 Good morning. This is a joint meeting with House Human Services and Senate Health and Welfare. It is Wednesday, January 18th, and we're very pleased today to have with us members of the RAND Corporation presenting to us the report that they've done on early care and education financing study. It's been a long time coming and we're pleased to have it here. Just, I'm not going to say any more because we know that we have been working on child care now for many years and one of the sticking points of course is being able to supply resources for our kids, our families, and our economy. So, Teresa, did you, Representative Wood, did you want to say a couple of words and now we'll turn it over to Nolan? Thank you, Senator Lyons. I appreciate that. Yes, I just want to welcome everyone who is here today and to those folks who are listening and in particular to the Joint Fiscal Office for their work on coordinating all of this and working with the RAND group in order to deliver this important financing study to us. And thank you to the folks who ran for their diligent work and their opportunities for updates a couple of times along the way. We appreciated that and we welcome you here today. So, thank you. And now I'll switch back to Mr. Langwell from JFO. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Great. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay, great. Well, for the record, Nolan Langwell, the Joint Fiscal Office, as you all are aware, Act 45, which was H171 of 2021, required our office to contract with an economist or an independent consultant with expertise in the field of childcare and early childhood education to evaluate the economic impacts of and potential funding mechanisms to adjusting Vermont's existing child system. I'm reading straight from the legislation, but you all know what you did. So, we've hired the RAND Corporation to do that study and I will allow, I will switch it over or introduce, allow Chris, Lynn and Aaron to introduce themselves and we'll just move it over to them. Thank you very much, Nolan. I'm going to take a second and screen share our presentation. Can everybody see that? Yeah, yeah, we're great. Thank you. Thank you all for inviting us to present the results of our Vermont Early Care and Education Financing Study. We hope that this presentation and the conversations that follow over the next two days can provide some critical guidance. I am Christopher Doss, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization. I'm joined via Zoom by my colleagues, Lynn Carrolly and Aaron Strong. Lynn is a senior economist at RAND and is a leader in the early care and education field, particularly in the, around the cost of early care. Aaron is a senior economist at RAND who specializes in modeling the effects of policy changes at the state and federal level. His work has been influential in guiding investments in California, Puerto Rico and other states. This study comes at the heels of substantial investments already made by Vermont in early care and education, often abbreviated ECE. These investments in recent years have targeted three general areas. The first is making ECE more affordable by expanding the generosity and the reach of public subsidies. Second, Vermont has expanded access to ECE through the establishment of state-funded universal pre-kindergarten program that serves children one in two years before kindergarten entry. In Vermont, the program provides 10 hours of early education per week during the school year. Finally, Vermont has focused on improving the quality of ECE through the step ahead recognitions program, recognition system or STARS. Despite these critical investments, many families still cannot afford the high cost of ECE and thus may not participate in high quality programs. As one example, the current subsidy system is available to families making up to 3.5 times the federal poverty guidelines, but there's not enough money in the system to provide subsidies for all families that are eligible. So further investments present us with two key questions. How much will expanded access for high quality ECE costs and how can that be paid for? This study seeks to estimate the answer to the first question while positing potential options to the second question. As Nolan said, the study was statutorily commissioned by Act 45. The parameters of Act 45 touch on some of the most pressing policy issues today. First, Act 45 acknowledges that ECE is intertwined with the broader economy and can be seen as an investment to support the economy. Second, it acknowledges that early educators face very low pay and consideration should be given to pay that is commensurate with the required knowledge, skills and competencies. Third, it acknowledges that this act builds off advancements we just delineated, including the redesign of subsidies dispersed through the childcare financial assistance program called CCFAP. Our study has two components that correspond to the two objectives of the financing study delineated in Act 45. The first component aims to project the cost of expanding the state's ECE benefits to more families, requiring commensure compensation for providers and utilizing a cost of care model to reimburse providers. This last point means that when estimating a cost of high quality ECE system, we will estimate the value of the resources required to provide high quality services instead of relying on prices charged by providers. The second component aims to identify feasible, stable, long term funding sources for this expanded system and estimates and estimates the expected fiscal and economic impacts. This is a roadmap for today's presentation. It will begin by providing you background on the ECE system in Vermont to illustrate some of the underlying features that drive our approach and results. We will then provide an overview of the methods and key results of each study taking each study in turn. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a broad overview of the ECE sector, the methodologies employed in the study, and the key findings from each study. We hope that this can set the stage for more detailed and substantive discussion with each of the interested committees. The report contains much more detail as well and is publicly available. Let's first begin by talking about the background on the ECE system in Vermont. Our study focuses on children from age zero to kindergarten entry, a group we call preschool age children. We group annual cohorts of children by kindergarten entry groups. At any point in time, for example, four year olds is the group that will enter kindergarten in the following fall. During that pre-K year, some will have already turned five. The three year olds will enter kindergarten a year later. Again, this cohort will gradually turn age four by the fall when they would enter pre-K. Vermont has about 5,800 children on average in each of these annual cohorts or close to 30,000 preschool age children. As we talk about access to ECE and subsidies to help families pay for the cost of care, we'll refer to family income groups based on the ratio of family income to the poverty level. Much of our analysis focuses on children and families incomes up to 3.5 times poverty level, which represents about 60% of preschool age children in Vermont. The first two darker green pie slices in the diagram. For reference, as of 2022, 3.5 times poverty corresponds to about $80,600 for a family of three. This is the group of children that is currently eligible for the ECE subsidies under CCFAP, the Child Care Financial Assistance Program. We also consider expanding ECE subsidies for families of incomes up to five times poverty, which adds another 20% of this age group. As of 2022, five times poverty equals to $115,150 for a family of three. For families with preschool age children, most families 71% have just one preschool age child. A few aspects of the Vermont ECE providers are important to understand. We focus on regulated providers, namely licensed centers, Head Start, and public school pre-K, and family child care homes. We call this a mixed delivery system of private and public providers. Vermont stands out for the relatively small size of its providers. Nearly 80% of centers, which are shown in the blue bars on the figures to the left, have a maximum desired capacity of 40 children and represent over half of all center or school baselines. Family child care homes or FCC ages, which are represented by the red bars, have a maximum enrollment of 12 children. We account for the size of distribution and estimating our per child hour cost of ECE. As noted earlier, Vermont has been investing in quality through the step ahead recognition systems, also called STARS, the state's quality recognition and improvement system. Just over 80% of centers, again represented in the blue, have achieved a top rating of four or five stars. But this is the case for less than 30% of family child care homes, which again are represented by the red box. ECE educators in Vermont, like many areas of the country have relatively low pay. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Vermont show that the average or median annual income annual earnings is below $35,000 for child care or preschool teachers. Well below earnings for kindergarten or elementary school teachers. Yet the ECE field increasingly expects lead teachers to have a bachelor's degree the same as public school teachers. This these ECE workforce members are also less likely to have employer provided benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans. This issue of low compensation predates COVID, but has made it especially difficult to retain and recruit ECE staff as the state emerges from the pandemic economy. This is one reason why Act 45 required that the financing study assume a commencement compensation level, which region. There are three major sources of funding for ECE in Vermont as shown in the role the rose shaded in green. Federally funded head start and early head start state funded universal pre K under Act 166 and CC FAP, which is funded by a combination of federal and state monies. Smaller funding streams include federal and state tax credits for child care and federal and state funding for subsidized ECE programs in Vermont in 2018 and 2019 totaled approximately $109 million. You will see this figure later expressed in $2022 as $125 million. Note that these estimates exclude funding for school-aged children and funding for special needs preschoolers and we'll return to this point later. CC FAP is a key part of Vermont's subsidy system and the main focus of our expansion of subsidies. In terms of the current system, Vermont is one of the most generous in that subsidies are available to families with incomes up to 3.5 times poverty, one of the highest in the country. There is no contribution from families with incomes below 1.5 times poverty. The family contribution does not vary with the number of children. This figure illustrates the current subsidy schedule by plotting the family contribution as a share of family income along the income distribution up to 3.5 times poverty. The schedule varies depending on family size, so we show the results for size of three and size six to capture the upper and lower bounds. For example, a family of size three with income of two times poverty will contribute 6% of their income towards ECE under CC FAP, which is a larger green circle on the green line. And a family of size six with incomes of 2.5 or 2 times poverty will contribute 4% of their family income, which is a larger circle on the purple line. The current subsidy structure means that some families of size three as well as size four have family contributions that exceed 10% of their income, which is a horizontal dash line. As part of analysis, we consider the same schedule but with a cap of 10% of family income. With the long-term trend towards increasing women's labor force participation, it has become common for women with preschool age children to be employed or actively looking for work, albeit at a lower rate compared with their male counterparts. Vermont is no exception. The participation rates by parents of preschool age children at 84% as seen in the first row. These parents represent about 10% of the current Vermont workforce of about 300,000 adults. And the 6,000 parents with young children who are not in the labor force, in other words, potential new entrants represent about 2% of the total workforce. It is the case that low-income parents with preschool age children, the group that would be targeted by expanded subsidies, participate in the labor force at lower rates compared to their counterparts with higher incomes. As shown here, 78% of parents with preschool age children with incomes below 3.5 times poverty are in the labor force, compared with 93% of their counterparts with young children but with incomes above that threshold. Even if the labor force participation rate for the lower income group matched the 93% rate of the higher income group, the labor force would increase by about 3,000 persons or about 1% of the force above the labor force. We will provide estimates of the number of new entrants into the labor market when we present the results of study 2, but these figures help to contextualize these estimates. We will now focus on the study, the findings for study 1, presenting our approach and findings in three areas. First, the estimated cost of quality ECE system in Vermont. Second, what families might be expected to contribute towards these costs. And third, what the gap would be for the public sector to fill. The cost study or study 1 involves quantifying four components, as shown in this diagram. The three boxes with dashed lines are based on estimates we generate, while the third box for the amount of public funding in the ECE subsidies is based on the current system. That's the $125 million in 2020-22 dollars that we shown earlier. Other figures will also be in annual 2022 dollars. We discussed each of these dashed boxes in turn. For the first component, represented in the top box, we estimate the aggregate Vermont wide cost of ECE based on estimates from a cost model that assumes high quality program features, including commensurate compensation, and then applies these cost estimates across the assumed hours of care for preschool age children in the state. Key assumptions for the cost estimate, which we now discussed, are the assumed quality features and the commensurate compensation for ECE staff who work with children in centers and family child care homes. This chart lists the key assumptions of what constitutes high quality in centers and family child care homes. One key cost driver is the ratio of children to adults and group sizes. For example, classrooms are assumed to have two adults, a lead teacher and an assistant teacher, with up to eight children for infants and toddlers, 10 children for two-year-olds, and 20 children for preschoolers. The ratios we use in our models are consistent with accreditation and licensing standards. We also assume that lead teachers have a bachelor's degree in early childhood, while assistant teachers are assumed to have an associate's degree. This is the standard required in Head Start programs and most state-funded pre-K programs and again is consistent with accreditation standards. It reflects the expanding research evidence on the importance of supporting even the youngest learners in a whole child approach that requires early educators to have a deep knowledge of the science and practice of child development across multiple developmental domains. Our models also account for funds needed for professional development activities and other professional support services to help early educators advance their knowledge skills and competencies. Finally, our models assume other quality features such as using evidence-based curriculum, developmental screeners, formative assessments, and independent assessments of quality. These quality features are all consistent with accreditation standards and a star five rating under the redesign of Vermont stars. Recall that the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Vermont show median annual wages in 2019 of $30,000 to $35,000 for the ECE workforce. Consistent with Act 45, our cost model assumes that the staff in high-quality ECE centers and family child care homes receive commensurate compensation of adults in related fields such as public school teachers. Drawing on the efforts in Vermont to define commensurate compensation for the ECE workforce and similar efforts in other parts of the country, we define a salary schedule tied to the qualifications and job role such as being a lead teacher or an assistant teacher in a classroom. Because our assumptions about the lead teacher having a bachelor's degree and assistant teacher is having an associate's degree, we use the mean wages shown here in $20, $22. The same earnings are assumed for family child care home providers. These assumed levels of cash salaries represent a substantial increase compared to the status quo but are also consistent with expectations for knowledge, skills, and competencies in similar occupations such as kindergarten teachers. We also assume a commensurate package of fringe benefits consistent with recent recommendations from the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children advancing ECE as a profession task force. This includes employer contributions shared with the employee for health, dental, and vision insurance, employer contributions for retirement and short and long-term disability and paid time off for 30 days of combined vacation, illness, and personal time off. We model these benefits as a 26% fringe benefit rate. Based on these assumptions and about the resources needed for high-quality ECE, commensurate compensation schedule, and estimates of the hours of care demanded, the estimated costs across all of Vermont's preschool-aged children for high-quality ECE with a well-compensated workforce is estimated to total about $645 million per year in $2022. This estimate also includes system-level costs such as administrative costs, data systems, quality improvement supports, and workforce professional development. The next step in our cost study is to estimate how much families would be expected to contribute towards these costs based on several subsidy schedules just like we showed for CCBAT and estimated heat use of care. This is represented by the second through loss. The study considers five potential sliding-scale schedules for families to contribute towards the cost of the ECE that they use. The first schedule shown in the green line is the status quo schedule under CCBAT that we showed earlier for a family of size three, except we have extended the subsidy schedule up to five times poverty following the similar substructure. Under this schedule, the family contribution for a family of three would reach about 17 percent of family income at five times poverty. These maximum family contribution shares would be lower for families of size four or higher. The second schedule imposes a cap at 10 percent of family income up to 3.5 times poverty. As you see, the black dash line does not exceed 10 percent of family income. Between 3.5 and five times poverty, the family contribution resumes the same family contribution rate under schedule one. In this aggregate, the schedule means that the total family contribution will be somewhat lower so the public sector would have to fill in the gap. In presenting results, we will focus on this schedule, schedule two, as it can be viewed as the one that's closest to what is described under Act 45. Under this third schedule, added with the red line, no family up to five times poverty pays more than 10 percent of the income. Thus, schedule three will require even a higher public contribution given the extended cap at 10 percent. Finally, we consider two more schedules that have families pay a fixed percentage regardless of the size and the percentage increases with family income. Under schedule four, the lighter blue line, the maximum share is under 10 percent for families up to 3.5 times poverty but reaches a maximum of 15 percent at five times poverty. Schedule five reaches a maximum of 7 percent of family income at 3.5 times poverty and a maximum of 13 percent at five times poverty. Compared with schedules one and two, schedules four and five will require even more of a public sector contribution. As already noted, we focus on schedule two shown here in the black dash line which differs from the status quo in capping family contributions at 10 percent up to 3.5 times poverty and then extends the schedule with no cap up to five times poverty. We choose to schedule because we build most closely adheres to the spirit of Act 45. In the report, we provide information on all of these options. The options are also ordered from least to most generous. The status quo therefore the least generous option was schedule five, the most generous and having lower family contribution shares compared to the other options. As you will see, there is a direct correlation between the generosity and the size of the gap where generous schedules would create a larger funding gap that will need to be covered by public funds. This chart summarizes the family contribution based on the five subsidy schedules in all cases using the schedule up to five times poverty. As expected, family contributions are greatest under schedule one which provides families with the least generous subsidies and family contributions are the lowest under schedule five given the lower percentage of shares that families would contribute. In considering these family contributions, it's important to keep in mind three features of the subsidy schedule. First, all six schedules maintain the current policy requiring zero family contribution when family income is below 1.5 times poverty level. Second, contributions from families between 1.5 and 3.5 times poverty are capped at 10% or 7% of the income for schedules two and five respectively. Third, families with incomes of more than five times poverty level would not be subsidized under the subsidy schedules considered in this study. Indeed, those families contribute about 162 million of the total family contribution amounts shown under each schedule. We will focus on schedule two where families in total would contribute $260 million per year towards the cost of care for about 40% of the total cost. The contribution from families of incomes under five times poverty would be about 100 million of that total. Note that if we assume schedule five, the most generous, families would contribute about 20 million less per year than under schedule two, which means funding an additional $20 million per year in costs with public funds. In our accounting, we now show the estimate of $260 million for the family contribution under subsidy schedule two. And we have retained our estimate of $125 million in current federal and state funds. In the final step, the estimate of the gap in funding what would need to be raised by additional state revenues is then computed as the remainder after the family contribution and existing funds are subtracted from the total cost. The resulting gap under schedule two is $258 million per year. Looking across the five subsidy schedules, the smallest gap estimates are $179 million per year. The final estimate of the gap is $170 million per year. The final estimate of the gap estimates are $179 million to $193 million per year and retain the status quo of limiting subsidies to families making 3.5 times the poverty level or less. Larger estimates of $256 million to $279 million per year extend subsidies to higher income families up to five times poverty. We will now turn to study two. As in study one, we'll provide a brief overview of the methods followed by the key fundings. This component of the study takes findings from study one, such as the gap in public funding from each subsidy schedule and proposes feasible and sustainable public revenue sources to fill that gap. Using these sources of funding and other outputs of study one, we will then model the effects on the Vermont economy over a five-year time horizon and produce estimates of state revenues, economic output, among other. The models we use have been implemented by RAND researchers in many other contexts and capture not only changes in revenue to the state but also how households and firms react to those changes in the economic landscape across all sectors of the Vermont economy, not just the ECE sector. This figure gives you a sense of how the model works. The model sees Vermont economy as a circular system. Families pay taxes to the state government, which then distributes that money across different sectors. For example, the government provides money to the ECE sector through the subsidy system. This is an addition to monies that families pay directly to the ECE system through their family contributions. However, the ECE sector also provides wages to the families in the system who in turn pay taxes and may themselves pay for ECE services. Though this figure concentrates on the ECE sector, the model considers the entire Vermont economy in the same way. The key takeaway here is that changes in taxes, subsidies, or compensation has downstream effects that the model will capture. But it also has effects such as changes in the labor force partition but also effects such as changes in the labor force participation rate have to be looked at in terms of the overall economy, which this model also accounts for. We'll return to this later point or this latter point later. You can see that each of the three major arrows will be a source of a policy change in the study. Wages will increase for ECE workers, which will affect the amount of taxes that they will pay in addition to the changes in taxes that would come from implementing the funding instruments. Of course, these increases in government revenue will be used to increase the subsidies to families, which will flow to ECE providers. The first task of study two is to positive potential feasible, stable, and sustainable sources of funding. Though Act 45 asks for three possible sources, we provide a menu of six possible options. The first four options are what we call single source options, which use one source of revenue to cover the full gap. Possibilities include a payroll tax, increasing the sales and use tax, or adding service taxes. For the service taxes, we provide two options, taxing a limited or extended set of services. The limited set of services concentrates on personal services and equipment, such as auto mechanics, household repairs, dry cleaning, etc. The extended services includes limited services and then adds broadcasting and publishing, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, cable TV, movies, and so on. The last two options are what we call bundles and combines three sources of revenue. Each bundle option contains a soda tax and a hospitality tax, and then either a new payroll tax or an increase in the sales and use tax. We provide bundles of options, we provide bundles as options to reduce the dependence on any one revenue source. We also consider other sources of funding. We considered adding a lottery, but Vermont already has a lottery and adding a second one will likely cost current participants to simply spread their current purchases across the new set of lotteries, not necessarily spendable. We also considered property taxes, but that system is complicated in Vermont and our data did not allow us to properly model such increases. Finally, we considered a novel tax on digital advertising that Maryland attempted to institute, but a Maryland circuit court recently struck that down. In the end, the charge of providing feasible and sustainable sources of revenue makes proposing novel revenue sources challenging for two reasons. First, projecting the revenues is difficult without prior information, and second, the sustainability and stability is apparently unknown. Before we focus on proposed rates for these funding options, we want to benchmark approximately how much money the sources can raise. If we were to establish a 1% payroll tax, we would generate about $196 million in revenue per year for the government. The sales tax already exists, and if we were to increase that by 1% that would produce $85 million in revenue per year. A 1% increase means increasing the rate from the current 6% to 7%. Similarly, establishing a 6% tax on limited services will produce $105 million per year in revenue, while taxing the extended set of services will produce $143 million per year. Hospitality and soft drink taxes will produce less income. Increasing the hospitality tax by 1 percentage point, so for example, moving the meals tax from 9% to 10%, will bring in $14 million per year, and establishing a soft drink tax of 15% will bring in $24 million per year. We obtained the soft drink tax amount based on what other jurisdictions such as Philadelphia did. As you may recall, study one provided six subsidy schedules and the gaps that they are likely to produce. In the report, we further break out the gaps within subsidy schedules to show how the gaps grow as the subsidies are applied up the income ladder. For the purposes of this presentation, we will show options for schedule two. Recall this option casts CAHPS Family Contributions to 10% of their incomes for family making up to 3.5 times poverty. Fully implementing that schedule will produce a gap of approximately $258 million per year. Vermont may not be able to cover the full gap immediately. So we illustrate a situation where 25% of the gap is instituted a year, so the policy is phased in over four years. With this approach, fewer people would be eligible for the subsidy in the earlier years, but in four years, all people covered by the scenario would receive a benefit. The first year where 25% of the gap is incurred for $65 million if option one is chosen, a payroll tax of 0.29% would cover the gap. If option two were chosen, the gap would require an increase in the sales tax of 0.66 percentage points. For option three, we would need a limited set of services of 3.09%. For option four, we would need an extended services tax of 2.25%. The bundling options shown decreases these amounts when combined with other tax revenue sources. By the fourth year, when the full $258 million gap is incurred, a payroll tax of 1.14% and increase in the sales tax of 2.64 percentage points, a limited service tax of 13.6%, or an extended service tax of 9.65% will cover the full gap. Again, these bundles reduce increases in any one type of tax. The results presented pose a few key takeaways. First, the smallest gap estimates are based on maintaining the status quo of subsidizing families up to 3.5 times the poverty level and can be covered with single sources of revenue. The gap estimate on the order of $190 million can be covered by a 0.9% payroll tax, a 2 percentage point increase in the sales tax, a new limited service tax of 9.9% or an expanded service tax of 7.1%. Again, using the bundling options will reduce the tax level of any one source. However, the larger gaps generated by expanding subsidies to higher income families cannot be funded by a single source without rates that are larger than what is seen in other states. In those cases, the bundles are the most feasible options. In all cases, even with taxes needed to cover the highest gaps, the effects on household economic well-being is small. Of course, the options presented here and in the report are merely potential options. Vermont can use our estimates as a starting point for creating other bundles of taxes or for funding other subsidy schedules. A key feature of our model is that it takes into account the effects of the expected increase in the labor force participation. As stated in study one, the structure of the Vermont labor market constrains the possible number of new workers that will be induced to work because of the policies. Our models indicate that we expect between 612 to 2,800 people to enter the labor market depending on the subsidy schedule adopted and other assumptions. These estimates are less than 1% of the labor force. We take when taking into account all the economic benefits of this potential increase in the number of workers, we anticipate 59 million to 218 million in gross state product and 1.5 million to 18 million per year in additional state and local tax revenue. It's important to note that these are liberal estimates that assume all these workers enter the labor market. This is optimistic for a variety of reasons. First, though these workers may start looking for jobs, there's no guarantee all will find jobs and it may result in increases in the unemployment rate. Second, these jobs may simply reshuffle some of the current workers from one sector to the other. Reshuffling workers does not result in a net increase in labor force participation. Finally, to juxtapose, the increases in gross state product with the gaps. Our largest gap estimates which are on the order of 255 to 279 million dollars per year are about 0.6% of gross state product or about 2.8% of yearly appropriations. We want to leave you with a few additional considerations to help you contextualize our results. First, we use 2019 data for baseline estimates of demographics, ECE program spending and other parameters in our costs and economic models because that is the last full year of data before the pandemic. It's important to note that data from the pandemic era would not be representative of the pre or post pandemic era and could lead to erroneous conclusions. We also do not try to model the new normal because of the uncertainty of what that would look like. Perhaps this past year is the first year of this new normal but the data is not yet available. However, to make the numbers more useful to the current environment we inflate the numbers to 20 to 22 dollars. Second, our estimates are state level and not disaggregated by region for example rural versus urban because the data are too limited to accurately make those distinctions. However, some of the features that differ across the regions are accounted for in our models. For example, Vermont has a high share of small ECE centers in part because of the substantial part of the state is rural with less densely populated areas that can only support small centers. Small centers cost more on a per child basis because the overhead cannot be spread across a higher enrollment. That has been accounted for in our models. Finally, our models are indicative of what you would expect in the long run with a stable expanded ECE system in place though we do not model the transition we do provide phase in for funding possibilities. Further, our results not explicitly account for children with additional costs associated with providing ECE for preschool age children with special needs. Estimates indicate about 10 percent of children would be identified with special needs prior to kindergarten entry but the range of needs is variable making it difficult to estimate the additional costs for serving these children. These children are included in our cost estimates at the same costs as they're typically developing peers. Other estimates suggest that adding costs beyond the high quality features we already assume for example teacher compensation levels that will allow for hiring teachers with early childhood special education degrees may be in the range of 10 percent. That increment applied to a 10 percent of children that these at these ages imply an additional cost of 1 percent that we would not have accounted for. Further, we have not accounted for the federal and state funds used to pay for preschool education for special education services and our estimates of the funds in the current system. Thus those funds are able to pay for the additional costs of meeting the ECE needs of these children. We also do not explicitly model after-school care for school-aged children. Using prior estimates of the cost of school-aged care and the funding already in the system suggests that expanding the subsidy system to include school-aged care would likely add another 10 percent to our gap estimates. Finally, research shows that there is potential for downstream effects for our children and society from expanding ECE access and quality. These benefits are realized as children progress through the school-aged years and enter society. They are well beyond the five-year time horizon of the study and therefore we could not account for them. In that sense, such longer-term benefits are underestimated in the study. So thank you very much for your time and attention. The full report is publicly available on Rand's website at the URL shown here. I look forward to speaking with you to the committees. Great. Chris, why don't you? Okay. So I just want to remind folks that are watching as well that in addition to this presentation, there will be another full presentation like this at two o'clock. That will be for the Senate appropriations, House appropriations, Senate finance in ways and means. And then outside of this presentation and that next one Chris and the Rand team will be making the rounds to the committees. So the schedule for that is they will be in Senate Health and Welfare in about 15 minutes. They'll be there at 10 o'clock. This afternoon at 3 there'll be another joint meeting for Senate finance and Senate appropriations at 3.15. Then tomorrow they'll be in Senate Health and Welfare again tomorrow at 9 to 9.45. House appropriations from 10 to 11. House ways and means from 11.10 to 12.10. And then human services in the afternoon from 1 to 2.30. I'm just pointing that out so that folks know that there will be time for Q and A. So these were the big presentations and when they go to the committees, committees will have an opportunity to ask their questions. I don't know if the chairs want to add anything else. Thank you, Nolan. This has been a vast undertaking to coordinate all of the information and as Representative Wood said earlier we do need to thank folks from Rand for the good work that they've done and for being here with us. Representative Wood. Thank you Senator. Yes, just thank you Chris for your presentation today and we look forward to our question and answer session tomorrow and good luck with the rest of your presentations and meetings today. So we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you and thank you Nolan as well. All right, so thank you. I think at this point Nolan, unless I hear differently from you we will go, we'll take it off live and we'll take a break until 10 o'clock when Chris and perhaps others will be here with us and thank you.