 Hello and welcome. This is the afternoon session in the Vermont House of Representatives, the Committee on Education on January 14th, 2021, and we are continuing our listening to how are we, how are our school districts? And we've heard from the superintendents, the principals, we've heard some from school boards, and now we're going to hear from some teachers. And with that, I welcome Don Tinney, who is currently the President of the Vermont National Education Association. So welcome, Don. Thank you, Chair Well. As I've said to others, pulling forth the Masai question, how are the children? Great. Good afternoon. And for the record, I am Don Tinney, a 31-year veteran English teacher from South Arrow, and as Chair Well said, currently serving as President of Vermont NEA. And thank you for this opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you for serving on this most important committee. I'm very happy that I'll be joined by three colleagues from the field this afternoon, Chris Gerro, Stephanie Miller, and Larry O'Connor. And of course, you have also a person from the field and Representative Brady. And sincerely appreciate how your committee has consistently sought to hear at the educator's voice during your deliberations. Throughout the legislative session, you'll also be hearing from our Executive Director, Jeff Fanon, and our Political Director, Colin Robinson, who with great expertise represent our members while they are busy working at school. And Jeff and Colin, as you know, they're the folks who know which bill number is which. As many of you know, Vermont NEA represents over 12,000 educators in every corner of the state who are organized in local affiliates with their own governance structure. We are affiliated with the National Education Association, which is the largest labor union in the nation with over 3 million members. I am beyond proud to represent our extraordinary Vermont educators who have never stopped working to meet the needs of their students since the onset of this pandemic. Our members put forth herculean efforts in adapting to remote learning last March to continue providing instruction and engaging their students so they would feel as if they still belong to the school community. Our food service workers, para-educators, and school bus drivers went above and beyond the call of duty to provide nutritious meals to students and their families. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is how important schools are in providing a nutrition lifeline to the children and youth of Vermont, which is why our organization will continue to promote the implementation of universal school meals in every community. Educators know that hungry children cannot learn. Feeding all of our children is an integral part of educating our children and youth. This is just one true indicator of why the public school is the bedrock of every community. Seeing how important schools are and providing essential services to our students and their families during the pandemic affirms our vision for the development of the community school model. And I know you'll be hearing more about that from Representative James and we thank her for her support of our that approach. As essential workers on the front line, our educators have been going to work every day providing direct instruction and support to students in their classrooms and to students learning virtually at home. The hybrid models, which I am sure you have heard about, have allowed schools to maintain proper physical distancing and other safety protocols, but they have nearly doubled the workload of our teachers since they must plan and implement lessons for both the physical classroom and the virtual classroom. While students may not be learning every lesson in our traditional curriculum, they continue to learn new lessons on a daily basis and have had to acquire executive skills that they would not have ordinarily learned until later in life. Our support personnel including custodial and maintenance staff, school bus drivers, par educators, administrative assistants, and food service workers continue to put themselves at risk on the front lines in service to their students and their families. When we consider the health risks and the chronic unpredictability that our members have been enduring since last March, we can easily understand why they have been experiencing levels of stress and anxiety as never before. Our educators have always been focused on the social emotional well-being of their students and in these tumultuous days, we have been reminding them to focus on their own social emotional well-being. From being in meetings with folks from the Vermont Department of Mental Health, I know they share our concerns for the mental health of both our students and our education workforce. We must continue to work at banishing the stigma associated with mental health issues and do whatever we can to make sure the resources are available to provide counseling and other services to our students and our educators. In the spring of 2019, through a grant from the National Education Association, Vermont NEA convened a summit of nearly 200 education stakeholders to discuss trauma-sensitive practices in our approach to creating safe, compassionate schools. Our work has continued in this area and over this last summer we hosted a webinar series with David Melnick of the Northeastern Family Institute who discussed adverse childhood experiences, resiliency, and how we can shift our mindset about student behavior. We received additional funding from our national organization to work with our New England counterparts in a regional approach, incorporate to this work, incorporating the trainer model and other ideas about how we can make this work sustainable over time and across all school districts. This is not work that can be accomplished by sending individual educators off to a workshop or holding one-in-service training. In the virtual setting and in the classroom, we must continue to address the trauma our students and educators have experienced and pay particular attention to the minority trauma our BIPOC and marginalized students have experienced. We must continue to do everything we can to make sure every school is a sanctuary for every student. All the additional protocols and programmatic adjustments demanded by the pandemic have dramatically changed the school day. And our educators, as do all Vermonters, long for the day when we can return to what we used to call a normal routine. We share the aspirational goal of our state leaders to return to full-time in-person learning, but only when it is safe for students and for the education workforce. While learning has continued throughout the pandemic, remote learning is not an effective substitute for in-person learning, where students experience daily human interactions with their educators and peers. Since returning to full-time in-person instruction is a top priority, then protecting the health of the education workforce through vaccinations must also be a top priority. Since last March, our members have not only been busy planning their own lessons and rewriting their curriculum, they've also been involved with local committees in implementing the state's health and safety guidelines and other protocols related to the pandemic. Over 20 of our members joined our Vermont NEA statewide task force on the safe reopening of schools to address issues related to our return to the classroom. For example, we have addressed not just the health and safety concerns of riding a school bus, but also the important equity issues related to school transportation. Before the start of school, the task force hosted virtual town halls with Dr. Mark Levine, Dr. Brina Holmes, Dr. William Raskin, and Dr. Benjamin Lee to disseminate up-to-date medical information to our members and answer as many questions as possible. They have also met with Secretary French to share their concerns and to hear his perspective on reopening. They continued to meet to address health and safety concerns and most recently hosted a webinar with industrial hygienists affiliated with the National Education Association to explore the issues related to ventilation in our school buildings. Air quality will continue to be an issue we need to address during the pandemic and beyond. We greatly appreciate the General Assembly's support of HVAC inspections and upgrades in the last session. As educators, we never thought we'd be learning so much about HVAC systems, epidemiology, physical distancing, and the difference between viral droplets and aerosols. But the learning curve has been steep and interesting. Vermont NEA continues to be the premier source of professional development for educators in Vermont and our professional programs director and her committee adapted quickly to the virtual world and the need for new approaches to teaching remotely. Learning is at the core of what we do. Our educators cherish the time they spend with their students and are the adults in their young lives outside of their immediate family who know them best. They know how their students learn and through ongoing and formal assessment know what interventions and supports they need. Our educators will need additional resources to support their students as they address the unfinished learning from this pandemic. They will need dedicated planning time within their local districts to develop long-term strategies to assist our students and their families to recover from this pandemic. Vermont educators are up for that challenge, driven and sustained by their love and commitment for their students. Thank you for listening and I'd be happy to answer any questions or we could wait to have questions after other folks have presented. And I see that Stephanie is here so thank you. I think it's working well to just make sure that we get to hear from everybody and our members are holding their questions but so do remember if you have a question members for someone specific or general that would be great. So I would like to welcome Stephanie Miller who's an elementary school teacher for the Colchester School District and we are very interested in hearing how things are going in the period of COVID. So welcome Stephanie. Thank you. So I am a fifth grade teacher in Colchester. This is my 21st, 22nd year I'm starting to lose count which says a lot at this point I guess. And I would say things are okay and I say things are okay because I for those of you who are here when I testified in the spring we were kind of in this place that we had never been before and now I feel like we've done that about three different times in the course of this year where the change is so often and so extreme that at least now we know okay we're just going to roll with the punches and we're going to figure it out. To give you an idea I've done things this even this year that I never dreamed I would do I actually rearranged my classroom three different times you know put desks and put tables out use plexiglass get rid of the plexiglass and then to make it work I actually changed my classroom space where it was physically located in the building over the course of the weekend in November so that I could actually safely house the 23 students I had at the time. I have never moved my classroom in the middle of a school year and it takes actually about two weeks of work and that's I wasn't the only one there were actually three teachers who moved over the course of that weekend that were classroom teachers and we put like I took over the music room so I could have a bigger space it's actually a classroom and a half that was monumental it so it takes two weeks usually to move a classroom I worked for 20 hours over the course of the weekend with my 15 year old son who is very well trained working in a teacher's classroom and we managed to pull it together those are the types of things that take huge pieces of who you are and it takes a huge amount of energy because our classrooms are really the spaces that create safe a safe haven for our kids and everything we do is is made of a choice to make it so that kids want to be there they want to learn they have the things they need so anytime you have to change the makeup of your room that takes a huge amount of effort and thought and energy and I think that's what this year has been about teachers are doing everything in there and they're using their Herkley and Powers all the time to change to whatever the latest direction is and at this point I can say you know every day we're like why am I so tired like I'm exhausted tired all the time because change is is good change on this level is is really hard to do all the time and so all of the school staff personnel from our cafeteria workers who have done all of this changing and how they prepare food and give it to our kids you know from the IA's who are working with my students to the special educators we are constantly trying to figure out how to provide the best possible education we can under these very sort of scary times and that takes a huge amount of energy and most of us do it to without taking care of ourselves and then sometimes without taking care of our own kids my son will still say wait when when do I get a turn with Mrs. Miller and and so I think Vermont teachers have shown that we actually can put an airplane together in the air while it's moving but it does come at a cost and it comes at a cost for not only our mental well-being but that of our families and our students I would say if you wanted to know what our biggest challenge is going forward it is the mental health of the teachers and the students our students need more mental help than they have ever needed before we still have students that have kind of dropped off whose parents either sign them up for remote and they don't come or they're just not the same as they were before COVID and the resources for those students are highly limited I have had more than one turn where I've actually had two parents ask me in the past week for the name of a counselor for their child if I knew of any names and I had to say to them I here's a list I can tell you right now everybody's full so even though parents are reaching out they don't have access to what they need to have access to to be able to fulfill the mental health needs of our students and that is what is going to be our biggest challenge over the next year learning happens when children are fed clothes have shelter and feel safe and part of that is missing right now because kids don't feel safe COVID has made this thing that makes it so that one of their basic needs isn't being met very well right now and what we need in the next year is to take the time to make them feel safe and I think when we hear things like oh we're going to come back on in April and I think how is that possible we had three classrooms with COVID cases in it in the past three days that creates an air of unsafety to them they came back and they were like wait are we coming back aren't we coming back how do we know it's safe for us to be back our middle and high school or only at 50 capacity because it really isn't safe to have adult sized bodies in those classrooms and when you make changes like that that actually upsets the apple cart more because it creates an unreliability from adults because are they really going to be able to come back I don't know teachers aren't being vaccinated students can't be vaccinated and it's creating an air where I actually have to say from for for the past six months I had my eye on a vaccination everything will be okay once I can be vaccinated it that that is my safety line that is the thing that allows me to see my mother that is the thing that allows me to be safe I have asthma I am terrified of not having a vaccine but the only way for us to come back to school altogether is to be vaccinated and that doesn't appear to be part of the plan and that is really what we need is mental health services and vaccination we don't have the supports for the kids that we need Brattleboro retreat has closed I don't know if you know that that is a place where we send some of our most needy kids what do we do with them now where are they going who's taking care of them there is a lack of service I guess for us we have done everything that we can we move mountains every day and it doesn't feel like anybody has our back it feels like we are disposable it feels like we are an enemy of the state we are a drain on the budget we are a drain on the society of Vermont they want to take away the pension that we give into every single paycheck and that is why we don't invest in other things that's part of our paycheck I think if you want to know what we need we we need the state to have our back and right now it doesn't feel like it does thank you very much Stephanie very much appreciate your testimony and I see I believe that Larry is in Larry O'Connor is in and Larry you are a special education in middlebury union high school correct yes I am thank you welcome to our zoom closet thank you yeah I'm a special educator middlebury union high school I've been here about 16 years and you know I I want to start off saying like I'm like I'm very fortunate I am I am in a community that really supports schools and teachers and we have an administration that has been very supportive and I'll say this I this I think our I would say all of our teachers have really stepped and we've we've done what is needed in in our district in the secondary level we're a we're hybrid system at the elementary school we started off with that but now they're back to five days a week the hybrid system I think is probably the best alternative we have right now but you know this you know there's there's some flaws in it I think it's it's probably double the work or at least it's 30 more work I think I think most of the teachers now work all all our weekend I was talking to someone last week and they said man I I only worked eight hours this weekend it felt really good to have a weekend off and so there's you know we've we've we've really stepped up the the the hours that we're putting in and I also think that teachers have really learned to be more flexible and accommodating during this time and we're really listening to what kids have to say and what's important to them but with all of that you know it's still like really not enough we we have we have a very high failure rate at least in the secondary level I would say that most of our students do not do the required work when they're on their remote days and our remote students are really struggling and I think an easy way to put it in perspective is we are in week 17 of the school year the most I could have seen any student this year because of like the schedule would be 15 days in a class so we're halfway through the school year and we've seen in a teacher would have seen a student a total of 15 times and clarify a question that is for the general population or is that for students identified with special needs that would be for the general population so so so we're in a b schedule and so if on a day you might have four four classes like maybe math history science pe and then the b day which would be Tuesday you would have English art and whatever else I didn't mention so as a math teacher you would see those kids on Monday and that's the only time that you see them and then next Monday you see them again and so what we do in hybrid schedule is we have a class on Monday and then we then the kids have stuff they're supposed to do on their own on other remote days and for you know for a certain group of kids you know they they have the social emotional support at home they have the economics where they can have a good internet system we you know are they living a place that is good has good internet you know and they have the intellect and the executive functioning and you know just the cognitive skills that they're persevering and they're doing okay but if but if but if you think the average 15 year old you know you you know you meet with a teacher for 80 minutes and then you have roughly two hours of work for each of your classes you're supposed to do like independently that's a really heavy lift for students I I know when I was 15 I would not have had the executive functioning to to do that long term and so and so what we really see is this gap is widening between between the students we have kids who have always done really well they're plugging away at it your average students are struggling they're falling a little bit behind and then the kids I spend most of my day with they're they're falling apart and and I really don't see a way of fixing that while covid's going on we have some teachers will require students to zoom into class I I spend a couple hours a week chasing kids around to figure out like why like why they weren't zooming into the classes that they're supposed to be in and it's it's it's dairy time consuming and we've seen little to no improvement you have a certain percentage of the kids that just don't have internet which we're lucky in Middlebury it's a pretty small percent I think in the high school we have 17 kids with none but you know you you know you go up and ripped in parts of Cornwall, Bridgeport, Shorm the the internet's just not good and so you're requiring these kids to be in meetings with cameras and stuff their their internet struggles to do it so that's not really working out and it's certainly not working out for a low social economic students as the economic pressures have hit families we have more and more kids are working during the week which gets in the way of them doing this schoolwork because they have to help out with the family so you know it is all this all this all of these issues there and it's you know it's it's no one's fault like I would like like like I'd love to point at you know like like Peter Conlon is here and he's on my school board like I'd love to say like Peter's not doing his job as a school board member but that's not the truth it's like we're like we're all doing the best we can and there's so many issues here that we're really struggling and so to me what what I'm starting to think about is like what is it we need to be successful for the rest of this year and then what is it that we're going to do in the future and what really makes me nervous is you hear like all these talks about budget budget budget and we're going to cut you know and in my district we're we're like up against the cap but pretty much statewide I think school budgets are a major issue but the reality is we have maybe the top 25 percent of the kids are right where they're supposed to be and then you get everyone else is really spread out and falling apart what we really need next year is we need more teachers and we need more support you know as kids fall further behind we need more supports in place and those supports are educators and when we have kids who are not proficient and we're and we're looking at some of them it's it's going to be a year and a half of school or a year and a third of school that they've missed like like that's tough and so so we really have to look at things to do to improve school for the next couple of years so just just to sort of focus a little bit here specific things that you would like like like for us to know and to address because we're not your school board no no no and like but but I understand you're not the school board but I but I think the state and the federal government has to come up up with a universal way of addressing these needs because I don't think the local school boards can fix this stuff I you think it's a bigger it's a bigger problem so what are what give me three things that you would would like us to do I is I this I think somehow there has to be some money found so so so that schools can fill in the gaps that have been created because of this there is there is whether it's having people come in during the summer and learning or adding more teachers that's that's one thing I think more social emotional supports have to be put into schools the local mental health agencies are maxed out and they're filled and some some schools have a lot of mental health services built in others don't but I but I think we need to to add add to that and then I and then I also think of things that we we can do like this year like I like I look at standardized testing like that just needs to go away until this is done like we know the kids are falling behind I think adding that on to someone's plate causes too much anxiety and the students and teachers are so fragile right now that they that they can't handle that and and I and when you look at things through a lens of students and teachers are just they're emotionally wrought every single day I come into work and I see someone crying because whether it's a student or a faculty member every single day this year and and as long as people can keep that in their mind and say what is it that we we can do to make the lives of these people better and easier and kind of cut out stuff I I I I also think that when that the schools should focus on going into depth on things and not focus on making sure you cover all the topics you know like if you think back to years ago when you said like an algebra one class and then geometry in the algebra two it's like I I don't care if the kids get to the end of an algebra one class I I want them to learn something and I want them to learning well before they go on to the next thing but there's these motives to kind of get to at the end of a curriculum a fourth grader next year is very different than a fourth grader two years ago and we need to accept that and we need to adjust everything that we're doing I look at next year's ninth grade class the last time they would have been in school full time was sixth grade they had no full-time experience in in middle school they had you know they had a good chunk of this seventh grade year but then after that so you know I you know I'm more than happy to to answer questions um if someone wants specifics I'm more than happy to give it thank you I've written down the things that that you were looking for and I'd like to move on to Chris Garros so we have two special educators here today Chris Garros who was here I believe in the in the fall special educator from from Montpelier school district so welcome Chris hi thanks for having me today sorry to join a little bit late but I'm coming straight out of a parent meeting so I'm happy to be here um so I teach at Main Street Middle School in Montpelier you know not too far from the Capitol building really and so the the first thing I'd like to talk about is just to highlight some of the work that's that's been done because I do think what's happened thus far here in my district is amazing but before I do that I just want to recognize that you know my my opinions and experiences are mine alone and if you talk to educators around the state as you're doing every district has a plan that's quite different and they've had to do do that because of what their infrastructure looks like their buildings and their their staff and what they can physically do by while being safe so just keep that in mind as I talk about Montpelier so I would say quite honestly our reopening plan has been a success and really exceeded my expectations Montpelier Roxbury uh from the beginning at our elementary and middle schools when we measured out the space uh we made the decision over the summer that we thought we could be in person five days a week and we've done that from the start with a shortened day it's about two hours shorter than it would normally be because frankly asking small children and middle school students to sit in a room all day with a mask on uh just necessitated making the day a little shorter and also because of some of the things that our staff is being asked to do that that was necessary uh some of the success that our district has had is in large no small part because of um the work our administration did to bring everybody to the table over the summer make sure teachers, paraprofessionals, custodians were a part of that reopening plan and that collaborative spirit has been there throughout this pandemic our superintendent Libby Bone Steel has been very uh communicative and empathetic with our staff and when times have been tough uh that's that's really helped uh our staff um the other thing that helped is our district did work with us to reach memorandums of understanding around what the working conditions were going to look like and that helps helped our teachers uh know that they would be protected we looked at the contract and the new working conditions and have a document that says this these are what things are going to look like this will what this is what will happen if there's a case and so on and it just helped people to know what that would look like um so I want to talk a little bit more about what the day looks like for our students and I'm going to speak mostly about the elementary and middle school because I'm a middle school teacher and that's what I know uh we we work with a pod model which you may have heard about and so essentially what we did is we looked at all the available staff we had in the school and took every classroom and made it so there's two adults in every classroom throughout the school um that pod stays together for the whole day and uh they might have a teacher switch so that they can get all the middle school content they need but that's their cohort and we've done that to mitigate risk if we did a typical middle school day where we had kids all around the building one case could shut us down and uh we wanted to be resilient enough where if we did have a have a case we could have one classroom potentially go virtual but uh remain remain open and that's required a lot of flexibility in our staff we've got specials teachers our french teacher is now in a pod and uh kids are supervised all day if they go to the bathroom an adult is following there and making sure they're not mixing groups so we've really gone to great lengths to mitigate the risk and uh you know for the most part that that has worked that said there's been a couple of really scary incidents um one at our elementary school which was related to the central vermont hockey outbreak where we had uh six cases in a single classroom and that's with distancing and masks in place and it's it's really uh the department of health came in and said your model is an exemplar um and i i worry about what would happen if we hadn't had that planning in place and and had kids going about their day as normal um and that those types of incidents really wear on the staff it it i'm sure others have mentioned that um you know there's there's a cost to operating school and the way we're doing and it is uh teachers are really or frankly quite burnt out before the pandemic but you add this extra layer where the day looks quite different it can be a little monotonous being in the same room all day it feels a little like groundhog day sometimes both for our students and us um and so both staff and students are uh it just can just feel a little monotonous and our staff have said we're not bouncing back from the stress in the same way we normally would the other piece that's been difficult in this model is i'm a special educator and uh we've been asked to operate in this model where we mitigate risk and the typical year i would be all around the building in classrooms pulling kids from different classrooms and having groups of students but we really uh want to be cautious that we're not potentially spreading the virus around the school so there's two classrooms i'm physically able to go and do and if i i can go in those classes and serve students but um in other cases i have to either pull a student individually to work with them i kind of stand at the door say come with me and that way i'm not going into the room and potentially exposing other kids uh or in some cases i'm doing services virtually while we're in person if that makes sense i'm sitting in this space which is my new office used to be the family and consumer science kitchen but i have a desk in here for this year so i'm not here in my other clustered office and i'm doing things uh virtually with students running writing and math groups but it's i'm sure as don has said uh you know any of that stuff through a computer is no substitute for in-person instruction and uh well i think i'm making some progress with students in that format it's not the same as if i had kids in a in a group from different classrooms so i look forward to the day when i can do that again but frankly i i don't see that happening until uh the vaccine is a little more widespread than it is um so i have that concern about really our tier our multi-tiered system of supports is kind of decimated this year because our interventionists are in classrooms i'm not in a pod but i can't pull groups together in the same way i would like to and uh there's a lot of kind of asynchronous material on-demand material created but we're really not able to to do the in-person instruction for those second and third tiers in the ways that we would like to and um as larry mentioned that's causing a lot of kids to kind of slip through the cracks uh and i i think in terms of what we'll need i would echo that there's going to be a lot of work to get things back to get students where we want them to and we may need extra interventionists extra social workers to make sure kids are both you know physically and mentally where they need to be and then we can work on academics and the other piece i'd highlight is even in our model kids are getting about half of the core instruction time that they would we end the day two hours early so kids might have math every other day so um there's going to have to be a hard look at the curriculum and what the long-term plan is to get our students where they need to be i think amazing things are happening in the classroom this year but we just don't have the time that we're accustomed to and the format frankly is is more challenging because we're we're we're remaining six feet apart uh we'll also just you know doing what we can to to make things somewhat fun and engaging for kids when we're we're somewhat limited um i think that's the gist of it but my main concern is is you know we know some kids are falling behind there's others that aren't coming to school as much as they would and how are we going to pick up the pieces when this is all over and the sooner we can start um um you know getting teachers vaccinated so that we even in our current model we can do more mixing of groups than we can you know i think that's when things are going to be able to move forward but uh i'm quite impressed with how teachers are rising to the occasion really putting their physical and mental health uh aside to worry about their students and uh it's taking a toll well we know we also know there's a lot of work work ahead that we need to do and i'd be happy to answer any questions thank you okay we have questions and i see you representative govley i had to find myself i'm not sure you can answer this question but i have really been for a year or so now with this COVID thing um very concerned about our kindergarten through grade three which i think we'll all agree are very formative years and and the education process um i it's my own feeling that they have really lost um a lot of their education uh substance and we you know these kids will continue to move on to the fourth grade the fifth grade and so on how how are we going to address that how can that be addressed that that if the if it can be at all i i don't know but it's been a very big concern of mine to see these younger kids just continue to move on with with the education that they've lost i don't know if anyone can answer that but i i just bring it about it's it's very concerning to me that we continue to pass these kids through the system um maybe i can sort of answer that a little bit i've worked with you know first grade through sixth grade what i will say is this i've gotten some pretty amazing kids from uh camps outside of the united states right these are kids who sometimes left their country they lose their first language they start their second language those kindergartners first graders and second graders have had it hard but i will tell you this they are sponges and when you take care of all the there's healthy teachers that are in a safe space that can teach them when they are fed closed and have everything they need once you take care of that you can move forward and you can you can take care of them i'm hoping you can see me because now it says i'm unsecure or whatever okay they they will make up time our kids will make up time what i worry about is if we are focused on catching them up without first focusing them safe and taking care of their mental needs you will actually do more than you will do help you've got to get them back in you've got to create community you've got to create safe if you do that then you can move forward and you will make up time but it's it's if you push it you'll overheat the system start with the mental health services first and making them feel safe and part of a community thank you it's very helpful yeah i'll come out hello madam chair oh yes um it it's um what a longer school year helped us out a bit anybody summertime part of the summer program a longer school year larry yes but a longer school year enabled some of these younger students to catch up or compared to another year yeah i'm i'm not sure a longer school year per se uh would help you know the the short answer is yes but then it gets like complicated but i but i i but i think giving schools the resources so they can run something during the summer for kids who have fallen behind would be a big help and then i then i also think refocusing on on what's valuable especially at the younger grades i think i think the you know if you look at like k-3-3 it's social emotional and it's the literacy you know if you're a strong reader then you know you're going to figure school out right and like if you're a strong reader like you'll do okay in life but if you're not a strong reader suddenly school becomes hard holding a job becomes hard everything else becomes hard so it's really kind of i i think trimming away things that uh might might not be as important and really start to focus on what's best for those kids they feel safe and you're really building on their reading in in math and writing thank you i also think class size plays into that a lot um i can typically have 25 26 kids in my room technically my room is wasn't even big enough to have that many kids in my room so when you have 24 25 and somebody else has 18 you get a lot more done with 18 and you can make up time when you have 24 25 it is a lot harder to make up time thank you we've got about 25 more minutes and i've got four representatives with questions so far our comments and i'm going to go to representative james and then representative clown one thanks sure web um i had two different questions i guess i'll just pick one um curious about um i know someone earlier had mentioned standardized assessments um and i'm curious to know um how you would then quantify and try to kind of pinpoint learning loss and learning recovery needs without that data i'd like to jump on that one so i think i think what larry's talking about is the the the s back you know the kind of the mandatory statewide testing most of our schools are i know our ours does have local assessments that we've administered or we know which kids are struggling in reading and math and for me personally this is an opinion the s back data doesn't get us that information as quickly so you know we do that test sometime between march and may and then we see the results you know in summertime so and it also takes about a week to administer and i've already highlighted the shortened day that we have so you're talking about eating up a week of already a shortened school year to administer a test when in my opinion we already have local assessments that tell us which kids are struggling we administer those three times a year so i think it's a case of uh you know each school and district should have a way to tell which kids are struggling but the s back this year is probably not the tool to do that and probably counterproductive in that it will eat up precious time thank you thank you kate did we hear earlier that that's a federal requirement though can the can we do nothing about that the s back i have a feeling we're going to be hearing something about that coming from the federal government with the new secretary um that's definitely a conversation that's happening at a pretty much national level thank you yeah thank you um representative arison i think what's next and then representative austin thank you madam chair uh question for our presenters uh and i'm going to prefix that with with a comment our pre-session we had a uh session with hcrs which is the mental health services in southeast vermont and one thing that will come and they provide some of the services to our school and they emphasize very strongly that there was not staff available not not just plain not available my question to the presenters is if these mental health services that are so dire and in need of are they going to be of do you have staffing that can accomplish that this might be a question for the principles but why not see what the teachers have to say yeah i would say no i agree with staphany and i talked to a number of folks that that is one of the concerns of the designated agencies that they they don't have enough counselors on staff now and when we see the heightened demand and um when we talk about address the issues of truancy and who's who's going to go out there and find students and as larry said that's incredibly time-consuming to find students who are engaged so it it definitely is an issue that we have to address and in absence of additional staff then we have to take a real district-wide approach to to solving those problems as chris mentioned you know looking at the mtss that will need to be revised multi to figure out yes thank you thank you sorry for the jargon yes we i'm really trying because as you know we have got a lot of letters in this field um let's see representative larry did you have something to add to that yeah i i'd like to comment on that comment on that i'm in a little bit of a unique situation i think uh my my district uses an outside agency my wife is a therapist or should say social worker in a different district and they hire them they don't use an outside agency they they they do use an outside agency for some stuff but they have several of these staff that are there for social emotional and it's a social work position these outside agencies the amount of paperwork you have to do that it's that it's the equivalent of two work days per month of paperwork and plus there's other like requirements and training they have to do where schools because of how Medicaid is done it's it's significantly less paperwork so it so so it costs more than using these outside agencies but you get a lot of bang for your buck my my wife is in a high school i think she's 70 to 80 kids that she checks in with on a regular basis and she's not as overwhelmed as i am so i think it's working pretty well thank you the good news is my daughter is working on her master's in that field and i keep encouraging her to and i said boy you're going into a field you're going to be able to write your own ticket yeah that's great to hear charlson um serita austin and then representative wilson williams i'm just wondering if you all have like a dedicated planning time in a um team time in addition to planning and lunch you have a dedicated time to meet with other teachers that share groups of students well could that this that happen on Wednesday let's say when students aren't in school on a regular basis um right now nobody shares students first of all because you can't you can't mix your pot our kids don't eat lunch together they stay in our room they don't go to recess together but i do we team we um use um all day Wednesday plan as we um we meet together we've never been more in sync because we've never had time um usually we're trying to check you know catch each other you know bathroom and um you know in between lunch for five minutes of together so that has been one highlight to this year is that wednesday more age than we have unfortunately when we go back next year that's not going to be there for us we we end the day two hours early and that's when we have those those meetings and our planning time um and there are kind of curricular meetings happening i participate on a math team one day and with the language arts teachers um i think what's what's missing is i'm not able as easily to keep tabs on some of my students and how they're doing in their core classes because i can't go in there and there's been less time to do that kind of informal hey this student's not getting any other work done can you help out with that um but we do we do have team time and it's why we end the day early good so uh we we have a collaborative prep at the high school within department so like the english department has collaborative prep and teachers also have have some prep throughout the week uh the traditional prep time depending what position you have like so like in my position it's it's a lot less prep and it's a lot more like chasing kids and families around but uh it's we've been very fortunate with with the collaborative prep in in in our district and we've been lucky to maintain that so thank you representative brady thank you thanks so much for joining us today stephanie and chris and larry um i guess i'll i'll chime in a little bit sort of with the question but also thoughts and experience as a teacher as well um that it what i'm hearing from this and having had been able to hear the testimony of other groups as well some of the principals i think did a particularly good job of kind of weaving together all of what has happened and the challenges um is that teachers are sort of in survival mode right now like navigating in some cases things continue to change as there are cases and classes shut down and and continuing to just teach in this altered challenging territory and so as we as a committee as a state as a nation think about recovery and re-engagement um clearly just doing business as usual going back to school following the calendar as usual um you know one or two in service days boom we reopen we reset the rosters as if nothing had happened is is not going to um that's my fear is that is that is what will will happen and that's not going to address the issues that everyone is raising here so um though i'm not sure we've heard a total succinct ask or and i don't know yet learning as a legislator what our role even is as the state to me it sounds a lot like there are there are time issues there are resource issues um in order to to do this thoughtfully i appreciate the the comments about class size and i think we're in a difficult position there i i've noticed it myself i think some of my classes are faring quite okay because they're so small i have six or seven kids in a section because they're split across two days or two parts of the week at the alphabet and so despite the distancing and the masks and the awkwardness we're able to have a pretty social atmosphere and talking and things and um obviously we cannot afford taxpayers cannot afford those kind of class sizes but it has been a really interesting um you know 201 every time i've surveyed all my classes because i've said you know what's what are the good things we love smaller classes we love having smaller classes um and and for all the students who are in school and notably we have lost a lot of students which has got to be one of our top priorities but for those who are in school teachers are able to be more in tune to them this year because of those um class size numbers again i i know that's a you know those we have small class sizes to begin in vermont so even smaller class sizes is not a realistic solution on the horizon but i think it's interesting pretty universal anecdotal or i should say anecdotal not universal evidence this year of what we what we've experienced i guess i'm curious from the nea if you have any other kind of thoughts about really what it what it will take to recover and re-engage and not just start business as usual you know the the when last second to last wednesday and august um and knowing that you know teachers are we're very accustomed to a school schedule and summers off and a break and often kind of plan our lives around that um and so you know i think it will be we be delicate if we're talking about needing some of that time clearly it would need to be compensated but um but i i wonder how the nea and teachers are thinking about um how to do this well and not just do it right and we we've just started meeting around that as as education groups with the aoe uh deputy secretary buchet has created the draft of a recovery plan and i think those ideas this are will be percolating over the next few weeks i do think we have to be cautious and not having it you know fixed by september i think that's one of the um issues that we're facing that this is this this recovery is is not going to happen over the summer it's not going to happen before christmas of next year um i also think one of the um things that i've learned at this from the state level is that you know and chris alluded to this that there's um every school district is different the experience of teachers even within a district are very different uh and um i think we we need to take you know a state approach but also a regional and district by district approach just one example i've met with uh jeff francis and j nickle superintend association principles association with uh deputy secretary buchet for a couple of times now on the truancy issue and i think as an example of let's look at this issue define what it is what are some of the solutions to this and then here the resources we need here's a plan for that so it's almost like issue by issue region by region and i you know and we're all in sort of a rush to get it done but i think that's what it's going to take so that we as we always do as educators right student centered figure out the resources are um in plan and and do that the the the challenge is going to be finding the time to do that and um and and we have to build it in i think it's definitely mentioned you know having the the wednesday time is important we've we've struggled with that you know i taught for 31 years that was always the struggle you know so i hope that addresses your concern but it's going to and it's going to take you know from school board superintendents principles educators um as as well as political leadership in the aoe thank you i have a question to the special educators and this is something that i have heard you know in special ed law there's something called compensatory education where students that have have been uh denied or have not made progress which is considered the basically that the school hasn't provided the correct you know the appropriate services and then there's covert related learning loss and my understanding is um that there's a there's there's a maybe a difference between the agency and the federal law that's looking at whether we're counting this as compensatory education and an increase in workload paperwork are you finding that have you experienced that based on requirements from the aoe uh go ahead larry you you you i can go okay so i would say better lately at the start of the pandemic we were asked to create these distance learning plans and then there were about three or four different revisions to set distance learning plans that resulted in me really the first thing i had to do was be on the phone around paperwork when i wanted to be uh planning how i was going to do distance learning you know at the start of this year our district came up with a with a system and we we put some things in the iep where there's a contingency plan in case we need to go virtual and that's working better uh hypothetically if we did go virtual for a week or two i don't think i would need a paperwork need to make a paperwork change it hasn't happened yet uh and i've heard conflicting information around that so in short it started with a lot of different paperwork changes frustratingly so i think it's improved but uh if i go virtual and find out otherwise i'll get back to you thank you mary i would i would echo that uh my spring in the first month of this year was paperwork and that's all that that that it was the amount of paperwork that was required was was was just this enormous i i like truly can't describe it it was it was so much uh but uh so far what we were promised is that these contingency plans would actually save paperwork i would say from probably end of october beginning to november my my paperwork is now kind of what it is in the normal year um i've not had to go remote yet nor has students in other high school so i can't speak to that but in theory i i just got to put a note in the iep and then and then we're all set i the compensatory services um i i i don't feel i can adequately speak to the uh law because i i i've heard a change but i can assume that there's going to be compensatory services for kids who are on ips and i think for kids who have severe learning disabilities we we should expect that and i think in the elementary schools we should i think uh when it gets to middle school and high school that usually translates to kids coming in in the summer and they tend to push back against their parents more so i'm not so sure and you'll see a significant increase in in that because the kids have to be willing to so i'd like to speak to that one a little bit too so compensatory services generally means there was something in an iep that somebody didn't do we have to make up for it then there's also uh esy extended school year that's generally provided to a student that shows regression after a long period without instruction um you know we bring them in in the summer to really maintain skills and then the states added the third wrinkle which is the the covid uh services how you differentiate those three things i i don't know but those conversations are probably going to start to happen and um you know i haven't seen a lot of guidance in how to differentiate them or what that's going to look like as we approach the the summer thank you um i don't see any other questions here um we are going to be uh continuing to stay in touch with the nea and with the teachers as we're moving forward um next week i'm hoping that we're going to have an opportunity to look at um how the state might be moving forward in addressing uh learning loss and um what's the term we're using now not learning loss well some folks are using reengagement learning reengagement reengagement thank you i gotta put this up i don't know why i can't remember that that word but another phrase as folks are using is unfinished learning yes i've heard that as well okay we want to make sure that we in in in all of this that we don't have any sense of punishment of students for being behind and we know that children often feel that they're being punished and i think that's one of the things that we we absolutely you know must make sure that we don't it it is not their fault it is no one's fault right this pandemic is no one's fault and we need to keep that in mind as as i'm sure all of you will but as we as we get into that rush right we've got to get them gotta get them caught up um we asked the question when when someone says my child is behind we want to say behind what right behind and because there are millions of students in the country in the same situation oh as you know we're the state and we're here to help with legislature we're here to help yes and we appreciate that we we we sincerely when i speak with my counterparts from around the country i genuinely appreciate the support our education system has from state leadership that that we enjoy that and they don't in other states well thank you thank you we know that our students are learning we just aren't sure what they're learning is but we wish they were learning um we have active brains thank you so much everybody