 I'm very grateful and honored to welcome Secretary French to send an education to spend some time with us. Before we do introductions what I've asked Mr. Secretary French to talk a little bit about today is just introducing himself his agency, and also start by telling us a little bit about what he's seeing on the ground with the kinds of things that you know we might not be seeing and where his agency might need assistance as we as they continue to grapple with COVID. And why don't I leave it at that but Mr. Secretary I'm looking around do you know the this incredible group of colleagues of mine. There are some more than others. So, why don't we just go around and say, everyone would just sort of say their district that would be great and start with Senator Hooker. Afternoon Secretary French Cheryl Hooker from Rutland. I know you know Senator lines but go for it. Jenny lions Chittenden County. Senator Chittenden. Chittenden Senate District. Okay. Secretary French shows is Josh Terenzini from Rutland County. And Senator Perksley. Secretary Andy Perksley Washington County. Great. All right, well, thank you Mr. Secretary. Well, we'll leave it with you. Well, thank you, Senator Campion. And good afternoon. It's pleasure to be here. What I thought I'd do is Senator Campion's intro. I'll introduce myself and a brief overview of the work of the agency then I just put together a quick slides on a covert response. I thought that was a good way to provide an overview but also stimulate some questions you might have for future testimony that I can follow up on. Thank you for your introduction. I've been Secretary since 2018 August 2018. More or less is my career as a Vermont educator I started as a high school history teacher up in Colbrook, New Hampshire if you're familiar with that neck of the woods, kind of near the Canadian border. My career has crossed over into Vermont my first job in Vermont I was principal of the Canaan schools which is in the corner of New Hampshire Quebec and Vermont where they all come together. And I was seven years of principal as a pre K through 12 school at the time had about 300 students. And then became superintendent there for three years was the Essex North supervisory union, which is Norton, Canaan, Wellington, Bloomfield Brunswick and most of the unincorporated towns and goers. Today. So I was up there about 15 years and then move to Manchester Vermont in Southwestern Vermont in 2007, where I became the principal of the Bennington Rutland supervisory union that was my last superintendency and I did that for nine years. Those towns are Sunderland Manchester, Dorset, Polit, Rupert, Mount Tabor, Danby, London Dairy, Landgrove, Weston, Peru and Winhall. So it's kind of a large multi district supervisor you know as we call it. So I did that for nine years. My, my job after that was at St. Michael's College, where I ran the graduate program and school leadership program for aspiring principals, special ed directors curriculum directors and that was from that position that I was appointed secretary. At that time I was working at the college. I was also doing a lot of consulting statewide, largely around act 46, but most of my work as a consultant was around operational effectiveness for multi district supervisorings. So the agency is about 160 employees. I think the key takeaways to know is that a large part of our work is about administering federal programs and of which they run the gamut from special education to feeding kids, child nutrition, do some curriculum work. So pretty much any aspect of the K-12 operation, you can think of the agencies involved and to a certain extent, we're not really involved in higher education. So that's the distinction I would make. And that that varies around the country. Some agencies are more involved in higher ed than others. We moved to the National Life Building. So we're not far from the state house. We moved to National Life last year. So we weren't long in National Life when the COVID emergency began, but that's that's our new home and well to give you a tour at some point. So you have some of the slides, the PDF document that I think that share with you that I'm just going to jump into that and I'd be happy to take any questions as I go along. But this was designed to sort of stimulate some conversation but also provide a useful tool for me to organize my comments. And Jeannie, I'm not sure if I can advance these or not since you're sharing my believe, but if you want to go to the next screen. Thanks. So I thought I'd start off by talking about what our response has been to COVID. And it's, these are my terms. They're not ones that we use often. But this is just, you know, when I reflect back on the experience, really, I break it down to phases and we're still kind of in phase three and phase four, but the first phase of this response and education, I call the emergency response, you know, there was a state of emergency declared. We literally shut down our school system overnight and had to figure out how to keep it working in a full remote situation. There was a period where, you know, the governor's executive order became sort of our construct for regulating and operating the system so it was a very frenetic time where we had to figure out how to stand up our response to support districts largely in communications, which I'll talk about in a minute. So we really just figured out how to keep the lights on essentially keep feeding kids. If you remember that time it was really busy, very crazy time where we, we were literally cranking out do we call guidance now we take that term for granted but guidance that basically functions as regulation under the authority the emergency order. So it was a very busy time, we're inventing things as we went along, trying to do the best we can. To say that goes from March to June somewhere around June is when we had to start thinking about reopening school in the fall. We had under the original executive order the gutter governor had asked me to produce some guidance for health at the high school graduation if you remember that experience so we had around May 8 I was asked to produce guidance pertaining to graduation. And at that time point that conditions started to approve, literally on a weekly basis we saw the viral conditions improving. And it's around that point where we were like starting to come to the conclusion I say we nationally as well that this emergency was not going to be over at the end of the school year. I think for those of us that work in education we always think, you know, the end of the school year brings the closure and then we have the summer and then the fall we started new. We started to really sink into everyone that the emergency was not going to be over with the school year, and therefore the summer was not going to be about remediating all the negative impact of the emergency that we really, we had a bit of breathing space but really the summer was about planning for the fall in the next phase of the emergency. So it's right around that point around June, where we really started to engage with the planning of reopening schools in the fall. And that became the big, big scope of the work, which is where we are working closely with the Department of Health has just been wonderful and a leadership role in so many different aspects of our response, but particularly on reopening. We produce a very large sort of comprehensive reopening document that's very prescriptive in some ways about the mitigation processes schools must must must use to operate safely. And I can get more into all of that that's when the coronavirus relief fund was coming out and so forth but all you know all of that was really focused on logistics and wasn't so much focused on education it was really about how do we, how do we operate schools safely. And it was around the end of September when we were starting to congratulate ourselves like mission accomplished that went really well. So we can start thinking about recovery emergencies over and somewhere around Halloween, the conditions started to deteriorate pretty rapidly again and we knew through this holiday period that we're in now this way I sort of draw the demarcation around phase three around the end of September. You know, we sort of have completed the reopening of schools, but now we're sort of in this continuous operation mode until we can shift into recovery. That's kind of where we are right now or we're kind of getting ready to pivot I think towards recovery but this continuous operations has been about just getting more comfortable with daily case counts and schools you know we still knock on wood don't see a lot of transmission of the virus in schools, but if you I don't remember back in the spring, a single case of the virus sent shivers to the whole system. And now we just sort of we've become more accepting and learn to live with the virus to a certain extent. But we also do the hard work of all our school employees were able to sort of maintain fairly safe operations in spite of the conditions and we've been fortunate as Dr Fauci when we had him in Vermont observed. If you can maintain the good conditions in your broader society you can do other things like operate schools. So for months for months been fortunate through the hard work and you know for monitors really accepting the fact that they all kind of work together to allow that to happen. So what we're about to do now is pivot towards what we're calling the recovery phase in anticipation of warmer weather in anticipation of the vaccines that will be emerging and basically all that boils down to conditions improving as compared to where they are right now. So we're starting to do that work to do the planning which I can talk about more and that's really I think will be a big part of our conversation with you this spring. How do how do you really bring our resources to bear to mitigate or address the impact of this emergency on kids. And that's that's really the central premise of recovery work for an education relative to the COVID emergency. So why don't we go to the next slide. So, just sort of an overview what you know the sort of the folks think about the reopening guidance as the centerpiece of what we've done and I would agree it's, it's sort of a precondition of everything else we want to do we have to on a daily basis, stay focused on safety. We can talk about things like remote learning and so forth but it's really a lot of it's predicated on sort of the daily attention to detail that allows our schools to operate safely so just to distill down what now is close to 40 pages worth of prescriptive guidance. So this is it in a nutshell, basically. Firstly, we try to prevent COVID from entering the operational environment of a school, and we do that through a daily health check screening that all school staff and all students are required to complete. And I will say, none of these are designed to be perfect. It's, it's really a layered response when taken together. So on a daily basis, all students and staff are required to answer those questions do you have symptoms have you have you been associated with some of these COVID positive that you travel upstate. Certainly the distancing inside of schools which has had an impact on you know what classrooms look like today, wearing masks and disinfection and we take some of these things for granted. You know we we open schools with the requirement that everyone had to wear a mask. That's not the case in every state in the country, you know so we've arguably our guidance is not only very prescriptive prescriptive but also pretty significant in terms of its requirements and that's reflected in our sort of positive outcomes if you will from an operational standpoint we still have relatively low case counts inside our schools. So we, on the one hand, we're very prescriptive in terms of the health requirements. On the other hand, we let left to districts to sort of decide the instructional mode and this is where we get into the issue of in person remote or some make sure the two in the form of a hybrid. And this this this this approach of sort of balancing the two on the one hand requiring very prescriptive health requirements on the other hand, providing the flexibility wasn't wasn't like a political decision it was based on just, as you heard my background, a real practical understanding of the diversity of our education system and that's that's a theme you'll hear from a lot of my testimony is that there's significant variation across the state, even among school districts, the conditions in which their schools operate so not all schools operate in the same manner have the capacity to operate in the same manner so we had to allow districts basically to adjust their operations based on the complex logistics that are involved in holding school every day. And a significant logistical consideration here is the availability of staff. So, in any given day, you know we we had a shortage of substitute teachers before the covert emergency began. Certainly covert is exacerbated those concerns, but we have, we have staff availability issues we have transportation issues. You name it. So schools, schools are juggling all those things on a daily basis, let alone when they get a call from the health department saying you have a positive case and then they have to move into a mode to assist the health department and contact tracing. So, needless to say, this slide, not only represents 40 pages of prescriptive guidance. It also represents the hard work that everyone's been doing just to keep the lights on so to speak in the system and this, this work has created a significant amount of fatigue in the school systems right now, let alone, you know the juggling between remote in person and so forth, but just all the work that goes into maintaining a safe and learning environment has been a significant, very significant undertaking on the part of our school system. Let's go to the next slide. To the agency standpoint, a big part of our response to the agency I would qualify as being communication support. You know we, we were not organized obviously to deal, you know, with the logistics behind supporting our districts in a pandemic or providing leadership during a pandemic. Pre COVID, you know, as I sort of gave a quick overview of the agency's operations, the better part of what we do is administer federal programs. We have very little involvement in sort of the operational aspects of school districts. So we had to learn, you know, stand up new groups and activities to do that so we have a COVID response team that meets twice every day in the morning once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And they also interface with the state emergency operation center. So there's a direct connection between our operational deliberations and the broader state response. So we had to figure out how to deal, you know, with all the communications coming in and coming out so we had to stand up a health desk. So all these sort of these communication structures are really critical. Somewhere in the summer, I was dealing, you know, through that sort of emergency phase dealing directly as a member of the governor's cabinet and sort of that reactionary sort of mode of the planning. I'm going to turn the corner into reopening schools and the prioritization of school in person instruction. I've been plugged more directly into that so I meet three times a week Monday, Wednesday, Friday is part of a core team that looks at the health data with Dr. Levine and so forth. We provide regular COVID updates that we took all this communication down and at one point it was a daily communication to superintendents we've since we net down to more a couple times a week. But to give them sort of a summary of what's going on and particularly as we were producing a lot of guidance documents in the beginning. And then we started to get into a habit of doing weekly calls with the superintendent so I do a statewide video call. Superintendents are more they're the CEOs of their school district so they're more aligned from an operational standpoint with my authority so it's important that we retain very close communications, more so than some of the other entities. We started just out of necessity doing a weekly call. We talked a couple times on and off I can look it back in my calendar and say let's maybe we can stop doing this in May, you know, and we've continued to find a very useful process. And then similarly, I was contacted by the various advocacy advocacy groups the various professional associations and education, including Vermont NEA the principals and superintendents the school boards. If they could meet with me more regularly and that's sort of settled off into what we call the advisory group in that group meets every Friday. And that includes representatives from the Department of Health school nurses school business officials. Got some teachers on there. So it's a group that I think has been really, really useful in helping us stay connected because it's in many times during the emergency it's been a very fluid situation very dynamic situation so the better part of what we've tried to do both through the superintendents of the advisory group is to sort of just convey to folks what the sense of dynamism is you know it's like I'm today I'm sharing with you what I know tomorrow we might have something new to digest and just to help prepare the system for the rapid changes that occurred at some points. And unfortunately now as we were after school open we also have a little more breathing room now so we can also do some more longer term planning. I just want to give you about a 10 minute warning. We have also have Dr. Levina and kind of a tight schedule starting at about two. Thank you. Great. In the financial support this will be a big area where we'll be interested in engaging with you on, you know, all this work is required significant financial support so we, you're familiar with the cares act at this point out we have a couple terms in there and you know in education we do use a lot of acronyms but answer in gear. So here I think you're more all familiar with the cares act or what we call a coronavirus relief fund. Education has its own discrete funding in addition to that so we have answer which is the elementary secondary education relief fund in gears the governor's education emergency relief fund. And those were set up under the cares act recently and the new package of relief. Congress has decided to put more money into those existing programs that we call them S or two here too. And then this thing called EAS which I haven't come up with a clever way to pronounce yet but it's, it's a separate dedicated source of funding for non public schools, the end and then there stands for non public schools so there's independent school funding basically being secured separately from how it was done previously. Next slide. And so I'll just add on where we're really pushing now is to start thinking about recovery. Not many states in the country are ready to turn towards this work I think we are probably weekly position to do that, but it's all predicated on conditions improving. So we've sort of come up with a conceptualization of where we think that work should be grounded and it's these sort of three domains the mental health well being reengagement truancy and academic success. We're now going through a process with working on the month of January with our stakeholder groups to sort of refine what we think the conceptualization should be for recovery to point the school system to engage in that work. And we're at the agency and I'm thinking we're going to be requiring school districts to submit a plan basically a recovery plan as a way to point the systems towards that work for a number of reasons one of which is to make sure that we're making use of our funding in that regard. But also we expect that there's going to be an increased need to coordinate other resources from other aspects of state government such as mental health and youth services and so forth. So it's going to be useful to create a structure to begin to really assess what the impact of the emergency has been on kids and then to organize our support systems. So I think I'll end there. We've got a few minutes left to be happy. You know this is a real sort of general conversation be happy to answer any questions from an introductory standpoint or on covid specifically. But I look forward to working with you this session we have a lot of a lot of work to do together. So questions if you don't mind I'm just going to kick it off and then if anyone has one please just indicate. So how will you when will you determine how you'll assess. You know prior to your coming on we talked about there are going to be some students out there that during this time it was it was OK. You know it was OK families were able to bring different people in at you know tutors family parent may have been home. Things might have worked out in some regards but in others it was students may really be behind how when will that is what would that assessment look like how do you plan to do it and when would we when might you come to us and say hey this is where things. This is a picture of where things are at. Yeah it's a great question. I think you know we're just so you're aware it's probably the one number one or number two hot button issue for the new secretary of education to figure out to what extent we'll be offering the required national assessments in Vermont's case that's the standard balance assessment so we have to answer this from a national perspective. We don't necessarily have the flexibility not to give those tests but this issue of assessment or alcohol sort of more broadly a triage. We have to begin to sort of do some measurement. And this will be one of the questions we engage with districts with. I'm not I'm not confident that the large summary assessments are going to be provide enough useful information quick enough for us. So we're going to have to figure that out but I think it is you know in spite of the complexity of that question. I think the simple answer for now is that this is one of the reasons why we have to put a priority on in person instruction so to even do the assessment requires in person contact with students so we're just going to refer now push the system towards more in person instruction if conditions allow it and knowing that the system itself has built in sort of assessment capacity and we've got some ideas on how to get that information together at the state level. But that will be one of the big questions we try to answer as part of the recovery planning conversation. Thank you. Questions. comments. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Secretary French. I'm curious to know how you handled like the staffing situation when, you know, there's a dearth of subs as you said, and not to mention that we don't have a full compliment I don't believe of teaching staff. I would certainly use more stuff. How to just handle it during the pandemic so far and what are your plans to improve that situation. Yeah, it's a really challenging piece. It's one of the, one of the variables that really made us decide to introduce that sort of flexibility the local level, because we knew staff availability wasn't going to be there to say require in person. Firstly, one of the strategies is to give districts a flexibility to move between in person remote hybrid because that allows the broadest use of staff, meaning there are some staff who are available to teach remotely who might not be available to teach in person so that was the first thing. A second pattern is we've been very flexible on the granting of waivers, particularly for school board members. We've had a large number of school board members volunteer step forward to be subs typically they're not allowed to be regular employees of school district so we've really gone out of our way to support them to do that. We did convene a task force fairly recently to across state government including Department of Labor Department of Public Service which is involved in the fingerprinting for employees to sort of do some brainstorming inside of state government to see what war we can do. There's there's no simple answers to this we have expedited the finger fingerprinting the background check process I think is best we can so if there is a school employee that comes forward for that record check process there are more or less given the front of the line in terms of that processing, but we don't have any simple answers. Once again, it's part of a demographic challenge that existed prior to the emergency and it's one that's going to be with us after the emergency so I think it's just in stimulating conversation for future policy I think this issue of pipeline and teacher development will will remain a concern of going forward as I was traveling around with act 46 in particular. I often observed in districts that will probably see schools closing not because of as much as students declining but due to availability of staff we have we're going to have real staffing shortages in the near future. So, anyway, no simple answer, but if I can follow up on that I mean we're thinking in terms of mental health for kids who have been affected by COVID. What is the department. What does the department have in place for staff for teachers. We don't currently have any staff directly related to mental health services so that's been more or less a partnership in the mental health department in that regard. So once again our agency was not really configured for direct service support. We've been meeting regularly with the Department of Health and the Department of Mental Health in particular on these issues we have sort of a regionalization of these services out in the landscape we have what are called designated service agencies. We think they're going to provide an important role in the recovery phase so that's one of the reasons we want to get everyone organized. So we can start really allocating those resources based on need. I have a final question before we move to Dr Levine. Secretary French, thanks for all that you're doing. Greatly appreciate it. We'll have you back certainly but center Alliance. I use my screen hand so I apologize. I didn't see it. That's okay. I listened. Senator Hooker actually sent the question in the direction of mental health and it will be good to hear some updates on how that's going and we'll also hear about it in our committee. I do have a question. I'll leave the capital question aside for now in terms of improvements to some of our schools that really need it. Of course, physical education and exercise and participation is so important to brain health. And I'm just wondering how you are planning for the future to ensure that kids get that that outside or inside exercise experience that helps them develop intellectually and emotionally. You see that emerge in our preliminary planning on the topic of engagement. You know, there's been a lot of conversation about truancy. I think, you know, truancy is more or less just sort of the tip of an iceberg of a broader issues of engagement including social engagement of all the activities you named athletics music. Just the daily interaction with teachers and their fellow students, all those things are just, you know, foundational to us being able to move into recovery so we put them into the broader heading of engagement or re engagement. And that's going to be an important focus conceptualization of our recovery work. No doubt. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Secretary French, and we look forward to having you back in committee probably sooner rather than later. Thank you. I look forward to working with you. Take care. Thank you. Well, now that we have probably, I think some would refer to him as a statewide celebrity these days. Dr. Mark Levine who has done, I think we'd all agree just incredible work. So grateful for him being in position that he's in. And Dr. Levine, I believe David Englinder is also in the waiting room. And he will be joining us if Jeannie would let him in. I suspect you invited him to join you. So what we thought we might do Dr. Levine, and you probably know that you're muted. Before we kick it off, we thought we might just introduce ourselves. But the overarching themes, if you will, perhaps give us an update on what you're seeing right now statewide. I think, you know, we all, many of us have followed your work closely in your weekly addresses, which have been incredibly helpful. And then benchmarks, things that you'll be looking for going forward with regard to what are the kinds of things that you'll want to have in place or that you'll be seeing that you'll say to the governor and to others. Let's move forward with schools reopening statewide. And then I know it's on people's minds. It was in the Bennington banner and different people are asking it and I know Senator Lyons also will be looking at this is, and I think we'll just like an update on vaccinations of teachers, school employees, children, that kind of thing. But before we get to all of those, I just thought we'd just go around and introduce ourselves. I've met a little bit. I'm Brian Campion State Center from Bennington County in Wilmington. To my left is Senator Lyons. Good afternoon. It's good to see you. Judy Lyons. To my right is the good Senator from Rutland Senator Terenzini. Hello, Dr. Levine Josh Terenzini from Rutland County is counterpart Senator Hooker. I'm Dr. Hooker from Rutland County. It's nice to see you. And then we have Senator Chittenden. Dr. Levine, I'm Thomas Chittenden. I've heard you speak at the South Burlington Rotary. Thank you for everything you've been doing for the state of Vermont. And Senator Perchlich. Any Perchlich representing the 15 towns and two cities of Washington County. Impressive. So great. So thank you Dr. Levine for being with us and looking forward to hearing from you and taking some questions. Sure. I'll try not to. I'll keep my comments on the briefer side so that you can have plenty of question time. How much time are we spending together? Well, we have until three, I mean, we can go as long as we have to stop. I think we have somebody coming in at 315 we were thinking about a little break in between there. Yeah, three o'clock would be nice 25 minutes. Good. Thank you. So for a little bit of a statewide update. It's no mystery to anyone that we're obviously seeing the highest levels of cases we've seen throughout the pandemic. At this point in time. And really, you know, since Thanksgiving, to be real, a little bit after Halloween as well. Not to not feel good about everything that happened between March and that time. Because we did as well as one could do as a state. I always like to say that if we were an island, like things would be even better. And we've tried to function as an island, literally through the pandemic. And pretty successfully, because when you look at what's going on, even regionally, we stand out so differently than the rest of the region, even with Quebec on top of us. So I always wondered how long we could maintain that stance and we continue to maintain that stance in a relative way, even though absolute case numbers are up. Our deaths have really escalated to places that we never thought they would go. And as I announced today, even hospitalizations are now on the rise here, though nowhere near threatening the hospital or health care system in terms of capacity. But we'll be watching that very closely, needless to say. We, you know, for the longest time are accustomed to single digits of cases every day or occasionally in the teens. And here we are, you know, in the hundreds now when we had a couple days in the 200s. The reality is it's wintertime people are indoors. People have gathered more people can't avoid crowds as much as they could before. There may be some pandemic fatigue, preventing as much religious masking and distancing as once was practiced. And the area in the country are on fire, they're all red on the maps. And Vermont looks orange or yellow depending on which COVID tracker you're looking at. And it's the only one in the continental US. So at the very least we'd like to maintain that to say the least. The success story of Vermont has a lot to do with compliance of people because fundamentally complying with public health guidance is what got us to where we are. And will hopefully keep us safe for the future. In addition, we did have a very strong attention to protecting the most vulnerable. And that continues. We've been less successful or we wouldn't have had deaths in those settings but the reality is we could have had way worse the picture. When you look at the number of long term care facilities that have actually been threatened or actually had outbreaks and deaths versus those who have not. We've done relatively well in that regard. If you want to look at our three priorities, one is reducing illness and saving lives. The second is keeping an economy vibrant and workplaces open. And the third is really where we're here to talk about today, which is having as much in person education as possible and keeping our education system open. Those are really where we're going for priorities in the state. The And that should probably let me segue from that to a little bit of discussion about the education arena before I get into the benchmarks. I think the education programming that we've gotten to to this point in time is a real success story, if you will. It's been success for students and their parents, for teachers and the staff for ability to collaborate across state government and the close working relationship we've had with the agency of education. And actually, you know, even beyond that for public health health health care sector partnership, because it was no mistake that we opened up education with a lot of people at the table. We had a lot of education professionals, but from the medical side, pediatricians, infectious disease experts, school nurses, public health and epidemiology experts. You name it. We had a large table and health got to inform the process very well. And I hope everyone in this committee looks at the fall, we'll call it the fall semester for lack of a better word, looks at that as a success story in Vermont. Even if a lot of students were still in hybrid, even if not most students were not in in person four to five days a week, it was a true success story, knowing we have a long way to go. You may be familiar with this document, strong and healthy start. This is essentially what catalyzed the reopening it was a safety and health guidance for reopening schools. It's on its third version, if you will. It's been an iterative iterative public document. First issued in June revised twice. The last one was October. And literally everything we've learned about managing a pandemic is within its pages and health has been in a very supportive role with regard to that. The kind of content it has builds on science that we understand about how the virus impacts adults, adolescents and kids differentially, and acknowledges those differences and capitalizes on them in trying to improve the experience for all. Obviously, the goal is to maximize in person instruction with a secondary goal being especially in the K through six population who are who have been deemed to be those least proficient and comfortable with the online platform for learning. Not that we should say anybody in high school could learn online and that's a satisfactory high school experience. But this has been the north star of our experience is trying to get the youngest kids back into a school setting where they're in person all the time. Lots of objectives that this manual helps with including prevention, minimizing transmission amongst whoever containment strategies and how they work, even when there are cases in schools and communication strategies which are invaluable for the school staff and especially the principals and superintendents when hard decisions have to be made, because on Sunday night they learned they had two cases in a school. So really all aspects of student and staff health are discussed in their health screening. The considerations you need to take into account if you have staff working there who have chronic conditions, what to do about when we should have a stay home policy. When people are sick, who's included who's excluded, what to do about cases in school, what to do about testing, what to do about closing schools if God forbid it came to that. And all the usual hygiene things and buses and transportation and kitchen and food services. Public use of schools. All of that sort of covered within. If there's one thing we've learned a lot about. It's that the success of education is intimately tied to the success of the state's overall management of the pandemic. Because we very rarely have closed the school, we very rarely, at least for more than a few days, we very rarely have had a major transmission of virus event occurring within school. Most of what we see is the impact of people living in their communities being subject to the amount of communities spread that they're subject to living their daily lives. We see cases in schools that might be a brother and a sister in two different grades who come from the same household. It might be a teacher, it might be a food worker who lives with somebody who was a bus driver who contracted it because of their profession. And the safety rails that are built into the school experience with distancing and masking and all of that are protecting the rest of the population. So that those number of cases never really result in a major trauma to the school and inability to carry out the educational mission. And I think that's really, really important. And in that sense, when I talk about the public's role in keeping schools open, it's just that we're only as good as our communities are and our communities are only as good as everyone who lives in them behaving appropriately in a pandemic. So that's really how things work. In addition to that, we did start, as you're aware, a surveillance strategy for testing in the adults in the schools. And we've had it various times anywhere from a third to a half of people testing in a given week. And we're again, and maybe Secretary French talked about this finding very, very low positivity rates. So even acknowledging where you live and what community you're in, the teachers and the school staff are taking their jobs so seriously that they're actually having about a one-tenth positivity rate compared to the rest of the state. So while the rest of the state is in the mid-twos, 2.5, 2.8% positivity, the schools are in a 0.25 positivity, very, very different. So when you talk about benchmarks and reopening schools, one thing is, again, numbers of cases, raw data like that, positivity rates, how the community is faring with regards to healthcare, are the healthcare facilities being overrun with cases and reaching capacity, what have you. Do we have adequate testing capability all across the state, which the answer is yes, so that we know that we're not fooling ourselves when we get testing data, but we're actually seeing a broad swath of the Vermont population, both those who are symptomatic and asymptomatic, those who have been exposed, those not exposed, those who are under surveillance testing like teachers, like healthcare workers in different settings, et cetera. And this goes hand in hand with really assessing how we're doing with regards to keeping kids in their school environment and keeping kids in an in-person school environment, because obviously all of those data pieces translate over into the school. With regard to the last thing you wanted me to mention, which was vaccination, you know, the problem with vaccination is we want to make it a good time discussion and we want to make it the high point of everyone's day, but the reality is we have harsh realities we're facing. We can't vaccinate everybody at the same time. We don't get enough vaccine coming into the state ever and certainly not predictably. We can't tell one group of people you're not a priority and another group you are. Nobody feels like they should feel like they're not a priority, and they all have good reasons for wanting to be the priority. So you never can deliver 100% good news to everybody all the time. This becomes especially acute when we're talking about teachers. You've heard that one of our three priorities as a state is schools. Unfortunately, I have to say it's a priority, but saving lives comes first. And that's not my mantra. That's the governor's mantra, the governor's leadership team mantra, and whenever we mention it to any Joe person on the street, they kind of get it. It's like we're having people dying in Vermont. We're having people get really sick and need to be hospitalized. Maybe we should try to prevent that and make that our first priority, especially because we have good data. And the data we have shows that the older you are and the number of chromorbid conditions you have predict if you're going to be in that group at highest risk of a bad outcome. So why don't we focus on those people first? But that makes people who are not focusing on feel like second-class citizens. And there's no way around that. Now, some states, along with the CDC, have chosen to try to make everybody feel good at the same time. They've said in Priority Group 1B, which is nomenclature we're not using, we're going to go to two. You're going to have old people. You're going to have people with chronic conditions. You're going to have grocery store workers because they're public facing. You're going to have teachers because they're public facing frontline workers as they're called. You're going to have other people they define as essential workers. Knowing that essential workers, if you really broaden the definition as it's been done, is 80% of the workforce. So they're going to have all of those people in the same group and say, you're our next priority. Come get your vaccine. Well, it's going to take them six months to vaccinate all those people. And every day of the week, each one of those people who feel important is going to feel less important because suddenly they can't get what they want. We are going to basically just be honest and say, there's 40,000 people who are over 75 years old in Vermont. We're only looking at them first. We're going to see how much vaccine comes in and get them vaccinated as quickly as possible. If it's only 8,000 doses a week, it's going to take at least five weeks to get them vaccinated. But that's what happens. And then after they're done, but not quite after they're done because we want to have a transition so we don't waste any vaccine. When they're almost done, we'll start the next band, 70 to 74. And accordingly go that way. Well, what does that mean if you're a teacher? It means you are literally 200,000 people away unless you happen to be a teacher who's older or who has chronic conditions. I can't make that story feel good to a teacher. There's no way. Even if I told the teacher you're next in line after the last person with chronic conditions gets their shot, you go first. Well, that's going to be April, May, I don't know when. You know, it depends again on how much vaccines available, how many new vaccines get developed, but that's what we're up against. So I'm just putting that on the table for you to understand. It has nothing to do with we have nothing but good words to say about teachers. We don't think ski patrollers are better than teachers or vice versa. But ski patrollers are actually working with sick people on the slope for a prolonged period of time. They're a first responder. They're doing health care directly. That's why they were in Group 1A. It has nothing to do with our prioritizing the ski industry over education by any means. You might be interested to know that a funeral director is also in Group 1A. It doesn't mean that they're more important than teachers, but God forbid you see what they do every day. They should have the vaccine. They're dealing with people who have died of COVID, who might have COVID and they don't know it yet because they took a specimen at the time of death and they're waiting for it to come back from the lab. And they're with the body for a long time. So I'm just throwing this all at you to give you a little better enlightenment. And I better stop so you have time to get your questions in and tell me what I didn't talk about that you wanted me to talk about. Great. Thank you, Dr. Levene. Senator Perchley. Thanks, Dr. Levene. I think the ski patrol thing did catch in a lot of teachers' craws. I got a lot of emails about that specifically. And what I assumed was, one, it might not be all ski patrol because I know like my brother-in-law is a volunteer ski patrol. Like he's not the guy dealing with sick people. He calls in the EMTs that are on ski patrol. So I tried to tell people it's not all ski patrol for one and two. I'm guessing there's not really that many ski patrol. Like that's not changing the list that much. And they're mostly EMTs. Some are physicians. I think that's a good point. You're right. They all have reasons to be first in line anyways. Other questions. Comments. So if I could just go back for clarification, then Dr. Levene. Actually, Senator Lyons, you go first because you probably put your small hand up and I didn't see it. Small hand. I don't mean your physical hand. I actually mean whatever those little yellow things that are that pop up. I put the little yellow hand up. You're absolutely right. We're all getting these inquiries and emails and in particular, and we all have unmitigated sympathy and understanding about the concerns that people are bringing us. But the rationale that Department of Health is using sounds really important in the, in the long run and to really be able to say. We know where we're going and it's not, it's not hit or miss. But I do have, I do have a question for you and that is, we know that we're in this for a much longer haul than people might want. And that the vaccine appears to be the end point, the light at the end of the tunnel. But can you just give us perspective and this is for schools as much as it is for general public. And just a perspective on how long we are going to be vigilant. And I mean, social distancing and masks and so on. Yeah, so, you know, I anticipate the current two vaccines will have manufacturing revved up appropriately. So there'll be more than we have now of them. I do really anticipate at least one, if not two or three other vaccine platforms getting approval, perhaps as early as the beginning of February. We'll have to see how that plays out. And some of them, because of Operation Warp Speed already have some manufacturing capacity, the government's already subsidized. So there'll be some doses of them coming. But even in the best of all worlds, we're talking late, probably mid to late summer before we really feel like we've gotten enough vaccine out there. Assuming more people take it than don't take it to feel comfortable with our vaccination rate. And so most people are trying to message late summer early fall would be the earliest we would pull back from a stance of masking distancing, all that stuff. I suspect it will go a little longer than that, to be honest, just because of the challenges that we're up against. And the fact that there's so much virus prevalence around now, it's going to take some time to suppress that. And the warm weather will help, because people won't be indoors as much, but the reality is still it's going to take time. So I would, I would say the fall, hopefully the early fall to be optimistic about the fall. Dr. Levine. Thank you. I'm sorry, Senator Lange, do you have a follow up or No, just to thank you. Okay. Dr. Levine, two questions. A student are going back to school. I think the governor was talking about maybe an April date. It's safe to assume that a student that might have an immune system issue struggling with cancer or something like diabetes. He or she would be vaccinated by the time they went back to school. That's my first question. And then second, is there are we seeing that depending on the age of a child is one age more susceptible to getting the disease and having symptoms than others? I mean, I've just heard anecdotally that maybe younger children might not be as susceptible and just sort of trying to get a sense of those two things. Yeah, so to take the second question first. It seems that the younger children are less susceptible. It probably has to deal with a receptor in their noses. It's called the ACE receptor. And that's where the virus spike proteins that you see on that diagram bind to that receptor. That's less developed in our younger kids. So there's less opportunity for the virus to sort of invade, if you will. That's at least the theory that we've been operating under. And it seems pretty, pretty reasonably valid. So we say K through six because of the way schools are set up, but probably it's K through four or five where those kids are clustered and those age groups sort of 10 and under. And that's why child cares have been so successful too, because the infants are not usually the vectors of the virus to the adults. It would work most likely the other way around. And that happens both in childcare and in school. If you ever find transmission, it's most likely from the adult to the child, not the other way around. Now, middle and high school are a little bit different. Those kids actually can get infected more like adults, but they seem to have a higher rate of no symptoms than adults. So they may test positive but not feel bad, where an adult might still feel bad, but they have a rate of infection that may approach what the adult has. With regard to the first question, I'm a little I don't want to get out too far ahead of my skis or the governor, because we're deciding that literally the next couple nights. What age band will the chronic disease conditions go under. So we all agree that 65 and above, whether you have a chronic condition or not, you know, you're going first. But below 65. The question is, how broad will the age band be for chronic conditions? Will it be middle age and older? Will it be starting in your teens or twenties and older? Or will there be banding in that array? It's a little hard to say so I can't give you with confidence the answer to that. All I can say is there will be a bunch of chronic diseases that mostly adults get, but in the middle of them are things like cancer and having an immunosuppressive condition. You know, lifestyle disease, those things a young person can have so stay tuned. Okay, thank you. Senator chair and Zini. Thank you. Interesting, you would think the this respiratory disease would be worse off for those with asthma, but everything I've read and seen suggests that asthmatics are not affected any worse than those without asthma. We're still finding that to be true doc, you're living and our children, we know far too many children have asthma. Are you finding that kids with asthma are affected at all with with the virus. Yeah, so I still regard asthma as a risk factor for developing the disease a little more significantly, but it hasn't really panned out to have significantly worse outcomes. There's two kinds of airways disease in human beings to keep it simple. One is asthma, which we call a reversible airway disease where there's inflammation and wheezing and cough and shortness of breath. Then there's emphysema, also called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease COPD, which is more fixed and irreversible. It's usually from the damage from cigarette and smoking use, but those airways produce the same symptoms, but they don't reverse those symptoms as readily as someone with asthma. So we see the outcomes being much worse in that group because they're already impaired on a day to day basis chronically, whereas an asthmatic maybe more episodically impaired, depending on the circumstances. If they're well maintained, they may have lots a lot of days forever and ever that they're doing very well. Whereas the people with COPD generally are having a downhill course over a long period of time. So COPD appears on the list of conditions asthma does not, for those reasons. Thank you. Senator Hooker. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Levine. I remember as a child being shepherded over to the high school to get my polio shot. And I'm wondering if thought has been given once the vaccine is available in higher quality quantities. If that's anticipated as a distribution, a type of distribution for school kids. Well, let's start with the school adults first, because it would be an ideal place for school adults, especially with the growing number of school nurses we have around the state. We don't have a nurse for every facility but I mean one could work it out because they cover several facilities at times. So we would just set up clinics and that could make it easy for the school staff and teachers to get their vaccine when their time arrives. And that means if we don't have any new vaccines approved, we only have Pfizer and Moderna, and the youngest student that could get them would be age 16. So the problem you're posing wouldn't be a problem because most kids, unless they're in the higher years of high school are younger than age 16. So getting it to the student wouldn't be an issue because they're not eligible to get it. The hope is there'll be future vaccines that have more pediatric enrollment in the trials and that show the safety and efficacy profile we'd want to see so that we would then want to give it to the school students on a large scale basis and I think the schools would be the place to do it. To make them all schlep to a mass community vaccination center or to their pediatrician when you could give it all in a single setting as part of the context of a school day. So that's a great thought but it's right now just a dream because we don't have a vaccine to give them. Any other questions. Dr. Levine. Thank you so much. Do you have any other final comments for us before we let you go and we hope you'll just stay in contact of course as these decisions are being made. You know just to keep us updated as much as you can either through yourself or Mr. Englander and I know you're also working in conjunction with Senator Lyons committee. Always very closely with Senator Lyons committee. We'll have to vie with her to become my favorite. Forget it. We know never get there. Set up a little internal competition here. Now I can say is I have no doubt that I'll be seeing your committee again. I mean we've had a long history of success with the lead in school water. And it's become apparent that there are always going to be issues that interface between health and schools and our maternal child health section is such an important component of the health department. And there are there are no shortage of issues so I'll look forward to interacting with you again in the future but I don't have any other things to say about COVID today or the reopening of schools except that. So we've come back from a pretty high peak of cases post Christmas and we're seeing more cases in schools. It's still not impacting to any substantial degree the operation of schools. You know you're not hearing about major schools that have closed down because of what happened over Christmas. I think the schools and everyone who works in them. And the parents who sent kids to them really understand that this is a high stakes game and they need to really do their best so that our communities look as good as they can look at our schools can then benefit from that. So hope we hope we can keep that spirit of optimism up. Thank you Dr Levine. Take care. Thanks you too. Bye bye. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I think we'll make just about a little more than a 10 minute break. We'll come back at 315 less than 10 minute break. Sorry, a little less than a 10 minute break. Come back at 315 and we'll pick up with this principles association and the superintendent's association. And as you know, we need to wrap up a little bit before or in order for the chairs meeting to start. Thank you so much for your time and video. Thank you. All right. Well, we're back from break and I see we have Mr Francis with us. How are you? I am well. How are you? Good thanks. And you brought someone with you, I believe. Yes, Dave yalts is the president of the superintendent's association and he's going to deliver most of the testimony. Thank you so much. I think whenever you would like to kick us off, you know, our question, I believe, which is, you know, what are you seeing? What are some of the things that we can be doing for you as schools are grappling with COVID and thinking about reopening, et cetera. I think we might expect to see you in this committee. Sure, I appreciate that. I'm going to just open one document. If you'll bear with me, I'll be right there. So it's great to be with you all to see you again. These are certainly extraordinary times. I know you keep hearing that. I wanted to give a very brief overview of the Vermont superintendent's association and then look to Dave yalts is going to talk about what it's like on the ground for school districts right now. The superintendent's association is a nonprofit organization comprising members, including superintendents assistant superintendents, and we have a few retired superintendents who stay interested in public education and they are with us as professional affiliate members. We've got about 70 members overall. We operate with three staff on the executive director. Two years ago now two and a half years ago the association added a position of associate executive director. That's Chelsea Myers who will be a regular presence in your committee as well. And we have an office manager who's Christie take the organization was founded in the 1940s. We had our first full time executive director in 1987. That was my predecessor Richard Kate, who now is the vice president. I think of administrative affairs at UVM. Some of you know Richard. I joined the association as executive director in the late 1990s so I have a long history in the education policy arena working with the General Assembly and others in public education affairs. Basically the association does three things. We create professional learning and networking opportunities for superintendents and other educational leaders. We're active in the public policy and management arena and focus on promoting laws regulations policies and initiatives and supportive equity of high quality learning opportunities, efficient use of resources. And we support individual members in the successful execution of their leadership roles. So we're very active in the policy arena. I talked with a number of superintendents on a daily basis in terms of supporting their work. And we also are supporting increasingly superintendents and coming together to support one another and professional development opportunities. And now we're serving 55 superintendents in a broad array of professional development activities. And as you might imagine, since the onset of COVID back in March, that has dominated not only a lot of time on the part of superintendents and school districts, educators in general, but also the superintendents association as well as other associations. My background is I've spent a large part of my career in public education with the association. I have experience as a town manager. I worked for a time in Madeline Cunan's administration. I worked in the nonprofit housing development arena. So my background is entirely in public management and I've always worked hard to do my best to support the best outcomes for the taxpayer dollar. I've always worked as a public education, the kids and communities in the state. I mentioned that David is the president. He and I have worked more closely in the role of president and executive director than at any other time in my career, largely because of the work associated with COVID. As a non-superintendant myself, I didn't have the context or experience for the day-to-day operations. And superintendents are working both with the association and with one another across community, like never before. So with that, I would like to turn to David Yautz, who's the superintendent for the Mill River Unified Union School District. He's been active doing his job at Mill River as well as supporting colleagues. Again, since the outset of the pandemic and he's got a number of insights that he can share with you in response to your question about coronavirus navigation and what it's been like for school systems. So David, I'd like to turn to you. Thank you, Beth. Thank you, Jeff and Senator Campion and the committee. Thank you for allowing me to join you today. As Jeff said, I'm the superintendent at Mill River, which is in Rutland County just south of Rutland, served the four towns of Clarendon, Shrewsbury, Tynmouth and Wallingford. I'm a resident of Arlington, Vermont in Bennington County between Bennington and Manchester, and I am in year seven in my current role. And this is year seven in Vermont for me. I'm a flat lander by nature. I can admit that openly to you. I came here from the Chicago suburbs where I grew up. My wife has family connections in Vermont and we made the decision that Vermont was where we wanted to be about eight years ago and we made that happen and certainly don't regret making that move. I appreciate Jeff giving me the opportunity to share with you today and of course I would be glad to answer any questions you might have after my comments are concluded. So first, superintendents on the whole are generally complimentary and appreciative of the overall response of the administration statewide. I understand that there are things that we will never understand about the details and the challenges inherent in state administrative decision making. We appreciate the work of Governor Scott and Governor Scott's team in leading Vermont through the pandemic. Some of our early challenges as we reflect back on, you know, January, February, March included the following lack of knowledge about the virus organizational and communications challenges and responding to concerns of the school community and the community at large, especially as things started to escalate in early March the weeks of March 2 and March 9 that we can all look back on and recall what that felt like there was a definite escalating intensity over the course of that time. VSA is an organization exerted its influence in March to inform the ultimate decision to close schools largely because of those escalating concerns and the operational pressures that we were experiencing in our school communities and the community at large. During the first month of school closures districts reacted very quickly and efficiently to feed students prop up what we now know to be a less than ideal remote learning system shift to remote work environments overnight and manage the social emotional technology employment physical health and nutritional needs of our students and staff in ways that schools had never before seen at a scale that schools had never before faced. In the early months of the pandemic school districts were required to develop continuity of learning plans, which would account for how schools would manage and navigate the needs both known and unknown the liehead. That process began with fits and starts as draft models required significant revision. VSA played a key role in that process and required reporting and planning efforts needed to align with the work that was actually being done on the ground in school districts. Vermont schools have found federal dollars supporting COVID relief efforts to be invaluable the mechanics and timing of approval, of course have been challenging at times, but we are aware that the Agency of Education has worked diligently to identify and distribute funds to schools to meet directly connected COVID needs in areas like staffing materials and technology PPE and many other qualified expenses. Without that support the fiscal crisis that we face now would be exponentially exacerbated. We're grateful for the AOE's work in that regard. One of the significant challenges facing school districts in the pandemic has to do with the myriad human resources challenges that emerge as a result of the pandemic. Decisions around disability determinations virus vulnerability status remote work options, equity and equality and quarantine dynamics generate daily decision points that have to be navigated with clarity and consistency in order to not place districts in any jeopardy. Most of our most Vermont school districts and us use do not have separate human resource departments to navigate these types of decisions. What this means is that the same individuals who are tasked with communicating to staff that they care about all employees and want to support people through the difficult times of the pandemic are also faced with informing those same individuals that their requests or needs may not be able to be met. The pandemic that existed at a very small scale prior to the pandemic, it is unfortunately rampant now. VSA and collaboration with VSBA pursued clear jointly generated legal guidance from multiple educational attorneys throughout the state in order to ensure that superintendents had good information at hand in order to make the best legal consistent decisions possible. By the way on that note VPA also joined us in that process. This is a role that we were compelled to play in an ideal world that guidance would have come to us from state resources. Superintendents and boards have been granted latitude to make operational decisions in our local districts which is appropriate and greatly appreciated challenges do emerge though in all districts when aspirations expressed by the state and state officials in the reality of conditions and logistics locally are in conflict. As a result local decision making often translates to local backlash that falls at the feet of the local decision makers. While this is all a part of the work. It contributes greatly to the collective exhaustion that school leaders and other decision makers feel. The pandemic in very simple terms has been a leadership exercise that involves responding to aspirational statements, navigating local dynamics and statewide rules around decision making and preparing for the fallout. This is made even more challenging as you are aware by the proliferation of social media. It has been accurately portrayed that virus cases are not spreading in schools in the same way that they are in the broader community. What we do in my opinion to the fidelity with which school district employees have adhered to the health and safety guidelines required, not only at school but also in their personal lives. School district employees, in my opinion, deserve great credit for that fidelity. However, outbreaks in cases do occur in schools and children and adults do get sick. Responding to those cases and outbreaks, case by case, school by school and classroom by classroom is an all encompassing experience for our local schools and districts. Some districts have seen more cases than others. Most all districts have been affected. Schools are not specifically engaged in contact tracing, which I would interpret to mean the process of identifying and contacting those who are determined to be close contacts with a positive case in the broader community. But it is important that the committee understand that schools are very involved in identifying, tracking and communicating with all parties linked to a case that is connected to a school. So this approach has proven to be a faster approach than the Department of Health is able to deliver on, which does make sense from a procedural standpoint. It is also worth noting that involved staff members who engage in that work become completely immersed in that work until all of that work is done. This also requires significant other areas of operational focus to be set aside for the immediate quarantine related concerns to be addressed. We have experienced in Vermont schools significant challenges with messaging and decisions made at the level of state government and how those messages play out at the local level. Some examples. The public push in the fall for all students to access in person school when the required health guidelines prevented that from occurring in many places due to the social distancing requirements that limited the number of individuals who could be in a school. The public proclamations that athletics should occur, particularly in the winter season, when school leaders and prominent physicians statewide indicated extreme concerns about such an action. The timing of decisions around holiday breaks related to multi household gatherings and school districts role in executing and communicating about those decisions. And finally, the admittedly aspirational desire to have all students return to school in person following April break without necessary context provided for families and teachers, indicating that virus conditions and social distancing requirements are the ultimate variables in that type of decision. Employee virus testing in schools is going reasonably well. The infrastructure established by state government is in place to sustain that effort over the long term. School district employees appreciate the simplicity of that process and the turnaround time in terms of results. Vaccinations are becoming more and more of an area of focus for school district employees who gets vaccinated when and the variability that does exist regionally raise a great number of questions about who is responsible for communication on those topics and how. In many ways the vaccine question links back to the question of keeping schools open to in person learning. The cognitive dissonance on this topic experienced by school district employees is having a significant effect on our workforce. They are struggling with understanding why if schools are critical to remain open to best serve our students and our society. School employees are not considered worthy of early vaccine administration. They realize that others are essential as well, but have not seen others mandated to return to in person work in the interest of maintaining the economy. If there is a possibility that schools can indeed return to full in person instruction after April break, ensuring that all school district employees have had access to a vaccine as soon as possible seems to be an important milestone in that process. Finally, there are of course numerous covert related educational needs. I'll share a few examples. As it relates to learning loss and recovery. What we are seeing is that the educational nutrition and social emotional needs that we face now are what they always have been the pandemic in many ways has illuminated and magnified the cracks and discrepancies that exist and and truly truly highlighted what needs to be worked on in Vermont. We know that remote learning, especially the quickly developed version that was developed across the world in the springtime pales when compared to in person learning opportunities. But we also know that high quality remote learning systems which many districts have worked hard to develop are a reasonable substitute when there is no other choice. What we learned from the pandemic about instructional delivery will have positive impacts, I believe, on our systems as we continue to seek to meet our objectives and the goals of act 77 in particular. The social and emotional needs of our students and employees are being monitored and attended to as best as we are able. We do know that there will be recovery necessary when the pandemic concludes. Our districts are largely focused on navigating this school year as best as we are able and planning for a fall that hopefully feels more normal and has supports in place that are both required and newly developed in order to serve our students and staff, as well as possible. Ultimately, it is our hope that the General Assembly does more than just understand the impressive work that school districts and school employees have accomplished with the support of boards, staff and communities. It is our hope that the General Assembly recognizes the best expression for school districts at, I'm sorry, the best expression of support for school districts at this time does not take the form of new ideas and new initiatives. It takes the form of time and space. Time and space to lead through the remainder of the pandemic. Time and space to complete the implementation of significant important legislation already in place. Time and space to take care of kids, staff and communities. And finally time and space to finish a good work started. Vermont is full of good people who seek to do the right things for the right reasons. And our schools are microcosm of that cultural reality. I wish to thank you for providing us with the opportunity to work to deliver on our promises to meet and exceed your expectations and contribute able to Vermont to its recovery and to his future success. Thank you for having me today. Thank you. And in hoping you'll submit your written testimony. There's a lot there. And it'll give us an opportunity since we, I do don't want to cut Mr. Nichols short but we do have time for a couple of brief questions, if people have them. I think my only question really is how are you communicating or how are they communicating the Department of Health with the superintendent's association I mean we just finished a long conversation with Dr. Levine where he took us through why certain decisions were being made. And how those decisions are being made I think it would be helpful for you and your association to have similar conversation I'm just wondering what that looks like. So you bet Senator Campion I'll speak first then defer to Jeff. My interaction with the Department of Health or our districts really occurs largely through our school nurses, when there are situations when there are cases that's where the line of communication occurs and that's how things are processed when there are positive cases and tracing that needs to be done. Jeff, are you able to speak to our interactions with the Department of Health as an association. I mean it happens at a number of different levels so Dan French gave a good characterization of how the agency of education works with the field and he's our lead contact. The, we have representatives on the strong and healthy start initiative and Jay Nichols who's going to speak next is actually on that committee I'm not. That committee has the health department represented in a number of different positions. So they bring science and the public health approach to the to the conversations we don't have we have almost no interaction with Commissioner Levine. And what Dave alluded to in his testimony was, you know, oftentimes will think that things are heading in one direction, and then the governor will have a press conference and we find out that it's moving in a different direction so just like you would expect in any large organization. There's decisions, there's models and so on and so forth so when Dave ounce talks about challenges associated with communications. You know, not a week goes by that we don't hear about some operational challenge that a school district or districts have to contend with. Because there are expectations that have been set that don't materialize that way, and your committee in its conversation with both Secretary French and Commissioner Levine touched on that with the matter of vaccinations, for example. And what we have done is we've become pretty adept at rolling with the punches as it were. But when Dave ounce talks about the implications of social media and how word spreads in a school community, you know, and it might be about a decision to go remote or to, to sort of contend with the dynamics of the coven that is a real time experience for superintendents on a daily basis. Another very quick example I'm getting texts right this minute about another meeting that we're hosting currently you're going to see this issue in the form of at age 48 at the end of this week, trying to navigate town meeting and voting in the, in the, in the COVID era right so districts like Dave ounces which is a unified district for communities. They've got real issues with sort of synchronizing what the municipalities want to do vis a vis what the schools are doing just to get smooth voting procedures. And then the last example I'll leave you with and if you want to delve into this we can come back and have a more sort of conversational approach. But the, the point that Dave ounce made about employment issues as the federal programs changed and people are eligible for various forms of employment benefit. I imagine, you know, people are extremely interested about that because it's their livelihood. So it's, it's a too long a winded way of saying it is a constant navigation, everybody's very well intended, but the channels within the river as we move forward to the state are, you know, they get royally, it's a, it's very, very challenging. And one of the, one of my jobs has become just checking in with people on a daily basis, making sure they're okay because superintendents are, you know, they work hard anyway but they're working harder more hours, many days more than even ever before. Same thing for principals and everybody teachers it's just, it's taking its toll, but there's a tremendous amount of resiliency and I think we should just all be, you know, despite, despite all of it be very, very proud for where we are as a state. Now I think we are and we appreciate the two of you coming in and we will likely have you back sooner rather than later I do want to turn it now to Mr Nichols. So we don't cut him short. Mr Nichols good to see you again. As you know, we, we do need to stop a little bit before four o'clock and I apologize for running a little bit late with our prior witness if you feel as though we are cutting you short in any way. So of course welcome to come back tomorrow but we are eager to hear what the principal's association or principal statewide are seeing and turn it over to you. Okay, I think she is going to share this screen genie is the one that we won't use that we don't need to use and so that we can save time if you can go to the one that just has the table in it. I'm Jay Nichols for the record executive director of the Vermont principal's association. The VPA was founded in 1915 we were known as the Vermont headmasters, and they were founded basically to regulate high school sports in the state of Vermont. 1989 it became the Vermont principal's association and over the last several decades, the VPA has become more involved with legal support. Education, professional learning, supporting in the legislature and genie this is the one we that we don't want. The other one why she's doing that. I will let you know that VPA is made up of 600 members, principals, assistant principals and athletic directors, and we have an executive council that represents the entire state of 15 individuals, career center director and assistant principal and a retired principal and then the other ones are all active participating principals and current principals. Do you see the other, do you see the other document that I submitted. See here. I have it on my screen if I can take over as host that would work too but. Are you with us. I am with you I can't find the document so Jay can you share it. Yep, I've got it right here am I a host now. I will make you one. Okay, you should see a document now on my screen that says Senate education testimony VPA logo on the top everybody see that. Yes, okay perfect. I submitted three pieces of documentation to you and I realized we don't have time to go over the model the first one is just an overview of the VPA, how it works what benefits our members get those types of things, and I'm willing to come back anytime to answer any questions on that. The third one that I also won't share with you is an educator bill that we'd like you to consider as a committee bill that is about educator retirement. It goes right to Senator Lyons questions around substitute teachers and how we can use for subs and for hiring personnel that we're having trouble hiring. We're proposing a retirement bill that would allow people to come out of retirement to feel hard to feel positions, and as superintendent yelts can tell you and executive director Francis. There's a huge issue across the state, especially in our rule schools. We have retired science teachers and math teachers that we could easily use, as well as specialists and special ed that are in retirement because of our retirement system they can only make a certain amount. So they're not willing to come back at a retirement. So please take a look at that we can talk about that further some other time. In terms of the table that I put together I just wanted to share a couple quick thoughts and give you time for questions that was really my main purpose. The major issues are the buckets on the left hand side and these are issues I've heard from principles since March broadband connectivity. Huge problem I've written a couple grants for with a couple legislators last year to try to get more money into the equity issue for the state of Vermont it's a huge equity issue for our for our kids. It makes remote learning, you know, very less than desirable and many cases, many kids simply cannot access the opportunity. Other people have talked about remote learning. I think David yelts said it best, you know, it's better, it's, you know, it's better than we thought it could be in a lot of cases but it's certainly no substitute for in person instruction. We need to get kids back to in person instruction to do that we need to make sure we can mitigate the virus. So that it's safe to do so substitute teachers I just touched on hiring teachers staff and administrators across the state is a huge problem as we're as we're looking forward. I've had a number of principles this year telling me they're going to retire early, at least in part due to the situation with dealing with the pandemic. I know that's the case with teachers to some national surveys are showing that many principles and teachers and superintendents are talking about retiring 234 years earlier than they were initially planning because of the stress brought on by this year. Whether people follow through that or not we you know we don't know at this time, but prior to this, we had an education pipeline problem. We need more educators in the field, and one area we can tap into is our retired educators that we don't use nearly well enough, and you'll see in the educated retirement bill document that I shared with you. Some states are already doing this, and we have plenty of people that come to Vermont from other states, I take principal ships and draw their full retirement, after being a principal for 25 or 30 years somewhere else. And we need to look at doing that in our own state. School budgets and another piece I put in there I think I'm nervous about this number of principles have told me they're already being directed to cut budgets. And we think the social emotional and academic needs of our students are certainly the highest they've been in my 30 something years in this industry. I also asked you to make sure that the administration helps support the administration to use federal funds and other sources to the degree possible to help keep the taxpayer rate burdened down. Flexibility is going to be really important with the funds that we just received, and with the next package that we're hoping is going to come with President elect Biden's administration. Early childhood. I want to quickly touch on that. The VPA has a position statement that all four year old should be provided early kindergarten access. We see this as being another equity issue. Our neediest children do not get access right now. What we have an Act 166 in many cases is a subsidy for people that already have money and already have day cares for their children. If we're serious about supporting our most vulnerable children that we need to do what Oklahoma did and some other states have done in the country of France has done and have full day school opportunities for our four year olds in school or schools if they can't don't have the room, they'd have to provide it in a partnership with another provider. And I'll be glad to speak to you anytime on that as I've been preaching it for quite a few years now. We have a lot of education funding we know the waiting study is going to be a big issue. I would suggest here, if at all possible that if the waiting study starts and one of the education committees the conversations around that. I think it would be better. If it was in your committee center champion, simply because the Senate has ability to have a broader perspective than the house. It's not going to knock on anybody it's just you have you represent more constituents, you're more likely to have people from different towns that could be seen as quote winners and losers, whereas in house somebody might represent only one or two towns. So it's just something to think about that's going to be critical work and the 20,000 foot view is going to be better than the 20 foot view Act 46. So for any legislation that would allow people to pull out of mergers. We think that a lot of work was done on that and we need to try to stay at the course with that to provide more opportunities for students. And then finally and most importantly, and I know I'm going really fast. I know you have another meeting education recovery. Oh you're doing great. Take your time. We don't want to rush you you can always come back this is excellent testimony and I love the layout it's it's very well done. Education recovery is the big one. Secretary French has talked about that in our meetings on Friday afternoons. I've been bringing this up for a while and the agency of education has said right rightly that they were not ready to turn their eyes towards it yeah and now that now they are. I'm not just thinking academics I think there's a lot we can do in academics I think the covert relief funds again federal the federal funds we need lots of flexibility. We need to be looking at things like mass tutoring work study internships credit recovery programs, even even paying students to do internships you know that allow them to do the proficiency is necessary to get their graduation requirements. We need to think out of the box on this this this recovery situation is going to be three to five years if things go well. It's not going to be an overnight fix and we all know that. And then lastly the last sentence there the social emotional needs are immense. We have a lot of kids who are tuning out, especially in places that are more remote. We have a lot of kids that are not even participating in remote learning. Or are only coming to school on the two days that they might be in person if they're a hybrid. That's a huge issue that principals and superintendents are dealing with Secretary of French is right I don't really see it as much as a truancy issue as an engagement issue. And we need to find a way to get these kids back into the fold. And if we don't our whole economy and our whole social fabric is going to suffer for the inability to do that. And I'll just conclude my written remarks right there and I've shared the materials with you and I'm glad to come back anytime to speak to your committee. Thank you for your questions. That was great. Okay, questions. See, I've got. I can see everybody. Somebody has their hand up. I'm not seeing it. Cheryl, please. Thank you, thank you, Senator. Thank you, Mr. Nichols. I'm, I had asked the question of Secretary French about what was being done for the staff with regard to helping to relieve the stress and I didn't know if the principal's association and the superintendent's association had any insight as to what is being done to address the inordinate stress that's being placed on staff. That's a great question what we've done I can't speak for other organizations for we've done is through a partnership with the Center for creative leadership and a grant fund that we have that was an endowment left to the BPA. Through the Center for creative leadership and what's called the Waddington initiative. Dr. Waddington was a doctor from Rutland, Vermont left $14 million that essentially is goes to the BPA and the Center for creative leadership. And what we've done with some of that money we're living off the principles we set up a number of workshops that are free this year 12 of them so far, three of them are around building resistance and helping people deal with stress. We've also had workshops with Dave Melnick who's spoken to two principles and teachers he's works for NFI he's a what probably the top known state person for working with schools around issues of mental health and taking care of yourself. And we also have several other trainings that are coming up in partnership with the Center for creative leadership that are on things like stress reduction, how to take care of yourself so you can take care of the kids. And those are limited spots there's we only have opening for 30 in each group because of the constraints of the grant, but by the time it's done we're going to have served about 300 Vermont educators for for free and no cost to them at all. We're trying to do our part there the second thing that that we've done. This is through partnership with the Vermont Community Fund and VSA has helped us by by serving on a grant committee with us. We've had a lot of money given to our organization as grant money to provide mini grants to schools, and we've set up outdoor classrooms and schools have done this work and come applied to us and got the grant money. And we've given out about a quarter of a million dollars so far since since the start of the school year. And tons of schools have received money and they submit grants and many of those things are around things like mental health for teachers with their students that they all have to have a student focus on them. But things like yoga in the classroom as crazy as that might sound. There's a lot of research supporting things like that, that helped deactivate stress. So we've been trying to do a lot of that but we've got a lot more we could do Senator Hooker. Thank you. And, and Superintendent ounce I left Mill River the year that you came. I'm sorry I have to work with you. I hope I didn't drive you off Senator hooker I hope that was not the case. You know the question you just asked, I'll give a local response first and then try to speak a little bit more broadly. We just finished negotiations with our support staff we ratified an agreement and actually for the first time we have a wellness benefit that is included in our support where kind of a tangible exchange of accumulated leave time and people can use that to receive reimbursement for things that promote physical activity outdoor activity you know we just have a list of things that we are looking at that are acceptable and looking to build upon that we're still negotiating with teachers and working through that process as you folks know how that plays out. On a more informal level, you know I found with with superintendent colleagues, we used to meet and the Rutland delegation and Bennington County delegation, you know we would have formal meetings with with our legislative leaders but also as as we tend to meet monthly in our regional groups and it won't surprise you that those meetings have greatly increased in quantity and frequency. And I found that from the standpoint of a superintendent's life, the collegial support and camaraderie and problem solving that occurs in that context helps people from a well being standpoint. We've also seen that translate with school staff in general, you know creating opportunities for people to get together and just share what they're experiencing to be candid about their anxieties and their difficulties to be transparent and get ideas from that is really positive and really productive. On the broader VSA level, we are, we've created some of the same opportunities and formalize those we have every couple weeks we have drop in meetings usually focused around two key topics one coven 19 navigation, and the other racial equity and equity leadership in the state of Vermont and again sharing ideas talking about challenges and successes and just just using group, group understanding group ideas and candidly group of motion to help people make good decisions so nothing, nothing fancy but definitely tangible and impactful. Jeff, is there anything that I missed on the VSA side that would be worth sharing. The only thing I would add is it's, you know, and I think this is for every cohort or segment of the education delivery system, the connection that's been formed among superintendents who are who I work with is just remarkable and I think it's probably true for people and teachers as well. So, you know, the rallying of the community despite the challenges is just extraordinarily impressive. That stated, you know, I do have conversations with Dave as president from time to time and suggest, you know, checking in on colleagues because these positions are pretty lonely and stressful and we need to be watching out for one another. And I think everybody know that but there's nothing more significant than following up with action and we try to inspire that and make sure people reach out. So it's, you know, that that's the life we're living right now. All right. Any other final questions. Thank you everybody for coming in. And as for a committee if we could just stick around for one more minute. Again, thank you, Mr. Nichols. Thank you. Mr. Francis. Good to see you all. I think housekeeping items one going back to some of the priorities that we talked about earlier today. One that I didn't mention is hopefully partnering with the Biden administration as it comes as it is with regard to whatever their priorities might be. Some might match with the state. Others might not, but certainly making the case that Vermont is small nimble. If they're looking to try certain things would be great if they would look at us as a laboratory whether it has something to do with free college tuition reimbursements, early childhood broadband, those are the kinds of things that I think we're well positioned no matter what political stripe you might be from. I believe Senator Leahy is going to be the chair of appropriations. We, you know, we want to align ourselves as much as possible and sometimes it might work sometimes it might not sometimes some of their priorities might not match with ours. But it's something that I'm certainly interested in. And then secondly, Jeannie, if you wouldn't mind sharing your cell phone with folks, if you would email that around, that would be great if you're comfortable doing so. That way people can text you if they're having difficulty getting online or if they have a specific question. I'm not comfortable with that. That's absolutely fine as well. But if so it would be terrific I think sometimes we miss saying things in the chat. Final thoughts, comments, concerns at this point. I guess Senator Hooker please. I'm glad you brought up that you had forgotten something this morning as did I and I'm sure that we'll have other opportunities won't we to bring up topics. One of the ones a tuition reimbursement I remember being having my loan forgiven. And I think that's something that's been played in and taught in the state, and I can see that as a possibility for education as well as for health people in the healthcare industry. So, I think I hope that we can talk about stuff like that. Yeah, and really, really informative today. Oh, good. Good. I think the other piece for me is, you know, I'm having a bill drafted and please anybody else interested let me know. But we keep talking about this being a unique year and I wonder if we should be exploring, allowing students to have a free year at CCV 13th year if you will, an opportunity to continue their learning that things might not things may have been missed you know this is, this is again a unique year unique circumstances, and I think, you know, looking at it that way and using some of these funds to say you're graduating next year, you know, the free year at CCV to take additional courses or to start your college education is something I'm certainly interested in and just ping me if you would like to be a part of it and I'll send it around when we're finished drafting. Anything else from the committee before I let you go and a few of us have to go to another meeting. Otherwise, we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you. Thanks.