 Ted Fisher from the AOA. Hi. Can folks hear me? Yes, we can. My apologies. My multiple unmute buttons are always my undoing. Good afternoon for the record. Ted Fisher from the Vermont Agency of Education and the Agencies Director of Communications and Legislative Affairs also lead the agency's COVID-19 response team. And I'm very glad to be with you on a snowy Friday afternoon in spring. I'm happy to dive right into my update. It's a little bit light today, but I'm happy to go ahead and give that update if that works for you, Madam Chair. Okay, great. And I also just want to hold that one question about the wellness group at the end. Absolutely. I can answer that now. And I did exchange some emails with Representative James yesterday afternoon. I still need to connect with Secretary French about this. We actually submitted a legislative report yesterday afternoon in regards to ongoing work on comprehensive health education and sexual health education. As part of these conversations over the past couple of sessions with most of the House human services, we did realize that this wellness council has been in abeyance for some time and we are interested in getting it being vigorated. But I need to check in specifically with regard to the question of adding this group. And I think maybe we can give an update on next week. I don't want to speak for the Secretary without checking in with him, but maybe we can check in and give you a little bit more of an update about what we're looking at there. Okay, I would imagine that's probably going to go into the draft on Tuesday. So if you don't want it, we're going to need to know Tuesday. Monday would be in this area. Okay. Yeah, we saw I'm hoping to connect with him about this on Monday. In the meantime, I recommend folks take a look at the legislative report that we just submitted. It does detail the work specifically done around sexual health education. Over the past two years working with the health department and a range of stakeholders, I don't want to foreshadow because like I said, we're still working on it internally, but we see some synergistic opportunities here as well for some of the work we've done, specifically with regard to this aspect of health education. But also, there are plenty of other including child nutrition areas of wellness that are that are very important. So sorry to not have more of an update, but we'll please should be able to give you some update fairly soon and speak specifically to the question of the membership. Right. So all right with that. Your section. I know Representative James was doing it, but Representative Austin, that's your section of the bill too. So please stay connected. Okay. Okay, thank you. Go ahead. Okay, awesome. Again, for the record, Ted Fisher from Manay-Unsive Education. Thank you for the opportunity to provide a weekly situation report on the pandemic as it impacts education in Vermont. This is a similar briefing to one that Secretary French provides on a weekly basis to Vermont superintendents. After a short oral briefing, I'll do my best to answer questions related to AOE's response and recovery efforts. If there's something I cannot answer, we'll do our best to follow up post-breathing or provide more information at our next status update. And I know you are also scheduled to hear from Deputy Secretary Boucher about recovery today. Unfortunately, with the long floor time her calendar, she wasn't able to move things around this afternoon, so we're working to get her scheduled then next week to speak to you about recovery. So I don't have any specific status updates I can provide today on that, but I do know she's looking forward to speaking with you and I know there is interest from folks on that. So apologies that we can't get that in today. Thank you. So I'll just dive into the COVID-19 context. We're seeing case counts still at a plateau. We're seeing a seven-day average of around 100 cases a day. There is a downward trend, sort of a less steep downward trend than when we saw earlier in the spring. We're still seeing pretty significant activity in Chittin, Orleans, and Rutland counties. And Vermont, generally speaking, is still doing a lot of testing. We're one of the top performers in states on a per capita basis. And we're seeing a really, at this point, seeing a really low test positivity rate, which is that really important number. It's currently 1.8 percent, and it's one of the lowest in the country, and we're doing very well by comparison to some of other New England states there. New Hampshire is 5.7 percent. New York is 3.1. Connecticut 3.6. Maine is 2.7. And Massachusetts is 2.4. So that's good news in terms of the general community spread. We are seeing some case counts in the 20 to 29 age group declining a bit in the last seven days, but it's still disproportionately high to other age groups. And the trend, as I've mentioned over a couple of weeks, the trend continues to drop as older Romaners continue to be vaccinated. We still continue to see the average age of cases decline. We're also still continuing to see a pretty high rate of daily cases in schools, with 15 to 20 new reports approximately each day. And this is really, at this point, associated with the transmission levels in the communities that are reporting. We're working with the Alts Department. We actually just released a memo in the last few moments to schools. We're working to clarify some questions about contact tracing and other requirements as a result of our strong and healthy start. We're hearing lots of challenges, but we're also, schools are doing some things that are a little bit more than required in terms of the contact tracing. So we're working with the Alts Department to get that sort of streamlined and clarify what the roles and expectations are as we continue to see these high case numbers. We're anticipating that it's going to continue to be a busy couple of weeks. That's bit borne out since from our previous projection. And then we'll, as we see, as we get into later in the month, we expect vaccination to bring case counts down and make the contact tracing and outbreak response more manageable. And the modeling, as I just sort of alluded to, still points that case counts will drop at the end of the month when the month's vaccination rate approaches 60%. It's currently around 50%. I don't have a lot of information, unfortunately, about the Janssen delay. As I'm sure you've seen, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine has been delayed. It's looking like it will last around another week. And so the Health Department has canceled some vaccine appointments for the Johnson and Johnson. It is still the lowest number of vaccines of the three that we give. We have the lowest number of doses there. So we're still seeing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines increase, which is very good. We actually just, the governor just announced that the press conference and we just sent some information to schools. Very exciting news starting tomorrow at 10 a.m. Vermonters age 16, 17 and 18 will be able to register for vaccines. There's a little bit of distinction here. So I'm actually going to pull up the email just to make sure I don't get anything wrong. 16 and 17 year olds will be able to register for the Pfizer vaccine. That's the only vaccine for which there's an emergency use authorization, excuse me, for the folks in the 16 and 17 age group. So folks will be able to register starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow in the state's TBRS system or make appointments through pharmacies. They need parent and guardian permission if they're minors. So for some folks, for example, going to Walgreens or kidney drugs, the parent and guardian must accompany the 16 or 17 year old to the appointment to provide consent, folks registering through the state's registration system via the health department website or registering at CVS. The parent has to provide consent at the point of registration on their online system. We're very excited about this because hopefully we'll allow some Vermonters who are students, high school students to sign up and get vaccine appointments as soon as possible. Certainly before we get into the end of the year, which will only help with keeping folks safe in school and allowing us to continue with more in-person instruction. And we're also very excited about this as we get closer to end of the year graduations, those sort of celebrations. Just a quick, quick, you said starting tomorrow. I thought it was actually starting Monday. Yes. So this is a change. So all Vermonters age 16 plus will be able to register starting on Monday at 6 a.m. What has changed and was announced today is that only Vermonters between 16 and 18 will be able to register starting on Saturday. The idea is to allow them to get into the system, register for some appointments sooner rather than later to receive the Pfizer vaccine if they're 16 or 17. 18-year-olds can receive both Pfizer and Moderna with the idea that we can start to get some of our high school student populations vaccinated as soon as possible. So that is the new change. That's the announcement. Appreciate that clarification, Representative Conlon. My apologies. So we're in the process of considering and planning for ongoing surveillance testing, both for unvaccinated staff and in the future for students in the spring into summer and into the fall of next year. I don't have details on how this looks yet because we're still trying to put the program together, but we're hoping to use this as part of her ongoing protective measures for schools. I'll go over a couple of additional thoughts about what we might be looking at as we get into the summer and fall in a few moments. Just turning briefly to guidance, the Vermont Forward Plan, which the governor announced last week, lays out our trajectory to the 4th of July. We are seeing a couple of other states move more quickly. New Hampshire is saying they'll be removing all restrictions, including the mask mandate prior to Memorial Day. The governor has extended his state of emergency as well, and at this point, we're not sure how long this will last, whether or not it will still be in the place in the fall. But he does this on a 30-day rolling basis as the need requires. Just so in terms of the fall, we're hopeful. It's way too soon to say what exactly the fall will be like. We are getting questions about it, but we are hopeful that we'll get back to in-person instruction with sort of yet to be determined safety precautions in place. These good examples, for example, include mask day, or the surveillance testing I just referenced. And of course, schools will be working on education recovery, and you're going to get a more thorough briefing from Deputy Secretary Boucher on that. So there probably will be some level of precautions on what we think of internally in our responses, the COVID response, so ongoing safety precautions, safety and health precautions, but really an increased focus on the education recovery activities. The last thing is that we're not sure about what the vaccine requirements will be. You may have seen some national reporting on this in terms of whether or not the emergency use, that's the second time I've done that today. The emergency use authorizations will be extended to younger folks. They may go down even as well as 12 in the near future, but we don't have any information about what that might happen. But it could, something like that could happen in time for the fall, and so that would be something that we could take into consideration when we're doing fall planning. I will just note, I did go over this fairly thoroughly last week, I believe, but I will note that our current safety and health guidance is in effect until the end of the school year. We are working on safety and health guidance for summer programs, including programs for summer nutrition. We do a lot of summer nutrition activities in the summer, and then once we get through into that and have a better idea of what the fall's going to look like, that's what we will be determining what is necessary for the fall. That concludes my formal update. Thank you. Representative James, you had a question? Ted, did you say when the, what's the date now for the state of emergency? So the governor extended it, I honestly, my notes just say that he extended it for 30 days. I would have to look, I can try and do that in real time very quickly, but he extended it for 30 days from this date. He usually extends it right around the time it's about to expire, so I would assume that it's extended into the middle of May, but I'm going to just very quickly check his website because usually they update fairly. Thank you. And if not, I can find it there too. So he, well, they have not updated their website, but on March 15th, he extended it to April 15th, and he announced this morning that he's extended it until May 15th for 30 days. So my assumption is that it would go until May 15th, and then at that point, there'll be a decision about whether it will be extended further. Questions? Representative Brown? Oh, thank you so much. I had, I just wanted to make sure I wrote, I made my notes correctly. So starting, you said starting tomorrow, students 16 to 18 are able to register. Is there a particular go live time, you know, 10 o'clock, 8 o'clock in the morning? It's 10 a.m. I will make sure that I actually forward this email to Jesse and to, and to represent a chair web to distribute to folks because I know many folks may want to communicate that to, to, to your, your stakeholder groups. So I will forward along the email that we put out this afternoon. If you could just keep it quiet until 10, 10 on Saturday, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Any other questions? Protect Fisher. Thank you. Just to keep you abreast of what your house education community is doing. We passed out S16, excuse me, S16 that will be on notice on Tuesday and will go to appropriations. That's the one that's marked in exclusionary discipline that we're going to be changing the title of that as well. S115, that has one of the issues that we just talked about. We're hoping to have that, the current plan is to have that ready to pass out to vote on Tuesday. So we'll just need that last little bit of information, I think, related to wellness. And we're also with that last other piece of information on the E finance group. So, excuse me, your personal comment, has that has, has CFO seen that language? No, okay, no, I can, I can pass it by him. Yeah, okay. Okay. And so our anticipation is to pass, pass the, that bill out on Tuesday. And then we'll be working on reporting those bills and taking up S13 in earnest. The S14, S13 being waiting, S14 is a literacy bill that's up in house appropriations at the moment. There's some, we're working on that communication between house and Senate. The house bill used the three million more broadly and strategically at the agency, giving more discretion to the agency. The Senate wants to put the three million into a grant program. So we're trying to work on those issues to iron those out. I am in receipt of a memo from the commission, the secretary, French, that I will share momentarily with the committee, at least the detail, not the actual memo, but at least the detail. And I'm assuming we're going to, that the secretary will be able to get back to me on Monday so that we may get something that, that is ready to, to move. Because I think there's a great desire to get things moving on, on literacy. I know that the agency is building up for this anyway. I would assume you're, you're, you're working knowing this. He indicated to me he'll be in touch with you. He's working on something for you. Great. And then I think we have, have we gotten a specific response? I can't remember. The secretary was in on 13, right? Last week, the other day, he, he, he spoke with us for just a minute and before Professor Colby. So we'll be working on that as well. Representative Austin. Just, I think I had asked the last time you were in, if you could give us an update on summer school and kind of addressing loss of learning, how that's moving along? Absolutely. Secretary, Deputy Secretary Boucher was scheduled to cover that with you this morning. And I know we're trying to get that rescheduled for next week. I do believe she'd sent along a couple of links to the, to the committee that you may be able to review prior to her coming in. I appreciate that. Anything else? Okay. I'm just going to share some of the notes then I have about possible updates to how we might want to look at the S114. We'd love to have you stay if you'd like, but understand that you I unfortunately have to depart at, at, at two, but I'd be happy to hang out until then. I hope you all have a absolutely wonderful weekend. Okay. Thank you. Jesse, could you pull up the, the document that I sent to you? One of the challenges I think that we all felt, and it was certainly evident when I went up to talk to the Appropriations Committee about our bills, that some of the information was, they just felt was a little loose. And that was, had to do with the, they were struggling with the language in the work group that said the purpose of technical support for supervised reunions under this section of this act, and the contractor report of this act, that they'll be carrying out duties to address learning loss and improve literacy outcomes. Oh, sorry, wrong area. You can hang in there. I'm going to, yeah. They, we said that the, shall we change the contractor to provide technical assistance to SUs? And that would be things like recommending for how to use federal funds, evidence-based practices, professional development, policies, procedures, educational leadership. And I ended up contacting Secretary French to say, if there's $3 million, how would you want to use it? And this is the information that I got back that I thought was of interest. And we may want to consider incorporating into our bill. I am also considering that we would want to make language to make it such that grants could be available out of the $3 million to allow some of the money to be used for grants. But in our conversations, we felt that using all of it probably wasn't going to produce the results that we had hoped for. So I don't know if you can see this on the, send the email, but the goal here from these ideas is basically to create a more strategic process that would maximize the use of one-time federal COVID dollars to improve literacy, advance district capacity on implementing 173 block grants that are coming up, and to strengthen instructional systems statewide. So there's a possibility that I'm going to try to work on some language on that. You feel free to take a look at that document. The secretary also indicated that he would try to find a way to spend some language that might be able to get to what both of us want, all wanting the same thing, which is to make progress on literacy. He could probably take that down. Representative Austin? Where is that document? I can't. Could you just email it perhaps to everybody? I just, I can't, is it posted? I just, no, it's just my notes. She had emailed it to us, Representative Austin. It's in your legislative email. Okay, I got it. It was on Tuesday the 13th? No, it's today. It was today. Oh, so it was in the last hour. Oh, I don't have it. I think that may have just been to leadership, but I'm recording this now. Yeah. Yeah, she could just send it to everybody just to get an idea of the way that we had considered looking at it was how do we use the set-aside state funds to think of a broader perspective versus sending money to the districts that have a lot of money. Perhaps not precluding that based on the testimony that we had from the agency and from the education advocates. I'll be working on that over the weekend and hopefully we'll have that pulled together on Monday so that I can take it up to appropriations and to you. I don't have anything else. Anybody else? Can I just share one thing? Sure. I just felt like I was blindsided on Tuesday when we were just about to take a vote on S115. I guess that's how it happens, but it's just concerning to me. You spend months kind of looking at the language and looking at the word and looking at the intent and looking at the outcomes. I guess I'm wondering, is that kind of normal? I mean to kind of develop policy in 12 minutes? There's one response who's been here for a while. I guess I'm a little unclear. You just said we spent months working on the language and everything at a certain point. We do have to fish or cut bait with it. But I felt like the AOE came in and changed everything. You know, not the intent so much, but at least the funding. Are you talking about 115? Yes. Miss Linnea said Bill? No, no, I'm sorry. The literacy bill. Literacy bill. Yeah, I'm sorry. So I think the answer to that would be yes, that does happen, but especially at a time when you're trying to find a path forward between two houses with two different visions and an agency that's ultimately responsible. And so yeah, it can't happen because if one path is clearly blocked, then sometimes you got to be able to pivot quickly to another path that might work better. Okay. Thank you for letting me know that because I couldn't figure that out at all. No, it's not pretty sometimes. And time is of the essence most of the time. The time pressure makes it more difficult to do the work. Being remote adds a whole other factor. Our ability to pull a few people together. The secretary's walking through. We're not trying to schedule an appointment with them. You can grab Ledge Council quickly. You can run down to Ledge Council's office. The conditions are really, really very difficult, I would say. And it was particularly when there's a time crunch and there's a real desire to get something moved quickly. And the conditions are so complicated and the funding is so different. I just thought we were ready to vote on it. I thought the whole committee was on board. I certainly felt like there was nothing left on the table for me. And then it wasn't what I was playing on voting on. So it's just process, just understanding the process and how things work. And it was just really, I really felt blindsided by it. I was kind of couldn't figure out what was going on. Yeah. I think you were blindsided. Yes, Representative Harrison. General question. Most of all the work we've done and it's been handed over from the Senate has date specifics on it. What happens to these bills if they linger into January next year? What happens to all the dates? Sometimes, so sometimes you'll, so let's say we sent what, let's say we sent our construction bill over with certain dates on it. And some of those dates you can see aren't going to happen before they pass it back. They would be changing those dates. Those would need to change. Okay. That's very common. Okay. That answers my question. And there's also the possibility that things are sent over from the other body and they stay on the wall or they are brought out at the last minute. It's complicated. And this year will be difficult, but next year when we're in the end of the biennium can be also be difficult. Representative James. Yeah. So I have two non-related thoughts. So on the, I'm just trying to figure out what I need to get done over the weekend on the social work thing. We're waiting to hear from AOE, right? Yes. Okay. Feel free to dog that. I will. From Deputy Secretary Bushay, right? Bushay, okay. Yep. And then the only other thing I wanted to say in response to Rep Austin is that to me what feels very unique about this time frame, and I mean, I've seen, we've all seen bills change on a dime under other circumstances too, but I think what's very different this time is this influx of federal funding with changing guidelines and changing dates. And everybody's in the process of trying to develop their recovery plans and figure out, you know, so that one didn't, you know, I guess that one didn't shock me because I feel like we're sort of learning more every day about ESSER and ARPA and how these funds can be used and how the schools are going to be, you know, working on their plans. And anyway. Yeah. I think what helped me was the relationship we've developed, at least I feel from my perspective with the AOE because I feel like I absolutely feel that they will, they know our intent and they will do their best to carry it out. And so that relationship building, I think, was really helpful to have in place. So that's all. I think if you look at literacy, when we first started working on that last year, we were totally working on a program that I think we did a beautiful job of giving school districts something that they definitely wanted, which was money. They've got money now and nobody, you know, nobody's telling, nobody can tell them how they have to do it except they have to follow the federal guidelines. So we don't, we don't have anything to control that in that way. They've got over $400 million and we can't we can't interfere with them on that. Either can the agency by the by the federal law. Representative Hooper. Madam Chair. So I'm correct in understanding. I hope that on Tuesday we'll vote on the miscellaneous ed bill. Yes. So I'm not looking to change it before then, but I'm curious to know if we feel confident that we settled on the on my section, the ask that the that Amanda and company made. I think we don't have that language yet. I think we've asked for that language. I wonder, since you're doing that section, if it might be helpful if you reached out to say Tammy Colby and said, hey, if we were to be asking for some help, not probably not from you, but from an expert to advise the agency and the work group on implementing on developing standards that were sensitive to ethnic and social groups. What do you think that would cost? Okay, so we because right now we have a number of 50,000 you could also call Amanda Garces and ask her how she came up with the 500 50,000. I thought she said 60, but yeah, okay, whatever the amount that she could ask her how she came up with that amount. I will help full. Sure. I'd like I'd like to if we're going to come up with a number that we've based it on something besides we just found it on a piece of paper. Yeah, because I would hate to get attacked from both sides. Yeah. Yeah. So it would be it would be good to verify where that number comes from and then then you'd have to defend it in the committee and then it defended in appropriations. Looking forward to it. Yeah. It'll be great. So I've got brown on sections and libraries and cultural liaison. I've got Austin on wellness and master products. I've got Cooper on ethnic studies. I've got James on what's 14. No, I don't have you anything right. He demoted me. I demoted you. No, I'm keeping you focused on the other bill. You've got a whole bill. I know. I know what's going to happen with that. It's sitting there. It was your varsity and Conlon, you're going to do if finance and to it's going to do the state board. Right. Yeah. Excellent. So all right. The work committee. I appreciate your understanding the complexity of the task before before us and the quality of work and comments that come from members. And with that, do we have just a quick question. Do we have anything big on the docket besides 13? That would be it unless S 100 comes over. Yes. But I don't know what we're going to do with S 100 at the moment. I don't know. We'll have to see if it comes to us. I don't know. I think that's it. I think it's that and whatever happens with what they do with our bills. Right. So I'm assuming that we'll get something back on construction. I know that they're working on that. I'm not sure where we are on on community schools. Representative James, you're more than welcome to reach out to your senator. I will be reaching out to him because I, you know, they took testimony and then I'm not sure that they've done much more. I texted them once. I didn't want to pester. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what you know. What do you know? Nothing. Okay. I don't know. Nothing. Can we ask Representative Beck and Professor Colby to come back again at some point? We're going to include Representative Beck in the room. We're going to start looking at some of the recommendations on 13 and represent a common year. Tag your it on that bill. We did have one request that I thought was really an important one and it came from the state the school boards at which in this work group to include an analysis to determine the potential impact of weighting factors, maintenance of effort, and census-based funding models upon each other. So I think that that's an important one. And the maintenance of effort for those who aren't sure what that is, the maintenance of effort is whatever you spent on special legislation last year. You can't you can't supplant with other funds. You have to you can't you no that's not I'm not saying that right. You have to you have to be consistent in the amount of state and local funds that you're using and you can't all of a sudden cut for some reason unless you can say well that teacher retired and we replaced her with someone who was much less expensive. We had two children that cost $200,000 a year moved. So those are the reasons you can change it but you can't just decide you can't just do that without paying a penalty. So as we move to the census-based funding where some districts it's going to be it's going to be interesting and we don't have the floor settled and that's why we're really hoping to use some of these federal funds too in terms of literacy set up. The playing field at 1.73 was recommending that we implement. Okay thank you. It is such an interesting concept in that Vermont has been identified as being really one of the highest spending states on special ed but you can't really cut your special ed spending because it violates the federal rules about maintenance of effort unless you can show causal reasons as Kate just explained. So you're in this sort of feedback loop where you say well we would really like to tackle this but we can't because we could be run afoul of federal rules. And if we start to be able to use our special ed dollars differently like to get regular you know classroom teachers trained in certain kinds of instruction that it's going to help some of our students who are struggling we can use special ed dollars for that. So excuse me we can use we can use the reading instructor now whereas before we can't because they're not special ed certified. It's it's really it's crazy and it's why we wanted to move to that. And all this came up because our education spending is high. Goes back to that in 2014 I think. Okay I think we're there.