 Good afternoon, welcome to Senate's Education Tuesday, February 7th, 1.31 in the afternoon. We're going to start our day off by returning to a review of the administration's school safety bill in here testimony. I'm going to talk with the McClure Foundation about their commitment to CCB, continue some of our conversations around education financing, community schools, technical education, Senator Chittenden's bill on kindergarten enrollment age, and then some follow-up conversation around from ESAC. Ms. St. James, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Good to see you. You, as well. And if you wouldn't mind, just bringing us back to what this bill is doing, as well as talk a little bit about the edits before we turn things over to Jeff, Jay, and Sue. Sure, Beth St. James Office of Legislative Council. Well, up on the screen, eventually I'll have in front of you and post it to your website is what's been labeled as draft 2.1 with yesterday's date of February 6th. This is the committee's bill on school safety, and the substance of it in the body of the bill is the language provided by the Agency of Education. The top of the bill here in the statement of purpose lines 4 through 12 is essentially a straightforward summary of what the bill proposes to do, and there was some feedback provided that it was not as accurate as it could be. So the language you see highlighted are the changes between the statement of purpose and from draft 1.1 and the draft 2.1. They really surround what independent schools are required to do. The original statement of purpose in the highlighted language indicated that the independent school was required to develop a policy on the action contemplated, and this new language you'll see there on line 6 is very specific to the independent school is required to conduct a bi-annual option-based response drill following the template developed by the Vermont School Safety Center. That's language taken directly out of the bill. And then line 10, item 5, is that independent schools are asked to adopt an access control and visitor management procedure, not policy. And then the rest of the bill remains unchanged. Ask this around. We can wait on it. Oh, this is the link up. Oh, OK. So any questions on what is the same change just as before we move on to the next slide? Is there a bullet or anything? No. OK. No. That's helpful. Would you like me to stick around to hear the testimony? If you prefer to do it remotely, that's fine too. But if you would stick around in some way, that would be terrific. Mr. Francis, are you all speaking from one voice on this, or? Yes. You are. OK. Good afternoon. Thank you. I'm Jeff Francis. I'm the executive director for the School of Superintendents Association. I'm joined by many of my colleagues, but two in particular, Susie Glowski over here. She's with the BSBA and Jay Nichols. I wanted to start by thanking you for the opportunity to testify and also make it clear from the outset that our associations support updating statutory requirements in order to address the important matter of improving the safety and security of Vermont schools. In other words, may I also just quickly ask, is the NEA, are you all together? NEA is not with us on this. Thank you. They may be, but we did not work with them. Appreciate it. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the approach that we took, and it was an interesting process to watch because the administration came up with a proposal. They passed it to the General Assembly. Ms. St. James did drafting. We got involved when our association started to talk about the proposal that came from the administration. And in my case, on the day that you visited with us over at Capitol Plaza, we talked about this bill. And Superintendents started to raise what I would say were subjective interests with regard to what they knew of how drills were conducted in schools presently. I took that under advisement and decided that these three associations that are represented by me in the Vermont NEA, along with Rob Evans, who's a school safety liaison. And in my case, Brooke Farrell Olson, who was a member of the Vermont School Safety Crisis Planning Team, she's the superintendent down in Fairhaven for the Slate Valley School District, should get together and talk about the legislation. We did that, and we came up with, I would not say major concerns, but some specific interests in the bill. After that meeting, we thought it was advisable to meet, again, with Mr. Evans, and also with Emily Simmons, who's the general counsel for the Agency of Education, along with Sue Seglowski. And I'd point out at this point that Sue's an attorney, as is Emily Simmons. And we just talked about the bill. So we focused on the specificity of the bill in order to make sure that the language was right. And I would say that we were mildly disadvantaged in that process, because in talking with Emily Simmons, she participated in the conversation. But she said, with regard to anything that you see in the bill, it's really now in the hands of the General Assembly, because the administration had passed it off. And when we contacted Ms. St. James, who is always gracious in our communications with her, she didn't acknowledge whether she accepted our points or not, but said, really, now this is in the possession of the Senate Education Committee, so I'm not going to change a thing unless I'm directed to do so by the committee, and specifically the chair, which we understand the process. So what we have done in a series of meetings is take a look at the bill and utilizing our experience. And in Ms. Seglowski's case, her expertise. And we made some observations and suggestions. And I would say they range from the technical to the substantive. So as we worked through that process, we decided one way to do it would be to give you a markup of your first draft of the bill and give you margin notes with the comments that we had. So whether you accept our recommendations or not, whether you find our points to have merit or not, you've got to document which lays it all out. So with your permission, what I'd like to do is just quickly go through these comments. And then at that completion, with your permission, Mr. Chair, if you'd let Sue or Jay comment on anything and I miss it, and then we'll respond to questions, OK? So the first comment that we raised has already been addressed, and that was the statement of purpose, wasn't consistent with what the bill actually did. And Ms. St. James corrected that, at least with respect to the form that the bill is currently in your draft, 2.1. Our second comment, and there are little lines that tie the comment to the place we lost the line numbers. But the second comment just looks at the section that calls on Supervisory Union or Supervisory District, and we're suggesting that that be replaced with school district boards. And then the second comment, which is the second pink comment on the page, it shows that the school boards of the entity authorized by statute to adopt policies. So we think that where there's a policy adoption requirement, it should cite school board rather than Supervisory Union or Supervisory District. The third comment, and I see the comments are enumerated. In our discussions with Rob Evans and Brooke Farrell-Holson, it was determined that drills are and should be conducted according to written guidance. So we're recommending that the word template be stricken and replaced by guidance. And the reason is because the guidance that school districts get really go to the frequency and nature of the drill, which is different than a template. A template is a plan that one would follow. And you'll see that as we go through the draft, we do utilize the term template in the appropriate places, we think. So that was the third comment. The fourth comment, I would say, is very substantive. And that is in my conversation with superintendents, and I know in Mr. Nichols' conversation with principals, and I know from listening to Mr. Tinney's testimony for the Vermont NEA that we believe that the guidance for conducting options-based best practices have to be trauma-informed. And I did not include this in my testimony, but I'll give you the link to this. In preparing the testimony, I took a look at this document, which I found online, called best practice considerations for armed assailant drills in schools. That's what option-based drills are. It just talks about how to conduct them in school settings with a lot of sensitivity to the people who are going to be participating because they have the potential to invoke trauma. So I am far from an expert on that, but our collective review of the issue tells us that however guidance is issued under statutory requirements, that the actual practice for the drills needs to be trauma-informed. My belief is that because the Vermont School Safety Center is very school-focused, understands that, and because the Vermont School Crisis Planning Team, which advises the Vermont School Safety Center, is comprised of school officials, that any guidance that was issued would be trauma-informed. But it's an important point that we think it should be addressed in legislation. If you turn the page to the fifth comment, we did not understand why there wasn't a policy required for independent schools. And I listened to Ms. St. James differentiate between the requirement, at least as she was following up on the administration's proposal. There are places in law that independent schools are required to adopt policies. And this comment, which was put here by Ms. Seglowski, references a few of those places. So irrespective of the question, it seems like there needs to be resolution to whether the requirement will be for policies followed by procedures and practices or not. But that was something that we noticed. We didn't understand why there was a differentiation, particularly because in other places in statute there is no differentiation. The sixth comment, I think, is also substantive because the reference in the bill is to other educational institutions. And it references specifically, I'll say the upper end of educational institutions in Vermont, universities or colleges. But it's silent on early childhood education centers. So we know that we know through the tragedy of what's transpired in this country that childcare settings and pre-k's are susceptible to violent acts as well. So we weren't sure whether that consideration was given by the Agency of Education, but we think it's one that is a good question. Comment number seven is explicit in that it requires school districts to have all hazards emergency operations plans. But there's no similar requirement for approved or recognized independent schools when you consider what all hazards are. It's a comprehensive treatment that is intended to address, to put it in layperson's terms, all forms of hazards. And we wondered why. Well, we actually didn't wonder why. We think we thought it was an oversight. You mind if I ask the administration right now? Was that an overstate independent school piece, do you mind laying in on that? Or would you prefer to wait? I prefer to wait. Sure, absolutely. But I'm leaning in that direction. OK, yeah. OK, so that was something that we noticed that it was. Because I mean, if you consider any type of hazard disevent that can happen at any place at any time. Our comment number eight just indicates it affirms the fact that all the emergency operations plans should be driven by a template. So in contrast to the options-based drills. Number nine was just a suggestion that we've made for clarity in terms of the collection of entities that are responsible. And in this case, access control and visitor management talks about not only school sites, but also supervisory union and supervisory district offices. So we wanted to make sure that the language at the top of that 1484A was consistent with that. Our comment 10 also asks why if the public schools and school districts are required to have a policy, why the independent schools would only have procedures when we know that, in some instances, the independent schools do have policies. Comment number 11, let me just take a look at that. So in the draft of the bill, and this is also substantive, that came from the administration, there was very specific explanation of the composition of the school crisis, excuse me, of the Vermont school crisis planning team. And in particular, excuse me, the behavioral threat assessment team. So when we delved into that, what we heard from school officials was that behavioral threat assessments are really situation-specific events in schools. And even if you've got an assemblage of people, you might not deploy all those people on a specific threat assessment. So because we're relying on guidance from the Vermont School Safety Center and the Vermont School Crisis Planning Team, we think that it would be sufficient to have the composition of the team laid out in the guidance. Because the guidance should presumably not only talk about the composition of the team, but how you respond to different behavioral threats by deploying your assessment team. So it's a long-winded way of saying, we think rather than specify the composition of the team in law, we should rely on guidance from the expertise of the Vermont School Safety Center. And then finally, the last comment is on the very back page. And it's the 12th comment. And we didn't understand why if sections, and this could just be a drafting aspect that we don't understand, if sections 1 and 3 are covered in B and sections 2 and 4 are covered in C, why you would need A. And as is sometimes the case, and Sue, if the chair will allow it, I want to turn to you here. We had talked about the fact that school districts, and this is not in the comments, school districts would be hard pressed to adopt a policy on some of these matters by August 1, 2023, just based on the timing. So in the spirit of getting this legislation passed and cooperating with timely passage, I think we want to suggest that that August 1, 2023 be changed to September 1, 2023. And it would be a logical question for you to ask, well, can these things still be put into place operationally? I think much of what is in this proposal could be acted upon by schools practically in terms of how they're going to go about it, particularly with regard to the access control, but it doesn't make sense to ask school districts to try to rush through their policy process. If functionally, it would be very challenging to complete by July 1, 2023. So I think we wanted to make a suggestion that that be September 1, 2023. Correct, in subsection B. Right, and we did not have a note on that of that, correct? Right. Okay, so that's, thank you for allowing me to go through that. Ms. St. James, do you see anything that's sort of outside of the policy decisions that you find objectionable or concerns with? No. No, okay. And do you want me to explain the effective date? Please. That's St. James Office of Legislative Council. Every section has to have an effective date. Oh. So the effective date section also needs to have an effective date. Usually you see that all incorporated where it says the full act is effective on such and such a date. That effective date on July 1, 2023 could be folded into subsection B or C, but there wasn't direction on this and just to be safe, making the effective date effective as soon as possible allows everything else to follow from it. So we can certainly change that depending on the committee's pleasure, but the effective date section needs an effective date. I'm gonna make a note of that because I would not want to forget that little detail. Right, right, right. I have to, you know what I'm saying. So could everything else, as the Director like to put it? Yeah, we have him occur foundation starting soon. Yeah. Of course this is an ongoing conversation, but yes, please introduce yourself. Jane Nichols, Executive Director of Vermont Principal Association. So could we just have everything start on September 1st other than the July 1, 2024 or does that take care of that? It's a policy question. Yeah, I was just asking, will that be? Legally, yes. Okay, yes. Okay, thank you. Let's note for the record that I didn't ask that question. Ha ha ha. Committee, any pressing questions right now in terms of suggestions and just striking all as logical, I think we need to hear now from the administration, which we will in the next few days. If that works for the administration, I want the NEA to come back in and sort of respond to some of this, but I appreciate your efforts on it. Sure. And if you'd like, I can send Hayden a link to this. I would appreciate that. That would be great. It's really very interesting. That would be great. We might even have the author in. That makes sense. Yeah, I mean it with the sponsors of the National Association of School Psychologists. Yeah. And also the National Association of School Resource Officer. So I just noted that and learned more and I learned more in the first two pages than I knew about the subject. So thank you. And just as a reminder to everybody watching here or remotely, all of our bills have to make crossover. So we really do have so considerable amount of time. We will make our way through this and our other bills, you know, if I bid in order to make the two evacuation day, which is March 17th, also in the St. Patrick's Day. Thank you. Great. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you both. Thank you all for being here this year. Is the pronouncement here? Yes, it is. Thank you, Ms. Weir. Please join us. I know we've said hello in the past. You've been before this committee. It's great to see you. Good to see you as well. This is the first time I've been in the State House in person in a very long time. It feels good. It's great. So good to be here. So the reason we asked you here is the Court Foundation has made a tremendous gift and incredibly generous to our community colleges. We have, without a doubt, changed the lives of a lot of kids. And it's, I speak for myself, but I think everyone's been so greatly appreciated. And we just, so I want to say thank you to the McClure Foundation. But I also thought it would be helpful to the committee to understand why you're doing this, why you've done it, where things are at. Also know a little bit about the McClure Foundation and your work. So with that, floor is yours. Wonderful. Thank you so much for the invitation. So for the record, my name is Carolyn. We're, I'm with the McClure Foundation. I serve as executive director. And I want to thank you for inviting me to testify. And thank you as well for the really meaningful investments that you all have made in the affordability of college and career training in recent years. We have seen such an astounding demand for the range of public investments on that front. Everything from the critical occupation scholarships to the pre-course incentives to 802 opportunities. And the very first message I have is just celebrating all of the public and philanthropic investments in the affordability of college and career training in recent years. So for the benefit of committee members who may not be familiar with the McClure Foundation, we are near a 30 year affiliate of the Vermont Community Foundation. And we've spent the past 15 years exclusively focused on building pathways to Vermont's most promising jobs. Our grant making supports viability and the sustainability of Vermont's public, college and career training systems. And our grant making makes the Vermont-based education and training programs that lead to Vermont's most promising jobs more visible, more accessible, more affordable. Some of you may know us from the actual list of Vermont's most promising jobs. This is an eight year partnership that we have running with the Vermont Department of Labor. And I'll pass some of these out. We update this list every two years in partnership with the ELMI team at the Department of Labor. And taking a look at- Put one more. Yes, please. Put one on the file. Taking a look at your agenda for later this afternoon, it might interest the committee to point out that the new data points to public school teachers. It's the promising job that pays above the state median wage associated with the greatest number of projected openings over the next 10 years. If I may say something about that while you're on the topic, the reason we're having to be sacked back in is we've been trying to pull apart. What do the numbers actually look like if you arrive here or you're here already, a recent graduate from the Vermont Institution, ready to teach school? And something that I pulled apart over the weekend a little bit was in terms of state dollars, it's zero. It's all federal. Like if this works out, in terms of our state investment with helping teachers transition into this state or reduce their student debt, and I think Marilyn's gonna confirm this this afternoon, we're not doing anything. And as we start to look at attracting teachers through our Vermont campaign to teach in Vermont, are there things that we can do? Thank you for the inquiry. I'm thrilled to hear it. We are in many ways, what I'd call a pathways agnostic, career pathways and workforce development fund are informed by this broad list of jobs. But the specific question about the role for both philanthropic and public funding in supporting the development of Vermont's teacher workforce is of real interest to us right now as well. Senator Gullif. Oh, sorry, no. Oh, okay. No, sorry. So I'll just mention that we have, our grant making really does aim to strengthen Vermont's public college and career training systems and we recently pledged a minimum of $5 million in grants over five years toward that end. And much of that is centered with the community college of Vermont and the students they serve. So that's really what I'm here to talk about today. Why CCV is our cornerstone partner, what we're doing to support CCV and its students and what impacts and insights are being generated through that support that may be of interest to you and this committee. So we zeroed in on our mission about 15 years ago when we became concerned about how few high school graduates are being supported to continue on directly to college and career training. You've all seen that data. The latest version of the data offers continued cause for concern. So two weeks ago, the New England Secondary Schools Consortium came out with the latest data on post-secondary continuation rates and both in the aggregate and disaggregated by gender, race, income status, disability status, Vermont is still the lowest in New England. Fewer than half of all Vermont high school students right now are transitioning directly to college. Fewer than a third of their low-income peers are doing the same. So, right, given- What I should just add also, it is historically, it's a bright point that we have a high graduation rate, but after that, it really does drop off in terms of what you're about to pursue. Yes, and we connect that long-standing trend to the fact that Vermont also has, I think, the highest poverty rate among young adults in New England and obviously at a time when there are great jobs available, but folks without the skills and credentials, those jobs require. So we- Sorry for clarification. I think I missed what you said about the third. I got the half. It's about a third of students from low-income backgrounds who are graduating from high school and continuing directly onto college. And then the amount of folks who graduate from college is also troubling, but that's a whole other topic. Yeah. That's a cool thing to know. Finish it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they don't have to wait, yeah. So we're committed to this work because we really do believe that affordable college and career training options delivered at scale is the single greatest lever for driving economic mobility and workforce development. That's our primary entry point for all of this work. And that belief really points us to a clear institutional partner for our grant making, and that's the Community College of Vermont. For a good reason, right? Nationally, Community Colleges are engines of economic mobility. So two is CCB. It's our state's access institution, and it's our state's gateway institution. CCB serves the greatest number of Vermonters and the greatest number of low-income Vermonters of any college in the state. And from what I've read, the majority of students who benefited from public scholarship and free tuition opportunities that were publicly funded actually enrolled at CCB during the pandemic. So all to say, we think that institutional partner matters. If you're aware or have any background on our support for CCB, you most likely know about one or both of our two public pandemic-era commitments. The first was our graduation gift to the entire Vermont High School class of 2020 of one free course if they're choosing at CCB. I testified to this committee back in 2021 about the impact and insights generated by that promise. It essentially doubled the number of recently graduated high school students enrolled at community college at a time when nationally new enrollment at community college was plummeting by double digits. So that commitment taught us a lot. It taught us about the value of hope and simplicity as design values for kind of big plays that are intended to inspire in the moment. It taught us about the importance of the right institutional partner. CCB was ready to serve and we went from idea to launch with the governor. And I think 10 days and also about the necessity of support beyond tuition. Not only institutional support for enhanced student services but also institutional support to promote and administer and evaluate the initiative. So those lessons layered onto essentially a decade of lessons that we have picked up from supporting the equitable and meaningful implementation of the flexible pathways bill, ACS-MB7 from 2013, led us to our second commitment. And I think that's what I'm really here to talk about today. So last April, we announced a promise to the entire Vermont high school classes of 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 of a free degree at CCB, any degree program that they're choosing through the state's early college program. So you all know the state's early college program is part of the flexible pathways bill that allows high school seniors the opportunity to enroll in a full three years worth of college courses in lieu of their traditional senior year of high school. We made this promise because we believe young people in Vermont deserve affordable pathways to college degrees and deserve to be able to count on those pathways early enough in high school to be able to plan. Our free degree promise through early college basically says for everyone who completes early college at CCB and is interested in continuing at CCB towards an associate degree, we've got your second year along with living stipends each semester and enhanced academic and career advising. So really- So to be clear, let me just say. So you do your senior year through CCB, all the classes and then your commitment is to do year two. Exactly. Also known as like year 13, right? Yeah. So what that essentially means is a pathway to a free fast-tracked associate degree through a state program, through the state's early college program in any degree pathway offered at CCB that students choose. So I'm really excited to tell you a little bit more about the early impacts and insights of this promise. We launched in April and now the first early college cohort at CCB that enrolled with the benefit of knowing that they could count on a free degree at the end of their early college year is currently taking courses and being supported by CCB. But before I get to that, I wanted to note that the two public commitments to CCB from the McClure Foundation that I've mentioned today is where our grad give to the class of 2020 and the free degree from us through early college were complimented by over a decade of more behind the scenes institutional supports to CCB and that ranges from secondary education programming, support that resources the middle school access days and introduction to college careers that President Judy mentioned in this room two weeks ago, to educational advising and courses delivered at Northern State Correctional Facility that I love this story because it helped pave the way for CCB securing two federal investments to scale incarcerated community college here in Vermont. I think it's a nice example of philanthropy assuming early stage risk and giving a trusted partner room to test and learn and build confidence in public partners to scale an idea or a program. We've also provided long time support for veteran and military connected student services at CCB and things like enhancing career learning opportunities for CCB students in ways that align with the guided pathways best practices for community college delivering nationally. And in all of that work, CCB has really proven themselves to be an institutional partner that is responsive and creative and just ready to serve. So I will turn to the early impacts and insights generated by our free degree promise. We have a handout that I think you also have access to if you'd like another coffee, it's here. So I've already explained the structure of the free degree promise. I wanna spend a moment on why we made this promise and what we're starting to see in terms of the early impacts and what we're starting to learn from it. So the why here is, I've already mentioned it's hope. Young people deserve to feel hopeful about their futures in Vermont and pathways to affordable degrees and also opportunity, right? Community colleges really are engines of economic mobility. So to center a universal college degree program at our state's access institution, our state's gateway institution makes sense. And Vermont's future, right? These are fast tracked pathways to affordable degrees. We see that as good for the students who can benefit from the pathway but also good for Vermont at a time when promising jobs are waiting to be filled. We really believe that the state's early college program which we see as underutilized has potential to lead to a highly supportive free degree pathway. Okay, so we're starting to see enrollment patterns at the early college program at CCB shift for the better. CCB is currently serving its largest early college cohort since the program was launched in 2014. The cohort represents about 90% of Vermont's high schools which we're really excited to see. About 42% of that cohort are identified as low income by their school counselor. And the headline for me is that that represents a really significant increase in the percentage of the early college cohort at CCB that identifies as low income. Our North Star goals here even though the program is designed to be universal access is that the students who stand to benefit the most, students who have historic and economic barriers to attaining their degree are the ones who are most supported to access and succeed in this pathway. We're also seeing that the percentage of first generation students, the percentage of students who identify as BIPOC are higher than the K-12 population. And we have the benefit of learning through the enrollment process that 65% of this cohort intend to continue at CCB after their early college year. And that's more than double the percent of early college completers at CCB who typically persist at CCB towards their associate degree. So that's a pretty big shift. We are, we're hopeful that means more young people who are choosing to stay in Vermont because they're hopeful about their futures here. And we're young people with a credential that they can put to use quickly in the job market. I just wanted to add one thing. I don't think it's on this sheet. An observation that I made when I was teaching high school which is folks have heard me say that our educational model is very much based on sort of an industrial revolutionary model or system. And it doesn't have a lot of flexibility, but the early college really speaks to those kids who are kind of ready after three years to be done with high school and move on with something else and it just built such a nice niche for those kids that other kids need five or six years, but there are those who are ready to be out sooner. And I love that about this program. Thank you for saying that. We really support the spirit and intent of the flexible pathways built, right? Passed by this body in 2013 that I think reflects that understanding really well in articulating such a wide range of flexible pathways to and through high school graduation. Now I won't sit here and pretend that we think that early college is the right pathway for all students. I do think it's underutilized relative to the number of students for whom it is a great choice. And especially among low income students, BIPOC students, young men, students with disability. Because we do know that there are a number of high school seniors who are checked out, who are disengaged, who are ready for the next step and who are really hungry for their next step. And if we can make that next step clear and be supportive for them, I think that serves them and it serves Vermont. I think of this as a sense of the dollar, that this investment is costing the group foundation. This is a learn as we go. From our perspective, a promise is a promise. So no matter how many students enroll, we are committed to covering that second year. There is a fixed cost associated with administration, promotion and evaluation of the initiative and building CCB's capacity to support the special population of 18-year-olds. In some cases, even 17-year-olds, right? So that's at about 150,000 a year on top of our six figures of ongoing institutional support to CCB for a range of student services and capacity needs. The costs associated with tuition, stipends, really depends on enrollment. And we just don't know yet. And just to follow up, any geographic area you feel as though you might not be getting the students, this might be more of a question for CCB, but getting as many Rutland people as Burlington as Bennington, do you have a sense of that? We're really curious about that as well. Don't have a strong sense of it yet. We just know that the cohort is quite dispersed, right? So 90% of Vermont high schools. I have to imagine that there are some regional gaps in representation that we need to be attuned to. And what that dispersed cohort also means, and we're hearing this directly from students. CCB has actually stipended a lot of feedback sessions with current students about what their experience is like and what they need so that we can adapt the pathway supports as we go. And what they're hearing loud and clearly from students is we crave a stronger sense of belonging among this cohort. A lot of students are taking classes online, and that's a good thing because it means the classes are accessible, but they're hungry from more in-person events and that's what CCB is doing right now, creating dedicated space for these students at large locations and creating social meet and greets with staff. I'll just mention briefly three factors that we think are contributing to the early success of this free degree promise through the state's early college program. The first is a commitment to universal access. We designed this promise to be universal because we want it to reduce the stigma of students enrolling who actually do stand to benefit the most from a free degree. And that is both an important and in some ways counter-intuitive design component and choice. The second, and I mentioned this already, is support beyond tuition. We are providing living stipends and enhanced advising to students and directly resourcing CCB to deliver this pathway and this promise. And the third is leveraging public funding. This goes back to you all with the gratitude that I started with. This promise builds on the state's early college program which has been helping students get a jumpstart on their college pathway since 2014 and on recent investments in the affordability of community college like the 802 Opportunity Grant. So my message to you all today is early signs are encouraging. We still have some time left. This was a five-year promise and our commitment to all of our partners, including you all, is that we are going to evaluate how this is going and share what we're learning along the way. We're also working very closely with CCB to make sure that current students are supported. Maybe I'll end it at that and see if you'll have any questions. Please. So phenomenal program, but a curiosity question. It appears that one of the goals is to let the students end up with an associates degree. Looking through the most promising jobs, there's only two categories that even have an associates related to it. And so my question is it's a strategic one from your perspective. What led to the decision to support associates degrees versus CTE type or certificate-based qualifications so that the direction is more towards the trades versus university, I'm just wondering. I love the question. So it's maybe a two or three-part answer. The first is that we are not a college for all funder, part of the reason that CCB is our cornerstone institutional partners that they offer 21 certificate programs. And their certificate programs are what we consider quality, high quality when it comes to the kind of wild west landscape of non-degree credentials in the sense that they are accessible, affordable, oftentimes nested within degree programs so completers of those certificates can use those courses and credits and count them towards a degree later on if that's what they choose. And we also know that CCB, like many community colleges, really are designed to be gateway institutions. So CCB courses and degrees are easy to transfer. So a lot of the folks that we imagine are pursuing a free associate degree through this program are planning to pursue a bachelor's degree and know that their first two years are free. And they have an interim credential along that pathway. I will also say one of the interesting things we learned during the pandemic was that I think there is a strong interest on the part of Vermonters, especially incumbent workers, to pursuing high quality non-degree credentials. When we launched the Vermont's Most Promising Jobs brochure back in the update in fall 2020, it was a time of extreme labor market disruption, right? People were feeling really unsafe or insecure in their jobs. A lot of folks were out of work and it honestly didn't feel quite as actionable to come out with a list of 50 to 60 high wage, high demand occupations like we usually do. So we paired that data update with a list of seven short-term career training programs that we considered at the time best bets for Vermonters landing a promising job in 2021. It was a new piece of work for us. It was done very collaboratively with a wide range of workforce development partners around the state. And the Community Foundation actually kicked in $350,000 into scholarships for those best bet career training programs and capacity investments to the programs themselves. So for example, contributing to the nurse training program at NVU-Linden. As I understand it, that short list of seven programs was one of the inputs for what became the much more comprehensive list of critical occupation scholarships. And I've been thrilled to see the state support the affordability of these non-degree credentials, many of which are conferred by institutions that can nest those non-degree credentials into great pathways. That's where I think we're gonna have to leave it there. Okay. I really appreciate it. We know how to contact you if you have follow-up questions. We have follow-up questions. Cam, thank you enough for everything that the McCurft Foundation is doing. And I'm sure we will be back in contact as we make our way through some of these needs, such as teachers, see if there might be additional ways if I dare ask a partner. Thank you so much for the invitation. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Professor Feldman, how are you? Math expert, Tats expert. I'm good. You're a Tats expert? I got a few minutes, right. Jake, thanks for joining us. Mr. Feldman actually saw that we were talking about this conversation and having a conversation around comparing Vermont property taxes to pure states and was kind enough to reach out to me and say, hey, I have some data on this. I have something. So I really appreciate you coming in. Do you mind just walking us through this? Sure. The document and then taking perhaps some questions? Absolutely. Okay, thanks. Jake Feldman, tax department. There is a, you have it right there. Oh, you have it right there, great. It's also under my name on your website. So this question has come up a lot at the tax department. I think it first came up five or six years ago. A former commissioner was wondering, well, are Vermont's property taxes high? That was the question. And of course, in Vermont, you have education property taxes and you also have municipal property taxes on the bill. Generally, municipal taxes are about a third of education taxes, but there's lots of personality in this state and those proportions vary quite a bit. So this is a difficult thing to do. Julia Richter from the Joint Fiscal Office was here about a week ago and when you asked her and she said, well, it's very difficult to compare and it is because there's such a wide range of property tax formats in different states and there's also a really wide range of relief programs available. So we tried to just take a manageable group of states to look at. And we looked at New England states plus New York and we use census data to try to get a sense of how sort of average or in this case it would be median because it's this data you would use median as a measure of central tendency, but we looked at how median effective tax rates compare where your effective tax rate is your total property taxes paid divided by your property value and this data is coming from the census. So there's a table that looks like this and I can walk you through that a little bit. The big green bar, the wide green bar is to show that there's a range depending on what county you're in in a state. Vermont doesn't have county level taxes, a lot of other states do, but Vermont, the census does break it down by county and so depending on which county you're in, your taxes could be higher or lower. And if you look at Vermont, we actually have a pretty tight range, which is a reflection of Act 60, because before Act 60, the amount that you could raise for your schools was dependent on the value of the grand list in your town, but Act 60 disassociated that. So it doesn't matter how much grand list you have in your town, it's what you spend per pupil that decides your tax rate. So before Act 60, there was a pretty wide range of education tax rates and that tightened up a collate of it since after Act 60. Apparently Grand Isle in Vermont has the lowest effective tax rate on average and this is very rough but on average and then Rutland actually has the highest. Not to say that taxes are the highest in Rutland County, but if you take taxes divided by average property value, that's how you get that 2.13% in Rutland. So those are some key takeaways from that bar chart. Other important things are that it looks like Connecticut and New Hampshire maybe have a little bit higher property taxes than Vermont. According to this data and a key consideration here is that the census is not digging into the different types of credits and exemptions that are available, but Vermont has a unique system where your property tax credit is applied to your bill. It's also large, it can be quite large in Vermont, up to $8,000. So Vermont's data here reflects after the property tax adjustment known as income sensitivity. So I would say that after income sensitivity, Vermont is sort of not that high for property taxes. It's a little bit higher in this group, but without income sensitivity, I think it would be further out than it is. It might be higher than Connecticut and New Hampshire. And then related to the point about property tax credits, we constructed a table so that someone could easily compare the different circuit breakers or relief programs that are available in New England and New York. As I mentioned, Vermont's is kind of unique because it goes up to $8,000. Other states don't normally go that high. And then our credit is also unique because it gets applied to the property tax bill. Other states, it's generally a tax credit where you go in the spring to file your income taxes, you fill out a form, and it sort of gets blended in with the rest of your return. So ours is unique for those two reasons. It's somewhat unique because it's very expansive. It covers up to $140,000 of household income. Usually circuit breakers or income-based relief don't go that high. Two thirds of the homesteads, which is like a declared residence homeowner, two thirds of homesteads get an income-based credit on their bill, which is also fairly unusual. And that's just about it for those graphics. Any questions or comments from Mr. Feldman? I really appreciate you recognizing that we were having this conversation. And it's certainly something, I don't know about the quality of the constituents talk about. It's good for us to have some info, which to answer questions or build additional conversations. Senator Gould. Thank you, Chair. I don't know if you'll be able to answer this. And I'm not, it's maybe a really silly question, but looking at Massachusetts, a state that has, you know, is often rated as having a number one public school system in the country and lots and lots of social programs. I'm just wondering what, how is it that their tax is seen lower than ours, generally speaking? I'm not totally sure, but these tax rates are effective tax rates where you take the taxes divided by property value. Could be the case that in Massachusetts the property values are quite a bit higher. So maybe people are paying like sort of similar tax amounts, but on, you know, their property values are maybe quite a bit higher. They also have economies of scale that we don't have. So I get that point too, but it's just still pretty surprising, I guess. Any other questions or observations for you to fill in at this point? Jay, thanks again. This is really helpful. Puss, did you phone? No, no, just give me the thumbs up. Okay, yeah. Once you get the thumbs up, then it's really usually the same issue. Thank you. Thank you, I really appreciate it. Let's take a five minute break and come back and we'll hear from Dr. Boucher at 2.35. Back to Senate Education, Tuesday, February 7th, 2.35. Committee, last year, maybe it was the year before, maybe it was last year, we passed at 67, the community, was it the year before? The year before, thank you. Community Schools Grant. And I can just speak from some personal experience, years ago, the school in my district, Molly Stark Elementary School, had wraparound services. And to stomach degree, they still have some of those services, but back at one point, they had a dental chair right at the school. They had, you know, a physician. You could really get the services that you needed, kid pick up services that they needed. And I think parents could in some ways also access some of those services. And as we're looking to see how can we improve education in Vermont? One of the things that keeps coming back to us is, are things like school nutrition, making sure you don't have a two-day, making sure that mental health is being taken care of, all those things. So I asked Dr. Boucher to come in and talk a little bit about the Community Schools Grant Program that we passed, where things are, what schools are benefiting from this, how schools got to getting these grants, how many applications, that sort of thing. We did it as a pilot, and these are federal funds and eager to learn where things stand. So with that, welcome. Sure, thank you for the record, Heather Boucher, Deputy Secretary for the Agency of Education. And I am very pleased to be here in person. It's wonderful to see you all. I really enjoy testifying in person much more than virtually, so I'm glad we have that option now. It's amazing the difference it makes. It really is, it really is. I was going to start with a funny joke about my name, which I guess I'll do, not that this is a non-serious affair, but the reason I actually seem very snooty and use Heather A. Boucher is because there actually is another Heather Boucher PhD who happens to be an economist and is in the Biden administration. Earlier in my career, her doctoral institution tried to give me an award for her, and I had to tell them I'm not that person. Yes, you are. No, I'm really not. I didn't go to the new school for my PhD. I know that I went to the first year of Denver. Well, we actually invited the person from the Biden administration today, so you're not. Oh my gosh. You are not changed? Okay. No, all right, so now I got. All right, it's fine. While you're here. Is it not funny though? It is not a typical name. I don't know. It's true. It's true. To get it all, also. Yeah, so. But we're glad you were with us. Thank you, and I'm really glad to be here. So I thought, I hope you had a chance to. I think Senator Hashim, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, I see that you were able to take a look at, or at least get it. My son is a little bit late this morning. So I had prepared a PowerPoint and I will just walk you through kind of a high level. Thank you. Conceptual description of what this program is all about. I'll give you some updates as Mr. Chair asked. And then I certainly am open for any and all questions. So I thought it would be best. I don't know if we have actually come in yet and talked about education recovery domains and how we actually had set that up. So these are how we conceptualize education recovery resulting from where do we go after experiencing the pandemic. So it's really critical for us when we're actually talking about what largely our ARP ESSER funds are funding. And so those are the federal dollars that back a lot of our state level initiatives. And I think Mr. Chair has Jill come in yet to give an overview of ESSER. She has. Okay, so great. So the distinction between the LEA, the local education agency, which is the districts and then the SEA, which is the state education agency and the set aside that we have some of which is mandated, some of which is more discretionary. So the three domains that we really focused on in terms of our recovery plan are academic achievement. And we like to think about more colloquially as unfinished learning. There was some discussion a couple of years ago about, when you talk about a lack of learning, you talk about learning loss. It's really, really tough for kids to hear that. It's tough for parents. So let's talk about that it's unfinished learning. Probably, we needed to recalibrate what we were trying to learn and how we were gonna do that. Social emotional learning and wellness. Social emotional learning, SEL, I'm trying to help you with the education, speak here and the acronyms. Because we've been talking about it in terms of social emotional learning and wellness. If you hear us in education, the agencies say so, that's what that means. So that's one's really quite interesting. So I thought I'd make sure that I note that for you. And then also student and family engagement. So we crafted those through a variety of stakeholder engagement exercises. It kept holding up time and time again that those were the three buckets we wanted to really focus on in terms of how we were gonna deploy our federal COVID dollars. So one of the initiatives that was identified in Act 67, as Mr. Chair pointed out, was community schools. And so I'm gonna walk you through. Mr. Chair did a really nice job of teeing me up for what our community schools. And then I'll tell you a little bit more about what it looks like in Vermont as a result of this funding opportunity. So community schools are both the place, so a hub, a place in the community. And they're also partnerships. So they're also how is that school and the folks that work in that school building sustainable partnerships in the community. All to ensure that kids have what they need to do well in school, but also that they have nutrition, they have health, all kinds of things. They have extended learning opportunities. That's another big piece. So these are just some different conceptualizations that have been put forth in this space. As I said, community hubs, learning, service provision, community engagement, and then a big core piece is equity for all learners because as Mr. Chair pointed out, citing Molly Stark, the school as an exemplar, an early exemplar in Vermont, often the communities that need these kinds of models the most are those that are the most underserved, that have the most challenges in terms of nutrition, typically some of our more high poverty areas, more and more in Vermont, I would say areas that have challenges in the community with drug addiction, those kinds of issues going on. So in Vermont, we actually adopted five pillars consistent with national literature on how to think about what are the core pieces embedded in a community school's model. So you have integrated student supports and those can be anything from supports for student learning, so the traditional academic learning that we think of, supports for social-emotional learning, supports for mental health and wellness, supports for medical wellness. Dentistry is often a really common theme in community schools and offering that, particularly for families of course who don't have transportation. So we know that they're getting their children to school and that can be where their children then get medical and dental services. And then how are all of those integrated together? So really at the core of the community school idea is something else called the whole child concept and you can see that from what I'm talking about, which is it isn't just, I like to say, it isn't thinking about, which no one does, but thinking about students as little brains on feet. This is really about thinking of them as whole human beings and how we actually make sure that they have everything they need in order to effectively learn. Very often we talk about expanded or enriched learning opportunities. So nationally, there is, through the federal government, some funds available that really aligns community schools very nicely with after school 21C funding. It makes sense because 21C funding is, 21C funding is for the same types of schools I'm gonna talk about in a sec to be served. And then also it is kind of that link between after what happens when the traditional school day is over and students are getting ready to enter into their community, whether that's home or another kind of experience. So it makes a lot of sense that they're aligned together. Active family and community engagement is a critical pillar. It's really, the reason that community schools tend to look unique and different from each other is that they are because they're really taking into consideration what the particular community they're set up needs. And so they're really, those that are doing it best are actually engaging in active family communication, family collaboration. They're inviting in families that in more traditional settings are not usually, they don't feel welcome to school board meetings or to different kinds of school events. So that's a really big piece that the most effective community schools do. Collaborative leadership and practices, and we're gonna talk a little bit about what that looks like, but specific to Act 67. And then again, equity and how do we make sure that schools are safe, they're inclusive for all of our students, so that all of our students no matter their background, their language, all kinds of ways to think about our wonderful diversity in our student body. So how do we make sure that all students are actually learning effectively and supported? Should I go through the entire thing, Mr. Chair, or pause for questions? It's, this community's great. Questions pop up, they can go up. Perfect. Great. So Act 67 indicated kind of a corollary to what I'd already said about the communities that we're trying to serve with community schools. So the eligibility criteria that we used here in Vermont were that the student body of the school that was going to receive grant funds had to have at least 40% of the students eligible for free and reduced lunch, or they had to be identified for what we call comprehensive or equity support, and that's language that's from our federal education plan. So it has to do with, you've probably heard of something called title schools. So that's really what that kind of means. So these are schools that have qualified through our accountability process at the state level to need and we'll get additional supports for students. Questions on that? So we really, I think that's important because we really did try to narrow in partnership, of course, with the General Assembly. We really did try to narrow this funding opportunity to those districts, LEAs and schools that really had high need. So the total fund was about $3.4 million. These were ARP ESSER funds, which was from the third tranche of funding that you're probably quite familiar with now. They're three years of funding, so they will end fiscal year 24. So not much time left for about two thirds of the way through, a little bit more than that. And so they'll end officially the end of the fiscal year and then there's usually about three months where the funds can still retroactively pay for things that have already been encumbered. So we have one more academic year is what I'm saying, one more. So that's where I come up with one and a half and it makes sense, okay. So there were five awards. I believe we had six applicants and one of the applicants did not follow the directions. I'd have to go back and look at why. So there was something missing in the application. I'd have to go back and look at that. Just out of curiosity, who was the sixth? I'd have to go back and look. Yeah, I don't have that information. So- Could you help recognize for school? I mean, one of my concerns was I noticed that there were a number of schools that I thought should get these dollars that didn't get these dollars. And sometimes I worry that those schools and those districts don't have the resources to be writing grants, et cetera. And a number of secretaries are sitting here. And I was saying, I bet you could identify, Mr. Secretary, those schools that need this the most. And would you say this reflects the schools that need this the most or this the gang that has the wherewithal to put together a good application? I think these schools represent some of our most needy regions. All of them, no. And I think we did certainly reach out to schools that met the criteria that were specified in the law. As you'll see, we've provided significant supports to directly to the schools once they've been allotted the funds. I don't know if you'll recall, Mr. Chair, but I actually didn't think we'd get any applications because of the timing of this. So I was thrilled. Exactly. Yeah, because this was during the first year of COVID. Right. The second year, excuse me. And so I was thinking from everything that I've been hearing that we wouldn't get any applications. And so we did and we were pretty excited about that. I do believe North country, the superintendent at that time, John Castle had come in strong support of this funding opportunity. And his district was awarded the funds to serve all 12 of their schools in that Northeast Kingdom district. So it's always a challenge. We tried also to make this application easy peasy. Like it wasn't superfluous pages of text and those kinds of things. So we really were trying to pay attention to that. We still have to follow grant procedures and just like we have to follow procurement procedures. Aligned with like, but we did have some, you know, where we could have some flexibility in terms of the ease of the application, which we did, we actually took advantage of that, so. So, and I know you'll get to some of this, but so people receive their funds, they start to follow the plans that they put forward in the application. One of the concerns and I'd say complaints two years ago was, okay, limited funding, these schools get a few years to do this, money's going to disappear. Are there going to be, I mean, one thing I was wondering, are there going to be, we will have lessons learned from this process where you'll come out and say, all right, this is feasible in other schools, but with this cost, that kind of thing? Yeah, I think so. We actually, and I'll talk a little bit in just a sec, we do have, compared to our other grant programs, this one has a much more high touch in terms of the grantees, and so we meet with them quarterly, with every single grantee quarterly, and we meet, we have two annual meetings where we bring all of the grantees together and we host some work to kind of think about common themes and, you know, what they garnered themselves from this process. And so I think we could easily, and we usually do, share in our final report some of those pieces. I think the idea of, I think the fiscal cliff is something that's on everyone's mind and it's certainly on our mind, it's also the fiscal cliff in this case being all of those federal dollars and what happens to the programs that we funded. So I think we will need to continue trying to figure out if we're going to invest funding, where we invest those, because this has been a really huge influx of funding for our tiny little state. The bulk of which is at the local level. So I think, I'm hearing much more about the challenge of at the local level this money's going away. So how are we gonna keep these folks on that we've on them? It ends in the fiscal year of 24. That means the program, how long do they have before they can have to have the money spent? Did you find that any of these schools didn't have a plan? Oh no, they all did have a plan. And they're all on track for spending their money. So it has to be spent by the end of fiscal year? It has to be encumbered by the end of fiscal year. So there is a, with most federal grants, there's about a 90 day period where if you've encumbered, which means you have a contract, you have something, you've already set it, you've already, you've made an official plan for the money. Then they'll allow you to, you know, they'll allow you to keep the money for three months to find out. Do you think that there are schools that don't have a plan? They have needs, but they haven't started their own actual plan. If some, a dump of money came in, they would be prepared in the future to do this? Well, I think not of these schools, because that's the beauty of having to go through even a simplified grant process. Like it requires them to have to sit and think about this. I think, you know, the scenario that you're talking about, Senator Williams, is perhaps more in line with what happened when the local dollars from Essar were just suddenly needing to be thought about, planned for, developed, and then spent. And so I think we try very hard as a state to have all LEAs do needs assessments and to really guide them on what are you gonna do with these funds. I think it's still ongoing. And I'm gonna show you a little bit about what the local funds looks like at the very end of the presentation. So one of the things I wanted to note is, in terms of what the funds were used for, in some sense, this won't be surprising to you if you understand the concept of community schools. One of the things that is really neat though about X67 is it required that schools who got these grants hire a community schools coordinator. So they had to hire a person or assign a person, recast a person, if it was someone who was already there, to actually be the lead at that local level to really ensure that these partnerships are happening, to really ensure that the services are being set up for students. Is that the correct time? Yeah, but you're fine. You're good. We're going to make some shifts, this is important. So I'm happy to report that all of them, which I think is really important, all of them have actually hired their community coordinator at this point and that person is working. And that's really important because a lot of what's been happening with ESR funds at the local level is a real difficulty in hiring for positions, as I'm sure you've already heard. And so they have been able to all hire their community coordinators, which I think is great. Each one will have a community coordinator and that's required in the plan. Yes, that was required in our state law. Yeah, so I'm just going to kind of run through these. But so some of the themes of what the funds were used for, after school, building internships, CTE opportunities that were more community-based for students, enhancing effective wraparound supports for students, including telehealth, which in some of our rural areas has really been required to really meet need. In North country, they actually built a budget using these funds to provide emergency food, clothing, hygiene items for all students in need. They also have a lot of students experiencing homelessness. As many more, there are many more students experiencing homelessness throughout our state as a result of COVID. They also, North country did some interesting things as well as one of the others, I think, perhaps we're gents, I don't have to go back and look at the exact school and I apologize for that, but they actually did a multi-generational focus where they actually were working with parents to get parents exposed to financial literacy, to their own education and how to actually improve that. So that's actually really critical and important too. Again, this is really trying to address student need and we know that for students, a lot of the pieces or the reasons that they are in need is that their families are in need and so it's really trying to get at that multi-generational perspective. And then I know in White River Junction that part of what they did was establish 10 partnerships with local mental and dental health providers down there to really ensure that all of their students in the middle school were getting their physical health needs met. You've seen mental health also? Yes, mental and dental. So that's just something that, well, a couple of things. We've started taking some testimony on trauma, on mental health in schools. This is a huge, huge issue. This is one way to start to look at it. There are others, one thing that I'm just wondering and actually it might be my colleagues who are in health and welfare might be able to weigh in on this is where are we with tele-mental health? I met with a constituent this weekend. She happens to be a high school senior. She's often in college. Can she continue to work with the same counselor, financially get reimbursed even though she might be going out of state? What if you're in the kingdom, but the counselor that works best for you happens to be in Wyndham County, do we have? Yeah, I think those are all really great questions. So what I can say about what we're doing with mental health is we also had a grant Act 127 that provided grants to LEAs and other partners that allowed them to really beef up mental health supports and other supports for students. I mentioned that a little here. I'm happy to come back and talk about that. Telehealth is definitely like I already said in like you're talking about Mr. Chair, something that I have seen LEAs themselves engage in contracts with. In terms of the state's purview over telehealth, I'm not really sure. I mean, I think that's gonna fall back on insurance and how insurance, health insurance and how health insurance allows or doesn't allow providers to be providing services. So happy to look into it. Come back. Also, I know that I think the house is starting it. I don't know if the health and welfare has started any conversations around that yet. No, it's just been touched on perfectly. Okay. But it was compelling this weekend to hear of a young woman who's been probably going to college in Massachusetts and she has a relationship with this particular therapist. It's not easy always to get a good relationship right out the door with the therapist. It takes a little while. So how can people maintain that and also allow their insurance to continue to reimburse the family? And really what we're talking about are a bunch of different systems you need to connect and talk to each other because if the student is gonna go to a college, a university, if she's going to be on their health insurance which often happens for students, then who knows? I mean like they might require that they use their providers. So it's a very important topic. I just don't know when it comes to across state boundaries. I don't know what we can do as a state in particular when we're talking about not only even in the education system of potentially insurance, that's not my wheelhouse. I'll just add the other piece of this compelling for me is a lot of people talk about that personal relationship with their therapist in the room but this young woman really made me realize that there are a lot of people who develop a really great relationship on Zoom also. And they get more comfortable sitting in their home at their dinner table or in their room talking to a therapist. And so there's some real opportunities there. I think if that we can find a way for it to be continued, I mean it's gonna be better for the student in that case. So let us know how we can help for sure. I then gave you an example. It looks terrible on my hand out because it's not color. This is from Cabot School. Just an example of some of the programming they're running just to give you a flavor of this is their after-school schedule. So this was, I believe, a brand new after-school opportunity for students that haven't been available, I believe, before this funding. I also received some information from the Virginia Elementary School. This was a late-breaking addition. I'm happy to pass this around. This is from that school principal, I believe, or possibly their community school coordinator on all the things they're doing in the Virginia Elementary School. I literally received it as I was exiting, though, the door to come over here. So I thought I would just print it and bring it. So would you say that or do you know that these after-school programs are directly funded by this initiative? Yeah, they should be. So I believe that this is a new after-school program that was actually, these funds were used to underwrite the new program. Yes, so I was going to have a question about the five pillars for Act 67. And my question was around definitions because these things all sound great, but then I was wondering what do they really mean? So this document here, so all the schools are required to provide a response. They were in the application. Okay, awesome, that's great. So they're very familiar with the five pillars. That's how they really set up their applications to actually address each of those five pillars. That's awesome. Some of them did more in some than others, but they had to address all five of them. Thank you. Sure. I have just two quick comments. One is, you know, we're all concerned about our per-people number and the amount of money we're spending on education and that. And yet when you look at this and you see the expansive programs that we are providing to families and students, especially those in need, it's pretty astounding and just pretty incredible. And I also just wanted to bring up a point which I'm sure a lot of folks are clued into, which is that to do really serious, like substantive outreach and community engagement can also be something that costs money. I know where I live, we have a lot of folks who live in poverty and we decided that it's really not fair to ask them to engage in the evenings, for example, without some kind of recompense because that might be a period of time when they kind of need to be working to make money, to provide for their family. So whether it be food, childcare, or actual money, that is one way to really expand who we get at the table. And it's worked really well, but it is an added expenditure. So you have that expenditure, you have in what district? We do that in Burlington. So for example, if a family member, somebody because of all these circumstances you just mentioned, needs to or everybody wants that person out of meaning, they might get HDS that meeting. Yeah, yeah, when we have some groups, community, I can't remember the name of the group, but something like a student community engagement group that meets once every couple months in the evenings and it's made up primarily of new American families and we usually provide some food and some kind of a stipend. And same with, we have some really great student groups that meet in the summer and they also get a stipend for engaging in that work. I know some of the schools up in the kingdom as well offer laundry. I've heard that too. So they offer, they have washers and dryers for families to use at the school. So, and it gets them to come in and you know, there's no shame in it or there's reduced shame and a pantry. There's something I've heard about. That food pantry right at place of work, whether it's a pantry or a store, by being able to leave and pick things up as you leave and make it, like you're saying, very normal as it is. Mom said, you need to pick up this on the way home out of school and they just happen to have it there and it's reduced cost and we'll keep it open to everybody. Yeah, I think when you just put that in their new school design, like I guess they built that into their new construction. Yeah, it's very cool. So I'm almost done. I just wanted to end with not community schools but just to tee up or at least let the committee members know about other related initiatives, one of which I've already referenced, that are funded through the three, primarily the second and the third tranche of state set aside, Essar dollars. So in terms of mental health, this was Act 127 of last session. So two and a half million dollars for another set of LEA grants in addition to these community school grants that are for specifically related to building sustainable mental health supports. Happy to come back in and talk about those. They're not the same. They're not exactly the same schools. So I think that would be a unique and interesting for the committee to hear about. We are currently in the process of identifying a vendor to provide supports for educators in terms of mental health. So this was also part of 127. And I can't talk too much about that because we are literally reviewing bids. So. Just a quick question for the universal school meals. I know last year, the price tag, I think was 29 million and the forecasted price tag is 24 million. I was wondering what the 8.4 is referring to or what? This is universal after school. This is not universal. Oh wow. It's okay. It's okay. It's a lot. It's the same thing. It's a lot. It's all universal. And it's what I think. Yeah, it's all right. Yeah. Just regard. Thanks. And we have invested a lot in after school. So we invested, you know, more than $10 million with our ESER funds in after school. And the ideas that we're building a universal system of after school around the whole state. And happy also to come back in and talk about those initiative, that initiative. We partner with Vermont After School and a bunch of other state agencies on that. The set-aside mandatory amounts are interesting. So these are of our state set-aside amounts. So these are the SEA dollars that were provided. We were required to actually spend these two buckets of money on 2.8 million for after school, which is where I leaped from the 8.4 to over 10 million because we had to actually spend 2.8, which we found out later after we already started investing in after school, by the way, which is okay. Like, we're all excited about that came later because it was a very dynamic situation going on in terms of rules from the U.S. Department of Education and all those kinds of things. So we were obligated to spend 2.8 on grants to LEAs for after school, ideally linked with 21C programs. So it really meant to expand that. And then also summer learning loss interventions, another 2.8 million. And the last slide I have, which if you have not seen this, I think that you might find it very interesting. And I bet Jill already told you about it, which is we actually have a dashboard that you can look at to tell you what the ESSER funds at the local level are being spent on. She did take us through this before with it. Yeah, and so interestingly, I thought this is just the overall state. So it's the overall state depiction of what the LEAs are spending their money on. Does that make sense? So I was just walking you through what the state was spending its set-asides on throughout this whole presentation. And so I think not surprisingly, 47% is on instruction and academic supports. We would expect that. SEL and mental health supports is only 4%. And so that was a little disappointing. I'm gonna say to me when I saw that because we know that it is a critical, it's a critical, critical factor in terms of students recovery. Maybe what's happening though, is that we have provided supports from a state level. And so at the local level, they might be relying on those and that's a good thing. So more to come in terms of that. And then of course, physical safety operations of administration are also key pieces there. So I just wanted to show that and you can go, we have that link for you if you would like it again and you can go look at your own district or your own region and see what they have planned to and are currently spending their extra dollars on. Senator Fulett. Thank you very much, Secretary Mabuse. The, for example, HVAC updates, would that fall into physical health and safety or would that be under operation? Where would that fall in this? It would probably be under the physical health and safety, which is why that one's so big because those are expensive. Yes, they are. Well, and given where we are in terms of our housing stock, well, housing students stock, it's the same principle. So our school stock, we have old schools. It's really what I'm trying to say now. You know, the federal government, the state has invested a lot of money in COVID recovery and I'm wondering what other things should we be thinking about? You know that schools are doing after school programs, hiring more mental health professionals, getting family engagement officers. One of them, I know you're coming back in to talk to us tomorrow about a few things and maybe we could continue that conversation around, what else, what else should we be thinking about as we work on our bills to get out this year? I think what I've heard from some local schools is they are very worried when this money ends. They have, there's a lot of recoveries happen, a lot of good things, but it's gonna likely, in some cases, come to a screeching halt unless we figure out are there ways maybe the state continues investments in those high needs areas and what would that look like? Well, right, because we know one option would be that they build these costs into their local school budgets, but we also know that there will be variability in terms of the success of that as an endeavor because in some areas that will be, that will be voted up and be fine in other areas. It would not pass muster through the voting process. So I do think it's something we need to continue thinking about. As I'm sure Jill shared, we don't have any more money in ESSER, it's all been allocated. So that, those funds, we're now gonna have to be looking if we do work in that space, it's gonna have to be state funds. So we're happy to keep talking about that and brainstorming. Always curious about metrics. So does the agency track some metrics related to these benefits just looking over the package in increased CTE seats or lifting, essentially lifting students out of poverty, some of these money packages, this is all very recent but it's a long-term effort. I'm just curious that there's data on dollars in the programs resulting in the real goal. So we actually, yes, Senator Weeks, we actually have, as our recovery plan, we have a set of metrics that we'll be tracking and that's going to be a multi-year effort as we look for an initial bump in the indicators that we've set to look at. A combination of academic outcomes but also to the extent that we can capture mental health and social-emotional learning outcomes for students, for instance. We have strong partnerships in all of these endeavors across agencies within our government and so we're often sharing information back and forth if not individually to each other. The planning has been shared. So for instance, we've been partnering with AHS on a lot of those metrics because the metrics for mental health for students would come from AHS services. So are there dashboards available for this type of? We don't have a dashboard yet but we have a plan in place for how we'll actually track progress and track to make sure that there is a return on the investment and I'd be happy to come back in and present that part of our recovery plan for Senators. That would be interesting. For Secretary French could. Even what is, the opportunities that aren't a lot from this are huge. What's 10 years out of the question? Are there a way to track kids? Are there ways to sort of see what some of these investments, how they made a difference? So our schedule is spilling up but we could probably find some time next week a little bit or maybe a week after that. It's not pressing. And 90% of the funds I want to say are at the local level. So what we've tried to do is actually require those kinds of indicators. We're doing it as well at the state level but the bulk of the dollars that are spent are at the local level. And so with each of. But these dollars we're talking about right now the wraparound are agency dollars. The community schools grants? Yes, those are part of our set aside. And as a matter of just the way we always do grants and contracts, we always have indicators of success we're looking at. So we can go back. I think that Senator Weiss you had a broader question about think, not just this particular program but about in general, so. I think I know I'm stating the obvious probably to everyone here. But if there's one thing that we've learned this year it is the mental crisis, mental illness, not only the fact that it's deadly but it's also extremely costly in so many realms. And I hope at some point we can shift the conversation to prevention and wellness. I worry, I just find this all very troubling and worrying and what is our role on the education committee and as educators and folks working in the fields to help long term fix this problem. I'm so worried for our children. And a problem in terms of some of our indicators of wellness or functioning for our students that they were actually even before COVID not going in the right direction. So much more anxiety, both non-clinical and clinical levels of anxiety. We know that we have subgroups of students that are at very high risk for suicidality and whether it's ideation and thinking about that or actually carrying it through. So yeah, we would be very happy to, education has to be a part of how you actually come together as a community and as a state to actually solve these challenges. We're pulling it into, maybe pulling it into curriculum and sort of like wrapping it up in what we teach and how we teach and all of those things. Obviously, family is important in this and whole life, et cetera, but what is our role there? Yeah. I think one of the challenges back to Mr. Chair, your question is, you know, we really have significant workforce challenges in every sector. And so it really does stiny our ability to actually invest in the way that we know we need to. So I think that is one of the challenges that's happening with the unused dollars to the local level is they're trying desperately to hire folks and they just can't find them and you're seeing that in all other kinds of sectors as well, not just education. But I just want to follow up on Senator Fulick's point was we're hearing later, I think this week from physical and health educators, how do you teach health in a way that like you're saying gets kids, I don't know, prepares them to deal with all everything that you're talking about. So it's more of a preventative piece, but that's only one tiny, tiny piece. Yeah, yeah, when I was teaching, I started talking a lot about the brain and the teenage brain, I was working with teenagers and it was, I found it to be really helpful. And the kids were really excited to learn about themselves in that way. Cause a lot of times, you know, they don't know why they're feeling what they're feeling. That's interesting. Certain things they're feeling. Yeah, exactly. It's super empowering for them to know like this is what's happening physiologically in my body, in my brain. So that kind of stuff, I just hope really gets enmeshed in our curriculum at some point. That's a great point, I think you really understand. Of course I'm feeling this way, this is where I'm at. Yeah, normalizing. Normalizing that my specialty area is in adolescent development. So this is near to my heart, but you know, it's, you know, they, in many ways, they revert back to being, I like to say, a toddler in terms of their emotional up and down, but with much more advanced cognitive skills in terms of they can out-argue most parents. So that can actually be very, very confusing for the kiddos, the teens going through that because it's kind of like, and there's a flood of like a lot of complex ideas and you know, abstractions and things like that. So yeah, good stuff. Thank you. See you tomorrow. Thank you. Yes. Community, we're going to have, we're going to come back in about seven minutes. We're going to wrap up with Senator Chittenden's bills and testimony, and then we've got Marilyn Hargill coming in to follow up on teacher scholarship stuff. Okay, great. Welcome back to Senate Education 335 on Tuesday, February 7th. Two final items for us to look at today. We have S34. This is Senator Chittenden's bill on kindergarten enrollment age. Senator Chittenden and Beth St. James took us through the bill. Thank you. I will pass out these statements and new copies. Same bill, but just have it ready for right now. So, and just to read this statement for those watching, the bill proposes to prohibit a school district from denying kindergarten enrollment to a student who will attain five years of age, honor before January one, next following the beginning of a school year. And I will also hear I know from others on this topic this week. Senator Chittenden, he's got some flexibility in his thoughts on what kind of bill he would like, but I know he's looking for guidance. Just doesn't want to run into the same situation. He and his wife and daughter ran into where there was a lot of ambiguity, waited until the last minute and had to hustle and send his kid at the cost of 12,000 to a private early childhood center, all that kind of stuff. So, what can we do for Senator Chittenden? So to answer that, we have Mr. Fisher and Mr. Case. Thank you for the record. Ted Fisher is from the Vermont Institute of Education and the Agency's Director of Communications and Legislative Affairs. And I think it's the section of my first time appearing formally behind the seat and always in the corner. I just want to pass the mic to my colleague, the Director Chris Case. Hi everybody, good afternoon. Chris Case, I'm the Director of Students of course. Little loud. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Okay, so can you hear me now? There you go. So afternoon, Chris Case, I'm the Director of the Students Support Services Division. So, this is also Chris and my first time testifying joint hybrid, joint hybrid remote remote and in person. So we may pass the mic back and forth to each other a little bit here. I just want to preface, we've introduced two exhibits today. One is the legislative report standard is in the kindergarten entrance age, which Hayden has posted to the committee site. It can also be found under the legislative report site. This was submitted to the committee as required under pursuant to 166, which was one of the miscellaneous ed bills of last year in December of last year. So I also did ask and follow up because we had heard Senator Chinnan's testimony to this committee saying that he was interested in implementing the recommendations that the agency made in the report. I just mentioned, but we were confused because in our reading and by we, I mean the agency was confused because in our reading the bill, the language that's currently introduced does not appear to implement the recommendations that we had made during the, during the, in our report. And again, I think I can clarify that for the Senator. Just looking, he came to me and said, hey, should I get this bill perfect and get it all lined up? Should I wait for all these reports or should I just get it in? And I said, if we'll just get it in, we'll have a conversation. We'll figure it out. I've been looking for some more, some better bad minds. So he did just, he did say the same to me. So we're assuming that we're bringing forward what our recommendation is to implement the report in terms of language. I'm not going to go over the testimony entirely and read it. Some of it is duplicative of the report, but I just wanted to go over very briefly what they request of the agency was in the report, which is to convene a group of stakeholders. So we pulled together members of the representatives for the Vermont NEA, the principal's association, the school board's association and the superintendent's association. Met with them in November of last year, talked a little bit about this. We also, as a result of that conversation, realized we needed to do a policy scan. And I think we would have ideally spent a little bit more time doing that or requested that school districts provide us that information with the burdens on school districts at this time and under the burden of time, we decided not to do that. So instead of what we did was searched school district and supervisory union websites for publicly available policies on kindergarten entrance age. We found 22 of them. We also have pretty much unanimous endorsement or endorsement from the wrong word. Unanimous feedback that the common practice in the field with very few exceptions is that there's a set kindergarten entrance age of September one. There are a gamut and it sounds like perhaps Senator Chittenden ran into this with his district of policies among some school districts not all that allow for a waiver process. And those waiver processes vary. The majority of the policies that we were able to find are just set a blanket date of September one. And one thing I wanna just clarify for the committee because it's a little difficult for me early on is that when we talk about students born later in the year, they are by definition younger. So a student born in November joining in kindergarten is gonna be younger than students. And they will be, if they're born in November, they'll be joining kindergarten at age four at the same time as they might be joining with students who are five and potentially age six. So we're just talking about the later the date is in the year, the broader range of students all in the same class, if that makes sense. Just curious, your comment, I just didn't hear it properly. Waiver, you support the waiver concept or you don't support the waiver concept? I didn't hear. So we do have a limited recommendation for a waiver that I'll get into in a minute, if you don't mind. I just wanna pass the mic to my colleague, Director Case, to talk a little bit about sort of the developmental implications, which was one of the pieces of feedback that we heard from our group of stakeholders. So certainly if I'm wrong, unless I've read the wrong report, this one says to do nothing. Correct. So I don't think Senator Chinden would fully endorse that as my gut. He completely disagrees with us on that. And we are operating under the assumption that the committee will also disagree in which to include this, which are, so we actually provide three recommendations. Maybe we'll just jump back there really quickly and then we can answer some questions about them. You're referencing your testimony or the report, right? So in my testimony, I've copied on page two, we've copied the recommendations from the report. If you look at the report, they are on page five through, excuse me, six and seven of the report. So our first recommendation is that the General Assembly should take no action. And the reason why is that among all of the needs that we were looking at in the fall of last year, this seems like one that is not low hanging fruit in terms of needs for legislative action. We could not find a single example, excuse me, we could find one example of a school district that did not use a September one cutoff date. That school district used an August 31st cutoff date. So it does not appear to be a problem. It sounds like possibly there is some problems with the waiver process in some school districts. And that was certainly a concern that was mentioned. And I do not wanna speak for some of the organizations representing our stakeholder groups, but one of the pieces of feedback that we did here is concern over the question of having a waiver process at all. So, and I'll get into why we recommend the waiver process in a minute. So in my accurate exhibition, I'm sorry to interrupt, that there was a date that Senator Chittenden and his family could go by. But they felt as though their daughter was really ready to get started as parents. And the waiver process that they were looking for didn't work out for them. That's very possible. Not knowing his district or what his district's policy would be. Okay, so maybe it's the more consistency like you're saying. Correct. Senator Apochim. Would it make more sense to focus on the waiver aspect of this instead of changing the cutoff date? I think that seems like it. So then let's jump to our second recommendation. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I mentioned earlier to Chair Campion, the other piece that is, again, this may be off in the future, but four-year-olds technically will now potentially be part of the public school system if S56 passes. So that adds a whole other level of complexity to what we're doing right now. Just wanted to throw that up there. That's a great point. Thank you for reminding me about that. And that may cause us to postpone or just sort of wait until we see that part of the bill will come to us, the pre-K piece. Yeah, yeah. So we- Senator Wieck. So wouldn't it be appropriate to assume, though, that while we're in this conversation that the assumption would be that the whole date block would move back in here? I mean, it's kind of the same conversation. It's just one year, 12 months. So like three years instead of four years kind of thing? Yeah, right, right. I mean, that's kind of, that's my limit. But there's going to be a lot to that bill, like funding, structures will be different. So, right, and also I think part of that is the whole independent part of that, right? Cause it's the pre-K, but if you have your child in a early childhood education program right next to your office and they also offer that one other year, do you want to keep them in the element, you know, just say, hey, no, you've got it with the elementary school now, or do you want to keep them that one extra year in the pre-K program kind of next year office? I'll just know for the reasons you just dug into, we avoided talking about pre-K for the purposes of this report and really stuck to the question of kindergarten readiness when it comes to where the cutoff date should be. And one of the things that we did here, so our third recommendation. So first recommendation is take no action. The second option is if you don't agree with recommendation one is to standardize the cutoff date of September one, which is already in common practice. We have little to no impact either on the education fund when it comes to changing the average daily membership, which is an important consideration if you want to change the date significantly and shift how many students are in a cohort. It's a change for one year, but if you decided to change it to January one, you'd have a bunch of students who would ordinarily be in one class in another class and that would affect your ADM calculations. We did not look at how it would do that, but just it's a warning there. The last item is the third recommendation is do not take action that affect the below or the kindergarten entrance age. If you're interested in about sort of those reasons why I would pass the mic to my colleague Chris. But generally speaking, there was unanimous thought among our stakeholder colleagues that they did not want to see a broad inclusion of four-year-olds into kindergarten classrooms. Now, I should note just, I don't want to bring pre-K back up again, but the pre-K bill currently under consideration in this body, I can't speak for, I understand there may be a separate version introduced in the house. They also set a date of September one in statute. I'm forgetting what section it is, but we referenced it before we draft it. So if you jump to the bottom of page three, we have proposed language here. And that language assumes that the second part of our recommendation for the cutoff date of September one, which is we can see the utility of a 30-day period to allow school districts the flexibility to set a waiver process. For any number of potential reasons, some of it's that it is an artificial cutoff date. So the human example, I've just been sort of using in conversation, is if you have two children who grew up together, play together, have been in class together, our good friends, and they want to go to kindergarten together, one is born on September 1st and one was born on September 2nd or within a week or something very close in age. I mean, you could even have the extreme example of twins born on either side of midnight or something like that. There's some reasonable opportunity to give school districts the ability to set some flexibility there. And we reference in our draft language that we're proposing to you, the ability for school districts to establish procedures or screening methods that it might be necessary to determine kindergarten readiness. And that's because when we did the scan of the policies, we did note that many school districts will use kindergarten readiness. We would not suggest that you mandate the use of the last thing. The last thing that we want is for them to purchase something, have to purchase something as a result of this that they don't currently use. So if they have any, whatever their existing processes for determining kindergarten readiness would be something that they could use. And you could probably ask, you could probably write language to that effect, but we would not recommend that you require them to establish a process they don't already do. And that's purely for reasons of capacity. May I just ask Mr. Gates a couple? Absolutely. Mr. Gates, could you tell us a little bit about kindergarten in Vermont right now? Half day, full day, mandatory. Just give us a little bit of what's required and what isn't. And then what's out there? So mandatory, yes. And I don't know actually, I'm sorry, I'm not prepared to do the advantage on some of this, the degree to which half day versus totally is represented at this point, but how the numbers break down. But happy to do some research on how to get back to you, Willis. You don't have time to share the information, Andy, but otherwise I have to... Well, my question is, so full day is not mandated. Is that accurate? So some, you might have a half day, you might have a full day. There are some that do not provide full day. We're aware of them. I don't know if we have good numbers, but we can pull what we do have. And just send it to Hayden and I can just share with you. So this would, and again, entrance age is five. Yes? So I actually meant to bring current law and I did not. So current law is that it says that students who, that students must enter kindergarten or it's actually in the definition of a legal pupil, right? So students may enter kindergarten up until January one of the year of the school year, of the year they turn five. So it provides for this window in statute currently because the second sentence of that says that they may establish essentially a school district, may establish a policy, may pick a date within that August 31 to January 1st window. It just so happens that almost every school district or at least the ones that we're aware of have picked September one, but they could, for example, pick October one. Now nationally, we did a national scan in our report as well, nationally almost every state sets a date. Most set it between July one and October one of the year that a student turns five. So generally speaking, there's a nationwide trend that five year olds are in kindergarten. Now it might be you have some students who turn four if a state sets a little bit later date, generally speaking, most states set it between sometime early in the summer. What if you had a kid and you said, hey, we're not gonna put Brian in until he's six? I believe that's a loud currently under statute. What if Brian's seven? I'm just curious, you know, how, if that's... I'd wanna consult and come back to you, but I'm fairly certain that it is an earliest. There's not a... That's what I'm looking for. And then on the other end, Chinman tells me his kids are brilliant. I don't know. If they are, could they enter at three? Could they enter at four? Currently, no. If your school district has a policy under this, under current law, if your school district has a policy that allows for students born before January one to go through a waiver process and not all do, then whatever the waiver process by the district currently is what your process is. So it sounds like, I'm not familiar with Senator Chin's situation, but it sounds like there may have been some school district policies do have a kindergarten screening tool that they use. So they have a way to sort of assess kindergarten readiness. Others don't. Others say, you know, if the family requests it, up to a certain date will allow it. It'll be at the discretion of the principal. Some of these policies are fairly big. And the majority of the policies we consulted have no waiver process at all. They simply say, it's a date, it's a date. And the other thing that I'd love to just get rid of is if there's, and you know this district, the best, if there's six seats there and the principal isn't acting, you know, just for whatever reason, the person doesn't want to add additional people or just want to take some of the personality out of it. You know, it takes some of the, so as much as we can in terms of guidelines, does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. I'd be interested, I mean, we can see the limited, the utility of a very limited waiver process. You, of course, could, as you do, often give guidelines for what the waiver, what the waiver process might allow for. We currently, I mean, we fall back on our recommendation that there isn't anything broken here from a policy perspective, understanding that their individual districts may decide something and families may come down on one side or another. But most, you know, in terms of the legislative charge we were given in preparing the report, there's a de facto standardization of the kindergarten entrance agents. In the stakeholder list, parents are missing. Correct. PTAs or whatever their calling out is. But parent organizations, do you believe that we're missing some of the narrative on why they might want a change of date or more flexibility of waiver? I don't want to speak for my boss. We have yet to announce the, we've yet to announce and do the final selection of the Family Engagement Council, which is the group that we solicited applications for in the winter in December. But yes, the agency believes that there could be more done to foster parent voice at the statewide level. So that's a future initiative or present a future? What we did was what was required of us in the way the language was enabled. I think what you have brought up, Senator Weeks, is a good example of how perhaps the Family Engagement Council could be utilized in the future. If you, I'm not saying, give us more legislative reports to do. But if you wanted us to do a report back, we could, that group could be consulted, for example, as part of that work. And that's certainly one of the goals of the group is to try to bring the parent's perspective to the floor. Thank you. Is this something which we touch on for a few minutes? Besides Senator Chittenden, is there a group? It's a great question. I suspect there might be a bunch of people out there that might as well take in, if you've had PTA members or something. How do you gauge what is actually happening out there? So it's a great question. I don't know if you've heard stories or others, or if this is. I mean, I shared with you all before that my situation was exactly the opposite of Senator Chittenden's. I'm sorry Senator Chittenden, if you're watching, but his daughter was born, I think, September 2nd, and mine was September 16th. He petitioned to get in in his district and was denied. I petitioned and it was fine. So my daughter was able to go to kindergarten. So I understand his frustration with the whims of each district. I mean, that is frustrating. But I, personally, where I live, I haven't heard that it's a big problem. So anyway. Yeah, no, so it is, it's like you just described, this is one of each district. But in his case, and I'm sure in other parents' cases, it cost 12, $14,000, he can't get in. I wanna, if you don't mind, Mr. Chair, I need to correct something a moment ago that came up. So I misspoke when you asked about the upper bound age. And I wanna double, I'll double-check, and if I'm wrong in what I just said here, I will send you an email and follow up with the committee to confirm. Truancy becomes an issue at age six. So we do not have a student enrolled in kindergarten age five. It is not, the student is not considered true. If the student is enrolled at age six. So I mean, I think, but this is hypothetical. My daughter is two. So this is still hypothetical for me, but I am thinking about this as we were preparing for testimonies, we were preparing the report, and she, her birthday's in November, right? So she will predominantly be age six during her period of kindergarten. Assuming that you do not dress, we change current law. So she'll start at age five in kindergarten? Yes, but she will be, she'll turn six in the middle of the November House. Yeah, I mean, I have to say again, sorry, Senator Durchenden, but there is a lot of data out there that suggests it's better to be on the older side rather than there's not a lot of data that suggests it's good to be on the younger side. Just generally speaking, broad brush strokes, there are obviously exceptions to the rule, but yeah. I know in the BSPA had an opinion on this as well because we talked about it over the summer, but again, I just think it's all in motion right now because of what we might be doing with pre-K and childcare too, because that would just change the whole landscape. He wouldn't necessarily have to pay $14,000 to go to a private pre-K. Yeah, I mean, if you have some of that research, it would be great for you just so that we have some, so when we're on the floor, if we get any kinds of questions, it would just be anything you have would be great along the way to be of great help. I mean, I started late, hey, look at me. Yeah, look at you. I mean, I'm a mess, no. That's right, but I think I've heard that girls can start a little younger, so I don't know. I'll try to find some of that. I know, Director Case, to put you on the spot, do you have anything you want to add here? I think that just what we were thinking about, this was largely around developmental readiness. I mean, Ted touched on this in the beginning of his presentation, but the idea that, I mean, we encourage and want all of our teachers to meet kids where they are, but we also think that there's a big difference developmentally between a child that's four years and eight months and one who's five and a half and starting kindergarten. So I think that we can understand the interest in wanting to standardize an entrance age, or rather like a waiver process and a cutoff statewide, but are also trying to think about what makes sense in terms of like a child's development. And I think that is echoing some of the comments that are coming up here. So yeah. Anything else at this point? I think a lot of good points. Mr. Fisher, would you be our liaison to Senator Chintan? This is his priority and I'll talk a little bit about some of the things that you've shared with us and just so that we don't lose sight of it. Absolutely. And we'll come back, I mean, I'm going to go about you sort of just go through some of the things that I've already put in this one. This education bill as a draft, I mean, this could be something that we put in there that the committee's so inclined, you know, just to formalize it or to look at the waiver piece, could we put in there something that gives districts more guidelines around how to make these decisions? But then that could get into the having to buy the assessment tools and stuff like that. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know, it's okay. Anything else for Mr. Fisher or Mr. Case? Did you want to say something on this bill? And would you introduce yourself? I'm Sandra Cameron, I'm the associate executive director of Vermont School Works Association. So I'll be here testifying on Friday. Okay, great. And also licensed early childhood special educators who can talk to you about assessments, how they look at development, but assessments we already use that wouldn't require additional purchasing. Also the position of our legislative committee that discussed this. And if you have anything around what Senator Fulick was mentioning. Just research. So research would be, it's good for the committee to have around, letters, some of the most recent science around waiting or on that way of all that kind of thing. If you have a document, that would be helpful. There is a lot of research on that. I'm sure there's a lot, yeah. I would say it's COVID era. Okay. All of it will be affected by water. Our kids in Cucay right now went through an entire, their whole life has been in isolation. So we don't know yet what we're going to be facing here. I'll talk about all of that. Okay, great, thank you. We'll see you on Friday then. Thank you again. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, good to see you. Marilyn in the waiting room. How are we going to happen? So committee, just so you know, as I'm starting to build a miscellaneous education bill, some of the things that I have taken from these conversations. And first let me tell you the process. Once a miscellaneous education bill is built, that's when we would start to take more testimony on at really trying to understand some of this. But here are some of the themes in it. Let's see, I've got CTE opening up and opportunities for grades nine through 12. That would be expanding language in 16 BSA 1541. Staffing compensation for the State Board of Education. Study on discrepancy of course offerings, K through 12, pre-K choice. This was the Northeast Kingdom choice school district. The woman who came to talk to us about the issue of going over the border. I put in there technology grants for teachers and schools, just as a placeholder, as we're looking to see what all schools have. If there are schools that are not offering certain things, can we make sure that they have the technology, so kids can take some of these courses online, et cetera, or even maybe hire an additional teacher, pay for an additional teacher if that person isn't in the classroom. So just basically a bunch of studies and things like that. But these are early days, so if there's anything else people are interested in, just let me know. Can I make an addition to the miscellaneous bill? Yeah, yeah. I think I had mentioned it briefly, but I had spoken to some librarians down in Brattleboro and they'd like to start the conversation about having libraries be included as a school zone for the purpose of deterring firearms and drugs being on the property. For example, the Brattleboro library, the entire top floor is, almost the entire top floor is a kid's section. And if you have somebody walking around with a firearm, it's around children, it's reasonably so a very tense situation with the kids and library staff. So yeah, just wanted to advocate for that. Happy to have some language drafted. Can you also just check with Sears? If you and Sears can have a conversation also, make sure you're okay with what that's working on. Yes, sir. How about the notion that our small worlds schools can't take advantage of the farm to school program? Farm to play? Farm to school. Yeah, great. I think, are they coming tomorrow to the farm to school? Okay, so they're spending about an hour in here tomorrow so we can plan a little bit of that. Yeah. Didn't I see something about schools wanting to have a course on how to balance a truck board? I can't remember the word. Financial literacy. Yeah, yeah. That came up over the weekend with me for both some folks and we're like, go please put that in. I'll see if we can develop some language. This would leave this committee mid-March so it's just want to give Beth some more ideas and get some language and I don't want to do my, I mean, we put 10 bills once on this land certification bill. You know, I'd rather keep it small and tight but it is what it is, we can always reshuffle and kind of re-prioritize and make them different drafts. So just about, you're going to do the school construction. You're going to give us some language. I am. Okay, if it's worth it for you, if it makes sense. You don't even, if you want to put it in right now, great, but you just want Beth to take us through it next week, just forward it to Hayden and say, hey, just so the committee can get a taste and kind of jump in. It depends on how you want to handle it. I sent it back to Rebecca Wasserman for some tweaking. So I'm kind of waiting for it. I can paint her and see what's happening. But I was sleeping when I said we were in a town had on my shoes. How about Sydney? Yeah, you know, it's, we're going to continue that. We did have a report on what's happening. I think a report is due back on what's happening in our schools around civic education. Once we get that, I think we should just start to take, look at them more seriously there. So how it's, people don't, I can tell you this part, not that it legislature can do whatever it wants, but people don't like the idea of us requiring it the way we can talk about requiring it. A lot of people say that it's being met in different classes, social studies, world history, American history. But one of the things that's interesting to me, like this, that we were to build a technology fund where, yeah, a teacher, one school needs to have a calculus teacher. His kids need that fourth year math or whatever you're gonna get into. Well, let's make sure that school can access the technology, you know, the teacher and have the resources to do it. Seems to be a part-time, one-off teacher is pretty reasonable, but maybe there are ways for us to also facilitate good civic education conversations and teaching examples and curriculum, things like that. Yeah, to the, to the civics education point, you know, I think, you know, yeah, there are some things that are covered in social studies classes, but it's different when you're going to the state house or going to town meeting and watching these things unfold, you know. And I think that's one of the best ways to answer the questions of, you know, what is town meeting? Why does it happen? You know, what is the state house and what actually happens here? And I think, you know, having it as part of the curriculum to have kids go into these different places to watch and, you know, participate as they can in the process is effective as is learning about it, you know, in social studies town. It'll stimulate the desire for them to know about it. Yeah, exactly. I can't agree more. Generally, the state, and this is one of my struggles is we don't do curriculum, that's local. We use standards, but what we don't do, and I think some of the school districts, some of the states that do better than we do, we don't do requirements, you know, where some states like Massachusetts in New York require certain things, ours are more. The way I didn't think about it is New York might say you have to have three years of math to graduate. What we say, and I'm looking to Mr. Fisher is you have to be able to do X, Y and Z. However you might get there, that's up to your district and then the district will do the correcting. Mr. Fisher. Rockards Head Fisher, my agency of education, and the agency structure of communications and legislative affairs. There's got to be an acronym for that. Yeah. I have a little card, I think I can probably violate the open meeting law, despite the pressable button that could play. So yeah, the way the standard is currently set is in current law, and I'm not gonna remember which citation we can follow up, requires a comprehensive education curriculum, that our education program that is in, that is then the, what is the EQS, the education quality standards, which is state board regulation. Then underneath that, the state board selects for each subject area a set of curriculum standards. And those are standards of proficiency, so they are not linked credit hours or the teaching of a course or teaching of a class in elementary or unlike other state. And those, then they, in recent years, since as long as I've been doing this and beyond the state board has adopted national standards for proficiency, in past times it's my understanding that the state board on occasion developed in-house for monstrosity standards. And that was, I think it was created for proficiency model. So those standards are the individual content area standards, so we have a global citizenship and foreign language standards, which is where civics falls, for example. We have the common core standards for English language arts and the range of different standards for all the different areas. And all of the areas that are listed in statute and listed in the lead listed in statute, they're listed in education quality standards. So the education quality standard says adapt the standard for each of these areas. And so that's sort of where the sort of regulatory funnel goes down. There are some statutory requirements for specific areas. Those are comprehensive health requirement. We are asking the legislature to consider a anti-hate curriculum requirement for this year. So there are extra, there are requirements for teaching specific things that exist in some parts of statute, separate from the education quality standards, that the proficiency based system is set for in the education quality standards and then adopt it, you know, standard by standard, right? We can pull some of this apart. Happy to provide you all the links. I have a sort of set email that I send to the commissioners. We have lots of questions from national reporters and things who want to know, does Vermont teach civics? And the answer is yes. We just don't have a requirement the same way others. Thank you. Ms. Cargill. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. How are you? I am great, our all of you. Great speaking for everyone. We had a conversation with you last week trying to get our heads around we are doing a come teach in Vermont campaign. What does it look like for a teacher who would arrive here either from out of state or graduate in state and enter the teaching career? And what does that look like specifically as it relates to some student loan debt relief? Yeah, I would say just the student loan debt relief is a great place to start. Okay, so when it comes to student loan debt relief, the federal government has two different programs that help students with any federal debt that they have taken out in the teaching field. So the first one is Federal Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program. This program, once a qualified teacher in that qualification has to be certified by an administrator at that school. So the superintendent or the principal has been teaching for five years. They can have up to $5,000 in their federal student loans forgiven. If they are teaching in a specific high need area such as special ed, math or science, they can receive an additional 12,500 for a total of 17,500 forgiven. After five years. After five years. In addition to that program, teachers for the most part are going to qualify for another program the federal government offers called Public Service Loan Forgiveness. This program is broader than just teachers. It's for anyone that's working in a public service position. And at the end of 10 years, any loan that is remaining is forgiven. So students need to make 120 payments, so 12 payments a month for those 10 years. And they have to be enrolled in what is called an income driven repayment plan. So if you think about a standard loan when you take a loan out, they divide the amount that you need to repay over a 10 year period. We'll just go with a really simple example. And that's your standard repayment. An income driven repayment plan actually looks at your income and makes an estimate of a payment based on income and debt. So those programs always are less if you're in one and you qualify, they're less than the standard payment. So in a course of 10 years under an income driven repayment plan, you would not repay the entire amount. And so whatever was remaining would be forgiven with Public Service Loan Forgiveness. These two programs are stackable. So you can receive the teacher loan forgiveness at five years. And then under normal circumstances you would start a 10 year process to determine if you were eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So those are the two federal programs that exist for teachers. So we heard from the McClure Foundation earlier today and they told us in 10 years we are likely to be short 4,400 nurses roughly. And in 10 years we're gonna be short roughly 8,000 teachers. Carpenters roughly 5,000 and bookkeeping and accounting 5,000. So teachers are really going to, we're gonna continue with this struggle. I'm wondering are we treating isn't the right word that if you wanna be a nurse in Vermont compared to a teacher in Vermont, looking at just these numbers is the state kicking in state funds right now for nursing? It doesn't sound like we are for teaching but it sounds like VSAC is going a little bit giving something to nurses. That's correct. So the legislature has a program that is a loan forgiveness program. So it functions like a scholarship. And if this nurse works in Vermont for one year for each year that they receive this scholarship which pays for full tuition up to the cost of the tuition at the University of Vermont for each year they work that year of funding is forgiven. They pay it back with a work obligation. We have that for nurses. We have it for trades. I think you mentioned construction workers. We have a brand new program that does the exact same thing for trades. The National Guard has one dentist, primary care physicians has a program as well as we're just standing up mental health professionals and nurse faculty. So you're right. There are a number of careers in Vermont that have these programs that actually reduce the amount that students need to borrow at the front end of their education versus repaying loans after they've completed their education that do not exist for teachers. Do we have any that act the way the federal government acts for teachers and public policy people for nurses also? Not sure if I'm asking. So there are programs that Vermont runs. They're not run by VSEC, but there are programs that have loan repayment that are targeted for nurses. They're run by AHEC and there is a new program that you started last year that is providing loan forgiveness to encourage recent graduates to stay and work in Vermont. It's not targeted to any particular sector, but those are the programs that I'm familiar with. There's also programs, I think for some of the other health programs that AHEC runs, but they're definitely health-related. They're not for teachers. It's Marilyn Hiroshi. Marilyn, I had some questions here. So how does a student find out about this loan forgiveness program? And because I'm just thinking of somebody who's looking at different programs online, trying to figure out how to finance their education. How do they end up learning about this or getting enrolled? Yeah, I think that's a really fair and good question. So the federal loans are serviced by servicers across the country. VSEC does not do this work. Those servicers are notifying customers and answering questions that are directly asked of them. VSEC will work with anyone who calls us. We can certainly counsel on federal loans even though we don't actually service that loan, but we can counsel on them. We'll let them know what services are or what options are available to help them with repayment. But it really does depend on the borrower reaching out more than it does on information being sent to the borrower. So what about the Vermont Loan Forgiveness Program? So the Vermont Loan Forgiveness Programs, the programs that we have where we're offering these that work like scholarships, we notify the institutions that run the program. So the nursing programs in Vermont that are at Casselton, UVM, Norwich, they're all aware of the Nursing Loan Forgiveness Program, for example. So we go through the schools to help notify students. We also use a very generic like front porch forum, radio ads, public service announcements, sorry, newspapers. We'll use those types of vehicles to get information out about these programs. We have a website that is a workforce development website that has information about these programs. You'll see schools talking about them as well, but those are the outreach and we'll certainly be working in the high schools letting the CTE programs and the high school programs know about the forgivable loan options that their students might be interested in. Thank you. Senator Lawrence. Do we do any of this outside of the state of Vermont? To try and attract teachers into the state? No. So not for teachers, but for example, the nursing program is not residency based. If you are an out of state student interested and willing to work in Vermont upon completion of your licensure, you can apply for the nursing scholarship. That same is true with the trade scholarship. The National Guard program is available to any member of the Vermont National Guard even if they happen to live in Massachusetts or New York. Marilyn, would you be willing to talk with our Ledge Council? I'm just going to ask her to draft a paragraph basically that kind of pulls the teachers in with everybody else that you mentioned just so the committee can consider it. Happy to do that. Okay, I'll have her reach out to you. That would be great. Great. Any other questions or comments for Ms. Carter? Thank you very much. It was very helpful. Appreciate the follow-up. You're welcome. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. Okay committee, that concludes our work for the day. I'll look forward to seeing everybody tomorrow. I'm sorry, Mr. Fisher, do you want to say something? I really do apologize for the chair's blessing. I just wanted to add one for the record to Fisher. Can I just say it there? Yes. I just wanted to slightly clarify what we said earlier in terms of the question. So students must be enrolled in school by the time they turn six. From both students this occurs when they're in kindergarten. Kindergarten is not mandatory, but enrollment by six is for many families. It aligns with the department. So most students who are joining, if they're rolling at age six, they're entering into kindergarten. Okay. That's the way that the years fall. Yeah. I wanted to just clarify. No, I appreciate that. Thank you. Anything else? You're okay? Great. Good. Okay. We'll look forward to seeing you later this week. Okay. Thanks, everyone. We're adjourned.