one is this is about actually recruiting teachers and keeping your grads in Vermont and the way that program works and it's as we're standing up right now it'll be students will be able to apply for it this coming spring as they graduate is if someone chooses to work in Vermont in a field that we've identified the current one's not that but you certainly can do it for teaching and they live and work in Vermont but you're willing to forgive or pay back a certain percent of their loan it could be a percent it could be a solid dollar amount the UVM program that we're just standing up is going to pay $5,000 of student loan debt in a for a two-year commitment to living and working in Vermont it doesn't matter what the field is but the field must require a bachelor's degree so you have to graduate this spring from a Vermont college you must be getting a job that requires the degree not necessarily the one you've got because as we all know I'm a biology major and you know I have I needed an degree to get the job but I didn't need to be a biology major to do it but you have to have at least a job that requires a degree so that's another tool that potentially you use one is going to attract people who are already teachers and the grants and scholarships and loan forgiveness is really about encouraging more students to go into their educational career path of education one is teachers that are already trained and one is four years from now the first teacher would step out type of thing they would give you a four-year degree this manner of willing then then we have a program like that but it was for come come to Vermont move here and work here and we'll pay it what for $10,000 $10,000 $10,000 I mean it it's there's a is that still the best song set that's a great question because it's kind of what what you're talking you said you've added education so I'll ask center Ron Henson do you know the answer I don't know the answer but I mean I was just going to comment that I think that program but making it a bit more specific and saying here's 10 grand if you're in one of these professions you know one of these five or six professions are sorely needed and you can have this 10 grand if you stay here for a couple of years or making it incremental where you know they're here for two years they get two grand they're here for another two years they get another two grand of that 10k that way you can avoid people coming in for six months getting their 10 grand and being like all right going into your being a pressure or strategic it was it was 10 grand five grand a year five grand a year yeah that's what they got so and by the way take a marketing yeah dimension to them yeah if we're going to be trying to be I'm a person outside the state I think yeah so the very next slide I have just shows you the workforce development funding that we're currently running on a TSEC and what I wanted you to see was the interest-free forgivable loans that are currently set up so there's one for early childhood education nursing the trades the Vermont National Guard it has one that's not specific to their major it is specific to them working in the Guard and then there is one for the Vermont dentist that there's also one for primary care positions and that one you do have to be a junior or a senior at the UDM College of Medicine and you're agreeing and this is a long ways out but when you finish school and your residency that you will return to work in Vermont could you provide us and it kind of looks like it's on page four but I'm not just what the teachers are doing could you just send us a document if you're a teacher what the opportunities are for you to sort of come back yeah it absolutely is so if you skip over page if you look at page five right now okay we have full-time and part-time Vermont State France through VSEC if you can okay yep if then I need to know the scratch you want to know a dollar I want to know the dollars because so yeah to dollars a full-time and part-time first of all all of the programs that we run for this day Vermont are need-based programs so they always have to show financial need but a grant at UDM would range between a thousand dollars for a middle upper middle income family to as much as seven thousand dollars for a low income family the private scholarships that we run as you know those are coming from foundations we talked about this when I was here a little while ago endowments the state has some there's seven that specifically are for education but again I will just say the majority of those programs Russians have a majority at least half of those are for early childhood educators there's such a focus last year on creating funding for early childhood education and then the only forgivable loan that we're currently running for education is also for early childhood education could you just run for us no rush maybe get next week the teacher of middle to low income Vermont that graduates from UDM or the state college is that the real possibility of what he or she may be able to get and then on the other side the early childhood educators just so we can see hey they're gonna max somebody could get up to 20,000 or is the max 1700 you know just so I can really get my head around these numbers sure that'd be great because when we talk to a prox you know I it'll be helpful to see if we really do need something else and in and in that how much money are we realistically giving out is it one kid every year it's going to get a 25,000 and then he or she stays around or really are we really reaching 100 teachers you know potential teachers every year so that's what I'm trying to want to talk to Senator Kinshaw about and that would be helpful if I get that sure the other thing we can pre-Senator can't be actually would like us to and we did this with the nursing was we kind of went with amounts of money if it was a million dollars and you wanted to pay full tuition up to UVM's tuition how many students can you have if you're trying to do UVM and the state colleges are we trying to do every college in Vermont because as you know when we get into the private schools whether we would pay full tuition or we cap it at what we would pay at UVM for example that's something that we do with some of these other forgivable loans so if you as a mini have some thoughts on what you'd like to do or how you might like to structure something then we can model that for you and tell you roughly what would happen there okay but this would be a great start just to yeah absolutely we'll work on this numbers around yeah then we can go from there questions just a small comment that I support the idea trying to make this a bit more robust to apply to more people and keep people in the state priority of mine yeah mm-hmm me too I also think you know that there could be something out there from private industry I'll be honest I really do I think everybody has kids a lot of people have kids in the school I have a six-year-old Beagle but most people have kids in the school thank you you are welcome really appreciate it yeah that was great really appreciate it thanks for coming in oh you are so open as always my contact information is on that last page if you have questions please reach out to us and I'll have Hayden send you an email about next week just zooming in and just walking us through what some of these numbers really sounds good thanks okay we're adjourned