 help with the foundation of knowledge and start like some groundwork for some of the things that we're going to be advocating for this session. So without further ado because we are going to have to have a hard stop at 5.15 on the keeping an eye on the time I'm going to turn it over to our first speaker and again because it will allow so if you have questions as people are presenting just feel free to raise your hand and link it as interactive as possible. So with that Commissioner Harrington. Hi everyone my name is Mike Harrington. I'm the commissioner for the Vermont Department of Labor. Good to see some familiar faces in here for those that I haven't met before. I look forward to connecting with you after today's session. Just by way of background the Department of Labor covers areas like unemployment insurance, workplace rights, workplace safety, workers compensation and then two areas today really around workforce which we'll be talking a lot about but more of the presentation that I have for us today is around workforce data. And so as we're talking about the fact that we need to make meaningful change in the area of how we approach Vermont's labor force and our workforce we need to understand the issue why we have dissatisfaction with where we are right now and the vision and where we want to go and there's no better way to do that than to better understand the current state of play. We're going to talk about the population and how that boils down into Vermont's workforce and also the challenge that we see. One of the things I'd ask you to do is just as we're as I'm going through these slides here in your mind I'd like for you to envision a bucket and in that bucket there's water being poured into the bucket but there's also holes in the bucket and the water is dripping out of the bucket. Now just hold that in your mind as we go through this. This information comes from a variety of different sources but it was mainly came out of our economic and labor market information division so when we talk about Vermont's labor force our total labor force is about $336,800. When we talk about how much of that labor force is actually participating in the labor force it's 61.7%. We'll talk more about what's known as the labor force participation rate that's 61.7. When we look at the number of open jobs in our labor force we have about 23,000 open jobs and when we look at our payroll which is actually filled jobs we have 302,100 that does not include self-employed and unemployed individuals so you may say okay why does our labor force have 336,000 people in it but our payroll only has 302,000 people in it and that's the discrepancy there. Vermont's unemployment rate is currently at 2.5% and the number of unemployed people in Vermont is at 8.4 thousand people and just so you know for we'll get into the numbers on a trend scale but both our unemployment rate and the number of unemployed people in Vermont is at a historic low. Correct so even if we and that's assuming every unemployed person in the state had the right skills and lived in the right location if we were able to put them back to work and we still would be not even halfway through the number of available jobs that we have open and we'll talk a little bit more about what that ratio looks like. So when we talk about Vermont's population some of this is based on new census information which that data is still being called through by the US Census Bureau so we don't have the final releases of all that information but we do know that Vermont's population increased to 647,064. Again our labor force is only a portion of that total number at 336,800 and then when we look at our labor force we actually look at what is that crime working age and that is defined by 25 to 54 year olds so of the 336,200 and 2800 are within that crime working age within our population there are it's 50.3 percent female it is 18.1 percent under the age of 18 20.6 percent are 65 and older and again 61.3 percent are between the age of 18 and 65. Here in Vermont 11 out of the 14 counties had population growth when we looked at the census however none of them saw labor force growth so again when we look at these numbers envisioning how many within our population are under the age of 18 and we'll be entering our workforce and then obviously those who are aging out the 65 and older and so again those create a number of concerning measures for us and I see there's a question back. Yeah I just wanted to make sure I knew the folks that are in the labor force. Sure. What age does it start at and what age does it stop at? Yeah so there's another slide on here when we talk about the labor force participation rate and what that trend has looked like so you age into the labor force at 18 but you never age out of the labor force so one of the things you'll see in that data is that our labor force participation rate has declined over the years we can surmise that much of that is related to people getting older in Vermont and we recognize that with Vermont's aging population that creates a challenge for our labor force participation rate. You can see the numbers up here better than I can see the numbers over there but when we look at Vermont's labor force this just looks back at 2005 to 2021 you can see that we saw that decrease in our labor force beginning in 2020 and in 2021. What I will point out is that the dip that you see between 2012 and 2017 the way our economists typically explains this to me is every 10 years when the census bureau does the census for each year after that they make an estimation or projection and so the further you get away from that point in time the margin of error grows so we are likely once they release the revised 2022 census information we're likely to see a revision there will that little blip down will actually probably balance out and that's what we're expecting but again you see the significant decrease and we'll talk about often we hear that question of where did everybody go and we know that a lot of that had to do with one retirement so either early retirements people who are at retirement age or people who are beyond retirement but had stayed in the workforce and then decided to use the pandemic as a time to exit the workforce. We also know that a number of individuals made decisions to leave the workforce maybe to care for a loved one or move from a dual income household to a single income household. When we look at our labor force peak we're talking about the number of the ratio of open jobs to unemployed persons and so if you imagine that that kind of one to one is the sweet spot so for every one person there's one job available you can see that we've hovered around the one mark for quite a while and you can see with the pandemic in March of 20 and then a significant increase heading into 21 and 22 and again with the current rate we're looking at about a three to one so for every one unemployed individual there are three available jobs. The concerning piece for us and we're not there yet and so we often hear about large layoffs that might occur across the state and at this point the saving grace and all of that is there's still a significant number of jobs available across our state but what we do the track is where those numbers intersect so again where do we get to where the number of unemployed individuals begins to outpace the number of available jobs and that's where we will see a concern. When we look at the rate of change from the last census you can see that we had peak labor force in a variety of different years by county but again like I said on the first slide all of those counties has seen a decrease in their labor force over the past 10 years. Feel free to raise your hand and ask any questions. This again talks to that labor force participation rate which we just discussed but really the piece I want to point out here just as a wet matter of course is that it looks like a steep decline which it is but just point out that we're talking about a shorter percentage because the graph only goes from 60 percent to 70 percent so again traditionally Vermont over the years has hovered above 70 for a number of years and then in 2010 again probably likely following the great recession we saw the labor force participation rate begin to decline and then we saw the steep decline coming out of the pandemic which again we often hear the word the great resignation and again that typically for us as equaled retirements or people who left the workforce due to some other reason specifically to care for maybe a child or an aging level. This is just a look at Vermont's trend and unemployment from 2007 to current day really I just want to point out I wanted you to see Vermont by itself so that then we could contrast it against other states in New England so you can see that in on on balance we are relatively similar across the entire New England region however I will point out that Vermont has been traditionally on the lower end and has fared better when it comes to our unemployment rate so our unemployment rate has traditionally been one of the lowest in New England. When we look at percent change and payroll jobs so again this is not the just to point out the graph so across the horizontal axis we're looking at years everything from December of 2007 to August of 2021 on the left hand side of the vertical axis we're looking at just the change in the payroll workforce so again if we start at zero which brings us back before the last recession what we saw was the decline in payroll jobs and then an increase in 20 passing the zero mark in 2013 and again you can see that Vermont did not suffer as significantly during the great recession however our rebound also was not as significant heading into the pandemic and then you see the the significant impact that the pandemic had on Vermont's payroll jobs. I also want to point out and well one thing here is that this is jobs filled so this doesn't include available jobs we're just talking about payroll jobs so again jobs that are currently filled where individuals are earning wages but this doesn't tell the whole story and what I really want to highlight is this next page and so a lot of what you'll hear us talk about here today is the fact that we've got essentially the story of two Vermont's right our metropolitan area or capital region and the rest of Vermont and so when we look at this slide we've broken it out by Vermont the Burlington metropolitan area and then the rest of Vermont excluding Burlington again so the green line is Vermont which is the free this slide but then when we look at these two trends all of the growth that we saw from the last recession predominantly occurred in the Burlington metropolitan area and then but we saw an even significant more significant decline in all of the areas outside of the Burlington metropolitan area when we talk about job loss from the pandemic. I want to just pause here because I'm about to wrap up but in the beginning I had asked you to think about that pocket with the water pouring into it and the water dripping out of the holes and so when we talk about what are the challenges that face Vermont right now with regards to our workforce and what are the initiatives and projects and actions we're looking to take moving forward to reverse that workforce trend I often equate it to that leaky bucket so if the bucket is Vermont's economy and the water being poured into the bucket are new workers right so they're either workers that live here and are graduating either from high school or college or maybe from a training program but also individuals we are recruiting to Vermont as well when we think about how do we fill that bucket we can't just continue to put new people into the bucket right we also have to talk about how do we plug that bucket and I often consider those holes the barriers to employment so what are the things that either prevent people from entering Vermont's workforce or what are those things that are causing workers to leave Vermont's workforce and so you'll hear a lot of the initiatives going forward not just on how do we train and upskill Vermonters to fit the needs of our employers but what are the actions we're taking to encourage people to stay in Vermont so whether it's challenges around housing or childcare or affordability those are all areas where I would consider them holes in our bucket that that need to be filled so again it has to be a dual approach not only pouring water in but how do we how do we patch the holes in order to fill the bucket so with that I will wrap up by saying every two years we put out this brochure it's a partnership with the McClure Foundation Vermont's most promising jobs we have a box of them over there so we'll make sure to hand those out or grab one before you leave and then going forward if you have questions about labor market information data within your maybe your specific region or area of interest Matthew Barowitz is our chief economist and division director within the economic and labor market information division and Cameron Wood sitting over there is our policy and legislative director so if you have questions and want data around your region or area you can go through Cameron and he'll make sure to connect you with Matt so I mean I'm just reading the paper that they and then there's like a chip maker for satellites at Lula that's going to be lots and I'm just wondering I'm concerned that they won't be able to find them because there's some and I maybe about this in terms of coordinating with UDF and Vermont University and you know just kind of having like a pipeline you know from these colleges to these businesses that are very excited and we'll be hiring yeah and I'll two of the presenters here secretary french and director byanda willow who is the head of our state workforce board are intimately engaged with how do we coordinate and how do we align our resources and our efforts so that there is a pipeline and it's not disjointed we're not working across purposes I I do think the the challenge we face is one at the national level and so we are constantly having that conversation of how does Vermont differentiate itself because every other state would share something similar to this if they were giving a presentation in terms of workforce and so when we talk about that identifying our strengths and and how to really highlight and build off of those strengths is is key you know yes ma'am so what I should have pointed out on that first slide with all the numbers most of those numbers are statistical numbers based on a survey sample conducted by the u.s. census bureau that goes through the bureau of labor statistics at the federal level and then our team uses that data so again it's it's a sample size it's a statistical number not necessarily we know each and every one of those 23 000 jobs and where they're located there is some sub data that comes in terms of where those jobs are located but not necessarily by employer what we do know is the state out of the department of labor operates a job board you know similar to like monster.com or indeed and so our state job board which is a requirement under the federal government but what we saw is a significant uptick for a variety of different reasons but during the pandemic we usually had anywhere from 18 to 20 000 jobs posted on there I think we're we've actually seen a decrease which is not surprising where we are now being around anywhere from 11 to 13 000 job posting so from that data we are able to identify not just the sector they're in but where they located and and what are the employers looking for talent but there are a number that are often engaged with our agency and commerce and community development with regards to how do they how do they grow their business here in Vermont and so we often work closely with ACCD on how do we link up from the employer side and the talent side to meet the needs of the employer. And then second, your question fits the mail on the head um when we see the low employment rate that something a lot of people celebrating it is a good thing but the flip side of that is if you're an employer you're looking at growing your business in Vermont where there's no bench right like there's a very low employment rate so you're am I going to find the employees to fill these potential decisions that I'm creating and one of the things we'll talk about more too in terms of like how do we solve this issue right we have really specific workforce programs um but there's also things we should recognize around child care, housing, affordability right other quality of life issues that will make a lot of things that families want to be and that families want to stay. I'll give you those names too as you go along around the pipeline question that you raised um between Torrey's Secretary French here in the moment um so this is a helpful uh kind of table setting to see the context in which we are working in right now and some of the work that we need to do to sustain ourselves and to now mention that over to Secretary French to talk about um three administrations uh pushing for a fail to career curriculum in terms of how do we try to expand our leader force um starting with our earliest assets you know our kids and then Torrey will continue the conversation in terms of higher education and freeing. All right this way French. Good afternoon um Dan French Secretary of Education um I'm joined today uh Deputy Secretary Heather Boucher is there um also Ted Fisher we might recognize and say this is our communications website of Ferris directors um the representative Austin you're prompt and Kendall's comments whoops just hit something there now it's over with that I've been a long time since I've been in the classroom with a pointer and then you're right one definitely I broke it already that's great I'm also known as being a technologist so thank you the um this point of in the title here the unifying trade of the career um you know I'm sure you're acquainted with Governor Scott's vision in that regard it's not an uncommon vision certainly I think today you know looking at the labor market context that we're operating in Vermont education often sits at the intersection of a lot of policy it's not just and you think traditionally about education I think you know everyone's either been to school or driven by school um we increasingly across the world acknowledge that education is critical not only for its sort of traditional role of helping individuals reach their maximum potential but also in the social and economic development of the state or country uh so it's it's a really critical piece of policy so unlike my colleague's presentation on statistics I'm mostly going to talk about policy themes so when we think about themes in education you know your policy goals as Kendall Kendall mentioned they break out I think in three easy to understand buckets this idea that we want to get every child off to a good start so they can be successful in school the idea of creating greater flexibility and options in the middle of the process and exploring pathways and then ultimately helping individuals transition to the workforce and be happy and productive citizens so we think about getting kids off to a good start this is where again the education I should say the agency of education probably 90 percent of our function is to supervise and regulate the k-12 system but we we touch on elements of policy on either end of that process so getting kids off to a good start this is where the priority on child care and pre-k emerges as you know we've made significant investments in child care continues to remain a priority how child care and pre-k come together is the topic of some deliberation over the years and I think provides a national leader in that regard but it's it's really critical that we focus on the foundation of the education system if we don't make gains in that important sort of milestone if you will the rest is really challenging becomes more challenging so it's a critical piece number two this idea of flexibility you know probably more critical than ever I think this also I were to describe education last 50 years or so we could see this acknowledgement of education being important for social and economic development but I think this idea that society and the dynamic nature of our economies has become more complex we have statistics about people changing jobs more often than I know about you but you know I I certainly explored several different career paths in my life but the idea of giving students options and what does that mean in a rural state like Vermont where some students are able to explore options more so than others but the idea is that you know if you're making a decision on what you want to do with your life you have to be open to exploring other options later on so the idea of allowing people to move flexibly have been among in between options particularly when we start talking about issues of career technical education higher education so forth we need to be open to the idea that adult education is a critical critical part of our strategy and then certainly lastly supporting the transition to the workforce and ensuring that we have a successful democracy which really needs people being happy and productive so these sort of broad brush policy goals I also want to talk a bit about structures because as much as this sounds like a unifying narrative for policy I just want to acknowledge that we we try to approach this through a variety of structures and this is where it gets really challenging and I think one of the more complex policy spaces in the state house is education firstly we have different agencies regulating different parts of the system I call it you know child care pre-k is an example where my partner agency and agency human services plays a pivotal role we have similar kinds of relationships with the department of labor and other agencies on ct and higher education so just an acknowledgement that education policy is enacted across multiple state agencies and departments secondly the k-12 system itself if we just contemplate a k-12 is a standalone entity in vermont that is structured in a very complex way in vermont there's certainly the state local partnership but the local partnership itself is articulated in lots of different ways we have different configurations of our government structure I'm sure you're familiar with act 46 but there's a lot of different configurations when we look at school districts in terms of like ecosystems if I were to describe to you what north country supervisory union does in newport and compare that to what addison central supervisory union district does in middlebury they look kind of similar but how they do things actually is quite different on a daily basis thirdly you know the issue of ct adult ed higher ed this needs tighter integration they're not necessarily set up to talk together that very very well so just keep harping on representative austin's point this is an area where we need to get much more intentional I think what I've noticed in the last few years is there's growing acknowledgement that the ct in particular is a critical asset from a policy perspective certainly this is a priority of the governors but ct there's federal funding behind it we can do a lot to timble student aspirations with much much younger grades we can certainly do more to promote the value of ct if you haven't been to a ct center I would encourage you to go out and visit one it's really quite amazing when you see these facilities of action but again to to think about ct in the context of adult education and higher education I think it's a critical piece it's not either or it's really about people having the ability to move in among these options not just in k-12 but through their adulthood and lastly I love the opportunity to speak to legislators about this it's just an observation we actually I think do a fairly good job of collaborating inside a state government around some of these complex areas of policy but when we go into the statehouse there's a lot of siloization of these policy concepts so for example pre-k child care different committees involved so it's hard and this will be a challenge for us going forward is we can envision policy to be enacted in the field if you will out in our communities that's considered on an integrated basis but we really need to think about how we design that policy inside our policy making process inside the state house to make sure that we're able to focus on outcomes that we want to see that we're measuring for those outcomes and that we're holding the system accountable for those outcomes so anyway it's important as we talk about this idea of unification the policy area to acknowledge that there there's structural aspects to this that make it more challenging perhaps than some of them feel free to ask me questions so I think you know that being said that's sort of the context I want to acknowledge that we've really worked well together during the pandemic with the general assembly and the pandemic stands out to me as a great example of you know how we can work together not only across these structures but through some very complex regulatory situations to accomplish what we need to do for kids right now there's an unprecedented number of dollars and I'll talk more specifically flowing through the education system we basically have a two-year period to make the best use of that money that we can I'll talk more specifically about that in a minute because that's that's on the forefront of every school district in the state right now not just the money but the work they need to do to meet the kids the needs of kids as a result of the pandemic secondly you know when we were contemplating how to put together a plan to spend this federal money we work very closely with the general assembly to do that I'm going to talk about some of the highlights of that planning here today but you should know there is a education recovery plan essentially a state plan it's on our website a lot of the elements of that plan were enacted through the work of the general assembly so we have a very coherent integrated approach to doing this education recovery work it was exceedingly hard to put this together but I think it's going to serve us well the next couple years and we we also had some work the general assembly charged us with to strengthen the regulatory approach in k-12 education actually when I was a superintendent I never would get excited about the idea of new regulation but I think this was long what we do and I'm excited to say that we're going to be strengthening um in particular our quality assurance regulations and education that should help I don't want to use the word drive improvement but we need to we need to think about strengthening the structure of our k-12 system and that really gets to the ideas of you know what is local control and just the state responsibility and we have the opportunity I think as a state more so than other states to really lead into that partnership of local control versus state responsibility and make it a very successful education system if not the best in the country so in terms of the recovery work in particular and some of this opportunity approximately $442 million has been flowing through the education system the k-12 education system to address student needs during the pandemic the bulk of that about 283 million is really available for this idea of recovery when we were doing our recovery plan and we basically determined to focus on three issues and these these three priorities are really the guiding guideposts of the world a lot of investment that's going on inside the education system we have an elaborate visualization of the data if you're wondering what your district is spending on you can go in there and you can you can see across the state how people are leveraging these dollars I will say this this money the 442 million 90 percent of that is controlled by local school districts so when we talk about what the state's doing with money it's important to acknowledge that we have the 10 percent of the money but the three buckets particularly in year one of the pandemic you you've certainly remember we literally had to shut down the k-12 system overnight and go fully remote and after that first year the priority was re-engagement how to how to get reestablished the connections with kids and their communities so we made a significant investment in that year one in summer and after school programs very successful collaboration public private partnership which is necessary to enact these types of programs across the state but it was the campaign was called summer matters you might remember that it was really I think the important first step in heading into recovery now that our schools are back open this year nothing would is going more or less normal as much as it can be normal in this context really the focus of the recovery shifts to two other areas one are academics and the other are social emotional needs and I list some of the discrete investments that are being made in those areas but I thought I'd also just sort of highlight some of the data behind this so one of the things we did very early on as we contemplated making these unprecedented investments in our education system we wanted to establish some metrics right up front to measure how are we doing you know like what's the need out there so in terms of sort of a baseline indicators and starting with the academics we knew the money goes away in two years so we have to make an impact in two years the decision we had to make right up front was do we have the time to create new measures and it takes a lot of time to do anything in education and we decided right off that we didn't have the time to create new measures so we we fell back on the measures that we already have this means the state assessments that we do on an annual basis in schools you might be familiar with the term SPAC so every every school administers test at the end of the school year we decide to use those as a measure as we get into the recovery work and also we have a national assessment it's really the only assessment given across the country that every state participates in it's called NAEP the national assessment of education progress so we're looking at these data and what's coming up behind me here in a second no it's behind me there it is it's sort of how we call these the initial results on the end of the school year last year now it's important to acknowledge that testing has been imperfect the conditions for testing have been imperfect the last couple of years and indeed in one year of the pandemic the federal government canceled the testing altogether due to the pandemic last year participation was different than it is in a pre-pandemic situation but these results more or less conform to where Vermont has been performing historically you know these when you see things like the 40 percent proficient rates when you look at these test scores around the country you'll see a lot of states sporing in that area we're not satisfied with this performance level but essentially this is our baseline data as we begin this intensive period of work in the next two years we're hoping to to move the bar if you will on student academic performance sure sure yes uh who sets the percentage on this if it seems that it might be consumed to be an unrealistic right yeah when i see this like i don't know yeah i think i think the way to look at it in the context of this conversation is not is 40 percent a fair measure or not it's just to say regardless this is our baseline as we begin this intensive two-year period of investment uh but to your question uh the the cutoffs you know we work with large testing companies the vendors who build these assessments they certainly have psychometricians who you know look at those things but as a state we have the opportunity to determine the cutoff scores of where these things are but they are i would say somewhat arbitrary it's a point of concern however when we look at uh you know this is why the issue of the native data is important this is the national assessment at least cutoffs to determine that the national level so we look for this not necessarily as a correlation but just to say you know to your point can we look at the s-back data and be concerned with you know true sense of concern that we look at the native data and we see similar patterns i think it's also important to acknowledge that if we were to spend more time with you and unpack these results you would see discrepancies based on the type of kids you know there's not all kids are achieving a 40 percent this is sort of like an average if you like for example when i was superintendent i remember eighth grade uh students every single girl was proficient in in eighth grade in writing but when we started to unpack the scores we found it was the male students that were not doing as well special ed students students in poverty those are the ones that were struggling and what we see in the national data the native is is really the story here not only to perform the problem but when we started to unpack the level is this those students that are more at risk are at more risk now because of the pandemic than they ever and that's that's one of the reasons when we start talking about investment strategies we have to be really interested in those students that are at risk more so than before yeah there are two different ways sure percentile ranks yeah this would be a long briefing on this and but i would say typically we would use this kind of presentation for something like percentile ranks and then proficiency would be the other measure yeah but uh if you're interested in this topic of understanding the assessment conversation we could set up a dedicated briefing to you on that again for today's purposes i know this is a lot of information but as we were contemplating um you know we're in this unprecedented moment we don't we don't have any experience of how to deal with a global pandemic and shutting down our school system we had to make some decisions around what are the priorities how do we measure them so we fell back on on some of the measures that we already had and similarly we had to create some measures for the social emotional needs of students so this is an area where we're really just developing this this is we work with our partners at AHS to kind of understand what do we already have for data because we hear a lot from schools about anxiety levels of students behaviors a lot of concern about the impact of the pandemic from a social emotional perspective so this is just a list of some of the metrics that were beginning to trap again these are examples of metrics that we already had in our portfolio of metrics but just to let you know as we're we're thinking about um are these investments going to be successful or not we're really looking at a series of measures um this is really we're looking at a series of measures that allow us to focus on academics and social emotional needs those are the two big domains of activity so all that being said the other aspect of the recovery I think when we think about this money there's two things we think about inside the administration one is we need to address the needs of kids in our schools as a result of the pandemic so there's there's immediate needs that we need to to address the second point is we need to as much as possible because these are one time funds focus on strategic things that can help improve the education system after the funds are gone so it's a mixture of both things one we want to deal with the immediate needs of kids which we're thinking of in terms of academics and social emotional needs but we're also trying to make strategic investments that will improve the education system after the federal money is gone so what's left of the landscape after the federal recovery period it's over so first one again ct important tool or lever we can pull on the governor's been targeting the gear money which is another source of money we've had recovery to really put significant emphasis on ct we invite you to share that priority with us this is meant we'll start to see more on this we're doing a major ct marketing campaign to really get the word out about ct you know ct is for all kids it's not for some kids and not others it's really for everyone we're investing in innovative programs you know someone mentioned beta technology we're putting money into electric vehicle innovative programs and housing redevelopment and we're also a big big thing i was going to call out here is focusing on the ct funding system as a priority so we have a jfo's commission to study of ct funding we the theme here is we want to eliminate barriers that might prevent kids from accessing the system we think the ct funding system might create some disincentive so jfo that report will come back at some point during the legislative session we hope to turn that into some sort of legislative action relative to improving the structure of the ct funding system we're doing a major analysis of education workforce this is being done by an outfit out of colorado they're the same folks that are working on the ct funding analysis but we'll have that report coming back sometime mid mid session that will tell us you know what is the condition of our education workforce the pandemic hasn't been the best recruitment tool in education and it does as i travel around the state this fall it varies considerably from area to area so not every district in the state is has a lot of vacancies but everyone has very shallow recruitment tools right now for sure so we want to understand that and quantify it and try to surface some policy recommendations to help improve recruitment and retention of our teachers making a significant investment educator wellness because those the people in the classroom that are doing work with our kids need to be in a good place themselves to do that work made significant investments in after school you know again anticipating wrapping services around kids whether it be social or academic needs after school can be a huge opportunity for us to make some progress so we've been focused on making those investments but ensuring that that can happen in all areas of the state so a lot of the theme of our policy is to examine each ecosystem if you will the state ensure whatever we do through a public-private partnership or through our investments that we're not leaving people behind we still need to double down in remote learning capacity it's not something we utilize in the state sort of sporadically prior to the pandemic but as a rural state if we're going to offer a true 21st century expensive learning curriculum for kids all kids in the state we need to have robust virtual learning capacity so we've been making investments in our Vermont virtual learning cooperative we think we can do a lot more in the space our school facilities improvement we've been leveraging recovery dollars to make some progress on a lot of the deferred maintenance issues I know you're familiar with the PCB issue I've been thinking about the nexus of PCBs and and some of this work is indoor air quality so our districts have really been focusing on making improvements in indoor air quality issues but we have a lot of work to do with facilities and districts have been leveraging recovery dollars to get a handle on that work and as I mentioned previously I think a fairly exciting opportunity to really move the needle on not only those test results but just the overall flow of the education system is new district quality standards and basically just really strengthen the regulatory framework that will provide greater public assurance on both the quality and equity of our education system policy priorities so I'll sort of wrap on this slide be open to some more questions policy priorities going into legislative session and education as I mentioned the ct funding system we're anxiously awaiting that report to come back we've been doing some work with national partners on computer science and we think this is an area we could make some improvements as a state to put a priority on computer science as a requirement for students but also to engage some of our businesses in the state to help us plan how to improve computer science education basically computer science nationally is emerging as a discrete academic discipline like math or science computer science is essentially starting to stand alone on its own merits as a discrete academic endeavor we want to strengthen adult education we have again here a mixed delivery model we think we can make some progress here it has to be a part of this sort of integrated coherent model between cte and higher education so there's some work there we I think would be an important priority school safety is emerging it's part of a larger initiative on violence prevention but we'll be bringing forward some recommendations on basically to shift what have been recommendations on school safety to make them more requirements we're at that point I think as a state you know I look back on my career as a principal and a superintendent maybe 15 years ago we started to think about physical security buildings and then that changed into planning all hazards planning and then more recently we talked about behavior threat assessment all three of those things physical security planning and behavior threat assessment essentially have just been recommendations for schools we've had a lot if not most schools participate in those activities but we think it's imperative now that we move forward and start requiring these basically safety is non-negotiable we want to continue to make progress on anti-hate curriculum and racial equity policy we introduce some ideas on this last session you might be familiar with our mascot policy initiative again not imposing from the state what needs to happen but the state has an interest in anti-discrimination and promoting equal and high quality education for all students we don't want to necessarily alleviate local districts of their responsibility in that regard but as our mascot policy example we can provide some guard routes for locals so they can at least have a framework to have those conversations with the community and then lastly simplification of home study I almost qualify this as sort of a technical correction to a certain extent we we struggle inside the agency to have capacity to manage all the different policy initiatives you put forward so we're always looking out for areas we can simplify home study sort of stood out right now our home study approach is very labor intensive we have a lot of labor intensive work that we have to do inside the agency to manage it and then when we started to look around the country in particularly in other new england states and northern england states we found out our policies incredibly more complex than what other states do so we think there's an opportunity to win win simplify it for the parents and for the communities but also create more capacity inside the agency by creating a policy framework that's easy to administer more easy to use so I think that's all I have turn over to Tori in a second on workforce um any questions yeah yes yeah we have not I think we've had a really you know as unfortunate or fortunate results of the pandemic we've collaborated a lot more with pretty much every department and agency including the national guard you know they were key players in our ability to deliver test kits and vaccines so those connections are really strong in the state I would point to it again as an example as a small thing that we can get some stuff down here which is really exciting but that labor analysis that I pointed to we were hiring that outside firm to quantify what is our education workforce issues that's like step one step two is to have them look at our regulations if we're not doing enough regular if we have barriers to people entering the teacher workforce we want to identify those the third thing we're having them do is to do an environmental scan across the country to identify precisely programs like that so if there are programs out there that other states are doing we want to identify those and then this through this report we will then surface some recommendations for you to consider as possible ways we can improve both our recruitment and retention of our education workforce it's going to be really important as you know you know this is an integrated policy space with social services these areas you know to Commissioner Harrington's data uh people aren't necessarily being enticed to social service professions right now for pay for a number of reasons we're going to have to figure that out and in education in particular you know we what's emerging for example as a national model is this idea of grow your own we know students particularly in rural states are interested in living and working in their communities because they like the quality of life that they grew up in we need to create a more clear pathway for them to to go into education jobs in their community you know so reaching out to people that might want to be para educators helping them become teachers helping them become principals so there's some good stuff we can do in that space so hopefully we'll get some some of those ideas surfaced with the workforce study there's a question over here yes going back to page 11 your expansion of remote learning capacity right what age and grades are you talking about there yeah really k through 12 um we we started particularly with the pandemic in um you know I think traditionally remote learning has been dedicated to high schools because remote learning was organized around courses and this idea of a course is really a high school thing if you think about your elementary school experience you had a class right you had a single teacher probably who taught you math reading and so forth um when the history on remote learning really started with this idea of a course so we can offer courses on one uh but more recently particularly as we got into year two of the pandemic we started to make more investment in the elementary space because you know when we start thinking about kids and grades k through three for example though remote learning isn't probably that appropriate for kindergartners but we start thinking about that grade span of k through three a lot of the learning they do is important skill development so math reading skills and there's a lot we can do with remote learning that isn't course related but it's good tutorial backup so there's a lot of gaming going on inside of virtual learning where kids can practice for example fractions on their own we can use it inside the classroom so there's increasingly more application for virtual learning at the k 12 or through k through eight as well as high school but I would just say as a height as a state as a rural state we're a bit behind in the use of technology and virtual learning in k12 education so it's something I think we were really committed to making more progress in and I think another area to think about back to cte policy career technical education we have a lot of kids that I think of in my neck of the woods other than Manchester but Rutland I know we have some folks here from Rutland the Stafford technical center has 11 different receiving high schools and a better part of what they what that means is those kids for half a day are in their home high school then they commute to Stafford and represent McCoy's here she knows you know you're out in poltny that's that's a hall and Stafford then has to coordinate the academics with all those different semi-high schools and their academic programs are totally different to a certain extent so the idea of using virtual learning in the ct centers for students to to maintain academic progress you know so they could take their core academics so they don't have to spend all the time on the road going back and forth I think has a lot of merit for us as well so bottom line is we need we need to keep making those investments in remote learning so it becomes more available to everyone and everyone starts to understand the application of it it wasn't just a pandemic thing we jumped into it in the pandemic because we had to but there's more we can be doing as a state in remote learning absolutely thank you okay no yeah that's a good I mean people think about it now it's a trigger word from the pandemic right but I think some of you know I taught when I was principal in Canaan for 15 years so Canaan is pretty far away you know we put the R in remote learning we used to say we did everything through remote learning even drivers education not the drivers part okay but we literally yeah not the driving part but we did everything through remote learning up there and we offered conversational Chinese but you know world places around the world really understand the importance of bringing a 21st century curriculum so it isn't about the pandemic it's about really just getting taking advantage of this significant opportunity non-precedent funding to catch up and make some progress and think about more flexibility and more options for kids Tori and I are going to try to wrap this up and bring it home and again if folks have other questions based on anything you've heard tonight I'm in the state house every day I think most of you there know where to find me out mostly Tori and Secretary Gretchen, Commissioner Maryton are too so again if you think of more questions again just reach out so Tori why are you kind of bringing us home in terms of when we talk about the center here in terms of training workforce development right so everything that we talked about today I think we need to think about it on a continuum and I'll try to be brief because I know I don't have much time but the ideas of connecting education to our workforce crisis makes a lot of sense because building an education system that's incredibly strong cradle to career is probably our best long-term strategy at creating a sustainable feed into the into the labor force as well as attracting new families here but that takes time clearly the kid walking up on the bus is not going to be going to work next week so we have to think about some of the data that Commissioner Harrington shared which kind of shows that there's some need for immediate corrective action so just you know summarizing you know all of our counties in Vermont have seen labor force decline we have significantly more jobs open than we have people to fill them so you know and wages are increasing substantially as you all know that you know we all hear about the bagel shop in Burlington paying $25 an hour right so our approach has to be tailored both to improving our existing workforce system but also getting new folks engaged in the workforce system so just as a high level our vision is investing in our current workforce retaining more of our high school and college graduates recruiting more working families into the workforce and then continuous monitoring and improvement to ensure that the system and the money is being spent efficiently and effectively so I'll go through this quickly just in the interest of time but I think all of you know that workforce development touches almost every single committee probably in the legislature and every single agency in the state of Vermont everything could be considered workforce here what we're just focused on are those who are really involved in kind of the nuts and bolts of the actual service delivery but I think it's important to touch on what Secretary French said about how things are siloed it's often harder to get workforce packages through because some of it might be going through healthcare some of it might be going through commerce some of it might be going through appropriations so it's all completely you know separate through the legislative process and we need to make sure that we're focused on it from a 50 000 foot view so we've got our government agencies so if you think Department of Labor that's like meat and potatoes of service delivery that's internships work-based learning actually connecting folks to jobs agency of education our education and training higher ability Vermont which does work with folks who are disabled and then ACCD which does a lot of our marketing and connecting with businesses and Vermont training program education and training again you probably know who all these folks are I don't need to explain that to you and then private and local partners I just want to preface by saying there are far too many to include on this list so if your favorite organization is missed up here that's not a slight it's just these are some examples of the folks that we work with and then the nexus between all of them is a state workforce development board so every person here has a seat at the table has a way to connect with everyone because the system is so large and our tentacles are so large and there's so many different folks investing in this space there needs to be one place for all of us to coordinate our efforts and so that's kind of where the workforce development board fits in and then the other piece of it is that our funding is a little bit different I mean everyone gets state and federal funding but I think when you're thinking about workforce funding our state funding is for our top priorities so recruitment retention training wraparound services and business supports and then we've got federal funding which some of you have probably heard of Viola or the workforce innovation and opportunity act which is really focused on making sure that we don't leave anyone behind in the workforce so that's our low income marginalized disabled adults disadvantaged youth and unemployed workers and then of course again there's too many to name but there's a lot of non-profit and private investment so the idea behind our workforce strategy is making sure that we're using the federal sources to the best of our ability and then using the state funding to catapult us further so we've done a lot of work and I'm going to go through with the each of the issue areas we've worked with the legislature very well on investing in workforce so in the past we've invested a lot in ctes trades training internships work-based learning and career placement we've done a lot for regional workforce development and we've invested a lot in training and upskilling our new opportunities for growth where we can build upon this work would be to modernize our apprenticeship program further invest in more work-based learning because we're seeing how effective it is for younger homeowners and folks trying to have a career change and then expand on the job training programs for retention we have done a lot in this area especially in the healthcare sector so again just going through some of the work that the legislature and our administration have done loan repayment for some of the critical occupations to the tune of hundreds of millions investment in youth employment and training expanding work-based learning in our education system again and then tuition reimbursement for upskilling and training so some of our new opportunities that we're focused on is kids who are in foster youth figuring out a way to create good career pathways for them into the workforce or higher education further investment in trade scholarships and advancement grants and then again further investment upskilling workers at our higher ed institutions whether that's in the Vermont State College system or at UBM on recruitment I know this one gets a lot of flack from people in and outside of the state house but I want to preface this by saying it's not just asking people to move here this is also about engaging folks who are currently in Vermont who are not engaged in our workforce so for the first two you know we're talking about again the hundreds of millions we've invested in recruiting for critical occupations and relocating families to Vermont those two really hit at the fact that we again do not have enough people to fill our jobs and again also modernizing licensing requirements so that folks who have licenses in other states would be you know it's easier for them to come here and use that but it also means re-engaging folks who have left the workforce for one reason or another so that could be an older worker with a return ship program where they're able to get back into the workforce part time that could be investing in the incarcerated population giving them rehabilitation and a pathway to success and also giving folks who have been formerly incarcerated kind of a second chance to get back and earn and be a part of the workforce so our new opportunities for growth and one that I find very exciting is addressing the benefits clip for wraparound services we want to make sure that folks are not having to make the tough decision between losing a specific suite of services and ten dollars more a month by taking a job so we want to you know focus on eliminating or at least alleviating where we can the benefits clip expanding workforce training for incarcerated individuals continued support and marketing relocation efforts for tourism and marketing a significant investment in resettling refugees and placing them into communities and giving them the support services that they need and then also providing affordability and tax relief for Vermonters and then finally continuous improvement of the system I know this is something that we've had conversations with the legislature about for a very long time previously some of you may have heard of the SOCWED which is the special oversight committee on workforce expansion and development I think that's right which essentially is reviewing has contracting with someone to review all of our workforce assets and see how we can deliver services more effectively on a regional basis statewide and make sure that we're not really missing any huge gaps here with our coordination and then obviously we have a unified state plan that we submit to the federal government just on our federal funding so our new opportunities for improvement this year the state workforce board is very focused on data monitoring and continuous improvement so looking at the metrics that we track in the state plan but also the similar metrics of how many people are getting placed into jobs with our state funding consistent stakeholder engagement so as you may know we go around the state for ARPA listening tours but also the state workforce forward tours the state to talk to businesses in all 14 counties and would love to hear from any folks that are from your constituencies ultimately the implementation of the advisory commission's recommendations to improve the system and then ultimately you know working on managing all of our workforce systems so that there's no wrong door and if you call one agency and they're the wrong place that you get immediately transferred to the right place for you and then everyone can get the services that they need so just to wrap that up I think one thing I'll say is that we understand that workforce is much more than just these programs as I said it's housing it's child care it's education it's quality of life so you know we believe that all of those things tie nicely into this but our main focus is making sure that one we have an incredibly strong system but two we're also attracting more people to live in Vermont so essentially we will be the same fall all kind of get the same work and I'm wondering if the state has considered coordinating our federal representatives or senator senators on the congressman to utilize H2B visas for temporary workers coming into the U.S. which is kind of a cap for the week by 63,000 people for the whole country and these are either visas for labor shortages which we identify or validate by governments. So I can't speak to I haven't spoken with anyone from our federal delegation but I have spoken with the folks of the national department of labor about this this is something we hear a lot especially from those in agriculture so it's something that it's an ongoing conversation but obviously it's not something we have the power to unilaterally change but we agree with you in in essence that we need to make sure like that cap should be increased especially for a smaller state like us who needs to help. Governor Scott has reached out about increasing the number of refugees different than H2B visas that Vermont can resettle and that we'd like to have up here so some some limited success obviously the pandemic over the past few years kind of halted on a lot of things but the H2B visa area is one that we would love to explore with more with you and it's a thing that we should give a generic congressional delegation on the thing that we can do on that cap to send it or it's also a follow-up if you want that piece. Any other questions for yes? Refus from Woodstock thank you. I would like to get a little bit more information as to how you are going to address the benefits but more to come on Friday and talk about the hedgehog. But I'm glad you're interested in all of this one that's one Friday. We've all heard those anecdotal stories right where people are like you know I can't save that extra um $10 an hour or I can't work that extra day because if I do I might use my benefits and then that's not financially viable for me so something we've talked about for a long time at the state you know how can we smooth that um and we're just proposing one uh small moderate I'm excited about it but step in that direction. All right well thank you all for coming have a great evening.