 So tell us when we're ready to get it. Okay, great. Welcome back to the Senate education Friday, March 11th, 245. Mr. Secretary, welcome. You're off the last item on our agenda. We really appreciate you making the time this last day of crossover, on the day of crossover to give us a little bit of an update on what you're seeing in schools and what your numbers are looking like, what you anticipate going forward, et cetera. So with that, the floor is yours. Yeah, good afternoon, Dan French, Secretary of Education. It's good to see you in your natural environment, I guess. Sounds like a national geographic stuff. Yeah, please provide an update on COVID and I can do that. I also sent over a handout just on an ESR, which I'll kind of just remind you a little bit about that conversation. Yeah, I know it's fair to say, the trends are certainly positive. I think you're well aware. We would call this a moment of transition. Yet again, we've had several of these, whether they're good or for bad, but this is a moment of transition for the system as we move from sort of one set of mitigation recommendations to another. And regardless of whether the transitions are positive or negative, they're always transitions and they do require a lot of work and there's things that we're seeking to answer and clarify for people as they make that change. It is very interesting. If we weren't living this, it would be very interesting just to consider the rapidity at which Omicron has made an impact on not only our society, but our education system. I can remember it was at Thanksgiving when we first heard about Omicron and I do these weekly calls with the superintendents just to kind of foreshadow for them what we're seeing, what we're thinking and how we're planning for it. And I can remember sometime around, maybe the first week of December, it must have been right after Thanksgiving, we identified sort of three sort of descriptors, if you will, of a variant. To what extent is it more contagious? To what extent does it cause more disease? And then third, to what extent does it evade the vaccines that we have? And we didn't really know. So we knew about Omicron and then we started to learn more as we watched what was happening in South Africa and then the UK. That seems the vaccines are holding up. It definitely seems more contagious, but we're not sure to what extent it promotes more disease or not more severe illness. And then bam, it was here. It was like we came back after the Christmas holiday and it was one of the more challenging moments of the pandemic ever that we've had. And now it's gone, it's going quickly. It's amazing. We knew the trajectory that was, we could witness in other parts of the world and that's exactly what's happening. It's phasing out, if you will. And even recently before, most of our schools run winter vacation that third week of February, when we made the announcement that we were going to enable the 80% masking rule the week before, our interest was going into the holiday with some sense of stability and we didn't want people worried about it. We wanted to tell them upfront, here's what we're going to do after the holiday. Don't worry about anything during the holiday. We won't talk about any new guidance or anything like that. We're just telling you now. And there was mixed reception to that message. Some people were fearful and we went into the holiday and then we came back immediately from vacation. Everyone was like, when are we going to be able to take off our mask? So something happened over the holiday period and people's perception of where things were going. So there was much more interest in moving towards an endemic disposition in schools. I think after vacation, perhaps it was the cases are keep coming down and what for and people were traveling perhaps over the holiday and going out to other parts of the country. And so we've enacted, I think you're aware new mitigation recommendations and basically a key theme of that is there are no longer going to be separate mitigation recommendations for schools. So part of our goal was to move schools away for the need to have specific mitigation recommendations because essentially now the vaccine's widely available. There's no need for schools to have separate protections than the broader society. But we were not ready to go live with that next sort of turn of the spigot, if you will, for broader society. Yeah, so we waited and set the date for March 14th, which is Monday. So on Monday we'll be operating under the new mitigation recommendations for all Vermonters. Schools will be living under those and that's the work that's in transition right now. We saw several school districts, I don't have an exact number, maybe around a dozen, maybe not quite that high who elected to sort of go to mass optional prior. You know, some went live this week on the 7th. That was a seem to be a popular date for some of the early adopters, if you will. And the issue of mask is sort of like the, I would say the representation of the new mitigation recommendations, but there's other aspects. Another key aspect of this because, you know, we've maintained a pretty significant testing program in the state in schools, you know, we call test at home. You might remember test at stay, then test at home or surveillance testing. So we're maintaining those testing programs for the time being, particularly the staff assurance testing and test at home will remain in place, at least through the end of March, but that'll be sort of the next piece as we transition away from a discrete testing strategy in school in favor of a schools living under the broader testing strategy that's going to be available in the state. When I say will be available in the state, because we're making some changes in that testing strategy at the state level as well. We're moving away from sort of the state run PCR based testing centers that you're probably familiar with. Those centers will remain operational, but they'll more become distribution centers of antigen tests as opposed to PCR testing sites. So you'll be able to pull into those sites and get antigen tests as the federal supply increases. And that transition will happen somewhere around the beginning of April. And then probably by May, we'll be shutting down those sites altogether in favor of folks just getting their antigen tests at pharmacies or retail outlets and so forth, because the supply is increasing significantly even as we speak from the federal government. So all good news in terms of COVID mitigation. And that allows us to create more capacity to start making a pivot into the recovery work, which is one of the reasons I wanted to highlight the ESSER funding handout, the one pager I put into my... I'm passing that out right now. So just as a reminder, a little bit, we worked hard with you last year to align, particularly this last tranche of federal funding. ESSER program, I'm sure you're aware, is the elementary secondary education emergency relief fund. It's the primary source of funding for COVID relief in schools. There's been three versions of this, ESSER-1, ESSER-2, because sometimes things don't make sense in bureaucracy. There is no ESSER-3, there's ARP-ESSER, which essentially would be the equivalent of ESSER-3. ARP-ESSER is the big pot of money. Basically in each tranche of funding that I just described, ESSER-1 began at the beginning of the pandemic. Vermont got about $30 million. ESSER-2 went up to $120 some odd million dollars, and ARP-ESSER is like $280 million dollars. ESSER-1 and 2 are pretty much out the door. So now we're working on ARP-ESSER, ESSER-3, and that came out last spring. That's what necessitated the state ARP-ESSER plan. As you might remember, we met over the summer and had the committee take a look at the state plan. So there's a requirement for a state plan and that was approved by the federal government. Now districts have to do their planning and so forth. At any rate, I just wanna leave you that little piece today that there is some money that still needs to be appropriated and that's the budget recommendation section of that handout. There's basically $8 million of the state ARP-ESSER plan. I say the state funds, the state, the SEA, the agency of education can reserve up to 10% of the funding under ESSER and we have done that. And the chunk that hasn't been appropriated yet is 8.1 million. However, there are requirements for those appropriations in the federal law. So we have to spend a certain percentage of our money on evidence-based summer programs, a certain percentage of our money on afterschool and a certain percent of our funding on learning loss. So that's what's listed there first, those required appropriations. So we need appropriations for $2.8, $2.8, $1.3 million to meet the federal requirements. That does leave $1.1 million that is essentially discretionary in terms of not being confined by any regulation for the federal government or by any programs we've already established. Our recommendation there is to invest in a facilities planning grant program. That's an outgrowth of our work under Act 72 with school districts through our NORMAC kind and our work doing school facilities management improvement program. We've identified this need to help districts plan better for some of the work we're engaged in. So that would be our recommendation there. I shared this handout with the House Education Committee yesterday. So this is kind of just hitting, coming out now, but happy to talk about this in more detail. And that's pretty much my testimony. Be happy to talk about COVID or SIR or any of those issues. Where it says required appropriations, are those the actual federal recommended, did the feds actually recommend those exact dollars or does that something that you sort of work within some guidelines and came up with? It's a percentage of our, we have to spend X number of percent of our dollars on these activities. I will say with ARPES or the locals also have required percentages as well. So for example, and you might be familiar with SIR 90% of the funding goes to districts, we call LEAs. For instance, they have to spend 20% of their ARPES or money on learning loss, evidence-based learning loss activities. Doesn't prescribe the specific approach, but they have to be in that qualified spending channel, if you will. And that's what these appropriations here, these are spending channels. The good news is we already have these channels established. You've made appropriations in these buckets before or channels and you just need to appropriate the additional funds. We have a question from Senator Panzei. Secretary French, I think I'm just thinking out loud, but we talked yesterday more about testing for PFOAs in school, could that money be used to ramp up that program? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. The starting point for any of the funding, whether it be state and local is COVID. So it's important to think about, first it has to kind of meet that test, it has to be COVID related. Now there are areas, particularly with indoor air quality that become an opportunity where these sort of other issues can be addressed, but we have to sort of thread that needle. So to the extent that it would satisfy that sort of test of being COVID related, yes, these funds can be spent on areas that might be directly targeted to PCBs or PFOAs, but they sort of have to meet that sort of indoor air quality piece. I think that's what we're finding relative to being a qualified COVID expense because that's what they have in common. Right, sir, sorry, French. I know there was, in second, maybe it was even the third tranche of funding for the indoor air quality, was that, is that in this memo or that was not in here because that was prior, that was our money or so? Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of, we could give you a refresher, that's sort of my last blurb on this. We should come and talk to you about the different programs that have already been established. That's not what this memo is designed to do. This is just alerting you sort of mechanically to the appropriations we need to meet the federal regulations that were in address last year. There is a good news, there's a $1.1 million central discretionary piece there, but the others, I would argue, are more or less mechanical. But we're happy to come back and talk about all the other programs and sort of map those out for you. There's a lot of spending activity. Some of it fell under the CRF funding, but there's a lot under the other two SR appropriations. We worked with JFO last year to, because they have different timelines. ARP as for this last pot of money goes out to 2024. The other SRs we want to encumber and have those appropriations set up because they expired sooner rather than later. So we tended to shift last year, for example, we shifted a lot of summer school and after school into SR2, so we could mop those funds up and make sure they got used first. But there is an additional, we're not spending quite enough on after school and summer, so we have these additional appropriations to meet the federal threshold. Right, thank you. Senator Lines. Has the SR3 million for remote learning been appropriated or yet, has it been categorized yet? Not yet, we're planning to do that now. So that would be, we're happy to come back and provide an update on the different appropriations. Honestly, I think we would have done that by now if it wasn't for Delta and Omicron. So a lot of the work we were planning for recovery all got put on hold. But we are in the conversation with, working with Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative now to expend those funds. So I'm just curious, does that include capital expenditures, hardware, software or is it- That's not what we're contemplating now. We're contemplating remote learning programming. Yeah, okay. We haven't really, beyond the initial start of the pandemic, there wasn't a lot of demand for hardware. When we shut down the entire school system overnight, that's when we really panicked and everyone had to find hardware. That hasn't been the case. I haven't seen that concern. And again, districts have a lot of money locally. But we're more concerned with building capacity on remote learning to, particularly as we think about recovery and supporting students making up sort of academic progress. Remote learning can be very useful, particularly for the high school students who don't have access to courses and so forth to stay on track. So we want to continue to invest in our Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative capacity to continue to expand remote learning options across the state. Thank you. Secretary Crunch, where is the recovery plan? What's the status of that? Is that still being worked on? The state plan? Yeah, it was approved by the federal government in December. I'm sorry, I need to... You're doing a learning loss because of the pandemic. Gotcha. Yeah, that's what I'm learning about. Yeah, that's really coming out now. I mean, we worked on it twice now and COVID outsmarted us both times. And just to reflect on that, in that first year after school opened and we were heading into Halloween, we thought we were moving into recovery, you know? Sure, absolutely. You know, we have to retain a sense of humility in front of the virus, but we are... And you've heard some of the testimony, particularly on mental health and so forth. I know Secretary, Deputy Secretary Boucher's been in. We are now basically shutting down a lot of our mitigation planning structures inside a state government in favor of creating new planning structures around recovery. So we have to let go of one in order to do the other. And that's happening as we speak. Senator Hooker. Thank you. Thank you, Secretary Friend. With your mitigation implementation, and I know it's sort of early still, things are happening quickly and things are changing, have you seen a change in attendance of both kids and staff? And, you know, how are the, how is our staff members being able to cope with what's going on? I know we talked about helping out, you know, having money appropriated to make sure that staff is taken care of. And I'm just curious to know what kind of difference you're seeing now that the virus is... Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, as you can imagine, it's always hard to make general statements about our education system, but it runs the gamut. You know, and it's fair to say we in a large part of the state has not enacted the new requirements yet or the new recommendations, not requirements. And so that's playing out. People are, I would say, again, any transition moment we've experienced, people are acclimating themselves to that. I will say I had, I meet twice a month with the leadership of the School Nurses Association, and I had that meeting yesterday. And, you know, part of my questioning time is always like, how's it going? And I should say firstly, they're in a much better place than they were in January. I mean, as a group of employees, they were really struggling. But they talk quite a bit. When we started to, you know, talk about how people were acclimating, the conversation really broke down into two groups, how are students doing, then how are staff doing? By far and away, students are doing well. I mean, they, and I didn't provoke the conversation. The several nurses unsolicited observed were so proud of our students. They're being really respectful of each other. You know, many are anxious to take their masks off, but they're okay with people who might be wearing a mask for some other reasons. So the kids get it. I think the staff are probably, you know, having a more difficult time making the transition. The nurses talked a bit about parents, for example, asking nurses to enforce masking policy. You know, for example, a parent would call a nurse and say, I want you to make sure my child is wearing his mask like I told him to when he left the house this morning, you know, or I want you to make sure my child has got six feet around them in the lunchroom. So we have that aspect, which always puts school staff in the middle, which is why staff are more stressed out than these things perhaps and the students are. But the nurses also remarked on spending, you know, because nurses are go-to people for staff as well. And, you know, school staff looked to nurses to interpret our health guidance and so forth. Some of the nurses remarked on spending quite a bit of time with individual staff members on their own concerns and so forth. So I think all those things are happening as we speak and we'll work through that. What I offered is to provide, you know, communication, direction, whatever I could to help, you know, be respectful of this transition moment. At the same time, I also want to keep people moving forward. I think it's critical at this point that we do really move towards a endemic disposition schools. I've seen some schools saying, well, we'll take our time, we'll take four months just to be sure. I think that really does a disservice and is really not helpful to actually moving into recovery. So we've got to make progress and it is hard. If we're, if we can't get out of the mitigation business, then it's going to be hard to engage in the recovery business inside of schools as well as the state level. If it's safe to do that, we need to do it with a sense of urgency. Go. Another question. Secretary Branch. Secretary Branch, anything else for us at this point? No, thank you for your partnership. Look forward to seeing you on the other side. We're putting a lot of ramping up a lot of effort on recovery planning, also the weighting study and so forth. You know, this complex policy issues that we want to be able to support your work. And I was thinking the other side of the crossover, but that's only two days of what I was talking about. I'm hoping that we just, just to put it on the agenda, so to speak, on the facilities inventory work and hopefully pick that back up from where we left it last year. Looking forward to that. And maybe come back here with the PCB. Yeah, where there's a lot of, I would say synergies happening around PCBs and the other facilities work. That's that's good news from my perspective, talking with Commissioner Walk this morning and again with the superintendent this afternoon. That's good. It needs to be integrated into the larger scope of work. Inventory had some interchange or interaction with on that topic this morning. We have about five districts that still haven't completed their inventory. So we, as of the 15th, I'm going to be reaching out to them directly to encourage them to complete that inventory. So we will have reporting, the vendors will have that reporting done by the end of March. So we want to get those stragglers in. It'll just add, make it a more complete report. And notably a couple of the districts that hadn't completed it are also embarking on significant facilities renovations right now. So it's really important that we get them included. Senator Chinden. So I don't know if this wouldn't be Secretary of French, but as we start talking about building constructions, testing, PFOs and all that, I would love to better understand why there was a referendum or what is a moratorium, moratorium on school funding back in 2007, 2008. So the treasurer spoke to that a couple of times. I'd like to understand what it would mean to lift that moratorium and what they have benefits that could be looking at the next five, 10 years for all of our school districts that need new school upgrades to their school facilities. Yeah, and that's really Act 72, is situating us to start to embark on that work. The inventory, the assessment, which is at Act 72 and then starting to work on the policy and regulations that define school construction that we're not, haven't been updated in many, many years. And then adding capacity for the agency. The agency used to have three full-time staff administering that program. We have zero right now. So all those things need to come together. And then the bottom line is at some point we need to figure out how to pay for it all. And then I would just why you've put this on the table, I'll just also from a policy perspective remark, we can't afford from my perspective to do it across the board flat reimbursement for all schools. We're gonna have to have that conversation about which schools we invest in. And because the big thing that's happened since 2007 is our population schools has declined significantly. So that's gonna be a more challenging policy conversation but I think one that should be brought forward at the same time. So, Secretary French, it's really appreciated, really appreciate all of the work that you and your team have already provided us this year. You've been a huge help as I mentioned to you in the hall a couple of days ago with a number of our bills. So thank you and we look forward to continuing the conversation, probably starting next week on everything we're receiving from the house and the additional work that we're going to do on our end. So thank you. Thank you. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Deputy, let's take this offline.