 Good morning, everyone. As I mentioned last week, we'll be dedicating a portion of our weekly briefings to update you on school reopening plans. And Secretary French will share more on this in a few minutes. Additionally, Secretary Young has already briefed many of the media on the details of the budget that we'll be presenting to the legislature later on. As I've said many times, we're facing a once-in-a-century crisis. And despite the challenges that have come with it, we put together a budget that's balanced with a combination of efficiencies, which we worked on for the last three and a half years, and state and federal revenues, but does not include new taxes or fees. But more simply, just like families are doing, we're setting priorities, trying to do things smarter and better while making some difficult decisions. The bottom line is, we're not spending more than we're taking in, and we're living within our means. Building a budget in this environment has been easy, and I appreciate all the work by my cabinet and their teams this summer. It was a bit challenging to turn this around so quickly, but they were up for it. Again, as I said earlier, this budget does not raise new taxes. Because I don't believe this is a time to be asking for more from Vermonters, especially when we consider we haven't yet felt the full magnitude of the pandemic, nor do we know the extent of the economic impacts. As well, we should not be cutting essential programs for Vermonters, and our budget won't do that either. And this budget does not tap into our rainy day or reserve funds. They're still full. We can do this because we've been focused on our fiscal management over the last four years. Some of you might remember this has been one area of significant debate with the legislature. In addition to our strong fiscal position, we're using our federal relief dollars wisely to help us manage through the crisis, help employers survive and maintain the program serving the most vulnerable. This is the right time and the right way to use this funding because we need to provide for Vermonters now so that we can rebuild and recover faster and stronger. But we must also recognize that there will be more difficult budget decisions ahead. Even if we see a vaccine distributed after the new year, the next fiscal year that begins July of 2021 could be a much bigger challenge. In part because of the one-time nature of the support from Washington, but also because of the unknowns we face in our economy and with the virus. But what we do know is the better we fight this virus now, the better the future will be for all of us. That's what we mean when we say be smart, stay safe, stay open. Slowing the spread allows us to keep businesses open and keep Vermonters employed and generate the economic activity we need. So let's continue the good work and stay focused. Wear a mask when you can't stay physically separated. Wash your hands a lot, stay home if you're sick and follow the state's travel guidance. Switching gears, let's talk about school reopening which will happen just three weeks from today. As we get closer to September 8th, I realize many educators, school staff, parents and kids are nervous. Believe me, I get it. We all want to do what's right for educators, staff and especially our kids. Having more than 50 school districts each doing their best to craft a plan to meet the needs of their students and communities and doing the work that is necessary to be able to switch between in-person and remote learning makes this especially difficult. So I think it's important to reiterate the answers to the following questions. Do we know if it's safe to return for in-person learning? Do we know how to implement health and safety protocols? And finally, why should we return for in-person instruction? First, prioritizing in-person learning is something we've talked about a lot over the last few weeks. It has the full support of Dr. Levine, the Department of Health and other experts outside my administration. Dr. Bell and Dr. Raska, for example, have shared their professional opinions with us at these briefings, which shows we listen to the science and data from the experts and will continue to do so. Secretary French has been working with many others on the how. How to implement health and safety protocols in schools so we keep viral suppression high. The question of if, if it's safe to return to in-person learning has been studied, debated, and answered by Dr. Levine and his team at the Department of Health and supported by health professionals. The bottom line is we wouldn't be moving forward with reopening schools without their okay. Next is the how, how do we implement health guidance? Vermont has a 200 year old tradition of local school boards. It's a tradition that gives parents a lot of input into their schools and their children's education. While it's appropriate to come up with guidance at state level, it needs to be put in place at the local level. There are more than 50 superintendents, 300 principals and around 18,000 teachers, administrators, and staff who have more insight of the operations of their schools and the needs of the children in their communities than folks do in Montpelier. We need to lean on their expertise, like we do with our health professionals, to do this work because they're capable and they're on the front lines. Clearly, there will be obstacles ahead, like staffing levels, which may limit much in-person instruction that districts can offer. As well, some districts might not be able to go fully remote and even though they might prefer it. And for many parents, child care will be a challenge when we move back and forth between in-person and remote learning. In the upcoming legislative session, we'll be offering some solutions to the first two issues. But today, we'd like to share our plans to help address child care. Secretary Smith will provide more information next, but here is the overview. We know we need more child care capacity and we need it quickly. Through an executive order, I'll be modifying our state regulations so that home-based providers can be reimbursed for more than four hours of care on school days. We believe this will add about 3,000 spots to help parents who are navigating different school schedules for in-person learning. Additionally, we'll be developing regional child care hubs for the school-aged children on remote learning days. These sites will use appropriate business and municipal spaces and will operate like summer camps from a regulatory standpoint to avoid some of the red tape so we can get them up and running quickly. We're recommending 12 million of federal relief dollars to be used on this initiative. And finally, I want to go back to the question of why. Why are we reopening schools? Why are we expanding child care? Kids will have been away from school for more than five months when they return in September. We don't know the full impact, but what we do know is not all families have been able to manage this since March, which means the inequity that existed before schools closed has likely gotten worse. We've heard from pediatricians who have told us that kids, especially the most vulnerable, are not okay. So if the health experts are telling us it's safe, then we need to get back into some routine and provide stability for these kids. Because while we know there is some risk of going back, there will also be long-term consequences if we don't. With that, I'll now turn it over to Secretary Smith to talk about child care. Thank you, Governor. The Agency of Human Services recognizes that the multiple return to school models being pursued throughout the state creates a significant need for school-age child care on remote learning days. The Department of Children and Families conducted an analysis of the Agency of Education's enrollment data by county and grade, and concluded that if 25% of K-6 students require child care during remote learning days, that is the equivalent to 10,300 new child care slots. So the Department for Children and Families will be working with community partners to get these new child care slots open and available in the next month. The Governor's executive order will allow the Agency of Human Services to work with child care providers and expand capacity to meet the school-age need with a three-pronged approach. These approaches include, first, as the Governor mentioned, we will expand the number of slots available through registered family child care homes by eliminating the restriction that prevents them from providing more than four hours of care per day for school-age children. This change will allow registered family child care homes to serve up to four school-age children during remote learning, which is currently what happens on school days. It is anticipated this change alone will service more than 3,000 children. Second, the Department of Children and Families will support the development of what we call child care hubs for school-age children across the state. These hubs will be set up in workplaces, school buildings, recreational buildings, municipal buildings, and summer camp buildings that historically care for children. We are approaching, pursuing these multiple hubs throughout Vermont to allow for an individual approach to care and provide the needs and alignment with the Supervisory Union's reopening plans. This will allow site flexibility to meet the care needs of the region and families. Grants will be available to programs running a hub site. Grant awards are intended to cover their initial startup and operational costs. It is anticipated and estimated that the regional hubs could serve as many as 7,000 school-age children. Finally, it's important to build the capacity of the child care system. As we look to increase options quickly, the Department of Children and Families will expedite administrative processing and increase administrative flexibility for applications seeking to become a regulated child care program. Increased administrative flexibility includes granting provisional licensure to programs while they pursue full licensure, granting variances to licensing regulations, and expedited division reviews. We believe these administrative changes will add to the long-term capacity of the existing system of care. We understand that these changes need to happen quickly and child care providers will need financial support to increase caseload in current child care homes and to develop the community hubs. Accordingly, DCF plans to invest restfully $12 million to meet this need and to do it in an expedited manner. The breakout of the investments is as follows. The CCFAP caseload increase, about 4.8 million. The regional hub site grants about $7 million. And then a community lead grant to help us put this all together with community partners about 220,000, just under $12 million. I do wanna point out that the hubs will adhere to health and safety requirements through the grant agreements. Sites will need to meet both COVID health guidance as well as childcare health and safety requirements, such as ensuring all staff have background checks with the goal of providing safe and consistent care for children. Other typical regulations such as the requirement of staff to have individual professional learning plans will not be expected by grantees. We expect to have more information on this in the coming days, and Vermonters will be able to find information on DCF's website shortly. When we get it up, we will make the announcement on the additional information to DCF's website at dcf.vermont.gov, forward slash childcare forward slash parents. And now I'd like to introduce Secretary Dan French. Thank you, Secretary Smith. Good morning. I'm pleased to be able to provide an update on the work of reopening our schools. Last week, we reached out to our districts to understand the patterns in their reopening plans. As expected, a majority are implementing some aspects of hybrid learning, where students are engaged in both in-person and remote learning at the same time, or different groups of students are doing so. We have approximately 60 school districts in the state. We were able to obtain information on the plans of 49 of these districts as of last Friday of these 49 districts. 46 will have some version of hybrid learning. Three will be remote. Several districts are in the process of finalizing their plans this week. Hybrid learning is taking several forms. 75% of these districts that responded are having two days a week in-person and three days of remote learning. 20% are having four days of in-person and one day of remote learning. We will continue to monitor these plans as we get closer to the reopening of school, and we'll be collecting monthly data on the implementation of hybrid learning so we can understand the patterns of access and opportunity. The focus of districts and the Agency of Education is now on the how of reopening our schools. We are interested in maintaining stability in our state-level guidance as much as possible. Last week, we issued an update to our health guidance. I do not expect to make any further changes to this guidance prior to the reopening of schools unless new health information or a change in health conditions warrants it. We are focused on producing guidance on applied aspects of the health guidance to specific instructional situations. For example, last week we issued guidance on sports and guidance on social-emotional supports for students. This week, we expect to publish guidance for our pre-K programs. We are also working with our partners at the Department of Health on building out a robust list of responses to frequently asked questions regarding the implementation of our health guidance. As evident in the focus on hybrid learning in our reopening plans, we continue to build out our capacity for remote learning statewide, even with our focus on in-person instruction for younger students in grades pre-K through five. Our state-level efforts to improve remote learning for all students include expanding access to the Vermont Virtual Learning Co-op. As of August 1st, we anticipate about 25,000 Vermont students will enroll in the VTVLC course this year. We also formed the first-ever state-level instance of EDMOTO, the Popular Education Network Cycling for Teachers. EDMOTO announced last week that they have reached an agreement to embed Zoom video conferencing into their platform. We will be following up with EDMOTO this week to explore bringing free Zoom access to all Vermont districts as part of their participation in the EDMOTO platform. Another technology tool we are exploring is a statewide app for the implementation of the required daily health checks in schools. We hope to identify a technology solution this week. All the technology investments for the support of our districts in this emergency are being funded by federal dollars. The financial aspects of reopening schools are an important consideration since schools have had to make adjustments to how not only how they teach, but also how they address the safety considerations of their buildings. I thought I would provide an update on the funding for reopening our schools which largely comes from the CARES Act. The CARES Act has three pots of money for K-12 education. The Coronavirus Relief Fund, or CRF, the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief Funds, or SR, and the Governor's Emergency Education Relief Funds, or GEAR. The General Assembly appropriated $50 million for K-12 education reopening costs under the CRF. These funds were allocated under specific programs, and each program must get separate approval by our fiscal oversight group to ensure the funds are used in a manner consistent with the CARES Act. The Summer Food Service Program, totaling $12 million for the delivery of meals June to August, the application for those funds went out to districts in late July. The applications are now closed, and we had 31 Summer Food Service Programs request a total of $1.3 million of reimbursement from the CRF fund. The HVAC program with Efficiency Vermont, a totaling of $6.5 million, was finalized last week. We are now working with Efficiency Vermont to get those grants out to school districts. Efficiency Vermont will handle the grant applications, and then the reimbursements will be sent to the Agency of Education. The largest CRF program to schools, the General District Reimbursement Program of $29 million, was recently approved, the application will be going out to districts this week. Districts will be able to access CRF funds to cover COVID-19 related expenses that occurred from last March and going forward to this December. Second pot of funds, ESSER, the Elementary Secondary School Emergency Relief, is about $30 million, and those funds are awarded directly to school districts as per the CARES Act, and can be used more flexibly than the CRF funds. For example, we learned last week that ESSER funds can be used to cover teacher childcare costs. ESSER funds can also be used over a longer timeframe through the end of September, 2022. The ESSER application hasn't been available to school districts in July. The Joint Fiscal Committee gave approval to this program last week. We've been working with them to identify solutions for the shortfall of the Education Fund, including exploring to what extent CRF and ESSER funds could be used to address the shortfall of the Education Fund. We will continue these conversations with the legislature in the coming weeks. The third pot of CARES Act money are GEAR funds, or the Governor's Emergency Education Relief Funds, which total about $4 million in Vermont. The governor has decided to direct the use of these funds to support career and technical education centers. The GEAR application will go out to CTE centers in September. These funds too can also be used through September, 2022. In summary, federal CARES Act dollars are being rolled out to districts, albeit more slowly than originally anticipated. I would like to thank the finance team at the Agency of Education for working rapidly to stand up these new complex programs. Current federal funding seems to be sufficient to address the immediate reopening needs of our schools, but the larger long-term costs have yet to be identified. No doubt it will require additional federal help. That concludes my update on the reopening work. Now I'll turn it over to Commissioner Levine. Good morning. We'll begin with a health update. Over the weekend, we reached 1,530 total cases in Vermont. The number of deaths remains fortunately quite static at 58. If we look over the last four days, we've had new case numbers that range from lows of three to highs of 17. Similar pattern to what we've been experiencing all along. While a number of the cases were in Chittenden County, they do not all seem to be connected to UVM students returning, nor to any discrete outbreaks, nor are they epidemiologically connected individuals. For the last week, Vermont was indeed noted for being the state with both the lowest number of new cases per 100,008, as compared with the national average of 112, and the lowest percent positivity rate, which remains, as you can see, well below 1%, 62.4% of our new cases come from three counties, Chittenden, Rotland, and Bennington. Now moving on from the data, a few items on the testing front. First of all, we've discussed serology testing many times at these conferences, and the idea of seroprevalence studies. These studies assess what proportion of the population has come in contact with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. There's a large-scale study under the auspices of the CDC that involves several states and metropolitan areas. Results are still pending from this. There's also a study of blood donors. That is not yet past its early stages. What data we do have comes from commercial labs, and these show a range between 1% and 7% prevalence, admittedly not very high numbers. Second thing on testing I want to discuss is that the FDA recently authorized the Yale-Saliva Direct COVID-19 Diagnostic Test. A great appeal of this saliva test is the fact that it doesn't require any additional or sophisticated collection devices, or swabs even. Just a specimen count. And it does not require separate nucleic acid extraction, which is, of course, the step that's done in the laboratory. And that's quite a benefit in case reagents become in short supply for the various laboratory platforms we use. What we don't yet have an appreciation of is what are the performance characteristics of this test in terms of its sensitivity and its specificity, and what settings is it most appropriately used in. I've tasked my public health laboratory team with exploring this mode of testing further and seeing if it should become part of Vermont's armamentary. Finally, to provide some thoughts on college and school reopening. I'm sure by now everyone has seen yesterday's big news regarding the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A place that normally has somewhere in the range of 30,000 undergraduates. It had 130 students test positive in the first week. The school recorded a positivity rate of 13.6% out of the almost 1,000 students that were tested. And they also had five employees who tested positive. The state percent positivity rate at this time is in the 7% range. Now keep in mind that unlike Vermont, they were not testing students upon arrival at campus. Currently, there are 177 students isolated and 349 quarantined on and off the UNC campus. And they have now abruptly and fully transitioned to remote learning. To now segue to our experience in Vermont thus far, where students admittedly are still in the process of returning, we've had four students test positive at Norwich, one at VTC, and six at UVM. Once again, I'd like to reiterate what I said last week, though. While we understand hearing about new cases of COVID-19 is cause for concern, these positive tests mean the system is working. We actually want to find these cases as the campus begins to regroup. So we know who needs to stay inside and away from other people so we can prevent the virus from spreading any further. The combined early testing and quarantine protocols that all of the colleges in Vermont have put into place will enable them all to protect the health and safety of their students, staff, and community as the fall semester gets underway. Regarding 3K through 12, I'll just merely echo what the governor said. The trends we've been seeing in our state for some time now continue to tell us that it's the right time to bring our children back to school. In the carefully considered, measured, and safe way that we've laid out together with education leaders, pediatricians, infectious disease experts, administrators, school districts, and public health experts. Of course we know there are risks and we hear and understand the fears and anxieties of parents, teachers, and staff. Had we the experience of so many other states, we would very likely advise a fully remote school year. But the data continues to support our conclusions to date here in Vermont. The younger children are less likely to transmit the virus, become infected, or develop severe disease, that adults in the family are more likely to be the index case in an affected family, not the child, and that studies from around the world have not shown significant transmission of COVID-19 within schools. And as I've said many times before, we will continue to see new cases, clusters, or even limited outbreaks in our communities. But the public health protocols we have been employing over the past many months, testing, contact tracing, interviewing, and advising people who have been in close contact with a person who has COVID really work, and will continue to work to limit the spread of the virus. With that we'll open up for questions. Okay, we'll start in the room. Just want to remind everybody on the line and hear that we have a lot of members of the media to get through and hard stuff at one. Calvin? Thank you. So, Calvin, I know the exact details of your budget are ongoing until a lot of talk today, but I'm just wondering kind of as a general, is there anything that you weren't able to fit in the budget that would have sort of reflected on anything that you wanted to put into the camera? Yeah, we've fulfilled most of the needs. Obviously, we have, you know, if we had unlimited sources of money, we'd be doing more with broadband. We'd be doing more with all kinds of infrastructure improvements and so forth, and doing more of everything. But the reality is this is what we go through every budget cycle. So I was pleasantly pleased with where we're at. We had a lot of surplus revenues that we talked about last week in the last year's budget. So we were able to utilize some of that to fill the need as well with our discipline approach and asking our cabinet members to restrict and find efficiencies. We were able to produce a budget that I think is solid and is able to fulfill the needs of Vermont while taking care of the most vulnerable and really forecasting what we need to do. So this could all change as well. You know, what happens in Washington will have an effect on this budget if they come back into session and they were to distribute more money to the states or allow us for more flexibility. Our whole budget could change dramatically as a result. But again, this is, we have to deal with reality and this is what we're going to present to the Legislature. Ross. Thank you, Governor. Sure is looking ahead, we're only about a month away from one of the state's most popular tourism seasons in fall, especially with many out-of-state burgers and typically Canadians coming across the border for foliage season. Obviously, we probably won't be expecting Canadian tours for a little while, but curious if the state is doing any extra thinking looking ahead towards what's traditionally one of the busiest times for tourism and in-state travel. Yeah, you know, it's going to be, I think, limited in many ways. I mean, I think that people are a little hesitant to travel, understandably. We put restrictions on out-of-state travel in some of the communities that are in the red and they're seeing high cases of growth. So we're, you know, we're at the mercy of the virus here. So we'll have to see what happens, a lot can change in a month. We'll maintain the modeling and see where it takes us. But we're not doing anything additional in some respects because we just don't know. There's just too many questions. But if things again open up, everything is safe here in Vermont and we maintain our low positivity rates and throughout the Northeast region, then maybe we'll see some more travel in the state, which we desperately need in some respects. Thank you. Steve? To follow up on that, Governor, have you talked to anybody in the, either with the federal government or the Canadians as far as any ideas on whether the border is going to open up? Because obviously with all coming. Yeah. And now, I mean, we're, we don't know any more than anyone else does at this point. I'm not sure that they know for sure. I think a lot of it is reliant on the Canadians, actually more than in the U.S. In some respects, they've done fairly well and in Quebec, I watch their numbers every single week and they've reduced their numbers dramatically. So I think they're a concern now for Vermont, but maybe for other regions of the country coming in and re-infecting their country. So we'll have to see how we're doing. And again, there's some good news out there. Watch the numbers of some of the individual states and it appears some of the Sun Belt, Florida in particular, their number of cases has been reduced over the last week or so. That's good news. And we're seeing the same in Arizona. So if that trend continues, maybe we're going to handle on this, but again, we're all at the mercy of the virus. Okay, we're going to move to the phones now. Lisa, BAP. Thank you. This may be a question for Mike Smith, those regional childcare hubs. How many do you anticipate the state needing and are they, those grants, are they state grants or federal money that will be covering the expense? Thanks, Lisa, for the question. Mike Smith here. We're anticipating 73 will be needed. And we're using the coronavirus relief fund, monies out of that in order to fund these. Okay. And how will parents find their children up for those? Is this will be like a first come, first serve type of thing? Yeah, we're putting together those aspects, those particulars of the program now, but I would assume that they're going to fill up fairly fast so as soon as we can get some information out there, we will. Okay, thank you. Kat, WCAX. My question is also probably for Mike Smith, but it's actually about long-term care facilities. When will families who have loved ones in long-term care facilities be able to have physical contact with their loved ones? When I look through the state's guidance for reopening those facilities, there are guidelines for when things like outside services can begin again at those facilities, but no guidelines for when a spouse or child will be able to do something like hold their loved one's hand. What do you need to see for that to be able to happen again? To be honest, Kat, I mean, I think we're going to need to see a vaccine. The aspect of the most vulnerable are those that are in an age group that are over 65. And I think what we're trying to do is make sure that they can lead a normal life with the various stages that we have set up, the various phases that we set up, as you mentioned, you know, leaving the facility or having congregate dining. But the sort of protocols of this virus, six feet of separation, masks, those sort of things are really going to limit sort of the activities that you are describing until we can have a vaccine. I heard from a family that, you know, it's kind of frustrating to see that someone can come in and do hair or do nails or something at a long-term care facility and have that physical contact with their loved ones. And yet, you know, the husband of, you know, 60 years, 50 years can't go and have breakfast with his wife. So I think families kind of want to know, you know, given that many of their loved ones don't have unlimited time, when will the state prioritize them having that meaningful physical contact? I understand. And let me go back and review with the group, but at the same time, we want many in our facilities, not only the person, you know, in the facilities that we're talking about, the long-term care facility, it's not only the individual that we need to protect, it's the entire facility that we need to protect. And a lot of these guidelines are in protection not only of the individual, but the entire facility. And as, you know, we try to make sure that we, as quickly as possible, loosen up these requirements. We got also going to make sure that we don't have the situation that happened in other states where long-term care facilities were just devastated throughout the state. Thank you. Okay. Greg, the county courier. Good morning, Governor. Forgive me if I had a bad connection about education funding. Good morning during a conference call. I asked about the ed fund and the quick response was that it's roughly $180 million short. What are you looking to do with the legislature when they reconvene next week to try to reduce some sort of sudden increase in property taxes to do under the ed fund? Yeah. Governor. Go ahead. Sorry, this is Secretary Young, Governor. I would just point out that the $180 million shortfall is in the general fund, and I believe we mentioned $60 million in the education fund. Yeah, that's what I was just going to point out, that I don't believe there's a $60 million gap in the ed fund at this point in time. We think we're going to progress. We'll have conversations with the legislature about this. Obviously, we don't want to impact our property tax rate payers at this point. We want to just work our way through this, but we think we can mitigate this, but it really depends, you know, as I said earlier, we're at the mercy of the virus, how long-term this will be, and how the reopening goes. Do you think that there's a way to mitigate a steep increase in property taxes for the ed fund? Well, I think a lot of it depends on what happens in Washington. I know that there was an initiative, a move by many on both sides of the aisle to help out with the reopenings, with the education portion, whether these funds would be able to be utilized, more flexibility in the CARES Act and so forth, or we might be able to use them for some of the deficits. So, again, we don't know what's going to happen in Washington. We don't know what's going to happen with the virus, and we're at the mercy of both at this point in time. But I think we'll have to wait and see. We're okay right now. It's nothing that we have to worry about today, but we'll know more. I think once the Congress gets back into session, and they work out a deal with the administration, and to see whether there's going to be any more dollars flowing into the states, and whether those can be used for any deficits, as well for the startups for education. It would make a dramatic difference in our budgets. Do you think we'll know that before the legislature? No. Is that for the year? Oh, I have no idea. Probably not, because we don't know, you know, the timeframe, timetable for the Congress. And if anyone can tell us that, then that would help us solve the other. I don't even know what the timetable is going to be for the legislature at this point. Yeah, well, with you at that risk, we'd all be a lot better off. Thank you, Governor. Yeah, thank you. Hadley Leskowski, the Valerie reporter. Hi. This is a question for Dr. Levy. You mentioned that on Saturday, the FDA authorized the emergency use of a saliva test for COVID-19. And I was wondering, when do you think Vermont will be able to add this saliva test to its existing testing protocols and how many peer-reviewed studies do you need to see before actually introducing it as a possibility? Great questions. Thank you. We actually, technically speaking, are using it slightly already. There is a saliva test through a company named Vault that the University of Vermont has asked its undergraduate students to submit a sample to before they leave their hometown. So these are mostly out-of-state students. And it's thus far shown one positive finding, which made one student lay their departure from home because obviously they were positive at that time. So technically you could say Vermont's already using it, but I won't quite go that far. As I mentioned in my comments, the Public Health Lab is going to be seeing what kind of literature we can come up with that would support the use of this test. I'm not purporting that we don't want to use this test or don't feel that it's going to be a valid test to use. It's really the circumstances under which you use it that they count. So is it used for screening? Is it used in a sequential way where people are being tested every other day at high frequency? Because we know that it probably will have less sensitivity than some of the tests we're using now. And in a state that has very low prevalence of virus currently, tests that have low sensitivity don't become really effective screening tests. They are much more effective when things are very out of control in a state and there is a high prevalence of virus. So we have to really understand the test more in that context, in terms of how it performs, but also what circumstances it should be used in. And then see if it then fills a niche in our testing strategy that would be useful. I mean, I'm all in favor of a test that doesn't utilize more reagents and more collection swabs and kits because that takes care of two of our anxiety-provoking concerns over time. But that doesn't mean that test can replace everything else we're doing and we have to find out where it fits best. Thank you. Erin Potanko, UT Digger. Next, we'll take quick questions about the child care program. First of all, do you need the legislature's approval for the 12 billion dollars? Yes, we will, from the Joint Festival Committee. Okay. Okay. Who do you plan to stack the child care under, particularly those remote hubs? Will they be like regular child care workers? Or could they be for benefit on that? Certainly. We anticipate having counselors and staff. If you look at it, we're looking at, the way that we designed the budget is that we would have 10 counselors per hub with one site director as well as the way that it would be worked if we work with our community partners to identify the sites, to identify, bringing these up on staffing levels. Obviously, at this point, we're probably going to have to pay a premium in order to bring people in, to bring staff in, as well as maybe even signing bonuses in terms of bringing people in. But that's what we anticipate. And this is only qualified for working parents. Can it also include teachers with children and they're looking for childcare for kids? This would be for school-aged children. So if you have a school-aged child, you would qualify. And that's it. Thank you. Angie McGregor, the Caledonia record. Star six to unmute. Andrew, Angie McGregor. Thank you. Can you hear me? We can. Yeah, good morning. This is probably for secretaries. The 73 hubs that you described, have you identified the towns where you would like to see them cited? And are these going to be state run or are these going to be created and staffed by local partners? And if local partners do you know who they will be? We don't know who they will be. Just to give you, what was the first part of your question? Because I have an answer for that. The 73 hubs, it's a very specific number. I'm wondering if you've identified the towns where you'd like them to be located? We've identified by county. So four in Addison County, four in Bennington County, three in Caledonia County, about 18 in Chittenden County, one in Essex County, Franklin County would have seven. I can go through the list here. Grand Isle County would have one in LaMoyle County, three in Orange County, four in Orleans County, three in Rutland County, seven in Washington County, seven in Wyndham County, five in Windsor County, six in all would be new hubs. But our community partners, let's go over, other community partners out there to identify these areas. Some of them would be an extension of the existing summer programs that we would use that have been ongoing and using some of the staff from those existing summer programs. So all of this is being put together right now. We'll be working closely with partners. These will not be state employees. That was one of your questions as we move forward. As a matter of fact, most, and I'm trying to think if there's any, but child care workers now are not state employees. And do you envision these hubs being staffed and having the capacity to help administer lessons that kids are supposed to be doing on their remote learning days, or is this more just making sure kids are safe and safe so that parents can work? Right now, this is mostly safe and having availability so that parents can work. But that's an option that you bring up if there is the ability of one of these centers to make sure that the remote learning is taking place. That's certainly an option that I won't rule out. So there isn't necessarily going to be a requirement that they be equipped with internet and technology that kids might need. Well, there will be we will, through these grants that we're talking about, we will pay for enhancing broadband if broadband needs it as we move forward. But there won't be a requirement that you have to have an educator on board. Okay, thank you. Ed Barber, Newport Daily Express. Star six to unmute, Ed. Okay, we're going to move on. Jack Thurston, NECN. Thanks Ethan, can you hear me okay? Yep. My question is for Secretary French. Dan, Governor Scott referenced staffing levels as one of the many challenges that school districts would of course be facing this fall. I'm hearing from administrators from districts around the state that they're concerned about their ability to have enough substitute teachers in the fall because they've told their full-time staffers that they absolutely don't want them coming to school if they're not feeling well. And we all know that that directive comes at the time that many of these existing substitutes that they've had for years don't really want a sub because they're often retirees or they're close to the high-risk age level. So my question is how do you view the situation around subs for the fall and is there anything the state could do to encourage more people to be willing to serve their communities in this way by, you know, raising their hand and saying that we're willing to help keep school districts running? Yeah, I think these are great points and it just once again underscores, you know, some of the local challenges that districts need to resolve and one of the more critical ones will be staff availability. I think it was certainly part of our thinking around hybrid instruction that one of the things that hybrid does is it allows districts to have that conversation with their staff. If some staff are not available for in person, for example, those staff might be available to teach online in a remote environment. So it does provide sort of that flexibility. But I think the first step is in my comments earlier in the press conference districts are in the process of finalizing the reopening plans. That's sort of the first step. I think the next step is to have those conversations with their staff about who's available and who feels more comfortable on remote learning and so forth. Certainly intersect that with parent interest in the school board and so forth. But then we get down to these very real issues of how to staff facilities and to your point we as a requirement in our guidance that all staff and students are required to complete a daily health check so we'll have an understanding districts will on a daily basis. Those are formal series of questions. So it's more than just, you know, how are you feeling about coming in but it really identifies those conditions because as we know many of the symptoms of COVID-19 are very similar to the typical cold and flu symptoms that we would experience at this time of year. So I think, you know, to just layer that in we have the plans are rolling out those conversations are having with staff and we have the guidance of the precautions in place. But I think, you know, it's an open question as to how this ultimately will resolve and I think we'll see different patterns around the state. But I think, you know, in terms of recruiting substitute teachers when that becomes necessary, I think once again remote learning adds sort of a different option on the table in that regard and hopefully we'll be able to provide additional opportunities for students to access resources when their regular teacher is not available. Thanks, Ben. Lee and Alder Connors, VPR. Hi. A question on the childcare that the state is working to set up. You know, it sounds like you've allocated them a certain amount for county. But when it comes to where they're going to be located within those counties, what are you going to be doing to make sure that the geographical distribution of them doesn't you know, goes to places where where they're needed and sort of make sure that you're not going to be furthering any equity to access in those communities. I mean, you're talking a lot about how we need to bring students back to try to eliminate some inequities that have grown in the time apart from school. So just sort of wondering how that ethos is going to be playing into your plan to set up these additional childcare facilities. Mike Smith, I just I think you've got to look at it this way. We're putting into place a system just like we did when at the height of the pandemic we were putting in a system that was never done before. We're doing this now again during the height of the during this this situation. And I think you find just like we did at the height of the pandemic that we worked out those issues first with essential workers and then as all childcare centers came out on June but first we're going to try to continue to work on those issues. It isn't a new issue. It is an issue that has been prevalent throughout sort of the not only the pandemic pre-pandemic in terms of childcare distribution but I think working with the locals working with our community providers we will try to make sure that the distribution meets the needs of that particular county. As you mentioned I mean some of these counties are fairly significant. Seven for Rutland County I think I said as well as Chittenden County at 18 Rutland County at seven. So there are opportunities to spread these out among the among the communities and we'll be looking at that as we move forward. In terms of connecting families to those places I mean it sounds like it's first comes first served but won't that sort of that's not exactly the best way to make sure everyone gets access to this in some ways. I mean is this safe to do any outreach to try to help families that maybe are less likely to be hearing about this or students that might be work with districts to identify students that might be more in need than other students because those inequities aren't. In a vacuum we're going to be working with the supervisory unions. Obviously we will be working through our CCTAP application process in order to help subsidize some of this program for those that need it. So it's not going to be in a vacuum as we as we move forward. Nonetheless we have to move quickly to get this system up in place and we'll do that. Both in terms of reach out in terms of letting people know that's why we're discussing it here today and as well as making sure through our district offices that this information gets out and working closely with the supervisory unions. And the plans to have it ready by the day school opens up in three weeks? We're hoping to get it up and running as quick as possible. This is a major undertaking as it was during the eye to the pandemic putting in the essential workers program. I'm not going to put a date on it but at the same time DCF knows that this is a priority and we need to move on this as quickly as possible. Thank you. Mike Domahue, the Islander. Thank you. Governor, we're going to complain about the state not investing in road-sized mulling so we're going to go back back up along like Interstate 89 and the state's natural beauty is not looking as good as a lot of past summers. Just wondering if there's a reduction in polishing up for months due to highway staffing shortages due to COVID or whether it was because of highway people were having to monitor they spent a lot of money on boarders or is it some other financial reason that they're not getting out there and doing the work? Yeah, I think it revolves around financing. Obviously with the first quarter budget we worked with the legislature on there were some reductions and maintenance in particular on our state highways and roadside mulling was the first to go. Hopefully, stay tuned hopefully we'll be able to do more of that because I think that as we work ourselves out of this situation we find ourselves in that we want to make sure that we're welcoming, that we're clean and we open up the doors to those who are traveling in, the tourists and so forth. At this point in time, again when you have to weigh out some of the options, the legislature decided to reduce the budget and maintenance in particular on the highways and roadside mulling was one of the first they had to go. And somewhat interrelated maybe is the state is spending money and manpower re-numbering the exits along the interstate system and correcting a lot of new signs and so in light of tough economic time is this a wise investment even if it's federal money, it's still back dollars I like there's a class in the state to re-number the exits, how much is it costing local businesses having to redo their signs, their websites, their placemats and more, I mean seems like the exit numbering system has worked roughly for what, 55 years why change it at any time. That was our argument to the federal government this is initiative, I think New York fought this for as long as they could as well, we did we were able to negotiate a little bit of an agreement with them where we're not going to have to change all of our signage at this point in time this is going to be a transition over the next number of years. This is all federal money, I believe it's 100% no state dollars if they want it and we're not doing much of that right now to be honest with you again, this is something that's going to be done over the next number of years but if the federal government decided to take and divert that money to something else that we could actually use, we would be all years and welcome that opportunity Is there any efforts to ask that that money be diverted for other needy things if we're honest? Well again, we've been working at this for a while and resisted for a number of years for the last four years I've been a governor, I've resisted so I didn't think it was for Vermont, it just didn't make a lot of sense I can't remember the last time that we added an exit although there's been some proposed and we may see some in the future but at this point in time it just doesn't seem like it fits Vermont very well we don't really, as you stated the system has been working quite well we know our exits, we know where exit 10 is, we know where exit 16 is and they have been staples for the traveling public so again we're not doing anything with that to any great extent at this point in time so there's probably not a lot of money to divert back to areas that we need but anytime that we can put money back into paving and infrastructure and replacement of culverts and things of that nature that's where I would go first Exactly, thank you Thank you very much Joseph Gresser, Fort and Chronicle To be directed about contact tracing and having heard about experience in other states and not much about what's happening lately I'm interested in knowing the people who have been contacted are going especially with the likelihood that there may be some additional clusters of colleges and universities re-opening I think it's an excellent question for Dr. Levine Joe what was the part of the question towards the end when you were saying the experience in Vermont? Well, other cities and colleges Great, no that's great I'll preface my comments with saying that we've had some website material devoted to this one of our weekly update sets of slides in it it tells about our rapidity of response in contact tracing and talks about how many cases were interviewed when the first 24 hours versus 48 hours longer how many contacts were interviewed in the same time period and we're doing very, very well in that regard we're up in the 95% range for those kinds of metrics which is great admittedly more recently though we're seeing more diversity of cases we're not seeing the abundance which is wonderful but we have staff in the wings waiting when and if that might happen the recent college returns haven't generated a high number of cases yet either but as you know young people are social and that may mean there will be more contacts per case than we might be accustomed to from a time when we were all staying at home and had very few contacts one thing I'm heartened by and I don't have a precise number to give you when you start reading about other states experience with contact tracing you find that at many times they're only able to contact 20 to 35% of the original cases within a small period of time not because they're getting overwhelmed but because the population they're dealing with may not be as amenable to picking up the phone and discussing things with the health expert on the other end we're blessed in Vermont to have a population that I think values that interaction and we haven't run into that kind of difficulty so to summarize to this point in time we're able to effectively contact trace with a very high rate of success in terms of time frame pretty much universally and that's really helped us tremendously as we've managed the outbreaks that we've had to manage and the clusters that we've seen and we have a great compliant population and we have adequate personnel so that even if with the universities and colleges coming back and the schools reopening there were more and more cases we feel pretty confident that we're poised for success in that arena Tim McQuiston from our business magazine thank you I understand Mr. Harrington is on the line I believe so I'll see if I can answer it first but go ahead okay I know you're my governor about $20 million to meet the $100 supplement the president suggested $400 a week and by my estimate that'd be four or five weeks worth of those extra payments on the state side does that sound right? yes that's all the president put forward some of the FEMA dollars that's as long as it will last about four weeks so it's a limited amount of time just as a stopgap measure between what the congress works out with the president and one of the questions earlier with the Susanian meeting was how many Vermonters right now on UI and PUA that would be getting this yeah there's a certain formula anybody over $100 it would be getting those dollars so it wouldn't be much less than the $40,000 that are on the PUA and the traditional unemployment at this point in time so if I just write about $40,000 or almost $40,000 I'd say yeah it's in that range commissioner Harrington have I got that number right it's a little over $40,000 but I don't know if we worked out the numbers as to who would be eligible over $100 you're correct governor so I think we're roughly at about 45,000 individuals collecting at any given time that includes both UI and PUA there are two caveats one is the $100 they have to have a maximum weekly benefit amount of $100 or more to be eligible for the program they also have to their separation or their eligibility for unemployment insurance has to be directly related to COVID most of them are obviously but there are certain circumstances where someone may have been unemployed even prior to COVID-19 that is still collecting benefits or there are other mitigating factors unrelated to COVID so we are working to pull that information from our mainframe so there are a couple caveats in there but it will be certainly less than 45,000 but I don't think it will be much less when you factor in those two requirements okay all right great thank you very much Kevin McCallum Hi Governor, thanks for taking the call can you hear me? Governor, I think both my questions are for you the first one is what are your thoughts upon being the rhetoric of the White House about mail-in balloting and funding for the Post Office and do you share Secretary of State's condos' alarm with those remarks and if so, what are you doing to make sure that the monsters mail-in ballot this fall are processed by the Post Office so they can be counted by the clerk? I'm concerned as is Secretary Condos on the same page in that respect our programs that we have in place even if we didn't mail ballot to every Vermonter the program we have in place could be impacted but I was relieved to hear that the postal I don't know if it's the Postmaster in Vermont but they thought that we would be okay here that we wouldn't be impacted like other states I share the concern and I'm grateful that the Congress is going back into action I think they went in over the weekend to discuss this very topic and hopefully they will be able to put back into place enough funding so that we don't have an impact on voters throughout the country because it's really important that every vote counts so we don't want there to be any delay in doing that continue to monitor this work with the Secretary of State in any way we possibly can to help make sure that there isn't any type of delay in the action of the Postal Service Are you aware of anything that Secretary of State is supposed that might sort of ameliorate or otherwise adapt to a situation where the Postal Service ability to deliver all those ballots is in question? I'm not going to poke into him about this but I've given a little bit of thought and if we get to that point where it is looking like we'll have a problem I would just offer that each and every one of us individually could have an impact by maybe not mailing anything for the last couple of weeks maybe we could reach out to businesses that typically do mailers maybe candidates wouldn't do their mailers for the last couple of weeks or for those to use the system so if your businesses are using it that could delay some of their postal operations for two weeks that could have a tremendous impact I think but I haven't discussed this with the Secretary of State he's the expert on the elections I'll leave this in his court but if there's anything we can do to help obviously we would want to be able to assist in any way we can you put a lot of energy and time as Governor into alluring people to the state of Vermont to try to address the demographic crisis are you doing anything or is the state doing anything to sort of market the state of Vermont and its low COVID rate because we're starting to see evidence of people moving here working from here and I'm wondering if you're doing anything to try to capitalize on that in the past to sort of bring people to the state yeah so I suffice it to say that I'm interested in doing something like that but I don't think it's appropriate right now obviously this is Vermont is selling itself just by our low positivity rate low number of cases where a great place to live work and recreate so that in itself is selling many from around the region to come to Vermont as we're seeing in some of the real estate sales but when it is safe when we do have a vaccine if I'm still in office at that point I would guarantee that we will be again marketing in some respect trying to attract more people because we're after this COVID crisis you know comes to fruition and we get back to somewhat normal normal means we have a demographic crisis on our hands and something that we have to solve it's going to be there when this is over so I will have an interest in trying to capitalize on this if possible but right now we have to to make sure that we maintain the safety of our monitors and I don't think it's premature for us to go out and try and promote and bring people into the state in too many respects okay thanks very much Libby Farron Local 22, Local 44 Are you guys able to hear me? We can Perfect The question is really poor but I know you guys mentioned an app regarding you know I was wondering if the app is going to regard checking symptoms of people you know going into the schools and what not or what is this app entirely going to entail Secretary French Thank you In our health guidance there's a requirement that schools implement a daily health check for students and staff and that health check includes answering a series of questions many of you might be familiar with you have symptoms have you been close contact with someone with COVID-19 symptoms so forth and the second component is a temperature check which would be administered by school personnel so we're looking at a technology tool to help automate some of that process because otherwise it can be quite burdensome I think you answered my question Thank you We've been extending the state of emergency month by month but you have also suggested on occasion that restrictions may remain until the monitors are vaccinated or something else ends the pandemic nationally are you ready to say today will Vermont be under a state of emergency until there's a vaccine and so when that time comes are you and other state leaders ready to give up the exercise of all the state of emergency powers Yeah I'm not ready to commit to that at this point I just don't know you know we'll have to maintain and watch this the virus and see where it brings us there are other approaches there could be a point in time when we could we could cease the executive order the emergency order and do something through legislative action for instance so that doesn't preclude us from doing that and we'll just have to wait and see now is not the time we need the emergency order as a vehicle to both add protection to open up businesses and so forth so we're not at a point where I believe that the other solution working with the legislators and putting into law so to speak some of the actions that could take place but we're not at that point at this point okay and as to the other part of my question when the time comes are you and do you think other state leaders ready to kind of give up the exercise of the sort of rather extraordinary powers that you've been exercising during the state of emergency well when we when we don't extend the executive order that we'll be giving them up okay I just want to know I mean if you've had months of I mean sort of more more say than you normally have and people sort of wonder are they getting kind of used to this or is it no we're really ready to I can say I'm looking forward to things getting back to normal and that would be to release the powers that I have under the executive order it's not something I take lightly but it's not something that I look forward to either I think again we've used it appropriately for and as we've seen with our low case numbers and where we're at being the lowest lowest positivity rate in the country obviously we're doing something right but I'm ready anytime that we can get to a place where we don't have to have the executive order I'm looking forward to that date thank you Mike Bielowski hi can you hear me alright you can great similar questions sorry so thanks for taking my question Mike with True North Report so last week you extended the state of emergency for another month there has been two more deaths in the past month still just a few hospitalizations per day since the beginning there's only been 13 deaths in all of Vermont under the age of 70 so my question is can you describe for Vermont the specific scenario that you are waiting for before we can go back to our normal life I think we have to see as a country where we stand you know we're so mobile in this country and truly as a region as I pointed out I'm sure you were watching last Friday when we did our modeling we saw the number of red counties increase in the northeast meaning this is migrating towards us that's why I took some of the action I did about three or four weeks ago so I don't know again when the right time is but I can tell you it's not while the virus is heading towards us that is not the right time to release I would say when the region is getting more green that there is more throughout our country but particularly in the northeast that would probably be more appropriate but you know it's still volatile I mean look how quick we for instance Hawaii had the lowest number of cases in the United States by fire this was like five six weeks ago lower than Vermont and then their cases started to grow right now they have four times the number of cases they did five weeks ago so they obviously have a problem I don't want Vermont to be the next one with a problem so we'll continue to monitor and we'll do what we can to protect Vermont but when you have high population areas just to the north of us the border would open up Montreal there, Quebec City and Toronto as well in New York New York City and Boston we've seen in New Jersey I mean those New York and New Jersey combined I have about I would say you know they had 50,000 deaths so we have to pay attention to the region it's not just about Vermont and I think it's using tunnel vision to get Vermont in isolation Are you watching the death rate for all these cases we always hear a lot about cases but the death rate, the death percentage remains very low especially under age 70 I think it's 0.04% for the nation under age 70 are you watching those numbers as well? Well obviously we watch the death rates as well I mean again 2,000 in New York alone certainly even our neighbors to our east in New Hampshire have over 400 deaths so every death is meaningful and the 58 deaths in Vermont are something that I think about every day so I don't want there to be 59 and I don't want there to be 60 and I'm sure you don't want a family member to be one of those numbers either Are we watching how many of these deaths have comorbidities or comorbidities I'm sorry I'm saying that wrong because I heard that numbers often pretty high speaking of having an older population you've got a lot of people passing away I think with other conditions that we're serious do you have a response to that or death? Yeah no nothing that I can add to that Okay well thank you Steve Merrill Can you hear me? Ken Great one for the governor and one for the doctor by May Governor again going back to the emergency powers and we still have You guys all have breakfast together this morning? Yeah somebody with the corn flakes I think We still haven't got a handle on how many or a number for how many older folks we lose by attrition just naturally I've asked about these numbers and we haven't seen what they are I mean obviously nobody wants to die and everybody wants to live forever No I don't Steve Well Okay I'll give you that What specific powers do you need with the state of emergency? Isn't the health commissioner given extraordinary powers over public health just through his office anyway? Sure but I think with this respect we've been able to deal with the economy deal with the reopenings, closures and so forth I think we've used them judiciously and again I have to say I don't take it lightly it's not something that I relish to have the power to shut down a business in particular and alter the lives of Vermonters in any respect I have to reflect but I use the guidance the data, the science and the experts Dr. Levine, Dr. Kelso in arriving at decisions that I think are helpful to Vermont and to mitigate the effects of the virus on Vermont and again I have to say with our numbers we've been effective especially when you consider that we're just a two, two, three hour drive from Boston three to four, five hour drive depending on where you are to New York City and what they had to go through we didn't experience that and I think it was all reflective of some of the actions that we took and many, most other governments I don't know if there's another state that didn't use their emergency powers on this Yeah, it's a point of debate I have a mass question for Dr. Levine if I may Dr. Levine Hi, Dr. I have a question from one of my viewers about mass and the mass mandate we're seeing that some states or municipalities that are mandating mass are mandating that they not use the ones with the flapper valves in them that it be a facial covering mass and I had a viewer ask me about the mass isn't it only an N95 mass that you shouldn't touch with your hands while in use that you should only wear for 12 hours or something like that and dispose of isn't the only true protection provided by an N95 mass and they consider the other type of mass to be like a Kabuki mass theater or something Yeah, let me go into that in a little more detail Thank you again for recognizing my special powers but they certainly don't rise to the level of the governors and you have to be in pretty dire straits for any powers to have to be exercised so you asked a bunch of questions at once so I'll try to clarify the N95 is the most effective mass in the area of filtration so when you look at particle sizes that are very small numbers of microns micron being as you can imagine quite small the N95 what's that such as the virus such as the virus exactly they will filter out 95% of all particles down to a certain small number of microns the typical surgical mass which I'm holding in my hand now is not as effective as N95 but does filter out a high percentage of particles as well the cloth facial covering filters out the lowest amount but still probably 20-30% and that's fine because the major goal of the mass right now is to protect others from the larger respiratory droplets that we all could spray on the N95 has a model that comes with this exhalation valve that would defeat the purpose of what we're using it for in this pandemic so we don't recommend anyone invest in one of those the news a week or so ago was about the gator type of masks and that was one study with one set of investigators that frankly if they had stuck with the data that they generated there'd be much less controversy now because the data they generated made one question whether those were as effective as facial coverings but also they took it to a level in the discussions with the media that perhaps it was actually worse than having no mask on at all because there were pores in the material especially if it was a single layer that allowed more droplets to spread around most people don't believe that's true at this point especially if you have one that has more than one layer of cloth and like so many things with this pandemic one study that comes along doesn't trash every other study that's ever been done in the scientific world we basically look for people to confirm findings or refute them but find some pattern in one very small study that had a few off the cuff comments about it as opposed to actually focusing on the data wouldn't be enough to say don't use those kinds of masks either would you not recommend yes but would you not recommend the flapper valves in any instance not during this pandemic alright great well thank you both very much every Powell WCAX my question is likely for Secretary Branch where is the agency of education on guidelines for physical education classes within schools we haven't produced specific guidance on physical education although in our health it does speak to the use of common areas such as gyms and cafeterias and so forth I understand there is a conversation going on with physical education teachers they have an interest in seeing specific guidance developed we've had similar conversations with music teachers and so forth that's kind of where we are back to this idea that now we're focused on the how of implementing the health guidance we welcome the opportunity to work with content experts and so forth if they feel they need specific guidance to implement our health guidance so you don't there's not going to be a specific guidance on physical education coming out not sure yet I know we're having those conversations at a certain level in the agency with physical education teachers thank you well April Barton for Elegance Repress hi my question is for Secretary Smith and it's also about the child care has my question is you said that money would be provided for start-ups and operational costs now would parents also pay for these spots or would it be a free service or would there be some sort of pay structure like 50% like we saw in child care spots this summer how would the spots be paid for let me answer that a couple of ways sites would be able to charge families tuition for the care provided the hub grants that we talked about are intended to provide start-up funding for the site so operational cost facility costs of those sort of things families needing assistance paying for child care can apply and I said this a little while before for the child care financial assistance program it's called CC FAP and CC FAP pays tuition on behalf of eligible families directly to programs in support of their child care needs and it's a sliding scale need based upon your needs so all of those sort of come into play all the things that you mentioned come into play in how this all integrates together okay thank you very much Cliff Cooper North Avenue News good morning and on the primary and the very important November election during the primary we had a record turn out of like 175,000 voters the question is that when you looked at the invalid balance there were 6,000 ballots that were marked as invalid which ends up being about 4% of the electric that's almost the size of every woman child in St. John'sbury for the people that were knocked out of the region how do you feel about that going into the November elections? Well obviously it's a concern I know the Secretary of State is looking into that to find out what the common denominator is I would anticipate it was probably due to the three ballots that are sent during the primary that does make it a little more complicated because you can't use all three not everyone understands that you have to put them in separate envelopes and put them together in the same envelope so they got a little complicated whereas with the general election there will be just one ballot so that will be a bit different so we'll see what the Secretary of State finds out and it's an investigation he's the expert on elections so I'll just leave that to him On a personal note I would question whether I signed I did mail in a ballot myself and I didn't know whether I actually signed the outside of the envelope so I did go to the polling place and double check to see if we were actually registered and we did vote and it was passed but my concern of the primary in the state race for Senate there's six votes for the people to get involved in the Democratic side of it and the 6th and 7th person in this primary were only off by 46 votes so those 6000 being in that group of invalid ballots might have a turnout of a different person for that spot so to speak Yeah I think your point is well taken I think there were some other close races throughout Vermont and could have had a difference on the outcome so it'll be interesting to see what they come up with I'm sure that they will take the ballots that were deemed not acceptable and probably look through them I would imagine but again probably a better question for this Secretary Gondos Yeah okay thank you very much That's it Alright thank you very much for tuning in and we'll see you again on Friday and we'll talk about modeling then Thank you