 And we are going to hear an update on COVID in our schools for the next 45 minutes. And so here we are with Secretary French, Dr. Levine. Good afternoon. They have a good afternoon, Secretary French. Mr. Fisher with them as well. Dr. Levine, welcome as well to Senate education. Thank you for having me here. Thank you both, Secretary French and Dr. Levine for joining us this afternoon. This is an opportunity for us to hear directly from the two of you how things are going in our schools as it relates to COVID, general COVID updates and numbers, what you're seeing, but most of all, what kinds of assistance, what are the things that you may need from us at this point, either immediately in budget adjustment or if anything from there has changed or even going forward with the big bill. With that, the floor is yours. Good afternoon, Dan French, Secretary of Education. I appreciate the opportunity to come and meet with you. We had sent over earlier just a summary of some testing information you might find interesting. You know, a lot of what we're doing now with Test-A-Home is logistics driven. To that end, I think, you know, and Dr. Levine can speak to the larger operating environment that schools are in now relative to the trends and the virus, but as case counts come down and people become more familiar with what we call Test-At-Home, that's smoothing out, shall we say. And you know, Test-At-Home, this idea of the broader deployment of rapid antigen tests in schools required a fairly significant shift in thinking on the part of school personnel, sort of pushed that operational perimeter out into the broader communities to let go of some of the control of the testing and so forth. So we found ourselves, you know, if you think about Test-At-Home being a function of supply and demand, supply has certainly gotten a lot of attention. It's fairly straightforward. Demand, on the other hand, is more complex and it isn't as simple as just what our case is. It's also about people applying the guidance in a correct manner as intended because that's how we do our supply modeling. So I think what we saw, and we were rolling this out right in the middle of pretty high case counts and a lot of general anxiety around that. And honestly, we were quite pleased that tests were going out so quickly because that was part of a broader societal strategy. But we also need to start to calibrate that and get folks to settle in and start applying the guidance as written and what I mean by that as well. So if I may, to start in, I wanna back up only because I want you to almost think of us as a bunch of folks from New Hampshire that aren't following the leaders. And honestly, I wanna bring it down to the family level. In other words, I want us to understand really what a Vermont family right now, what it looks like picking up tests, having tests done, frequency, does everybody have them? What happens when a kid runs a fever? And that kind of, that I think would be very helpful. Sure. So you threw me with a reference to New Hampshire, so I'll just sort of shut that out of my brain for a minute and focus on the sort of family perspective. So we're at a moment of heightened case counts coming out of the vacation period. And what we were doing previously wasn't gonna work in terms of the rapidity of the cases and the volume of the cases. So we had to make some rapid adjustments. So for parents on the ground and for school staff, they experienced a pretty abrupt transition. And as typically as everything we do in the state and our education system, it wasn't uniform. So first thing, as a caveat I'd mentioned, that depends as a parent what you're experiencing right now. Not so much this week, but maybe a week ago, it would vary depending on to what extent your school made that transition to the new approach. So a central element of this is using schools as distribution centers of antigen tests, which are rapid tests. And our protocol for doing that follows a revision to our isolation and quarantine guidance. So that would be an important thing to understand. If you remember that conversation that started to happen with the CDC over the holiday. And I often feel like I should be hitting this stuff after Dr. Levine, but we spent so much time listening to each other, so I'll just keep going. Dr. Levine, if I really mess this up, let me know. So there was a change, the general trajectory with Omicron is we were shortening everything. The Omicron moved so much more quickly, we had to make adjustments and move to more rapid response. So parents might have started to be familiar with test to stay, where they were giving consent for their child to be tested at school in exchange for remaining in school. Basically all that shifts to the home. So it conforms to our isolation quarantine guidance and that it depends on if your child's vaccinated or not. So there's a big distinction. So previously schools were spending a lot of time on this thing called contact tracing. So if you were a parent in a fourth grade and there was a class, a case in that class, the school might have reacted a couple of different ways. One would have been to send all students home and start to do contact tracing until they could figure out who was a close contact, which was defined as someone who was in three to six feet for 15 minutes or more. With elementary school, if you were a parent in a fourth grade, you very well might have saw the whole class be sent home. And that was before contact tracing could even begin. So that inefficiency, if you will, created a lot of student absentee as particularly at the elementary level. And it's not by accident I choose fourth grade because firstly my wife's a fourth grade teacher, but also elementary schools are really the phenomena we're speaking to high schools to a large extent but operating pretty stably this year. So with tests at home on the other hand, what happens now since we're not doing contact tracing, that process wasn't acceptable, honestly, and was too inefficient. We talk about this new idea of presumptive contact. So the idea is let's just assume everyone in that fourth grade classroom, if there was a case in that classroom, let's just assume that presumed that everyone in that classroom might or might not be exposed. And what schools do in that case, so instead of trying to send everyone home in the begin this elaborate time bound process, we send a notice home to parents saying, there was a case in the fourth grade. And if you're vaccinated, there's a fork in the road here between vaccinated and unvaccinated. If your child's vaccinated, you should feel okay about that, but we're gonna provide you a couple of ansigen tests too to be used on day four and day five in accordance with our isolation and quarantine process. In this case, quarantine process. So don't have to worry about it, but on day four, day five, we would recommend that your child do two of these tests back to back just to confirm that they're okay. So we didn't know the child was within three to six feet to go back to the sort of the close contact definition. We're just broadly deploying these tests to everyone in that room to say, hey, okay, but if you're vaccinated on day four or five, pick up two tests. On the other hand, if you're an unvaccinated student in that classroom, we would like you to pick up five tests and basically do what used to be called test to stay. We want you to do it at home and because you're more vulnerable if you're unvaccinated and we want you to check every day to see if you're positive and those tests can be administered at home. If you're negative, you just keep coming to school every single day. So that's sort of test, the major focus to test at home is shift from a parental thing. I would mention another piece of it which sometimes doesn't get as much emphasis is that previously nurses were doing a lot of the web work on that contact tracing. I mean, that was their job and driving them crazy, honestly. And many of them were, you know, Dr. Levine by the meeting, we were in meetings where people were like, we're gonna quit. We can't sustain us, that kind of thing. So one of the things that's also going on is that we're equipping nurses to sort of do their more traditional, I would say clinical function because there's still a lot of nuance to managing the virus. The symptomology looks a lot like headcolds and so forth. So we're also equipping nurses with the tests so they can do screening at school with symptomatic individuals, both students and staff. So nurses, ideally, as they make this transition will no doubt certainly involve the notification process and managing and helping distribute tests, though largely that's an administrative test that doesn't need to follow to nurses. We're trying to carve up more time to get nurses back to doing what they were doing because that added a lot of value to the overall safety and security for individuals. And we haven't really been able to have them do that. So we want them to be evaluating students when they're symptomatic and talking to parents about reminding them what to do and all that kind of thing. So that's essentially it in a nutshell. Okay. I see a question from the Chittenden's. And I think we have somebody who might be on the ground. On the ground. You think that's... I've been experiencing firsthand and I think you framed the question well, Chair Campion. This is my son Thomas and he's been home recently and so was his class because of all the concerns we're wrestling with. So what you just described actually has worked quite well from our perspective, whatever that's worth you hearing. But my question to you is, this guy's now missed about six days of class, all right? And so I'm worried that we're going to spend about five to 10 days on these SBAC tests at the end of this year when teachers could carve that time back for some direct instruction. Do you see that softening from, I know it's a federal question and it's going to take an act of Congress, but what are your thoughts on the testing and how that might get this guy to cover some of the classes that he's missed over the last six or seven days? Yeah, that's a powerful question. Yeah, it will take an act of Congress or regulatory waiver, where I came down on this last year and it's hard for me to answer this question at this moment in time because I'm not sure what's in front of us for the rest of the school year. But we came down to this question, it was around April and May and if you remember what it was like around April vacation we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel so to speak, or at least being able to restore our schools to mostly in-person instruction that by far and away our school system rose to that challenge and was able to really move forward. So as we're looking at the finite number of days available after April vacation, my simple conclusion was we shouldn't be spending that limited number of time doing testing. I wanna make up whatever we could do with direct instruction and furthermore restoring the sense of normalcy for students. So what a lot of districts did to their credit is because the window for SBAC testing starts in March, a lot of them did a lot of SBAC testing during that sort of hybrid learning mode. So they would bring in some students and test them and so forth and they were able to essentially get it out of the way before the in-person return. But to your point, we don't, it's not within our power to do this. If we're given a waiver authority again, we'll certainly evaluate that. I'm not too worried right now assuming we can make some progress going forward. We have our own waiver process available for absenteeism. I think that's largely gonna be a question for elementary schools. SBAC testing coincidentally is confined to sort of grades three through eight. So there is a direct intersection there that's gonna have to be evaluated. But on the other hand, and this is where some of the political sort of conversation goes, the testing is, when we think about now, we're trying to understand what is the impact of this pandemic on students? Do we have any data on this? Do we need data as policymakers on how to intervene? The only statewide assessment that we have is SBAC, the one that's required under federal government. So we have no other, from a state consistent perspective, we have no other understanding about actually what's going on from an academic perspective in our schools. It's the only data point we have. And furthermore at the national level, and I would say in Vermont as well, it's therefore the major means by which we expose equity gaps. So, where there's a lot of pushback to canceling the test over the last couple of years comes from the civil rights groups that are like, look, this data is essential for us to determine, our students really being left behind, so to speak. And therefore we need to remain committed to exposing those equity gaps. What I'm hearing so far, and I know Senator Campion met the secretary when he was in Vermont, what I'm hearing so far is that a waiver is unlikely for the spring. Thank you. Let's, if you don't mind, Secretary French, we'll just shift to Dr. Levine for a moment. And Dr. Levine, wondering if you might just say something to us about cases, case counts, what's happening a little bit around spread in school? Sure. So, and I'll try not to be redundant because Secretary French has learned a lot from me. Clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly. That's good retention as well. Yeah, I think somebody's gonna be applying for an MD, I think for the time this is all over. He's doing a great job. I wanna, it did know what he said though that the document that we provided really does give you a nice natural history of the evolution of the testing. And I thought it was pretty understandable and logical in its flow. So I think that will help all of you for some very brief reading. But that just represents a portion of the evolution because obviously the evolution has not just been in surveillance testing versus test to stay versus test at home. It's also been in the contact tracing, as you've heard. And indeed, one of the questions I got on VPR today on Vermont edition had to do with how important our buses, how important our cafeteria is for transmission. And we can't give you a 100% absolute answer but the answer we can give is that they have not been noticed to be high places for foci for transmission. So when we think about all the content tracing that has been done prior to the time when we evolved to our current state, those are not the locations that were on the alert. And there are many mitigation strategies built into those settings beyond the usual in terms of distancing, in terms of ventilation, windows open on buses, for instance, spacing of students, number of students in a cafeteria at one point in time or another or in a classroom eating at one point in time or another. And anecdotally, I've heard a lot of reports about not that this is a habit we want to encourage but students are able to eat pretty quickly and not dilly dally, so to speak. With their mask off, which I think has been very useful. I wanna maintain also in this discussion the optimism about logistics. No, we got 200,000 more tests into the state on Monday. There's another double that coming in whenever it arrives from an airport that it's been sitting at. So not that I wanna say it's all rosy but I think we have enough diversity in the portfolio that we're gonna see tests meet the demand and in answer to your question demand go down a little bit. So we are clearly in a downturn in numbers of cases. We're in the high 600s to low 700s per day now where we were at one point in the several thousand per day. So that has been a very nice outcome. So to speak. Senator, would you just tell us why that's happening? I know it's been in the press a little bit but why are those numbers going down now? Yeah, so I think it's based on the epidemiology of this particular variant strain. We're sort of fulfilling the prophecy that South Africa originally had that UK has had to some degree so they seem to have plateaued a little and that now the Northeast being the place where we first encountered Omicron at the worst rates is now gonna be the first that comes down at a nicer rate. It's also been observed that the slope up on the curve is relatively steep and the slope down is relatively steep. I'm not sure we will mimic that completely but just the fact that we're in that trend is really critical. And we're seeing it in the downstream outcomes not just case numbers which we of course know suffer from a variety of issues but more in terms of hospitalizations where that number was in the 120s per day and now we're in the 80s per day and that's a dramatic change obviously. So there seems to be some consistency amongst all of that. The other thing is as I don't know how far you want me to go with this but Secretary of French has mentioned the word recovery on a number of occasions in terms of the education sector and we're now trying to look at that across everything. All adverse health, social, educational, developmental outcomes because really the virus doesn't just affect one part of our society or another it's affected us all and its impact in negative ways has weighed on everyone. So the fact is we're focusing on recovery we're focusing on a gradual progression towards a more of a steady state where we and the virus are kind of in balance if you will and we can resume the attention that all these other areas need to have in a bigger way because of where we are with the virus. And again, looking at schools as part of our communities we talked about transmission on buses and cafeterias and what have you sure we did have transmission within schools over the course of these two years but it was not the major way students were getting COVID it was coming in from the community often in their household and then when they are identified as a case it wasn't like it spread like wildfire through all of their colleagues in a classroom setting. And so it makes a lot of what we're doing make a lot more sense but it puts it in a little better perspective as well. So that's sort of very general comments I don't know if I hit on everything you had wanted me to. Very helpful. Senator Hooker, please. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Levine and Secretary French for being here. Dr. Levine, I heard a report last night on the news about a difference in the recommendations for masking for kids masking and the questions around that now about whether or not it's as necessary and how healthy it is for our kids to be masked all day. Can you comment on that? Please. Yes, we can follow this discussion over two years where it becomes more intense, less intense, more intense, less intense, but never resolved. And so the bottom line is there's sufficient data to support masking in general and in the schools. There's now come to light also data that is contrary to that. I have not known of a significant systematic review or meta-analysis that's been able to resolve this tension between some of the literature that's clearly not in favor versus that that is in favor but it is the reality we live in in almost every aspect of the pandemic and it's unfortunate. I really do believe and I believe most in public health really do believe that we are in a good place with regard to keeping our kids in school and educating them because masking has been one layer of the mitigation strategies utilized. And I don't think, in fact, I know you won't see Vermont veering from that as we try to get closer to an endemic state by any means. So that's not gonna happen. The studies about harm of masks that I think is more challenging because that is clearly more to me in the realm of misinformation and fringe on the internet. There's a lot of physiology studies done and we'll call it mechanical engineering studies done in laboratory environments, trying to look at oxygen levels, carbon dioxide levels, dispersion of viral droplets and aerosols. And there is a part of the population that wants to really not see this succeed that pivots on a few studies. The breadth of the literature and the brunt of the literature is that a kid's brain is not being adversely impacted by wearing a mask. Now, that means a kid's brain in terms of the physiology, the blood gases, the impact on their ability to learn. I'm not saying a kid's brain may not be adversely impacted by not seeing his teacher's faces, classmates' faces, them seeing his and the kind of social development that he's exhibiting, et cetera. That's a little different, more social science phenomenon that I don't know too much about research that actually tells us anything more than what we want to believe. If you wanna believe those things are being harmed, probably there are plenty of examples where they are. If you wanna believe kids are resilient and can really actually wear a mask and still succeed in other ways, there's plenty of evidence for that as well. So that part's a little less inflammatory in a sense, but people seize upon that. But from the actual physiology and brain chemistry and learning, I don't think you're gonna find a lot of people in public health or science saying that masks are a bad thing. And if I may, please. Thank you. Secretary French, if I could ask you, how is the staff faring with the new program? Great question. When you say staff, do you mean the nurses? Teachers and other school staff, with the implementation of the new program? I would add nurses in there too. Yeah, I think, well, nurses, yeah. I mean, I could draw the line there because I think nurses are more operationally impacted by it. So we've met with the nurses association. I think they're, my impression from the leadership, they're very committed to operationalizing this, but they were in a difficult place before with the other process, and particularly with contact tracing. So they have some work to do among their membership, but they're very supportive of trying to make that transition. I think the larger, the disposition of staff is still very, very challenged to say the least. I think people are really tired. We're still seeing a lot of staff absenteeism. So I mentioned the other day at the press conference, I get emails from parents saying, well, you've implemented this new program. Why is my school closed still? And you really need to just understand that people are still getting sick themselves or having to stay home with sick children and so forth. So staff are still being impacted from the virus, just like everyone else is, and workforce issues that are not unique to education are manifesting themselves in a manner that does require schools to close still. But I think that where there's still a lot of tension or where we saw it initially anyway, was the perception that this new process would be a safety issue for staff that somehow not providing sort of isolating those cases or sending large quantities of kids home was a compromise in safety. So we've had to do a lot of communication education on that, Dr. Levine and his staff been very gracious and forthcoming with their time to do that. So just working from a communications perspective to explain the rationale, my impression is some of the initial concern has died down but I think that also could be construed as being connected to the case counts themselves coming down. So it remains to be seen but we certainly I think we're continuing to do our best to educate people as to what is the public health rationale for making this shift and how it contributes to the broader safety of not only schools but to their communities. Thank you. Thank you. But Secretary Fringe, this might be a question for you. Are parents, when they're notified of an outbreak in the classroom, is it on them to come pick up the test or do the schools send it home? And then I guess if they are coming to pick up the test, do you have any numbers on whether or not some parents just, I'm not saying intentionally or anything but just they're busy, they're not getting there? Yeah, I mean, all those things are true but we haven't done data collection on that still too very new. I think what we're seeing as expected elementary requires a different approach than high school meaning that high school students can be counted on to pick up tests. So we know examples where high school students, yes, are coming to a distribution point and picking up the tests. We know at the elementary level, the schools are much more proactive in distributing those tests to the students so they can take them home. Yes, absolutely. It's sort of on at school by school, somebody might say, hey, we know that this kid needs it in his backpack, it's gonna make it. You bet. Somebody else, please come pick it up. Okay. Yeah, so they have to work those sort of specifics out. We have generated a lot of like frequently asked questions kind of things and we work directly with districts on operationalizing that. But your other point about parental interest is an important one to acknowledge. And I would, to Dr. Levine's point about, the issue of masking, you could draw a through line back for the last two years around that conversation. Similarly, parental interest and willingness to participate in the mitigation strategies varies from school to school and it varies among parents. So this kind of gets to the heart of the conversation around perception of safety. What we were doing before, and really a major cause of fatigue for school nurses was setting them up in conflict with families. So they were calling parents on a daily basis almost to say, well, need to do that contact tracing. And a lot of parents had just stopped participating that in a positive way. So we were really putting nurses in a position, in schools in a position of conflict with families and communities. And that's important to acknowledge because none of these mitigation strategies work if people don't sort of follow along and are willing to comply. So we are certainly aware that folks might not be interested in the testing does require sort of voluntary participation. On the other hand, we're more broadly distributing a large number of tests. So that's sort of the balancing piece. I think that ultimately will assist with a safety issue. Okay. And I think we can be very honest here. Like every other aspect of the pandemic, the word that rises to the surface is trust. And people in Vermont, I say have been very trustworthy. And that's why we've gotten to where we've gotten to when done so well. But the reality is in circumstances like this where you're relying on parents to do the right thing and report the right result and not just blow it off. I can understand why teachers would feel perhaps but they couldn't trust everyone and maybe they wouldn't be as safe as if they were actually talking to the wall by themselves. But that's a really challenging setup to have to put one through. But that is indeed what it boils down to. I think if there's a message coming from us and certainly from your committee from now until forever in the future, the major message still has to be stay home if you're sick. Because we all know how often maybe we even come to work but nevermind how often parents may send their kids to school because they're threshold for the amount of illness that child is exhibiting isn't quite meeting what they would do to interrupt their whole lives. But I think that's what we have to really emphasize the most. We're not super worried about the asymptomatic kid that comes to school. I mean, especially as virus becomes less prevalent in the community, but certainly with all the viruses out there, kids coming to school sick has always been a problem. And we'd like the behavior change to actually be perpetuated from what we've talked about during the pandemic. It sounds to me like the plan that you talked to us about a couple of weeks ago with tests has worked out. In other words, engaging a bunch of different, I don't know, companies, different folks to send them. It sounds like in general, things are here. We have enough tests. You're not concerned about that. Yeah, I'm not. And I plan, I participate in those planning meetings. And that was always part of our design that sort of diversified portfolio. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, those things are coming online as expected. Okay, great. I mean, we're still prey to what's out there about at the same time. I understand. The landscape seems to be improving and we should be optimistic. Committee, Senator Hooker. Thank you. We heard, I heard, and I think others heard that some of the tests had to be sent back. Was that accurate information? I don't know about recently we had some issues. You know, when tests to stay was being implemented in particular that some of the tests were expiring. So there are expiration dates on the tests and some of the manufacturers have different requirements in that regard. And you might, we also had the issue of freezing tests and so forth. So, but, you know, to a large part, we haven't seen like tests being returned. Okay. Okay. And one more. If I could, with the possibility of vaccinating children under five. Could you just talk a little bit about that? And I know there's some concern. Some parents think that, you know, they've had enough vaccines for their kids and what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I'm trying to reserve most of my thoughts because it's mostly a news item now and the actual science hasn't been published for the medical community to actually examine and understand better. So understanding exactly what the studies have found with efficacy and with adverse effects, what the risk-benefit ratio is, the parents who are most adverse to using this vaccine in that age group will appropriately cite the statistics about how almost uniformly kids do well in this age group with COVID and how often they have no symptoms at all. So you have to weigh all those things together to be honest. And I just don't feel like we have enough of the data in hand to do that just yet. Prediction-wise, nationwide, people are talking about a 20% uptake which is even lower than the five to 11 year old but knowing in Vermont, we beat every record every time, we'll have better than a 20% uptake if the science supports it for sure. And do we have better than a 20% uptake in Vermont on the kids who are under 12? Oh yeah, yeah, we are. We are up to 62 point something percent for at least one dose and about 10% lower than that for fully vaccinated in that age group. And the national average is in the low 20% range. Right, thank you. And it's increasing still, so. Committee, any more questions for Secretary of French, Commissioner Levine? Do either of you have anything else that you wanna share at this point with us? Yeah, I thought I'd mention and particularly your invitation for support. Just wanna give you an update on the recovery framing. We had worked on that last year and this largely speaks to state level supports that would be deployed. We were unable to do that. We certainly last year when we were talking with you at this time, we were anticipating being able to do that at the end of September, both with Delta and Omicron, we just weren't able to make that pivot. We are planning on doing that now. So we are doing some planning inside the agency. We have a meeting again next week. We'll at some point here, probably before the end of the month wanna give you an update on how we see recovery rolling out. You might think, remember previously we talked about academics, social-emotional learning and re-engagement. A lot of our focus right now is on those first two. Re-engagement really I think was a task, particularly coming out of hybrid learning that was a focus of summer matters and after school and so forth. Not to say summer and after school are still important strategies, but we would think about them in the context of academics and social-emotional learning. So we're in the process of sort of unpacking that a bit and we expect to point the state-level resources forward at the end of February at the earliest, but we'll come in and would appreciate the opportunity to give you an update on that work. Perfect. We appreciate that. And I would say that yesterday we had a great meeting with just to Carolus about a number of different bills and we are working, are going to start to work, but not before checking in with you on some ideas that we have for the budget as it relates to not only the work that you just mentioned, but also some curriculum work. So with that, Senator Shinden. I just say, Secretary French with this huge monster snowstorm coming in this week. If you want to make a bunch of kids really like Secretary French, you just want to declare a statewide snow day on Friday to not impact all the school districts. They'll be singing your praises. You'd have to take that bill up pretty quick. You know, I'm always, you might have noticed there's been a lot of interest in granting me all kinds of authority, but I've yet to, I haven't been monitoring legislative process that closely, but I've yet to see that interest manifest itself in actual specific legislation. But I used to, what grade is your son in, Senator? Third grade. Oh, okay. I can remember what I was principal, I used to go into this one sixth grade classroom and I'd always, you know, if it's snowing out, I'd come in and say, hey, do you guys hear we're gonna close school early? And they're like, ah, and I'd say, no, I didn't hear it either. I was just asking you, if you were, you know, it's like one of my favorite. That's a heck of a way to make friends. I mean, heck of a way to make friends. I'll tell you, if you run for office at some point and those kids are over 18, you're gonna have a real problem on your hands. I hear from them now actually. I'm sure. During the pandemic, they're reaching out all the time. Yeah. That's great. Well, thank you both very much. We know you're very busy and appreciate the updates and taking the time to come and share those with us. So thank you both very much. Take care. Thank you.