 Welcome to Senate Finance, everyone. We are live streaming. You can get us on YouTube. And I believe everybody is here. Yeah, if everybody mutes except when you're talking, we will avoid echoing, hopefully. And committee, I can't get enough tiles on my iPad. So just say, Madam Chair, if you want to ask questions, and I'll start after each presenter and have a time for questions. The purpose of today's meeting is to look at the broadband issues and how they're impacting remote learning right now. We've sent all the kids home from school. We've heard some schools, I know my grandsons came home with their own iPads and they're hooked up and they have class group meetings once a day and then individual meetings. But there are other schools that have not been able to do remote learning. So we are trying to figure out is how big a problem that is, how many schools or how many children's sections of schools, and then why. Is it because there's no broadband going through the town or by the house? Is it because the parents can't afford to hook up to broadband services? Is it because the schools or the family don't have computers? I'm also trying to track down what happened to all the iPads. The legislators turned in earlier this year to see if any of those are still available. I've also heard that there are some community college students who do not have computers that will allow them to do remote work. So I'm trying to see if we've got a stockpile somewhere. And if anyone thinks the small cells will work on any of this, let us know because we've got lots of small cells left over from the last one. So the first one up is Heather Boucher and Heather, welcome. Say routine, introduce yourself for the committee and the floor is yours. Thank you, Madam Chair. For the record, Dr. Heather Boucher, Deputy Secretary for Education. Good afternoon. Happy to be here with all of you. I apologize if you hear strange chainsaw activity in the background. It is not me. There are some public works going on that I have no control over. Hopefully you will not hear that. I'm also in Montpelier, Chair Cummings. So they're getting around. OK. I thought I would just start by I sent to the committee earlier this morning our annual tech survey, which we do every year. I'm not sure it will get at exactly what committee members are looking for, but I thought it might be useful just to ground the conversation a bit. So we actually do an annual tech survey and do it in June usually with a forecast by the schools, by the supervisory districts for what September should look like for them. So in general, I was just going to go over some of the broad trends that we saw in 2019. The last time we did this survey. And then I also wanted to acknowledge our division director just to Carolis, who is also on the line. She is our division director for student pathways. And so she oversees the work on education technology in the Agency of Education. And she will be available and can potentially jump in for some of our questions. Most of our schools are, and again, this is at the school level. So most of our schools are pretty good when it comes to broadband speeds, both upload and download. In general, most of our schools and supervisor unions are meeting our targets. One of the things I want to point out to the committee is that virtually all of our schools have access to wireless. There are some challenges, though. In some states and some colleges, I'm seeing this with some college faculty. One of the solutions, if they don't have broadband access, is to park outside in a car of some of the Wi-Fi hotspots, which the DPS, as you hopefully know by now, has put out a nice map on. I think from what I'm understanding that for some of our districts, our education districts, it's a little nerve-wracking to have that set up because they're concerned about security. So I think that's something we want to actually be thinking about, that I think folks are like, well, why can't we just have that set up with education so parents could drive to the school parking lot and just use the wireless there. I think that we have to think about security concerns that are real that the LEAs currently have. When I say LEAs, I mean local education agencies, which for the most part is our supervisory districts and supervisory unions. Okay, commissioner. The parents would drive to the school or a local hotspot and then they would do what? They would do, because they would get instructions or download homework or all of the above, I would say. So this would be for families where they actually have already equipment in terms of a laptop or computer that could be mobile or an iPad. So one of the things that I was actually going to talk about a little later, but I'll jump in now, is that all of the things that I was going to talk about are districts are responsible for meeting children where they are. And so they really, if there are areas which we know there are where that last mile of broadband is not functioning, they really can't be putting all of their eggs into the online basket in terms of instruction. They've really got to be having what we would call both analog and digital methods of instruction and teaching and materials. So I think that's really important for us to acknowledge and we are going to get by April 13th, each of the districts has to submit to the AOE, their continuous learning plan as required by the governor's directive. And so that will give us much more specific information about where those struggles are and what the plans are at that local level. The other thing I wanna point out to committee members which you probably already thought about, but with our younger children, you can't have a sole virtual platform to really meet their teaching or learning needs anyway. There's some work that you can do virtually, but our youngest children, they just don't have the attention or the cognitive capacity to do everything online as you might be able to do more functionally with say sixth to 12th graders. So I think that those are the primary points that I wanted to talk about. I do have some information on the primary internet service providers, again, that are based in our district statewide. I'm not sure that would be useful for the committee. There's a good chance that those would be similar to what's in the homes in those areas, but I'm not sure that's really, that would be helpful at this point. I know also Clay Purvis from the Department of Public Services will be also testifying today and we'll have more of this information to talk about with you all. Okay, but what you've got right now is a survey that went out some time ago. Yeah, it went out the way to ask schools what kind of download speeds they had. Correct. Okay. And it went out last week. It went out nothing at this point about homes, how many students have the ability to connect online, how many don't, and where those students are located. Yeah, we routinely ask that in our school survey, but we don't get a lot of information back on that. And I think part of it is, part of it might be sort of, how do we best get that information? So, but I'm focused is- This is a standard survey. You haven't done anything since school was essentially moved to the home. No, we have not had any capacity at this point to do that kind of a survey. We've been focusing on setting up nutrition, childcare and some kind of continuity of learning, but it's a great question. And- Well, this is part of continuity of learning. So- Well, and as I said, we will be getting this information back when we actually get the plans that are actually happening at the local levels and they're due April 13th. Okay, so you have got a questionnaire out asking schools what's happening at the local level. Yeah, it's not really a questionnaire, but it's what their plan is. And so their plan has to address issues of connectivity in their region and they're in the communities that they're serving. That would be something that, if that were not addressed in the plan, we would send back and say, we need more information on this. And we're happy after in mid-April when we get that information to come back to the committee and share those findings. Well, mid-April, the kids have lost quite a few weeks of school. So committee, anybody have, yeah, Senator Pearson? Yeah, I think you covered this, Heather, but so are you saying that by mid-April you expect to understand whether or not students have access to broadband at home, whether or not they have a computer suitable for remote learning? Is it gonna be that detailed or is it more like the survey you've had just about school buildings? It's not really going to be a survey, so I wanna clarify that. Each local education entity needs to do that work to figure out what is going to meet equity challenges in their community. So if there are students who would not be able to access education because they don't have broadband, they don't have access to computer platforms, then that's something the local education agency has to address. That's a do not pass go, that's a must. They have to address that. And that will necessarily look different depending on each of the communities that we're talking about. But it doesn't strike me as terribly realistic that parents would drive with their kid to sit in a parking lot where there's a hotspot four hours at a time. Is that... Yeah, so that was one option I said. In those cases, we would think that it's probably more likely that they would be doing some kind of paper packets and then communicating with parents via phone or other types of means that are more, that are available. And Jess, do you wanna jump in here? It looks like you wanted to actually add something to that. Madam Chair, may I get on the list also? Yeah. Okay. Do you have a question for Commissioner Boucher before we switch to it? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Those things can't be. Thanks, Madam Chair. Commissioner, I'm just trying to get a sense of, again, back to the technology piece. It seems as though you might be able to hone in where these surveys would be sent. In other words, I would think in part what you're trying to do is identify where technology needs are, where there might be gaps. But I think looking at a lot of connectivity map of the state, there'd be a way to get some of that information sooner rather than later so that we could perhaps help those folks. For example, down where I am, in terms of access to broadband, I think it's here, but I guess part of, and I'm sort of thinking aloud, I guess you're also looking at issues with regard to who might not have the technology or be able to afford the technology. Is that correct? Yes, that's part of it. Okay. Yeah, so I'm wanting the committee to kind of think about that it's not just a broadband issue. Our charge is to actually best educate our students. And so even if we had perfect broadband across the state, that's not going to be the best solution for, for instance, our younger children. So that's why we're really relying on the local education agencies to really help inform us about what their plan is. I do know that we are investing in some state strategies to build up more of platforms so that if there are LEAs that have not been able to invest so far in robust platforms for education and learning, that we can give them some help. And I think that's what Jess might want to talk to. Okay, the other thing I'd be interested in knowing, because you're talking about LEAs doing a plan, but you're the professional educators at the department. Are you giving them any guidance as to what a plan might look like? You're sending home paper material, but do you even know if all the parents can read and write? I know I can't do new math and my husband is a professional estimator, but he couldn't do it the way my children were being taught to do estimating. Yeah, so what's happening there? Yeah, so that's a great question. We absolutely are providing guidance and technical assistance to the field as they develop their plans. I do want to make sure that we're on the same page around in the context of this pandemic. We're not talking about just taking everything that would have been taught in the last two and a half months of school and completely replicating that in an online or paper and pencil format. That is impossible, that is impractical, and that is not what we are supporting. What we are supporting is please identify what the critical essential learning elements are that students need from here on out to make it to get to the next level when fall is here and school opens. So I think, and we're in strong agreement with the Superintendents Association and the Vermont Principles Association on that larger vision. And so I have great confidence that that support that we're providing is going to be well received. I think if we're putting pressure on educators that they're supposed to be very quickly, somehow completely redoing their entire latter third of the school year in a virtual or remote fashion, that's again just a recipe for disaster. Right. And we know that from research, actually, that that's not how you do this. Okay, okay, Jess, are you next? Who was, I'm not seeing a whole screen, somebody was going to be next. That would be me, yes. Okay. Just from the Agency of Education, I'm a division director who reports to Deputy Boucher. And I guess I just wanted to follow up on some of those items regarding the survey. So we do ask a question about whether the LEA's survey, the school survey, their parents and families to find out about broadband access. However, that's something that they would need to do. We interface with systems, LEA's interface with families and students. Often we get an approximation. So we do have a back of the envelope understanding across schools the estimation of percentage of families within communities that might not have broadband access. And that's something that we can pull together for folks. I'd also just point out that over the years, when we look at this survey, we also within the report speak about areas in which there might have been growth or contraction. And so this often can be a good estimate as Deputy Boucher said of what the future is going to bring. So I think that the 2019, the fiscal year report is actually probably a pretty good snapshot of current state. As previously referenced, I think that the two things that we have to contend with in a remote learning environment is that analog and digital divide. Deputy Boucher has done a good job in thinking about and explaining what is developmentally appropriate and not just a matter of resource. But I would say that when we're talking about expanding access to students to online learning, there are two components. One is about that broadband access. And I'm not sure if it's necessarily gonna be like a drive to the parking lot and expand Wi-Fi that can be a mechanism as a placeholder or intervening step to make sure that folks can access analog materials, get online briefly and download assignments or get a sense of what the week is going to bring. But I think that really addressing the infrastructure issue of cabling to communities is probably the most secure way that you can ensure that you're going to have that broad access. And I'm not sure if that's necessarily mediated by schools. I think also a short-term or a near step solution can be adding cell phone towers to schools which will actually significantly expand wireless cell phone access and there's so many mechanisms by which you can access online materials through cell phones. So that's another step. As far as- I think that's what we're looking for is if there is some money that becomes available through all these plans that are out there at the federal level, what would be most helpful? And I'm operating on the assumption that this is probably not the last time we're gonna see something of this scale. I mean, the experts have been telling us for years to we were, this was gonna happen, it has. And I think we need coming out of this to know what we need. So we're ready for the next one. And just trying to figure out what we need right now. And I would say that in that advanced thinking that preparing for the future and knowing that there might be multiple waves making an investment in a long-term solution like thinking about running fiber, thinking about getting to those communities that do not have the privilege of access. Every school has wifi in this state. But schools can't guarantee that every home has wifi. That's the role of the state. And so I would say pursuing a long-term solution that sets us up for success, which allows us to at least expand online learning when it is developmentally appropriate for the learner or meets their particular need. And we also know that sitting any learner in front of a screen for six hours a day is not good practice. Some of us are having a lot of sympathy with that at the moment. Absolutely. And so the state level solutions that we have currently been working on for the last two weeks. And I think we have really moved the needle but we still are consulting with some of our stakeholders including the VSA is an analog solution leveraging Vermont PBS who my team is actually meeting with right now. And we've had three very good conversations about being able to deliver a pre-K to 12 curriculum 400,000 pieces of materials and learning and lessons that are all aligned to the Common Core State Standards and the next generation science standards. So these are all standards-based curricula. Currently both Boston and the Los Angeles Unified School District which is the largest school district in the country is using it. In fact, that school district actually owns one of the PBS channels and it would actually provide for predictable programming on a weekly basis, parsed out pre-K to three, four to eight and nine to 12 throughout the day so that literally any home that's got a television would be able to receive lessons, engage in interactive activities and we would be able to provide a platform through the AOE to bundle and allow for educators to use that material to deliver lessons that we know are aligned to the national standards in the four core. We are, I'll pause there. I don't know if there's a question. Okay, no, I was going to say that that is the first positive thing I've heard in a while. So that's helpful. Madam Chair, may I ask a quick question? Yes, thank you, can't be. Jess and Heather, what are you hearing so far from teachers with regard to, again, what are they saying that they need a technology for, you know, in terms of what they're teaching? What are some of the needs that you're hearing out there? So I would say that- I understand that part of it is instruction, but other just generally, what are you hearing from teachers? Well, I think the one thing that we, and I believe Heather references that we'd like to maybe get some greater insight about is while the survey is pretty clear about the number of one-to-one devices that schools report, and they have different models in which they stay in the school, they're disseminated, but to what degree do educators feel that they're not sure that there's predictable device use? And we know that there is an opportunity for us to leverage some title funds to allow schools to rapidly purchase some devices to fill gaps where students might not have that predictable access. I think the biggest issue though is just knowing if someone can be online. There are additional issues though, right? We know that there are probably students who might have some childcare responsibilities as families are still having to work. Folks get sick, that that will probably increase. We know that there are certainly situations in which students may or may not have a space in the home in which it is conducive to learning. So particularly, we know that families live in all sorts of different circumstances and that not everybody has a separate space with a desk, Jimmy, and that's sort of quiet. We know that there have been significant concerns around maintaining FERPA, particularly when you have others in the home and you're delivering instruction or you're engaging in direct instruction and you might see a parent walk behind. So there's all sorts of considerations that are not related to instruction but are related to how do you create the environment and ecosystem for students to feel connected, safe. Sure, that's really helpful. Thank you. And I'm putting this B in everyone's bonnet, but I am concerned about the parents who we have now shut up in the house with children. We're asking them to either work or deal with having been laid off in the financial pressure of that to be providing their own childcare and to be doing some providing of education. And it's sunny right now. You may be able to put the kids out in the mud but we need to be paying some attention to the just emotional health of our parents and giving them the supports they need to carry this off. Well, that's another benefit of the PBS programming that we've been talking with them about, which is, one is there are lots of activities that can be identified to support parents in supporting learning activities or actually engaging in them. And we also talked about some of their interstitial programming that can focus on some of those social, emotional, wellness activities and short bursts between some of the sort of content programming. A team within the agency is also developing has draft guidance around supporting the emotional and mental health of students and families because we know that as a state, we're all gonna be contending with loss and possibly trauma. And so we, our educators are experts. They have been engaging in trauma informed practices. They understand this work. And so it's just about figuring out how they can restructure it in that remote learning environment so that you can deliver it through an analog or a digital platform. I did just, and I will certainly get off cause I know I kind of horned in on your time today, but we are also working on a state level strategy to scale online access as well. And so again, there's a few more folks that we need to consult with, but we have a fairly robust roughed out plan to significantly expand if folks choose access to a learning management system that would support career technical education, work-based learning, dual enrollment, AP, the four core and health and PE. Madam Chair, let me just add one thing. It seems to me that we're dealing with a problem that has two parts. The first is the short-term part of dealing with the need by education with some immediacy. And I think the kind of plan that combines digital analog makes a great deal of sense in that regard. But this is part of a larger issue. That larger issue, what we've talked about before is a statewide telecommunications plan that should be looking ahead at how we deal with this more broadly going forward because this is not the only time that we're gonna have a need to be able to deliver broadband more widely throughout the state to every home, leave no kid left offline and also to deal with our cell problem. And that's a statewide telecommunications plan and maybe there of some part of the federal funding that we're talking about might help us get there because this is part of the problem we're dealing with right now as well. Right, okay. Other questions right now. Madam Chair. Yes, Senator Pearson. I have a question for Jess and appreciate the great work you guys are all having to do and are doing and under quick turnaround. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit and more about the educational expectations. Are you just broadly, are you thinking sort of a half day or I myself have two elementary school kids here if they were and we have robust Wi-Fi and but between my wife and I and the two kids if we were all online curriculum at one moment I don't think our system could handle it and I'm just curious if you can talk about some of those logistic or the best thinking that you've got at the moment in terms of some of those logistics side that there are a whole lot of other challenges which you've just come in. Sure, and I think this is what Deputy Boucher was referencing with the continuity of learning tool that we put out where there's a series of we have sort of design pillars with kind of essential elements that you have to address and prompting questions underneath and it's asking folks to think about that because we know that as you break it up by grade level, developmental level that you're gonna have to adjust. I think just very high level making sure that you're limiting the synchronous instruction pieces so that idea that it shouldn't be that people are online getting an hour lecture that doesn't work in a remote education environment and it's analog or digital, right? Across the board. They also need to be designing their learning activities not in that daily schedule. We should not be replicating and saying however the school day was set up before we're just gonna replicate it here. It doesn't work. You need to allow for not only the medium by which it's being delivered but also the current situation that we're in which we know is going to tax people differently. And so at the higher grades, the older grades I know of folks who are actually holding like synchronous activities in the evening which allows for some older students to be doing some work with their younger siblings. We know that we might want to make sure that we're starting early with the littles the pre-K to three, but really this idea that the dosage should be pretty short bursts of synchronous instruction with much longer dosages of student driven inquiry and exploration and work that often is also trying to use what is around them to engage them so that they can feel connected to their home connected to each other connected to the team actually sharing some of their experiences and building that into the learning activities. But we should really be thinking about this as like week long chunks with expectations short spurts of instruction longer pieces in which people are doing some of that self exploration and independent learning. Thank you. Okay. Other questions. All right. Then we're going to get on to Sue Siglowski. Sue, are you with us? Thank you. Sue here. And they're coming. Sue isn't here. She asked that Jane Nichols speak basically. Okay. Mr. Nichols. All right. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. So I'm Jane Nichols. I'm the executive director of the Vermont Principles Association. And Sue thought that because it sounded like you wanted to hear about some of the operational concerns and some of the strategies to address those concerns that it might be useful to hear from me. I found out. Okay. That sounds good. So I've talked to a number of principles in the last 20 hours. And if it works for the committee, I'd like to share some of the challenges and concerns that are out there. There's some of the things that people are doing and then take any questions. Does that work? That works. Looks for me. All right. Share from you from what they've shared. We just had a cat go through one of the screens. I've got a boxer dog laying across my lap here. So I understand that. I saw him too. As long as he doesn't see the cat, we're probably fine. If she sees the cat, we're going to have a problem. So challenges and concerns shared from principles. I wanted to start by saying, we need to remember that we're asking families to work from home if they can, to not have anyone help essentially because of the social distancing and to oversee their kid's schooling for months. Parents are not trained for this. It's causing major stress on already very strained family structure dynamic. We hear that repeatedly from principles. The biggest issue as you folks have talked about is home access for many families for internet. In some cases, and I think Senator Pearson just talked about this, families have the internet, but the parents are using the internet or the college kid is using the internet. I myself have driven over to the Berkshire School several times to use their internet because my daughter has to be on the same time. I have the best Wi-Fi you can buy where I live in Berkshire, which means not very good Wi-Fi. And that's just the reality. And that's the way it is in a lot of places. So other families cannot get any internet out to their homes due to their remote location or very little internet. We also have families with no cell service or very little cell service. We have families who choose not to be connected, that do not want their homes to have internet installed in the first place. That is a minority, but we have some of those. It's important to understand that many of our households are overwhelmed at the prospect of navigating any new schedule. So we need to be really mindful of that with whatever plan comes forward from schools. People are losing jobs, they're stressed out, they're not in a position to really help their children with the schoolwork. Internet access are not, as you talked about Senator Cummings. So for us, the most important thing, most of our kids need right now are classrooms and schools with teachers teaching them not internet. And we know we can't have that. So the bottom line is, how do we, we know we can't replicate that. That's a simple fact, but how do we move forward in the best way possible to stay connected with these students, provide them with some academic support, help not to have a major regression during this time? At the elementary level, it's further complicated. Many parents do not want their children on technology by choice. Or if they do, they want them in very small doses, which makes sense. As a grandfather of eight kids, I totally get that. Many families limit screen time to 30 minutes as it is. So there's no way kids at the younger ages will be able to do the screen time. Well, a lot of this leads to packet learning for many students, which we know is not a solid research-based, effective instructional strategy, even with teacher oversight. It leads to worksheets, books being sent home, writing prompts, games, activities, directions. That's all stuff that can help. It can be a nightmare for schools to put it together and try to get it out to parents. And it's not the best learning. During this so-called maintenance of learning period that we've been in right now, it's suffice for most places. We're worried about it as we move forward. A big concern is how to assess the work. And right now, there's no real good, safe structure to return work because of fears of spreading the virus. So if you're online with a kid and a kid goes into a Google Doc and shares information that way, teacher can provide feedback, that works really well. It's working for my migrant son who's doing a couple of hours of work each day around my schedule, but it doesn't work for families that don't have internet, obviously. So it's gonna be difficult to meet the needs of all of our kids, not to mention the challenges of letting work sit for days. So for example, where I live, the school's putting out a packet of work once a week. Some places are doing it every couple of weeks. The kid does the work, somehow he has to get back to the school. And then the school has to find a way for it to get to the teacher who's working remotely. So the teacher can look at the work and get feedback to the kids. In that time, oftentimes there's a lag of two weeks, which makes it pretty hard for the teacher to get timely feedback to the student. That's an issue. We're also seeing, and these are reported from principals, school refusal rates are increasing. A lot of kids are saying no, and a lot of parents are saying, no, I can barely survive right now. I can't sit here and try to make my kid do homework. So there's anxiety, depression issues, there's digital addiction on the rise, and we're worried that a lot of extra pressure from our school systems will make that worse for families. I can talk a lot more about this, but essentially what we think needs to happen is we need to give parents opportunities, give kids opportunities, try to make it as engaging as possible, but understand that not for every family is this going to work to the level that we want it to. And that's a reality. Our biggest concern is connecting with families, seeing what they need and making sure we're getting them food, academic materials if possible, things that they need. I had one principal tell me today that they're preparing 275 paper packets every week for pre-K through five. And then they're trying to figure out how to deliver those. I mean, right now they've got parents picking up at certain spots where they're dropped off, then they've got places where they're dropping them off on front porches, and for some kids they're actually mailing them or walking around the neighborhood and putting them in certain areas. That's not going to be sustainable as the COVID-19 numbers continue to rise. We have Chromebooks in a lot of our schools, but those again are not very practical for kindergarten through first and second grade. So, you know, summation in terms of the challenges, the lack of access to internet is in many cases symptomatic of several other barriers to accessing education for students outside of the school setting. So the solution isn't going to just be printing off packets and either mailing or delivering them. It's a complex issue and it's one that's going to need to be solved, one family at a time in many cases. We've also heard from principals that have some families that they cannot reach. We've got some kids that are homeless, that schools can't reach. We have some kids that are living with grandparents because both parents are essential employees and grandparents might not even live in Vermont. Those are minority examples, but there are some examples out there of small subsets to students. So what are schools trying to do from what the principals that I've talked to said? Some are working with VTEL to deliver routers. You heard just the Carlos talk about that to get cell signals to homes that need them. This is a slow process. It's going to take some time to have it happen. There are lots of homes without internet and it's also expensive. Right now, VTEL is loaning routers to schools to help with cell services, but this is not an immediate thing. We're going to need infrastructure to construct 5G type of wellness. When just the Carlos talked about internet and cell service across the state, that's really what we need to happen in Vermont. I think it's principles. We think that is a real equity issue for the state. And if we don't tackle that, then it's going to be really hard to support kids if we go through another crisis like this in the future. Many internet providers are offering free services, which is great. Many schools have been helping families to navigate through the process, but in many cases what has happened is families have had outstanding balances previously and so companies won't work with them. Some superintendents and special ed directors are working with their school districts to find out they can pay for that themselves during the period of closure so that kids can access appropriate education. So we're hoping that's going to happen. We've also had a lot of teachers that are sending work to administrators by email and then the administrators are making packets to work for the kids or with support staff. So it works literally on paper, but it's slow, doesn't serve the teaching and learning cycle with fidelity. I've already talked about that a little bit so I can skip past this. One school has had the idea of purchasing flash drives and sending them back and forth, giving every kid a computer and a kid to work on the flash drive. But now there's health concerns saying, well, you shouldn't be taking anything back out of the school because it could have the virus. So they're not sure how they're going to address that kind of work on that. People are trying to be creative as both Heather and Jess had said. But we're still looking at a lot of students without access. The local access TV idea, the PBS type approach, that's a great idea too. If that's something that can be put on TV where parents and kids can have access to it in times that work for them. And for us, bottom line is schools and school leaders are being creative and doing the best that they can to provide students and families with learning. In an infrastructure that quite frankly is built on inequities and that schools have very little ability to change or even influence those inequities. One major thing that we at the VPA hope happens from this crisis as we start treating broadband and cell phone access as a fundamental right in a 21st century economy. By not having these fundamental global economic basics, we're putting our most vulnerable and neediest families and students at an even greater disadvantage. This is something the legislature should make a top priority. There should be no place in Vermont that does not have access to high speed internet and cell service for all Vermonters. So I know Senator Brock talked about that. And I really think as a state, that is where we need to go. I know for this committee that has been a priority, all we need is money. So, but we're working on that. I think you have a $35 million coming in. I'm not sure how much control you have over it. Well, we aren't either at this point, but once we find out, it will be helpful to make sure that we use it in the best possible way. And I think this crisis is just bringing home the inequities in the educational system when it comes to access. So thank you for everything that all of your people in education are doing. You didn't mention they're also being charged with providing childcare to essential workers, which I know has caused some disruption just by my email. So we are asking a lot of essentially a few people. Committee, questions, nothing. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Pleasure, thank you. Okay, here we go. Jeff Francis. Hello, committee. Jeffrey Francis from the Vermont Superintendents Association. I have with me Chelsea Myers, who's my colleague at the Superintendents Association. I asked her to join. She's got a great educational background and I'm having trouble with potential laryngitis. So if I have to stop, she'll pick up. She may have a few comments to add after I give my testimony, but let me just follow on Jay Nichols, who I thought did a good job with points that I could reiterate and I'll try not to. I'll just give you some high level observations from the Superintendents Association. So one of the reasons that my voice is the way it is is I've been talking more than I normally do and I've got a reputation for talking too much. Since the 13th of March, your educational leaders have been pretty much working tirelessly during the period since the 13th and I support them. So I've been right along with them. The first thing that I wanna say is that we all recognize that this is probably the warmest crisis that society globally has faced during our lifetimes. I think that folks are doing a tremendous job in responding to it, but there's no negating fact that the magnitude of the crisis is unprecedented. I look at the immediate challenge ahead, meaning the 10 weeks that children will be in school as trying to do the best we can given crisis circumstances. As Senator Brock indicated and several others of you alluded to, there are gonna be lessons that will come from this emergency response that will inform how we move into the future. And several of you also talked about how we can make the system more equitable over time. I think that that will be well-informed by what we're experiencing over the course of the next 10 weeks. But the challenges that Jay articulated in terms of how we're going to provide education in the upcoming 10 week period, I think must be characterized by we're gonna do our absolute best, but we have a lot of factors around the absence of equity in our system currently that we're gonna need to contend with. So at the superintendents association, I think that the leaders there have prioritized areas of interest that they are going to do their level best to respond to. And I think first and foremost, it is the health and safety and wellbeing to the extent that school districts can contribute to that for children who they customarily see in school buildings that they now do not see. Because these children are in their own homes and for some of the kids, the best place for them to be was in fact, the school. So there's a real interest in making sure that school districts do everything they can to reach out to the children in every home, but particularly in places where kids may be less well advantaged. The second mindset is, how can they provide services to children in the most equitable way? And that means taking advantage of technological capacity, but also making sure that when there is not connectivity in the home that the children have continuity in their learning processes as well. The folks from the AOE alluded to that, school districts are hard at work in making sure they do their level best in that area. But it is not, and I know that you understand this, all online learning. So remote learning in Vermont in 2020 necessitates different ways of connecting with students beyond just utilization of technology. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. We're trying to make sure that relationships are preserved. So when superintendents talk with their administrative and teaching staff, they are urging that folks use whatever methods they can to stay in regular contact with kids because that's important not only for the educational continuity, but also for health and safety that I referred to. That shines a bright light I think on the fact that schools are picking up a lot of responsibility in terms of the health and wellbeing of children. You as senators know because you've talked about it and thought about it that over time, the requirements on schools and this was in evidence and we understand why and appreciate it when school districts were asked to pick up childcare schools are the hubs of their community. They have access to resources. They are in contact with families and kids. So it makes sense to put them in the position of all forms of support when in a crisis and otherwise. But one of the lessons that will take away from this crisis is that schools truly are carrying a lot of responsibility in normal circumstances. That's in evidence tremendously currently. We also know on the subject of your committee today in terms of the learning process that monitoring and measuring and supporting student growth is not the same when children are outside of school as it is when they are in school. So what we're urging particularly for the next 10 weeks is that everybody educators themselves, families, legislators, the agency of education understand that we are in a period of crisis response where we need to do our absolute best to serve children but the expectations for the system cannot be the same as they would be under normal circumstances. And then finally what we want everybody to keep in mind and I know that you know this, it is that we are in a period of extraordinary stress on practically everybody. And if we can understand that stress is a dominant factor in terms of our collective response to this crisis and understand that we need to operate in ways where we're gonna try to alleviate stress rather than potentially induce more through expectations that may not match the crisis that we face then we ought to do that. So those are just some general summary comments. I'm gonna give you very briefly some specific information and then I'll stop and answer questions if you have any. So when I heard about the invitation to testify today from Faith, I realized that the superintendent's association does not have information on internet connectivity school district to school district. The AOE talked about the fact that they've got it for schools and that they're gonna try to get it for households. We did not have it, but we did pull 10 superintendents who are on the VSA Board of Directors in near daily contact with them right now. And I asked them the question, how do you assess the percentage of students within your districts that do not have access to internet connectivity? And what you won't be surprised to learn is that it's variable across the state. So in places like Middlebury and Thetford, for example, fewer than 3% did not have internet connectivity. And I did not ask to define whether there was no access in the community. Otherwise, in other words, internet connectivity was not available or was it a circumstance where it was available? And as Jay indicated, the families may choose not to have it. But in those places, it was less than 5%. But in the town of Newbury, which is in the same supervisory district as Thetford, 30% of the students in Newbury don't have access. So you can see the variability. As Jay indicated, it's also not a question of whether you have internet connectivity. Senator Pearson spoke about this too. You might have a connection in your home, but if all of a sudden during the day, the home is occupied by five individuals rather than zero, because they're all off working or in school, the fact that you have connectivity does not mean that you have connectivity consistently for the learner. And there's a multitude of pictures of that, depending on what the strength of your broadband is, how many devices you have, and so on and so forth. The other thing that I would add is that although we do think very, very highly of the educators across Vermont, not every teacher, in fact, most teachers are not online educators. So the notion that we're gonna move from a period where kids are in school to one where they're not and maintain sort of a high level of consistency in terms of educational continuity, that really does not consider the fact that this is a new experience for many teachers as well. So I'm gonna summarize by just saying we've got 10 weeks left to go. I have every confidence that everybody's gonna do the best job that they can. I think that we do need to treat it as the crisis that it is, have expectations to do the best we can, realize what our limitations are, but really significantly, look at this period that we're going through and don't forget to record the lessons learned because there's gonna be a tremendous amount of useful information coming out of this crisis about how we shape Vermont's response to the future. So let me pause or I'll stop there and answer any questions that you have. Okay, and I think you may have 10 weeks in the school year left, but again, we don't know how long this crisis is going to last. We could have another flare up next fall and be starting out the school year in the same place. And all of these kids are gonna have to go somewhere this summer. And unless things change, the places, at least the more affluent of them go, town pools, camps, playgrounds are gonna be off limits. So I think we're all just trying to struggle to figure out how we take care of our children in this. Right, and if I may, I could not agree with you more. So I'll just talk a little bit about how my work is organized right now because I think it's indicative into how we at the superintendent association are starting to think about this. So the last two weeks was basically spent supporting school districts in contending with the three requirements that came from the governor's order. So the first thing was food, nutrition, because school districts are pretty adept at that. They've done a great job with that. Then we grappled with the requirement for childcare and then we moved into continuity of learning. And it was all in the sort of inconsistency of capacity and under an immense amount of pressure as our communities watched the COVID virus dynamics unfold. Now we're in a phase where I'm not only continuing to try to provide those supports. And the reason that I'm speaking in the first person is just as an example, it's really the organization that I serve in the other educational organizations as well. Now we're trying to keep pace with the legislature, which is looking at legislation that they had available and moving through the system prior to the crisis. You can't stop your business and you're also taking a real interest yourselves. So we're paying attention to what the legislature is doing, including sharing with school leaders what the likely financial dynamics or fiscal considerations are gonna be coming out of this because the dire is what I would say. So we're trying to alert the educational leaders to the fact that it will not be business as usual coming out the back end. Then when you go back to the education side of it, it's not only the next 10 weeks, but as you say, Senator Cummings, a lot of these schools are involved with all forms of summer programs. And then what is the restart of school next fall look like? So those are all things that are sort of percolating in the education community. Many of them don't have answers yet, but we're thinking about all of them. So I will stop there. Thank you. Okay. I think Chris Recky is pet wins the beauty contest and it just got shut off. Committee questions. Okay. I think we're getting more challenges than answers, which puts us in the same boat as everybody else. And I think also that if at any time you find the legislature is keeping you from doing your real job, let us know, because we're trying to stay informed and figure out what responses are going to need legislative activity to help us combat the present crisis. And once we do that, I guess we all hope we'll return to normal and become our usual annoyances. But right now, nobody ever hesitate to tell us that you really need to do your job and you'll send us an email sometime when you get a few minutes because we are trying to be very respectful of that. I have tremendous respect and admiration for you and the job that you do. Never more so, I think, I mean always, but this really brings that right into very, very clear view as I indicated, Chelsea did send me a text while I was talking and she said this, can you please say that there are immediate techniques that districts are facing midterm, summer, and long-term emergency planning and management, each of these have associated technology goals and challenges since you have some of the internet providers with you watching, I wanted to say that, I'll also say, and I meant to say this in my testimony, every day I'm getting requests from superintendents. I got two today. One was, would I lobby the legislature to see if they couldn't put into place emergency broadband connectivity for families that don't have it but needed over this period? My response was, well, it may be more complicated than that, but I'll pass that on. And then there was a question that came from a superintendent today asking for, let me set that up, I had it a minute. Take me just to get through it. It says, we have about 40 students that don't have internet service at home, approximately 75% of these homes could be served by VTEL wireless at a cost of approximately $60 per month in a state of emergency with the governor have the authority to compel these companies, including VTEL to provide these services or should the school district pay for this and track the cost? So that question came from one superintendent but it probably could have come from 25. And I think that's also what we're tracking. We know that the grants coming to the state. So there's apparently gonna be money coming directly to schools, we think. Don't know any of the, you can probably know better than I do any of the strings attached to that. We do know that any money coming to the state can't be used to fund shortfalls in our revenue which right now look significant but could for new response activities. And I think part of the question is gonna be could some of that money be used to get people connected or get the wire? Yeah, but right now we're just trying to figure out if you've got a significant number of students then that school district has a real issue. If you're a school district and 1% of your kids aren't connected because the parents don't believe in being connected or they can't afford to be connected that's another issue. So right now we're trying to figure out if there's a problem, what it is, how big it is and then what solutions there are out there. Committee, any questions? I'm not seeing any, I'm trying to figure out who I'm not seeing Senator McDonald but you're on the phone, I know that. All right. I'm here now. Okay. Thanks very much committee. We're gonna head off to house education now. Thank you. Okay, bye bye. I think I'm supposed to be on that too with health and welfare at two o'clock but they scheduled that after this one and I don't think that can be at two conferences at once. All right, we're gonna move on. All right, Chelsea, did you have anything to add? No, I don't think so. Jeff and I weren't sure yesterday who was going to be delivering most of it so we put both of us on the witness list but thank you very much. I've enjoyed listening to you all and hope to meet you in the future. Okay, so next I've got Clay Purvis. Clay, are you with us? I am, Madam Chair. Okay, so... Can you hear me okay? I can, the rest of the committee here, Clay. Okay, I think we can hear you loud and clear. Great, thank you for... I guess we're looking at what, if anything, is the department doing in trying to help us in the schools figure out how many children are really being denied the ability to do online learning which I think we've heard where not ideal, especially not ideal for young children is better than sending home packets and then having to range to get them and pick them up and get them graded at which point, especially younger children have probably forgotten what the question was by the time the teacher told them they got the wrong answer. So, at least it's a little more immediate. I know my grandson gets some kind of a group thing with his classmates every day, which helps with some of that social isolation. So, what's the department up to? Sure, well, thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity and it's been fun to zoom into committee meetings. I think your previous guests have already laid out the issues pretty clearly. With regard to connectivity and students, you have two basic problems. One is the service is not available at the student's home. And then two, maybe it is available, but for one reason or another, the student's family does not subscribe to the service. In that subset, the biggest problem is affordability. The household can't afford the service. Right. Madam Chair, may I ask a quick question while he's on that? We've got a question, Clay. So, Clay, what's the breakdown there in terms of availability versus access? On availability, I can tell you with a great certainty that a little over 6% lack broadband of any kind that we're aware of. That's what we do a lot of mapping around that. You've seen our maps many times. We know town by town where they are. The affordability issue. I'm wondering what's the breakdown in terms of, so you're a family that could access it, but you're not accessing it because of either financial reasons or something like that. What percentage of people out there fall into that category? You're living in an area like where I live, but you're not accessing it. Right. There isn't a whole lot of good data around that. There are a few programs designed to bring broadband to low income. The biggest is Lifeline. And what we know about the federal Lifeline program is that it's under-subscribed. So anyone who has, who receives a SNAP or free or reduced lunch could be eligible for Lifeline. And when you compare the SNAP recipients and the state with the Lifeline recipients, it's well below who could be accessing that program. Can you send us some of those numbers? Yeah, I'll try to pull some numbers together for you. All right, Clay. When I think of Lifeline, I think of telephone service. We said you had to be able to call 911 essentially or call out for emergency. So if, but has that been expanded to any kind of cable connection or are you saying that if they had phone connectivity, they could do dial-up service? No, the Lifeline, the federal Lifeline program has been expanded to include broadband. So there are broadband eligible Lifeline carriers. Maybe we should get that information out to the school superintendents to get out to their people. Certainly we can have that conversation with A. We've been in touch with quite a bit in the last week and a half and DCF as well. Unfortunately, it's a program that the FCC has been slowly choking for reasons that I think everyone's probably aware of, but it's about 2015 or 16. They expanded it to broadband and Burlington Telecom is a broadband only Lifeline provider. So if you're in the Burlington area, you have that option. I believe consolidated is probably the biggest track phone is a wireless carrier and under that, the service actually costs the same as the Lifeline credit. So it doesn't actually cost you any money to get the service through some of the wireless carriers. Okay. That would be good information if somebody's got it, you know, without a whole lot of effort to get to us. We'll get you some information on Lifeline. The other is that since the pandemic has occurred or really got underway, several carriers have made commitments to provide expanded services to people with school-aged children in the home. So Comcast, Charter, EC Fiber and consolidated are four companies that have offered new services that are either free or very low cost to the consumer. Many were free for 60 days from March 13th when they've made the commitment. So there's some opportunity there. A lot of companies have waived data caps and has increased bandwidth for families with students. And they've also suspended disconnections. So they are providing relief. And we've been organizing that information and it's available on our website. And I can send you a link to that as well. Okay. At one point we did get a list of what various providers were doing. So having that up, knowing where we can get that updated is also helpful. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'll send that your way. And then the last is a map. We've produced a map and a list of publicly available Wi-Fi hotspots, which we're updating weekly. I know several have commented that, well, is it really realistic to receive, you know, Internet connection? I don't know if that would be a good idea. And sympathize with that. But we thought it would be better to provide as much information to the public as we could on available Internet connections. So that if you really are stuck without Internet, you could go to schools in your area or libraries. We started adding, you know, Internet connection. And then we added a list of, you know, We added a list of, you know, We added a list of establishments that have made their Wi-Fi available. So that is something that, although not ideal, could be helpful to people that absolutely need to get online. Yeah. I think that could be help. Probably not real good for doing school lessons, maybe getting your homework. But. I can see where. If you needed to check on family members. That would be a good place to go. Okay. So your basic information says you've got about 6% of your students. Is it students who do not have Wi-Fi service available to them? Is that, or was it 6% of the state? It's 6% of the buildings in the state. So it might not be a one to one, but it's probably fairly close. All right. To which students have it available. Well, let's, yeah, we'll assume they live in buildings, but not always. True. Let's see. Once again, I suppose we'd have to get it from individual carriers. You know, a road, a map where there are roads. In a particular town that do not have any lines. Something like that. Just trying to figure out. You know, something as vague as 6% of the buildings in the state. Doesn't really help me start to zero in on if we come up with limited dollars. Right. What do I do with them? We do map broadband. So we have data from most of the, the carriers where they have service, where they don't. And we do map it by building locations. So we could produce a map for you for your town. Showing you exactly which locations are reported to have broadband and which are not. We use that data for our, our connectivity initiative grant program. So we don't, we don't fund projects to buildings that already have broadband. We're starting with buildings that do not have broadband. And that is typically the end of the road. Every town has got some percentage of broadband and then. And almost without exception. The village center has connectivity and it's the edges of town where the density is lower and the buildings are further apart and there's less of them. That's where you have the issue. That's where you have the issue. And that is a matter of expanding existing service. With the passage of act 79. Last year. The, the state strategy has shifted a bit to. Developing. And nurturing communication union districts. So. Right. That's one established one, but we have others that have just started. You know, that's a long-term strategy. Yeah. That's not going to get these kids schoolwork. You know, if we have a flare up in the fall. Which some people say we will go in by past patterns. Then. You know, that's not going to get. We're probably not going to get broadband to a whole lot more kids this school year, maybe a few. But. I'm. Trying, you know, just to wait for, you know, central Vermont fiber to come online right now is not, you know, most of these kids will probably be in high school. So I'm trying to figure out if there's an, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So. For us for where the greatest density. Of. Lack is I have a feeling. Yeah, yeah. We can, I know what you mean. And yes, we can put that together. Yeah. I mean, where, where is there the greatest need to have lines. Absolutely. And see if we can go from there. Into. Into, into trying to do some problem solving. Oh, yeah. And that is what we do in the short run to deal with the emergency we're facing right now. And the longer term issue to the extent that we are determining where we have good broadband service on the basis of carrier maps and representations. A lot of times we have found, I think, we talked about this committee previously that many of the carrier statements as to where there is good broadband are aspirational at best. Yeah. Certainly mapping. Senator Brock to your point. I can't disagree with you that the, that mapping broadband mapping, whether it's at the federal level, which is really bad. We're at our level, which isn't perfect. I think that it certainly creates problems with that said, the maps do highlight areas where there is no service. And you can be certain that areas that don't have service, don't have service that don't have service on the map, don't have service in real life. And this is a problem that Congress has recently addressed with the, the enactment of the broadband data act, which was signed into law, I think last week. Mapping is the gateway issue for solving this problem. With that said, Vermont, it has better maps than most states. And we frequently get asked by other states, how do you make your maps? We want to do what you do in Vermont. So it's not perfect, but certainly it's better than what we have available in other parts of the country. And it's a good basis for starting to decide where you want to put service to get service to the areas that we know lack service today. You have to cross the areas that have some amount of broadband service extending that line down the road. If you're creating a communication union district, if you are trying to get a co-op, an electric utility co-op to do broadband service. In almost all of those instances, it's going to require some amount of overbuilding of existing networks. You got to cross the road to get to the other side, in other words. And so as much as our maps, people disagree with their individual location, they do provide a good rough sketch of where we have broadband and where we don't. And that would be the basis of any state strategy for solving the problem. Madam chair. Yes. Clay, are you guys working with AOE? It strikes me we're, we're trying to figure out a top-down system of. Ascertaining where kids are going to be in homes without broadband, but what about just opening up some process where families can tell us. And then, you know, there wouldn't be a one-size-fits-all solution, but in some cases the school district would be able to come create a hotspot. We could work with the carriers. You know, we, it doesn't all have to be a robust built infrastructure. Some of it as you referenced, VTEL wireless option would be a good one. That requires an installer if they're in the right geography. So. Has there been discussions across the administration around something like that? Yes. We are working to put together a short survey that families can take. Obviously the problem is it'll be online. So if you don't have the internet, you have to go somewhere to take a survey, but we've been in touch with AOE about this issue and we're going to get their input, but it's something that starting at the end of last week, we started work on. So we hope to get that out soon. We'll let you know when it's out and encourage families to take the survey just to get us a rough idea of what the issues are. And where, where folks are that lack the internet. I. Hey, you've pointed out the, you know, the problem if they don't have internet, they're not going to take your survey, which is designed to find out. Who doesn't have internet. It might be. Better to set up some kind of a hotline where somebody could call in and say, this is my problem. You know, I lost my job. I can't pay for it. I've canceled the service because I've lost my job and can't pay for it. I've the, the line doesn't go by my house. But if. We had a hotline, even if it's only open a couple hours. A day or a week, we could start to at least reach those people who would like to have their kids. Have. Internet service available. And. Start, you know, maybe problem solving some of the issues that are there. I mean, we're having trouble figuring out what kind of programs are available. There's probably a whole lot. Of people who aren't spending eight to 10 hours a day trying to stay on top of things. Who know less. And they may not know that their carrier is offering. This or that program. So. That might be something to think about between the agency of Ed and the department. If we couldn't get something like that set up. So at least there would be a helpline. For. Families that probably could be eligible if they just knew what to do. At this point. So I'll just throw that out for consideration. Madam chair. Thank you. We'll. We'll take that up with AOE and see if. See if there's a. That would be helpful for. For both of our agencies to do. So it's a good idea. I think. Going back to Senator Brock's comment about short term and long term. That's a good short term solution. On the long term, the telecom plan. How's this working with AOE on, on this issue? And. We'll certainly be doing surveying around that. And I think that's a good idea. We'll certainly be doing surveying around that. An anticipation of writing the telecom plan. So. That's another. Another area where we'll. We'll be focusing and certainly a sense that for the telecom plan, a pandemic theme will, will emerge. As we're putting it together. This is. Very unfortunate circumstances that we're in. Because of the pandemic. And it's also causing a lot of. Harm. Economic and both to our health and safety. But it's also highlighting. Where we need to be focusing on our long term planning. It is. Okay. May I ask. Another question. Yeah. And this is for Clay, since we have you here. We've been talking with you previously just about the state. Telecom generally internet connectivity and so on since the. Virus crisis has emerged. Is there any update? Are there any issues that we ought to be aware of? Regarding difficulty of maintaining or getting adequate communications. Thank you, Senator. That's some. That's been a question that we've been thinking about every day. We've been in touch with most of the carriers, all the major carriers. Both wireless and the cable and DSL providers. And they all report that. They are seeing an increase in traffic. That their peaks are higher. They're longer. And there are different areas or different times of the day. But they are managing their networks. Just fine. They have experienced problems yet. We've certainly heard anecdotally from. People who. Mostly on DSL who have had issues. Not getting the speeds that they're paying for. But, you know, those are problems that existed before the pandemic and will exist after. I would say that. Many of the carriers have done things like increase bandwidth. And I would say that. Many of the carriers have done things like increase bandwidth for consumers on a temporary basis and also remove data caps. Throttling bandwidth and imposing data caps are to network management strategies. And so that. Signals to me that so far they don't have a concern. About about their networks and they're, they're willing to increase. The amount of data and the rate of data for their consumers. Okay. Other questions. All right. Thank you, client. If you could get back to us and just tell us. You know, what the best thinking is now how. Assuming that. We might not have everybody back in school in September. But. You know, what. What are we going to do if this turns out to be longer than 10 weeks. And. See where we go. All right. Committee. Well, we'll do. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Okay. Next I have Gordon Matthews. From. VTEL. Gordon, are you on? Yes. Yes, I am. Thank you. Thank you to the committee for the. Thank you for the invitation. I'll give you an overview of what VTEL has been doing over the past several weeks. Trying to figure out the best way to support our customers during this emergency period. We've taken several steps. Initially on March 13th, we've notified all customers that's residential and business customers that we would. Not disconnect. Any customer due to non pay. For at least 60 days. And we also that's consistent with the SEC's. Keep Americans connected pledge. And we signed on to that pledge. On behalf of both, both Vermont telephone company and VTEL wireless. So that's. Kind of a broad stroke to give our customers. Some assurance, you know, in the event that they're having employment challenges or other challenges that they will not lose the existing service that they have with us. We've also in support of remote learning reached out to all the school districts. And Vermont telephone companies service area. To see which students and how many students they've identified that are either unserved or under served in terms of broadband access that they need to. Support remote learning. We're currently. Working to connect about as of today about 65. Students with fiber internet connection in our service area. We've also started reaching out to school districts around the state. To offer a wireless service where. We have good strong wireless service available. In both cases. We're. Offering to provide. Connection. And broadband access. At no charge through the end of the school year. So we're currently working on about 35. Wireless connections for students around the state. And as I mentioned about 65 fiber connections in our service territory. And then finally, we've turned up a new project today in. In Rutland where we installed a new wireless service. To provide. High speed broadband. And donated 100. Wireless routers to students there working through the Rutland school. Rutland city school district. So our efforts thus far have been to. Contact the school districts. Let them tell us who's in need. Who's underserved. And then we're. We're doing our best to support those students and get them. Service where we can right now, we're looking at the. Typical. School year timeline. And where we can, we're providing service. Through the end of the school year. Okay. That's excellent. And these are, I assume students that don't have broadband because they aren't connected to the. Line going by the house, or are you actually stringing. Line up the road. On the fiber side, these are, these are students that. We have. Could have access to fiber. Internet, but for one reason or another, do not. Currently. And we're just hooking them up. Correct. Yep. And we're. As I said, we're really relying on the school districts to tell to tell us who they. Have identified. You know, the schools we find are typically surveying their students to see who needs. Access and we're relying on the schools for that data to. See where we can read students. Okay. So. In the state of Vermont. Is that, is that Mark? So I'm just, I'm trying to. Ambers with us also. Okay. I just, I need you to identify yourself for the record. So we know who's talking. Okay. So. Okay. So. Okay. So. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm just, I just asked how many students are in the state, do you have a record so we know who's talking. Oh, of course. I'm so sorry. So this is Michelle. It a kind of in the room. With a group of our of our company. And, uh, As Gordon was talking about what we're doing, I'd asked to him, which of the school boards we wrote every school board in the state as far as I know, and we heard back from some of them. And, uh, how many have we been interacting with. No, I think, well, we're in touch with all the school districts in our territory. That's, I believe that's eight. And then we've got another 23, 24 throughout the state outside the VTEL exchange, where we've been in touch with them about providing wireless access. Right. And then we also had offered every school where we have a 500% increase in internet bandwidth that was needed at no cost, saying whatever you're getting, we can multiply that by 500%. And one major university, really, we found very gratifying when they were sending everyone home needed it. So we're really making a difference to thousands and thousands of kids from one school, but most came back saying we don't need it. And I think one small school said we need it, and one giant university said we need it, and everyone else said we don't. But I think the thing that's more material from what you guys are looking at probably is the rollout of what we did in Rutland, because it really shows what the technology called massive MIMO with 5G is really going to be doing across America. One of the variables that we're all necessarily confused by because the data isn't public is what T-Mobile is going to do when they roll out their $60 billion in the U.S. to fulfill their commitments to the FCC with regard to bringing 5G high-speed internet to something like 85% of all rural homes in America. Whatever their promises are, they're all completely public and you can look them up in the FCC under FCC T-Mobile sprint commitments. But that's potentially a huge shift. It will probably take a couple of years to do it, but it's massive. And I think Vermont made a huge mistake by refusing to support that transaction when it was invited to many times, because we could have had a very, very inside track of exactly what they were going to do. But the good party all isn't particularly lost. And if you could take a minute and look carefully at the press release that Eric's and sent out today, and we'll send a copy to you or Gordon, can you send a copy of that press release to Ann? And you can see it. But that went out this morning. It's on Yahoo News and a bunch of things. But it's really material because the new super high-speed radios that we put in there that are the same things that are being put up in hundreds of sites around the world really are broadcasting a strong signal that should reach about almost 65 of the 95 homes without internet in all of Rutland for kids. And that should be for if there's 100 homes without internet, that's probably 250 kids or so. And so this new technology is reaching, with free Chromebooks, the schools are providing from Rutland, is reaching more than two-thirds of all those, but reaching them with speeds that are, I mean, faster than most of you have at home. Most of you have almost anywhere in your lives. And it's really fun technology. T-Mobile's doing it everywhere in the country. We're doing it in Rutland and it'd be 100 to 300 meg. And it's really, really interesting stuff. Okay. We'll have to look into that. Thank you. Anything you can send us on that would be helpful. Okay. So Gordon's gonna, I can send it right now. Okay. And if you just send that to our faith, Brown, our committee staff, then she'll get it out to all of us. All right. Committee, any questions for the folks from T-Mobile? Detail. Got T-Mobile in the brain right now. All right. Okay. Don't see any. Thank you for hanging in there with us. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. And now we're going to Chris Recchia. Chris. Hi. Hi. Can you guys hear me? Have you seen me? And or seen me? No? Wait. I can, there, I can see you. We've been able to see you and your pet at one point. Oh, yes. The dog. Sorry about that. But yes, we wanted to try her out. You can see she was working very hard. Yes. I can see that. Most of the pets are these days. That's right. Can you just, your, your sound is a little faint. I don't know if you could get closer to your mic. Yes. I'll do this. I will hold the phone at my head. Is that better? That's much better. Okay. There'll be a little delay, but okay. So thank you very much, Madam Chair, for having me. I wanted to fill you in on what Valley Net and EC fiber are doing in this challenging time. What I guess I would start with is we had always thought that ultimately, when we finished building out our 22 towns, that we would try to figure out a way to make the internet more affordable for households that couldn't afford it. And then when this kind of emergency came up, we said, oh, well, we're just going to offer free installation and free internet for any students that are eligible for free or reduced school lunch or on WIC or SNAP. And we would do that through, at that point, it was the end of April. Now it's through the school year, we will offer that for free. We're also, of course, not doing any disconnects. And we have put in our newsletter that if any home that previously could afford internet can't anymore for having lost jobs or whatever, give us a call, we'll find a way to make that work for them. So that's the main thing. And I guess what I would say is we have 4,300 customers right now in our region that has about 12,000 households altogether. We're currently serving 13 communities entirely, meaning we can go to the last poll on any street. And I'll talk to you a little bit in a moment about a map that I have to show you. And we're currently building in nine others. And wherever we've got access, wherever we currently have the ability to do so, we will provide that free internet service to households that are eligible. So that's kind of the main program we're doing right now. I want to say that we have speeds that start at 25 megabits per second, upload and download. So that's our lowest available. And then we go up to 800. I had one household call yesterday who was eligible for this program, but they had seven kids at home and two adults trying to work. And I said, just put them up to the 300 megabits per second, don't have them try and use the 25. I probably shouldn't say this since this is a public meeting, but I also said something about maybe we should also provide a free 1.75 liter of gin to go along with that. But we didn't do that. Let's see. I wanted to try and show you that because we were talking about mapping. And I'll see if I can share the screen. Yes, I think I can. This, can you all see this? Something is coming up. It's coming. Yep, there it is. Cool. Okay, so this is our map that we've got on our website so people can see whether they are served or not. In general, everything you see here in green is built and operational. And what's in orange is currently being built. And what is in blue is expected to be built toward the fall. And you can zoom in on this map right down to the street level. Well, I guess it's kind of taking a screenshot so it's not filling in like it normally would. I'll go back out again. Normally what you would see here, oh, maybe it was doing it and it just didn't give it time. Yeah. So it actually shows all the premises on the map. Oh, yeah, I can see them. Right? And then on a green route, we can reach, even though the line maybe stops here, what that means is that's probably the last public utility pole, but we can reach these households via what we call drops, which is basically going from the utility pole to the house. So we have a map that can do that for everywhere in our district in our 22 towns. And I'll pull it back out again so you can see where we are. Okay. So as you can see, we kind of started on outside towns like Grandville, Hancock, Rochester, Pittsfield, Stockbridge, Barnard. Those are all completely built out. First year we just finished a little while ago, Stratford, Bedford. And we're moving our way into the centers where people probably had service from some other option, albeit cable or DSL. But so we weren't trying to compete. We're really, you know, with the public mission, we're trying to get it to unserved and underserved locations first, which often meant the most rural. So we've been building that out. And this is an example of a CUD that Clay was talking about before that 44 towns voted in March to join other CUDs or form CUDs to try and provide this service. So I guess I could stop there and ask, you know, and answer any questions you guys have and see if there's anything else that you might think of that I can help with. Did you get many takers when you put out your offer for hookups for students? Yep. We started it last week. So it hasn't been that long, but I have been, I have been in communication with the two supervisory unions and schools that are in our area. And I got a list of about 50. I want to talk about the list for a second. Don't may forget where we were going. But one constraint we had with the schools was they couldn't actually tell me who was on free school lunch because of privacy issues. So what I'm doing is I'm telling people just self-declare. They've given me addresses to look at, but what I need the customer to do or the household to do is to subscribe so I can see their dot on our map and then I can tell them if they're serviceable or not. As I said, I got 12 towns that are already and then nine portions of nine others. So in those nine others, they've got to kind of ask and I can tell whether they are serviceable. But they have to, when they subscribe, I just said in our comment section, they can just put eligible for WIC or for your reduced school lunch. And that's good enough for the self declaration for now. So that the schools don't need to compromise their privacy, but people, if they are willing, can sign up and tell us themselves. And that's really kind of where we are. So in the last week, I've had about a half a dozen that we know we could connect with, that I've connected two or three of them in this past week and we're speeding up to do more. I expect the the lists that they gave me were on the order of 50 or 60. But truthfully, we think about 50% of our region is eligible for free or reduced school lunch. So it's potentially quite a few and it hasn't been advertised very well yet. I put it on my listserv in Randolph. Some other people have have identified it. But I am expecting it to be in the Randolph Herald this Thursday. And I would expect things to pick up from there pretty quickly. Okay. That's that's a great service. Okay, committee. Thank you. Any questions for Chris? No, thank you, Chris. It's great to see you. Thank you. Nice to see you guys all virtually sort of. Yep. And yeah, I know, I know. Well, thank you all very much for what you're doing. It's an amazing time and I wish you all well. And as I say, let me know if there's other ideas you have, or if I can help, let me know. I did try and send faith the press release that we did, which you guys would name the towns that were fully built in and what we're building in. And you'd see a little more detail. But unfortunately, I don't have an eight year old here to help me load that up. And and the dog, even though she's 12, I don't know why she hasn't learned this yet, but she hasn't. Well, we're all kind of the same boat, I think. I think so, too. But as we're a bunch of old dogs learning new tricks, but we're doing okay so far. So yeah, you are. You are. Thank you. And so committee, no questions. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all very much. All right. That takes us through our list of witnesses. Madam chair. Yeah, Austin is on the line who would like to speak from communication. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I apologize, Jeff. I'm still I thought I had updated. No problem at all. No problem at all. Good to see you guys. You madam chair. How are you? We're good. How are you? We're doing okay. Thanks. We're doing okay. Thanks for the time today. I thought I'd just give a quick overview like the other companies of what we're doing, what our responses and how things are going out there. That's okay with you. That's good. Great. So actually, I think Jeff Francis said it really well when he mentioned the magnitude of this crisis is unprecedented. So obviously, there's a lot of things that we're doing internally. One of the things that we want to make sure is the important part. Our technicians are out there every day in the field doing installs and repair, doing maintenance, building out broadband, expanding broadband. So it's really just making sure that they're safe, their families are safe, their communities are safe. So there obviously we have to go in houses still taking care of customers repairs and installations. So there's a lot of operational things that we're working through here at this point. But we have an emergency operations plan that we're working through. And that's going well and knock on what everybody's safe and currently sound here in the company taking care of our customers. So to give you an idea of what we've been up to, like the other companies we signed up for the Keep Americans Connected pledge. So we're not going to terminate any phone or broadband service for anybody who calls us. Advising they have an inability to pay based on the coronavirus. Now, of course, the PUC took that one step further and they've issued two orders putting moratoriums on involuntary disconnects of residential and business telecommunication services. So we're obviously following those. And kind of as relates to the students and school work and how everybody's dealing with that, we currently offer student support program. This is for, it was originally put out there to support low income students. And it includes two free months of home internet, free installation, no equipment fees, no contracts, no data caps. We don't have data caps, but no data caps. So that initial two week promotion expires today. And we're extending that two week promotion for at least another two weeks starting today. The original program focused on it was basically all students that did not limit to low income. People would call us, they would self declare. We worked with all of the school districts in our territory, sent out the information. The school districts then sent out the information to teachers and to all of the folks on listservs and tried to get it out into the communities. So there's a lot of activity on that. In the last 10 days or so, since we've done the promotion, we've received about a thousand orders. So there's a lot of interest around the state. And we cover, you know, 9,500 square miles. There's a lot of homes, you know, out there. And so we've got a lot of orders at this point. That's double what we would normally see around this time of year. So those are just the new install orders. How are you letting them know about this? How are you advertising? So we're advertising through, it's on our website, you can go to our website and find it. And then we're just in contact with school districts. So school districts are sending it out. Basically, however way that they can, you know, so there's a lot of information on the school district websites. I'm sure that's posted. We've seen it on representatives websites. So it's definitely being kind of expanded with the knowledge there that this program is available. So whether it's new orders or upgrades, there's a lot of activity going on for sure and trying to support our, you know, the folks working from home. Like I said, in the beginning, it was intended to be for new customers. But then through the process, we also included existing customers. So if you're an existing customer and you were having some difficulty paying the bill or you were home and get laid off and you have students, we offered that for existing customers also this promotion that starts tomorrow removes the existing customer part of it. And it's only for new customers, just so we can kind of prioritize for the new customers. So like I said, there has been a sharp increase in orders has been a sharp increase in all volumes. We are some of the dates for installation are out there a little ways, you know, our normal time frame, it's about 10 business days. Some of them are out 15, some of them flirting with 20 business days. So that even though it's going to take a little time to get some folks connected, that two months of free service starts when we do actually get it connected. So we're hoping that even though there may be some delay on the front end that this will get folks through the school year and and possibly through, you know, part of the summer. So we have that program going on. And like I mentioned, a lot of interest there, that program will continue. And we've worked also Senator Campion, you mentioned who we talked to, also the agency of education. So we've also notified them. So we've tried to hit everybody we can. We've talked to the Department of Public Service, who's been very helpful. So there's a lot of information out there, as we work through, you know, this, you know, this crazy pandemic here. So we've got that going. One of the things that I found from this call, and I think it was either Jeff Francis or that mentioned it, or maybe it was Jay Nichols. We do a lot of meetings with broadband and talk about where broadband is available, where it's not available, what opportunities that there are for public and private partnerships. Something that I'll take away from this call that was really helpful is we don't usually in those meetings, we don't have representatives from the school district there, you know, no principles, no, no superintendent. So as we're talking on a town level about broadband and public private partnerships, they're definitely through this coronavirus. There's definitely a need to incorporate everybody in the town and the school districts. We will have to start incorporating them in these conversations. So I think that was a thanks to you guys for having this conversation because that's going to be helpful for us. And one good thing that was actually very helpful. Thank you, Madam Chair for the conversation. So I know there's going to be, you know, one of the things that we're still doing is we have a lot of responsibilities. We're still doing make ready. We're still out there turning up sites, building fiber, expanding broadband. Senator Campion, I talked to Katelyn Randall the other day down in Poundall. We turned up that site on Skipperry Road. So we've got one more to do, but we're we open that site for sale. So I talked to her and she's spreading the word. So the process continues and that's what we're doing in response to the coronavirus. A lot of team effort, like I said, we've got our operations folks out there every day helping our customers with repairs and installations and making sure everybody stays safe. Okay, any questions for Jeff? Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. Thanks everybody for your time. Well, thank everybody. Sounds like everybody is stepping up to the plate. So let's see if we can figure out where we go from here. Okay, committee. It is time for committee discussion. And I will throw it out to you. Where do we go from here? Is this something that maybe we keep in the back of our minds and see if federal money does become available? I still have a feeling that there's a couple school districts out there that are really stressed. And if we could find out where they are, maybe we could target some effort. I'm sure you mean specifically around lack of technology, lack of access? Yeah, lack of access for whatever the reason. I'm not sure. Does the federal bill do we know if we heard from joint fiscal, and I'm sorry if this, I should know the answer is, is there a component to expanding broadband? I have not heard that directly at all. There is money that we, coming to the states that we can't use to cover presently budgeted items and we can't use it to backfill loss of revenue. So we're kind of putting other expenses on hold that are COVID-19 until we find out the details. The place we do know we have trouble is in property taxes and tax scheduling. And we are going to go back to that on Thursday. I had tried to set up a joint meeting with Ways and Means, but they are meeting with Ed on Thursday afternoon and health and welfare that I'm on is meeting every morning this week. So we haven't set anything up this week. But we're going to have on Thursday the clerks, the listers, the league, and the tax department to come in and just start to talk to us about all the ramifications of putting off those homestead declarations until July, all the deadlines that are in the present law for clerks, all the, you know, how we go forward. We're all, Joint Fiscal is working with us today. Money Chairs asked them to put together a list of if we do nothing as a legislature, what are the present emergency financial programs abilities in place. Joint Fiscal has a certain amount of power to move a certain amount of money around. E-Board has some certain powers. Those are really for when we're just not in session. So we're looking, there's some questions about can we rescind any money in last year's budget? And then we're down to the last quarter. So is there even money that it's worth resending? But we're doing that kind of just organizing and thinking while everybody else is trying to figure out how much money is coming when and for whom and what the rules are attached to it. And again, this happened very quickly and things seem to change overnight. So we're going at it kind of slowly, it may seem, but we're trying to make sure when we do it, we do it correctly. We don't rush out and spend money on things. We could end up with warehouses for 10 years later unused. So I think that is it. But dealing with, and I will ask the tax department also, they said in a few days they should know the volume of sales and rooms and meals tax that did come in on the due date. They were especially watching some of the big retailers, probably we can assume some online, that aren't being impacted like your local restaurants that suddenly have had everything cut off. So we're going to take a look at what that revenue looks like and then working our way through, the probes is working their way through revenue streams, but also things we might do to supplement it and then get us through next year. But right now, probably the most pressing issue is the entire property tax system and how we get through the next tax year, starting late, assuming that many people are going to have a much reduced ability to pay, assuming that towns are going to want to give rebates. And I've also asked, and I think it might be Maria, but if we, I'm not sure, I know towns can rebate their, they can rebate taxes, they have to pay the full add amount, amount to the Ed fund into the Ed fund. They've asked us if we could do away with that because that's usually two thirds of the tax bill in most towns. And so and if they have to pay it in, it definitely depletes, they're already depleted resources. But most businesses, which are probably the ones, the hardest hit right now are on, are not tied to the school budgets and the property tax. We set that second home business tax rate. So I don't know, I just want to make sure who has the ability to abate that or reduce it and what that process is. So we're working our way through the basics. Anybody else, anything you want to add? I'll be curious to hear what kind of pressures, you know, we have a sense of what they're all dealing with, but what they're hearing directly. I mean, I know I've emailed tax and other groups, other departments up there about the pressures that my constituents are feeling. And I'll just be curious to hear what they're hearing in general when we talk to them on Thursday. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of it is just settling in. Some people haven't been laid off long enough to miss a check. And I think we've been trying to get people through and especially unemployment other than the little phone crash last week. We seem to be on the state level in good shape for people that have been paying in. It's the self-employed folks that and the small businesses who have suddenly seen their revenue go away. And that was still waiting on the federal money and forms and stuff to come in. So you know, and it's hard to tell people when, you know, especially if they hadn't put away any savings to tide them over for a week or two. And their rents do. Madam Chair, have you heard from other moneychairs in any of your meetings? Is there any anticipated time when, I know appropriations, for example, said this morning that they're not going to meet until they have more direction from the Fed. Do we have any sense of when that might happen, when they might have that? It's a work in progress. I don't think anyone's saying a date. It sounds like, you know, that what they told us at the moneychairs today is when we were dealing with Aira or we were dealing with Irene, there was basically one funding source who was writing the rules. And so we dealt with FEMA or we dealt with number five sticks in my head. But there are a number of funding sources, all of whom are, you know, they put this thing together in two, two days, three days. And the devil is always in the details. And we're just kind of waiting for them to figure it all out. I think we're all hopeful it will be in the next week or two. But that we'll know when we know. If you look at the federal bill as it's engrossed, there's a lot of money in there that's relevant to what we've been talking about here today. For example, elementary and secondary education, $13.5 billion in formula funding directly to states to help schools meet the needs of A-12 districts to improve the use of education technology and to support distance education. That's directly on point to what we're talking about. In addition, another $14.25 billion for education, generally higher education specifically. So there's a lot of things once we see the details that may help us directly deal with some of the very issues that are most concerned right now. And I think that's definitely what I'd hope when we started this. And again, this problem is not going away in 10 weeks. We've got all those kids who will have to be somewhere this summer. And unless the emergency is lifted, they're not going to go to the city pool. Their parents may or may not be going to work. Their childcare centers may or may not be open. We're going to have a fair amount of work to do. So I'm looking for somebody that can help us figure out a great way to start with the tax, the deadlines. Towns are still on different tax years for local. We finally said all school taxes start July 1st, but not all town taxes do. They are on different payment cycles. And they are very proud of their cycle and very protective of it. And it costs time, money, and energy when they can't put five people in a room and stuff envelopes. So we're going to have to have some probably pointed maybe difficult discussions with the listers and the clerks and the school boards to figure out how we set at least to get through this coming year. Madam Chair. Yes. I hear you. Thank you. When we meet on Thursday, we might ask for, ask the tax department what we can do to help them get the people in those towns that pay multiple times a year to and send them to put in their both pieces of paperwork they need to pay their school taxes based on income and to designate the residential property. Because the more if it goes beyond the deadline, those people are going to be, they're going to take two hits. They're not going to be able to pay the, they may be short on their booty to pay their taxes having lost work and they're, at the same time, they will not be paying based on income. So they're, as soon as we get that dealt with, the better. I think we've got a couple problems they want. I mean, we could just say everybody that filed a declaration last year, it's this year, you know, and it's just considered to carry over. But we know that there were, right now, Mark, correct me, it's based on your 2018 income. There's a year's lag. Yes. So there are a lot of people that are declaring a lot more income this April than they're going to have to pay their taxes next August or November, because they may well not be working in those months and they are not under the present system going to be eligible for paying based on income. They may well get an abatement from their local community, but that, you know, will depend on if the community has to pay into the ed fund. I mean, we are right now in a position where no one has anywhere near the amount of revenue they had last year or they were anticipating last year. And we don't, at this point, have a prediction, you know, a model to predict when it will all go away. So they're working on trying to get one together. And, you know, if they come up with a vaccine in the next couple of weeks, then the issue with a, you know, another flare up in the fall might be really diminished. But if they don't, then the flare up in the fall might be worse or in the winter or maybe there won't be one. This fall, people who owe money based on last year's earnings will likely not have as much money to pay what they owe. That's right. The following fall, people will have, will be more able to, there'll be more people eligible for income sensitivity because their incomes have did drop and the revenues will be coming in short. So that's, we have a two-year problem. We hope. I mean, what's going to happen to the world economy at this point is unknown. I mean, we're, we're doing this day by day problem by problem. And we just have to stay flexible enough to change when we need to change. So on that happy note, I need another happy note. Madam Chairman, I have a happy note too. You have a happy note. Okay. Well, it's not a happy note, but it's not, but, but, but it's a, but it's something we're feeling positive about and it relates to what we did at Rutland. And what we see, and it's recognized around the world, but it's fun to see it here with our own eyes right in our own neighborhood, that the cost of using 21st century, 2020, really high speed, Ericsson type radios to deliver massive MIMO data to homes is probably about one eighth to one tenth the cost to doing the same thing with fiber. You could probably cover the whole state with an incremental cost of probably 50 or so million dollars. The cost to doing the same thing with fiber is something closer to a billion dollars, 20 times more. The, it doesn't mean that wireless is perfect. It doesn't mean that fiber, if you could afford it, isn't the best thing in the world. If you could put it everywhere, it simply means that if you wanted super high speed data to be sent to most homes in a really reasonably reliable way, in a way that isn't really available across Vermont now, massive MIMO radio technology that's being just deployed around the world could work here for a cost of about 50 million dollars. Okay, that's good to know. Thank you. All right, thank you. Okay, committee. I will see you all on Thursday, if not before, I guess we've got an all senate call tomorrow. And Senator Cummings, you want to end live stream now? Yes, let's end live stream. Faith, have you got enough to go?