 So, and welcome. This is a meeting of the House Education Committee and the Vermont House of Representatives, and we're also joined by two members of the House Ways and Means Committee so welcome Representative George Till and Representative Scott Beck. There's probably nothing more important in our state at this time in the opening of our schools and it is likely far bigger and more complex in the opening of our businesses. At this time, the primary work belongs to school district supervisor unions and the administration, and we will hear from them today. And as we listen to testimony will keep an ear for those areas where the legislature might play a role. And just by saying that this is not a time for partisanship, the stakes are simply too high. There is palpable anxiety, and with the challenges ahead, we cannot be lost in a dust bowl of infighting, but must work collectively to meet those challenges. We are Vermonters, and we have a history of doing just that. We also know that the ability to keep schools open is based on our community's willingness to follow health guidelines to keep the virus at bay. We know that if we don't, the virus sneaks in and we close schools, we must all work to keep the virus at bay. Today we will hear from the Agency of Education, the Superintendents Association, the Vermont NEA, the Vermont Principles Association, five superintendents and two teachers. And with that I want to welcome Jeff Francis of the Vermont Superintendents Association, who will then introduce two of our five superintendents. And we've asked them to give us a report from the field. This will be followed by a report from the NEA, the Teachers Association Principles, and then we will finish with three remaining superintendents. So thank you and welcome Jeff Francis. Thank you. Is my audio working okay today? Yes, it is. All right, I'm going to only take a minute or two, because I think that other witnesses and the superintendents who you hear from are going to add a lot of value to the committee and its knowledge. First thing I'll say, you all know this is extraordinarily challenging. I've got a long career in public policy and management. I've never experienced or witnessed anything like it. I will also provide kudos to every individual and association with whom I've been working because I'm seeing demonstrations of leadership that are also unsurpassed in my observation. That stated, it's a complicated navigation because we have a tendency to rely on old habits and the way we work and the perspectives that we've shaped over the years in terms of the conventions in which we have existed do not go away. Your statement, Chair Webb, about no partisanship working together and doing our best to navigate this are particularly on point. I, from my vantage point as the executive director of the superintendent's association, simplistically today have this lumped into three particular categories of interest. One is the utility, the validity of the health and safety guidance, which is constantly evolving. There are teams from the health department working with local education officials to make sure that we have guidance that is useful in creating self safe and healthy learning environments for schools. They're doing a good job, but the guidance is complicated. Also, what has emerged and this will come as no surprise to you are key issues related to the workforce. And the simple way to state that is if school systems don't have a predictable and reliable workforce, then it's difficult for them to know how they can start school. Right now there are two particular areas that are of utmost concern. One is childcare, and that is we've got a demographic working in schools, many of whom have two adults and a household both employed in the education system. Oftentimes they have children themselves, and with the variability and starting startup plans for schools, we're seeing a set of dynamics that make it difficult to understand and predict who will be available to work. And then and this, the other demographic has been known to us since the outset of the of the COVID-19 crisis, and that is those who have a compromising health condition, or are in a age demographic where they're concerned about the threat of the virus. Some things are proving particularly challenging to navigate. But I do think we are navigating them. And then finally, there are literally hundreds of operational and logistical issues that local school officials have to contend with so those are three very integrated components. So two final points and then I'll give you two suggestions about legislative action. The timing of all this is extraordinarily significant. So when the guidance comes, people respond to the guidance, and every time the guidance comes, there's a need to adjust plans, and that's a dynamic that we're going to have to contend with. So we're taking an appeal to try to get the guidance as settled as possible so that school districts, some of which are very large and complex organizations have time to adjust when the guidance changes. And then also, whenever there's a new development, it sends ripples through the system and local leaders and staff and schools have to contend with it. So for example, and I'm going to point out here, we are working very closely with the Vermont NEA, but when the Vermont NEA or any other entity, the governor, the health department issue something new, you have to adjust for what comes that's new. Today, just by way of example, the NEA put out a statement and a five page plan to reopen schools. People are now going to need to both stay the course on the plan they have and react and respond to that. So it's extremely dynamic. You would ask Chair Webb about what the legislature can do. We're developing a list. There are two items on that list right now. One list is to respond to the governor's order to open schools on September 8 by having the General Assembly wave for one year, the 175 day calendar, the mandatory requirement, adjust that downward to 170. And the other, and we'll continue to work on this so we can advise you on it. Schools are very concerned about predictability of their enrollment because it affects the finances. We're hearing a lot about adjustments to enrollment this year as people make choices to homeschool or seek other forms of education. We want to ask the General Assembly to take a look at some form of protection around ADM so that schools don't have a double whammy and have to deal with both the challenges of the COVID crisis and also dramatic changes in their enrollment associated with decisions that are going to affect this year. With that's my testimony in summary. I think it will be consistent but not as detailed as what you'll hear from the superintendents themselves. And with that I would turn to the superintendents who you have invited to speak with you today. I think first up is Lynn Kota. And Lynn, you are from, you are representing a consortium I believe. Yeah, maybe you could explain that. So I am the superintendent of Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union. I am up in the far northwest corner of the state. I lead 10 schools that exist on eight different campuses. And I'm also the co-chair of the Champlain Valley Superintendents Association. So I appreciate the opportunity to share some of the details of our reopening plan with you. Chair Webb, could you give me a little bit of a time check? You've got about 15 minutes. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen if that's okay with you. Great, please do. So I put together a little presentation because when I was approached to present to you today about the complexity of our reopening plan, I thought it would be easier to show you than to necessarily speak with you about it. So I'm going to do a little bit of both. So this represents both the FNESU and the Champlain Valley approach to reopening. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about the Champlain Valley. So we represent 16 SUs or Supervisory Unions or school districts around Chittenden, Franklin, Grand Isle, and Addison County. I can tell you that this group of administrators have become incredibly important to me and the work that I'm doing, and I know that that's true, we've become incredibly important to one another. And then at the start of COVID, we were meeting on a daily basis and we have just recently shifted to meeting twice weekly. We took kind of a painstaking approach to planning for reopening and we definitely had some considerations around, you know, how does the reopening plan play out with the variety of groups and the size of the schools and the counties and the regions that we all represent. We worked really hard to come up with some operational definitions from the guidance so that we could apply some of that with consistency throughout the organization. And then each of us then took that out and did our own SU or SD organizational level planning. We've also very much focused on the importance of sharing our resources and our documents with one another because the magnitude of this work. It's larger than any of us have ever contended with before so that collaboration and willingness to work collaboratively to share our resources has been really instrumental. So I'll talk a little bit now about the FNESU approach. It's also been very centered on a collaborative team approach. For our FNESU leaders again at the start of COVID, we were meeting daily for the first few months and then we've been meeting weekly and bi-weekly for the last several months along with some really extended blocks of time focused on our reopening plans. We spent four days together. We have created task forces around reopening. We also have design teams focused on all of the components for reopening. We have stakeholder advisory teams that include parents, teachers, students, and other a variety of community members. We also have been working really collaboratively with our 21st century after school program. They've been an important part in the collaboration around reopening because we know that we have we've had needs this summer for after school for summer programming for kids and they've been wonderful about that. We also have needs for before and after school care as we reopen. We have worked with the team that has been really incredibly instrumental to us is also our nurses, they have been working really hard with us all summer. We've just begun having our virtual town hall so we're rolling out the draft of our plan and we're people are asking some really great questions and it's helping us to make our plan even better. Here with you, the first I'm going to start off with some operational definitions and I know there's not time to go through all of this but you can see that there's there's a lot of information we've all had to digest and what we've tried to work on as a Champlain Valley is contending with all of that information and unpacking it in a way that makes sense to us within the context of us reopening in a three step process. I'd like to just let people know that this is also on our website so if anybody's having difficulty reading this if you can pick it up on the website. Thank you. You're welcome so across the top it really is just identifying these are the, you know, like the most restrictive first step where everybody would be in a remote learning phase. We're going to be reopening at right now, and then the least restrictive step at a step three. And what we've tried to come up with are some common definitions around what are the health and safety measures and how do we interpret those. What do we look at in terms of what would the learning look like in each of those phases, and what's the provision for school meals. And this continues to be a document that we come back to on a really regular basis. We add to as there are changes in the guidance and things are updated we come back to these definitions and we try to clarify some things that aren't clear because we know it's really important that we get this right for the start of the year. I also have tried to unpack what the guidance says about transportation around use of our school facilities, what it looks like for physical education and use of our gym. What it also looks like for music and I can say that we know that this is not final format music in particular we know we need to go back and make revisions around brass and woodwinds we're waiting for some clarification on that. It's complex but we're trying to do the work together of unpacking it and really understanding with consistency. From there I have taken the operational definitions and you know we've looked at our, our local approach to planning for reopening and we have actually dividing divided up the work into nine sections. So this is kind of what our framework is based upon so we've had a team, multiple teams actually we've had a design team and then a stakeholder advisory team, working with that design team for each of these nine categories. So it's difficult to represent what that looks like without showing you an example. One of the things I was I pulled out one piece of our reopening framework to share with you, and that is our health and safety framework. So you can see how we have structured. Each of our teams has a team lead we also have a school nurse team lead on each of our reopening plans. We have a leadership team who's been really centrally focused on unpacking all of this work and making sure that we're ready for the return of our students and then we have also had advisory team members that are representative of a broader base of stakeholders. So we worked. Those teams work to identify what are the key considerations in the health and safety guidance that we need to consider as we're developing our local plan and then what are the questions this team needs to be able to ask. This represents all of the key considerations and questions. I apologize it's looking like the way I cut and pasted this and cut a little bit of it off. There are also some links resources embedded in there that the leaders will be able to grab and use when they're working on this in their buildings. And then took the key considerations and the questions to consider in order to develop what the reopening plan is for that particular category. So you can see that we have, we know that we're going to need to be flexible and be able to shift between most restrictive to lease restrictive steps along the way. And we have identified those areas that we need to contend with just in the, you know, interest of time I won't go through all of this but you certainly can see it later. So it's, it's quite comprehensive. We have tried to work together to say, you know, how do we operationalize all of these things so that we're ready to make sure that these, all of these things we've identified like minimizing parent family school visits that's part of the health and safety guidance so we've tried to unpack what does that look like in each step along the way. What's the health and safety education that has to happen for all of our stakeholders and what does that look like along the way. So you can see that this is, there's still some sections that we know we're going to get guidance on so we tried to indicate that in our reopening framework. And we have taken this framework to serve as a foundation for the tasks that we'll have to do as a school and an organization to be able to reopen. This is a sample. Again, this is the health and safety part of the task list. This is the work plan, if you will, and I will just say the statuses are updated because a lot of these are in process at this point. So we took that reopening framework and we've unpacked it into in order to operationalize this. These are the tasks that we have to do. We've identified what's our deadline. Who are the people who are responsible? What resources will they need? And then we have created a spot for them to put their product so that we can collaboratively use it across schools. And again, the work is huge. So we're trying to make it where we can develop a tool. We can share it across all 10 of our schools in order to be as efficient as possible. So you can see that in order to just unpack this one section, it's quite complex. And there's a lot here that needs to be done in order for us to get ready. We have people working on that right now. We're shifting into this logistical phase where people are doing all of these tasks and getting ready for the year to start. There's something that Jeff mentioned when he was speaking that I just want to, you know, address and that is that as we as we continue to receive guidance, we unpack that guidance and we have to put that into through the operational lens of how does this work for our framework. And then what's the work that needs to happen in order for us to be able to put this into practice. So I can't stress enough that this is complex. I feel like we have the right people working on this throughout the region and locally at any issue. I feel strongly that we have the right people working on this. We're trying to engage our stakeholders as much as we can. It's very complex work. So I hope, I hope I didn't overwhelm you, but I thought it best to just share some artifacts with you. I thought that might help you to be able to see the complexity that all of these leaders are working with during this time. I can't hear you. You're muted. I don't usually mute myself. Sorry. This is a, this is a model that is drawn from 16 school districts that have some pretty different, different numbers, different buildings, different situations and I'm wondering, given that you were able to bring 16 different districts together. Do you see that there's a possibility for other regions to replicate this process. I think I want to just clarify that the operational definitions and that how we chose to come back. That's the part where we chose to work in to try to get into alignment that the framework and the task list. It's not specific to our SU, but certainly is modeled after the work. I know we, we actually borrowed the tool from one of the Addison supervisory unions. So I think that I just wanted to make sure I said that, but do I think that other people could do something similar I think it's hard to know what resources other people have available to them. I think that we were all given guidance that allowed us the flexibility to figure out how we were going to reopen our schools. We recognize as Champlain Valley that our decisions all impact one another because we share students and we share some of our employees or parents and some of those other regions. And that's the intention behind us making those decisions that we did recognize that adds complexity to other regions. I mean, do I think others could collaborate as well. Sure, I think others could collaborate as well but I think geographically. I'm not sure that that others are are. I guess I can't speak to how others are working with their regional partners. Thank you. So what we will do is we will move on to Randy Lowe from the Bennington Rutland supervisory district and we will, we will see what we have for additional questions following this. So thank you very much. You're welcome. And welcome Randy. Thank you very much. So thank you for welcoming me today and it's a great privilege to speak with you. I should probably say that I became superintendent on, on July 1. So I'm about four weeks into this. And, and I don't have a team of other regional folks I've been partnering with so. So I guess I'll sort of put, put that out as I, as I share with you our plan. I am the superintendent with the Bennington Rutland supervisory union. So we are a very large supervisory union in the greater Manchester area. So we're southwestern Vermont. And I'll share with you our reopening plan, but I'm going to frame the workout a little bit like Lynn did. It's so interesting to see how, how she approached it. And I think our approach is similar in many ways. I, I came to this rolling out a plan that was built on three concepts relationships, safety and trust. And those three concepts, I said at the very beginning, because I felt like coming back, it was very, very important that we prioritize those so that we created a culture in our community that was connected that was calm, that felt safe. So that learning could happen. There was a lot that happened in the spring related to, there's a lot in the, in the media around catch up around loss of learning around urgency. And I was concerned we have, we have amazing teachers who care tremendous about about their professionalism and student learning. I was concerned that we would come back with this feeling of intensity around needing to catch up and it and that would be a mismatch for what our students needed. So, so that's that's been a kind of foundational premise for our planning. I also took, I took a phased approach. So, so our first phase of planning included 14 stakeholders, half of whom were teachers, where we, you had more Lynn breakdown areas than we did we had six. Fourteen individuals representing a wide range of stakeholders got together and went through six main areas and developed considerations and recommendations to be given to the phase two team. So those six areas that we identified included scheduling and logistics operations instruction, physical health, social emotional health and communication. So, so for three weeks in June, this team met very, very regularly, and, and created this list of recommendations to go to the phase two team. We then began our phase two team at very end of June beginning in July and that went until July 21. I then took those six areas and had people assigned to those six teams to take a deep dive into planning, making recommendations, details related to the six areas and I had 41 people involved in that work. So that was a wide range of stakeholders. Again, as Lynn said our nurses took a key role in this work they are working tirelessly, and we have, we have many many teachers involved leaders, food service facilities, central office leaders, parents so a large group of folks engaged in this work so so I live in the community that had what I kind of refer to as the COVID scare. So I'm going to kind of insert in the middle of my planning that experience because I think it's important for all of you to hear like for me as a new superintendent. So, as I said phase two work went through the 21st on July 10. I sent a survey out to all of our families expressing asking them about their interest in in engaging in a distance learning model. I really didn't have any idea so I sent that survey out July 10 and it was closing a week later on July 17. On July 12 Sunday night about 9pm I received communication letting me know that a child had tested positive at a camp that was housed in one of our schools. I thought, here we go. Right this is, this is it. The first thing Monday morning. I was in contact with our facilities director, the director of the camp with Jeff Francis with Secretary French with Dr bring a homes from the Department of Health, and I started saying, what what are my actions, I need some I arm myself with facts. And by 10 o'clock that morning it was becoming clear to me that that this isn't was not a one individual event that it was much larger than the camp. Antigen testing was happening within our community and it almost felt like by the hour the numbers of positive antigen tests were increasing. I, I stayed out of the communication as much as I possibly could I did not engage I was on the phone or texting or emailing Dr homes every day multiple times a day I spoke with Secretary French and Jeff Francis every day. I believe that week. And, and I watched the impact on our community. I, I know that Representative James is in our community so she knows what I'm talking about. It became pretty intense. There was a lot of fear, there was a lot of concern. Our businesses voluntarily shut down. Everyone went right back into staying at home. People were were very frightened. I worked with the Department of Health to set up a pop up site in the mountain towns where near where we are. Southwest Vermont Medical Center set up a pop up site. We, I believe, tested 1000 plus people over the course of that week for using PCR tests. And, you know, the results of those indicated that indicated that that the outbreak was not what we had thought it was originally and thankfully for that our community was not impacted the way that it could have and I'm really grateful for that for our families and community members. I had a lesson for me right there was a lot for me to learn as a brand new superintendent and somebody who's planning for the reopening of our schools so I had I'll go back to the survey because the reason I mentioned it is because as I said, it was open from the 10th until the 17th. I had this opportunity to disaggregate the responses to see in the time before from the 10th until the morning of the 13th. What was the feedback from my community. I received 403 responses to that survey, which is a pretty high return rate, 80% 90% of those responses came in in that first weekend. So I have a 10% response rate that came in over the course of that week. The overall responses indicated that 42% of our families would like an in person educational model for their children. So I pull out only that 10% of the week in which we had the scare, the results of that survey from our families indicated that only 18% of our families would want in person instruction. So that that didn't it was a small enough percentage that it didn't impact our overall numbers but it was helpful for me to see people people are going to be scared. And the idea of sending your children to school, even if the science is sound is, it's a concern. So I made a decision to sort of pause and to think about our opening plan. And understanding that I can have all the confidence in the world and in the health guidance and I do I, I have gotten to know Dr. Holmes very well, and I have learned a lot about what we've gotten place and I trust it. I know that the protocols that we can put in place will work. We're dealing with people. We're dealing with people who are really scared teachers staff families. And so, so the plan that we rolled out which we just rolled out on Tuesday is somewhat different than other plans are and I am happy to share with you this in a PowerPoint I did not submit this representative I'm happy to if you want to but I just thought it might be helpful for you to see it because it is, I believe a somewhat different approach than some other folks are doing but I feel like it's the right one for our community right now. And we'd love to see it if you could send it to Avery. Okay, and I can share it now that's okay with you. I don't know I can't. I have permission. You can you can host. How long do I have a, I have about five more minutes I think. Okay, this is, this is quick. Okay. Avery, can you give her hosting. I get you know what I can also just talk if you're comfortable with me talking I don't mind not sharing it either. So what we're doing is we're taking what a phased in approach to start. So, well, I'll just talk because I know we're telling time. So, we're going to be starting primarily remote and a distance learning model for most of our families. We are going to have our schools open for 10 to 20% of our students who who need to be in school in order to meaningfully access their education. We'll be proctored by a staff member, and we'll be housing them in specific classrooms in the school, our staff will and teachers will also be in school working. So this will give us an opportunity for a brief period of time. I'm anticipating probably two to four weeks to really get all of our protocols up and running to get ourselves our health and safety screenings we get the flow of the. You know, the flow of traffic through the school, our teachers get used to being in their classrooms again seeing each other reconnecting. We get our cleaning protocols on all underway and I want to do that and in a way that has fewer students and we can all kind of adjust to being back in school. So the second step once we feel like we've got that in place is going to be to bringing in our about 50% of our students in grades K to five or six in our K to six schools. And so the guidance has been clear that our youngest students who want to get them in as quickly as possible. So we'll bring them in we'll have kids divided into two cohorts cohort A and cohort B. We'll be in school Monday, Tuesday and learn remotely Wednesday through Friday cohort B will come in on Thursday and Friday and attend have distance learning Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday, we will be deep cleaning all of our buildings in the middle in the afternoons between cohorts. Once we have our elementary students in them will bring back our middle school students in the same format, and we are only a K system we have choice for high school. So, so we'll stay in that as much as possible and we'll be tweaking and adjusting and bring more students back when we can, based on numbers and size. We have tents ordered large 20 by 40 tents so that people can be outside learning as much as possible. And I'm trying to think what else we I'm hopeful that you know best case scenario is everyone's back in school by October 1 in the hybrid model that I'm proposing. It could take it you know I'm anticipating probably mid October. We'd be having everybody back but it's going to depend on a lot of factors this is new for everybody. So far, the feedback has been has been really pretty positive teachers have been positive felt cared for felt heard families understand they are in general appreciating the kind of slow entry, careful approach we're taking. We're trying to be very responsive to the families that are really concerned. And so we are going to do everything we can to get those families, the kids who really need to be in the buildings in the buildings right at the start of the year. So, I think that's probably kind of our plan in a nutshell. At this point the last comment I'll make is that are at this point our schools are now engaged in the work of planning the logistics for their buildings based on all of the face to to work that was completed, and they're just starting that right now. There's a lot of every school has a team of people working on the implementation for their buildings. So I'm going to hold questions right now. We're going to move on to the next section I think that there will be questions that will be coming if, if you can stay with us. That would be great. I'm happy to. Thank you. I'd like to turn now to Don, Timmy president of the Vermont National Education Association. And we look forward to hearing from you and you are also going to be helping to introduce two teachers. Thank you, Adam chair for the record I am Don, Timmy high school English teacher from South hero currently serving as president of Vermont any a representing nearly 13,000 educators across the state, which means I represent nearly 13,000 different levels of stress and anxiety. For sure. We have, we have reports of members physically getting sick over the stress and anxiety of returning. We have other members who can't wait to get back to school so we've our educators have been very busy this summer serving on the work groups and their local school districts as a superintendent have said we appreciate the cooperation that we're seeing and many of our districts. We're also very busy planning for their classes they're doing that independently and with their colleagues. We have two educators with us today so I'll keep my remarks brief to allow them more time to present their ideas and I know you'll have questions for them. Two dozen Vermont any a members have formed a task force for the state for the opening of schools, and have been working with Vermont any a staff to address the multitude of issues and questions being faced by our members. We held, we held a virtual town hall meeting with Dr Mark Levine and Dr Brina homes a couple weeks ago, and on Tuesday of this week we held a second town hall meeting with them as well as with two specialists and pediatric infectious diseases. Dr Benjamin Lee, and Dr William Rasko. I know the importance of making decisions and plans based on the best medical science available. So we were very pleased to have these four physicians speaking directly to our members. One of the work of the task force was to try to figure out the best approach to to to reopening, try to be consistent across the state. And so we've introduced today the phased in approach to safely reopening Vermont schools, which is based entirely on the health safety guidelines that were issued by the Department of Health and the agency of education. Essentially, much of this you could see as a checklist. I've sent this to Avery and I believe it is posted so you can look through that. I'll just call your attention to the need for for time. We appreciate the extending of the date for the start of instruction to September 8. It's important and Jeff Francis already referred to this the need for some flexibility and and the calendar and reducing the number of student days to 170. So that will be very important because we need to make our decisions based on what's necessary and based on the medical science not on the arbitrary calendar. So let's call your attention to one element in in in phase two, which calls for an opportunity for educators ESP and school administrators to meet with students and their families in person, or remotely. We have a we had the second webinar in a series of five webinars with Dave Melnick, Northeastern Family Institute. We had such success in the spring with him providing a webinar series for our members that we've expanded his audience and we're working with all our New England affiliates and providing a similar work. One of the points that Dave made today was how important it will be for students and their families to meet their educators in person without masks. Before the start of school. So we'll need to figure out a most likely way to do this outside where they can physically distance properly so that they'll have an opportunity to get to know each other. Before they come back into the physical school building or before they start their virtual learning experience. So it's we know how important it is for the social emotional well being for our students to establish that relationship with their teachers. And that is one of the elements of what our plan is here that we incorporate that we find the time the resources to make that happen. So I will be around for four questions later if you'd like and I'll turn this now over to our educators and I think I'm not sure who's first on the list chair when but either Chris girls or with Chris. Thank you. Hi folks thank you for this opportunity to be here. I'll apologize in advance for the traffic noise I have young children I found that this little enclosed porch is actually the quietest space in my house. So my goal today is just to tell you a little bit about what things have been like on the ground what teachers experience back in the spring and what we're experiencing right now during the summer as we plan for a return to in person instruction. So I'm a 10 year veteran teacher I teach special education at Main Street middle school in Montpelier, which is a five through eight school. So back to the thinking back to the spring. I think as most of you know things were fairly chaotic for us. Teachers had to scramble and figure out how we were going to teach in a completely different way on a very short timeframe and for me personally as a special educator I was extremely concerned about how how I would teach my my intensive needs students who I was usually right next to in the classroom and to be completely virtual. Virtual learning began and there were successes and challenges. The father of a four and a two year old, and my wife and I were both working full time in the house while I taught virtually. And I can say that I taught more than one math lesson while my daughter melted down over things in the next room. It was grueling. Add to that. The things that I was getting in touch with were in different places. You know, some there were technology problems. Some kids had trouble signing on when they were supposed to for a variety of reasons, but families in general were doing the best that they could. Much to my surprise, I did have some students who seemed to progress better virtually, I was able to identify some resources online. I had a teach with a virtual whiteboard, and I could look at data from what they were doing online and then make sure they really understood the concepts when we did a meet through Google. And that that seemed to work really well for some kids. You know I had other groups where we barely skipped a beat as well. As I said other students I had trouble getting touch with in touch with them that was a concern. My colleagues as well I was really quite amazed at some of what they were able to pull off with such short notice. And in short I think we learned a lot last spring. And we know that should we end up in a situation where we need to go virtual this year we know how to do that, even better, and it needs to be even better if we go back there. Last school years over, but I can honestly say for me myself that I really have not stopped working. I've been working closely all summer with my local administrative team and one failure Roxbury. And we're taking a collaborative approach to planning our administrators I think you'll hear from Libby bone steel later who's our superintendent have set up a weekly meeting with teacher leaders, care professionals, the clerical workers and custodial staff. And we're trying to work through the host of issues that have already been brought to your attention by other speakers. And that collaborative approach I think is really going a long way it's clear admin wants to do things with with safety first in mind. And, aside from those district meetings were meeting at the building level we've done things like walk around the building and look at what spaces are appropriate, and which ones may need to be moved. And I would say that, while that relationship building is going well, we're feeling okay about our plans, there's still a number of problems on answer questions. Everyone all the teachers I talked to would rather be teaching in person, but with the virus out of control nationally, the majority of teachers I speak with are scared, they're scared that it's not safe for them, or their students. And it's incredibly uncomfortable to feel that you're you're potentially putting your life on the line to do something. But there's so many unanswered questions with just a few weeks until school wide in service starts. Some of those are, what will we do if a student gets sick in the classroom. We don't know we're supposed to call the Department of Health and get advice from them. What will we do if too many teachers are high risk for, or have childcare problems that can't work, and can't work, we don't know. Do we have the staff to pull this off safely. We're still not sure we're working on figuring that out. What if the virus makes its way up the high 95 corridor, and renders these plans move. Don't know we know we have to cover both a robust plan for virtual instruction, and put a lot of time into into in person learning. So not knowing the answer to these questions is is really uncomfortable right now and I honestly I'm having trouble sleeping a lot of nights as somebody heavily involved in this planning. I want to make crystal clear that none of these unanswered questions are really the faults of local administrators. I believe in local control, but I can't help but think that some of this uncertainty could have been avoided with some more centralized guidance created with all the stakeholders at the table statewide. And if that had occurred, perhaps at this hour wouldn't be worrying about things like childcare. As a special educator I know the we put out some guidance the other day around evaluations and compensatory services, but frankly, I still don't know what I can do in terms of in person instruction when a lot of when we're trying to create a pod model that limits contact between staff and students. I don't know how my one to one paraprofessionals are going to do their work, and we need guidance on that now, because as has been stated when guidance comes out at the 11th hour. It causes us to have to reshuffle. So right now, we're short on time and short on answers. And what I really want you to know is that's creating a whole lot of anxiety on the part of teachers and our community. Any other things I could talk about. I'll leave some time for questions and our other speaker. Thank you. Thank you so very much and I thank you for bringing children with special needs into the room because that is going to be, we know it's a complex issue and I'm already hearing from from constituents. I'm going to go right on to Andrea Griffin, a teacher in Williston to get an update on and from the ground from your perspective Andrea. Thank you everyone so I am I'm Andrea Griffin and during the regular school year I teach on a set I teach language arts on a seventh and eighth grade team at Williston Central School. And I'm here talking to a little bit about summer school, because I was one of, or I am one of the coordinators for CVSB working in person with students I was in person with them today earlier today on a four week summer school model, and this school has provided us with a lot of really good information that, you know, I know our administrators are taking to heart as they plan for this fall, and it's definitely been on a much smaller scale than it would be, you know, during that it will be this fall. And a couple of takeaways that surprised me as a classroom teacher one thing I thought, and I know we've been hearing, especially in the news and everything is how will kids keep masks on all day. And one thing I'm really happy to report is that, at least, you know, in this situation in Williston we have a lot of students that are on our site as well. This has been almost a non issue for most students. We have students in incoming first grade through eighth grade in summer school right now. And it just so happens that all of the students we invited are on IEPs and have ESY extended school year services written into their plans. It's a really big success story. Students come in with a mask and certainly on the first few days they said, you know, can we take a break with these so we'll go outside and, you know, base ourselves out, take a little mass break. I have a four year old and a six year old and my own six year old son has been attending Camp Maple Street at Maple Street Park and F6 junction and he's had to wear his mask all day that he's there and what, you know, the first day I picked him up and brought him home I said how was that. And he said, Oh, no, no problem. I, he wanted to talk about what he did with his friends and everything else. So that's been a really big positive. I know that it won't be that easy for all students, but it was something that once we got in person we were able to see the other thing that's been really refreshing being back in the classroom and in person. It's really when teachers can do the best teaching and one thing I mean by this is when you're in person working with a student, and you see a student get stuck or start to get frustrated. We can adjust. And even if we have our lesson planned one way we can adjust on the fly to meet that students needs in person. We can even get the class or you know the other group of students, going on a task in order to privately check in with a student. And that's something that's really difficult and near impossible during remote learning. So, seeing teachers do that again and work with students has just been really refreshing. The best part of our day was when students arrived and again help screenings have just become part of the norm and students, you know, get off the bus if they're coming from Heinsberg or we do have a stagger drop off in Williston and they wait on the tape marks for their turn. And it's, it's been refreshing to see, I guess is the biggest thing and it's not perfect, but I think for me gearing up to go back in the fall. It was really important that I got this experience. Because while we're doing all this planning the piece that's missing is the best piece and that's the students so being able to see a bunch of them in person has just kind of given me a fresh look and another push to give it our give it our all so we can be ready for them. And I'll leave you with a comment in incoming sixth graders said on the first day after she had her temperature taken. I was walking her down the hallway to her classroom. And she looked at me and she said, we are so lucky that we get to be in school right now. And it was so refreshing because that first day as a coordinator was really stressful we had been planning since early June how this would look and could we really pull this off. And it was stressful I lost a lot of sleep and was really worried. And once she said that it just, it made all the pieces fall into place and it made every sleepless nice worth it because here she was so excited to be back in school for a small portion, even though it looks really different. Just, I can't wait, you know, and it was really nice to be able to see that this summer a little bit gives me more hope. So I think I'll end with that unless, you know, stick around for questions but thank you. I appreciate that. I am very inspired with the teachers what you're facing no matter what script is written or not written. No matter what the producer has done to make sure that the theater is ready and the props are there. You're going on stage, and I know that you are going to carry the water and really appreciate. Appreciate what teachers do and we do need to hear from you because you are going to be the ones giving us up to the minute, what we need to be addressing. I'm going to open up to the committee to see if they had any questions for the teachers at this point. I will start quickly with myself with Don titty when was the this this. NEA the union of Vermont at the phase in approach to safety reopening from our schools when did that kind of what's the date stamp on this. We've been working on it for a couple of weeks and it was just released this morning. Okay, we, we released some of the details. Yeah, they're coming up in the last two weeks. And I think this has been published in the last year and they are more familiar in the week. Have you shared this with the with the agency of education and other education? I know we shared it with VSBA, VS AVPA. superintendent's as opposed to that and also of course it serves for our local members to go through it and as they look at their local plans to go through. Make sure all the pieces are in place as well. Okay, thank you. Any other questions for the teachers representative elder. Well, maybe this is a question for the superintendent. I'm not totally sure my question is really just about whether the Department of Health has laid out any clear availability of testing. Of course, I've been glad to read the reports of the relatively lower risks of children and lower likelihood of transmission from children. But given that there's probably even higher incidents of a symptomatic patients in that age group and the proximity to vulnerable individuals and the teaching staff. I would love to see, you know, just a massive deployment of testing across the entire public school University of Vermont. I haven't heard anything suggest that's happening. I also just curious for those who may be asking the question what will be availability of testing be and whether anybody's heard, heard anything specific from the Department of Health on that score. I can, I can answer that from the superintendents. This is Libby Bones down from Montpelier Roxbury and the superintendent there. We've heard nothing about testing from my perspective and I made I don't think I missed an email. So I'm looking pretty closely on that but there's there has not been no there's not been one mention of testing of students or teachers whatsoever to us. So that's just that's just not even in the consideration from our point of view. However, our teachers are definitely asking for it. We talked about it just this morning in our group. Okay, thank you. Good question. And if I could piggyback on what Libby said, you know, just one thing we've discussed is there's a requirement that all college students are going to get tested. And professors but there seems to be the question is arisen like why aren't we thinking considering doing the same for our schools. Thank you. Good questions. Representative tell not really a question, but I just want to tell you what's going on the hospital around testing. Because this is a real fly and you know it. This is. The real problem is that the testing supplies are being siphoned off to go to areas which are having very high outbreaks to the point that we're having to start sending testing out of state again to the point that we're having to prioritize again who's getting tested. And we're being told that we're, we're starting to run low at even at the hospital on testing. To me that is the biggest sign the argument to getting, you know, in person instructions reopened because we really don't know how long that's going to last. You know, the federal response has been horrible in terms of they had plenty of warning to gear up the testing but it hasn't really happened. The federal response has been well ahead of the curve with testing to this point. But right now it's really an issue of getting the supplies to do it. And let's make sure we check in with the secretary on that to see if there's any plan to to address this on a statewide level. Representative Austin. Yes, first of all, I just want to say thank you to the presenters that are presented so far I am so impressed and so grateful, you know, to the work that you and your staff and teachers and nurses have been doing during the summer to come up with these plans it's just very impressive and as a citizen and a legislator I'm very grateful to you. So that I was going to ask about possibility of weekly testing and all the schools of staff and pupils but I can see that's not going to happen. The one question I had. I think it was too much it was Andrea, I think. I think it would be advisable to suggest to parents in Vermont that their children just start practicing wearing masks now. So the first day of school is not the first day that they have to also be wearing a mask or seeing people with masks. I think absolutely. The one thing I will add is that while wearing the mask didn't seem to be an issue for most of the students. A lot of the students had ill fitting masks that were almost too big for them and would slip down. Our school had purchased disposable adult size and child size masks. So, you know, we could hand a student one of those. But oftentimes they wanted to wear theirs but it just kind of kept slipping so I think if we could have students and families practicing that ahead of time, we might be able to find out some of those things to find a mask that feels comfortable for you that your child will wear and fits well would be really helpful. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We'd love it if you could, you could stay. We're actually on time, which is something amazing for our committee. And I see that we have Secretary Francis joined us. Oh, excuse me. We're not behind. We're not. Jay Nichols, Vermont Principal Association. Good afternoon. I'll be, I'll be brief. Thank you. So I'll just share what principles are talking about. I know we talked earlier Kate about principles coming in and teachers coming in a little closer to the start of the school year. So these are some of the themes that I'm hearing in our conversations. So, principles are worried about having the staff to safely and effectively reopen to in-person instruction. That's a big worry whether or not teachers are actually going to be there and support staff. A lot of that has to do with childcare. And I'm not a 5-year-old at home. How can I teach if schools are not open for my 5-year-old kid to go to kindergarten or whatever in person? So also worries about on the other side of that is the capacity related to broadband and connectivity. That hasn't got a lot better. It's maybe a little bit better, but there are still, you know, last I talked to anybody that it was a no said 50% of our kids still do not have the level of broadband connectivity. They really need to be able to do the remote learning that we're talking about across the state. Having extra teacher time before kids return to prepare is really important to principals. And I think Secretary of French and the governor have really addressed that with the delay and pushing some of that time to the front. Along with that principles are worried about having to make up those days. Jeff Francis spoke to the moving from 175 to 170. We endorse that too, because principals know that their budgets won't have the money to pay for employees and stuff if we have an extra five days on the end, student days. And also the concern a lot of principals have around ADM. That was also mentioned earlier. If students go to a home school route. We don't want to see schools get punished and not have the budgetary funds they need to support the kids that are still there. And I would suggest that we treat this similar to how we did with go students leading up to act 46, even though I testified against school students many times. I think now's the time to do something like that. I'm worried about the funding issues for FY 22. That's a real big concern that the cliff is a concern for them. There's a worry about implementation in the state in terms of consistency. You heard some superintendent speak to how they're doing it today and just a little story to illustrate the point. I talked recently to a to a kindergarten teacher. She's in a system that is going to be going students are there a students are there. I think it's Monday, Tuesday and be students are there Wednesday, Thursday, or maybe it's Thursday, Friday, one of those type models. And she's got six kids in her kindergarten class. So she's going to have three kids there two days and three kids the other two days. And I suggested to her you need to talk to your superintendent and your principal because that's that's silly, but that's the basically what the model is going to drive her to do. So that will get elementary kids back in school soon enough where they can get in person instruction, which will take care of a lot of these issues. Again, staff are worried about having to work with their own children are in school and their school being on a different schedule and no childcare for school aged children. It's it's hard for little little kids, but it's just as hard for five, six, seven year olds people are not going to leave five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 year old kids home alone. And so they need to either have those kids in school or there needs to be some type of state solution to provide some resources for that. So they're really worried believe it or not about HR issues. Now what do I do when my teacher gets sick. What if I can't find subs. How do I cover that. What if my district is making decisions that are different than the district next door. How can we have some consistency in that area and not being different than the district next door to us. And another big one that's coming up is worried about how to feed students. If they're in a hybrid model. So if half the kids are coming to school on a day and they get their food service running and feeding those kids. How are they going to feed the kids that are at home. And what will that look like and what extra resources will that take. So, while in a hybrid model so those are the things that are really coming up coming up very similar to things that you've already heard. So, they want to be back in school. They want teachers and kids back in school, as long as we can do it safely. And I'll take any questions at the end as well. And that's it for me. Thanks. Thank you. We will hear from the secretary next I'm sure that there are going to be plenty of questions for him. And then we will hear from the remaining three superintendents and then we'll really open up to some broader questions. I know that our committee has a variety of them ready to go. So, Secretary French, I believe that you are here in the room with us. Well, yes. Good afternoon. Thank you. And we've asked you to come in and give us an update on guidance and communication with the field and sort of a, where are we now. So, good to see you all. I'll start just backing up a little bit. You know, as you know, we decided to put some emphasis in our approach to reopening schools on the health of health guidance. We looked at models emerging nationally on how to do this planning and in many cases those models include health as sort of a topic but then they get into many, many other issues. As we are sort of contemplating the complexity of how to approach a planning model in Vermont, we basically decide to simplify that to a certain extent by focusing on the health guidance and we were able to do that. Quite successfully I would argue with the participation of all the major stakeholders may which are represented here today but also significant representation from our health community in Vermont. That guidance in my view goes beyond what we were seeing as in many cases national models or many of the models used in the States. A lot of that initial work from the CDC and etc was was I call considerations like to schools here are some things you should think about. Our guidance. It's 25 pages or thereabouts goes down to a specific level of detail. And require certain protocols to be in place to reopen school safely for in person instruction. So we were able to publish that somewhere around mid June. Certainly before I think the sort of national political controversy started around this topic largely do statements from the president. But then certainly before, from my perspective, a lot of states start to lose control of their virus condition. So, in our state we are on this trajectory of just developing guidance heavily laden based on the science perspective but also based on assessment of Vermont's conditions which now have emerged as fairly unique conditions and that were one of the few states that has reached a degree of suppression of the virus. So it's important to remember that sort of narrative because our guidance was was built based on the assumption that we have and would be able to maintain a high degree of suppression of the virus. So that came out mid June. These other things have happened. Thanks. After that somewhere around fourth of July. We address the issue. We're called hybrid learning. It's something that emerged pretty early actually as we dealt into the health guidance, but we also saw emerging nationally this this model that was folks were using as a combination of in person and remote sort of simultaneously. And I had promised our stakeholder groups I would look into that from a regulatory perspective you know as you know many of our regulations never anticipated pandemic. So we did sort of the legal review if you will, to answer the question to what extent is something like hybrid learning permissible in Vermont regulations and we answered that question and guidance sometime right after the fourth of July. The answer was yes, hybrid learning is permissible in our regulations here are some things to consider especially around how to take attendance. We answered some of the attendance questions previously in the early part of the emergency, because they came up when we were in the total remote mode and we had to come up with some answer and how to take attendance. And we had to, you know, really focus on that aspect in our hybrid guidance and then promote, since our regulations don't really speak to any more specificity on the issue promoting the idea that this would possibly be an area for school boards and superintendents to develop policy or procedures on how to implement this topic because we don't really have any other insight from our regulations on how to go forward. So those two bodies of guidance, both our health guidance and the hybrid learning guidance are, I would say basically the foundational documents for our approach to reopening schools. Most recently we issued a short document on what we call decision making and when we look at those two other documents the questions remain about well who's going to decide what. So in our decision making guidance. We answer the question. If you if you're familiar with our health guidance, you know it refers to steps, if you will, so step one step to step three, which refer essentially to the broad sort of mitigation disposition of school districts towards the virus. We put in the decision making guidance that the Department of Health would decide those step levels, and they would they would apply uniformly to all schools in Vermont at the same time so there wouldn't be some schools on step three and some schools on step two. The analogy I use with that is that perhaps comparable to what Homeland Security did after 911 you know where we put the whole country into a disposition on Orange or whatever for a terrorist alert. So short of having a virus. It's our intention to play schools in the same disposition or excuse me short of having a vaccine. All schools in the state would be in the same mitigation step level and based on a lot of the feedback from folks many of them around this call today. We decided to be very cautionary input schools in step two, which is open for in person instruction with the most stringent mitigation strategies employed. And then let's see what happens and then move to step three at some point with the decision making documents as the health department will make that decision based on analysis of our the modeling statistical modeling that we built that we use from the Department of Education. The decision making guidance also clarified that school districts are responsible with school boards are responsible for making the decision about hybrid in person or remote and so forth. This is an instructional disposition decision that needs to be left to each school district. We didn't think we could have, we could do this because we have a hard time reconciling many of the conflicting opinions and perspectives that you're now seeing a version statewide. It's a very complex dynamic around trying to receive a chief consensus. So, I think, you know, that's where the reopening guides has been since about maybe the third week of July. Now we have a few other things I think that those documents represent sort of the cornerstone or foundational documents to reopen school. So we have things that I would say are issues that then are created by a consideration of those documents. They're not necessarily foundational documents, but they're sort of the next of the tertiary level documents that we have guidance on sports, which should be out probably early next week at the latest. A large body of guidance that'll be coming out on special education in particular. Now the districts are defining their, I'll say, quote unquote regular education environment. We're able to start developing guidance on how to implement special education and other related services. We have a body of guidance coming out probably next week on social emotional supports for students including mental health strategies EST that kind of thing. And we'll continue to consider other other areas of guidance that are necessary. You know, and our guidance has basically taken two flavors one is sort of regulatory guidance and the other is I call considerations guidance like best practice ideas. I think the regulatory guidance is almost done. I see it as fairly stable that we are making revisions to the health guidance as we speak. And we'll probably do that every month at the beginning of the month. But the considerations guides will also emerge as a pattern of work as well particularly as districts identified best practices and we can make more infatic suggestions from a state level and like here's here's probably the way to do this. So I think, you know, that's a fairly quick, but I think I've touched on all the major elements of where we are with reopening. Happy to answer more. And then recently, of course, the governor's executive order delaying school. It's not necessarily guidance per se, but it's certainly related to how we see reopening unfolding. And be have one always pause there and be happy to answer any questions you might have. That would be great. I know that there are several but just in relation to the, the September 8 questions come forward as to how does that include independent schools. Some independent schools are independent schools. Yeah, I think, you know, to answer the question we have to wait for the order to come out. So, you know, that's in production I expected out any time now but we have to wait to see and writing exactly what that says and once it comes out I'll be happy to answer any questions. We know that we have some that are our historic academies that are primarily public school students and then we have boarding schools. Yes. So there's likely a difference in that representative common. Thank you had a question. Thank you very much. Secretary French. One of the comments that you've made previously is that you are trying your best to avoid a repeat of spring where a lot of guidance was coming fast and furious and school districts were having to adjust rapidly to that. And, you know, it's been a challenge for school districts in terms of trying to open the schools with consistent messaging to parents in a time of changing and evolving guidance from the AOE. So what assurances can you give that there won't be more of these sort of changes are significantly involving guidance in the next few weeks I mean just in your opening statement. You talked about a there's going to be a fair bit more guidance coming along. I think that school districts are having a difficulty in having to consistently pivot. Two examples that I serve here in the ring is probably guidance over the youngest students and the ability to have them in school more than the hybrid models are indicating and to recent talk about going from six feet to three foot separation. And every time one of these new adjustments comes. So in terms of hiring school districts to change their message and change their pivoting I just, how are you, how are you balancing that with the need to have consistent solid messages that families. Yeah, and it's an interesting topic by sort of creating two categories of guidance one sort of once again these foundational documents of which the health document is the cornerstone of that. And the other guidance documents which are sort of considerations or best practice, the terms of the health guidance, what I've been communicating regularly, particularly with superintendents is that I, I intend to stabilize that guidance as much as possible. In particular, I'd like to advertise a regular revisiting of that guidance or sometime always around the first of the month so you know they would have that sort of cycle in their minds. But then there are basically three criteria that I would consider for revisions to the guidance now remember we have teams working on these things and large collaborative teams working on these things that's why you read about things in the press. And I, in the case of the health guidance have the final sign off on guidance itself, but there's three criteria of I've advertised the leaders for revision so that document one, are changes to the health. I'll call health science or the recommendation for my health professionals and I would throw science changes in science on that, and then also some assessment of the Vermont condition. You know the issue for instance of the youngest students. That's only emerged in the last couple weeks as sort of a consensus from the research I mean it was available. When we were creating our initial guidance sometime in mid June but it's really in the last couple weeks that there's you know since the American Academy of Pediatricians issued their statement that's when there seems to be in my view, consensus building around this topic. So that that concept is an example of something we would consider as a function of revising our guidance. So, likewise if there were changes in the Vermont health condition if there were outbreaks and so forth that necessitated a change in the guidance we also contemplate that, but that that would be one variable that would create a substantive change in the guidance. The other two criteria I would subject the guidance to our, is there anything we can do to improve its readability or clarity. That's not designed to be a something that would require a district to pivot per se. And then the third category is minor edits spelling errors that kind of thing. So I think you know we tried to say to people as clearly as possible the health guidance would change this document you know if there is, excuse me the perspective health guidance something could change the document. And I've seen, I think we've been consistent on delivering that message but I know people are reacting to it differently, you know because it's very stressful and confusing time. So for instance I've had a superintendent call me up and say, you know we built our plan around six feet. Don't don't change this. So my message is we won't change it unless the health conversation changes but you should be aware the health conversation is changing. And the superintendent walks away from that feeling satisfied. But then they're disappointed when it changes. Not to say it has changed yet. And similarly, we have superintendents advocating for the change to three feet because it would better suit their guide so you know it falls off both ways but we're doing our best to be very clear about that. To your observation this is a totally different situation than the beginning of the emergency, where we literally were putting guidance out to lay down the basic regulatory parameters to operate in an emergency situation that's not what we're doing. I will say it seems like we don't have enough time now but we, we have had some luxury of time even four weeks I would argue in Vermont compared to other states is a luxury we've we've earned that luxury by achieving a high degree of suppression of the virus in our state. But it's clearly we're under the pressure to do our best and to reopen school to your point about, you know, I listed off other types of guidance I think I would throw those into that consideration sort of category or bucket particularly special education, highly technical, you know, we're going to need to work closely with the field on how to implement federal regulations and requirements in this environment so that isn't once again I would if we use the criteria pivoting I don't see that as a pivot issue. The field is really hungry now for technical guidance on special education so it's not it's a different disposition than the health guidance which is, please don't change this I'm building plans around it. The field is like saying to us we need a lot more on special and it's highly technical please help us and we will continue to work down that path so that gives you a sense of sort of the balance we're trying to strike between these things but I'm acutely aware of the need particularly now to stabilize our guidance and to ensure districts can really focus 100% on implementation it's not necessarily helpful to change the guidance on people as they're doing that. But, you know, the health, the health science and consensus view and recommendations will be a significant variable to consider. I'm trying to only do that once a month, something were to happen in those suddenly something new emerge we have to make an immediate change but trying as best as possible. But, you know, people, you know, people are just really under a lot of pressure to do this very very complex work and it's not surprising to me by any means that any change at all whether even it's a good one. I'll use the idea of delaying schools to the eighth of September. I think there's pretty broad consensus that that's a good idea with reservation people in large large number of those reservations were about, is this another change we're going to have to react to. But I think there's strong consensus. Representative tell you had a question this area. Thank you. First of all, thank you madam chair and members of the committee for letting one of us from ways and means be in here but you know I mentioned earlier that the testing issues that we're facing right now we're in a very fluid situation and I can tell you our results of the hospital changes. You know what our policies are what we can do just based on the fluidity of the situation. But as far as the testing goes that want people to remember that our positivity rate for testing is the lowest in the country, we're about 0.6%. So I think there's a whole number of viral cases. It might change with students coming back etc. But my question has to do with the study that the secretary alluded to, and it didn't really change everything mostly reinforced what we already had reported but, but it did add some nuance and the nuance that it had. Children from zero to 10. Do not transmit the virus. Very often at all, whether at home or outside the home. And that corresponds to K5 grade K5 school. School wages. Kids 11 and 18 or stay lumped together. Did transmit the virus just like adults in the home environment, but not increased outside the home environment, but it didn't include school. So that being said the consensus that the secretary mentioned really is happening and I will tell you I was a skeptic about reopening schools. But the consensus has emerged based on the science among the medical community, especially the pediatricians and precious these folks. That it is safe. And it is wise to open the K35 school pre K35 for in person learning. So, my question really has to do with what the DOE. What the superintendent's association, what the school board's association are going to do to courage or even require that school districts open in person K5. Now I'm not talking about two days a week. I'm really talking four to five days. Because that is where the science is right now. So anything could change, but what are we going to do, you know, I live in another world in medicine and where I do QA for our department. And one of the basic principles is variability, the enemy of quality. We really need to get this uniformly done, which also helps by the way that the child cherishes for our teachers. So that's my question. How are we going to go about that? What can we do? And do you need anything from the legislature make that happen? Yeah, thank you. I'm certainly, I think I've, you know, probably achieved an advanced or maybe at least a master's degree in public health in the last couple of months, but it's not my area of expertise. I will say, you know, I do spend a lot of time listening to the health experts and I think, I think they're pretty solid on this and I've read some of the research and findings and sort of the meta analysis of patterns and the data that we're seeing. That seemed to conclude pretty strongly that it's much safer for students K through five in school. One of my education educator had on to also say there's really compelling reasons why we should try to do in person instruction for those students, especially particularly when we consider those are the foundational years and language acquisition, you know, socialization and so forth and such critical phase of their development so we put those two things together and I think we have a strong compelling case to do that. I was president of a federally qualified health center once and I walked away from the experience with a couple observations one is healthcare finances infinitely more complex and education finance and I throw Vermont finance into that. And finally, I was involved in hiring our QA QC person, and I would just say, you know, I spent 20 years working in the state. We can't get standardization to your point about variability the system itself is not is not consistent so we can't. If we can isolate those conditions and I, you might remember last year I published something about that. I think representative Coupoli can speak more directly to that issue. So, this is about realism and you know looking at what what the state of our system is, and I would also say looking at where these organizations are in their capacity to do this very very complex work and I would argue, you know, last year we're talking about 173 was how complex x 46 is. This is in a whole different area in terms of organizational complexity. We have organizations all over the place as you heard Mr Nichols talk about a kindergarten class of six students trying to implement a top down policy just from their district that would require three students to be in one I mean. So you can imagine trying to do that from a state level and sugaring off all the different variations. So I think you know where we've sort of struck the balance is one very consistent and very directive on our health guidance I would argue much more so than most states. I think you will see increased emphasis on the pre K through five idea. And we're, you know, certainly been listening a lot to our health people there becoming more and more emphatic about that. And that's something I think we want to reinforce with folks. But you know the bottom line is people, it's not so much about suddenly looking at the science and saying oh you're right, we can do this. It's about addressing the emotional issues and the anxiety issues that parents and teachers have around this very, as you acknowledge uncertain context so I think it's very realistic and very prudent to open schools on step two. I think it's also prudent to give districts in some communities time to sort of get into this and work their way towards more in person instruction. And you know where we are fearful, I think as a state as much as we're admiring the situation we've earned right now through everyone's hard work, but we see what's going on around us and around the rest of the country. And as someone mentioned we're about to bring a whole bunch of 20 responsible 20 year olds back into the state. And we really like for personally I'd like to see how that affects our statistics and our numbers. And it didn't, it didn't escape me that there's some rationale there for delaying K 12 a little bit to get let's see what happens there with those numbers before we also introduced the reopening of K 12. Because as we know schools it's not just about schools it's about all the other social interactions that schools create when they do open so it really just sort of opens up our communities to a lot more interaction. And so I think we really want to be careful and monitor those data very closely and just do our best to stay focused on that but I think you know it's hard. You know as a legislator you've started to appreciate the diversity of our education landscape but I mean I'm continually just you know say surprised or puzzled or interested in how diverse our organizations are. And I think any plan that didn't acknowledge that would be setting us up for failure more so than you know otherwise would be representative James. Thank you for being here Secretary French I have I have two questions so the first following along this this questions of guidance with with fairly broad guidance from the AOE and then a focus on local implementation. It seems like districts and s us have worked really hard to develop plans that work for their schools and their communities. It seems like they've done an excellent job it as we've all been hearing it's resulted in a patchwork of models. That seems to be creating some challenges in terms of workforce and childcare for teachers and families and I'm just wondering now that that has sort of seems to be coming the case. Do you think that the AOE could play a role at this point in offering some kind of solution. Yeah it's good to see you. I think these these are you know some I called the logistic issues there. The other point I'd make as an educator. Our systems are very fragile from a logistical standpoint and a lot of that sort of operational fragileness comes from staffing issues so that's that's why once again I think it's important to give districts that sort of ability to pull their employees to do that headcount to find out who they have and how they can best deploy their human resources to address the situation. I think there are some patterns emerging. I know you've talked about ADM a little bit things like that that you know that deals with student counts. So there's some things emerging and I would say HR issues are emerging that are probably things I don't know. I don't necessarily have the regulatory authority as secretary to address but there are things we could do perhaps in statute to address those issues. I think the calendar playing with the time and professional development days part of that. Is as we get a better understanding of what's what's emerging I think those are issues were be interested in taking up with you. Thanks and then my second question was just been you know hearing conversations here in my community and reading you know some snippets in articles. And what you're hearing or what you're seeing about groups of families that may be planning to leave the public schools this year to form homeschool pods you know hiring private tutors to maybe keep their kids home this year in groups and I'm just wondering what you're hearing about this trend how widespread you think it may be and what impact you think it could have on on the culture of the public schools this year if that becomes if that really becomes a widespread trend. Thanks. Well we've seen. I think our most recent data and homeschooling applications indicates a 75% increase over last year. The numbers keep increasing the proportions 75% has been holding fairly steady. But we're not particularly well staffed in that area where we're staffed at the agency basically one person to handle a normal year. This is not a normal year in that regard so it's literally like I'll ask someone what are our numbers and they'll say 1900 and then they're like oh last night we had 300 I finally got to you know it's literally that kind of interest. But that's still hard to understand because I think firstly part of the interest in homeschooling we saw the spike before the hybrid guidance came out so I think many parents were personally unaware that you know remote was going to be an option and if I rewind time a little bit. I think a lot of parents really begging for a remote option in mid June you know let's have that flexibility and so forth now we're seeing you know the opposite I want more in person because I can't put daycare together. And I think you know that's to a certain extent extent to be expected. So what's happening now is I would say in my my experience typically around August 1st a lot of families really start to come to grips with okay what are we going to do come September you know with students so they're really. This is where some of the new anxieties coming from parents are actually starting to OK we've been kind of thinking about this but now we really have to figure out what we're going to do. So I think that's where parents are starting to assess what are the options for my community are offering reaching out to other parents and so forth. I don't have a sense to what extent that's a pattern you know I'm a Manchester resident. And I've seen that on the Manchester area Facebook I've seen it in a couple other communities on Facebook but I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook. I think you know one of the things we are starting to see very quickly are the issues of equity play out and you know communities that have more opportunities to put down in terms of options and so forth and resources versus other communities that don't have as many so we're we are acutely concerned and actually led to my hesitation a publication of the hybrid guidance for several weeks as I was struggling personally with this idea of what it would do from an equity standpoint. But at the end of the day I concluded it was a necessary tool to put on the table to give districts the flexibility to navigate this very uncertain fall. My compromise on that is I told superintendents I'm going to be collecting data. I have authority secretary to collect data from them. I am going to be collecting data on a monthly basis to sort of start to understand the patterns and identify the trends. So I'll be able to provide you some insight into what's going on as well. But it is it is an area of concern. But once again it's important to know you know we're in the middle of a pandemic. You know no human experience with this this type of situation certainly not in Vermont. And we've got to be prepared to navigate an emergency situation no matter what we put on the table in terms of planning or structure is going to be imperfect. I think we have to put out the systems particularly on data collection that will alert us as problems emerge so we can be as nimble as possible and responding in policy or guidance or regulation to address those issues. Thanks so much representative Jim Batista and then representative Alder. Well thank you for being here secretary French appreciate that and I want to follow up a little bit on representative James question. I heard a lot from the US Department of Education about future possibilities of expanding portability where public education dollars could be used for private vouchers and other things. We've heard recently discussion about this idea of micro grants for families to use for homeschooling. And I have some concerns there because this is a moment where I would think those public resources particularly as districts navigate not only unprecedented volatility and student counts but also resource constraints and pressures building at the local level from a tough budget year that we've just gone through that some are still working on and tough years ahead questions of ADM and so forth. I'm just wondering at this point are there specific pieces of guidance that the AOE has received from the federal government about what those proposals might look like. And would you have recommendations to actually ensure that those public resources stay within our public schools because I want to make sure that our educators have what they need. And that our teachers can really focus on providing that social emotional and academic learning environment that we know our kids need. Yeah those are great questions I give you a couple of concrete examples. I think to its credit and to Secretary DeVos's credit she did a very good job in the very early phases of this emergency working with Congress to get the CARES Act situated in out the door for states that some I'm talking about like third week of April or so. And my colleagues around the country were very supportive of her leadership in that regard. She seemed to be able to get the bureaucracy to move. And I think to a certain extent our support for her started to slip when she introduced a questionable change in a provision what we call equitable shares, which has to do with how school districts, public school districts are required to share their funds with private schools or independent schools in their regions. And the Secretary introduced what most people would argue even if you're regardless of what side of the issue on as a departure from how historically that's been interpreted many would say also contradictory to the intent of Congress. And so that that really gave everyone pause from I think that was the first time we saw sort of a political agenda inserted into what had been we're all the same team let's respond to the emergency and do what we can to help our communities. And that gave everyone a bit of a pause. I think even further, she decided to, instead of sort of that was issued as guidance so we could say, well we disagree with you we're going to go forward and follow the law. They then took a fairly aggressive step to issue that guidance in the form of an interim final rule, which basically means that has the force of regulation immediately. And then they go into public comment period but we start with that as the basis of regulation. We, you know how that impacted us was firstly we we sort of what we were prepared to do the answer grant for districts. I'll be working with the General Assembly about concerns about the Ed fund and so forth that we were working sort of methodically through that from a legal perspective. And then when the original guidance came out where like time out we're going to have to figure out what's going on here. But then when the interim final rule became essentially regulation we didn't have a choice. And what we've done is basically advise districts, basically that devolves down to the district level to basically say you have two options under this law that have been put in place by the Secretary of Education, US Secretary of Education. And provide you some advice to say you might want to model it out either ways to explore your options and you might want to consider setting aside some money in case this gets overturned by a court because the lawsuit has emerged on that topic. So that's a that's a good example of kind of how we've had to navigate those kinds of issues. There's been a there's been a couple others along those lines as well there was a recently a competitive grant application, which we applied for. And there were three types of proposals the state could submit the first one was the micro grants the parents as you alluded to. And the other two categories the third one especially had to do with targeting enhancing a state's ability to do remote learning. We have we elected to submit a proposal under that third category. So we didn't we didn't see number one is being consistent you know Vermont school choice and the choice of a school district to operate a school or not is not consistent with that sort of national political agenda per se. But we chose to submit a proposal consistent with that third option. I will say we did not get the grant we found out yesterday unfortunately we scored very highly except for one grant reader who gave us a little score but the other two were very supportive so we were disappointed not to get it. But you know that's that's been part of the dynamic in the last last couple months is figuring out how to situate our state relative to those policies but we've been doing all right for the moment. Representative elder, followed by representative Austin. Thank you. So, just following up a little bit on testing I totally take your point secretary about the kind of suppression that Vermont has achieved and we've earned that a lot of hard work. One way we've earned it through contact tracing we trace 100% of our contacts to this point. I know that's becoming more difficult. So, I'm not sure about that but go ahead. I'm sorry. I'd be interested to hear if there is, if there is no So, if a to two scenarios of a student or teachers at school and has a symptom that might be covered like great could be a common cold but Do we have any kind of protocol in place or any kind of guidance to suggest how testing should should happen. Hopefully that individual get a negative test but if they got a positive test. What is the ability and the capacity for contact tracing within our schools if we can determine that we've traced the likely infection back to a school for someone who doesn't need to have a positive. Yeah, so let me this is kind of addressed in our guidance once again developed by the Department of Health, largely in an assessment of their capacity. And I just took issue initially because I spent enough time listening to them to know that they have confidence in their ability to contact tracing in the context of reopening schools. So we've we've expanded our capacity in that regard, similarly with testing, though, you know the supplies for testing are going to emerge as a national concern as well but knock on wood for months, got sufficient capacity to do that right now. So the health guidance to sort of simplified a bit walks to sort of three layers of protection for school districts. The first layer is the idea of a safe safety and health check every day that all students and staff must do, and that includes a questionnaire as well as a temperature check. The idea with that is to prevent symptomatic individuals from entering the school system at all. Okay, and I will say once again this is predicated on having a high degree of suppression in the community so you know this idea of a safe and healthy check, you know you might think is not being very rigorous. If you were in Florida or Texas or someplace that have a significant outbreak out of control, but in our context it makes a lot of sense because we have a high degree of suppression so the focus firstly is on making sure that no one are limiting the safety of anyone who has the virus from even entering that I'll call it the operational perimeter of the school district. Similarly, if you are symptomatic, you are required and directed to stay home and that that pertains to students and staff. So that first level is let's, let's, you know, make keep our society safe by keeping the rates of infection very, very low. We'll do a safe and healthy check at the beginning of every day to make sure that anyone entering the operational perimeters of the school best we can is not symptomatic. So then we go to the next layer, which is to acknowledge that in spite of our best efforts there will be people with COVID-19 inside the school perimeter. And that's why we implement things like masks, sanitation protocols and so forth that prevent the virus from spreading inside the school. And, you know, it's, every time I start talking about the second point, that's where like parents will start to go. Oh, you mean we're going to have the virus. Yeah, the plan is designed to anticipate that because once again if we have the virus in our communities even at very, very, very low rates, they're still going to be in the school because the school is just a reflection of our communities. We, you know, that's how our schools operate and all schools operate. So the sort of second layer, putting all those protocols in place that limit the spread of the virus in the building because we can still have asymptomatic folks with the virus. Or perhaps folks aren't following the recommendations on safe, healthy checks, what have you. And then the third level is what do we do when people do become symptomatic it's not it's not about testing quote unquote it's just people when they become symptomatic. So, during the school day people emerge with symptoms, the guidance calls for nurses to have isolation spaces to separate those, those people away from the other sort of normal folks in the nurses office and, and to figure out a way to get them home or outside of the facility as soon as possible so that's sort of the three levels, what the school does in terms of testing that's that's really outside of the school's response symptomatic folks are referred, you know for testing through their primary care provider what have you. In the case where pattern started to merge and I'll use Manchester as an example area where I live. You know, if there is a potential pattern, then you know the state will acknowledge that through the deployment of pop test pop up testing and begin sort of a very saturated approach to testing larger capacity to determine what extent there's an outbreak or not. But that's sort of the protocol that the health departments contemplating and has enacted through our guidance. There's no nothing in the guidance that talks about testing all employees or all students all the time. It's my impression on that is we're in a different place firstly that we were in the beginning. We have the virus now we have, honestly, we have a test in the beginning phase we didn't even have a test. We also because we're a high degree of suppression. This is, you know, once again, I'm not a medical person. We have a high degree of suppression so it's not necessarily useful as we found with the antigen test in Manchester it's not necessarily useful to be testing asymptomatic people at scale in a context where there's a high degree of suppression. So, you know, I, my, that's all my interpretation, I just trust I really do I trust our health department to say you know they thought some broader protocol of testing was necessary they would have argued for it as part of the plan. They would have influenced a great extent they'd recommending our ability to reopen or not. You haven't. You're feeling that there's no, no indication that our 100% contact tracing will be difficult to maintain, given national conditions this fall. Well that's a big question that was a different sentence I think the right now the state and this is what I when I listened to Dr. Kelso our state epidemiologist Dr. Levine. They feel very confident in our contact tracing capacity right now as a state based on the conditions we see in Vermont and I'm sure they have some understanding of what thresholds they would need to bring on additional capacity. We feel confident right now we have sufficient capacity. I think once again to our credit. Yes, we were very I mean there's, we were very disciplined and implementing very aggressive social mitigation strategies to, you know, very aggressive like shutting down our schools immediately shutting everything down to suppress the virus but we were also very prudent to simultaneously making investments and testing and and the contact tracing capacity, you know, as I think I heard Dr. Levine to say the other day in a press conference something like well Vermont is more like Europe. You know, we followed that playbook, you know, from Europe, basically, and we made those investments and, you know, so that's, that's where we are right now we have that capacity and I think, knock on wood I think they feel it's sufficient at the moment. We have about five more minutes and then I'm going to take give us a five minute break. But I wanted to representative Austin. You had a question. Yeah, I just, I have a statement and then one short question and then a longer one. I'm just hoping that, you know, we're possibly five months out to a vaccine or getting closer to a vaccine. And I'm just wondering, I'm not this isn't a question but I'm thinking it might be nice of teachers, you know, along with other essential workers, kind of, if we need to start positioning, you know, teachers in that role to be able to get that vaccine kind of ahead of time. That's one question. The other question is, do you, you may not know off the top of your head but are you keeping track of the kids that log in. You know, do we have any sense of kids, the number of kids that are logging in and staying online. I assume you, you are, you know, but I'd be curious to hear about that. And so my question is the issue of working parents and childcare. And my concern is the ability for a working parent or working parents who either have to work remotely at home or on site to have a sense of where their children, when they're not in school let's say for two days can be supervised and safe and be in a receiving support of instruction and this is kind of from an economic recovery perspective as well. I mean, parents can't do the job of the teacher and their jobs at the same time. I think for the beginning in the spring it was the only option. But I'm wondering if the AOE is at all considering talking to the agency of human services. And seeing if there are spaces in the school or in the community that could be set up with supervision, maybe instructional support, where parents could bring their children, even if they were working at home they could bring their children, the children come in with their Chromebook and they could receive, you know, receive their instruction in that space where they're supervised and parents can do their job because I think that's a huge dilemma in terms of from once recovery economically and it's a huge dilemma for parents. Yeah, I think you'll come back to that question because I think it is a big concern and one that is on the front burner essentially as districts solidify their plans. In terms of logging in, I referred to the spring in particular when everyone was remote, we had to create some provision for direction how districts would take attendance. And we had to loosen obviously students were no longer coming to school to take attendance if you're familiar with that pattern. Generally students are recorded at the beginning of the day, whether or not, and then many high schools might take attendance every block or period of the day to ensure the children appear at class. So when we went to fully remote we had to provide some other options for people and basically the idea is that you, you have contact with student once a day and that could be through analytics from a learning management system that showed someone logged in. It could be through having a video conference call or email exchange or so forth and so on. So, you know, basically just to make maintain that contact with students and family so we had to say lower the bar. We had to create some new process by which to do that. And we didn't capture data on that because there were so many diverse settings and so forth. And we don't have a single learning management system statewide. They'll potentially we do. You know, since the spring we've expanded access to the Vermont virtual learning cooperative. It has a learning management system called canvas. We haven't gotten into the issue of pulling data out of the system but theoretically, if we wanted to we could get analytics about login and so forth from that the district certainly have access to that information. We're also, we've also implemented a statewide solution called Ed Moto which does have some learning management functionality as well. But we're going to have the conversation I think firstly about to what extent our students online or the in person hybrid and really just want to understand those patterns first. And I think, you know, I know our current guidance on attendance is basically the same as it was in the spring. You have some options school district to do that. We haven't quite gotten into the ADM issues I know it came up a couple times here already, average daily membership that's an interesting process. That's happens at the be it's a census period at the beginning of the school year, where we figure out on a percentage basis how many students are actually in the building on a daily basis you know factoring in Dennis notes and everything else you know our dental appointment so we don't have a comparable way to necessarily do ADM in a virtual or hybrid environment so it's something we're going to spend a little time on a technical basis but currently we I don't think we're going to plan collecting attendance data because it's going to vary significantly other than to say we're going to ask districts to conform with our general guidance on ensuring some of that daily contact is in place. So to your second point. Yeah, this is a critical and critical issue for us as a state and we know, you know, statewide. You know we have issues with childcare prior to the emergency I think they've been exacerbated certainly as we've in the beginning part of the emergency might remember we're asking school districts on a more or less voluntary basis to provision childcare, very similar to you know, suggesting it'll be interesting to see where we go that I will say, I know representative web you've been interested in a mapping we built a pretty nice mapping tool with our, we call our comprehensive support center on pre K there are technical support from the US Department of Ed, they built out a very comprehensive mapping solution that we're ready to show the public here at some point so I think you'll find it very useful to the larger policy issues around pre K. But yeah, we're going to we're already feeling the need to turn some attention to this issue and I think your your ideas are very useful ones and constructive ones. We've had similar thoughts along those lines and we are we have a conversation going with the agency human services on these topics. But this is, you know, part of it is we we need to understand first kind of where districts are going to end up going in terms of opening, and then we'll understand those patterns and needs. And I think this is a very important issue and one definitely is part of the economic recovery piece but also it's an essential part of what schools do for for parents and as you mentioned safety. You know, that's one one key aspect that schools can fulfill as we have a safe place for students to go and we are concerned about those somewhere more vulnerable students not having that radar safe place to go on a daily basis. And one, I was just bouncing ideas. Okay, I need you need you to wait that we're just about out of time and I want to make sure that that Casey to thank you secretary. We'll have time at the very end and and I just want to make sure that we get. Okay, thank you. Representative to thank you and thank you, Secretary French for coming on and talking with us today. I will just echo I want to start just by echoing Serita's concern about finding childcare or, you know, people to watch I have a five year old who's going to be in kindergarten this year. I just want to echo that myself finding what we're going to do I can barely access my internet for these meetings I don't know how my five year olds going to be also with me trying to instruct him while being in committee meetings on the house floor so it is a concern I've heard I've heard many other ones so I just want to echo that that is something that we're hearing a lot. My questions, I got two pretty quick questions. The first one is someone brought up to my attention regional enrichment centers that they use in New York City I don't know if you've heard about them policies. Yeah, I think so I've read a quick article on it they it was brought up to me last night I just wanted to know if that's something that. The next question is about PPE. Is there enough adequate PPE for the state and what's the state's role. And that being said, if kids are going to be wearing masks I did hear some concerns from a few parents that like hearing impaired hearing impaired students who rely on reading lips would be it'd be an issue for them. So I'm just wondering if there's any plans for that. Sure. Yeah I mean to the earlier point about your your personal child care needs I would also say there's the there's the third reason why pre K through five should be considered strongly for in person instruction you know there. It's the online remote learning for those students of those ages not nearly as well delivered as it is for the older students, you know so. And then factor in issues of care and safety and so forth so I think we have the health evidence that that makes a compelling case for that educationally we can say it's the most critical developmental time for a student. And then thirdly just the sort of safety issue and and honestly the inability to offer a robust remote learning option for those students really, I think really districts have to look hard at doing what they can for in person instruction pre K through five. In terms of regional resource centers we don't have such a structure in Vermont many states do. Many states this is this is called educational service agencies or ESAs. There's a federal stream to do that. Vermont's had a history on that over the years at one point we had about five of these ESAs. I think it's sort of rolled them up now. I think there's still one. I'm not even sure Champlain Valley teacher development center receives that money anymore and I should know a secretary but I was on their board when I was at St. Michael's College and I think my impression was the that system has devolved to a certain extent as a state so we don't have regional service centers. In most of these example in New York those centers do many things. They're there like technical support centers for special education. They do a lot of the tech ed. And they also have gifted talented programs and so forth that you know New York operates the system on a different scale than Vermont. In terms of PPE. Yes it's something in PPE. You know we use that term fairly generally at the beginning of the emergency as a pertain to health care workers. We have a state emergency response entity called the SCOC the state emergency operations center that one of the functions it has is to coordinate the acquisition of PPE particularly at the early phase of the emergency where every state was more or less on their own to go find supplies and PPE for schools I think my from my perspective falls in sort of two categories now we have this issue of facial coverings for teachers and students. And that's sort of the broad category. And then we have specific PPE that nurses are going to be required to utilize so the idea of nurses being more akin to health care workers, particularly as they're doing a sort of triage and isolation students are symptomatic. So in terms of facial coverings. The state has worked to secure sun. And we have, I think we ran a survey and I want to say we have about 10 mass per teacher. They're what we call can the can 95 mass, which are sort of a version of the n 95 mass they're really the high quality one that medical people use the can 95 are not pressure tested they're sort of a different variant I would say, as much as we're going to supply them out and we are in the process of delivering them. I would expect most people would prefer to have their own cloth face mask because these are pretty I would say heavy duty and they're they're not overly comfortable to wear when you're working but you know we have them so we're going to distribute them out to people. We also have had a donation of hand sanitizer so we're distributing that. absent that we don't have a lot of state coordination of PPE. Going on at the moment, there aren't, you know, they're just aren't the need necessarily at the local level I think what's going to happen our districts are going to secure their own facial coverings because they find them to be now they're more readily available and relatively to your question about like teachers of the deaf or I would say speech language pathologist. Yeah, our guidance anticipates those issues and those those folks aren't necessarily required to wear a mask during those key instructional locations so it imparts a certain amount of flexibility for instruction and that's that was something that doctors were very keenly aware of. We want people to mask up as much as possible but there's a time and a place where it's some educational situations where a mask can be removed in the name of the educational practice. Thank you and there are shields clear shields as well. Yes, yeah we have those and also and I know a lot of districts particularly speech people where you really need to see you know those those things are being implemented. So I want to thank you I think I'm going to close with a couple of questions and if you can stay in the room because we do have superintendents that will speak to us. And that has to do with data keeping on curious about what you're planning to be asking schools to gather to inform the process going forward. I assume that we are going to have teachers with fairly granular information on how things are going. They will know exactly where the breakdowns are in technology is it internet is it devices is it parent usage. Family challenges that they're having students who are falling behind. I will be very interested in knowing the kind of data that you will be collecting and would actually be interested in being able to participate in that conversation on data collected because we also will have an interest in that, particularly as we return in January. We will then have had three months. And data that we collect in those three months could be quite helpful in informing us and moving forward. So I would like to be. I can respond to that now yet. Yes, we're in the process of having that conversation. I think as this committee is acutely aware. Our interests of the data must be balanced by our ability to actually gather it and collect it so we on the other side of that we had our first meeting on this today we want to make sure it's easy for districts to submit that information. And it also has to be easy for us to arrange at the state level so that's sort of the other side of that. But we do acknowledge right up front that legislators and the executive branch might have a policy interest in this information as well so we'd be certainly welcome your involvement and sort of defining that my interest right now is a little more immediate and to really use the collection to one identify patterns of behavior and patterns of operation, particularly with some attention to equity and opportunity, but also then secondly to use the data collection to sort of incentivize people to go in the right direction in terms of attending to those issues so we're working under a compressed timeline the next couple weeks to develop them that I think we're going to end up doing a survey tool as the most efficient way to resolve some of our collection and sort of those sort of logistic aspects of implementing such a collection but that that's sort of been my compromise to when we develop the hybrid guidance we acknowledge that it would be difficult for us to make sure that districts sort of also do this huge lift in terms of implementation while simultaneously trying to satisfy an agency compliance requirement. So I decided early on not to require them to submit their opening plans for approval per se, but my compromise to that was I'm going to collect data on this and might change my mind later on depending on what the patterns of operation as they emerge. So I think that we will take a five minute break. And when we come back, we have three superintendents that I know what we want to hear from. So let's see I've got 408. So can we back be back at 413. Okay, so if we could go offline and back to 413