 My name is Camisa Boulod. I'm the member from the House Human Services Committee. And according to statute, I'm supposed to call the first meeting to order. So that's what I'm doing. And our first order of business is, well, I think maybe we should just, we have a few people in the audience. So why don't we just go around and say who we represent? So why don't we start over here. OK, Stacey Rulo. I am the assistant principal at St. Albans City School, and I represent teachers, principals, and superintendents. Jennifer Farrell, Executive Director of the Northeast Kingdom Community Action, and I represent the Community Action Agencies. Come up. Kara Capparelli, my regular job is the clinical director at NFI Vermont, but I'm here representing the child and family trauma worker. I'm Sandy Parrots. I'm director of the poverty law project at Mont Blanc. I'm Jay McCormick in the Senate. I represent the people of the Winsor County District. And on this committee, I represent the Senate. I'm Larry Cooley. I am in the legislative legislative. I represent the city of Albans. And I am here to represent the legislature. Hi, I'm Diane Lanker. I'm in the House. I'm the representative of Madison 3 and I've been the past chair of this panel. My name is Karisa Wood. I represent Waterbury Huntington and Bolton Geel School. And I surround the Human Services Committee. My name is Katie Ballard. And I'm here representing the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights. I'm Aubrey Larison. I'm the new director of trauma prevention and resilience development at the Agency of Human Services and I'm representing the Secretary's Office. I'm Abusheh Deputy Secretary for Agency of Education. I'm from the Agency of Education. Karen Lafayette. I'm representing the Vermont Low-Income Advocacy Council. Michelle Fahey with Voices for Vermont's Children sitting in for Carlin, who usually does. Great. And there's so few people in the audience why don't we introduce ourselves and our committee assistant. It's going to be great. I'm Katie McMillan with the Office of Legislative Councils. Sarah. I'm Sarah Kenney from Los Roquets. Hello. And we're going to call each other now to see your audience. Travis Westman from Aubrey, Los Roquets. Sierra and Tardney as an AmeriCorps at Deccan and St. John'sburg. Awesome. I'm going to head off. Dana Kilburner from the Health Department replacing Greene at Holm's. So they're going to help me go over a long. Go ahead. We're just doing introductions. Apologies. Sarah Phillips, our conduct speaker. And I'm going to cover to you the day before the Department of Children and Justice. And Mike. Doug, Mike Brown, committee assistant for the council. And we are being filmed today. Are you an Orca person? Oh, yes. Great. Welcome. So first order of business is to elect a new chair and co-chair. And Diane has been our chair for the last. I would like to say two, maybe three, but definitely two. Yeah, definitely two. And before her, it was Jill Kroinski. And so it is customary to trade back and forth with the Senate on a committee, a legislative committee such as this. And so are there any nominations for chair and co-chair? I mean, vice chair, excuse me. I would move to nominate Sunder and Greene for the new Senate. Thank you. Any other nominations? OK. Is everybody know who's a voting member and who's not a voting member? So OK. So let me do the by raising hands. That would be easier. So all in favor of Senator Ingram, who, by the way, sends her apology. She was not able to be at this first meeting. And she's agreed to this. Right. Great. And for a vice chair, Representative Cooper. I move that we nominate S. Vice Chair of the committee. Your second. Thank you. Any other nominations? All those in favor of Representative Amherst? I just want to say co-chair. Vice chair. As vice chair, please raise your hand. Do I get your hand? Yeah, she can vote for you, so. And just as a reminder, if you're representing the administration, you are all right. I knew the role. Yes. That's true. OK. So I'm going to turn. I'm presuming that as vice chair, you are going to run the meeting again, Senator Ingram's absence. I guess so. Yes. She's definitely agreed to that. So welcome, everybody, back. I hope that your summer so far has been going well, and that we can put our heads around this. Why don't we? There's some people that are new. So can we just go around the room? We did go around the room again. And introduce everybody. We're good to get that started. So I think our first order of business is to hear from Katie. Come on up. She's going to walk us through the room. I haven't been here before. Where we left off, what did we recommend at the end of last year? Maybe what activity occurred during the last session that we might like to take a look at the weaknesses that we have? Good morning. Well, I think I'm pretty good at talking at home. Hello, I'm Katie McDonough, Office of Legislative Council, and welcome to the new members. So what we've traditionally done is there is usually a set of recommendations that comes out at the end of a calendar here from this council. And then our first meeting back, typically, we go through what those recommendations were and try to highlight any legislative action that happened with regard to those particular recommendations in the past year to see how the legislative agenda carried out the items that were most important to this council. So I've put together that sheet in the same way I have in previous years. And we can go through that. And I have to say, as I do most years, I staff Truman Services issues. I don't staff all of the topics that the council covers. So there may be items or particular topics that you follow in your work more closely than I follow. And if you know of a legislative action item that isn't on the list that's completely possible, please feel free to make this more of a discussion and meet kind of talking at you. So first, the first set of recommendations from last year's report had to do with child care. And there were three specific recommendations in the field of child care. The first had to do with increasing child care provider reimbursement rates within the Child Care Financial Assistance Program, which I refer to as CCFAP, to the most current available market rates. And so if you look across to the corresponding subdivision A, you'll see that there was action taken on this item in the budget. The Act 72, which is the budget, aligned the rates of reimbursement for preschool and school age children to the 2014 market rates. And that the rates of reimbursement for infants and toddlers were at the 2017 market rates. And we haven't received the most recent set of data. 2019 is the next set of data that is going to be coming out. So 2017 is the most up-to-date market rate at this point. I'm sorry to interrupt. Can I ask you a question on that? And just because you refreshed my memory, where was it that we brought it to the 2014? Where was it prior? I had to ask my friends, because as much as we talked about it this year, I couldn't remember where they were. So my understanding is that for preschool and school age children, it was 2008 plus 3%. And the infants and toddlers last year had been brought up to 2017. So we maintained that. 2017 is, Katie just said, is considered current right now. For preschool and school age as well? Or does that stop at 2014? Is that our latest? No, 2017 across the board would be considered current. So we were not current on preschool and school age. But we went from 2008 to 2004 teaching. The market survey is conducted every two years. So usually the data comes out in the fall. And I think it's in process. Yeah, I would anticipate the 2019 data coming out this fall. So the next item was supporting an expansion of workforce incentives, including educational supports for child care providers. Again, Act 72, the budget appropriated $300,000 for grants dedicated for hiring or retention bonuses or for tuition assistance for continuing education for child care professionals who are employed at a privately operated center-based program or family child care home. And then third, expanding eligibility within the CCFAT program. In this year's budget, there was an adjustment to the sliding fee scale to ensure families whose gross income between 100% and 300% of the current federal poverty guidelines receive between 99% and 10% of the available financial assistance benefits. So this had the effect of increasing who had access to a subsidy through the CCFAT program and also increasing the amount of the subsidy for eligible individuals, eligible families. And then I added a start fund because there's also an investment in the Bright Futures information system which is a necessary investment to get the system in a place where it can make further changes to the way the program is structured and the way the benefits are distributed. For them, is this? Another thing that was in Act 72, that is sort of one of those sleepers, but makes a big difference is that requires us to stay current with the FDL, Federal Poverty Limit, which generally takes up, you know, well this year was close to, it was around a million dollars. So that wasn't previously in there, so. And there's that extra language that you can't backslide. So even if a year was to have a lower FDL, we would still maintain the previous year's higher rates so the family wouldn't backslide. And it also puts out legislative intent that this is essentially the initiation of continuing redesign of the CCFAT program, which is undergoing some changes in order to be compliant with federal rules, but also to make it simpler, more easier to access for families and provide higher benefits. So we need to hold ourselves, hold our feet to the fire to make sure that just because this year we made a substantial investment of about $7.4 million that's not that people just don't say, oh yeah, we're done, because we're not done. So if you don't mind my adding, I think the number that was a little tough to reach in the first year, just by multi-year process would have been to have an investment of 26 million is what it would have taken. So seven is a big step towards that, but the big number is still out of reach at the moment, but I think continues to need our dogged response to it. But when we made incredible advancements. The next action item was a recommendation increasing investments in after school and summer programs to expand high quality programs and statewide increased statewide access. Oh, so. Actually, I said we need to do the CFAP investments to help with the after school. So kids who come to licensed childcare programs for after school get that increase. Okay, so it's CCFAP eligible families who are using after school programming. Okay. Let's go for things. And I didn't know of any other items with specific investment in after school. Okay. Not so much in the legislative piece. I think it was, in the incident, there was a $600,000 one time, he said, was a multi-year. I think we probably included that in the last year's activities, the legislative actions were agreed because it was fell in the middle because I think it wasn't announced or wanted to talk, it was almost in the fall. Okay. So I'm just gonna put the $600K in there and figure out where, and it was a multi, I think a three-year role for that. This would have been, not that it required any legislative action, but that was something that was still happening within that world. And maybe we can hear a little bit more about that during the year. That could have been in last year's budget. Yeah, or at the end, actually what it was, it was a part of one-time money that was in the prevention piece on the Substance News College that we have. There was a part of that, that's $600,000 into the after school. Okay. Next action item had to do with a variety of investments in housing. So the first one was increasing capital investments to reduce the shortage of affordable housing in Vermont, for example, by providing full statutory funding for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. And while I understand there was not full formula funding, one million was added above the baseline to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board's budget. Madam Chair. Yes. Just a little correction on that. Actually it wasn't above the baseline. It achieved level funding. The governor's budget had recommended a million dollar reduction. And the legislature was stored, I think it was a million, it's a little complicated because it was a million, 50,000 reduction in that proposed capital budget, and then the legislature was stored a million. So all about $50,000 through the general fund's budget. Right. Because the property tax transfer came in higher, so instead of taking it through all of the various splits that would, they took the 100% increase on that new move directly to... Exactly. When you add the cattle funding and general fund funding for BHCB in FY19, it comes out to FY20 funding in the high rate. It comes out the same minus the $50,000 that wasn't restored. Okay. It's the same. We restored. We restored. And it wasn't an establishment, no. Okay. So the same minus the $50,000. It was basically level funding vis-à-vis FY19. Okay. When you combine cattle and renter. Okay. Then next item was increasing rental assistance in other housing and related financial supports. For example, increasing funding for the Vermont Rental Subsidy and Housing Opportunity Grant Program. So the general assistance program did spend more than the budgeted amount in fiscal year 19 for emergency housing and emergency rental assistance, which would require a review and budget adjustment and in the 21 budget. But aside from emergency assistance, my understanding is there is little change in the base. Correct. Are we going? There's a lot of up and down and all around. Okay. And then expanding investments and support services to increase housing retention for families. For example, increasing funding for family supportive housing. I wasn't aware of any legislative action. Absolutely. I just wanted to add that, you know, it looks like not a lot was achieved. There was awful, awful lot of attention paid to housing and there were efforts to create a second housing revenue bond, which unfortunately failed, but resulted in a directive to reinviging the budget for the action of the budget in H-132 from the president to initiate a study on how to finance 1,000 units of affordable housing over the next five years, and then also as a result of attention spent by the general assembly on the issue of rental assistance, specialized rental assistance vouchers, including for families experiencing homelessness and the number of vouchers and voucher related resources, federal vouchers left on the table, as a result of an inability to provide support services to accompany those. There was also language in the budget that requires H-S to look at that issue and come back to report on whether or not, what the causes were and whether or not additional investments may be needed in support services. A couple of little steps forward. A lot of attention, a lot of conversation, was there, I think that we were just talking about, was there any dollars of the one-time funding within the substance abuse for supportive support services? There were, if you look at support services for mostly seniors through SAC program, which was restored and SAC actually is getting into family housing and supporting families in housing and not just in housing, there's some people with disabilities. So there was a one-time investment made, it was, again, to bring it up to level funding. Right, so we're going to talk. And we had one about, I was remembering, but I might be misremembering this, that there was something in the designated agencies for supportive services for people in housing. And I think that there was some money to be simply allocated. Aside from the increase for salaries for designated specialized services agencies. Yes. Ooh, not that I remember. All right. If you remember what I mean. The world's starting to wake up. I could be now, I could be misremembering. I can't literally brain fog. What's your urban habit, Mrs. Lam? I'm very often low because I'm very... I'm pretty sure there was some... I think it was related to housing, but there was some peer support money and some other mental health type of support. Yeah, I guess if we're looking at, I'm looking at this broadly as supportive services keeping people in housing, so. Sure. Okay. Can I say, Claire, my question is which housing is in my area. But there was some announcement about the redevelopment grants. So those are federal funds that pass through the, to the state of Vermont and the state of Maryland. Were they also flat, like, was there an increase in the fund history? So, federal funds are a whole different story. And actually, there was a bit of an increase, but because of the Federal Budget Control Act, there was an act to contend which, you know, had created sequestration in their two-year budget deals. So there was a two-year budget deal that included federal fiscal in 2019. And actually, that did someone increase the amount of block rate dollars. It's for the great news that there is a number of questions here. Just a minute. Okay. Okay. Anyone else? So there is a work of its form to do this housing and services legislative report and that report will come out in November and it may be helpful to the Secretary to have a presentation on that report and it's no member of this. Oh, great. Thank you. So moving past affordable housing, the next category was economic empowerment and employment supports. So first was increasing the minimum wage in Vermont alongside corresponding adjustments and benefits, eligibility to avoid and that lost beneficiaries. And S23 is still at play. As you know, we're in the middle of the biennium. So the legislative efforts of the first year are not lost. They can, bills can continue to move forward in the second year of the biennium. So there is a Senate proposal of amendment to a House proposal of amendment that was passed maybe even the last day of the session. And there's a link if you're curious to see it, but it would increase the minimum wage to 1220 by 2021. Next, the adoption of paid family and medical leave legislation. Again, that's still at play. It's H107, the Senate proposal on paid family leave would provide eligible employees with a total of up to 12 weeks of family and medical leave insurance benefits, which could be used for up to 12 weeks of bonding leave, up to eight weeks of leave for care for a sick family member and for employees to elect to obtain coverage for their own illness up to six weeks. And the benefits are replacing 90% of the first $530 of the employee's weekly wages and 55% of any wages above the amount up to a maximum benefit of $964 a week. So that's where those two pieces of legislation are currently poised, how they're currently positioned. Third, subdivision C, increasing funding for economic programs that create jobs and build savings and assets. For example, micro business development programs and the Vermont match savings program, which was formerly the IDA Individual Development Accounts. It's actually still the Individual Development Accounts. We didn't change that anymore. You didn't change it again, okay. Actually, we do call it the Vermont match savings. We do call it that, but legislatively, it's still IDA, but. Okay, so that's you. Officially. Slash. Okay. If anyone was looking for the statute, they wouldn't find it. So there is a maintenance of the base for the IDAs and micro businesses of 100,000 through one-time funding. I was just very excited about this. This was a really last minute conversation and opportunities when we had some other time dollars. So many of the advocates here who've been strong in supporting this, it really made a difference in our opinion. This is the third year in a row when we've received the additional 100,000, which is great. For a while, we had the 100,000 in committee or at least in the budget as a ongoing. And that, it got you to the point where it was still working on it, was still working on it. So the next item, subdivision D, investing in workforce training and financial literacy education. I was told that the Treasurer's Office has ongoing programs, but in terms of legislative action, I wasn't aware of anything specifically that there is actually H5, H5338's Act 8. It does contain some education and training pieces that also contains the remote workers. It also has some directives for the Department of Labor to work more closely with community action, especially on weatherization training, workforce training. So there's a number of things in that legislation that didn't, in fact, pass. Okay, thank you. I'll send you up, little board. And in addition, along with the Treasurer's Office, the Agency of Education has been working on getting financial literacy standards passed prior only for K-12 education, obviously, at the State Board of Education, generally called the original meeting. I'm not sure you're going to get a transition yet. Obviously, those are again, are for K-12, I think we'll have a long-term effect in terms of our workforce development. I think most pressing for this legislative council though is that our adults who are in the high school concentration program, once we have those standards, and they would also be under the purview of those standards as well. So that will be quicker for Treasurer's Office, I think, or our students who are more closely linked with workforce development more immediately. Excellent. If you're, if it's, it wouldn't be too much to ask. Would you email us a little blurb about what that is? Yeah, we can email you. Because if you want a presentation, it's always really good to, you know, have it listed as to what's going on. Yep, yep, that'd be great. Thank you. And then in Act 72, again, the Child Care Workforce receives some investments that you already set down. Okay, Subdivision E, supporting transportation related public initiatives, including increasing public transportation options, increasing access to reliable and affordable vehicles and providing license fee and fine remediation assistance. Act 59 provided initiatives to Vermont households with low and moderate income at or below 160% of the states. Prior five-year average median household income level for electric vehicle purchases. I'm not aware of anything else. I don't know. Other than, there's a continuation of looking at commuter rail between Burlington and Montpelier. There's a addition to the study. Act 59 also has vehicle repair emissions. Yes, the Emissions Repair Program. That's, I'm going to do something else. Emissions and allowing up to $2,500. So if you're, all right, let me, now I'm really, but we'd have to take a look, I think it's in the T-bill. That's not something else. Yes, it's in the T-bill. The T-bill that allows for, let's just say your check engine, like your emissions, your car falls within that zone that might make it very difficult for somebody to return to that specific income level to get the repair on that. So within there, if you fall within that zone, there's up to, I think it's $2,500 to go towards that repair so that they can come and comply with the emissions without it costing the family. OK. OK. And this will, I think there's a way of repair. It's like 16 years old, I'm going to talk to you. Yeah, it's 16 years old. 15? Oh, you would know. OK. My right. There was a bill that passed in the House that would have exempted motor vehicle purchases from participant and reach-up program, but I don't think it went through in the end in the Senate. It did now. Yeah, OK. It was age 249. OK. Age 249. And it made the initial registration of the motor vehicle. You didn't make it all the way through? Yeah, it did go through the Senate. But that's something that came here again. OK. Yeah, that's right. It's still alive. It's still alive. Next, subdivision F, increasing reach-up financial assistance for households up to 100% of their basic needs based on current cost of living with automatic increases for inflation. And Act 72 increased the base of the reach-up program by 2.3 million for the purpose of enhancing benefit levels. And this also includes $400,000 for the change from $115 to $77 for the amount of the SSI payment that's received by a parent that counts towards the determination of the amount of the family's financial assistance grant. So that 2.3 encompasses both. Both of those? This has been a long-time desire of this council that has looked at the reach-up financial assistance, particularly when we're looking at Michelle, who's been a strong advocate and a really good voice around this. And Karen? And Karen? Yes. Oh, Karen, yes. Now, we're going to be lying together. But I was like, Karen's been in the services here for a long time. Yeah. So, good. We'll continue to see if we can make strikes. Can I ask a question on that change of course? We increased it, but it's still considered low, right? And it's still 8. We increased it from 2,000 reported to 2,008. So if we move from 2004 to 2008 numbers. Yes. It's still variable, so it's less than half of... Good news, but it's still a long way to go. Much like that. What's it in perspective? Progress, yes. But it puts it in perspective of how far it's going to go. It's just for clarification. So the rate of all reduction is 49% of now the basic lead standard of 2008. Right. Once the basic lead standard of 2004 comes forward four years, but it's still 49% of that. And so the data fact is... Maybe Michelle... We get like 35. All right. But it just gives you a little bit of a picture. Okay. Okay. Last topic had to do with trauma and resilience building. So the first item here I was supporting in monitoring implementation of the Agency of Human Services Act 43, Childhood Trauma Response Plan and both the Committee on Human Services and the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare reviewed the Agency's report and response plan this session. And I'm not sure that any other legislative action was taken besides reviewing the plan. And then the second item was... And offered. And offered this time. That's right. That's what we actually have for us. Good. And then the second item was support increased funding for parent-child centers and their two-generation approach of supporting the five protective factors. There was a $1 million appropriation for parent-child centers for one-time infrastructure improvements. There was an increase in the base of the master grant by $1.3 million, but a $1.6 million reduction and reach-up case management services that had previously been utilized by the state. Thank you for including me. Up and down. Yeah. And thank you for sharing your collective memories of the legislative session. I appreciate it. I also wanted to flag the importance of benchmarks to this Committee. Pursuant to your statute in 2023, there's a kind of an interim report due to ask this council to measure how you're doing in terms of specific benchmarks. So statutorily, there are two benchmarks that you have to be mindful of and I have those flagged. Just remind you what they are. So the first is the number as compared to 2016, the number and percentage of children living in families at 50%, 100%, 200% of the federal poverty level. And secondly, the number and percentage of children living in families paying more than 30% of their cash income for housing and related expenses. Last year was your one-time opportunity to add additional benchmarks that you'll be looking at at the midterm point. And so you did that as part of your list of recommendations. You added three benchmarks. The first being the number and percentage of children living in poverty according to the supplemental poverty measure. The second being the number of children experiencing homelessness on a given night. And third, the number of children whose parents lack secure employment. So those are the other three benchmarks that we'll be looking at in three years. Thank you. Because that was one of our things that we talked with and spent a lot of wrestling time figuring out the benchmarks because that was our one and only time to get them in. And that now this council will be somewhat, not somewhat, will be responsible for supporting our movement of homeless in two years. 2023. 2023. Yes. Is that supposed to be the benchmarks at the end of your final recommendations from last year? Yeah. Can you be updating the based on the conversation today? I can. I'm happy to. I can do that. Okay. So it wasn't in our recommendations but there are some other bills that obviously can help the lives of families with children. One of which I just wanted to highlight is the reminder of work against domestic and sexual violence. It's on age 132. I can't remember what that number is now. But it provides a significant additional protection to survivors of domestic violence including adding survivor status to the state's housing law and certain other laws. So when were tenant law to provide additional protection? Yes, representative. Here I just made me think of another. In addition to that when we removed the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse which I guess people are talking about. My other thing was just to put for a future agenda item that we should each year and that's a great compared to the 2016 benchmark of this. That's a future date. There's also a lot of policy legislation in the budget bill that calls for a review of reach up that calls for review of human services and meet some needs and that type of thing. So we probably want to look at that at some point when those reports are due. Yeah. They're not all in the budget but there's some of the budget but I think there's more than just what's in the budget. And there's one thing that it touches on this group especially people with children is that there's reform happening right now around the developmental disabilities payment reform and representatives would and I are very much involved with that over the summer and it's one of the reasons why we're putting up a good amount of time into paying attention to what's happening in that because there's a lot going on with that and there's deep anxiety on all sides of it as to what might happen. So I'm starting another one. We restored the CIS funding Children's Integrated Services funding so that definitely affects the population. That's here. 300,000. Foster care? Something in foster care. I don't know if we made it in advance but sometimes we feel like we've advanced but basically we charted to where it was. You helped with funding for foster kids especially kids who are placed with kids to be able to access the resources through Child Care Resource. And we increased payments to foster care providers. Foster care parents wasn't very much of that in my perspective. I had five dollars a day or something like that. And you also created recreated the position of the deaf part of hearing, deaf on coordinator for those folks with disabilities. We were busy. All right. So thank you. It's now the end of all in. Just like Sarah said, we'll constantly update when we think of something. Don't be afraid to state. So we are right on time. Excellent. So thank you. You are very good to us. So from the follow-up we will be talking about all right. About that. Before you just a full disclosure I should mention that my wife works for Action Simplest and advocated for the family child service. She does not walk there. And our policy and shared policy do not arrive here. You are the one who will arrive. Wow, that sticks. So as we said we're thinking to walk us through on some significant changes in the childcare for the beginning changes and more to come. I think that is going to walk us through the definition of childcare for the children and family. That's right. Incredibly key roles in making sure that we get to the finish line with this. So tell us what we did in a little more detail. Okay. So I had I think four handouts for people. Can we get this up here my mom? I put it into a PowerPoint for a few because I thought that would be helpful just to walk it through. But usually I come with some numbers for you. So I threw those in too. So I'm going to sort of walk through this trying to leave it. Those are all the qualities. Yeah, that is true. And it's in the PowerPoint. I thought I did. The PowerPoint. Thank you. That goes on the table. Technology. Then I also just gave you so you have it in detail. It never comes out well. The actual new sliding piece scale. The grant in the back is what was true before last week. And the rule on the front is what is true now. And this is the rates and I gave you the sliding piece scale. So just to refer to those if you want that level of detail for how that fits. And then we did create just to keep it straight there was quite a lot of changes in our budget. So we created just this budget fact sheet that I gave you. I can refer to all of those as we walk through that. I'm excited to be here with you today because there is a lot to report about child care. It was a great year for early care learning. So I'm going to walk you through some of the data that we've tried about capacity and quality that we often talk about. So you can sort of look at status. I'm going to share those new investments approved by the legislature and also talk a little bit about the long-term plan just to really completely redesign the child care financial assistance program. So and I'll try to walk through these slides quickly enough to leave plenty of time for questions and answers. So this is the capacity conversation you've had in these years. Access to child care early learning how much is out there. The capacity decline seems to have slowed and we are actually hoping we have seen as you know over the past few years we have lost child care capacity. That seems to have slowed particularly in school age or actually seems to have grown. Infants and toddlers is still a very delicate situation but we're doing pretty well in preschool so if you just look across the you know across the bars you'll see that in 2018 we're beginning to do a little bit better. We hope we've hit the bottom of the curve. There's a lot of capacity building work going on the Early Care Learning Committee of Building Bright Futures which our Child Care Licensing Director co-chairs is working really hard on capacity building. We have marketing campaigns for providers to open. Let's Go Kids has a program called Make Way for Kids and one of the new investments that you'll see at the bottom of the budget updates page is that you all, the legislature very kindly gave us some money that had been planned to be cut from last year. Let us push it into this year to help with those new programs. So we know there are some shovel ready programs that will significantly increase capacity in some areas that need it and we'll be putting out some money to get that money out there to help those programs get going and keep going and enroll kids. So we think we're beginning to turn the curve on child care capacity. Also part of the new investments that we got from the legislature was if you will recall we had Early Care and Development Grants at one point just to help programs out of our subsidized kids dealing with higher co-pays that families couldn't pay. What happened last year is a million dollars was set aside to preserve even with the rate increases that we got to preserve a similar kind of program called Stabilization Grants for those programs who have over 50% enrollment of CCFAC kids. So that will look very like the old ones. The programs will be getting them but they'll be getting them on a quarterly basis based on a formula around their enrollment. And those will just keep rolling out as they did in the past on a quarterly basis. That's going to be about half the million we'll go out in those grants to programs with over 50% of CCFAC kids. And then when you've got a good rate the representative wouldn't have the question. Is that a good time? I just want to finish another half of that million dollars is actually going out into capacity building grants for infants and toddlers. So we're going to and that whole amount of the million is in the base so that means that those investments will continue. And so we're again going to put an RFP to one of our community partners to have this infant toddler grant program that will support building more specifically infant toddler spaces in the places where we know that they're most needed high quality spaces. So that's some of the exciting capacity work that's happening. We're just beginning to see impacts on the data but we hope by this time next year we'll see some real impacts on data that will be really helpful to families. That's a good time. Okay, so my question is about capacity. So I want to make sure I understand. So in this coming year you're spending 1.5 million in expanding infant and toddler. Is that correct? Well, we'll be spending 1.4 in expanding all capacity as long as infant toddler is part of it. So a new program opening might also serve preschoolers but they have to be serving infant toddlers to get one of they have to be expanding infant toddlers to get one of those capacity building grants and that'll be the 1.4, that's one time only. So that'll be going out we're hoping to have a lot of this spent and be able to report it to you when you come back into session. So we're getting an RFP out in the street now. We know there are projects that are waiting to apply for these grants because they're trying to get some new places open. And then the other thing that I wanted to ask is how does this money sort of dovetail with the private money that's being invested because there's roughly around a million dollars invested to increase capacity with a focus on infant toddler. That's right. Make way for kids. Let's Go Kids is doing Make Way for Kids. So I don't know. Let's Go Kids will apply for these grants. So it may certainly dovetail. We certainly work closely together. It may dovetail with these. A lot of what Let's Go Kids is doing is technical assistance to help people through business plans and developing their programs and the actual cash dollars that programs are getting are fairly minor. We think that these investments can really help people with materials, maybe even start up of staff. It's pretty difficult to open a program. Kids don't, you aren't full the first day even with all of the capacity issues we have. And so programs even in areas of need have struggled if they open fully staffed the first day and they don't have enough kids to pay their staff. So some of this may be start-up grants to get you through your first two months of staffing. And so I guess the problem with the question is you won't, so a program might be able to apply for the division's capacity building grants even if they've received a grant from Let's Go Kids. We weren't planning to limit that for people who had not gotten out. Okay. Thank you. Because we know that some of those programs are struggling with some costs even when they have gotten out. Yeah, well, I mean... And again, our job to help is technical assistance. So that's helpful but it doesn't pay your bills in the first six months that you... Well, I think they put that... The technical assistance was in addition to about a million dollars. Yes, and then there's money that's going to supplies and other things like that. Okay, thank you. And I just wanted to let you know I didn't print this for you but there is a link on the PowerPoint. So that allows us to update our closures report that we had done a couple of years ago. We updated that in December. Again, we're seeing, particularly in school age, we're seeing a turn in the trend. Again, family child care, we have not had as many openings as we have had closings. The closing rate has not changed significantly. It's the opening rate that we're not getting. So again, marketing has been really targeted around particularly in rural areas to family child care providers and encouraging family child care providers to open and get help getting into the business. Can I ask a question on that? Sure. Is there a sort of like an exit interview when someone closes together the data? We do do that in licensing. It's not particularly easy to pull that data. The time that we did a pretty extensive closure report, we actually had a summer intern. We had them call everyone who had closed and asked what they were doing now and what happened and then we had them pull through our because it's in our licensing notes. But we might do that again next year if we could get an intern to do that work. I'm not sure that that might help to inform or... We do try to keep that. And again, our licensors often will know that. So it's not as scientific as doing a survey and actually having solid data. That in the system, if you go into closures, you could mine that for reasons. Whatever they tell us at the time they're leaving. Because a provider whose closing has to tell us their closing or they remain licensed until their license expires. And then we do call them if they don't renew and ask if they're closing just so we have an official record of that. And this is one more question. Sorry. And this is I just want to make sure I understand this is licensed capacity. It doesn't mean that they are serving kids. These numbers where you see desired capacity that means it's their enrollment capacity. That's enrollment. They report to us how many kids they will take out of the number of kids that are licensed. And these numbers are those numbers. Now that that's pretty well populated we're trying to use those numbers as a more real measure of what's actually available out there. The licensed capacity is likely licensed capacity is often a little bit bigger. Many Vermont providers do not enroll to their full licensed capacity either because staffing is still very tight. It's a tight workforce for all employers in childcare where the pay is not stellar and the job is hard. It is that many center directors have trouble even in these new programs with staff. Because people are critical in childcare can't open without. So this slide the next one is about is about quality. So the good news is that quality continues to increase and we know that high quality programs have a positive impact on children's development and so that's a really important part of the equation and we if you look at how the green bar is growing how the green bar is growing on this slide that is three, four and five star programs. Now I will tell you we did a major evaluation of the stars program as part of the race to the top rate and there are reports on our website about the results of that but we are doing an evolution of the program after 15 years using all the evidence that we had using A what everyone has learned about quality rating systems over the last 15 years and using all the evidence from the evaluation we did. So the first change these charts will change drastically next year because the first change is that now that our licensing regulations are strong and people have really settled into them the first star will be a regulated provider so all regulated providers will be a one star provider. So we sort of linked the licensing and the stars program so that people don't have to apply to both of them to get going. Now many of the programs that are opening will be opening at three, four and five stars they may not be opening at one but anyone who opens and is compliant with regulations will have one star. That's also that allows to market to parents there's a little dilemma about wanting parents to use regulated child care but not wanting to run two different campaigns about what to look for so essentially the marketing campaign is about looking for a star and so that will help providers regulated providers who are marketing and it will help parents better understand what the system is like. So the first phase is that and actually Melissa Regal Garrett our policy director is at El Car right now the new rules that will make that change then the whole system is changing quite significantly in the next couple of years. We're doing research on the impact of the changes on current providers where we're just at a tour around the state to tell providers about what we've been thinking about for the changes and get input and feedback from them and so that's going to continue to evolve to really look at the best science and the results for our evaluation to create the best quality rating improvement program that we can so that's just something to pay attention to. I'm sure Melissa would love to come talk to folks about the stars changes next session because there's a lot going on there but the good news is participation continues to increase as do people's progress through the system. So in the future what you're saying is that that blue section will be non-existent? That's right there won't be unless you are not there is a there is a status in licensing called provisional. It's not automatic you could you can walk right in and not have provisional but people who are struggling with compliance may go into provisional if you're in provisional that would impact stars it would impact your ability to be in UPK because that means you're not in good licensing standing but for the most part we will not see very many of those which will also impact CCFAP again because all providers will get at the one star rate as we move forward but I think it will increase the use of it it will increase there will be so we have a base rate that if you're not in star as you get everybody's going to be in star so everyone's going to get the one star so that will help folks who take our kids as well so now moving on sort of to CCFAP I think probably these goals are really important to you as a council the two generation approach around the child care financial assistance program is really around helping eligible families pay for child care which supports their participation workforce education and training and financial stability and also access to high quality early care and learning helps kids be prepared to enter school and succeed in school and succeed in life so those are really important pieces about the program the way that it works now is that it helps families pay the cost of child care by payments made directly to child care providers on the families behalf the families eligibility and benefit level is determined by their size and how much money they make the payments are determined by the age of the child so those all interact together excuse me for that question sorry I'm not sure if this is a good question to ask but I just want to so part of the funding with child care resource and for families who are looking to access one of the challenges when you have a child with disabilities is the special accommodations grants I don't know how much that plays into any of this I know that the process was redone it was redone last minute so a lot of families actually didn't find out that the deadline for summer funding came until after and also they have a lot of hard time accessing transportation so it seems to be families who might qualify for family support who might get that funding so they could be eligible to go to child care then can't get their child to child care because there isn't transportation the funding is very limited to child care resource and also same with the special accommodations if you have a child with special needs that might be a support in a program is there any conversation with any of this around helping families with the affordability of that piece yes so I don't want to get go too far to this rabbit hole because those are two very complex issues both of those are children's integrated services services so they're not child care services and they're not entitlements they both have a limited part of money that is available and the kids have to be eligible so certain kids are eligible for transportation because they can't get to child care but not all kids certain we have a process for the special accommodation grants which is a very small amount of money and that actually doesn't come out of child care resource or the region it comes directly out of the division and the child care provider applies on the parent's behalf so if folks are struggling with that they should reach out to Jill Perle who's our specialised child care actually her son is from Ireland so she usually helps any parents and then we do have and we've been working hard on specialised child care coordinators in every region who are supposed to be helping families through that so if you contact Jill it helps her know if there are any hiccups in particular regions where there are problems as a matter of fact this afternoon we just did a competition that we were required to do around our transportation providers and we are selecting this afternoon because our piece came in but we are expanding to a couple in the region so they're called regional we have regional specialised child care services coordinators who are part of the CIS team so for the kids who need a combination grant because they need help thriving in child care but that is a very small amount of money so we actually don't generally turn down qualified kids until very late in the year I just want to follow up so I actually worked for Children's Integrated Services EI and had a presentation by Wendy and the team at CCR and their information was a little bit different which was that the funding for transportation and for special accommodation grants actually is a big barrier for children or parents with disabilities in accessing affordable child care so it might be worth looking into some of that as an account where is that kind of gap coming and how do they access or find out about these coordinators because I have two children with special needs and I've never heard of that CCR actually is the host for the coordinator so we should talk about that a little bit thank you but I'm happy to take information from you our CIS director is having a baby as we speak so she's out for a little bit but the team is there and available and they can talk to you about that and I'm sure it would be a great thing to have Morgan come in after October and she can talk she could bring Jill and talk about special care it really is an important topic because it's how kids who have special needs can go to child care and do well Wendy Lashapow is another great person who has a lot of information and insight into children with special needs and their family supports as well as for families with disabilities who have a parent who has a need she's the one who really supports their children okay so thank you for your questions but that is an issue that's important to talk about so just in terms of who gets assistance from the program some children and families have categorical eligibility kids in protective services, kids in the reach up they have categorical eligibility children from six weeks to 13 years or if kids have special needs they could get assistance until they're 19 families with income at or below 300% on the federal poverty level and parents need a service need and this just shows you what the service needs are and how they're distributed this is fairly consistent with last year it's not terribly different there was a slight drop in protective services which we always like to see but protective services have spiked in recent years and the total is slightly less but I'll tell you in a few minutes so this is sort of who is participating in the program and you'll see there is a large number of families who are employed a few less in training and education now there may be families who work part-time and get full-time childcare because they're also in training and education this data really shows their primary services so this is unduplicated this is unduplicated yes total number of families which is a little less than the total number of kids and that's the unduplicated count of their service so a good news bag there's a slide here total is the number of families that's the number of families that's the number of families that's the number of families and do you have any children on it it's a little over 8,000 I think our average is 1.2 children well those are numbers as well when we talk about the changes in a couple of minutes you'll hear something important about families with more than one child so this slide actually shows you something that some of these changes were designed to intersect with you can see here over time so this is our number of children and the average number of children in 2018 and 2019 you can see that our average number of children is declining now more of our kids are in high quality care which is a good news piece and it's what many of our policies were designed but we have less children participating and what we believe after a great deal of analysis of the program is that that's because the cost sharing for families with less than 100% benefit has been burdensome and many families are opting to do something different about child care cobbling stuff together with relatives using care whatever they can do that they can afford so the changes that the legislature supported this year and the change that we're trying to move toward was really designed around reducing the burden of co-payments on families so that families would use the program and participate in higher quality care I just wanted to clarify clarifying questions does this take into account the population demographics of children actually declining in our population so we have low birth rate lower K-12 because the number might actually be declining that's because the overall number in our population is declining which wouldn't actually be a decline in participation rate these are just the numbers of the kids participating in PCFAC are only about a quarter of the kids in the regulated care so that is not the whole population of kids under 6 these are only the kids participating and the families and the income levels that are not the people who are not here anymore so if you look at kids in poverty that hasn't been decreasing as much as overall number of kids and this really is more relevant for kids or approaching poverty it could impact that I'm not quite sure how to analyze that whether we get that question a lot but because it's not an entitlement it's not a total population and we're still seeing all the population who could participate at 100% of benefit which is 100% of poverty yes, I think we've pretty much saturated our market those very low income kids are participating on the scale we see less and less participation of the total population that would be eligible so we think that has something to do with co-pays it will be interesting to see with the changes that were made this year if that changes and that's probably how we we have to do it by income bracket to analyze it and so and it's 1 for 25% it's about 20-25% of all kids in regulated health care now that's only 50% or 60% of all kids in those 8 groups it's only a portion of the population but that's a great question and often gets asked that is worth analysis so that was something we spent a lot of time analyzing when we put forth some of the proposals we did this is just information about dollars spent some of the things I heard you talking about previously is you will see that in 19, even though our total number of kids declined or at least stayed stable our expenses went up and that's because we made some changes mid-year particularly around kids and protective services we had always paid all of the co-payment for kids who are foster kids because essentially DCF is the parent so we paid the provider rate that was a problem for kids going into reunifying with their families it was a problem for kids who were in what they call conditional cases where the court had assigned a kid to somebody else that wasn't their parent and those kids weren't getting their co-pays paid so in order to try to increase stability and make sure that people were willing to take these kids that are involved in protective services who are often some of our most difficult we made a policy change to pay the provider's rate for any child with a protective service need and it has indeed begun opening more slots for them so that's kind of good news and it helps the kids stabilize a child's care Did that include a kinship placement? If it's through DCF so it's if it's not a child who's in our protective services system we would consider the income of the kin but if they're in protective services we no longer consider that all of those kids get they get 100% benefit which they always got but we also pay the provider's rate don't think it's me didn't we also make a change in the infant population? we also increase the infant population so that's important to know what surprised us was that it was a long time to impact in the first in the early months that we thought that would impact right away and it didn't seem to I think perhaps more providers are taking more of the DCF infant population because then after January we really did begin to see that rolling out so the thing that's tricky about childcare is it doesn't always, sometimes it takes a while for the policies to actually cost the money that you estimate them and we'll be watching that pretty closely this year though we've never done what we did this year in terms of combining both a rate increase or we haven't in 10 years combined a rate increase with an eligibility increase so we think that's going to have more of an impact but we'll be waiting to see and how will we be reaching those families who are in unregulated care or not in care at all so that they know about the changes so we will be marketing, we've done some of the things we did towards the tail end of the race to the top grant was we put together some marketing materials and some marketing campaigns both for STARS and for CCFAP so we'll be doing more marketing of CCFAP as well and will that also involve partnering with schools because oftentimes providers and schools often will be who refers to families and all of those community childcare support agencies of which CCR is one also have a responsibility to do recruitment and information and referral there is a lot in the new federal law about family information so we have more on our website and that's why we're doing some of this marketing stuff to try to make sure families know about it and that they know that they should come take a look again if they had looked before and I'm just wondering I'm presuming since we're all agency services but that we utilize the health department and the health agents visiting and all of that kind of stuff and help me grow also is a great resource for families families looking for childcare they know where to refer them to or how to help them think about what might be a good match for them Does anybody help anybody that might need help with the paperwork for the process I know sometimes it can be a bit of hoops the community childcare support agencies are supposed to help families who are stressed so you can go into one of the agencies though our eligibility is not done by the state it's done by agencies in the community so that families could actually go in and get help with their paperwork you can submit online you can require a face to face you can do it online you can do it by now but if you need to go in or families who speak the first languages in English can go in and get support so yes that's available throughout the state I just wanted to ask you some questions about the marketing so we've got new investments and new changes coming is it was or do you have an opportunity to increase your marketing well I mean our marketing budget is part of our general operating cost so it's our website or the things we produce we don't spend significant amounts of money on it I won't tell you but we use the stuff that's available to us so we actually have increased a little bit because we can use some of our CCDF quality money around this we've bought like front porch forum pieces things that we think families participate in more so FSD has always had a subscription to do to look for foster families and we used to borrow it every few but we're getting our own we also was dragged kicking and screaming into social media so we now have a facebook page and are sort of trying to use some of the new media around getting the word out to folks both on the repeating child care providers and letting parents know what's happening what Katie was mentioning too that sometimes in some other state things there was a lot of great things that were happening and opportunities that are there and then we're we don't fund enough to be able to get the word out and really our community partners are great at that sometimes we produce materials that then they can use right the recruitment materials that we produced are being used all around the state by BDF councils by community child care support agencies by everyone as well as by us so this is the fund new investments in 20 about 5.8 million dollars of additional funded was appropriated for CCFAP itself we did three new things with that those infant toddler rates in 2017 which is our most recent market rate survey there will be a market rate survey we'll collect the data in October and we'll be publishing somewhere between January and February of what 2019 looks like for rates that may change some of our estimates I'm going to show you for the future but that's at least 2017 the infants and toddlers are current then what we did was we adjusted the income guidelines to align with the new federal poverty levels I'll tell you what I am eternally grateful for that went into permanent law was that we will now be adjusting those automatically every year which we had asked for for many many years so that we didn't have to keep going to ask and we never could get that approved and it flew through so we are very grateful for that because if you wait too long it costs a lot of money if you do it regularly you can usually factor it into your budget and it will happen annually now this year it was a little more expensive than usual because many families had sort of reached a threshold where they were getting more benefits so all of this is very good news for families because that has sort of a small impact on their benefits but there are a lot of families who are seeing big impacts this year and then we changed the income guidelines so I'm going to show you that a little bit more in detail but if you look at the income guidelines which is this one and there's an orange line so I can so these families who are now getting 95% of a benefit which means 95% of the rate you pay we're getting 85% so that their benefit increased by 10% these families and then all the families in between because we adjusted the scale get a little bit more these families who are getting 75% I want to make sure I'm doing the exact right number because I looked at it we're getting 60% so their benefit is increased by 15% which is quite significant to many of these and that's for each child in the family because right now it's a per child benefit so for each child in the family and these families here that are now at 50% were at 15% so that's a huge increase in benefit for those families and then all the families who are a little more than that they were all at 10 and now they're all you know now we sort of scale that out some more so this is a huge and really unprecedented unprecedented in 10 years impact on families co-pays I remember the unspent funds from past years worth those in part as a result of higher income families just not wanting to bother with the paperwork because we're not sometimes we believe that too low and so this should help we think this will help with that that's exactly right so that's a significant change that will really help families and I'm going to show you some families in a minute so you can actually see that impact and then we put the school age and preschool rates which were still back in 2008 with a 3% bump they got up to 2014 which is also significant and so we are hearing from providers this just happened over last weekend so all of my staff is busy folding certificates to send people just do it in all their spare time because that's still so families will be seeing that but their providers know it immediately from the system and will be sharing that with them and we've already begun hearing from providers who are really excited about this I was just going to say my way of feedback which you probably heard the other day as well at the future's meeting the providers that were in the room were really excited so I actually gave you there's a lot of detail about these changes on our website for providers who are interested in it so I gave you that link to give you what I can tell you is 2,000 families 2,800 children will get a higher percent of CCFAP and over 1,500 families and in addition to that 1,500 families who are preschool school age will also get the rate increase and the percent benefit so it's going to be a really big bump for the families so I'm going to move quickly into the redesign so I can tell you about it there's a bunch of reasons that CCB worked with the administration to propose this redesign one was the underutilization problem also the feds were not happy with our sliding fee scale so we've been having a conversation with them about that and actually it's the one part of the non-compliant state in the nation except for that one area of non-compliance and so we were trying to think about what we could do differently many champions for change some of you have participated in the groups that have examined this the Blue Ribbon Commission Billing Vermont's future from the Child Up the Think Tank had all been recommending significant changes to CCFAP and it fits all the governor's priorities and we knew there was an opportunity to invest in it so we really sort of went to work and said how would we solve all of these problems and we came up with a totally new plan right now when we talked about we've kind of flipped the system so what happens now is we give the family a percent of benefit a percent of our rate and then they essentially pay the rest so they're you know we put our money in and then they sort of backfill the cost is we're kind of flipping that and we're creating a flat and I'm going to jump a slide a little bit so you can see it and then I'll go back families will pay a flat co-payment based on affordability for their family and we did examine every index we could federal poverty level living wage data I think there were like three or four we looked at they actually weren't that different in impact on the family so we decided to stick with the federal poverty level because it's what the other benefit programs use and they were a little bit consistent so based on the families again size and income they would be assigned what they have to pay as their share that's all they pay for all of their children if you have two kids so we know sometimes that families may have two children a school-aged child and a younger child and they may not be using school-aged care because they can't afford both so in case you would not get additional co-pay because you have additional children you pay what you can afford and then you would pay the rest so we've kind of flipped that so that's a very significant change for families that you will see so I'm looking at that slide monthly probably 200% federal poverty level I have three children I'm going to pay $50 for all three per $50 a week for all three not per child totally so we think that it doesn't matter it's based on your income now your family size impacts your assessment because family size and income are part of the eligibility assessment but you don't have any more money to pay for the more child because you have more kids so that's that's a huge we think that's important yeah it's exciting the co-pay will be assessed at the youngest child first but it doesn't change if you have more than one kid we stop using that percent of our rate as the benefit which the feds are super happy about and have already approved and then we would pay the provider's reported rate again based on the age of the child and the schedule after the co-pay it will be a capped rate we will maintain tiered rates one star, two star, three star, four star, five star based on the market rate survey and the provider's stars we would have if you charge over what our five star rate is you might not get your full rate but you would get the five star rate you would get the five star rate so that we think is a pretty big change is a good change too this is the income guidelines these are the rate caps these are again based on the 2017 market rate survey so these would likely change because the plan is to try to stay current but this is based on 2017 and the estimates are based on 2017 until we find out with 2019 so you won't find out with 2019 until once more in session did you say January February comes out? yes before the budget? no and in our original plan I don't know if this is changing in our original plan we had not proposed a change between year one and year two we had proposed a change in year one that would be maintained till the big change so the trick of this however though is that our current system cannot manage this plan so people got really excited about it but we can't actually do it in the system that we have we have to really tear the system up and recreate it now the good news about that is our system is 16 years old it's also the youngest system in the department but when you say system you mean? which is the bright futures and trainings the technology system that runs really everything for us that's why you get all this data it's licensing it's provider credentials it's subsidy it's all of that right so that system has to be rebuilt to accommodate these changes and thank you you gave us a million dollars to get started on that process which has made ADS and our departments take that very seriously and we will be reporting to you on those plans when we come back in January but we're working really hard on moving that forward so that we can do these changes so I just want to show you quickly why this matters so these are three families let me tell you who the families are family number one the one all the way over here is actually a family of three at 100% of poverty so that could be a single parent on reach up with two kids an infant and a preschooler that's our center that parent still has a copaint and then the second family and that's a family at 100% so even at 100% that's because of rates I might suggest that you stick with one family and go through the now then I think I'll pick the middle family because that's a family of three that's a family of three with a single parent that earns $15 an hour which is only about $31,000 a year a little bit more than that currently that's one of those families that had a 60% benefit for each child the infant and the preschooler in full time care in the center and you can see that their weekly cost sharing is $250 on that income right so this is now I'm so happy to be able to say this is now like you were saying this would be if this passes this is actually now that family has shaped over $100 off of their okay for that middle family and so if you look at the other two you will see the differences for both of them really significant even this year and this is what we're calling the data payment so when we flip the system now you'll see our co-pays are at the bottom but there's no co-payment for families at 100% of federal poverty level this family this single parent of $50 an hour is only paying $25 a week and even for the family of four with two parents they're only paying $75 a week so they're much more likely to use the systems than they would otherwise and we did factor into we actually did a five year plan where we factored in more children coming in in the final years we didn't factor in a lot of new kids in the first couple of years because we think it takes time for families to realize what the change is so it might escalate faster than we imagined and so this is my last slide that means going to need for money so just to let everyone know I don't know I mean this is what your plan is but it would be helpful to know what it would take to get the 14 to get up to 19.5 17 we always do we always do a budget pressure around rates so we'll be producing that that's a regular thing but we can do some more and we'll have to re-look at these as well so what we estimated was that it would take us about 18 months to revamp the system ABS is not blanching too much at that and we'll probably run with contractors which is good news and so our plan would be to implement the redesign on someone on the federal fiscal year we have a new state plan that would be coming in at that time what we promised the feds is that we'll come into compliance by the new state plan which is October 1st of 2021 so that means that that's what we would expect to be putting the redesign in and they've accepted that corrective action plan so right now that's the road we're headed down with them as well as with support from the wonderful legislature and the administration so we're kind of excited okay thank you I know this was a lot of information it was helpful it would be great to have to talk more about kids with special needs because that's an important part of the overall system okay thank you you're welcome to stay but I know you're busy I have to score all my transportation for this afternoon so you know I don't know if we should indicate the changes I know I want to personally thank you publicly for the many years of guiding this program forward and the changes that have been made and the partnership that we had in really advocating for children and families thank you it's been really fun the support all of you have provided is remarkable thank you don't stay in touch I know you're saying that but stay in touch she's available for hiring commercial thank you Erin come on up thank you for your patience of course you know us I do and I love the iPad great good morning my name is Erin Olligan and I am the director of the Reach Up program thank you so much for having me I'm really excited to be here today to talk with you about the projects that have been happening in Reach Up over the last year or so so just to kind of give a little bit of background and framing for the program and the size of the caseloads the caseloads have continued to decrease since 2013 and so that has enabled us to be able to provide a little more intensive case management for participants that are projected to continue to decline they will plateau most likely at a certain point but as for now they are declining not quite as rapidly as they had been in the previous years but they are still going down so that's really primarily due to the economy but then also due to the work I believe of the case managers in helping care this is number of families correct this is the number of families like there aren't families on wait lists or anything correct PSE PSE is also included in there oh sorry post-secondary education so in August of 2019 we're of course very excited and thankful that the legislature approved an increase in the benefit which is the first time since 2004 that the reach-up benefit has changed so this is really a big deal for us it's really a significant for the families that we serve so for a family of three just a couple of examples here outside of Chittenden County currently they're getting approximately $684 if they don't have any other income that's per month and beginning in August of 2019 this year they'll be getting $744 a month so we are grateful for that change still not a lot of money to live on clearly but any little bit does definitely help so this is the average does that reduce their other benefit levels that it does reduce a little bit their three squares benefit it's approximately a 3 to 1 comparison so for every $3 in addition that they get from another source it's about a dollar decrease in their three squares benefit so reach ahead and that's our transitional benefits program that's when somebody closes their reach up closes and they go on to reach ahead this program has been the numbers are decreasing a little bit in the last couple of years but the percentage of the case load is remaining stable so we know that people are still going to work from reach up and so this is really encouraging and also we met our work participation rate in 2018 and about 80% of our work participation rate is due to reach ahead due to folks going to work and that is our federal performance measure if you will measure that the federal government the only measure actually that they look at when evaluating our program I just got a question so I missed the beginning so you said that the 478 is 100% I may have this wrong just to restate it again sure so the 478 is the number of families who are on reach ahead which is our transitional benefits program so all of these families are working and they're meeting what would have been their work requirement if they were in the reach up program it's just that 100% I caught that part I think maybe it was the 80% oh so the percentage of the total case load including all reach up post secondary education who are on reach ahead has remained the same even though the numbers have decreased a little bit but our overall case load is also decreasing and you may also be thinking of the 80% number that I rattled off and that is because almost 80% of what comprises our work participation rate which is our measure for the federal government in order to receive our grant is comprised of reach ahead and so they, these families help us to meet our work participation rate work participation rate has come under a lot of scrutiny because of what activities it kind of measures and so I do think that's important to note because that's only one measure and that's only what the federal government measures us against so it's important that we meet it and we don't get fiscal sanctions but at the same time we're always looking to do what's right for that individual family so I'll try to be quiet so so the employment here would be my question so we've got 100 people who are great, they're all employed but do you look at what the job is and the wage is a little wage is it going to sustain them the annual report is online it has more detailed information about that we do know that the wages have increased in the last couple of years the average wage has increased I think by about 30% over the last couple years so that's encouraging but we do know that they tend to be in fairly low wage and then I know your job is I just remember from years before it's the post-secondary education piece that has the best results in terms of increasing wage rates you weren't able to see the members participating in that program well they're higher than they have been in the last couple of years so our work participation rate, according to the feds where are we in terms of meeting that and not being sanctioned we have met it for the last four years, we just got notification that we met it again for 2018 and the other important thing about meeting the work participation rate is that it gives us more freedom to be able, a little more slack, to be able to work with families in the way that's most important for them and the way that's actually going to help them move forward so a family may not be ready to meet their work requirement at any given moment but if we invest in them at where they are at that given moment and are able to help them set those meaningful goals then we see them moving on to employment and so we think that's just important to note and I'll talk a little bit more about what we're doing to help families meet their goals so these are some of the partnerships that we've had in the last year we've been working really closely with Mathematica Policy Research Organization to work on really looking at the program in general doing some strategic planning we are completely revamping our assessment process and then the process of revamping the family development plan which is the families plan for what they're going to do to move towards employment and then also the center budget and policy priorities has, this actually is a really interesting website if you're interested in research and building better programs which has a lot of information about how to improve program participation and improve results and outcomes for families participating in programs we're also working and so the center for budget and policy priorities notes three things that are kind of the key hallmarks of the science informed approach which is what we are really trying to do within ReachUp because this is based on research what actually works to help people move forward and so those three things are to create and support responsive relationships to strengthen core life skills and to reduce sources of stress responsive relationships two to strengthen core life skills and three to reduce sources of stress so there is a lot of research out there from the strengthening families framework to the harvard center on the developing child and numerous other research that's been done to support these kind of key hallmarks and then in addition to the oh, yeah, thank you that's with family members within the family unit or with extended family or social connections I think I'll be above, yeah and then in addition to these organizations we're also working with the office of family assistance so that's our government oversight organization and they're providing us with technical assistance to assess ReachUp as a trauma informed program so they're going to go through a lengthy assessment with us to help us determine what do we need to do to improve to truly become a trauma informed program what things do we need to change and new rules and our policies and so forth and then also they're going to be providing extensive training to our staff on what trauma informed means and what that means in terms of working with families so one of the first things we did with Mathematica which we felt was really important as kind of to lay the ground work was to develop a mission and this was done as a collaborative process with staff and participants and community partners all over the state so I personally visited every single all 12 districts in the state and this was about 18 months ago I think and we formalized the mission last summer and so the mission for ReachUp is that ReachUp joins families on their journey to overcome obstacles, explore opportunities improve their finances and reach their goals and what we came to was that it's really we really feel strongly that it is a needs to be a holistic program works with the entire family and that we walk with the families on a journey it's not about us telling people what they need to do it's about walking with them and supporting them on their journey and so we're using this mission to frame our strategic planning and our road mapping over the next year our overarching goal within ReachUp is to reduce intergenerational poverty we know that up to about 60% of families who are on ReachUp today we're on ReachUp as children and so our goal is to reduce the number of children who are in families receiving ReachUp today who will need it in the future we're also going to be repeating an intergenerational poverty study that was originally conducted in 2013 for ReachUp and we're going to be repeating that in the next year to see if it was it was by our contractor Leslie Black Plumo and it was a study on intergenerational poverty within ReachUp last year or year before in one year presentations to House Human Services I thought an extremely compelling table or maybe it was a chart showing how many people time out at the five year point and then come back within three months six months and within one year and I was just surprised and started by how many people wind up kind of back into me it was an indication of the number of folks experiencing intergenerational poverty and as great as the increase in benefits is and I know you've heard this from a lot of folks and you don't make the top level budget decisions and ultimately they get made in Appropriations Committees and by the General Assembly but the every year sweeping case flows into the general fund budget instead of reinvesting them in those families is really self-defeating and I think we can really change a lot of the families that are experiencing that intergenerational poverty by reinvesting those funds in a lot of ways that help those families including housing as an example and support services sorry for the so locks but John I need to say that you wouldn't be yourself I'll add your comment so can you say more about who's helping you with that so we are working through the Office of Family Assistance and they're providing PRTA technical assistance and they have contracted with a trauma expert through Rutgers University and she's going to be consulting with us to do that work environment and it's funding that's provided by the Office of Family Assistance so we're able to leverage that funding through our federal partners feel free to reach out to me I'm happy to talk more about it if you'd like so part of part of this kind of revamping both the assessment process and the family development plan process is using a goal oriented approach and this is an approach that is trauma informed and that has been shown through research to be highly effective in helping people to set and reach their goals so some of the main things that we need to look at are to ask people what's interesting to them what is meaningful to them what is the thing that at that given moment is most meaningful to them and then what is interesting to them just in general and then find routines that involve deliberate practice or specific skills helping to build executive functioning skills finding meaning and purpose in what they're doing and having hope that what they are doing will improve their circumstances and I think that that's one of the major shifts in what we're doing now in Reach Up from what has happened in the past because we don't just put people automatically into unpaid work sites anymore that's not necessarily something that's going to interest someone or help someone to gain the skills that will help move them forward it may be an appropriate thing for someone to do if it meets their interests and is meaningful and helps them to meet their goals and so that's what we're really trying to capitalize on to find out what is interesting and meaningful to people and then help them to find the opportunities to match those goals in that meeting so this is just a quick snapshot of our new assessment process although it's actually less of an assessment and more of a tool that helps people to establish their goals many of the families we're working with have been assessed to Kingdom Comp they have had so many assessments in so many different areas and what this really does is shifts to what is meaningful to you what here resonates with you the most and then we're going to help you set goals based on that what we are finding is that employment falls into place very naturally that almost everybody wants to work and people are at different places along in that journey and so our goal is to meet people where they are in that journey and to help them get to where they want to be what we have done with this is we've gone through a road test with Mathematica we've actually done tests with both participants and done surveys with both participants and with case managers to find out how is this working and what we're finding is that most case managers and participants felt that this process focused more on their goals it was respectful and asking them what was interesting and meaningful to them and they felt more motivated when they left the meeting to go and to you know follow through on the steps of their goals do you remember in that kind of testing process were there any experiences that might have shown families that had a really hard time with this when they identified that maybe they don't have the ability to achieve some of the goals or that there are so many goals that they are feeling overwhelmed is that something that you guys have before that's a great question and yes and I think it's really important to recognize that because it's a matter of finding out if somebody is really overwhelmed even with the word goal which we find sometimes is shifting the language so okay so we don't need to talk about specifically a goal but what would you like to accomplish between today and tomorrow and sometimes it's a matter of breaking it down into much smaller steps so that people find success with whatever it is that they determine that between today and tomorrow this is what I need to be able to do I have to get up and get my child to child care for example or and then building upon that and so so yeah that's a really good question Did you find people at a hard time checking out the box I need help? That was also something that we found sometimes yeah and so people are kind of all over the map on that some people appreciate being asked and others say like I don't want to have to ask for help and so that's where we are going back now and working with Mathematica on how can we approach using this tool in a way that's going to kind of work for as many people as possible so it may be a matter of kind of saying to people as we approach them with this you don't have to fill this out you know sometimes what key measures do is they actually just fold it over and they just look at the main categories and say like what kind of like resonates with you here today and then work from there other people prefer to have kind of something to work on so it's really just about it being an individualized process and it being another piece of paper that we need to track and you know so yeah it's about to be the language piece of it you know having somebody have to check off on all of those boxes that they need help maybe something about just a language that's more about collaborating and accessing help and admitting that they need to access help but maybe not having to check a box that says I need help in every category Let me just ask is the participant filling this out or it's the case worker because it's the participant or is it something they're doing together they're doing it together so either the participant is filling it out or they're just kind of looking at it together and sometimes they don't use it at all so it's really about a mindset shift more than anything with the case managers of starting with what's meaningful and then working backwards from there so they're using their skills and knowledge to assess the person at home to get that feedback as to whether what their focus will is on exactly and motivational so they get the program and they're told to fill it out on their own and then kind of the case manager works with them from there I have an 113 needs I do want to say how much approves of this I think it addresses the real underlying needs people whether they're financial trouble they need first is cash for the first day but the underlying issues here need to be addressed but also from the point of view of the politician who has a sort of a bridge between the public and the actual people do the actual work the constant resentment that I hear about and you often will it's not my fault that they've got themselves in the trouble they do have some complicity in their own fate why do my taxes and what I answer is yeah you're probably right I share your resentment to tell you the truth not that that settled what we're going to do about it and to have an answer to the what we've got to do about it I just want to follow up I think that was a really great point I do think there are a large number of people in Vermont living in situations that they did not make choices and they have found themselves whether they're living with a disability with a child or a health or whatever it is that do kind of in these same spots so it is sometimes important to so you need to I know that we're running a little bit over make sure that we forget that we were going to take a look at the dates to make sure where people were comfortable with what was thrown out there and Mike did you have something that you want to add I just thought it was we're not quite done we've got two minutes and then we'll go to that then people need to be respectful for your time if I don't understand is the air going to be in this? yes but if people need to go I totally understand so one of our other strategies is bringing the mental health outreach from others the moms partnership to Vermont we are really really excited and honored that we were chosen by Yale University to replicate this research based intervention in the Chittin County area so this brings mental health services in a cohort model and so the purpose is to reduce stress in mothers with any age child and one of the biggest factors that makes the biggest difference is that there is a mom with lived experience embedded in the program and that's a paid position so right now we're piloting this with Howard Center and we know that mental health addressing mental health needs is one way to help interrupt intergenerational poverty obviously as you all know intergenerational poverty is extremely complex and so this isn't the magic tool but it is one thing that can help and so we are definitely very excited about that and these I actually meant to put these for results from the New Haven project because ours hasn't started yet so we don't have our own results were due to implement in January of this year are these available online I don't think we get this this is a first hand that it was underneath the file so you can help it so just a few of the outcomes that they have already seen in implementing this program is that 78% of moms adhere to the treatment and so that's compared to 40% nationally it's a huge difference and that's having this peers exactly a peer 76% of moms experience a decrease in depressive symptoms and that's compared to the average experience only 48% drop in depressive symptoms 67% decrease in stress the children of moms attend six more days of school per year so it has even implications for the children in these families and that is again one of the reasons why we are really excited about this program because it is truly a two-generational program and then even the hours of week that people are becoming employed is increasing with participation how long is the program? it's only an eight-week program so it's eight weeks I believe it's an hour and a half each week it's in community hubs so there will be several different places where it's happening around Chittenden County to be able to come to areas where moms typically congregate so in New Haven what they did was they actually set up at grocery stores and moms came there and also the purpose is to kind of destigmatize mental health and depression and leaving them in poverty is incredibly stressful and so anything that we can do to be able to help moms address this is really critical so we're just starting this off and it's one? yes so we have an agreement with Howard Center but we'll have groups running at the same time all around Chittenden County starting in January or February so we're in the implementation phase right now so any transportation for people? yes we'll provide transportation if they need it so here is any of what you've been talking about because it sounds like it even the budget bears the case management review and community engagement the review of case management that's due in October is this part of what you're doing now or what you're talking about? yes so this is a program another pilot program however we need to stop calling it pilot and figure out a way to expand to the rest of the state so we are working in conjunction with Economic Opportunity and with two community action organizations CDOEO and Capstone we call the Financial Empowering Program it provides financial coaching to help families build assets and as you know building assets is also crucial for interrupting poverty and so these actually are before and after before we made some big changes to the program that we're science informed and so before we made these changes you can see the difference in the number of participants we have the jump was huge once we made some of these changes so what we did was we include we increased the demographic that we offered the program to we did some marketing that was informed by participants and asked them what is working what is not working we restructured the incentives so it's a highly incentivized program for people to earn incentives as they set financial goals and so you can see that the financial incentives increase quite a bit as well so again it goes back to using the hallmarks of science and people have reported feeling decreased stress knowing that they have some money in the bank from these incentives that they've earned that they're able to take their kids you know to an activity and do something things together as families that they weren't able to do before and we know that increased money in a household even a little bit each year is tied to better outcomes for children in the future and so any bit of extra income that we can help families to achieve or provide that environment where they can do that is really crucial for us and I almost finally promised and so what we took from your time okay and so what in along with the mission we also developed a vision for the program and so the vision really is supposed to be pretty lofty and forward thinking and so our vision is that families will be empowered connected and thriving and if you kind of reflect upon some of the changes that have been made in the program this again is going back to hoping that this we will achieve that through these changes that we're making in the program we do have some opportunities for the future I think including two parents to be able to participate in the post-secondary education program is something that statutorily they're not allowed to do we would really like to know to see that also the childcare co-pay issue is incredibly encouraging and right now families even on reach up are paying sometimes $50 to $100 a week for childcare and when you see how much money they're actually bringing in I mean the state of scarcity is so extreme that it's hard to imagine honestly how you can pay for childcare and also try to participate in just life is there a further explanation of this pilot program that you're working on with the incentives and the goals if you go to our annual report there's more information on that there and I'm happy to provide any more information that you like absolutely where does the money come from for this oh great question so office of economic opportunity has been able to see some money for the financial coaching but that's going to have to change because the bucket that that's coming out of is not it's for training and initiatives is my understanding and so that initiative needs to we need to move to sustainability so we're really trying to think about how to make that happen the incentives come from reach up through the support services budget you're welcome and just some other opportunities and things to think about of course housing only 27% of our families are receiving any type of subsidized housing which means that the remainder of those families are trying to get by either by doubling up they're precariously housed they're paying way more in their rent than is even remotely affordable so just the the dire need for actual housing is 25% received out of the 100% that could correct yes they would all be financially eligible and then transportation we're really trying to focus on increasing car ownership and again research shows that car ownership is one of the biggest factors in economic stability and we all know that in a state especially like this we're very limited access to public transportation not to mention being able to get your kids to various things at various times is incredibly important so those are just some opportunities to think about thank you very much I really appreciate the time to come to talk to you all I'm always happy to come back and this is the link for the annual report but I'm also happy to send it to you you're welcome so if you walk away we've made some improvements but going further we still need to work on transportation ownership and housing that's the two and cash okay cash okay I wanted to list coaches re-investing in families that instead of sweeping caseload savings re-investing in families we actually put that language one year in the budget but I don't know how much oh the caseload savings you know that alright thank you you're welcome yes you are excuseless anybody has any questions I have a question that's kind of a big question