 when we are alive. Welcome back. This is the Education Committee and the Vermont House of Representatives and we're continuing testimony on S16 and act relating to the creation of a task force on exclusionary reform. And we are delighted to welcome J. Diaz from the ACLU to give us a response to that bill. What do you see as, do you see even support? Do you see problems, unintended consequences, anything that you would do to advise us on moving forward with the bill? Sure, thank you very much for the record. My name is J. Diaz. I'm senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Vermont. For those of you who I haven't had the pleasure of meeting before, I've been working on the issue of school discipline reform and starting in Vermont, starting about eight years ago. When I worked at Vermont Legal Aid representing low income students and their families in a variety of education matters, most frequently related to when we were excluded from school for long periods of time. So usually anywhere from a couple of weeks to months or a whole year for a variety of reasons. And so I can talk about S16, I'm happy to do that. We are supportive of the bill. There may be a couple of tweaks that the committee might want to consider. And I'll talk about those. But I also would like to ask, because I don't know how much you've already looked at the bill or heard some background on like where it's coming from. Would you like to hear some about the reform conversation and what the impacts are of school discipline more generally? That'd be great. All right, excellent. So I did provide just a simple fact sheet kind of just that I'll just go through, kind of summarizes some of my comments here if you wanna read along. Otherwise I'll just go through it. This conversation really got going five years ago. And we had a lot of discussion around exclusionary discipline reform in the Senate and in the House. And we're very pleased to see this bill being considered now. Why do we wanna reform school discipline laws or at least take a look at what's going on in with exclusionary discipline across the state? Number one, and this is based on my experience representing students and the many stories I've heard as well from students and families directly is that there are some real short-term negative impacts on kids. I think they're obvious, but we don't tend to like, we think of suspension and school discipline as just this is just how we do things, right? So we're really asking ourselves to rethink what it means and like take another look at it because when kids are kicked out of school, they're missing valuable education time, obviously. They're at home in all likelihood. So either their parents are missing work and perhaps even losing their jobs or being docked pay or the children are left at home unsupervised and perhaps unsafe. Children who receive free and reduced lunch at school, which is the vast majority of children who are subject to a exclusionary discipline are going without the meals that they would normally get at school. And finally, for the kids themselves, every time they are kicked out of school, whether it's one day or five days or however up to a year is what the law permits, it only teaches that student, that young person that school is where they don't belong. And I think that's a really important point to recognize because we've all been kids, some of us have kids, they wanna belong. And I think that's something that really gets lost when kids are kicked out of school. There's also short-term costs, not just to the kids and families, but to our schools and communities. In schools with more suspensions are rated on climate surveys as feeling less safe and having lower educational scores. We're wasting resources when we kick kids out of school because obviously our school budgets don't change when mid-year a student is removed from the school. And again, we're leaving potentially leaving unsupervised children in the community where they are greater likelihood to get into trouble for lack of a better term or be harmed themselves. Moving from the short-term costs to the long-term costs, the long-term negative effects on children have been well studied around the country and they're pretty clear at this point. Students who receive suspension, even just one time are more likely to drop out of school or more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system and therefore more likely to be incarcerated or end up in poverty long-term. Of course, this has long-term costs to Vermont's communities and our economy. Our communities are less safe, less productive, less fiscally sound because some studies have shown that a high school dropout costs the state anywhere between $120,000 and $240,000. The cost for a juvenile used to be, if you have, I think still to hold a juvenile in detention thankfully Woodside is now closed but we're still holding some juveniles. There's a, that costs tens of thousands of dollars per year and of course the cost of an inmate in our prisons is over $50,000 a year. And so, the way I recognized all this through my cases led me to craft the report. The report that I drafted at Maligolade in 2015 was called kicked out, unfair, non-equal student discipline in Vermont's public schools. And in that report we listed, we had stories of students I had represented, de-identified of course, we had statistics from around the state that we use which with data from the federal civil rights data collection. And we had, and we compiled that into looking at discipline rates across the state, looking at law enforcement referrals from schools across the states and school-based arrests. So, and in that report we came out with five findings and you'll see them here. And this is going back a ways now, but I guess, so some of the data is a little bit old but the data was confirmed as having some changes but in 2016 and 2017 with the agency of education reports that I also included and sent to Jesse. But now we haven't had data on this for five years and that's a real concern of course because back then at least we had 8,000 school days lost in a single year by our students. We had students with learning disabilities, those students on IEPs were nearly three times more likely to be suspended. Black and African-American students in Chittenden County and Abinackie students in Franklin County the best data we could get at the time were two to three times more likely to be suspended. I know that in Burlington where they did a robust data collection on school discipline 90% of the kids that were suspended were free and reduced launch eligible. We don't know that number for the state but we know what it is now, but we know also from the agency of education data report from 2016 and 17 that the numbers were similar. But our final finding here was that valuable data on school discipline actions across the state is largely unavailable and inaccessible. Not just to advocates and people who work on these issues but most importantly to the general public. And so we came out with four recommendations then and in the report they're more detailed but I'll leave them just with the top line recommendations here of limiting disciplinary exclusion, allowing students to continue learning if possible during at least long-term suspensions and expulsions. Ensuring that students' rights are upheld and finding positive examples and ensuring that we have accurate data collection and reporting that we can use to hold ourselves accountable and ensure that we're making progress long-term. So I'll stop there for a moment before I move on to talk about a 16 in case if there are any questions. I don't see any at the moment. We've had some pretty amazing testimony this morning so I think we're caught up on the statement of the problem and are now really looking at the bill that is before us. What it is that we need to do what looks good, what needs to change. So if there's a way to target some of this too, the bill would be most helpful to us at this point. Yeah, I did have a chance to watch some of the testimony from this morning. From our perspective, S16 is a positive step in the right direction. We get a task force made up of the important players by and large in this work and we get specific requirements for recommendations and data collection. I think that is all really important. So the bill as a whole is a positive step and we support it moving forward. A couple areas where changes might be considered. From our perspective, having the secretary designate individuals from among of various entities doesn't seem to make just a whole lot, just make a lot of sense. Typically when I've been involved in other task forces, the, you know, as a secretary or an agency head will have say in who they nominate, of course, their designate and maybe a few nominees, a few designates, but typically you pick organizations to designate who is going to represent them. And in the list, we don't have a specific list of, you know, organizations we have like a catch all kind of phrase around racial justice. That's a good catch. Yeah, usually we do have the various advocacy groups appointing someone. So I think that's definitely a good catch. Thank you. Great. You know, and then, you know, I listened to some of the data conversation from this morning and I think that, you know, some of the, what people from UVM we're talking about, I think we will hardly support that, you know, we, maybe this needs to be a little bit of a broader conversation. Of course, we don't want, you know, we don't want to go too broad because then you kind of get lost in the, you know, lost in the fog, so to speak. But when you're trying to look at a specific issue, but I agree that there is a real need to not just look at the negative aspects or just to look at the outcomes, but to also look at what is working and be able to talk about that. I think it's kind of implicit that this task force will examine those things because the task force will be making recommendations on like what should be done to the legislature, but that could be made more explicit, of course. We've heard, I think it might have been UVM or it might have been the best program that for example, in districts that had implemented PBIS with fidelity, their numbers were lower. We didn't get to see how other things might have played out there, but so what's working is a good question, yeah. Yes, and having some analysis of that, I think would be useful. I'm sure the agency of education has some of that information. Yeah. And so, of course, the ACLU's hope is that this group will do this work. It's very time limited, it's one year. We'll do the work, we'll do it efficiently and effectively and in a really meaningful way to move the ball forward and give you all recommendations on what does work. What kind of data are we missing? What data do we have? I mean, we may have a good amount and then we'll know. It's really not about the data we have, it's about how we present it. And that might be the crux of the issue. All right, my hope is that long-term we get a report similar to what the agency did in 2016 and 17 on an actual basis. Correct. Exactly, yes, thank you. Team, I just, I found this in my pile, this is from 2017, it would have been nice for us to actually look at that, but I forgot that we had it. I sent the 2016 and 2017 reports that you just laid out and I think they are useful. I mean, they're really instructive because they are, they do capture the issue and they show how the agency was able to get around some of the difficult aspects of privacy and considerations, things like that. I get around them, honor them by talking about just larger groups so that you don't have to be concerned with FERPA. Accegative data. Exactly, exactly. You can aggregate by supervisory union at a high level. So yeah, so I think that's most of what we have to say. We're very supportive of this. Again, we would say the ACLU could be an organization on there, Vermont Legal Aid, Disability Rights Vermont. I'm sorry, I'm actually writing this down this time. Okay. So you're saying ACLU and Vermont Legal Aid. These are just optional suggestions. But the Vermont Family Network has done a lot of work in this area. I would think the best program folks at UVM might be, might want to be included. I would add Disability Rights Vermont. And there is a strong coalition working on issues over restorative justice and school discipline, and best practices that I think would love to also have a seat at the table. Yeah. Amanda Garces is closely connected with them. So I'm sure she could connect you. Some of the, and some of the, there are a number of groups that have formed recently of student led organizations around this. And I think it's vital that we do include a measure of student voice on such a task force as well. Yes, we had a student present to our committee in 2018 on this topic. Terrific. Gone to some Ivy League school somewhere. Sure. Okay. Thank you. Are there any questions? I see that we have Mr. Hoffer here, our auditor, in a minute. So representative Austin. I'm just wondering if we could review the participants, those participants, maybe at some point. Yeah. And just kind of to see what we, who's missing and you should be. I have that. I have that from our cup. Great. Thank you. I have to know that from our cup. And represent a common. Same topic. I just was curious if, if, you know, because we're getting into the area that we're not very good at, which is making lists of participants. And Jay, you may have been involved with watching the Senate for a while, but what were you and what did you do with the Senate? And if you were a part of the committee, would you be able to take a look at the testimony? And were they fairly deliberate in the way they set this up to sort of keep the legislature out of prescribing exactly who would be on this committee or who would do the nominating? I don't know if you, if you were. Witnessing that. The Senate is a truly deliberative body. I don't know the, the, I don't actually know what the thought process was there. might have might have seen that I'm not sure but but they did do it in an unusual way usually what we would have you know the superintendents you know or designee and they would be appointing their own they'd be recommending their own yeah it was it seemed so unusual that I was curious if there was a very deliberate move that's usually our work we're more detailed tend to be more detailed anybody else thank you very much I have made note of that if you see anything else in here that you think needs to be tweaked that would be great we intend to do that on Tuesday if not Friday we might might do it Friday but at least by Tuesday to start tweaking this bill not tweaking marking up this bill well thank you very much for giving the opportunity and if you have any further questions or would like me to come back at any time please hesitate to ask thank you thank you so much for your contribution greatly appreciated thank you well thank you for your work thank you we have our state auditor with us Mr. Doug Hoffer welcome to the education committee I think this is our first time in a committee together thank you for inviting me and I might say not only this is the first time but in your honor I'm wearing a tie probably the second time in the last year thank you for that opportunity thank you I know you wear them and thank you I I want to keep up I don't know whether you've had a chance to read the reports probably not but I can summarize them very quickly and we can have a discussion if you like that would be great okay and I think the report is posted isn't it did it get posted Jesse or not I think she did this afternoon here originally okay okay but yes please please please fill us in well there were two uh well three or four objectives initially the first one was done much before the others so we issued it as a separate report there was no meaning to that other than timely we just wanted to get it out the first one looked at the broad question of the extent to which statute and rule apply to public schools versus approved independent schools it took me a while to get that lingo I keep saying private but I know I care for that but you know what I mean yes in the end we learned as I'm sure you know this is your world your whole committee that there are many more requirements in statute and rule that apply to the public schools as opposed to the approved independent but that varies by category there's some overlap in some ways and in others there's a big difference and we put together uh some tables in the first report which show them I love to say they're side by each uh so you really get a sense of which is covered by which rules and statute it's very helpful in fact the secretary was grateful for it because they had never done anything quite like that also the secretary as you know is required by statute to supervise and direct the execution of the laws with regard to public schools but there's nothing comparable for the approved independent schools the primary oversight is from the board itself after recommendations from the agency about approval once that's done there is effectively no ongoing oversight except until the next time when that approval is removed the notable differences I think are not surprising the public schools have very public processes both for budget purposes and meetings and access to information that's and that's not typically the case for the approved independent school there were some differences that you can read about in detail in the report if you're not already familiar with them for example one of them which I'll mention because we did a job on child protection registry about a year and a half ago which was new to me it was really kind of interesting we did learn at that time that there were some public schools that did not meet their obligation under the statute to ensure that people under consideration for hiring whether they were teachers of staff or so forth were not on the registry the agency took that seriously and I believe the school school as well but we didn't at that time look at whether the approved independent schools do the same as it turns out there's reason I think they could improve their performance there the second report was more quantitative and we were interested in the extent to which there was a trend and if so what does it tell us about both the number of students either in or moving into approved independent schools or the out-of-state school versus what's happening in the public sector and as I'm sure you know in the last 10 years there's been a bit of a decline in the public schools we are all familiar with the demographics but at the same time public school enrollment this is just K through 12 declined by 12 percent approved independent school enrollments went up by 8 percent and I have no idea whether they're awake we didn't look into that level of there's some interesting graphs in the report that will help bring that home the other is the second of the three objectives in the second report related to tuition and the rate and how that's determined and what's paid and as you know well and there's new to me it's kind of interesting most of the approved independent schools charge the average rate that the public schools do and the differences are in not exclusively but largely the four mega I would call them legacy but the biggest and oldest secondary schools have stayed from now and so forth and the differences in some cases are can be quite dramatic on the other hand there are some differences related to the services provided by those secondary schools in terms of technical training and so forth that's all in statute and we didn't find any problems with that one minor exception in the end it does appear that the difference in those rates across the board it was about 3.6 million dollars in 2019 between had they paid only at the average tuition rate and the rate that they actually paid and of course all those who approved by voters there's nothing unusual it's all a lot of statute everything's fine but 3.6 doesn't sound like much in the context of 1.6 billion or whatever the total is these days I'm sorry just to clarify that you said in 2018 they paid 3.6 million total above the average that was the total total expense okay and most of that was secondary and not elementary and what was this attributed to the Ed fund or not to the Ed fund do you know it does go to the Ed fund yeah okay also we learned that the total paid to approved independent schools and out of state school was just under a hundred million dollars this is a fair bit of money you guys know better than I where this tuition thing started and where it's going but it's really an interesting story I first time I'd ever had any exposure to only one other yeah the question about the board's role the board was not technically an oddity in this process although Linda who I think is probably somewhere on this meeting they communicate with them on occasion we also looked at the their methodology the extent to which they met their obligations in advising the board and the board's role in approving these independent schools and for the most part it was fine there were some instances where there were flaws we've informed them about it changes have already in some cases been made and will be made going forward the one that jumped out at us was kind of interesting and I and I think was an artifact of some long ago decisions by in-house counsel and others that to the extent to which any ASC provides information to the agency about an approved independent school that should be of interest to the board you probably would agree that should be if it suggests that there's a problem at a school and that's the kind of information the board presumably would want to know about when they were in the process of reconsidering renewal or approval in the first instance but we found in one in two instances but one in particular where any ASC initially indicated that there was a concern and that was filed at the agency but not shared with the board subsequently that school was identified as being under a warning but there was some concern I think it was financial in nature and the agency did not share that information with the board which I thought was curious at that and their response we spoke to their attorney and this is prior to her tenure especially talking about whether it happened or policy practice that happened initially long ago they felt that the information provided by any ASC was confidential or there were led to believe that it was confidential and they weren't sure or felt uncomfortable sharing confidence information with the board and I just thought you know remember in the the movie I make many references all too often but it struck me as odd that the board should not be made aware of something so fundamental about the condition of an approved independent school and after posing the question to them after what's so-called exit meeting with them when we share the draft of the report the attorney went back spoke with the secretary and others in the office and they have agreed that in the future they will in fact share that information with the board and presumably if someone anywhere whether it's the school or any ASC believes that it's confidential then a determination can be made that if it's shared with the board the board itself can't share with the public but can make use of that information in the course of his determination and I'm grateful that they responded so promptly and in my view that's been why other than that I think the agency as you can see you can get a chance to look at their management response to our report we're very pleased with the work we did it kind of was useful and I think so too I'm glad you guys have to work with this stuff and not us are there any questions it's interesting we just had an independent school and and today represent of common Doug you just mentioned that the agency has a response to the report is that where can we take a look at that forgive me that is always appended to the report it is in the report itself oh it is okay very short then I just outed outed myself is not having read the report fully you're not alone on here thank you we we do have thousands of pages of reports but it is always helpful when one gets sort of brought into our focus that's why we give you a two page highlight yes two page highlights we're really good at that second of summaries and conclusions okay thank you representative Austin it was with us Linda do you have anything to add before they get some more questions I'm sorry I missed that I interrupted myself what the Lambert who was the audit manager for this job and oh thank you yes I just want to make sure she knows that if I miss something or she likes to add something to please do please to speak up uh no I don't have anything to add thank you though okay thank you um representative Austin just to clarify who does have oversight over the health and safety of children in independent and private schools the schools themselves but the state has no role I don't have that enormous side-by-side the table in front of you Linda correct me if I'm wrong but I believe in the case of health and safety that is specific to the schools am I right Linda you're muted I'm sorry yes I had to debut um I am looking that up right now I believe so safety and security requirements so general yes it is uh up to the school but um mostly it's the same requirements on the independent school as it is on the public schools yeah representative Austin I can tell you I was having never looked at this area in detail before I was a little surprised at the extent to which local control is still primarily what's going on and the agency in response to many of our questions said hey that's not our job it's a little discerning for me we're local control however they are they are approved on a regular basis by it's either me ask or Nietzsche I think they've changed their names um right um me ask is the accreditation organization and they approve or well they relook at a school every 10 years um and then schools also are required to submit periodic reports uh to me ask addressing certain issues within that tenure period vaccines for example the the rules that we passed the law we passed a few years ago independent schools were required to follow those as well um I saw right James I was just going to chime in about the accreditation process okay thank you thank you very much I know that the um independent school rule is open right now I believe um the the uh act the act 173 advisory group is taking a look at that and making some recommendations to the state board of education I think it's the 2200s or something I'm not sure um so that rule is open at the moment by the way to be clear we did not look in detail that issues related to special ed because we know that the statute requires major changes in a couple of years so yeah I'm sort of left that aside yeah I don't blame you thank you very much you're welcome and I think that is it if I don't see any more questions and that will bring us to the end of our testimony today I am going to leave shortly um to go down and meet with the senate uh just wanted to speak with the committee and thank you again so much um Mr. Hoffer uh Ms. Lambert we appreciate you filling us in on this we have to have our we have to have our radar up radar up on certain things and this is one that we should be aware of thank you thank you um so just looking at the week coming up um we are looking at tomorrow I will be out tomorrow um you'll be in the good hands of Representative Coopley and Conlon and um so tomorrow we'll be looking picking up our um our miscellaneous ed bill from the senate 115 tomorrow looking at the wellness uh issues the section of that bill uh and then after floor looking at the e-finance that we're planning to drop in at this point um Jim Dammeray has draft has a new draft of the miscellaneous ed bill that's addressing some of the things that we've talked about um adding something work some working language for us on e-finance adding some working language on act one um there's something else wasn't there oh there's also uh put in a piece related to um the state board of education and that's something that has come up um when the state board of education when the agency of education moved from being a department of education under the state board of education to an agency under the governor there were some roles that were not uh not updated as they should be and so there was work done last year in the senate um so there was some negotiated agreement between the um the state board chair and the secretary when it came to us it appeared that that there was not agreement around that so um Jim Dammeray has drafted some language to sort of look at that over the summer and come back so that will be on our list as well on that on that list um can you think of anything else representative Coopley or Conlon that works on that list that's it um in addition to the other issues that are on there so we're going to be marking that up also s16 we're going to be marking that up it's my hope that we can pass 116 out of committee uh next week so um I'm going to look to uh representative Brady for her guidance on on areas that there was a tremendous amount of information that I quite frankly have not figured out where it all fits in our bill um and I know that they've sent some information so um if you wouldn't mind actually representative Brady maybe reaching out to some of those people and saying give us some specifics give us specific language we're at a concrete level now we're we're not at the big concepts we're at the concrete language I think would be helpful and uh the same thing with the other aspects I think um representative Brown was working on on libraries I think maybe there's a link or two that we might want to talk about the language is still in the bill as it came over and we'll we'll do a little walk-through on that and representative Brown will be looking to you for areas where you might have seen um an tweak or in the testimony that maybe we've made some recommendations um wellness we're going to have more testimony tomorrow I think tomorrow yes so um and wellness and um I think representative Austin you are going to be so so write down uh some some things that we might want to want to discuss that that that we would be addressing um and um the the act one is is a little tricky that's going to be I'm not sure what we're going to do there yet I don't have a picture of what we're going to do I'm certainly open to conversation about that we've just left in the language to add the people right now that's the only thing that's there at the moment um we'll there'll be room to discuss that okay um so I've got two questions for a minute and then I'm going to run out and you can continue to to talk um and please text me if I need to come back and straighten things out why would you have to do that Madam Chair um representative Austin yep um I was going to say I'm really conflicted by the refinance issue you know what instead of talking about that right now because I have to leave and if there are some issues would you uh work on that we're going to bring that up again on Tuesday um and maybe you could work with Representative Conlon who's going to be taking that part I'm sorry to to be abrupt that's all right and it's on the agenda for tomorrow it's on the agenda yes there we go so that'll be the time to be addressing that right here and is there anything else then so I'm going to be looking when we get to miscellaneous that folks um we'll sort of divide that one up on who's going to who's going to do what Coop I mean uh representive too if I'm looking for something you might want to do of course we have some ideas um but uh okay you can you can look over what's left in terms of what's left of those bills of those items in in s1 15 and then we're going to also be taking up the waiting study so that's why next week I'd really like to get one get 16 out of here I'd like to have uh 115 pretty well ready to go and then we're going to be basically on getting those to the floor and um waiting study and the waiting study we will work with that and then it will go to ways and means and probably appropriations so we're going to be now uh closing in pretty focused focused we might just vote these stuff out tomorrow yeah there's a good possibility that could happen good possibility excellent first we have not warned it but that's okay who follows the rules anyway I do know that here's one thing I did learn that happened one year um you can't what when the terrace not there you can't pull a bill off the wall and pass it that was done are you sure yeah it was a result of that that you can't we don't necessarily have to pass any bills but we can have discussion oh absolutely you can of course you can do that you just can't pull it off the wall and pass it well I would certainly have no intention of doing that that's there's a good story for that yeah okay so with that I'm gonna leave and and I I'm gonna uh I think we're we're pretty well done should we uh Jesse should we go offline I think we are yeah no we're not no we're not so we're yeah