 Good afternoon. Welcome to Senate Education. Today is Wednesday, January 11th at 1.30. We're going to kick things off by talking about school meals, child nutrition. We're then going to jump into part one of something I talked to the committee about last week is what does a Vermont education look like? We're going to jump in with around test scores and things like that. And we're going to move to school safety. Everyone may recall last yesterday we heard from Secretary French about school safety and then wrap things up with financial literacy. I don't know if it'll take us all the way to 4.30. But that is the schedule. We have Senator Weeks on Zoom who is participating and not feeling so hot. So we appreciate him actually being remote. Yeah. Can you hear us? Okay, Senator. I can hear you fine. Thank you. Okay, great. And we can hear you as well. So senators may recall last year we passed a bill that is in session law, which is temporary as we heard yesterday. Reviewing the little expertise I have. And it basically extended universal school meals for one year. So things wrap up, I believe, July 1, 2023. Is that accurate? Yes. And one of the leaders on this issue is Norhorton who is with us today. The other one I always think of is Senator Starr who really led on this issue. And Norhorton is with Hunger Free Vermont. Thrilled to have you here. Thrilled to hear sort of just how things are going, what you're seeing. And but also would love to hear a little bit about you and Hunger Free Vermont since everyone here is, say, for me, a new committee member. So with that, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Senator Campion. For the record, I am Norhorton, the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. It's really a pleasure to be here with all of you today. I'm really excited to be here to tell you all a little bit about the Universal School Meals Act and to let you know really how well it's working right now to end hunger and stigma in our schools and to make healthy meals available to every student at every meal every day in our public schools and some of our independent schools as well. And it's doing this in the most equitable way. And I'm also really excited to be here just to learn what's important to you and what questions you have so that I can get you the answers. And as we work together this session to wrap up this work and make the funding for Vermont's Universal School Meals Program permanent in the Education Fund. And the first thing I want to say is that I'm really able to be here today to talk to you about Universal School Meals because of the great work that was done last year with this committee leading the way. And I especially want to thank Senator Campion for his leadership on this issue. I'm really happy to be back here in this room and back working with this committee again. So most of us are meeting each other for the first time right now. So I am going to start with a little bit about myself and hunger free Vermont. And sorry to interrupt you. I hope I have to do this again. I just want to let you know Ms. Horton that the two individuals from schools have just zoomed in. So when you're ready they are there watching and you're in charge. So whatever works for you. Okay. Thank you so much. Hi friends. It's very strange to have you in behind me so that I can't see you that way. I guess yeah okay it doesn't make a difference to them if I turn around. Only to me. All right. I'm getting used to this hybrid or trying to. So hunger free Vermont is a statewide nonprofit. We are turning 30 in 2023. And our mission is to end the injustice of hunger and malnutrition for everyone in Vermont. So we do a lot of different kinds of work toward that mission. We work in coalitions to advocate for permanent and dignified solutions to hunger at the federal state and local levels. We educate the public about the causes of and the solutions to hunger. We conduct outreach on the federal nutrition program. So school meals once at the federal nutrition programs but there's child care meals and there's meals on meals and there's three squares Vermont and there and WIC there are many many federal nutrition programs and we work on pretty much all of them. So we do outreach all across Vermont on those programs to help people learn about them and know how they can apply. We provide free and customized consulting and training to the entities like senior centers, community action agencies, food shelves, child care providers, schools, area agencies on aging and many more that use the federal nutrition programs in one way or another or that help people apply to access the federal nutrition programs. We also support 10 regional hunger councils that cover all of the state and a little bit of the upper valley of New Hampshire thrown in there for good measure and they're made up of local community leaders who work on the specific hunger challenges in their regions and I would like to pause right here to encourage all of you to join your hunger councils because you all have one. You can go to our website and and sign up to get information notices the agendas and all of that for those meetings. And you know hunger for Vermont is available to you we're available to help you help your constituents connect to food resources and so please use us for that. I live in Williston and I've been at hunger for Vermont for almost 12 years. When I started I was hired as the manager of our child nutrition programs advocacy and support work and I was shocked to learn how broken the traditional school meals system was. I really had no idea before I started working at Hunger Free Vermont that the school meal program in the old way that it works segregates kids by family income in the school cafeteria. It causes so much shame and stigma that many low income students prefer to go hungry than to get the meals that they're eligible for. Many families won't even fill out the intrusive and intimidating application. The eligibility cutoff for free meals is so low that up to 40 percent of the kids here in our state right now who need school meals don't qualify for free school meals and they wouldn't be able to get those meals if we didn't have Act 151 in place right now. Universal school meals replaces all of these inequities with dignity and it ensures that all students can focus and learn and it relieves social emotional and economic stress for kids, families and educators and that is why it is my passion. And I want to just tell you, I want to just give you the overview of what the Universal School Meals Act does and then maybe we can hear from the experts on the ground a little bit about what's happening in one school district in Vermont right now with Universal Meals. So the Universal School Meals Act is not a very complicated bill although there is very precise and technical language in that policy that's really important because it ensures that Vermont's Universal School Meals program works with the complicated federal rules that govern school meal programs and govern federal reimbursements for school meals. But what it does is it created a one-year Universal School Meals program that provides free breakfast and lunch to all public school students and that one year is the current school year that we're in. Also approved independent schools that are physically located in Vermont can participate in the one-year Universal School Meals program if they choose to for those students who attend their school on public tuition dollars. Vermont's Education Fund supplements the federal per meal reimbursement so that school meal programs receive the full free rate amount for each meal that they serve and that rate the rate of reimbursement is set by the federal government and the Universal School Meals Act in Vermont just uses that same free reimbursement rate as the rate per meal. So it covers every breakfast and lunch that are served to students that meet the federal nutrition rules that don't qualify for the full free rate of federal reimbursement. It makes up the difference between the federal reimbursement for that meal and the total free reimbursement rate for that meal. And Act 151 also created a one-year moratorium on the ability of the school district to ask for an exemption from participation in a school meals program. In other words, right now in Vermont for the first time ever, every single public school is providing breakfast and lunch to all students because the act required the last two schools that weren't doing that to find a way to do it and they did find a way to do it and they're doing it now. So that is how the Universal School Meals Program works and I have a few broad things to say about the benefits but I think where you're really going to get clear about what the benefits are is from listening to the superintendent and the school food program co-director for the Harwood Union Unified School District and they joined me, so I think I'll hand it over to them. Can we turn it over to them? Terrific. Mr. Superintendent, would you like to start and then Ms. Dolan, if you want to follow up, whatever word you'd like to go in. Sure and I provided a full copy of my remarks to the committee so feel free to reference those and I'll try to be brief in my remarks but I do want to thank the chairman and the members of the committee for having us. We think that Act 151 is a tremendous opportunity for schools throughout Vermont and we're so pleased to hear that you're considering the program for future years. My name is Mike Licklider. I'm the superintendent of the school district and we're right here in Washington County. In fact, I'm at Brookside Primary School today. Both principals are at a training so I'm the substitute elementary principal so if the bell rings or a student, a little student comes in you'll understand but this is my first year as a superintendent in Harwood. It's my first year in Vermont. We moved to South Duxbury at the end of June but I have been a superintendent. I've been a principal and a teacher for over 30 years. We moved from Pennsylvania for the last 13 years. I was a school superintendent in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in a school district about 5,400 students so I've had a lot of experience in lunches working with students and families to make sure that we have all students who are fed. One of the reasons my wife and I contemplated a move to Vermont based on a long history of traveling here. Having a daughter who most recently was a student at the University of Vermont is just because of your commitment to children and the climate of the state and I think this is the most recent example I have that makes me proud to be a superintendent in this area right now. I have three very specific examples I can give you related to the positive differences that this program has made for our students right here in Harwood. I can tell you that if you speak to any one of the principals in this district, you will have big champions for continuing this program. I can also tell you from just being in cafeteria duty with the primary school children that I mentioned to the three cafeteria workers that I was going to be testifying to you and they said to let you know that the three cafeteria workers at Brookside in Waterbury, Vermont are fully supportive of the program as well. But the three examples I can give to you they are real-life examples. I've changed names and a little bit of the circumstances just to protect the families but the three points I want to make is number one that many of our students do not eat breakfast and they come to school hungry and as educators we know as classroom teachers, principals that a full stomach guarantees that we can focus on education and teaching the student the most important elements of the day whether it's reading or math or art or any of the other experiences that students have. Prior to the pandemic this school district and Erica who is just a wonderful does a wonderful job with our food service program worked very hard to increase breakfast participation with little results. We had some students who took advantage of it but it was a smaller number and in spite of all their efforts they could not increase that number. With the pandemic, with universal meals we've seen our numbers for breakfast almost double. This morning as our students walk in here the staff has done a great job as students get off the bus and walk in we hand them a meal if they want one they go to class they sit in their class they have their breakfast and that makes a big difference in the lives of many of our students. Let me talk to you about Sam. Sam is a young student he's in third grade. His mom often struggles to get him out of bed in the morning get him to the bus stop in time to get the bus. It's very common for him to skip breakfast so he comes to school hungry. He also has some disruptive behaviors that he can show in the classroom and his teacher and the principal really worked to understand Sam and some of these behaviors they realized that that they're directly tied to him being hungry. He displays those behaviors when he has not eaten. So what this program has done is really has allowed him to the school to ensure that he can get a meal every day that he doesn't have to worry about whether his mom can pay for that meal but but they can provide for him. If you talk to students if you talk to teachers at the school you'll also learn that many of our teachers buy snacks in the grocery store on a regular basis for their students especially in the past who come to school who are hungry so that they can give them something to eat to have them focus on on reading and the lesson of the day. So Sam because of that has developed an amazing relationship with our cafeteria chef in that building. He really has latched on to this person and looks to her because of her love and support for him. So I think this is an example of eating breakfast at school really makes a difference in the life of a child and especially makes a difference because of the fact that he can focus on on his classes. The second example I'll give you and this goes under the category of teenagers often choose not to eat due to the social stigma of a free lunch. I've seen this as a teacher I've seen it as a principal I've seen it as a superintendent. I was recently talking to one of our administrators at Harwood Union Middle School High School and the one principal gave me an example of a student I'll call Sydney she's a teenager. She relies on our Harwood cafeteria as her only reliable food source every day. She recently spoke to one of the principals while she was in the lunch line and said that this has made a big difference to her this program because she said it makes it easier for her to get lunch as opposed to the other years when it was the perception of many students their classmates that only the free kids stand in line for lunch. So often that social stigma would cause her to not eat to not get lunch. So she said the fact that it's known that everyone can have a free lunch makes a big difference as part of this universal program and that has seen as an effect in our number of lunches while our breakfasts have nearly doubled lunches have not doubled but there's been a significant increase that Eric can talk to you about as well. So for teenagers it's a very important program as well and then finally I'd say that we have many struggling families who do not meet the federal free and reduced lunch criteria and I'll give you the example of the Smith family they have three children prior to the pandemic they would historically carry a very high lunch date debt every year both parents work one of the parents holds multiple jobs they have three growing children who eat a lot of food and their kids who are really good kids in our school they work hard they get along with others they do everything that we would want the child to do on our school system but lunch and paying for lunch has been a challenge for this it was always a sticky point for the relationship that the school had with the family it was often heartbreaking for the cafeteria worker who ran the register to tell the one student that your lunch accounts in the negative when the principal had to speak with the parent about it the parent would also often say you know I forgot to check this week I'll bring it in next week and but the principal knew that it was a challenge for the family in spite of them being this hard worker hardworking Vermonters so this program has made a difference in the life of that family that that's not something that that child has to worry about when they walk into the cafeteria having that lunch person say you know what you're out of money will still provide a lunch but you'll need to bring in a check later you know as an educator I believe that our free public schools are a hallmark of our nation when our kids come in in the morning there's no cash registers at the door asking them to pay in order to learn to read so I just asked the committee to consider that as we decide whether we should really have a cash register in the cafeteria as kids get lunched so that they can focus on learning so you know I really appreciate your emphasis I appreciate the advocacy of hunger free vermont and Erica is the expert on on the cafeteria she does a wonderful job we invite any of you who want to see our program to visit to come let us know we'd be glad to provide a lunch or breakfast and let you spend some time with some of our students in the cafeteria so Erica thank you thank you Mike um first of all thank you so much for having us here this is a great opportunity I had testified before charter committees and this is just a privilege that we are proud that we can be the experts I guess so my name is Erica Dolan I'm the hardwood union school district food and nutrition co-director I've been with hardwood now for 15 years prior to consolidation I was with for from 11 years with the water berry ducks bear school district and I have been with the hardwood for four years now with a total 15 years so I live a long a long time with meals that were not pretty to students and I have you know experience the the stigma that we've been all talking about between students and the hardships the families that do not qualify for meals pass through all those years I would like to start that um since my first day as a director I had the dream that meals would be free I had spoke freely and out loud about this from day one that that would be one dream that I had before I retire in 30 years so I still have at least 17 years here so I think I have to find another project now another goal so I'm it's pretty impressive that we were able to accomplish this uh with your help so fast I'm very very thankful I couldn't say it I couldn't say enough it's hard to believe that something so devastating devastating like COVID ignite the this you know this movement so I have to say thank you to COVID a little bit for this so um um so what can I say about our districts we um have very low parts we traditionally have very low participation of free reduced kids so our the main meals that we always serve were two kids that were paid um so we had a very high percentage of kids that do not qualify for free meals um over the years well let's let's start from the beginning when I first started here we used to have a model that um every time the kid came to the lunch line and they had a negative balance we would tell the kid you know either give them a little paper or say you have a negative balance you got to bring this no home or um we were always telling the kid once they got their trace so the registered person was trained to tell this child that they had a negative balance that their their account was in the negative so this child went through went through the lunch line got their little no went to said and was carrying that burden their family burden in their shoulders and I thought that was devastating so that was one of the first things I advocated to change in the Waterbury Duxbury School District the no kid should ever receive a note at the register before they get their meals so with them we've um heavily send bills out you know back in the day we issue mail them with paper and then we suddenly move quickly to emails but as you can imagine I became a bill collector so part of my job was to collect bills to make phone calls to ensure that parents were paying their bills and that took a lot of my time hours per week and um it wasn't just me all the principals that came to this building also helped in this process sometimes we used to divide the list um and the list was pretty big and the bills were accumulating and no matter what we did it seems that that problem was always there and we helped the families fill it up applications we helped them ensure that they could qualify for free meals we did our work and it was a lot of time that I was spent not taking care of nutrition not taking care of kids and but taking care of money of cash and then suddenly now we're free and I don't need to do that anymore and I I know I'm talking a little bit about myself and I'm going to go into the kids here but I want to put that out that we are no longer bill collectors right now and we are investing we're creating we actually have some time to improve our programs to market it to make it better to invest in our local economy with the food incentive grants so part of school meals and meals are very healthy local and fresh so we we want to spend our time doing that we want to spend our time investing in what kids need the most and they do not need us to be um spending our time collecting calling parents regarding to that so that's a big part of like how this was affecting me personally in my the job that I do um one thing that we always talk about here is that kids are not paying for anything else in the school and Dr. Mike mentioned that before that we don't have registers at the interests of the schools and we you know we education in this country in the state had become something that we provide to kids provision providing to their well-being providing for them to be hold to be a human being to give it back to their committee to you know full circle as a an adult um that became something that is we all can agree any educator can agree that we provide way more than just classroom classroom education and like in between math and um um English and in languages we are providing wellness physical education we provide even drivers add to school and to students providing meals is no different meals are part of education as everything else um and I know that this has not been the culture of the country or the culture of the state to that meals are part of education in that sense but it shouldn't be anything different I have a daughter in ninth grade and she I live in very town by the way I didn't say that for the record in the beginning so I'm president of very town and I have a daughter in ninth grade at Spalding high school so I told her yesterday that I was gonna come and she was a page last year in the stay house so um so I I I talked to her yesterday that I was gonna come you know talk to you guys today and I asked her so what what what does it change for you how is it different in your word the meals are free now and she stopped for a little bit she wasn't too sure how to answer and then she said well it's hard to say what I'm gonna say but it's almost like we are it's the law that we have to be educated I cannot just drop off school right now you there will be consequences for all of us if I'm not at school right now and everything is provided to me meals are no different they should and she and it was good that she was the same word that I always use the provision of meals and she said we it's almost like it's mandatory that we're we're there I know it's not that way that's not the right word that I want to say but we have to be there and meal meals will I would not make through my day if I didn't have meals so that was kind of her little way to say that she couldn't learn if she wasn't fed and I believe that she's taking weight she's in that category that she's taking way more meals like every day now because they're free than otherwise so I'm I'm I'm very happy that I don't need to be worrying about her going to school and being hungry because she is getting what she needs to to be able to learn one thing that happened at our high school that is very interesting and it it tides back to the register again we decided as hardwood high school actually in all the schools but hardwood majority because we used to sell a lot of our card items to students at hardwood high school we decided that we were not selling anything there's not even one single student that can purchase one single item in our schools so our cafeterias are not selling anything there is no money transactions only the teachers are buying meals breakfast and lunch but no student we have no transactions because our card items just goes back to the same problem that we are identifying who has the money who doesn't have the money to pay so we move away from that at hardwood and I'm proud that we made that choice um so I think my ask is to make the universal meals permanent in the educational fund the education fund I have um you know I'm available for answering questions right now but I think you got got my you know where my passion really is thank you I appreciate it was a great testimony both of you thanks very much uh committee we are uh and for those watching and here we're just really jumping into this today this will be a longer conversation we're going to look at uh you know the the education budget and other uh pressures on it if you will over the next few weeks but this is a terrific way to kick things off any questions at this point for uh any of our guests uh senator hushin I just wanted to put my own plug in for uh universal school meals that's okay absolutely you know probably one of the most impactful things that I did during my campaign was going to school Bell's Falls that had universal school meals and we sat down with a big table of students from all sorts of different backgrounds and you know the thing that they all shared in common was what a positive impact the school meals um the universal school meals had on their performance their ability to pass a driver's test and um yeah so it was it was really awesome and to not out of courage anyone and everyone who's legislator to go to a school that does this program to talk to the students and really see what type of impact it has now I appreciate that I would also I think I love the connection between local farms I love that economic uh connection and also I do believe if if young people are eating well early on in their lives they're going to it's it's going to prevent illness in the future and perhaps less stress on our healthcare system down the road so other questions before we uh move on any final comments from you miss Horton just a just a couple of things please absolutely so um hunger for your month is an anti-hunger organization so I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't say a quick word about what is happening in our state with hunger and the relationship between that and the difference that universal school meals is making right now we have never seen hunger and food insecurity at the rates that people in Vermont are experiencing them right now in the last 12 months in our state according to research from UVM faculty research group two and five people in Vermont have reported experiencing food insecurity to some degree that's 40 percent of our folks and for families with children the rate is even higher than that and so the farm fresh school meals for all package which includes universal school meals the local food purchasing incentive which you you heard Erica speak about and the farm to school and early childhood grants program that provides technical assistance to help schools and farms connect with each other um that's a piece of the food security puzzle for our families it's a really important piece right now all of the other pandemic economic emergency relief programs have already gone away or they're going away including the emergency increased allotments for three squares Vermont which are going to be ending in a month and what's left for some of these families now is universal school meals that is a one little floorboard under their ability to meet their basic needs and we've heard from a lot of parents about the relief that that the existence of this program as a stable source of meals for their kids is for them and I just want to make sure that I name that the agency of education is is working on the kind of hard and specific data and I'm going to let them do that but I do want to say that we're seeing increased participation by students this year in school meals we're seeing increased purchasing of local food by schools we there are links between the way that Vermont designed the universal school meals program that's in place right now and our ability to maximize other federal dollars like pandemic ebt payments for this school year and this coming summer the Vermont has just been accepted into a pilot to directly certify students for free meals through Medicaid and that's going to actually really allow the program to draw down more federal funding starting starting next year and there's pots a little bit of positive sign at the federal level despite the last time I'm going to say this for a little while but that that there will be some changes administrative changes to these the federal universal school meals provisions that are going to allow more schools in Vermont to do universal school meals more easily and perhaps draw down additional federal funding as well so this is a national movement that Vermont is a leader in and you know that's that's a really exciting thing um that's a regular sorry no okay I just had a quick question the Medicaid program is that also a program that kind of covers costs that are covered for folks who don't get free and reduced lunch is that sort of the similar does it cost the am I making sense I might not be I'm not quite clear so there are those students who um are able to get free lunches through the free and reduced lunch program correct okay and then there are those who don't qualify yes um would the Medicaid program that you just mentioned cover those students how would it I guess I'm asking yeah relationship would be with yes um so so no um it won't the Medicaid uh directly certifying students for free meals through Medicaid will not help um the students in families who are over income for school meals count as low income for school meals but it will identify more students who are being missed right now and that will allow the schools providing universal meals to draw to count more students as eligible for the free rate and therefore it will mean that the program is paid for more with federal dollars and and less with state dollars thank you for clarifying yes you're welcome it's all very complicated and it's taken me 12 years and I still am learning so no problem um I also just want to say um you know for for members of this committee you all in your districts that you are present preventive present a really good example of what is typical for what's our situation in in our Vermont school districts um where what's not only without universal school meals not only do we not have equity among students in a given school but we don't have but all schools in a district can't provide universal school meals necessarily so we we have students you know uh in the same family who are going to different schools in the same district and one kid can have universal meals and the others can't under under the pre-pandemic system and within your districts you have town you have a lot of inequity among your towns so for the Rutland district for the Bennington district for the Wyndham district you all have one large town and in that town you have a sufficient kind of concentration of population and therefore of low-income families where all or at least some of your schools were offering universal meals before the pandemic and they were able to provide universal meals in those larger towns without a lot of additional cost to uh on the local taxpayer but all the rest of your districts are rural towns with small schools and none of them were able to provide universal school meals in that way and then for um uh senator Gullick your district so the Winnowski schools and some but not all the Burlington schools have been able to provide universal school meals at no additional cost to taxpayers for many years but Colchester and Essex are would are not able to do that on their own in the same way and so Act 151 really transformed that system where you know we don't have to explain you don't have to explain to your constituents and superintendents don't have to explain to parents why it is that students in one town have universal meals but students in another town can't and that is we want to present we want to really um you know make permanent this transformation that we've had inequity in our school systems with universal meals great we do have another guest who needs to jump in because we've slotted about an hour for this any final comments from you yeah well I do want to close by acknowledging Vermont's agency of education they have really worked incredibly incredibly hard to successfully transition all school all public school in Vermont to universal meals this year I just want to acknowledge them because without their efforts they could never get here and I want to thank this committee for designing a bill that's working really really well right now and I'm really looking forward to continuing to work with you thank you so much thank you very much thank you miss Kruger great miss Kruger before you begin I I do want to tell you and the committee that you uh are just really recognized public servant by so many people in between this committee and the agriculture committee for your dedication and everything you do around school nutrition and so I hope you know that but if you don't I'm or even if you do I'm telling you again how much everybody appreciates your work so with that thank you for appreciating hearing that so for the record Rosie Kruger and the state director of child efficient programs at the agency of education I manage a team of about eight and a half people at the agency who manage all the child efficient programs in Vermont and these are federal programs so near the state agency that implements these federal programs there are extensive federal regulations around how they have to be implemented so we will often hear like well why don't we just do it this way or make things simpler or eliminate this piece of paperwork and while we would love to do that we can't do that if we want to continue to draw down the federal funds so the report on universal school meals which I am frantically writing we just got the data that we need for the first few months of the school year to be able to get you some real analysis of how things are working and what the money looks like which I know is something you're particularly curious about so I'm not really going to talk about that at all today instead I want to give you kind of a foundation about school meals in the federal child nutrition programs and I want to point you in the direction of some resources where you can learn more so that when we come back to you with that report and start to have conversation about what's next you've got a real solid understanding and and don't you know what the abbreviations mean and all of that so so as I mentioned these are federal programs the the big one is the national school lunch program and the school breakfast program we also have a couple of other school nutrition programs the fresh fruit and vegetable program which provides a fresh fruit or vegetable snack outside of mealtimes and low-income schools and elementary schools and the after school snack service which also provides an after school snack and then we have the summer meals program which provides meals when school is out of session during the summer but also actually during emergency situations and disaster situations when school is closed and we use that extensively during covid and then we have the child and adult care food program which provides meals to kids in child care is as you might guess both in child care centers and daycare homes as well as in adult day centers and we just have a few of those in the state and that program also can be used to provide meals to kids in emergency shelters we don't currently do that and it can also be used to provide at risk after school sufferers and low-income communities and then in addition our team also operates the USDA foods program which is food that the federal government purchases to support all these programs as well as to support vulnerable folks through food pantries so a lot of that food comes through the agency of education that goes directly to Vermont food bank to for distribution to their partners so that is what my team is doing is kind of implementing all of those federal programs and the funds that go along with them we do have some state law around these programs so we do have a state law that requires public schools to offer breakfast and lunch through the national school lunch program prior to act 151 there was an exemption process and we had two schools in the state who were using that exemption process and not offering those meals to their students act 151 temporarily eliminated that exemption process as you heard from an or and those schools are now offering it but that's definitely something to think about as you're moving forward in terms of whether you want to return to how things were previously or continue that requirement screwdriver manager from yeah Arthur and I'm sorry if you've already said this are there nutritional standards in other words I didn't remember once going into a school I mean this was many many years ago where the lunch that was served many years ago wasn't what I would want to have as you know if I'm little one but even at my age it was there was just didn't really a lot of sugars so that's a great question about 10 to 12 years ago through the healthy hunger free kids act things really changed drastically in the federal regulations and so at that point there had been some standards before that but at that point the we have a requirement put into place that all the grain items be whole grain rich that fruits and that at least a half a cup of fruit or vegetable will be part of every meal the vegetables you have to offer a range of different vegetables over the course of the week so not just your your red orange but also your your dark green vegetables and all the other vegetable types over the course of the week there's some sodium restrictions and there are some some calorie limits over the course of the week and who changed is that federal government could the state become stricter if it wanted to so we actually we are we in pretty good shape from your we're in pretty good shape in my opinion yeah we have the the federal government actually did roll back a few standards a little bit and we maintain the whole grain rich requirement at a time that the federal government actually rolled that back we're on a little bit shaky ground to the extent that we put in a lot of different requirements and there's a couple of reasons for that one is the federal government is not real happy about us withholding reimbursement for meals that meet their meal pattern so we could withhold our state funds if we had a stricter meal pattern but that would be in some areas they might let us do it in some areas they wouldn't so that would have to be something we want to do in consultation with them the other piece of it is a lot of the child nutrition program foods the the producers who make those foods are making them to the federal standard so those sodium restrictions those whole grain restrictions the labeling that you need to prove that this item meets those requirements that's all kind of producers reacting to national requirements and so if we were to try to do something to like you know target sodium even more or do something else our folks like Erica would have a much harder time shopping it would be much more difficult for her to purchase the items that she needs to meet the meal pattern so it's definitely a conversation we can have but there are very strict federal requirements in place and if you haven't gone to eat school lunch at school in the last 10 years I would really strongly encourage you to do it because it looks very very different it is not you know it's changed significantly since I was in school I'm we go out on my team and we're reviewing schools all the time and I'm always happy to eat school meals at school that's great they're they're good meals and I'm really proud of those meals but yeah there there are strict federal requirements we couldn't do things like I do hear sometimes folks ask if we can serve whole milk and it's federal requirement we can't serve whole milk so if we tried to offer whole milk then again we'd be risking us unpasteurized or whole milk just fat content thing yeah okay so there are some you know we could for example Erica was talking about a la carte items so selling meals outside of the meal pattern that's that you know that additional slice of pizza or bag of chips or whatever there are states that are more restrictive about those we don't have stricter requirements on those we leave those up to the schools but that is an area where if you wanted to you could theoretically do more in that area we have heard like Eric was mentioning a lot of schools now this year with universal meals moving away from offering a la carte completely as a result of being able to offer all the meals for free and no longer needing to support their programs with those a la carte purchases so yes there is a strict federal meal pattern and almost every other thing that you can think of about the program is is covered by a strict federal regulations and I'm happy to answer any questions that you you have about those so going back to our state laws we do we do require that schools participate and again that that exemption process was eliminated this year we also have a state law that requires that summer meals be offered in the highest poverty districts when they're offering summer programming that's an area you know you you could look at whether you know we definitely see fewer summer meals offered than or summer meals provided than school year and I think summer is definitely an area for growth the federal rules around that do make it somewhat challenging in that only the highest poverty areas are able to offer open summer meal sites where students can take meals for free we provide a little bit of state funding to support summer meals but that amount has not grown in recent years so that's something that you could think about looking at in the future we also have a state law that you know prior to to universal meals this year that permanently provided state funding to cover the difference between reduced price meals and free meals so you've got three categories of meals in federal meals programs free meals are traditionally served at no cost to the family and those are available to kids who are under 130 whose households are under 130 percent of the federal poverty level or students who are directly certified and this is a word you're going to hear a lot directly certified for free school meals because their household participates in some other means tested program and so the biggest program there is three squares Vermont which is gone federally to snap so any household who participates in three squares Vermont we get that information from DCF we share it with the school and the school directly certifies that student for free meals without the household having to submit an application there are a couple of other categories of direct certification which allow the household to receive free meals without requiring the household to submit an application and then the other option is for the household to submit that application showing that they made less than 130 percent of the federal poverty level that's the free category the reduced category is for students between 130 and 185 percent of the federal poverty level and it's called reduced price because traditionally the federal the federal government doesn't reimburse 40 cents of that meal and they expect the household 40 cents for lunch and 30 cents for breakfast they expect the household to contribute that share in Vermont for many years the state has picked up that cost and it's been frankly a fairly nominal amount of money I think $500,000 is budgeted and we end up spending less than that but there's still the category there's still called reduced price students even though the meals are provided to those kids at no charge there right now are no direct certification processes for for the reduced price categories just household submitting an application as in or mentioned the state was just approved for the direct certification through Medicaid pilot that will start on July 1st of this year that will allow us to directly certify two categories of students so we'll be able to directly certify students for free school meals based on their participation in Medicaid if their Medicaid information shows they're under 130 percent of federal poverty and we'll also be able to directly certify a reduced price category of students for those kids between 130 and 185 percent and that is brand new that we've never been able to directly certify that category before so those are those two categories and then there's this whole other group that is considered paid now the assumption is always well these families must be wealthy but really all we know about these families is that they have not submitted an application so we don't have any information showing that they are eligible for free or reduced therefore they're paid and so those are the that's what we know when we're talking about free reducing paid that's what we're talking about I do want to kind of briefly I guess I'll continue through through talking about the the couple of other state laws we have but then I want to return to that and talk a little bit about the idea of stigma because things may have changed on that front as well with regard to what folks remember from many years ago um so we uh the state pays for the reduced price share of student meals for breakfast and lunch we do not pay for the reduced price share of student meals for after school snack um after school snack is a very small program um and you know compared to the meals we serve for breakfast and lunch um but that is an area where we don't pay it at the state level um there's a number of schools do chip in for that and just cover it for their students um but that is you know potentially a component to think about there um and then we also have a state law um as was referenced earlier the local foods incentive grant program that's now in its second year um and that's managed by my team um that we currently have five hundred thousand dollars appropriated for that that's a two tier grant program the first tier of that grant program is very it's pretty simple um schools do a couple of different things and then they qualify um for uh I believe fifteen cents per meal served um in the prior year for an additional reimbursement they're only eligible for that for one year once they've received that they have to move on to tier two if they want to continue to receive the funds tier two is much stricter that is a specific percentage um local purchasing requirement they have to purchase a certain amount of their local of their total foods locally um and if they do that and they meet that threshold and they're audited by us um then they get um a certain amount of additional partly reimbursement um depending on that percentage so we're now in year two we've had a whole bunch of schools who've made it through year one and a small number of schools who've made it through year two to get that year two grant and then we still have some schools who never applied for year one they still could if they'd like to in the future we'll be presenting a full report to you on that um shortly I think it's due at the end of the month but we do have that um ready potentially to present to you sooner than that right so that's um that's a state law and then we also um provide about fifty thousand dollars um for state equipment grants to school nutrition programs as well and that's been a uh many many years um thing that we have done uh we also have some additional state funding in the form of state match which is federally required um and we do I mentioned we provide about a small amount of state summer funds as well to support those some of those programs so that's what the state does on top of those big federal requirements um I'm looking at the clock here um so I am happy to answer general questions that you have if you don't have general questions I think I might like to spend a minute talking about stigma and then maybe if we have some time talking about CEP and provision two and how those work or I can refer you to the universal meals report from last year to under weeks one question for summer programs yeah I apologize um you said that some some schools they have a summer program what what type of programs yeah we have a recreation program with the appointment right yeah so um it'll be just take different forms in different places um so if it is a high poverty area um usd needs to call these area eligible locations um then you can have an open meal site um where you know students show up you know the library a food truck at a park um and and receive a meal there under the normal federal requirements they have to eat the meal right there um that has been waived for the past few years because of covid but that waiver is is gone um so we're going to have to return to in person congregate feeding this summer although the omnibus appropriations bill that congress passed mean um added a non-congregate option for rural areas and we're still waiting to learn how that's going to work um so that's what it may look like um in low income areas and then if a school has some kind of enrichment activity happening over the summer um you know summer programming like you're talking about sports camps whatever um they can also offer a program to those students they can either do that as an open program where you know those students go participate in the in this open meal site or it can be a closed enrolled program and in a closed enrolled program you can do that in a non-low income area if you base it on the status of the students who are participating in that program so you can collect applications from them uh you're not a lot of charge um so you just need to come up with some funds to cover the cost of those meal serves to the so is it through a grant would they have to apply for a grant for that it's so these are all entitlement programs so if if the program goes through the federal requirements they sign up with us they um they go through you know they they need all the paperwork requirements with us then they go out and try to serve meals and if they serve a meal that meets those meal pattern requirements then we reimburse them at a set federal reimbursement rate um so you know they could come in and say well we don't know how many minutes we're going to serve maybe it'll be 50 and then they come back to us and say well actually we serve 75 we'll reimburse them for all 75 meals so that's that's how that works and that rate that's a set rate federal government sets it you know of course the state could add more to it but there's it's not very able thank you please um so I guess uh I can just mention um there was some discussion about stigma and I just want to mention that um you know depending on when you went to school things things have changed over many years with chat nutrition programs and school meals um and some folks may remember that the free kids got a different color ticket or a token or you know that's called overt identification and that is strictly prohibited in the school meals programs at this point so if you're thinking that that's what's happening and that's what we know what we're talking about stigma that that isn't happening um it is you know the the school meals program makes every effort to make that information private that's something that my team reviews when we go out and review if we see any violation of that we're very strict about that so you know to the extent that when a child goes through the point of service the the computer may um you know they may scan their their card or enter a pin number and it may pop up with a fake balance just to try and provide that anonymity and make sure that there's no way for family or for kids in line to tell or even the person at the point of sale to tell what's going on there but um i think you heard you know discussion of of a la carte or only the kids um the kids who are in line or the ones who are eligible for free meals and everybody else brings their meals from home um a la carte sales is a really good example where the the free and reduced price kids are the ones who are going through and taking that federally prior reimbursable meal and they have to take the fruit or vegetable in order for it to be considered reimbursable the kids who are paid can you know buy whatever they want from their if their school is offering all the cart sales and that's just paid for by their household so maybe they just buy a slice of pizza and they don't have to take the fruit or vegetable so that's that's a lot more subtle nobody is overtly labeling those kids as free or reduced and certainly you know that's that's that's already prohibited in the federal laws it's already something that we do to make sure it doesn't happen when you're hearing stigma those are those other sources of stigma are what we're talking about and they're a little bit more difficult to to specifically outlaw because it's not something the school is specifically doing committee questions again we're just jumping into this this group will be back to find report in weeks to come they just wanted you to be able to provide us with a little introduction and some of the work that you do yeah so I would really encourage you to go back and read the universal meals report that we published last year I think we may have submitted that as part of our our testimony today that will really give you the basis of kind of what we were talking about going into this and the problems that we were trying to you know make sure that you fully understood so that when you're writing legislation you can address all of those issues it's it's complex we tried to break it down as much as possible and I'm happy to to answer any questions that you all have about that as you're going through but that's really the starting place and then we'll come back to you with that report about how this is going thank you very much great committee five minutes just take a stretch bathroom break we'll come back and we'll jump into what we're calling part one really of trying to understand what it's like to be educated here in the state of ramon and then we'll move on to school safety and financial literacy welcome back to senate education today is january 11th 240 in the afternoon we have with us or we are about to have with us i believe dr bushe and uh miss quorum quorum and we'll wait for them to arrive dr bushe miss quorum how are you both hello mr chair i'm great it's nice to see you good to see the two of you we really appreciate you being with us you are kicking off our conversations trying to understand and help new committee members and returning committee members and others watching really what a vermont education looks like we're going to hear from teachers students other school personnel and we thought we would kick it off by just getting an overview and i see that you have this vermont assessment results document for us thanks for sending it along and thank you hayden for printing it kind of give us a snapshot of testing and test scores how they work what we should be looking for vermont historically generally is celebrated as a state that does a good job but we also know there are areas where we can improve and one most recently is the work that this committee did on literacy so with that i'm going to hand it over to the two of you and i would ask a couple of things just to make sure that are included in your presentation one just tests in general uh a little bit of a this is this is uh this is good reliable information this is what parts that you might want to take with a grain of salt this is what we're trying to evaluate this is what you're really seeing that would be very helpful and then i would also keep in mind as you're going through other groups organizations people that we should talk to that can help give us this sort of baseline of what vermont education is so with that the floor is yours wonderful thank you mr chair so for the record my name is heather buchet and i am the deputy secretary for education i wanted to start by expressing my um disappointment that i couldn't meet you all yesterday in person i'd really been hoping to do that um i'm not sure how many of you have furry children but i have a very um doted upon furry child who actually potentially has a stomach obstruction because of something that he's eaten and so i was tasked with watching him all day yesterday he seems to be doing well he's a dog um so anyway that's that's why i couldn't see you in person and i do apologize um i am here joined with um amanda gorem dr amanda gorem who is our brand new although she's been in the agency for several years now she is our brand new division director ish a couple months now right amanda um of our division of data management and research and you may have heard about that division when secretary french testified yesterday i believe so mr chair this she is the new wendy galler um just to um keep things um in perspective of sort of the movement within positions in our agency um so we are um i think you know that's a great question uh that the committee is is posing and and getting answers on um we're very happy to um help assist committee members in understanding the answers i don't say plural to uh the question of what is our education system look like how are students doing and all related questions um there upon we are as mr chair said going to focus today on um just some broad sweeps of how our students are doing in terms of our latest um at this point they're preliminary um state assessment data and dr gorem will get into some of those details about um the different kinds of testing that we do that might actually address the point that you had brought up mr chair so i'm going to um pipe down and let amanda um take it away and then i will also be perhaps piping back in um throughout um to um provide some additional context or if there's a point that i think would be really helpful for uh the committee to um know and then of course we'll um throughout and at the end be very interested in questions great uh thank you for that dr brashay and dr gorem i should mention that uh our committee assistant also put in our folders this preliminary 2022 statewide assessment results just so you know that we have that as well in front of us so with that uh welcome floor yours thank you very much um i am going to share a powerpoint presentation on the screen um so i'm just going to take a moment to um to acclimate myself here oh i cannot share my screen maybe i can now i believe you can i can now okay we're in good shape all right all right so um i'm going to take you through some results from the 2022 school year um we'll discuss uh some of the interpretations of those results including limitations and comparability um and then we'll wrap up with uh what we believe we can learn from a year of testing so first i will note that this presentation is going to cover um the state assessments that were administered during uh 2022 so we have the smarter balance assessment consortium provided assessments of e la and math we have the vermont science assessment uh which is sometimes referred to as the vtsa and we also have the national assessment of educational progress or the nate assessment in reading and math which was administered across the state as well i do want to note here that this is not like a comprehensive overview of the assessment program that the state administers we do also have the um assessment of english language proficiency which is administered to our english learners there's an alternate assessment and of course our districts and schools administer various local assessments in addition to these assessments to better understand student achievement at different points throughout the school year and for different purposes so this is sort of just a limited scope um of of what you might see uh happen throughout a year amanda yes just wanted to clarify um as as new committee members are probably already learning we are very deep in acronym land in education and so e la is english language arts so it is it is what most um folks um in the world think of as english um just so you know it's it's a broad spectrum of reading writing comprehension um all those kinds of things but when you see e la that's what it what it means is kind of english for the rest of us would you agree amanda yeah yep thank you heather yeah sure all right so moving along here just a quick note on using assessment results um you know we we want to acknowledge that assessments are one of many tools that we can use um to to learn certain things uh and limited things you know there isn't one assessment that that tells us everything about everything um we take great care and ensuring that results from these assessments are used appropriately and and we also encourage appropriate use of these assessment results um and lastly here i'll note that the results from state and national assessments like the ones presented here are intended to inform decisions at the state district and school level and they capture learning that has already taken place so they're not assessments that are given during the course of learning and can immediately be used to inform instruction these are more final or summative measures here that we're reporting on uh quickly so that you know the nature of results that are being presented here today for our state assessments of e la math and science we're uh reporting preliminary results that's what you would see in the press release that came out yesterday um so these results are not official they are not final what makes them what makes them official great question so we would consider the results official when they have been matched up with our enrollment records so right now they have not been matched with our um with our data collections for enrollment and so um we're considering these preliminary the scores that each student has has earned do not change but where those students are reported to could theoretically change depending on where they were enrolled during the different times of the test window so we hold these as preliminary and then once the assessment results have been matched with um our enrollment records they'll be published in the annual snapshot which we anticipate to be published later this winter and that's when more detailed results such as school and district level results will become publicly available thank you of course of course um the the national of uh assessment of educational progress or the NEAP those results have already been released publicly they are official they're publicly available on nces's website and so we will be presenting on official results for that assessment uh and here we dive in so what we're showing here is for our English language arts assessment provided through Smarter Balanced last year um we are showing the percent of students who were proficient or above at each grade level so you'll see here numbers hovering somewhere between 40 and and 50 um and something that I want to point out here is that um when we say proficient right we are not talking about a measure that has been defined by a test vendor or anyone outside of Vermont what we're looking at is a standard that has been set by Vermont educators and that standard um qualifies what a student must know and be able to do to be considered proficient that's decided by our Vermont educators through something called a standard setting study and so what we're seeing here kind of to put it into context is that 41 percent of our grade three students achieved in a way that our Vermont educators would consider to be proficient um minimally um on that assessment what then can the remaining third graders not do well there's right we assess a variety of standards and so in that the answer to that question would vary depending on the student it the student could be um you know I think that if we um if we describe the assessments in more detail it might be um a little easier to understand so our English language proficiency assessment has different targets that we are assessing right we have listening we have reading we have writing for examples and within that there's different standards that students are being assessed on and so we can't really say that if a student is not proficient they're not proficient at listening or they haven't met this specific content standard it's going to vary across students um what and and so that's when we kind of have to take that deeper dive into the assessment data and also look at other measures to understand what that percentage of students um could be uh could be working on to gain proficiency okay uh yes uh please uh senator hushin um Dr. Guam I was wondering if we could just share how these results compare to the rest of the country yeah so we can uh we can actually use the nape uh to look at results across the nation um our smarter balanced assessments of ELA math and our science assessment are state specific so what we can't really compare to other states with those assessments because they're based on our state standards and our teachers uh and educators expectations of proficiency but the nape really is like the national standard um and so later in this presentation we will look at Vermont compared to the nation um and so we'll we'll get to that in just a few more slides um but for this assessment this this assessment um provided by smarter balance and the Vermont science assessment are really intended to show us um a state specific perspective thank you so the next uh graph that I will show you is our math assessment results the preliminary results from 2022 and what you can visually see here is sort of a uh a decline in percent proficient as we advance in the grade levels um grade three being the highest percent of students uh being proficient um and then kind of dropping down from there all the way to 26 percent in grade nine um you know this is this is something that um I think that the nature of these results can be seen in other years we don't recommend comparing these results to other years but I think the nature of the performance that we see um for math is something that we have seen before um in Vermont so I think what would be just uh so I don't forget it is to have you back in uh next week to pull this apart a little bit this I appreciate what we're doing today uh but I would like to get a sense of the things that perhaps our eighth graders you know that you know over 70 percent of eighth graders aren't getting something and so either come back in with sample tests sample you know some examples because we are like you looking to make improvements on all this so as much information we can get our our heads around uh the better great sure thank you Mr. Chair all right and just presenting this uh performance levels for science here uh for percent proficient we can uh we administer our science assessment in only three grade levels grades five eight and eleven um and the assessment is designed to um assess uh sort of a broad range of standards so that we're not just capturing grade eight science but we're kind of get capturing standards that a student experiences across the grades in between um and so you know it can be a little bit challenging to interpret these results I think because we're not looking at one year after the next um but we can see that you know we have between about 30 and 40 percent of students across grade levels uh reaching at least proficiency on the science assessment so I've taken these results um by subject and clustered them here together um and and I've done this because I think it really highlights the difference between ELA and math as the grade levels advance um so you can see that gap between ELA and math proficiency widening um as you advance in the grade levels it also highlights the uh difference for grades five and eight between ELA and science so just to clarify um because it can be hard to digest these more complicated um slides so the first piece about um a stronger um gap between English and math is if you come across over time over grade is if you compare the um like the um distance between the green and blue um bars so you can see that that's actually um it's really not statistically significant in grade three and then by grade nine um you're comparing 45 percent proficient to 26 percent proficient just to clarify thank you Heather okay let's go please uh just out of curiosity how come there are for example between grade six and then seven and then also grade nine there's no proficiency for science that's a great question thank you so science is only admit the science assessment is only administered in grades five, grade eight, and grade 11 so you won't see a measure for science in grades three, four, six, seven, or nine okay part of that just to follow up um is that the science assessment is a bit more complex so it actually has performance tasks students are actually doing things um as opposed to just answering questions um and obviously in math they're making calculations and things like that but part of the reason is um that those assessments are are different um the the what they're assessing are um a combination of performance and um typical types of assessment questions the other thing um in our state plan we wanted to we're trying to balance um the work that it takes to actually um do the assessment um in the classrooms like in the schools with instructing students and so that also factors in because it does take time away from classroom from instruction when we are doing assessments thank you Heather okay so so i'm going to transition into um the NAEP results so again this is an assessment that is administered nationally um and so this assessment does allow us to look at Vermont versus the nation um and so we're presenting here reading first and it's a similar measure percent proficient or higher and um there are two bars for each grade level here so the light green bar is for Vermont and that is the percent of students who scored proficient or above in 2022 for Vermont and we're comparing that to the darker green bar which is the national public for 2022 so that's students and other public schools in the nation um and um i thought you know as we're going through this slide someone might ask well where was Vermont in 2019 then and so i have added this little diamond here to indicate where performance was for Vermont in 2019 um in in case that's something that someone is curious about we can kind of cover it on the same slide so things i'd like to mention about this this graph only the grade eight difference between Vermont and the nation is statistically significant so that means that even though 34 percent of Vermonters scored proficient or above and 32 percent of the the national public scored proficient or above so there is a two percent difference there but that difference is not statistically significant it could just be due to chance uh with grade eight this difference between 34 percent and 29 percent is statistically significant it is not likely just due to chance and so we can say that Vermont in 2022 outperformed the nation in grade eight math i'm sorry reading in grade eight reading well i'm not sure if i would agree with that well let me tell you my concern you can correct me if i'm wrong i don't think vermont has as many english as a second language students as let's say some other states we don't see that those numbers in this state yet i could be wrong but it doesn't seem exactly apples to apples to me is would you agree or disagree with that i would slightly disagree mr chair because this is the national sample they um deploy a very sophisticated statistical sampling method so they actually would they are including a proportional number of ELA students um to actually be able to make for each state to actually be able to make um these comparisons so for instance typically what they would do would be to wait the results with certain coefficients i'm getting very technical here um so that so that they so that they actually are apples to apples and not apples to oranges but it's a great thought and a great question i appreciate i appreciate yeah tell me if you agree or disagree with this i mean those numbers 70 percent of kids in the united states of america in eighth grade are not proficient in reading i mean to me that i'm that that is is startling uh and i think most americans would agree you know we need to do something about that we would agree and it's what it's it's we actually really um are thrilled to get the opportunity to talk about these assessment results very frankly um with the committee because we do think it is time for us to be thinking about um not only nationally but how can we improve um in terms of our state you know it would be it would be great just one last piece it'd be great like if we had you know 60 percent in vermont proficient um compared to the national average so yes we're higher but we're not amazingly higher right thank you chair to your point i think what you may have been getting out a little bit is sort of demographic um you know what what we look like demographically um in vermont versus the country and i was wondering if we might be able to get a comparison to our new england neighbors at some point that just might be interesting to say vermont versus vestiges is Connecticut and hampshire etc it's a great idea can we get that yeah absolutely um we'd be happy to come back and present more on nape and the comparisons to other states and across the nation or just to provide materials that are more descriptive but do our canadian neighbors uh offer something a similar test or the same test um i'm less familiar um sorry i'm less familiar with what stairs would be i would assume they do something but we wouldn't be able to compare either okay okay thank you okay all right so i'm going to advance here to look at math um and again this is the official 2022 nape results for math uh similar layout with the graph here so if we focus on just the bars we are looking at vermont in 2022 with the light blue and the national public average for the dark blue bar here and and we are seeing some very slight differences here between the two bars but neither of these differences are statistically significant so what we can interpret is that for mathematics in grade four and grade eight we were performing similar to the nation um in 2022 you can see here from these diamond shapes that indicate 2019 performance that there has been a dip since 2019 for vermont so that's something that we can note there and i'll talk a little bit more about comparing to previous years in a few slides but if that brings up that curiosity for you um performance was a bit different in 2019 okay and so here we are clustering some results together once again and and again i think that you know showing um reading is green math is blue as i've tried to keep consistent through the presentation and this is on this side we have vermont and on this side np stands for national publics that's the national population of public school students that participated in the assessment i think this shows the difference between reading and math achievement within the grade levels so you know for grade four it looks pretty pretty similar but for grade eight we start to see a gap there same thing for for the nation but just a bit smaller so same information but just a little bit of a different way to present it okay so we're going to take a break from graphs for a couple of slides heather did you need to say something yes i apologize i had been muted because i had barking in my background um i also if you go back to that side and you'll recall that we also had with the state level data for 2022 the same if we look at the breakdown by grade that we started to see that um that same pattern in terms of um perhaps doing a little better or a lot better in the early grades for math and then by the middle to high school years um really declining in terms of our own proficiency scores so we have a similar pattern with national with our comparison to national and with our own aspect scores is the point i'm trying to make here thank you heather okay now a break from graphs um so i want to acknowledge some limitations here um first i will note that the nape assessment is administered pretty differently than our state uh summative assessments uh smarter balance in the vermont science assessment with nape there are uh hired assessment coordinators that come in to the schools with machines that are provided to the schools to administer these assessments so there is some control over how standardized and typical the administration can be and that is you know that kind of led nape to be able to make these cross-year comparisons with the 2022 results uh for our smarter balance and vermont science assessments that were administered here within the state um first i want to acknowledge that the results have not been matched to enrollment we talked about that earlier um so these are preliminary but uh we also have this point about participation in the assessments um 2022 was still for us we still consider that a pandemic year for our assessments um we know that in 2021 the year prior participation especially for historically marginalized groups of students uh participation was quite a bit lower uh than it typically is and we believe that we may see a similar trend in 2022 um but we don't have official data on that yet so the results that we are looking at right now we are not sure how those results should be interpreted given participation of students so whenever we're looking at these aggregate results we want to remind ourselves that it might not be uh all students that are contributing to these these average scores or these proficiency levels that we're interpreting there could be a lower percentage of say students with disabilities participating in the assessment during the year um and so we want to acknowledge that um and we also want to acknowledge that the pandemic conditions likely impacted administration of the assessments we went into detail about that in the press release that you all have with you but we do know that you know with educators being responsible for administering these assessments um and there being educator staffing shortages and also resources being pulled in different directions um you know things weren't certainly not typical uh in 2022 as we saw in 2021 um and I see I see a hand raised uh thank you Amanda uh just curious uh do you have any kind of uh thumbnail uh sketch on what the participation percentage was you alluded that it was it was smaller but doesn't really say anything was it 20 percent smaller 50 percent smaller than uh 2019 yeah I don't have the 2021 numbers on hand for participation um and I apologize for not having that with me and for 2022 we we can't compute that until we have finalized enrollment numbers um so that's something that we would be happy to you know to provide when we have it available um I can I can pull up the 2021 numbers though and and share those um I'll make a note of it sure I will note just as a follow-up to that question that we are required um through federal legislation to have an overall 95 percent participation rate in our state assessments um prior to COVID we would typically I think be fine with that there have always been um sometimes from year to year certain districts or schools that struggle for whatever reason to make um to make those that um 95 percent um benchmark but it all we tended to do quite well overall as a state in that and so I think that's the other piece of this is really trying to match to our student enrollment so we can have a much better sense of like are there areas where we can really provide some supports around getting around ensuring that students are participating um in the assessments as you can see it's really critical information for us to have as a state and we would argue it's critical for parents to know this um with their own students as well thank you Heather okay so the next couple of slides I'll be talking about comparability of results across years I'm going to start with our state assessments of ELA math and science and I'm going to note that you know as an agency we're not recommending comparing 2021 2021 results uh to any other year including 2022 uh we had great difficulty in administering assessments during 2021 uh during that school year and and as I already had suggested we saw lower and uneven participation rates across all students and across subgroups of students and that makes interpreting the aggregate level results really challenging um as I had said you know if we're looking at a proficiency or percent proficiency are above for all students we might be interpreting that as all students when in fact it may mean all students except for a good number of English learners or a good number of students with disabilities um and those are the students that these assessments are meant to serve and so we really want to be careful um in our interpretations given those participation rates I also wanted to note here that the 2022 administration was influenced by pandemic related challenges um and because of that influence and that impact on a standard assessment administration uh we don't feel that the administration of the assessment was typical and so we uh do not feel that we should be comparing the results to previous years especially prior to the pandemic so um for example in 2019 we had a very standardized administration of the assessment that was very typical um and in 2022 we had an administration of an assessment where a lot of schools were trying to make it work uh with with staffing issues and with um with resources that were stretched a little thin and um with uh with lower participation rates uh from uh from some students still lingering from the 2021 school year and we also had you know lingering effects of of an interrupted school year from 2021 um impacting students as well um we don't want to ignore the social emotional piece as well with students you know the the the emotional state of students prior to the pandemic was very different than it was in 2021 and 2022 um so um we are a little bit challenged in interpreting the results from 2022 at the aggregate level but we do want to reinforce that making comparisons across years with this particular data is really discouraged. NAEP on the other hand um has published comparisons between 2022 and 2019 publicly and I talked a little bit before about how the administration of the NAEP is is different in nature than the administration of our state assessments and so um they have come to the conclusion that it is okay for that assessment to make those comparisons. Nationally the scores have declined since 2019 uh as evidenced by NAEP um scores in Vermont also declined since 2019 however we can't really attribute that solely to the pandemic or the conditions of the pandemic because what we know is that scores on NAEP have been generally declining for over a decade um I can visually show you that here um and so these uh overall these lines are showing you how participation uh has changed over the years for about the past decade I will uh just note that NAEP is administered every other year not every year so that's why you're seeing only a few uh a few years here um and I'm going to um zoom in a bit here okay so I've kind of gotten rid of the title on the slide so you can see this a little bit easier perhaps but what we can see is kind of this general trend that's that's coming down to a decline here and and if you stop at 2019 uh and don't focus on just the difference between 2019 and 2022 which is very apparent um you can see that the scores were kind of trending down over time so because that trend existed before the pandemic we can't say that a decline in scores between 2019 and 2022 is solely due to the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic although we might be able to say that it exacerbated it and I think that's what's important because those lines do have what we would say is a is a deeper slope on average yeah it's a challenging place for us to be because we don't have a treatment and control group you know um but yes Heather it definitely is um a steeper slope at that point and more information would be able to certainly tell us more and so we can bring it back up to the top where we've suggested that you know more measures is better yeah and I think what um what we're trying to communicate just to clarify a little more well Amanda and I jumped into a nerdy um research issue and I apologize because you can tell that that's really both of our daily lives what I think the point that we're trying to make here is that um it isn't as though things were wonderful and then the pandemic happened and we suddenly took a nose dive that there has been um this long standing um I would say kind of erosion of our performance um in the past several years um on our national tests um looking here at fourth and eighth grade um so it's important for us to keep that in mind thank you Heather absolutely so the final slide that I'll present here is what can we learn so having looked at all of this information what can we take away and firstly I want to point to participation on these assessments we really need to be focusing on participation especially for our students in historically marginalized populations so that's students with disabilities English learners students living in poverty and there are a few other classifications of students that come into this historically marginalized student group um that we that we have established and report on um because participation has been lower for all students and across these subgroups we are um we are not able to report out on these results and interpret them in the ways that we would like to you know some of the power of these results has been taken away um and so we really need to be focusing on participation so that we can make full use of these assessment results and so that the purpose of the assessment can be fully realized um to you know to summarize some of the results that we've seen Vermont has seen a decline in the percentage of students achieving proficiency since before the pandemic which is evidenced by our national assessment results with the NAEP um again you know there is a limitation to that assessment uh results were or scores were declining prior to the pandemic so we'll just note that as a caveat um and and I do want to point out here that um you know our our recovery efforts as a state are focused on building an education system that our students and communities need um so so really our focus is not on returning to 2019 and student performance in 2019 as Heather has already described we're really focusing on building out an education system and going above and beyond that to meet the needs of our students and community as we move forward um and that does conclude the presentation for this afternoon so thank you both uh Dr. Gorm uh Hayden we'll reach out to you about a time next week while it's still fresh with us to come in to talk as Senator Gullick uh mentioned let's compare ourselves to the New England states let's also get a sense of what are these what are these questions what do these tests look like so we can really understand what students know and do not know and then I would also say we're going to look to all of you also to help us with some solutions I mean we started with literacy two years ago and that bill is now in the works but there might be more that we need to do I'm really interested in are there things that this committee and the legislature can do around math uh and then you know just other ideas from all of you so that in 10 years we can look back and say all right this committee sort of did some work that laid the groundwork so we're now at got closer to hopefully 60 70 80 you know percent of our students are reading and writing uh at grade level in our proficient in math um Mr. Chair thank you I appreciate that um I would like to note just briefly um that we can certainly look at the assessment that was administered in 2022 but I do want to note that we are administering a new assessment starting this year um and so um this conversation may be one that you know we revisit um uh later on as well as we look at what the new assessment looks like and what proficiency looks like on that assessment as well. Senator Weeks your hand is up I'm told oh yes sir uh just a question the last bullet on the last slide seems to imply that the um the uh needs of our education system are necessarily reflected in standardized tests is that is that kind of the you know what's written between the lines there I understand the pre-pandemic comparison but there's something seems to be more in that sentence than that's fully written. Okay um I think that our state assessments uh they do serve the purpose that they're designed for and that is to inform policy and supports and services uh for our students um I think that you know this sentence really is is intended to suggest that we uh as as a state and and how we're interpreting there is these results we do not intend to uh try to determine how to get our performance back to where it was in 2019 our intention is to figure out how to move forward and and surpass that performance. Right but does the standardized test and reflect the goals again using your words that the students in the communities need? I believe it does um I believe that our previous assessment did that and I believe that the new assessment that we're rolling out really does reflect it it's informed by Vermont educators um and we've been really thoughtful in the implementation. Okay thank you. Senator Gullit. I'm just wondering um as we look at these test scores and you know they're a little bit concerning um for sure but everything that happens in education has to be seen in a broader context of society uh what's going on in our in our country in the world etc um I am wondering if at some point we can unpack some of those ideas that actually might be within our purview in this committee and certainly here in the legislature. Such as? Such as um money going to public schools versus private schools. I mean private schools aren't on this on this in this in this graph they're it's not part of these results but I'd be really curious to know if their scores are better. Yeah and what what does that mean um so I mean obviously I could list a whole bunch of things but um poverty, mental health, etc etc. Yeah I mean it certainly would be interesting to see if independent school test scores are better if they're worse where they are and without a doubt poverty, nutrition, all those things are huge. I feel like though as a state we have to get we have to look at these in some way and say all right let's say let's say it's not 70% of kids let's say it's 50% or 40% it seems to me like there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to support teachers who are in the classroom and to help those kids come to class prepare for sure yeah please enter group. Thank you chair. Another elephant in the room might be for example you know if you look at these starting in 2013 cell phone use um social media use um the amount of hours screen hours that our students are um engaging in especially outside of school so interesting I know this is this is big but it's very interesting and very important yeah yeah yeah yeah so a long senator who looks questions if there is research that any of you have that you might be able to bring to the table around these kinds of things uh it would certainly help inform our decisions some of which are certainly in our control some of which of course uh aren't but I think they're all legitimate yeah okay anything else uh at this point. I just wanted to thank the committee thank you Mr. Chair we um are very eager to um we are eager to present these preliminary results and we're very eager to dig into these and and really have some concerted discussions with with several stakeholders around our pattern of findings and we really welcome that that work and we're excited about it. Thank you. Okay thank you and I believe we have Secretary French who will be might be in the waiting room who's at the end of the hallway is at the end of the hallway all right all right so we'll come in in just a couple minutes we'll just take a couple minutes quick stretch and Secretary French will join us at 3 30 thanks everybody welcome back to uh Senate Education 332 on Wednesday January 11th we're now shifting to school safety uh policy initiative being brought to us by our very own Secretary French so welcome Mr. Secretary uh where's yours good afternoon uh Dan Frank Secretary of Education I've got a several page outline of this um topic just a follow-up on yesterday's sort of brief introductions of this topic it's one we think is an important initiative by the way do we give you a smaller chair as just as an intimidation captain just a little bit of a little bit of eyes wondering that's fine okay um I can say that if I couldn't date yesterday I spent the bulk of my adult life in school board meetings uh which is a shame really but uh sorry uh but I'm used to any manner of provisioning seats and positions and of course pretty flexible memory board um so this this is an important topic uh obviously nationally and statewide and um we've been working on it inside the administration and uh we'd like to recommend a policy initiative in this area to strengthen our statutory framework uh around school safety um and I'll just pause there for a minute just on a wave introduction we were talking I think yesterday an introduction about statute versus regulation and it's sort of a I call it a nested ball effect so what the agency does administratively is driven by what you do in act of law and then uh like all agencies we then create regulations and rules that more specifically implement what's required in law provide further specificity and so forth so last session um the legislature directed the agency to create new standards new regulations in the area what we call district qualities uh we had made the argument really emerged as part of the pupil waiting conversation we talked briefly about that major policy reform so at one point when I was testifying I think it was in the house ways of leans committee um very early in that process someone said well if we if we give these additional weights to a district what do we have as assurance that they're actually going to take that capacity and make investments in areas that we'd like to see them improve and I said that's a great question we really need to strengthen our regulations in some areas key areas and what we've identified as district quality standards and that's something we're working on I can talk more about in that law it was act 172 you directed us to create district quality standards and you also named the three sort of domains if you will where we create standards those three areas are business operations so we're talking about sort of a back office functions in school districts business operations facilities management safety and school board governance so we started working on that at the direction of the general assembly and we're working on this issue of facilities maintenance and safety regulations and when we're working on one of the questions we surfaced very early in those conversations is you know to what extent is the statutory framework sufficient for us to do this regulatory work and we identified pretty quickly with school safety that it wasn't sufficient so inside our own work group this summer we're like it wasn't on point I'm making is it wasn't so much a reaction to events that are happening nationally without you involved it was just we were working on a regulatory construct and we asked the question right up front do we have sufficient statutory protection or direction as we're developing these regulations and we concluded we do not essentially many of the regulations or the statutory language around school safety is worded in the form of recommendations not required so the big theme here is we're bringing forward the idea that we think it's time to make these things requirements so what are these things they're not new things they're things in the background paragraph of the memo these are things that were identified through the work of a school safety advisory group that the general assembly formed in 2018 we can share that report with you that they did but it's basically comprised of all the different stakeholders that are involved and who have technical expertise in school safety like the Department of Public Safety and so forth they surface the series of recommendations it is these recommendations that we are bringing forward as recommendations translated now into requirements that that's the policy suggestion here so there's three areas of recommendations that this group identified one is this idea of options based response drills and we can talk more in detail I sort of give you some bullets on what's in there there's there's a alphabet soup of acronyms there for you to chew on just to get you acclimated to some of those and all hazards emergency operations plan so that's number two all hazards that's I think I mentioned yesterday it's sort of unique to each school district they you know if you have a dam in your backyard that that gets addressed in your all hazards plan if you don't have a dam you don't address that in your plan so number one drills number two plan three policy on access control this is the physical physical security buildings this has changed over the years I can remember when I was superintendent in Manchester I think it was around 2007 Manchester and senator you might remember Manchester men's was going through a an upgrade in their facilities and the school was building a new front entrance which is not an unusual innovation I was at Winnowsky today and they're touring their new facility that's one of the things most schools address when they're doing facility upgrades right now is improving the front acts to their buildings you know the perimeter security but at that time this was 2007 even then it was sort of controversial inside of Manchester as a representative community of the tension around should we lock our school doors all the time what about community field and access to the building we'd like to be able to come into the building anytime we want and that was a conversation the community had to adjudicate basically through the creation of a visitor control policy and we worked through that even in 2007 most of the parents ended up being very supportive of creating more secure facility but I can remember that conversation starting out in 2007 like we're concerned about not being able to come into the building anytime we want but times have changed and we're at that point now at this number three that we think it should be a requirement that all school facilities are secured during the day so again requirement number four is sort of the more I would say modern evolution of where we've been in a lot of this training and the technical support this idea of a behavior threat assessment team this is the sort of the latest innovation the last two years really this is work that's come out nationally it's work we've been deploying through the Vermont school safety center across the state this is well understood by our school districts that they need to organize themselves in a manner that allows them to assess the threats of the context of their end but importantly use that assessment as a means of deploying additional resources and providing supports to students and families so anyway one two three four these are elements I would argue that are not new these were surfaced as part of the school safety advisory group that was formed in 2018 at the direction of the general assembly at that time that group issued a report that suggested that these four things receive more attention what we're going to be or like to recommend to you that it's time in the state that these become requirements these four things so we a little unique in terms of sometimes what you'll see as I present more specific testimony sometimes it would just be these sort of bullet point systems but I went a little further here and shared proposed statutory language for you to consider I know if the committee is interested in working on this topic I thought it would be useful to provide you some sort of starter language to work with happy to talk about these things in more detail but that's that's it a summary of the testimony essentially and again we think this is a very important topic it makes sense to us in terms of the evolution of where we've been as a state in terms of providing these resources and the training for the last and I'd say go back even 10 years or so that this is a logical next step to us our school districts are familiar with these four things they've they've received incredible resources technical resources and expertise from the Vermont School Safety Center what I would suggest you bring in if you're going to work on this as a topic they'd be a good resource to hear from it's Rob Evans and Sunni Erickson but again we think you know as I was starting to mention yesterday thematically when I look at topics and I think yesterday I talked about the school mascot policy you know when I think about this issue what to what to mandate or what not to mandate we talked about teacher valuation yesterday you know like when the state is thinking about these things and I say the state I mean all of us in the general assembly and the administrative branch what's the state's interest here does the state have an interest in ensuring in requiring these measures to ensure that all schools are safe and that's that's what led us to conclude to make this recommendation that we answer that question in the affirmative yes the state has an interest we feel if this is not a requirement it's anytime things aren't required you're going to see patterns of inequity and inequality in the landscape of Vermont what happens in this particular area when we talk about you know I think it's very clear that the state through the school safety center has provided exemplary resources professional development grants hundreds of thousands of grants unfortunately the districts that are resource to access that access that so meaning that if you're a district that's resource and you have the ability to apply for a grant or if you have the ability to take time off from school and send a team to training you will but there's places in the state that don't have that capacity unless we really start to require it you know through requiring it will also identify those people that need targeted support as opposed to offering sort of across the board support for everyone we could really start to focus in on those districts that haven't been able to make sufficient progress in this area so that's that's really the nut of it why we're bringing this forward is a recommendation for a requirement at this point you have to answer any questions any questions thank you chair my first question or reaction was oh this looks like it would um require some financial appropriations or outlays and hiring more people and so on and so forth but actually on second glance i don't think it really does yeah it's a great question to ask i don't address it in this testimony if you're interested in going on this path we would i think i'd offer a couple of other resources for you to start with the one would be this this entity called the vermont school safety center and you should understand what that is and what it isn't the vermont school safety center is a partnership between the partner public safety and the agency of education there's an agreement between us we and it sounds pretty fancy and it is to a certain extent we can go to the website school safety dot vermont dot gov but it's really two people and it's rob evans who is an employer employee of margolis heli a national consulting group that's headquartered here in vermont on this issue on this on this broader security yeah school security is a sub topic okay they do um and that's where we're able to take advantage of national resources you know to their connections um and then sonny erickson who's a state employee so really the school safety center is two two resources if you will one's a contractor and the other's a state employee um we the agency of education anticipates building up its capacity something we've been working on as a result of uh pandemic what we call a a healthy school safety team some of the work if you've met jill in particular she's been managing grants on hfac air quality and pcb we need to build up capacity in the agency to get supervised school facilities issues more um but we i don't anticipate us having public safety or um i don't say security expertise inside our agency we will always need an out outside resource and some collaboration with dps so understanding to what extent the school safety center is resourced adequately and that contract would be important um because i think inside a state government i think it's working well we we have our eyes on how to make it work better but um our ability to contract for that expertise and what that expertise has been isn't necessarily what it should be going forward it has evolved very well over time i mean vermont's benefited greatly over the last 20 years as this is involved um but there's more there's more technical support we could use from them so we can talk more about that i would take get some testimony from them i also think understanding the vision inside a state government would be useful uh yeah and that's really the governor's form the violence prevention task force school safety is a sub component of that strategy um i think it would be useful if i had the committee to have me come back with my partner d barbitt who's the governor's appointing on that to hear the broader uh sort of context versus violence prevention and how this factors into that what kind of resource is going to be configured around great but that's a good that's a good question to ask in the beginning of any if you're going to go down the path that's one i would keep an eye on right from the very beginning but your your initial diagnosis i would argue senator is pretty good that we've we've been able to and there's a lot of federal dollars flowing through this topic um we've been able to leverage those pretty efficiently and effectively over the last few years but it's something to raise as we go into it oh that's it i'll sit there questions or comments at this point i guess i'm just looking to the committee would anybody if does anybody object us moving forward on this this issue yeah so we will continue to take testimony uh or really kind of kick it off a little more next week or those you know early into the week after uh with uh Vermont school safety center and you and d barbitt again yeah and then hear from those you know what we call our usual suspects the school board association and yeah you know there's to get people's thoughts on this and i'll um i think it's great and i'm sorry to drop like that this mr evans is is here and can probably give us a good sense of the landscape across the united states around what's absolutely yeah that's terrific you know one of the flagship events of that effort has been an annual governor safety conference which goes back sometime uh just to give you a sense of that this year we held it for the first time since the pandemic we had over 300 participants and um due to the connections that mr evans has and his firm were able to bring in the person who did the profiling for the secret service who essentially is the author of the idea of threat assessment that you know that's been a joint effort at the national level between the u.s. department of education and the office of homeland security um so we're literally able to bring in the best people for the state on this they've done a lot of work consulting on various specific issues in some of our districts um i was going to mention um i'm in a similar trajectory right now with the house education committee so they asked for so introductory testimony i i kind of walked in here yesterday off just while i was roaming around and what i didn't introduce myself but um i'm going to go in on friday and kind of what i did yesterday to ask me to surface like policy priorities i'll do an orientation through the organization structure of the agency and then i'll probably surface this issue as well i don't know if i'll provide the detail yet but if they if they're interested i'll probably do that next week great so the house has an education for you also i think so i wasn't that yeah i think so yeah but i don't know i didn't see that i haven't seen anything that's true i'll i'll do it i think you know i'll go in and sort of generally provide general bullet points on policy topics if they're interested i would then come back like it today with a little more detail right i assume there's i know there's broad public interest in that topic but this again emerges from some very specific regulatory work that we're working on and we think there's an opportunity to strengthen the statutory language grounds and i appreciate bringing to us early because you know senator or representative conlan and i have sort of divided started to divide up some of work already and i think this will probably land here i'm guessing and we'll pass it to them after crossover so but i can confirm that with him okay any other questions for secretary french this point of comments thank you very much very helpful thank you we have one more witness today uh and then we will uh these breaks are you planning on no i am not i just haven't wrapped up testimony so i knew secretary french was in i i would not like to test okay we are going to hear uh let's i think we're ready perfect come on in uh miss espinal is going to spend a few minutes with us uh please take the witness chair thanks for for joining us nice seeing you again we ran into each other last evening briefly thank you and mr sherman thanks for joining us as well so i'm gonna ask you in that last one correct espinal espinal yes is espinal is visiting us uh is the director of educational outreach next generation personal finance uh senators may recall uh that um my gosh it's been only not even a week back but i believe mr sherman you came to us came to me to talk a little bit about uh this idea what we're seeing in the schools around personal finance economics that kind of thing and so what we'd love for you to do over the next 15 minutes is tell us a little bit about yourself and your organization and what you're what you're proposing sure uh so as mentioned my name is janelia espinal and i'm here on behalf of actually mission 2030 fund which is affiliated with n gps um next turn personal finance is a nonprofit organization that works in education offering free curriculum to the teachers who teach personal finance or financial literacy in high school setting so all of the lesson plans that they need all of the homework assignments the tests and answer keys all of that is created and provided free online for the teachers and then we also couple that and improve and also provide free teacher training it's one thing to offer the curriculum but if the teacher themselves have not received a formal financial education there may be some some gaps in content expertise so we offer teacher training for free as well and with mission 2030 fund an affiliated organization that really works to provide some advocacy and expanding access to financial education so um i just i'll talk a little bit about sort of what why we believe personal finance really needs um a place in our public school system much more uh robust place than kind of what it looks like right now specific to kind of Vermont what the situation looks like and then of course um you know next steps great uh so right now ngpf has almost 70 000 teachers across the country and senators just so you know this is in your okay yes please follow along so just the very first page um ngpf our affiliated organization has almost 70 000 teachers across the country using the curriculum that means that they went onto the website they created a free account and they accessed our free curriculum right now in the state of Vermont about 505 of those teachers are here in Vermont spread all throughout the state already using the curriculum already accessing our free teacher training as well and um both organizations are nonprofits they are funded through an endowment that was created by our co-founders so everything that we do is free it will always be free and that's really part of our mission is we want to make sure that there's no school or district that is lacking the budget for this that says oh well you know we just can't do it we don't have the funding for a curriculum oh curriculum's free oh we don't have the funding to you know be able to train the teacher oh teacher training is free so we really want to be able to say the funding is not going to be a barrier to access um and then finally we have this big hairy audacious goal which is um called mission 2030 and that is that by the year 2030 our vision is that every student across the country in all 50 states will have a guaranteed access to a standalone semester class that teaches them personal finance has that's been up man just so who's sort of behind this initiative i mean so the reason why i say affiliated organizations ngpf is a non-profit we cannot lobby ngpf mission 2030 fund is a 501c4 still not for profit but is able to lobby so we do lobby so i'm an advocate with ngpf mission 2030 fund i'm lucky enough to have two jobs and then also i'm the director of education outreach with our affiliated organization ngpf okay so is it is it banking community who sort of got this going is it just people out of the goodness there is actually a coalition of stakeholders here in vermont many many people have been supporting this initiative we've actually partnered with the champlin college sensor of financial literacy quite a bit for years and years john palatial reached out to ngpf in about 2015 to talk about you know some of the synergies in the work and to uh just really be able to expand access to teacher training in particular and champlin college runs a three grad credit course over the summer the summer institute four personal finance teachers in the state of vermont where they get the grad credit and they receive the training as well so we've been really partnering um with a lot of local stakeholders here in vermont but the initiative is it is a national initiative but we've really heard that the kind of more of a demand here from vermont teachers and from all of the stakeholders bankers association uh center of financial literacy jumpstart council for economic education it's a lot of key players um but of course we've partnered with you know maggie and nick and the folks over to really um create a push for advocating for more center of leadership question please just a comment i'll date myself by saying this but um we used to teach that in my school in home economics yes interesting and i wanted to take it because i didn't have a clue and i hate math but they wouldn't let me take it because i wasn't in that curriculum and it used to be in a lot of um home economics and even economics courses used to include a lot more personal finance but for just over the decades has kind of gone by the wayside it's largely no longer included in a lot of um the high school graduation requirements currently 17 states have a requirement the most recent states that added it were new hampshire um kansas missouri so new hampshire is the only other state besides vermont that doesn't have a standard space time and seat sort of high school requirement system is more proficiency base they figure this out so i i mean i'm confident vermont can as well and i i mean the ask here is like really that vermont can work to become the 18th state because being creative about personal finance um or or high school graduation requirements in general is something vermont's already really good at and just figuring out where the place is for personal financial literacy in there um is really the critical component senator gula thank you chair personally um we here in this committee the education committee um dealing with all things education we know that there's a connection between poverty and um success in school academic success etc i would i would love it if there were like a mission statement or a vision statement it says to me as someone on this committee we are committed to reducing poverty ultimately in our country um because that would that's a direct connection with the work that we're doing absolutely so just that would be helpful well i love that um we do say personal finance for all and you'll notice on the title all is in capital letters because we really believe this is a social justice issue that we actually if you follow along to the very next um slide there's two maps the first map is the national map where you can see where in the country this is already guaranteed as part of high school graduation requirements there are 17 states in orange and where it's not um and and all the various levels of the brighter to the darker blues range in the percentage of students that are getting guaranteed access so guaranteed access means it is a requirement versus an elective which some students are lucky enough that they opt in or their parents convince them to take it but not all kids are getting it and so when you look at the closer look map at vermont you can actually see the access gap much more clearly here in the state of vermont 13 percent of students are getting this class no matter what before they cross the graduation stage they're learning about budgeting banking comparing interest rates on loans understanding how to pay for college investing insurance taxes how to buy a car i mean just so many things that are relevant to their lives um 13 percent are guaranteed to get that an additional 39 percent they may get it but they may not because it's optional it's an elective and the other 48 percent are either maybe getting one or two lessons on budgeting within an economics class or a financial algebra class but largely not getting it at all and so what this is is essentially saying let's go from only the select few of students who are lucky enough to get this to bridging that gap and saying all students need this and in particular students in poverty um and so you know just really saying we can't like have another generation of vermonters or even just americans generally that are going from like school to like the school of hard knocks to learn about how money works they should be learning it inside of our public schools um and then that's very personal for me i'll tell you all i um my parents are immigrants they came to new york city from dominican republic in the 80s no english no money um and and so my entire life we're really essentially in poverty and and depending on government assistance but my entire community told me and my parents pushed it that school and academics is your ticket out of poverty and i took that really too hard so i applied myself and i excelled academically and i got a full scholarship to brown university that changed my life coming to new england was like a complete i mean it was just an experience that i can't even put into words and when i graduated i still had 20 000 dollars of credit card debt even on a full scholarship because i needed textbooks and a laptop and i wanted to look like all of my peers on this beautiful campus of mostly wealthy students so i was buying anything and everything i thought i needed to fit in on credit cards having no understanding of how credit cards work how does borrowing on credit work how does compounding interest work i have no idea and i did everything right right i took all the classes i did all the things i got to the ivy league school but it was never taught to me and my parents don't know it so i'm at a disadvantage because i didn't get it at home i'm not getting it in school and so this class would have completely changed my trajectory and i and that's why i when i graduated college i became a classroom teacher and i realized like being a student in a public school and becoming a teacher in a public school decades of my life and nothing had changed and so it's it's a very personal thing for me and i think that you know luckily in new england we have already seen road island pass the requirement in 2021 new hampshire just got on board we have active legislation that has just been filed in connecticut we're working on some in main we're working on some in remont so i think there's this movement and the time really is now especially in this sort of thick kind of end of covid hopefully post-covid era where people are realizing like another crisis after the great recession in 2020 like when are we going to actually have citizens who understand truly understand the skills around money management and also understand the tools available to them because had i known that that 15 with my first job i could open a custodial Roth IRA right i mean it's true my life could be very different today it's a really good point yeah i mean these are the things that we have to teach that is accessible to you this is what's there this is what is available to you but you have to know about it and understand how to make decisions that serve you you and your family best um and then you know and that looks a lot of ways point also is it's a we used to i'm old enough to also there was home back but also honestly it wasn't cool for guys to take so we just take it that's right and if you wanted to fit in you didn't go to home back honestly so we went to woodshop and which i didn't teach this yeah so it's just it's interesting that it seems and then homex seems to have disappeared or you know is there a version of it so that's right it's it's a real and i think senator gulick's points are great i mean how do we really give people the tools to start to help them you know deal with poverty absolutely yes and so i i think we have a question oh go ahead please so do you want to finish your thoughts no no i we could go into this next but happy to hear okay um i just had a couple of things to say one is that um through financial literacy you could also be teaching math and reading so i mean it really is a great vehicle for learning other skills um secondly um someone sent me today actually uh an op ed piece from vermont digger but this i get he must be in his 20s or 30s i actually don't know his age but he's talking about his financial success and how he pinpoints it to his his class at musky high school yeah his financial literacy out like 100% he's like that class set me on a trajectory of success and he outlines exactly how i thought that was really interesting and i love these anecdotes i'm an anecdote i also grew up poor in a first generation college um are you also um collecting data i because i you know as legislators love data absolutely and i hope that um over the years we can really see what kind of effect yes these curricula are having absolutely so we one of the things that we're developing now so we're still in the works is a way to assess not only financial knowledge but also behavioral change in students so that's something that we're really interested in measuring because before 2012 a lot of the criticism in the financial education space was that it doesn't move the needle financial knowledge people know it and they still don't do it doesn't change their behavior but since 2014 to now there's so much new research that shows that it does change behavioral outcomes and there's a few specific outcomes listed on the first slide which came from the University of Missouri which is where carly urban um dr carly urban has been doing a lot of this research and a few of the things that happened where student loan repayment increases so less defaulting on debt after college particularly for first gen students who attend public schools more responsible borrowing behaviors which means that when a student gets access to a personal finance class they are much more likely to compare the loan options they have for college and instead of going to private loans they'll max out all the federal loans they get first because they know that they're at a lower interest rate but comparing interest rates on loans is explicitly taught in a personal finance class not in a math class and more responsible borrowing behaviors as well in addition to credit cards and and loans that are outside of student loans where they're having to compare interest rates financing cars for example really understanding those borrowing environments and not just going with the first option or an option that somebody told you about um and then finally improving credit scores so we see that and there's a particular study from Utah Utah was the first state in the U.S. to officially create a guarantee around personal finance and this was right after the 2008 session and so lawmakers decided okay we got to do something people didn't have savings this was really rough and so they did the guarantee and then 10 years later they did a longitudinal study that came from the governor's office in the state of Utah and it explicitly shows the change students have better credit score more money saved higher savings rate less defaulting on student loans I mean it was just 10 years changed so much um and so this course there's so much data around that and there is a lot of data about in particular first generation and low-income students and how it changes things for them and their families as well because when you teach the students they run home and say mom that did you know that when you pay off your credit card like it helps your credit score so don't carry out and it seems like common sense even for me now that I didn't know that before but it's not it's not most people don't know what the factors of their credit score it like what makes your credit score go up or down so these things are explicitly taught students take it home to their families and it it really has a ripple effect um you know beyond the classroom so that leaves us with an exception how how how have 17 states already done it and how can Vermont become the 18th well for us we've done a lot of research at the mission 2030 fund about what effective legislation looks like and we've boiled it down to these five principles the first which is on the last um slide the first of which is that you need to include flexibility and that means respecting local control making sure that districts have a lot of choice and say in how this guarantee is implemented it might look differently in different districts because they have different needs different demographics different population you know it just it just has to be flexible enough so that districts have a lot of say what it looks like when it's rolled out um it's gotta be well not got to be but research shows that it is significantly more effective in junior and senior year so grades 11 and 12 and the research that backs it is called the just in time education research which shows that if it's taught when it's about to be used it's just in time they capture it versus putting it on the back burner in your mind freshman year because you're not really thinking about college until senior year but if you're filing your FAFSA junior year or buying your first car or applying to college you're going to use this stuff right then and there so um that's the just in time uh justification for really pushing for upper grades uh and then the full semester is really just the sense that you've got a crunch for time with any coursework but personal finance is so comprehensive banking budgeting investing insurance taxes paying for college careers I mean how can you teach that in three weeks I mean it can't be integrated as a component of another class you won't be able to teach it in a comprehensive way that's 21st century relevant so really the the the need and the research shows that it's got to be that standalone semester course um and then the last three are the standards for this course and as I mentioned you know Vermont and New Hampshire are the only two states that are proficiency based and not standards based so there could be a Vermont specific list of proficiencies there is a lot of guidance already from the um agency of education here in Vermont that includes recommended resources that align to the national standards for personal finance which came from jumpstart and the council of economic education so there's a lot of stuff here in Vermont already um but just to you know kind of think about that and then the last two scheduling of course like a periodic implementation like transitioning into implementing because we I know personally being a classroom teacher that is overwhelming to constantly get new guidance about what needs to be done but a transition period that's maybe three or four years out so that it is not something that we have to do one day to the next um and then finally just highly confident qualified teachers and that comes from providing them with training earlier today I mentioned I teach with NGPF I teach the investing certification course which is a five-week course for teachers we've had thousands of teachers take it and the number one thing they say to me after is thank you because not only am I taking this back to my students but I logged into my 403b account which looked like a foreign language to me before today and I was able to select funds that were low cost that I now know what I'm investing in and actually project out am I going to be able to retire when I thought I would and have the confidence to click around and know what I'm looking at and understand what the vocabulary means you know so it's it's for teachers just as much as it is for the students and their families would you send us uh I actually I think you've already had but if you haven't a link to uh what what what students would leave with basically absolutely um we'll actually send out the competencies um happy to send all of that senator blinks sure you ever heard of the green light part yeah yeah they are very engaged in financial education advocacy right now green light so it's a it's a debit card where school age kids work yeah even around the house and they get a they get a they put it on the yeah and they even have an app so that parents can help kids like manage money on the on the credit it's obviously a startup it's a tech company but the the idea that we need to be thinking about how students are mobile first now with their finances versus you know I mean when I was growing up I actually learned how to write a check most of these students today are probably not writing checks uh but but they need to honor and that makes it more difficult to manage money when it's not tangible now it's all on the screen so it's even more important that we prepare them for that uh because things just look so different and and they have to keep up with the 21st century financial changes including technology yeah committee any final questions this has been very very helpful thank you so I really appreciate you being here in person glad we were able to coordinate it and coming from Florida this should be an absolute shock to you no by that's right you're born and raised yeah yeah I'm new to Miami I've only been there a year and a half I'm really from Brooklyn yeah yeah your passion is contagious yeah that was the same thing you're in a great field senator weeks uh you want me to do you have a question or comment but I did have one question and I'm curious from uh possibly senator uh gulik's uh experience as a teacher what would be the the perceived negative side of adding a semester into the current school curriculum and how and how do administrators respond to to that balance between what's already obligated for students and what could potentially be added such as the the personal finance course just curiosity senator weeks are you asking me or or no no no senator gulik i'm asking you since you have you're in school experience uh you know you you've dealt with the day-to-day pressures on trying to balance uh obligations and timelines and schedules thank you for the question um well first of all I have to say um I taught many years at sx high school and they actually do have a financial literacy program you may know about it um which I think has been very successful so um I would say my only like almost visceral reaction when you talked about implementation was like we've sort of been encouraged not to implement anything new because people are so stressed out post-covid but the fact that you laid out this sort of gradual um get Ted did you want to go ahead send the um the the fact that you laid out a potential gradual integration I think would be really helpful um you know there are stigmas and biases associated with all kinds of things um I'm just going to put that out on the table and I'm just going to leave it there um but uh yeah personally I you know yeah it's a great thing as far as I'm concerned so um I'll add one of the things that we've seen happen in the most recent states that have passed financial education legislation Michigan Ohio these are from 2021 and Rhode Island they have included a lot of flexibility Michigan being the most flexible which is a little funny what they've included is that this half semester of personal finance could or this half year of course full semester course could fulfill many different high school graduation requirements so that the districts and the students decide this could count as a half credit elective this could count as a half credit math this could count as a half credit foreign language in the state of Michigan which is the fun part uh and some people might say personal finance is a foreign language for them but you know every state has sort of decided what works for us and making sure that it's not an added um half credit you know uh which senator weeks mentioned is is a burden to say now we're going to increase so what certain what states like Florida and um Michigan have done is say we're actually going to change the credits by net of zero by saying nope it's going to be an existing half credit of either this this or that so they have the flexibility to choose and it is part of the existing credits awesome yeah I mean the only other negative if you want to say negative is that we're resistant to change and if you're used to teaching algebra and geometry and trigonometry to suddenly have this new curriculum can be challenging but um you know again seems wonderful Mr. Fisher final word goodness um uh Ted Fisher the Reminded Agency of Education and the Agents Director of Communications and Legislative Affairs Senator I apologize I was just trying to catch the chairs and this is partly in um in response to your question Senator through you Mr. Chair um I think actually uh Mr. Chair I might recommend that you um ask my colleague and I know your favorite AOE employee uh Director DeCarolis just DeCarolis who's the Director of our Student Pathways Division this might actually be good opportunity to talk a little bit about just the structure of curriculum and instruction and Vermont's standards based I appreciate this that's been all talking about the um the Vermont proficiency based structure of Vermont is also a local control state what that means is that we set I'm going to do with like the that 25,000 foot overview in two minutes um and ask my colleagues who know a lot more about this than I would come in um the Vermont Vermont in statute you set the requirements for um comprehensive education that then leads to um regulation as Secretary Friend was mentioning statute and regulation that regulation is currently education quality standards which are set by the state Board of Education the state Board of Education also sets standards for all the content areas so think math science global citizenship for example those standards are adopted in the proficiency based system and then uh local um supervisory unions so in Burlington School District is a supervisory union or supervisory district you also have large multi-district desks used in some parts of the state um those supervisory unions um then set curriculum locally right so we require standards at the state level and then they decide in terms of how exactly to meet those standards so when we're talking about a curriculum they could for example adopt and use these kind of curriculums um that's a conversation that's a conversation that's greater than just this particular and I know there's some other areas of curriculum that you might hear about this year um and and I would recommend hearing it from the folks who know much more about than I do because I just exhausted my mind because of the level but okay because I was going to ask you but we can ask um uh Jeff yeah um I think financial literacy is in EQS uh I I do believe so I know we've done a lot of work on it I would want to phone a friend and I believe it's in at least one of our standards I would I would I just would definitely be the one who built an answer with our current departments are um and these are again these are board state board adopts these standards um on a regular basis um I don't remember the last time this particular standard was updated but and Hayden has had a scheduled day or some time for us club heart standards versus you know efficiency versus thank you very very much thank you all so much terrific to have you here and uh welcome back to the northeast thank you you come up more often ladies and gentlemen I think that concludes our work for today thanks very much we are adjourned and you will look forward to seeing everybody tomorrow thank you chair oh next day thank you Hayden