 Hello and welcome. This is January 14th. This is the Education Committee in the Vermont House of Representatives. And today we are getting an update from the Secretary of Education on, you know, our question, you know, how are we doing? How are the children? How are our school districts? And this will be followed up later by an update from the School Boards Association. So welcome, Secretary French. This is your first time I think before our committee this year. Good morning. Thank you for inviting me. We're interested in hearing from you. Very well, I'll go ahead and jump in. I did have a handout I sent to Jesse this morning. I'll try to put up on the screen a minute, but before I do that, I thought I'd take a minute to introduce myself. I know there's, I know most of you, but there's a few members. I don't think I've met before. But just by way of introduction, I'm Dan French, the Secretary of Education. I've been a high school teacher. I started my career up in the Northeast Kingdom was a high school teacher in Colbrook, New Hampshire, actually, right across the border in Vermont up in the corner, across the river to become the principal of the Canaan School, which is in Vermont in the corner where New Hampshire, Vermont and Quebec kind of meet. It was principal of that school. It's a K through 12 school, pre K through 12 school 300 students did that for seven years. I've been the superintendent of that same school district Essex North Supervisor even for three years and that was Norton, Canaan, Lemington, Bloomfield and Brunswick basically the towns along the Canadian border than down the river valley also included the better part of the unincorporated towns and gores at that point. And so after living up there 15 years. I took a job in Manchester to become the superintendent of Bennington, Rutland Supervisor in Southwestern Vermont. We're both from Connecticut and we wanted to be closer to Southern New England and our family in that part of the area so became superintendent of the Bennington Rutland Supervisor in once again, sort of centered in the Manchester area, including the towns of Sunderland Manchester Dorset, Paula Rupert, Mount Tabor Danby, Lang Grove, London Dairy, Weston, Peru and Winhall, and did that for nine years. And then became the director of the school leadership graduate program at St. Michael's College, and also did statewide consulting this was around the time that act 46 was sort of ramping up so I wanted my consulting was with school districts around act 46. So doing IT and operations issues with school boards was the better part of my consultancy. And it was from that position that Governor Scott appointed me secretary in 2018. So I've been around Vermont as an education educational leader for some time. I basically started my career as a principal with the advent of act 60 and 1997 and my last superintendents superintendency was with the advent of act 46. So everything in between there I've touched one way or the other. But nice to meet you as a committee and I look forward to working with you in the coming session. So just want to take a minute to just have our new members introduce themselves. Representative Brady. Right here. Hello, I am representative Brady representing Williston, and I am an active school teacher I teach social studies at Colchester High School, and also coordinate our professional development here. And I'm an adjunct instructor at St. Mike's we might have overlapped in a meeting or two just barely I teach the instructional methods classes for graduate students so and on the school board in Williston and CBSD. Representative Brown. Good morning, Secretary I am representative Jana Brown representing the Chittenden one district which is the town of Richmond. In my job outside the legislature is with the children's literacy foundation so we are a nonprofit inspiring kids to love reading and writing and we work across Vermont in New Hampshire. And actually pretty frequently in Colbrook and Canaan so those are communities that I'm a little bit familiar with from my work. So, thank you. Nice to meet you. Representative Harrison. Good morning my name John Erson I represent the towns of Cavendish and Weathersfield. I'm also a selector of 16 years in the town of Weathersfield and my other occupations electrical contractor. Nice to meet you. And representative Williams and then Jesse I'm going to have you to representative Williams. Hi, my name is Terry Williams. I live in Granby. I represent the town, which consists of Concord, Victory, Granby, Guildhall, Maidstone, Lunabird, Brunswick and Kirby. In the early 1990s I was school secretary of Concord. I have been an athletic director and a coach. My most recent previous to this I owned a local minima in the town of Concord and hide a lot of these students and spent a lot of time with the with the young people of the area. You might have talked on the phone at one point to arrange a game or something between Canaan and Concord. So, I think probably for a small state I love it. And Jesse Tracy who has stepped in to help. Yes. Good morning everyone. I'm Jesse Tracy. I am the new committee assistant for house education. This will be my first session. I'm personally very interested in policy as well so I'm very excited to be here soaking everything up and supporting the work of the committee. So, feel free to reach out to me with any questions or concerns. Thanks Jesse. I'll go ahead. I have a couple slides but I figured, I don't know Jesse if you could put up the handout. It's just a easy way for me to stay organized. If not, I'll just talk. Okay. Yes, I can. Appreciate that. So, in the intro, the testimony sort of talk about the state of our schools I thought I would organize this around an update on the COVID response from the agency of education perspective. And I think, you know, this is more or less an outline so I'll take it one side of the time and but feel free to ask questions at any point and I anticipated this sort of being our introductory of getting to know each other a little bit and orienting you and giving you an update on the COVID response I assume you have a lot of questions and so this is just designed to be sort of a general overview. If you have questions along the way just just raise your hands and I'll. And also reminding folks to be careful of all of our acronyms. Yeah, well, anytime you question on that I'll go out of my way to sort of unpack those. And by further introduction the agency of education is on about 160 employees. At one point was a department of education and we used to have a commissioner of education and fairly recently, I think in 2012 or so the General Assembly passed a law that promoted the department to an agency of education and the commissioner to a secretary so a secretary of education I serve as part of the governor's cabinet. The agency of education is largely focused on administering federal programs and you know sort of acting. We call SCA is a person acronym I'll use for the day state education authority or agent, which is a formal role in each state so we're sort of the go between the photo between the federal government and the local school districts which are called le as local So the better part of what we do is administer the pre K through 12 system we don't really have anything to do with higher education which is always a point and that that varies from state to state as you'll you'll become aware pretty quickly. Education is essentially a state function. So how the states do that varies greatly but our role is largely pre K through 12 administering programs on behalf of our districts and so forth. So when we go to the next slide Jesse. So to just get right into this. I think that I did you skip one. There we go. So I thought I, you know, once again this is all introductory material to our work, but I think COVID provides a useful way to organize that and in this slide I've just sort of thinking about what it what has been our experience today in this unprecedented state of emergency and I've adopted these sort of terms phase one phase two phase three. I know that can be confusing nationally you know I was on a call this morning with my New England peers and the Commissioner from Massachusetts was saying you know we're in phase two you know and we're just saying every state has sort of a different nomenclature and how they describe the emergency process. This is just my own internal sort of thinking about it when asked to reflect upon our experience to date I think it's useful so far of course we're still in the very, very much in the middle of this to think about phases. So I would say you know the state of emergency was declared, which in itself is important to acknowledge, because it's that the authority of a lot of what we've been doing flows from that state of emergency declaration and specifically that in that declaration that the governor delegated to me as Secretary of Education to administer the system in the state of emergency. And I call the first phase from March to June really being the emergency phase where it was very chaotic. We literally shut down our education system overnight. We're very aggressive you know the beginning of our pattern I would say a decision making of Vermont a following science of being proactive in our decision making and not so reactive. So that was a very aggressive move very traumatic move, promoted a lot of chaos in the system we you know once again we shut down many aspects of our society essentially to to really stuff out the virus the best we could. And that that created a lot of firstly this word guidance which is now we take for granted but we had previous previous the emergency had always promulgated guidance to a certain extent but now the guidance is essentially the force of regulation under the authority of the executive order. So we were we were promulgating guidance very rapidly. Almost on a daily basis on how to how to operate the system in this timeframe. This is where school districts were learning how to do remote learning essentially overnight we are trying to feed kids a big part of the operation. If you're you know once again I'll just throw out some things you might be interested in learning more about. Essentially feeding children nonstop 24 seven every single day through the summer throughout this and so using schools as a way to provide support to communities that it's not just about in person instructions about all the other routines and connections that our schools provide in our communities. So this first phase, largely a true emergency response. So keeping the lights on basically as best we could. I draw sort of the end of that around June, the in in the governor's order at one point he had directed me to create graduation guidance. The deadline for that was May 8 I remember that quite finally that date and that's that's really where our thinking started to pivot a bit about okay so what comes next. I think as we're those of us at work in schools we are lives are patterned around the school year. As I mentioned my wife's a teacher so we're you know we're used to sort of the cycle of August to June and, you know, sort of getting ready for the new school year over the summer kind of thing so I think we were a culture not only in my family but in the education system to think that this emergency would be over with the end of the school year, you know and our initial planning for graduation was okay well this was horrible it was a heck of a ride, but it's over right. And it started to sink in pretty quickly that it wasn't going to be over and, as we reached out nationally to our partners across the country. There was growing consensus that people were waking up the idea that this emergency would not be over and that we then had a sense of urgency about preparing for the fall. And I was thinking like once again traditionally was that the summer would be a time for remediation and reflection try to, you know, address begin to address the impact of the spring, the mitigation of the emergency on students learning and so forth but then that was abandoned very quickly somewhere around the beginning of June, when we all realized I think as a country that this this wasn't over that we had a limited opportunity to plan for the fall. And that's that's sort of the beginning of phase two is like well how do we reopen schools and of course in the backdrop of all this, sometime right around when we were planning the graduation guidance around the beginning of May. The conditions were rapidly improving at that point so it was it was challenging to produce the graduation guides because we were making a prediction in May about how things would be June and we didn't have testing at that point I mean we had a limited understanding of how the virus behaved or what really was going on. So it was difficult. And so as we as we turned into thinking about reopening schools here to no path forward you know we were reaching out to our partners around the country. You know, we, we started to see patterns of thinking around okay there's like maybe five domains to reopening a school, maybe one of them is the safety considerations which I'll talk about more detail. So after two Vermont once again we just carved our own path we basically anchored all of our guidance around the health and safety requirements. And we that led us for example to as I'll talk about in a minute to require wearing masks and school, which now we sort of take for granted but there are many places in the country that only recently started to do that so, you know we we anchored our thinking about the science and our health department has been such a tremendous asset to us as a state and really provided a significant leadership role in the sort of phase two planning. So that phase two planning is really about 100% of our focus on reopening schools and you know the summer is a finite period of time. So we, you know all the planning had to take place in a finite period of time it wasn't like we had two years to come up with the best plan to reopen schools. And we basically had one month to come up with the best plan to reopen schools because we needed another month to give districts a time to implement that planning so it isn't like you have the whole month to do the plan we have also have to carve out time for implementation and that's a theme. I'll highlight throughout this that a lot of our planning is is not complete essentially because it's in a finite time frame that also has to acknowledge that people need time to implement and digest and, and the planning itself has to be simple enough that people can digest it and implement it and apply it. So that phase two, you know reopening, I think here, you know Vermont had a very successful experience. It was very challenging. But you know, I say successful because our health data shows we were very successful, we were able to reopen our schools at a time many states in the country, where reopening their schools for political reasons but their conditions did not support them for reopening. We are conditions we achieved that as a society I think Vermonters really bought into the discipline necessary and our data health data showed that so that as Dr. Fauci observed when he came and visited with us. It allowed Vermont to start at a different place on the curve and many other places so we were really well situated to have a successful reopening and, and we also coincidentally put in some of the most fringe and requirements in our schools around distance and distance and so forth. And that allowed us to be successful. And so I draw the end of phase two somewhere around the end of September and that's when we made it in our guidance we talk about going from step levels we have a step two to step three and step two we opened at step two which was the most restrictive requirements at the end of September, everything was looking fine we moved to step three. We sort of congratulated ourselves somewhere in that timeframe thinking oh this we've got this thing licked you know we know how to operate our schools in the pandemic look our numbers are great. And then sometime in actually we were starting to think about recovery which I'll talk about a little in October, and we quickly had to put all that on the back burner as if you remember around Halloween we started to see our case counts increase in underscoring again that we're not an island that you know as, as New England started to see their cases increase as well so we had to make a decision. At some point in October to say look we can't pivot to reopening at this point we have we have a huge task in front of us with the holiday period. And that's what I'm calling phase three sort of the continuous covert operations. What we are now is how to how to operate the schools in this environment and that's sort of the precondition of everything we talk about going forward is based on the daily attention to the safety requirements to operate school safely and that's that's a that requires a huge effort on the part of our schools just to do that on a daily basis. We sort of take for granted to a certain extent now that you know we have a case here in a case there back in a string a single case would have shut down most of the state because everyone was anxious and didn't understand how to mitigate it. Now we sort of figure out how to do that but the effort that goes in on the local level to manage a single case not only at the health department but at a school level again. But this continuous operations period has been very challenging non stop since the beginning of school but especially challenging now. And we're in a very dynamic situation relative to the holiday period. Particularly it's sadly many places in our country are really struggling right now and we're certainly seeing that across England. We're still doing fairly well, but it just underscores again that, you know for months not an island and particularly as a family on tourism where we're vulnerable to, you know, the larger trends in our region. So at some point we're going to pivot to recovery and I use the word recovery from sort of an emergency management perspective. This is like you know if you remember hurricane Irene actually hurricanes over, you know we're going to clean up. Recovery and education I think for us is meaning. How do we begin to address the impact the emergency on students from an educational perspective and I use the term educational perspective there to include everything very broadly to include their development their social emotional well being their nutrition. So those functions of school provide. So how do we, how do we begin to point the system into that recovery work, assuming that the conditions are going to improve significantly as weather gets warmer as, as we feel the building into the vaccination, taking effect, and so forth. So we're starting to do that now. And I put question marks on that because we don't know when it'll start it's it's the starting of it is predicated on the conditions improving. We're telegraphing that we think the conditions will improve sometime after April vacation. We're beginning to do the planning now which I'll share a little bit in my last slide so sort of a general overview of the COVID response today maybe I'll just pause for a minute. I'm going to get into some more detail on some of these concepts, but if there's anything people have questions on I'll be happy to pause for a sec. Okay, well let's go to the next slide. Thank you. So, just in terms of that we call the reopening guidance or the sort of idea of the operations like what's involved. There's two big components of this. One is the, as I said, if you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of sort of priorities and this is sort of the base, you know that the non negotiable essential essential part of our operations, which is to maintain safety and prevent the virus from spreading inside of schools. When we started this in the summer, you know there was alarm. I remember getting a question I think it was on vpr and someone said so you're expecting cases of COVID in the schools and we're like yes our plan has a whole section on this you know the better part of this 40 page document now talks about this eventuality. That was alarming to people at the time but it just, you know once again it underscores the idea that if there is virus in our communities there will be virus in our schools. So, how do we, how do we plan for that and we also say the trick of it but we also know from a lot of the data, particularly from the experience in Europe, this was, you know back over the summer when we were planning that school age children appear to be less susceptible to spreading the virus into getting sick from COVID-19 so that that's certainly informed our thinking, but two essential components to this one is required, sort of mitigation policies, and these these are all imperfect on their own this is very much a layered sort of response if you will. The idea, basically if you think of the school is having an operational perimeter or boundary and that boundary more or less starts at a school bus stop. Firstly, to prevent the virus from entering the school perimeter or boundary as best we can. So let's assume the virus is in the community how do we prevent it from ever entering the school to begin with. And that's where we come into the daily health check so all staff all students on a daily basis are required to attest to their symptomology whether they've traveled and so forth and also this sort of basic idea that if you're sick stay you know, and that's that's important I mean these basic public health sort of concepts are deeply ingrained in a certain amount of discipline in our school system and it's one of the reasons why we see the, let's say the positivity rates in schools being lower than the general population. The distancing which I think you're familiar with this has been especially challenging, depending on the circumstance of the school some school districts are able to accomplish as much more easily than others. Wearing masks once again something we take for granted in Vermont but controversial and other parts of the country. In disinfection, I will say you know what we've learned over time and you know I will say I'm not a public health expert on this though I think I've earned a couple of advanced degrees in the last six months. There doesn't seem to be as much concern about the transmission of the virus from inanimate objects or we call fomites. You know the research is constantly evolving and we work closely as part of our team that's behind this was infectious infectious disease experts at UVM and pediatricians and so forth. There isn't a lot of data around catching the virus from surfaces or inanimate objects as it's still mostly from human transmission so this disinfection back when this was on a priority list we had, we had schools engaged in activities like deep cleaning. I couldn't remember a conversation with our school librarians association about how to, you know, sequester books that have been borrowed for how many hours or days before they can be returned in the circulation. This isn't as important as the distancing and the wearing in the mass and you know just the idea of aspirating. If you will is really the primary source of contagion of spreading the virus. So once again the idea is to keep the virus out of the schools but then the second layer is if it is in the schools we want to stop it from spreading inside the schools and that's that's really what these other layers are designed to do. And our guidance also then talks about okay what happens when you do have a case in school so you know getting into the nursing school nursing areas that had to be basically retrofitted to isolate the students who are positive or staff or positive from the rest of the population how do you get those students home or out of the school as soon as possible. So how do we work with the health department around contact tracing and the follow up them once again this is the we've taken it for granted but just even one case provokes a huge response from a school system it's a tremendous amount of work. But that's worked out pretty well for us and you know we we have been able to stay on top of that the cases inside of schools are prioritized. They receive special attention from the Department of Health. And there was a time sometime around Thanksgiving before Thanksgiving where we were really struggling I think as a state to keep up on on this and but since then we've built up a lot of capacity and it's going pretty well. Just to draw a contrast. Once again on a weekly basis I talked with my colleagues from around the region, and I was on a call this morning and main, which has had seen a significant increase in their cases in the last couple months. They've really lost the ability to do contact tracing and their agency of education their Department of Education. It does all the contact tracing for schools they've had to take that on because their Department of Health couldn't keep it up so. It's the federal dollars that contract out contact tracing to do all the contact tracing for their schools. So just totally different circumstances, but we're fortunate in Vermont we've been able to stay on top of that I will say you'll hear. And you should be attentive to the issues of our border districts, you know our school districts, you know I work in Canaan on New Hampshire border but we have a number of districts that intersect significantly with both New Hampshire and New York. We have unique needs in a lot of ways because they rely on the health care systems in both states they have community travel back and forth and they present a unique set of challenges in many cases. So anyway that that first bullet the big bullet are mitigation that remains fairly constant we revisit this fairly regularly. There are issues we haven't really been able to make progress on one of them is music education which you'll hear on. Unfortunately significant amount of scientific evidence around the dangers of singing and aspiration because there were a number of super spreader events last spring. Our doctors are fairly grounded in their position but we're hoping is conditions improved to make some product of progress on music but for the most part this the guidance has been pretty stable. It's been updated I think twice. We had to update it, I think in November, largely to anticipate cold weather which brings its own set of challenges. And this the second component of our approach is the flexibility around the mode of instruction. So we, you know this here too this was not in a political assessment this was just real realistic understanding of our diversity of our school system. And figure different ways have different logistical complexities so we wanted to basically give school districts comfort that the health department would be assessing the health conditions. But we wanted to give the tactical flexibility if you will to school districts to be able to deal with their logistical challenges which on any given day could shut down a school system, not because of conditions but because they don't have enough staff for whatever reason, the bus drivers out they don't have a cook whatever. So any of those things at any given day could shut down some of our schools but not others and that's an important distinction it's not necessarily a whole school district that might shut down it's one school or a part of a school. And we've seen a lot more of that type of behavior. And more on a focus sort of say surgical basis and districts responding in a very narrow way which is good. But it's been very challenging logistics of school systems are complex and also very fragile, particularly since you know both of our activities a humanistic endeavor teaching kids it requires people. And when people are not available there's not a lot of substitute for that. So we, we hit collect data on this on a monthly basis, the sort of exchange for giving districts we knew we had to give districts flexibility to keep schools open as best we could are sort of, we have a state interest in education education is ultimately a state responsibility in Vermont. So we do a data collection on a monthly basis around the instructional mode and to what extent districts are moving in and among those modes. So in person pretty stable, we saw a big increase in in person instruction at the elementary level after that sort of September period when we moved to step three. Basically the amount of in person doubled so I think for the most part it's fair to say 50% of our elementary schools are in complete in person for it to the most extent, you know there might be a day off some schools have like a day off or cleaning but at the elementary level, we have a lot more in person instruction going on and at the middle level in high school. The amount of what we call hybrid instruction some combination of the two which has many many different forms so it's even hard to say you know what does that look like districts have different schedules and approaches for this. I would say that the bulk of our districts, particularly in the middle and high school have been somewhere around 75 80% of them are in a hybrid mode and have been in hybrid mode from the very beginning. Particularly the high schools that you know high school seem to adapt to remote learning a little more readily than the elementary. Since the sort of essential building block of education at the high school is around a course versus the elementary where it's a class with one teacher so to speak. Okay, that's that's sort of the broad overview of sort of this operational disposition our school system has been in and this is this is pretty typical. So how other states are organized right now as well. So why don't I pause there for a minute, and before I go on. Are there. Yeah, are there, are there questions. I will have one and that is, can you tell us about the communication you're having with the local districts to come up with this plan. Are you in contact with the various members of those in the field. I have a whole slide here on communications I think it's the next slide I'll get into that so it's probably I'll do that first and why don't we Jesse if you want to go yeah so this is still you know to give you a sense with the response has been from the state level and what that starts to look like. A big part is I reflect on what we've done is around communication support. Once again the agency of education largely administers programs and regulations and so forth so there certainly to the chair's question about how things are created is one aspect of that and the other aspect of it is how things are communicated. And that has evolved it's it was totally different in the beginning of the emergency where essentially the agency was promulgating guidance if you will slash regulation on a daily basis without much involvement from the field. Because the public health issues were the priority at the time. We have a communication sports. This is where we're at right now and I'll go through the to answer the chair's question more directly on the development issue. We had to, we had, we, the agency of education really provided no operational oversight of school districts once again our role is largely regulatory which is sort of at a distance from the daily operations. We had to figure out how to how to respond sort of the daily operations things like getting PPE to school districts organizing you know now the vaccine. That required us to form a response team from pulling people from different divisions of the agency or we have our organizations structured around divisions which have about 20 to 30 people in them. So we had a very small communications team we had to sort of bring people together to staff a coven 19 response team and also have people on that team that interface with the state emergency operation center, which is sort of the mother organization if you will that coordinates the coven response across all agencies and state government. The coven 19 response team that team is involved with the logistics of supporting our school districts they meet twice a day have met twice a day since the beginning of the emergency. So, pretty tremendous effort on their part. They interface again with the state emergency operation center other state agencies the National Guard, and certainly any any other entities including the governor's office. So we can process we inundated with communication literally overnight, you know with questions of how to do certain things and so forth so it's just been a tremendous huge influx of communication, the volume of communication that we've had to manage. So my role as secretary has always been as education has always been a priority I've always sort of been at the sort of the top level that planning process, particularly when we shut down the schools. But more as we transitioned into reopening so we have a leadership team meeting that meets. It's a different little different than the cabinet around the governor so we meet three times a week Dr Levine and his team is part of that. So, Secretary of Education on part of that as well. So we meet every Monday Wednesday Friday morning we go through the data and detail and, and there's other meetings at the health department has on a regular basis but I'm connected as secretary to that conversation. The superintendents are under Vermont law are CEOs of their districts so there's a direct connection authority wise between the secretary and the superintendent that's a little different than some of the other roles that we put out regular email updates the superintendents instead of like putting out stuff every other hour. We sort of consolidate that information and say you know here's the latest guidance if you will which once again in the spring was very dynamic. Less so now, here's the old guidance here's links to the governor's latest addendum to his executive order and so forth. So the superintendents get a digest essentially of regular communication. There are other people on that list that it's directed towards the superintendents and their authority as the CEO and in charge of the administration their districts but you know the principles are on that list and so forth so people the information is broadly disseminated. And then we started doing a weekly call with superintendents. I think somewhere in April and May. It's just interesting to know at some point we always thought these would go away like oh we're done with the emergency let's stop doing these and periodically someone would say oh you know in May should we stop these at the end of the yeah I think I think we'll be done by then and now we've kept them going so we have a weekly call with the superintendents where I essentially provide reflections on three things and I you know sharing with the chair we're happy to sort of share this information with the committee as well and I think Ted's going to come in tomorrow and provide that to you. So we sort of go through an assessment of the conditions of the virus you know and this is based on me processing a lot of the public health information that I'm exposed to. And you know things like vaccine now are the better part of that report. We talk about the guidance you know what's going on with the guidance are there new issues and so forth. And then lastly I talk about the finances, you know the federal dollars that are necessary to support the work. So we do that on a weekly basis. Superintendents don't get a lot of chance to interact with me in those calls it's basically me talking is 45 minute call I do about 30 minutes, 20 minutes or so just straight updates, and then we have a chat window where they can post and I read the questions and try to respond to them, but we make it very clear that this is not a I don't give out oral guidance during those calls they rely on the written guidance to digest the information this just gives them a chance to ask me questions. My team listens in on those calls so it helps us refine our messaging and also I often identify areas for us to work on. Sort of the last structure we created, which is now called the Secretary's advisory group started. I forget, maybe April Mayish same timeframe where the major education associations reached out to me and said hey we want to offer our support, what can we do to help, you know, with this. So we created a weekly meeting. We've, we found it to be very useful so this is the group that has the superintendents the principles from on NEA. It's been augmented to include a couple teachers, school nurses, business managers, School Board Association, you know, so it's a fairly larger group the health department sits on these calls. So it's designed I think now to be more of a strategic position group where we process try to look ahead a little further than sort of just the administrative focus of the weekly call with superintendents that we try to identify what's going on and so forth and it's from this group that we spin off groups to work on the guidance so the health guidance which is the cornerstone of this. There's a subgroup of these individuals that were formed a committee around the leadership at the health department that was augmented by physicians from UVM, and so forth so a team was formed different stakeholders to develop the guidance but the large focus of it again was health, the health focus so as we engage with potential revisions what we tried to do. There was the initial guidance for reopening schools came out mid June, and we did a revision in August early August just based on people's practical feedback on how to implement the guidance how it could be improved. So what about revising the guidance based on a couple criteria one is if there's new health information from the science and so forth and that's more or less been stable but back in the summer that we were getting a lot of new information all the time. Are there things we can do in the guidance based on people's feedback of implementation that would make the guidance better more implementable, if you will. What other editorial issues did we forget to capitalize something or put a period in somewhere. So that's sort of been our criteria we did a second revision in August based on people's practical implementation. And then we basically decide to revisit the guidance once a month. It's a big process when we open the guidance up for review the subcommittees work on their pieces of it. Then it ultimately gets funneled back to Dr Levine and myself because we are, we issue our health guidance jointly between the agency and Department of Health. And we are the two officials that are responsible for promo getting it so they, they can propose things but we're the ultimate ultimate signer offers, if you will on that. And that's worked pretty well. As I mentioned, music has been challenging. We're contemplating addressing a few things we also have the ability to do frequently asked question documents sometimes a smaller issue would emerge that doesn't necessarily necessitate necessarily doesn't necessitate to bring up the whole guidance but it's something we can deal on a one off basis. I think winter sports is a good example of that where it's, it didn't really bring the whole group together it's a whole separate group that involves a VPA and athletic directories and so forth, and is coordinated with the recreation sports as well as to make sure that those the guidance in both of those areas goes forward together. So why don't I pause there and take any questions. Excellent, I think I'm just going to have you finish because I know we've got the principles coming in I want to make time for overall questions as well and I've got some of the financial support coming up and I think that's something that we're going to we're going to be very interested in. I appreciate that is this is designed to just give you a broader view and stimulate your questions for further testimony or questions so why don't we move ahead Jesse. So financial support a big part of this has been managing a whole bunch of new federal programs. These programs more or less have grant applications, the SCA the state the agency of education is often the recipient of these funds, and then we sub grant them out to the leas school district so the money that relationship goes from the federal government to the SCA, the state education agency, sub granted to leas school districts school districts then distribute the funds to their schools. And some more often and not there's also sub granting between school districts and schools as well, depending on their configuration or at least supervisory unions and school districts. So, at any rate, I'll just go through this at a high level you're familiar with the cares act which was the federal government sort of first step into this Vermont received over, you know, a billion dollars. We call the coronavirus relief fund. The point I'd make, and this is where some of the acronyms are going to become tricky for you but we can draw a map on this a little more emphatically, particularly the work in the General Assembly was largely focused on the CRF the CRF funds which are part of the cares act. It's important to acknowledge that in education. There are two other major funding streams that were created under the cares act so the CRF was certainly the big pot of money that in the General Assembly was very involved in allocating the CRF through the appropriations process. But these other two programs didn't go through the General Assembly these due to their authorization the SR one which is the elementary secondary education relief fund. Those funds by law were directed directly to school districts so there was no appropriations process of the General Assembly generally I find when I talk to legislators about this they're they're less familiar with SR in gear, because they weren't involved in deciding how the money was spent and the law basically directed how the money gets sent and it gets largely sent right to school districts for very specific purposes, and we're going to have we're going to have we're going to hear back from folks as to how that money was spent so absolutely yeah I just guess this is very general primer at this point is I'm already getting into the weeds but it's very general. Just to know I think, for the most part legislators are less familiar with Esther and gear than they are with the CRF because you weren't as involved. But it's in the first round of this this is cares act this was back in the spring, March, April. You know, we received $30 million essentially an answer funds the elementary secondary education relief most of that has to go directly to the school districts. And he's not involved in deciding how that spent school districts have the authority to spend that money in accordance with the federal law. We have an application for them and so forth but the federal government basically prescribed how the money gets spent gear is a program is the governor's education emergency education relief. So the federal government gave a discretionary pot of money to governors to for education to figure out how to, how to, if there's anything that isn't covered between the CRF and Esther essentially, they want to give governors a discretionary pot of money. Vermont received $4 million in gear. Originally, Governor Scott decided to allocate those funds towards the CTE centers the career technical education center since they were not really addressed through Esther or the CRF. So that was all how we, you know, we get into a ton of detail about you guys were involved in the CRF or the Legislature General Assembly is involved in the CRF. Hunky Dory all that kind of went well ton of work to hand out the money to get it accounted for district suspended, and we were moving the CRF is important to note had a timeline of December 30. So everyone was spending their CRF money as rapidly as possible because it was going to go away if you didn't use it. People didn't really spend a lot of time on Esther and gear, or I should say Esther in particular because CRF had to go out the door first. So then recently very recently Congress created a coronavirus response relief supplemental appropriations act. And one of the things they did is they extended the CRF deadline so all that urgency about people spending their money really quick before it went away. Suddenly, that urgency evaporated overnight because Congress extended the deadline by a whole another year. So that's something we're working on now. And also they appropriated additional money into two existing programs. So they, they instead of creating new programs which delay the delivery of funds on the ground if you will they decide to pump more money through two existing programs so that's why it's useful to know Esther and gear, because they're going to be with us coming forward as well. So we now call them Esther to in gear to, because even though the federal government use essentially these bank accounts to make money, they've attached different strings to them a little bit so we have to track the money separately. But the point I'd make today is that this is brand new hot off the press so to speak this is evolving rapidly, but just to give you a sense of the magnitude of this, under Esther in the spring we received $30 million as I mentioned, in S or two, we've received $126 million. So four times as much money for schools in S or two, which is good news. Gear, $6 million before we got $4 million gear to a $6 million. And there's this new program EAS, which has to do with non public schools. And there is a specific program established for basically our independent schools previously, their needs were attempted to be addressed to the Esther program. But the Congress and this, this approach removed the non public school piece from Esther and put it as a separate program in here. Anyway, we'll go through all these things in more detail. But just go to the next slide and I'll conclude. The point is, you know, this is Jesse if you could go one slide. Thanks. So now we're moving to recovery. We've got, you know, we've got this history of operating our schools safely. But that's an ongoing it's not a given so every day we have to attend to that. We have the prospect of the vaccine prospect of warmer weather and conditions improving so we're trying to do this initial planning around recovery once again recovery being how to how to address the emergency on kids where we are now conceptualizing a sort of a planning process around that very similar to how we created a planning process for reopening schools. In particular, we're going to have these resources that were just sort of, as I said hot off the press we have new federal dollars coming in we expect to receive additional federal dollars under the Biden administration so we have to start conceptualizing what is the work in front of us it's certainly there's ongoing costs of operating schools safely, but we have to also focus on sort of this recovery idea of how to how to focus resources on addressing the impact of the emergency on kids. And so right now our planning is in like three buckets and this is happening in integration with other state partners, including the mental health department. Mental health and well being and these aren't prioritizes are sort of all are interrelated. Re-engagement and truancy. So truancy, if you might be familiar with that concept is basically like sort of the tip of the iceberg we have our system because it's been operating in a sort of hybrid mode and so forth hasn't had as much direct contact with the education family as we typically would have schools make so we have some engagement issues to get kids back in to figure out what's going on, and then certainly academic success and achievement. So, those are sort of the three planning modes we're in we don't have answers yet about how we're going to quantify this how we're going to organize it where that's what we're sort of engaged and now through the month of January. So, we are trying to use structures we already have and also point the system to many of the changes we know have to occur as a result of act 173, you know, in terms of improving sort of the pre special education disposition of districts. So, what we're promoting now this is all a draft is the idea of using what we call educational support teams or EST is sort of making sure there's one of those at the district level. For a couple reasons, one is so that we can bring other state resources to bear on a district basis meaning mental health and so forth. But we also because the funds are coming into the district level we want to see that coordination and prioritization from a district level. And I think you know that's that's something we've been working on as part of our conceptualization on 173 is how to and this is consistent with act 46 as well as how to get our school districts operating more as systems and many places state they already do that. But in other places they're not as strong as they could be in the theory is that if the school district is looking at all its schools as a system that they're going to be in a good position to address equity issues and so forth with our support. I'm going to conclude there. A lot of big concepts and some some ideas to stimulate your thinking but happy to come back at any point to talk more about these and provide regular updates. Thank you and we are going to be hearing from from your shop as well on this. I have I see a couple of questions representive Conlon. Very quick. I assume S or two is money that also will not go through the General Assembly. We, in other words, we don't get to have the fun of spending that money the way we think it should go. Yeah, I am. You know we're waiting for the specific guidance from the US Department of Ed on this but just reading the statutory language I would, I feel comfortable saying absolutely it's going to go directly through the leas. The meeting that. That's correct. We do we do have a period of sort of ambiguity at the federal level, you know where we're to put it politely we have a you know we're waiting typically we would see receive guidance from the US Department of Ed on how to interpret the statute but our professional associations at the national level are starting to do some of that interpretation. So I feel pretty comfortable saying that's that's how it will will come out it will go directly to school districts with the federal parameters and the General Assembly will not be involved in appropriating those funds. Representative James. Thanks chair web. Secretary French thanks for coming in today. See you. Yeah, good to see you too. I was wondering if you could talk just a little bit about you had mentioned academic assessment and I wonder what how you're thinking. Is it going to hold out or how that will work in a coven environment or even in the fall is just start to try to get a handle on learning recovery and learning loss. Yeah, I think it's daunting task I'm curious what you guys are it is. And I think it's, you know, there's a couple layers to it we don't have an answer. This is, you know, a key element of our deliberations and the planning with our stakeholder groups of how to do this. But I think it's fair to say we need to have I'll use the word assessment not to mean test but just this idea of triage or some we need some information about what's in front of us in terms of recovery. So I think that's sort of the broader paradigm of which I engage in this conversation and then say there's a couple layers to it one is the federal disposition towards our required to go back and use assessment in the term of test. We have required tests that we are, we give every year in Vermont we call them the aspect smarter balance assessment. They're given and basically may. It's not clear yet whether the federal government's going to require us to administer those tests or not, you know, so we know that'll be one of the first topics the new Secretary of Education engages with Congress on. There will be some sort of flexibility ultimately imparted, but it's not clear yet to what extent we are going to have as back as a tool in our toolbox as we begin these conversations about well. Okay, we need to do some sort of assessment or sort of triage. What are the tools we have in our tool. So we don't know yet to what extent aspects available or could be available. I will say aspect does require in person administration so it's not one of the tests that we could do remotely if people are still in a hybrid mode so we have to figure that out we also know districts have a lot of benchmark assessment that they do themselves that we don't necessarily have visibility in so those are other tools that are out there. So we don't know yet how we're going to do this it's a conversation, you know that we're going to have with our stakeholder groups. I'm pretty convinced the state needs to have some information on this so we can direct resources and understand the priorities. So what we might find, for example, elementary students are doing okay, you know, and it's maybe the middle level kids that need more help. It's really hard to predict we saw there's a, for example, a large commercial benchmark assessment which is called the NWA measures of academic progress for the map test many districts give that test nationally usually about 40 million students take it. This fall across the country but what the company reported was that reading scores were okay it was actually the math scores that had fallen off significantly. So, it's just it's interesting to understand what those trends are and it's hard to predict so we it's confident I'm pretty confident say we're going to have to do some sort of assessment but I don't know what that means yet. Representative Brown and then represent Boston. Thank you chair web secretary French. I know this is a difficult issue but I've had several teachers in my district reach out to me about teacher priority for vaccines. Can you just comment briefly on how that how those decisions are being made going forward and how teachers can sort of express their concerns and who that person who they should be expressing those two. Yeah, I think they're, I'm hearing the concerns as well believe me so it's, I don't, I don't think I need to give any more advice on how they should express their concerns and I'm married to a teacher so I get it at the dinner table as well. But yeah, I mean it's it's a hard message to hear I think Dr Levine I saw some of his testimony yesterday I think he's done as good a job as anyone on explaining it it's basically a very scarce resource right now. Unfortunately we're faced with a decision around saving lives or preventing illness and so I think appropriately we've you know in this in this moment of significant scarcity of vaccine where we're trying to save lives because there are, you know the the elderly are much more vulnerable to death, unfortunately than the younger people so that's what we're doing right now. I think it's fair to say and this is what I've been saying to superintendents and so forth is that when I'm in conversation with our national partners, a couple, a couple themes emerge one is. I expect the CDC to provide a more leadership role under the Biden administration that it did under the Trump administration so we're looking forward to that sort of more energetic and so I would say traditional role the CDC and some of these questions they're part of the vaccine information has been inconsistent, inadequate, and you know unpredictable so it's been really hard to to make decisions when we're not getting reliable information on how much vaccine we're getting when will come and so forth and so I think as a country we're going to get better at that but clearly there's there's a huge role for the CDC and that I think to a certain extent they haven't been leveraged to their maximum. I think also, you know, President Biden's going to have a new position on vaccine and so I think we have to basically wait for some of that to settle off and, you know, into your question I think 90% of the decision making now is being made on logistics, you know, so it's really based on the sort of the scarcity and how to stand up the systems the it systems that are involved and so forth. So I would expect, and you'll hear more tomorrow, better part of the press conference tomorrow will be on an update on vaccination. And it leads to teachers and every all Vermonters will evolve as the supply becomes more knowable. And it's certainly. I think we are seeing more states sort of sort of come into where Vermont is realizing you know we only have a limited supply right now let's make the difference on death I'm seeing more states make sort of those hard choices. But we certainly still view teachers as a priority but it's a question of supply and how much of it we have and when we can we can get there. So, I mean that's that's kind of where the decision making is I'm not a secretary of education I'm not directly involved in that decision making we have our own, you know there's a federal panel with ethicists and so forth and Vermont has its own panel. I'm certainly plugged into those conversations but my impression right now it's like 90% of it's based on logistics. Which aren't good right now. We will be hearing from the NEA who will have some opinions about that our secretary. Thank you for listening in on time representative Austin. Yes, thank you chair, and thank you, Secretary French. And I also want to thank you for participating in the twice weekly news conferences from the governor that was really helpful, you know to be able to kind of keep track of what was going on in the public schools. This is one of the, this isn't for now but I'm just wondering at some point, I always feel like in the crisis there's always a kernel of opportunity. If at some point, you know when things are calm down and you have some time to reflect I'm wondering if you could come back to us and talk about what opportunities, especially with the remote learning the hybrid combinations. What didn't work what might have opened up some opportunities or other trends in public education in Vermont from the COVID virus. So that's one. Also you spoke at the beginning about a state calendar, you know maybe at some point we can have an update on your thoughts on that. And I have to say when we met with the superintendent say talk a lot about reengagement. And I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that they that was a to me a strong theme that came across yesterday when we talked to the superintendent can you talk now a little bit about how you see that happening. And I have to, I have to say you have to name that very simple request. Yeah, I think it is a sense of responsibility we feel to bring forward ideas that lessons learned if you will any opportunity so we're, we're definitely anxious to do that and we've assembled a series of policy ideas for you to consider. And one piece and I'll end on this is really I think you know we started to hear information about truancy. And as we sort of unpack that a little bit more I think I think it more appropriately should be framed on the issue of engagement, you know, because we have truancy statutes and regulations and so forth. I'm guessing that's not the right tool we come out to gate with on some of these other issues because they're I mean families have been deeply affected by the pandemic, you know our school systems if all this has been deeply shuffled so we have to be a little more thoughtful about it I think than just saying oh it's a truancy problem. Because we have we know we have broader issues and I'll just make the observation about music again. You know we've been in constant contact with our music educators they have no trouble sharing their ideas on this as well. And most recently I was talking to a couple of leaders of their state association where we're saying you know we're talking about how to restart that conversation with our infectious disease experts and so forth. And so much of that conversation was still attached to the reopening conversation you know it was like, oh we've done this on that reopening guides whereas music and the reopening guides. And I was starting to make the observation through through their sort of advocacy that really music belongs in that container of engagement is part of the recovery plan so we're about to make that pivot. So in a little way, our best tools in the toolbox right now are just to get schools reopened to the maximum in person to get in person not so much in person instruction but certainly in person routines in person relationships as we often say. In things like music, those sort of those programs are sort of sort of take for granted now be can be seen as an intervention towards issues of engagement. So where this will sugar off in terms of the planning is that districts will, if we can figure out how to do that triage or that assessment piece in this area of engagement, you know to what extent which groups of students need more support or others. I could imagine that, for example, becoming an emphasis in a district to hold a weekly. A group or an advisory for say it was in our school say we're a K through six school and we find out our fifth and sixth graders are really the ones that need sort of a proactive focus on engagement prioritized over reading instruction even perhaps. So we would build into our schedule a way to engage with those groups, you know directly to re foster those relationships and so forth because a necessary precondition for them to move forward with some of the learning intervention so I that's the kind of thing I think we're thinking about with engagement. I have to stop us now I'm afraid I will certainly say that some of the music that's been coming over some of the zoom that we've been seeing on YouTube, but some of the things that music teachers are doing doesn't say no but have been truly inspiring and brought me to tears. Those kids are just anxious to get back together, you know and this. Yeah, anyway that's the engagement called puzzle it's much bigger than truancy. Yeah, because we have kids even when in person that aren't truly engaged so we've got some work to do in that area. So we are I believe we're going to hear from from the agency tomorrow as well on just an update on covert response from Ted that we're going to are you depending that we're going to be getting on a weekly. And just the future if we could get the data that you have on the schools that are in person and remote and hybrid would be most appreciated. And with that we're going to have to pivot to the principles, and I want to thank you very much Secretary French for joining us today. There's an awful lot going on we have anxious communities and we're we're happy to do our part to support this. So I want to thank you. Thank you. Look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you. It is now 2011 superintendent we have this school boards at 11 I'm going to want to give us at least a five minute break. And they're normally would be at least a 10 or 15 but I'm going to give us just a five minute break. So Jay, welcome to the House Committee on Education. Thank you for the record Jay Nichols executive director the Vermont Principles Association. I know you have some new members I did hear them introduce themselves to Dan so it can save you a little bit of time right there. My background is I was a superintendent for a long time before that a principal, before that a teacher, and I also teach education leadership for people that are currently principles at St. Mike's. And I also teach at Southern New Hampshire University a class of people that want to become principles. So I'm involved with education that way and I also do some consulting work on leadership development. And quickly the VPA as an organization started in 1915, and it was created as the Vermont headmasters, and his purpose was to regulate middle school and high school sports. And obviously the VPA is involved into a lot more since it became the VPA in 1989. And now we're an organization with over 600 members. 98% of the principles are our members almost all the assistant principles are members, and most of the athletic directors. We have five employees to cover the entire state. And we have 15 members on our executive board which are all school leaders, and three of them spoke to you and testified yesterday Christian, Bob Tebow and Eric McLaughlin, the three that I asked to come yesterday. So, Jesse if you could put up the testimony that has the table in it I can walk us through that quickly. Thanks. Why that's coming up what I did as I organize the table with some issues concerns I thought we should talk about real briefly I'll introduce those to you, and be glad to talk with you about any of those in length as we go forward. And I also submitted a template for an education education bill essentially on teacher retirement that I'm hoping that either you or the Senate committee will look at as a committee bill and try to put forward and it has a lot to do with our the struggles we're having retaining teachers and finding substitute teachers and keeping teachers employed. So the first thing I'll share with you and those of you that have been around know that I've talked about this in the past is the issue with broadband. That's been an issue that's really shown up during this pandemic. We really need to find a way to have connectivity throughout the state, essentially as I say here is a fundamental Vermont right. So it's a huge problem. It's a problem that's exasperated the difference between the haves and have nots, and it's made it more difficult for more vulnerable children. It hurts us even more in in person school, because some kids have access at home to resources other kids don't, but when we're remote. It's a real big issue. The second one I want to touch touch on is related to that which is the hybrid learning remote, we need to do whatever we can do to get more students back to in person instruction. That has to be a fundamental key. The research that we've seen come out so far has shown that in person instruction is much more beneficial than remote remote's better than nothing no question. And our teachers and school leaders have done a great job with remote, but it's missing a lot of kids. They've probably missing, you know, a couple thousand kids in Vermont. We haven't done any data on this but I was talking to leaders from New Mexico yesterday and nine through 12. They believe they're missing 21,000 students that have just dropped off, because they're not, they're not not participating remotely. So those are two teachers. There's some issues around finger printing and sharing of records between agencies, Secretary French and other agencies have worked on that and they're trying to make that better some optimistic that will, will be able to do a better job in that. It's hard to get subs anyway in a pandemic, and we don't want to put up any roadblocks. That was a huge problem in the beginning of the year, where we had a lot of college kids that were home but couldn't get finger printed in time so they so beginning the school we had a lot of people we could have used to do to use the substitute teachers that we weren't able to because of their inability to get their fingerprints in time. Hiring teachers and I'm kind of hurrying I know we only have a little bit of time Kate was texting me before I got out here saying hurry Jay hurry. Hiring teachers staff administrators, this is becoming a critical issue across the nation and Vermont rural areas are hit especially hard. It's very difficult to find these positions. That's why we're proposing the educator retirement bill. And you'll see the red up for that was sent to Jesse. She can share that with you and I'd be glad to talk about that in length. I think it's a bill that's cost neutral. I think it's a bill that will, it's similar to what Massachusetts already does. And it will support us in the fact that right now we sometimes have teachers come out of retirement or principals come out of retirement, come to Vermont get their full retirement and work here. We could let our teachers get retirement without a cost on us any extra money, and maybe help us have more quality people in our classrooms that are actually Vermont educators. In terms of school budgets. Where I would ask you to advocate Secretary French did mention that the Esther funds we're going to go directly to school districts, where I would ask you to advocate wherever you can as any flexibility we can get in federal funding will be the key. We need to make sure that we have the funds to provide students with a social emotional needs that they have and the academic needs they have. People talked about reengagement, I've been using the word recovery I think reengagement probably is a better word, but there's going to be gaps that kids are going to have academically for sure. But there's also going to be gaps that kids are going to have in the social emotional and we're going to need to make sure that our school budgets. Are cut because of fear of lack of revenue at the state level, and then once again the most vulnerable kids get hurt. This is not the time to be looking at austerity measures in public education as President like Biden has said, it's a time to be doubling down on education and spending money on education. The last thing I'll say there is that when we look at the federal funds. We also need to look at a way to release reduce the tax burden on taxpayers and I fully recognize that. We need to look outside the box here and we have to do this in a way that doesn't increase the tax burden to a point where our community members can't afford to pay it. Jesse could you, could you go down now past school budget one there. Early childhood those of you who have been on the committee have heard my pitch for years now act 66 in my opinion has actually widened the chasm between the haves and have nots. This is also preschool full day option for all four year olds. This is important for education and our economy. Oklahoma already does it. We have a public statement that four year olds and Vermont should access should have access to full day early kindergarten. That's something that we should mandate 30 years ago when we were talking about kindergarten, people were arguing. Kids don't need full day kindergarten kids don't need to have to come to kindergarten. So we made it optional, and within 15 years everybody was going to kindergarten. And now most kindergartens are full day. We need to do the same thing for the four year olds and early, early kindergarten program. It'll make a big difference for some of our most vulnerable students. Education funding the waiting study is going to be a really big issue. I would suggest to this committee that you asked the Senate to take the lead on that. And I'm hoping for that from my, my thinking is that the Senate, if I'm a representative in the Senate I've got a wider constituent base than I might have in, well then I would have in health said, and that I think can help because what's going to happen I think in the house is there's going to be people looking just at what it does to their town, which is a normal thing. So I think the broader that the 20,000 foot view can be in the beginning of that conversation. That's where everyone will be. Act 46. Please don't make any changes. If anything, it'd be good if we could stop people from trying to pull out of mergers that have already been approved. Let's give school leaders, superintendents, principals, school boards, the opportunity to take advantage of some of the advantages that can come from mergers that can come from economies of scale we haven't really given that a chance yet. Lastly, educational recovery, which is to me the biggest thing. Again, flexibility. I would like to see us hire tutors provide extra personnel where necessary work study internships. Let's make sure that we don't have kids fall through the cracks, because of a pandemic that they could not control. And because of the school system that they could not all access the way they should have been able to access. I'll take your speech, and I'll take any questions you might have. And again, I'd love to be, I'll be here often I'll be willing to answer any questions you have and do the best I can to address any concerns you bring up. That's an extended school year. Well, I think you already know how I feel about that so I've also we should have a longer school year anyway. I'm not sure if an extended school year right now it's going to be the right thing to do because I know a lot of teachers are the stress level for teachers administrators is higher than it's ever been. And I'm not in a school that used to be. But I certainly think strong summer programs that that can look more than have academic as well as enrichment focuses on them. That's a good place to spend some money to really help the kids that need it most, and maybe have opportunities for other kids who didn't didn't decline as much during the, during the pandemic but still could use those supports. And I do want to mention, Secretary French shared a study with you the results of a study. And he mentioned that a lot less kids took that study than the past. The reason less kids took that study is because many poor kids did not take that did not take that assessment instrument this year. And those results are probably even worse than the eye and they're showing in mathematics you're looking at three, four, maybe five, six month difference on average and the loss of mathematics skills and reading very little not a lot of loss. But again, the poorest kids are the ones that typically show the most loss and reading and many of them were not in that assessment so you have to keep that in mind. And we have to, we just need to, we just need to keep that in mind that all the kids are going to need some levels of extra support enrollment. Well it's, it's going to be down because we're going to be missing, you know, kids that are not fully engaged and it depends whether or not they were fully engaged in the first day 11 to day 30 of the school year in terms of what your, what your ADM is going to look like. But I think your ADM is actually going to be higher than your actual enrollment, because there's some kids that are falling off the mark as we get further and further in, whether it's internet issues or family losing jobs. I was talking to a high school principal yesterday that I mean high school teacher yesterday who said he went into a supermarket. During the school day, he was on, he was on a dentist appointment or something and he had the day off and he stopped by to pick up something for lunch and two of his students were working in the supermarket. In a time where they should have been online remotely in a class. And I think there's a lot of that, especially in our poor families. We very much appreciated hearing from the principals that came in yesterday. I saw it last night they did a really good job I told them they all look a lot better on camera than I do. I think what we'll do at this point then is we'll take a 10 minute break. We will be hearing from school boards and update from the school boards as to how things are going. I'd like people to have just a 10 minutes for a body break. So if we could just go on represents completely excuse me. Yeah, thank you madam chair I just have one quick question and I'm not sure that that Jay has the answer to this but what's what's going on with homeschooling. So the, I think Dan could give you better numbers but it's exploded. The number of homeschool students last I knew was like 100% higher than I've been the previous year. So there's certainly a lot more homeschooling, for sure. And whether that will stay that way after the pandemic center not certainly had to probably come down some but there may be some people that say this is work for me. Although I do know some parents that have said this is not working for me and I can't wait to the pandemic's done. Thank you Jay. Thanks for being with us today. Of course, my pleasure. Okay, with that, we will take a break. I encourage you to turn off your screens. Jesse, do we do we stay on YouTube during this break or can we shut off YouTube while we just take a break. It is whatever your preferences. Okay, my preference is going to be that we go off and we'll come back on.