 Good morning and welcome to your house education committee. Today is Thursday, April 22nd, 2021. And we're gonna be in today's session with testimony on Senate bill S13. It's an act relating to the implementation of the pupil waiting factors report. With us this morning is Mr. Alberghini. He was the superintendent of Mount Mansfield, modified unit district. And is it Edie, Eddie, Edie? Edie Gannon, right? Edie Granick. Yeah, great. And who's the board chair of the Mount Mansfield modified unit school district and Aaron McGuire, who's back with us, director of equity and inclusion, Essex Westford school district. And welcome to all of you this morning. And I think we'll start with Mr. Alberghini this morning. Testimony, if you are ready to go. I am, thank you. Hopefully I'm not echoing. I'm out at one of our schools. Pretty quiet here, we're on break, but still a lot going on in the building. I'm gonna be referencing some notes today that I took after examining the waiting study again yesterday. But first I wanted to start by saying that I fundamentally support examining and considering changes that provide additional funding for students that are economically disadvantaged and fully recognize the need to update some of the categorical grants and analyze the pupil waiting because it's been approximately 20 years since it has been adjusted. Additionally, I agree with many of the positions and the findings in the waiting study, specifically that additional funding is necessary to equitably and effectively educate economically disadvantaged students. I wanna be very careful in not coming across in any way, shape, or form as apathetic or uncaring or unsupportive of additional support for economically disadvantaged students because that is far from the case. And I have some information that I would like to share with the committee and some questions that I'd ask the committee to consider. Again, I reviewed the executive summary in the full summary yesterday and something I didn't notice and I hadn't noticed in the past was any mention of the consolidated federal grant money, specifically Title I funds. These are funds that I'm sure you know that are allocated to schools based on poverty factors and school districts with a higher poverty factor is determined by the US Department of Ed receive more funds than districts with lower poverty rates. Now, this is non-education spending revenue. So it's not included in education spending for equalized pupil or a district's overall education spending but you could identify it if you look at overall spending. Pre the waiting study, I did a quick analysis as I was looking at some local districts and comparing our education spending and overall budget to others. And what I found was there were some districts who based on their size and scale, their education spending per equalized pupil was pretty close to ours, but their overall spending per pupil or overall spending for the overall budget was higher. And that might be something that the committee wants to consider or a task force. And it's something I didn't notice in the waiting report. Recently, I think the ASSER funds demonstrate the differences from district to district and federal support. When you look at the outline of the districts, some districts are receiving 40 to 50% of their total annual operating budget when you combine ASSER one, two and three, while others are in the single digits. For example, Mount Mansfield is about 1.4% of our annual budget. Based on the communication that I've received from the AOE, title one funds are allocated in the same manner as ASSER. I may have missed it, but I didn't see included in the waiting study any reference to the consolidated federal grant monies or title one. I also have some questions and I didn't notice this in the waiting study around the differences in home values from town to town and how this affects the tax rate and how education spending per equalized pupil affects funding, some of the differences in tax rates from town to town and how this might influence taxpayers. MMU comparatively gets very little title one funding and therefore non-special ed support, which most of our non-education spending is from the special education support, that non-special ed support services and resources that comes directly from our education spending. This is also something that's different from district to district. When I also wanna share that, I understand whenever you're trying to create equity, there are layers of complexity that are needed and that this is no doubt a complex endeavor and process because there's a lot of variables to consider. Some of these are, who might benefit from the changes to the student waiting? Not just schools, but community members, taxpayers. How will it be regulated so that you're able to attain the intended purposes? How will the state make sure that it's not incentivizing unintended outcomes or inefficiencies? When I looked at the preliminary analysis from February 6th, 2020, that the Joint Fiscal Office offered and in it, it indicated that, and this is based on FY20 and some of the variables that were outlined in that analysis and MMU's tax rate would go up 35 cents if the waiting changes were enacted based on the recommendations in the waiting study. This would be catastrophic for our district and our students and I'm not underestimating that. The cuts we'd need to make to pass a budget would be extreme. A three to five cent increase would be significant and very difficult. So I wanted the committee to hear a little bit about that. And I also wanted to share that Malmanceville was one of the first districts that unified. We repurposed the school pretty recently to better serve students number one, to eliminate central office costs and rent that were not going to students at all to optimize space in the buildings and staffing and to right size classrooms. The districts made some really difficult decisions over the last several years. These decisions are intended to offer students a high quality education at a cost that the electric grid can support. Post merger and unification of the school district. The district's tax rate has been stable, up or down slightly. While our K to 12 enrollment fortunately has stopped declining pretty much. It's leveled off, it's relatively static. Raising the tax rate without any decisions or spending adjustments of the district, it has me really, really concerned. And I'm not sure what we would do if we, honestly if the tax rate went up five, 10 cents that would be incredibly difficult. And some of the cuts we'd be forced to make would be ones that I really don't even want to think about or contemplate. So in closing, I ask and hope that if the task force is put together, that it considers some of the information and complexities that I've shared with the committee today. I'm also hopeful that we can offer additional support to economically disadvantaged students while not increasing the property tax rates on hardworking taxpayers in Mount Mansfield Unified Union School District. So that lot there, I appreciate you listening to some of the information that I've garnered over the last several weeks. And hope that we can find some ways to better support economically disadvantaged students and not raise the tax rate on folks in Mount Mansfield who are really supportive of our schools and have sacrificed a lot, certainly in the pandemic, but over the last several years to make good decisions to best meet the needs of students. So thank you for your comments, Mr. Alberghini. It's much appreciated. We do have a couple of questions. Representative Austin. Yes, thank you for your testimony. You made a lot of points in your presentation. I'm wondering if you could possibly create some language that our committee could look at in terms of questions. So we could look at them to propose for the task force to get answers to your questions or for them to look at it. Would that be possible? Oh, and would you want me to do that now or at a later time and send those to you? Probably, I think as soon as possible, but just to frame them in question so we can look at them and say, well, include these questions for the task force to study. Yes, I can certainly do that. One right off the top of my head would be, we're consolidated federal grant monies considered in the waiting study. And again, I want to, at our board meeting last week, we try to be really delicate around this because we don't want to come across as not caring about students that are living in poverty. We have students that are economically disadvantaged in our school district and we know it costs more money to educate them. But I think it's really important to, if you can be comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges and get a full breadth of what the revenue picture looks like for school districts. Thank you. Thank you. Representative Till. John, it's so nice to see you. How are you? I hope you're well. I know you've been concerned about how the poverty calculation is arrived at. And I know you've made some inquiries about that as I have. And my most recent inquiries have turned up that in all of the Mount Mansfield district and that we had 107 students considered poverty students. That didn't seem very realistic to me. We also had in the town of Richmond, zero. And in the town of Jericho, zero. Which again, does not make any sense to me. So I just wondered if you had gotten any more information than I have or if you've come to any better understanding of how this is getting these crazy numbers or getting calculated. Well, it's great to see you too, George. I hope you're well. And thank you for coming today. This is a super important topic and one that truly affects our school district. I have no idea how they came up with those numbers. I've got to be totally honest with you. That is not accurate. We know that's not accurate. I know folks in both towns that are living in poverty and economically disadvantaged. And I haven't gotten good answers. And it is much more complex than I ever thought it would be. And that's another, I mean, I guess that's a good segue I think to making sure that a task force or in the legislature and possibly important committees understand the actual math that goes into coming up with these poverty counts. Because as representative Till shared, that's just not, that's not the case. Those numbers are not right. Thank you. I would like to take a moment to welcome chair Ansel and members of her committee, the Ways and Means Committee to this conversation. Nice to have you back with us again today. Representative Williams. Yes, thank you. I just have a quick question. I was curious as to your success rate on getting your school budgets passed. Yeah, it's been really good. I would say it's been very good. And one of the reasons is we have been able to control our tax rate. And one of something that I think is important for folks to know is that, again, we get very little revenue from the federal government with the exception of special ed, which is categorical in Vermont and based on the number of IEP students that you have and what their needs are. So almost all of the support that we give students either who were at risk comes from education spending. So it comes from property tax revenue. And we have been diligent and worked really, really hard to make sure that we're optimizing all the resources and literally every nickel and penny of taxpayer support so that it's going to kids, students' needs and helping them be successful post high school. Thank you. Representative Till. Yeah, I could speak to that too as I was the finance chair on that board for a number of years. And since the merger, we have done very well. It kind of correlates with when I left the board. I don't know if there's anything to explain it there, but prior to the merger though, we had multiple years where we failed budgets. And it was not an area where it was given that we would pass it. I mean, I went through at least three failed budgets while I was there. Yep, that's, and I was around for some of those budget failures pre the merger and part of it was the volatility in the tax rate and people just saying, look, we can't afford a 10 cent increase in our tax rate. And you get into crisis budgeting and you make decisions that are not necessarily in the best interest of students. So I don't want to relive that because as representative Till said, it's not good for the school community and it certainly isn't good for students. And that part of the reason why I wanted to come today to talk to the committee is because I'm very concerned that if the tax rate goes up without any decisions or actions or adjustments of the district, it will be a big, big deal. Thank you for presenting today and we'll move on to Ms. Ghani. Yeah, so I'm here to support John. I'm here to share similar things. I will restate a little bit of what George said. We had about our last budget didn't pass about seven or eight years ago. And that was, I believe, a three or four cent increase in our tax rate that didn't pass. I think it was not a lot. We really have been incredibly careful about the way we spend money. And we've really looked at everything that you all have done in Montpelier to make schools more efficient and to make sure that costs to tax payers the money goes directly to students. And so we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy ensuring that our students who are at risk get the supports that they need. We support summer programs for them. We support after-school programs. We support as much as we can. And one of the focuses of our board is how to how to bridge that gap for those students and how to make sure that all of our students are high achievers. So we are just very concerned the way that this is looking. It would be at a huge detriment to those students as well as to all of our students to have that large of a tax increase. I don't really have anything else to add. Thank you. I see Chair Webb is back with us and I will turn this meeting back to the chair. Thank you. And I was able to hear part of your testimony and I will say that we are going to have a little bit more of a discussion at 11 o'clock regarding the Title I and allocations and how that's allocated. And I'm pretty sure that we're not gonna get a full answer because I think we're all pretty struggling with how that is actually calculated at the federal level. But I take your point of looking at how consolidated federal funds need to be addressed in this as well. Thank you for that. That was it. So I think we're up to Erin McGuire from the Essex Westford School District. Hi, good morning. Thank you for having me. Good to see all of you. I'm Erin McGuire. I'm the Director of Equity and Inclusion for the Essex Westford School District. I'm also the Co-Director of Student Support Services. It's worth noting that I'm also the President of the National Organization for Special Education Directors and will be inserting some comments around this topic related to some federal requirements around special education as it intersects with the topic. But really I come to you today as a representative of Essex Westford. And Essex Westford School District is a district that would be substantially impacted by implementation of the models that were included in UVM's study. And we would stand to lose a sizable amount of programming in order to manage forward with a reasonable tax rate. I think John's comments apply to Essex Westford as well. One of the things that feels really important to share is that Essex Westford has taken on equity as a substantial component of our work in our school district. And part of that effort is recognizing redistribution of resources as it relates to historically marginalized populations. It also means that we invest in ensuring that the voices of people who have not historically been represented at the table are at the decision-making table. And the work in the district comes in many forms. And it feels important to note that because it seems that the implementation of this is dedicated to equity. And so it wouldn't be reasonable in the same way that John shared for Essex Westford to come to the table and say, oh, we don't want you to consider this because we will lose as opposed to saying equity is essential. And that does sometimes mean redistribution of resources is related to historically marginalized populations and underserved populations. And so I come to you today with some requests and recommendations in order to help that move forward for our state in a way that supports all of us forward toward equity. We are all better off from an equitable system. And so that is really critical on the front end of the testimony. In looking at the design of the task force under S-13, one of the things that I think we see as missing in the bill itself is the voice of practitioners. Grateful for the engagement with our statewide organizations in the context of who sort of has voice in this process. But one of the things that we would like to strongly suggest, and I think it's supported by this conversation, too, around the federal Title I funds and the process by which the numbers show up and how that happens is to ensure in this bill that there are actual simulations of decisions that get made. I think that we have done a lot of work in this state to try to create a myriad of changes in educational funding as well as practice. And sometimes I think we could do a better job of actually modeling out the impacts of what's about to happen based on ideas or decisions that get floated at the statewide policy level. So we'd really encourage that simulations take place. I think maybe a sampling of large and small districts and ensuring that the sampling and the simulation activities incorporate the administrators in the districts that are being simulated so that you can hear and understand in that process from the people who would have to implement that, maybe board members as well, from those districts. So that's something that we would like to recommend to the task force. In addition, we'd like to really recommend that there is a conversation about phasing in the impact. One of the things that we know, and I think John described it well, is that when you have sudden and radical changes in funding in school districts, in either direction, it can be really challenging to implement quickly. And so one of the ways that we can avoid program to program arguments about who's supposed to stay and who's supposed to get cut, as well as unexpected increases in funding and how to spend those well is to move in through a phase in of the impact as opposed to a sudden impact. And so this also I think would allow us to think about implementing in a way that really enhanced efficiencies to John's point and as opposed to drastic cuts in order to maintain a tax rate in the same way that was described earlier, I think we would struggle to pass a budget with a 35 cent increase. What we would need to do is cut our spending. We would need to bring the spending down. That means cuts to positions. We know that 80% of budgets are staffing. And we would have to really do some work around that likely. So we think phase in might be a good approach and would encourage that to be a consideration within S13 formally as a suggestion for consideration. Brigham was a long time ago, and the Brigham case sought to bring equity into the Vermont education finance system. And over the years, we've had a number of changes to try to bring equity into the funding system in Vermont. And if we're going to center equity and investment in students, then it seems important in some way to ensure that implementation in whatever it might look like through this process is not used to necessarily simply decrease tax rates in places where there is more investment. So I think EWSD is supportive of an equitable reallocation of resources to ensure that our most needy students have increased investment at its core. And that feels hard to talk about if that money is going to be used to decrease tax rates as opposed to invest in student outcomes. And so we would ask that you think about that as you look forward into the future of this task force. And if we're decreasing tax rates, I'm not sure we're getting an equity. And equity is what this is about. Two more sort of topics, and then I'll end with a couple of review recommendations. In S13, you've included a component of the intersection of Act 173 and the people waiting to say, well, the Senate did. And I think that makes good sense. VCSEA and other organizations have said we really feel like the intersection of Act 173 and implementation of this people waiting factor report is really important. Act 173 and the census implementation will absolutely decrease the amount of state investment at the state level in special education and move those costs to the local side of the ledger. So we have state funds that we implement in special education and we have local funds that we implement in special education. And so while we implement Act 173 census models and then we also implement a substantial change to the waiting factors, those will intersect in ways that are substantial. And the simulation activities that I described should absolutely be a component of this, this Act 173 census change. So please be careful about modeling without the contextual underpinnings of our current circumstances. That gives false narratives related to outcome. So what we need to do is we need to make sure that when we model these changes that we do so in the context of implementation of the census grant design under Act 173. The last area of focus, and I see a hand up. Do you want me to keep going or? Why don't you finish this point and then we'll get to Representative Moslin. OK, thank you. So the last point I would like to make is one that I have made in front of several of you before, which is that in special education at the federal level, there is something called maintenance of effort. Maintenance of effort requires that you spend at least the same amount as you did the year before between state and local dollars. That's specific to LEAs, the local education agency. There is something called maintenance of effort at the state level, which I think the Agency of Education has come and presented on a series of times. There is a separate maintenance of effort requirement related to local districts. And so it's important to note that regardless of whether we're talking about Act 173 or we're talking about implementation of the waiting study, there are limitations on the amount of cuts that can happen in special education without substantial reduction to the federal dollars in special education that show up in Vermont. So I just want to make sure everyone is really clear and understands that as we move into these conversations because the more we reduce spending and try to shift funds into other spaces, there are some limitations in special education. That protection is at the federal level in order to stop states from divesting in students with disabilities as a marginalized population who needs the investment in order to ensure the future success for those students. So I just want to make sure everyone understands that there is a component of special education funding that intersects, especially as we look at strong impact from the waiting factor report in a district plus the Act 173 implementation of the census grant. It doesn't mean we can't do these things. It's all about knowing your impact. If we don't know our impact, then our decisions will not land as we may have intended. So with that, just a couple of overarching recommendations, a recommendation to phase in the change, a recommendation that we expect investment in students when we redistribute resources as opposed to a decrease in tax rates, to run simulations on final decisions from the task force to ensure that we understand our impact, to expect that we simulate within the context of Act 173 funding model shifts, and also to create a clear understanding in the language related to maintenance of effort for special education as we continue to make changes to the Vermont funding system for education designed to ensure equity for students. So thanks. I hope that was helpful for all of you. All of those points are in written testimony for your re-review should you need them. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Representative Noslin. Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for coming in today. Your testimony was very helpful. You said not too long ago in your testimony that if more resources are put in for some of the things in the waiting that the burden will shift to the local level, could you be more specific about why that would happen? So my comments were specific to the Act 173 census model implementation where the phasing of the Act 173 census model for special education funding will decrease for many districts the investment in special education from the state level and therefore will shift the ledger to the local level. That's tied to that maintenance of effort conversation I just had because local plus state has to equal the prior year. There are some exceptions to that, but efficiency in systems is not one of those exceptions. If you have a high cost student leave, you can reduce your maintenance of effort by that amount. But generally speaking, it's the federal expectation that in special ed we invest the same amount from the prior year between state and local. So if the state is implementing a certain amount and the local is implementing a certain amount, those together equal what you need to spend the next year. And if we see the census grant decrease the investment from the state to the locals related to special education in order to maintain effort, we will have to increase the amount of local dollars invested in special education. I hope that helps. It was less related to the specifics of the waiting study other than to say that any reduced programming that happens from the waiting study also cannot be within the context of special education unless we're going to decide that we are not maintaining effort federally at the local level for special education. It will need to come out of general education programming primarily. So just as a point of reference as we think about the impact of the waiting factor study and implementation of it. So and maintenance of effort is held at the state level as well as the local level, correct? So go to it. They are separate calculations as well. And interestingly under federal law, the state has more flexibility related to maintenance of effort than the locals. So for example, during COVID, state maintenance of effort had some flexibility to it from the US Department of Education. There is no sort of external administrative flexibility under the local maintenance of effort requirements under IDEA. Those are static in statute. Thank you, Representative Connell. Thank you. Same topic and Aaron, thanks very much for your testimony. It's been very informative. In what you did say, this is more of a clarification. You said that the Act 173 census funding model promises to decrease state investment in special education and shift costs over time to the local side of the ledger. But that's not true for all districts. That's just again, much like the pupil waiting study, some will potentially see a benefit, some will potentially see a decrease. Yeah, I mean, the implementation of Act 173 requires that the original census grant be a combination of a certain set of years of spending and it's not the current year. And so unless a school district has decreased its special education spending one year over another, which is unlikely, especially given maintenance of effort as well as climbing costs of special education, then the original census amount that a school district will receive will likely be lower than the prior year's state investment. Does that make sense? Yeah, my understanding is a little different, but my understanding is also a lot more basic and simplified. I think you're probably far more correct than I am. So thank you. Well, I mean, you know, ultimately the goal of Act 173 is to sort of level out the census grant, but it's also my understanding that ultimately there was a goal to save funds at the state level in special education through the conversation, that it wasn't simply an attempt to shift to a census grant without reducing some of the special education costs. We know that special education in Vermont is very expensive, particularly as you compare it nationwide. So I didn't necessarily design my comments related to the underpinnings of Act 173. I think there are definitely important conversations to have on both sides of that. And BCSEA, of which I'm a member, did support the implementation of a census grant. We are supportive of moving forward with that model and ready to try to support and think with school districts related to how to manage some of those impacts when you capitalize that with the impact to some districts from the implementation of the weighting factor report. There's some substantial potential for challenge for some districts, not all. I absolutely agree about the importance of looking at the intersection of those two issues. Thank you. Thanks. I do believe it was modeled in a couple of ways how that was factored in as well in the weighting study, whether it was just considered based on ADM or perhaps was a weighted number as well which is in her calculation. Representative Williams. Yes, thank you. Earlier in your testimony, you mentioned something about redistribution of the funds. Is there a policy or a written guarantee or any document that guarantees that these monies would go directly to the students? Not that I know of. I mean, it's one of the reasons that I... Do you mean locally as we're doing this work in our district or are you talking about through the implementation? Locally. So locally, we are in the process of developing an equity policy and we subscribe to the concept of investing where investment has been lacking in order to address systemic barriers for students where that has been present. And so that's a conversation. It's not sort of a formal written document but is a conversation that we have regularly as we make decisions and ask ourselves questions about whether or not our decisions center equity. So as we have conversations about our budget, equity is an underlying factor and ensuring that we are having those conversations is something that our school board and our administrators are dedicated to having to ensure that that conversation about where are we investing and who's benefiting most from the dollars we invest is something that we have conversation about. But it's not sort of what I would describe as a formal policy. It's more of a practice and an overarching umbrella or maybe even a foundation of our budgeting process. Okay, thank you. Sure. Just a question about Title I, we have heard testimony that the state sends Title I money back and when I talk to people around the country they can't believe we're sending Title I money back. That we heard from one district that it's very hard to plan budgeting when you have to hire before you know what your funds are. Are you as well finding that you're sending Title I money back? I am unaware that we have sent Title I money back but I do not manage those funds. Our director of learning and innovation does and what I would say to that comment is that it is very challenging given some of the federal restrictions on those monies and the timing of the knowledge of how much we have versus when we budget that that is an active challenge in our system. We are regularly in conversation trying to figure out how to manage those issues for certain. I'm not sure if it's resulted in us needing to send money back. I would hope not. Our goal is always to invest every dollar that we receive as best we can to meet the needs of students. I also earlier in the testimony there was comment about the federal percentage of students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and one of the things that I'm worried about as I was listening to that this isn't in my written testimony but it occurred to me as I was listening to John talk about it is that we are about to have some real limitations in identifying the numbers of students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged because one of the primary ways we do that is through the free and reduced lunch applications and because of the amazing work of the legislature and all of the leaders and nationally too around investment in food during the pandemic. I'm a little bit worried about the number of people who are going to complete those forms given that they haven't had to in order to get access to food. And so I would encourage us to be thinking carefully about how are we defining the numbers because we wouldn't be using models from 2018-19, right? I mean, we would need to remodel on current numbers I would assume. And I'm a little bit worried about the free and reduced lunch numbers. And I don't know if John agrees with that or not but I just think we're going to be challenged to know the number of students who are economically disadvantaged if that's the number that we use. Thank you. Just up to, not Mansfield, are you aware of sending title funds back? Yeah, I don't believe so. We do have some carryover. And as Erin mentioned, it's complicated because you don't get what your allocation is gonna be until you sometimes in the fall of the school year that you're in. So, and there's some caveats to it where you have to save 15% of it and that can become hard to sort of track and manage. But we're not sending title one money back that I'm aware of. And we have applied for some carryover waivers but which have been approved. Those are much easier to apply. And I would just add quickly that I'm really concerned about the free and reduced lunch numbers because they're not gonna be accurate. And some of the data that I saw, they're using information from 2017 to figure out what the poverty rate is. And I have big, big questions on the accuracy of that. Thank you. So I believe we are finished with this section. Very much appreciate your input. We will be, the Education Committee will be looking directly at the questions before the task force and we'll be working on that. At some point, it will head over to the Ways and Means Committee and they will complete their efforts as well. So hearing from the field is very important as we move forward. So with that, we will move on. I believe we have Patrick Halladay in the room who will help us with EQS. Thank you so much. Yeah. Ways and Means, you are also more than welcome to stay with us. One of the questions in the waiting study has to do with looking at education quality standards and accountability. So we would love to have you stay or some of you stay, whatever works for you. Our doors are open. Representative Kornheiser. We have completely different testimony on an entirely different subject at 1030. Okay. So I'm personally interested in this. So I'm gonna stick around for a little bit but I think we're all gonna drop off at some point before 1030. And so just wanna make sure that all the Ways and Means members are aware of that and we will exit quietly if we're in the middle of testimony. Thank you. Welcome Patrick Halladay from the Agency of Education and you are going to help us with the EQS and accountability as we move forward as it is a question in this bill. Thank you very much, Chair Webb. Vice Chair Capole, members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to provide an overview of the ed quality standards but also just to make sure that I'm answering your questions. I ask you to interrupt me at any time to ask for clarification as we're going forward. I sent some slides today. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen if that's all right just to kind of talk through. There's nothing that's particularly amazing and wonderful in those slides but it'll just ground the conversation a little bit. And I think you can probably see them right now. Yes, we can. Thank you. Good, let's see, there we go. So the education quality standards were State Board of Education Rule 2000 they're adopted in 2014. The bullets at the top, three bullets there just kind of what's the preface or the preamble I guess to those rules around substantially equal opportunities for students. But really when I talk with folks around it it's really describing what good teaching and learning in Vermont should look like and for Vermont students should look like. And I think that that's kind of the that was the intent when it came about to update what those standards are. I think it's also really important to understand that we're talking about standards not curriculum or pedagogy. These are what should be learned not how it should exactly be taught or exactly what the content of the curriculum should be. So local school boards at the LEA level have a lot of ability to determine how EQS it realized within other state and federal laws. So there's really a responsibility for that local school boards to do that interpretation work that's going forward. All right, so we think of the ed quality standards in four, five different domains. And I also want to be clear that these five domains are not how the actual law itself is organized. It's kind of internally in our office as the categories that we've put things into and academic persuasiveness, personalization, safe, healthy schools, high quality staffing, investment priorities. And if you go through the law and we did this work back in 2016, I believe, 2015, yeah, 2015, goodness, that we kind of took each part of the law and put it underneath one of these headings for us to think a little bit more succinctly about the different pieces of it. So walking through those under academic proficiency, there are a number of things that I think that would fit under that. Just general instructional practices, which I'll talk a little bit more when I get to personalization. One of the big things is the curriculum content. And so for all of these different areas, literacy, math, science, global citizenship, which is social studies and in foreign language, physical education and artistic expression, the state board of education has adopted learning standards for each of those. And then it's up to individual LEAs, SUs, SDs to develop a curriculum and pedagogy in order to meet those standards. One of the things I think that's, and it depends on what those learning standards are for each of those. For example, literacy and math is the, my goodness, I'm blanking here. Common core state standards and science are the next generation science standards, et cetera. One thing that I think is particularly novel under this curriculum content was this idea of transferable skills on the bottom. And these are cross-cutting skills across the entirety of the curriculum and that are often left out of discussions about curriculum around innovation, problem solving, creativity, et cetera. And they are applicable in all parts of those. And then I think another important thing is this local comprehensive assessment system, the LCAS, as we, as shorthand in ours, whereas all schools need to participate in the state accountability system and report those. They also have the responsibility under the ed quality standards to develop a local assessment system that really reflects the local decisions that have been made as to how to enact these various, the various curricular content areas. And that asks schools to do things to have a balanced system so it's not just relying on summative SBAC assessments at the end of the year, but also to do formative and interim assessments that these things should be done in the classroom on a daily basis, but also have benchmarks that are taking place. And it's not just random saying to teachers that you should be doing this, but really setting forth an individual system for each school as to how they, or each LEA as to how they want to be thinking about what their local values are and how they're gonna be assessing those. Are the LCAS at all mixed up in some of our other data challenges that we've been hearing about such as e-finance? LCAS is not part of e-finance at all, it wouldn't be a part of e-finance at all. And that's really in the important part, I think of the local comprehensive assessment system is that this is in all of what I'm talking about ultimately gets down to the continuous improvement plans and the LCAS are really supposed to inform continuous improvement and looking at data in a really smart way and looking at all data to make decisions about teaching and learning and going forward. So the local comprehensive assessments are not reported in the same way, at least at the state level they're not reported, they're really up to individual LEAs as to how that's done. So it's also not part of SSDDM or anything like that? Oh, I don't really work super closely with that. So I would be guessing, I don't believe that it is, but I'm not positive. You can leave it. Senator James had a question. I do, thanks Chair Webb. I think you were getting toward the same question that I wanted to learn a little bit more about which is whether the LCAS are simply used by the LEAs to kind of measure their own progress and hold themselves accountable or whether they're used by AOE to hold districts or SUs accountable? Yeah, very much the former. They're used at the local level to inform their own decisions. These are not, there are no accountability or reporting requirements that the state takes from those. We don't publish the LCAS results out. So they're very much at the local level. And they're not like a statewide framework or each district can develop its own that feels relevant. So they've already, okay. There are guidelines within the Ed Quality Standards for what a good local comprehensive assessment system would look like, but there's a lot of discrepancy or not a difference from one SU to another as to the specifics of it. For example, I'm just gonna use, pull something just out of the air. You may have a local literacy assessment. One group may choose to do the Fountas and Pinell literacy and another LEA may choose a completely different literacy assessment for local to inform those decisions. But neither of those are reported out at the state level. Okay. So it's not something you could currently use to, like you said, not apples to apples at all. Nope. And the local comprehensive assessment system was not intended to be apples to apples. Okay. Thank you. Representative Austin. Just, can you just talk a little bit more about the oversight, like kind of the accountability? Who, you know, if it's just at a local level, like how is the AOE, what's the AOE's role and, you know, accountability to make sure that these, you know, that academic proficiency standards are being met. Are you talking specifically about the local comprehensive assessment system or just academic proficiency in general? Well, I assume the local comprehensive assessment system is one component of assuring that students are meeting proficiencies. But, you know, in the end, if there's a school that, you know, when you look at their data, they're not meeting the proficiencies. They're below proficiencies that somewhat of an alarming percent. What happens? So I'll talk, let me touch on that right now. And I'll get to that in a little bit more detail at the end. Really, this is the logic of where the annual snapshot and the integrated field reviews come in and that the integrated field review and annual snapshot together, we refer to as the Ed Quality Reviews, which is where the opportunities that the state has to go and look at individual schools and individual LEAs and say, how are you doing in meeting those education quality standards? And again, I'll get into this in a little bit more detail, although I'm happy to talk about it. Now, too, the annual snapshot is annual and they're all quantitative measures that come out. And some of those are determined specifically by federal law. Others of those are local or state decisions that we've made. And the integrated field reviews are done every three years and that's a group of educators and staff from the AOE who go onsite to individual LEAs and kind of poke around and ask questions and look in classrooms and look at documents. And that's where a question about, tell us about your local comprehensive assessment system would come in. In terms of kind of accountability determinations, well, first I should say that both the integrated field reviews and the annual snapshot are organized around the same five domains. So you get indicators on the annual snapshot for academic proficiency and high quality staffing and the like. And then the questions that are asked in the integrated field reviews are also grouped around these same five domains that we're looking for. Specifically though, if there's a school who is not meeting standards as determined by our Vermont state plan, there are potential for a number of different, either supports or down the line, some sanctions that would come through and this is where our schools that are eligible for comprehensive or equity supports based on federal determinations come in. Thank you. Yeah. Personalization, I think this is really where we, another area where the ed quality standards start to see a departure for the way that schools were organized or good teaching and learning was defined in the past. Building off of Act 77, which had come out the previous year in 2013, it talks more about flexible pathways. This is where the requirement for personalized learning plans come through. Local graduation requirements, which again are set by a school board but really push school boards to think beyond credit hours and the number of hours that students have been in seats but to have what we called our proficiency based graduation requirements to demonstrate proficiency as opposed to just collect number of credits. Again, that's up to the local school board as to exactly what those are going to be but that was a fairly big departure. And then it also there's a part of the statute that just ensures that students have access to career and technical education in there as well. And I think this is a really big, I don't wanna belabor it too much but this is a really big departure for education, really talking about the personalization approach looking at students as defining education is not something that just happens from eight to three every day and inside a school but really broadens that definition. Paul, is there any questions around personalization? I don't see any at the moment. Okay. Oh, yes I do. Sorry, just how do you measure this? How do you measure that this is successful, this initiative? Yeah, great question. And again, it's through the same methods that we were talking about before. There are three different indicators in the annual snapshot that look at the number of students, the number of offerings of flexible pathways by schools and the percentage of students who are engaging in one of those flexible pathways so that we have that information and we've defined what those flexible pathways are. We also at the integrated field reviews, those are exact questions that we're asking. I remember back in 2015 going on an integrated field review up in Canaan where I was taken out to a working sugar bush as part of their CTE program and they were showing us, this is what flexible pathways means here, there was a large sugar bush commercial operation that had been opened up recently and this was a way for students to get real world experience as a way to potentially turn that into jobs down the line. So I mean, obviously that's an anecdotal example but those are the sorts of pieces of evidence that we look for on the integrated field reviews. Thank you. Safe and healthy schools are what kind of what it means. There are two different parts I think that are particularly important for this. One is the tiered systems of support. I think that this is what's evolved into our MTSS program, multi-tiered systems of support. It's also where Act 173 requirement or focus pillar of the educational support team comes in as a way to try to provide supports for students. It defines what goals for the having school counselors and school nurses on site would be for safety and then the school facilities and learning environment are both around safety, both physical and emotional safety of students. So these are talking about fire codes and the like but also very specifically mentioning the learning environment, anti-bullying, anti-harassment being named specifically in that. One of the ways that we assess this again through the annual snapshot is disciplinary exclusions and looking at how those disciplinary exclusions have been different schools at different grade levels and the like. And honestly part of an integrated field review of every integrated field review I've been on, we went on a tour with the facilities manager and he or she pointed out this is the boiler in the school and this is the last time we had upkeep for this boiler and very, very specific examples like that are questions that are part of that integrated field review. High quality staffing, this breaks into a handful of different things there's some language about school leadership in there and both in terms of the responsibilities of principals and then also the for needs-based professional learning and staffing specifically what professional learning opportunities and it calls for, for example, two hours a month of professional development opportunities for teachers during the school day and so this is why you see a lot of schools pre-pandemic who may have had a late start on Wednesday because every Wednesday they're using an hour in the morning, using this as an example not all schools do this I know, but using an hour in the morning for professional learning or maybe a two o'clock release for students on a Wednesday and that's something that came directly out of the education quality standards so that during, teachers could really engage in professional learning that is based on the specific needs outlined in the continuous improvement plans of schools for that. I think if there's anything else specific around there there is a requirement for a staff evaluation. There is not a requirement for a particular staff evaluation model. So about, well, I'm gonna say 2017 I may be off by a year or two on that but around 2017 all of the schools, all the LEAs in the district are in the state had to identify what staff evaluation model and then we had a rubric to make sure that it met the requirements but we didn't say you had to use the Danielson model or the Marzano model which are a couple of popular models across the country for staff evaluation but that it did meet those but it met the outlines based on this review. Any other questions on the professional learning or high quality staffing? I think we can keep going. Great, so investment priorities is the last one. One of the things that's really specific in the ed quality standards is that our ratios of staff to students ratios of principals to teachers that are that are that are minimums and I'd have to pull up my document to get it exactly right but I believe like for every principal there needs to be for every 10 teachers there needs to be at least one principal. I'm not gonna quote that as exactly right. That's from memory. There are maximum averages for K to three and then three to 12 I believe are the delineations again to check it myself every single time for student teacher ratios across the school. There are also ratios for counselors to students librarians to students, school nurses to students and specifically for counselors the ratios differ by elementary and secondary the secondary ratio is actually fewer students per counselor just because a counselor has different responsibilities besides just the counseling but a lot of the college application process too that falls into that. And I think what's really important and all of this is important but all of this aims at the continuous improvement plan. And so when you have the education quality standards defining what good teaching and learning looks like it serves as a filter for a school or the state to say what are you doing well? What are the areas where you can be doing better? And for the areas that you need to be doing better let's really focus on that in the comprehensive improvement plan. What are your goals and objectives? How are you going to achieve those? What are the things that you need specific help in meeting either from the agency of education or others? One thing for every continuous improvement plan has to have one of the goals that's focused on safe, healthy schools. You can have multiple goals and you almost you always have multiple goals but one of those goals is specifically on safe, healthy schools. The continuous improvement plan the development of them is not something that's just supposed to be written at central office by a couple of people but it's really meant to engage and defined in statutes or in the rule as including all stakeholders in the community, parents, teachers, other community members, students and the like. Every LEA has to review their continuous improvement plan annually and it has to be submitted every two years although a school of one of the sanctions not the exact right word but one of the requirements for a school who's eligible for equity supports or comprehensive supports under the federal ESSA law has to submit a continuous improvement plan annually instead of every two years. So that's one of the things that's been done and that really defines then how you're going to be spending your additional your funds where you're gonna focus those funds in order to meet those goals that are set up in the preamble that we talked about at the beginning. And then as I referenced in the beginning if you can see on the slide over on the far left are the educational quality standards. There are education quality reviews are the two things there in the middle that are the annual snapshot in the integrated field reviews and that along with local data through the local comprehensive assessment system and other things are really what defines the continuous improvement plan. So in the annual snapshot if your schools science performance for fourth grade or your LEA science performance for fourth grade for students who are historically marginalized we're seeing that continually fall behind that might be an area that you want to address in your continuous improvement plan. If you see disproportionate number of disciplinary exclusions for our students of color that might be something you want to consider that you want to address in your continuous improvement plan. And so really the education quality standards are the goals, the annual snapshot integrated field reviews are the two tools that the state has to kind of say how are you doing in meeting those goals all in the service of the continuous improvement plans so that that defines what you're going to do to get better. Yeah, I see the hand raise. I'm sorry, please. Sorry, Representative Collin. Thanks. I'm going to use your word sanctions. Let's say an integrated field review goes to the same school twice over six years as you said, it's every three years sees the same deficiencies. Let's say it's something as understandable as I don't know, a building deficiency, a leaky roof or mold or something. What's the enforcement or sanction that would force that district to make the needed improvement? Yeah, so there are a couple of different things that would really depend on the nature of it for taking something like a leaky roof so that you're in an unsafe position. One of, I didn't get into this but in the education quality standards there is the ability for the secretary of education to intervene and say this is something that needs to be addressed right away. And so in a situation like that, I would be something that would involve the state to come in to say this is an unsafe environment. If it's a specific learning, if you see kind of a continual performance problem, discrepancies between one group and another, that's where some of the tools at hand under ESSA around schools are eligible for equity and comprehensive supports would be brought in to provide some supports so that schools can address those equity gaps further. So it really depends specifically on what that would be but there is part of the education quality standards where the secretary has the ability to come in and say, these are things that need to be addressed and they need to be addressed. I guess my follow up question would be, or what? So the secretary comes in and says, these really need to be addressed or else? Yeah, there are, there is authority within the education quality standards and I'm not, I have, in sharing my screen I can't pull it up immediately right now but there are, there is authority for what? There are three or four different things under there or may actually be even not even in the education quality standards it may be in state statute where the superintendent has the ability to, for the state to take over a system for the merger of that with another LEA for, and I don't remember the exact for different options that are available to the secretary in those situations but there are options that do exist. Yeah, thank you. Yep. How many are under this secretary's order at this point? None that I'm aware of, none that I'm aware of and again I hesitate to use the word sanction it's, we really try to use the word support more than sanction to figure out not to come in and be the heavy hand of course at times that has to happen but it's really to figure out what under a continuous improvement framework what is the challenge and then how are we going to help you understand that challenge and address it? I think it would be interesting to know at some point how many, I don't have to know where about how many are under a continuous improvement plan or have been in the past that required the secretary to come in. Yeah, I can find that out and again, I'm not aware of any usually those well, that's not true. There have been some in the past usually they are around financial challenges and I know that there was one maybe three or four years ago where a number of folks from the AOE ended up kind of physically going on site and helping to straighten out the finance department of one SU. That's one example that I know off the top of my head. Okay, thank you. Representative Williams? Yes, thank you. In reference to that, I represent Essex, Caledonia. So there is a school in my district that has a roof that needs repair I believe with your guidance, they can use it when there isn't a weight on the top with the snow and such. Help me understand, is the only way that this can be addressed is if the taxpayers vote to have it done, is there other help? I, do you know what I'm speaking of? So I don't know about the specific example and I'm really not an expert on the rules of construction and that's been made clear to me over the course of the last couple, last month as I've been pretty involved in the recovery planning work for schools that are there. There are a lot of things that just I had never heard of. Maybe you are all familiar with the Davis bacon rules. These were things that were new to me, six weeks ago. So there are ways for schools to take on construction projects. Not all of them are necessarily based on local funding. There are a number of schools right now if they can show a relationship to whatever the construction need is to COVID in lots of different ways that they can take on that construction project using what we call the S or one or the S or two or the upcoming one now and in actuality, the S or three funds which are really big, huge, huge amounts of monies for schools coming in that kind of unprecedented amounts of money. All the steps that need to go through with that we have other folks at the agency of education who are immensely more informed about the what needs to be done for to get construction with those funds. Cassandra Ryan is the person I would reach out to and if you want to reach out to me I can put you in touch with her without a problem. She would be able to answer those questions and she may be well aware of that particular project too. Now, so the answer is that there are other resources other than counting on a past budget for such a thing. Yes, and those are very, again, I'm not an expert on funding. These, you know, these are better questions for people like Brian James who comes in front of you regularly. What I do know. Yeah, he would, he would, he would really be able to answer that question with a lot more, you know, detail on I what I do know is that for there there are a lot of schools that are looking at undertaking construction projects using S or fun, S or two and three funds that would not have been undertaking those construction projects before those funds became available. And that's unique to the current situation that we're in. Thank you. I want to make sure we get to your next slide with just the annual snapshot but I also want to representative Austin and I think representative, no, just representative Austin. Just is poverty a consideration in the net in the annual snapshot. So if it shows that, you know, certain percentage of students in poverty are not meeting proficiency, let's say in fourth grade reading and they need, and they build that into their improvement plan. Does funding, is there additional funding either through title one or the state that is attached to that to help with that support? Yeah, so it's certainly something that shows up in the annual snapshot. So I've shared slides with you all in the annual snapshot before so I went pretty bare bones here just with a single shot on this. I'm certainly happy to talk about it in more detail. You should know that the next iteration of the annual snapshot is coming out on, I believe it's going to go live on Monday which is great except that this particular iteration of the annual snapshot is going to be missing lots and lots and lots of data. There is no S back in the 1920 year. There is no, so a lot of the assessments that we typically include in there, just they didn't exist. So there's no way to put them in. But one of the things that the annual snapshot allows schools to do is to disaggregate performance by student groups. So whether it's poverty or whether it's students who are on an IEP eligible for special education services, English learner, ethnic racial, under ethnic racial minority, et cetera, that you can disaggregate that data for all of those different ways. And it's one of the things that we really encourage schools to do. In terms of funding, there are a couple of different ways to answer that. So using your example of elementary school students who are in poverty, who are performing where there's what we call an equity gap in literacy performance. If that school is eligible for equity supports, what that means is they specifically have to name an intervention that they're going to be using in order to address that gap. And they need to be using some of their title funds specifically to address that gap. There are some schools, a very small number, 15 schools in the state who are eligible for what we call comprehensive supports. And there's comprehensive supports in the same way they need to address where those gaps are. But there is additional federal money that comes to those schools who are eligible for comprehensive supports. And for them to be using, to really engage in that. Other supports that come through that we're really working with those schools who are eligible for equity supports to see what their particular goals are and how the agency might be able to help address those if there's expertise there, or at least kind of connecting the dots to put people together. So if you're looking at literacy, what is a resource that you might want to consider in order to address that particular challenge that you're seeing right there? So I'm just trying to understand, we're looking at the weighting study and increasing the weight in terms of how to bring about equity, especially I think towards poverty. And I'm just wondering about this ability of schools to be able to access additional funding to address the issue of poverty or any of the other issues. How is that different than the weighting or the weighting amounts that our students are given? So this is separate from the weighting amounts. It's just reporting out data based on a category, a demographic category of an individual student. No, I'm talking about the funding. Yeah, and so the funding, boy, again, I'm gonna defer a lot of this to Brad because I will get a lot of this not exactly right because I'm really, I don't deal with kind of like, the big Ed fund funding side of things. It's not something that I'm well-versed on. What I can say is that there is additional, for those schools and comprehensive supports, there's additional federal funding to address those. But in terms of state funding, and schools should be targeting some of their title funding, federal title funding for that. But in terms of additional state funding based on poverty, that's really a question that others are gonna be much better place to answer. And I would take you down the wrong road in that. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Patrick. Okay, I think we've got one more slide. Just a lot of this I've talked about. This is the integrated field reviews that are every three years. They're largely qualitative. They're not strictly qualitative, but they're largely qualitative data that we're collecting. We have not done field reviews for the last year for obvious reasons because we can't get into schools. And the last thing that schools want are, a bunch of people from outside the community coming in and walking around. The questions that we ask, we have kind of broken into what we call a third, third, third, that a third of the questions are standard for all LEAs that we ask. There's kind of general questions that we wanna ask. A third are specific to LEAs based on the review of the last time there's an integrated field review that took place or the results of their annual snapshot or the results of our, or the teams review of the documents that have been shared. And then that final third, we're going to be asking LEAs to create questions that they want us to ask them. So these are around, an LEA says, we've really been trying to address science instruction. We really want you to pepper us on science instruction to see if we've moved the bar. Are we smarter in talking about how we're going to engage science? Do you see evidence of a dedication to this particular, whatever that goal might be across the school. And so that's a chance for an outside group to come in and see, are they seeing evidence of that thing that the LEA has found, has stated as value? And the final thing, just to say about the integrated field reviews, they're facilitated by the ALE, but they're really conducted by educational peers. So largely organized geographically, but it's teachers, it's principals who are going into the links for a day, asking questions, talking to students, talking to community members, talking to teachers, administrators, and the like. So with the ALE kind of pulling, doing the facilitation side of that work. Yeah, there's a question. Representative James. Thanks. This is such helpful testimony. I was just wondering if you, from your point of view, see any way in which this kind of assessment and accountability system could or should be beefed up or made more robust or, that's it. Well, that's a great question. And it's a bit of a loaded, not loaded question. It's a bit of a particularly tricky question at this particular time that we stand. Because we don't, I mean, there's just so much that we don't know right now and we're relying. So this is going back to the quality standards. The state in the past has had the integrated field reviews. We've had kind of summative assessments, SBAC and the like as a way to be able to collect data and find out what's going on in schools. We don't have that information right now. We're really relying on those local comprehensive assessments. And we're really working right now. For example, we've contracted with WestEd on a data literacy professional development for LEAs so that they can be smarter about both how to gather data, how to interpret data. We had 300 people show up for our first one of these sessions a couple of weeks ago. Because we've aligned it with the recovery plans and schools are really trying to figure out, it's a deficit model for me to say this, but where is the learning loss? Is there learning loss? Where are the students struggling? And probably as you know, on the recovery plan, we have organized around three different pillars of re-engagement, mental health and academic achievement. And really trying to figure out how do we gather this information? So to get back to your initial question of like, how do you beef up the system? In a perfect world, I think there may be individual parts of this that I might have a little bit of an argument with and someone else might have a different argument with. I think overall it kind of holds together pretty well. In the COVID world that we've been living in, there's just so much we don't know. And this is gonna provide us with a whole bunch of new data to be able to think about going forward to say, what are we doing well? And what, for example, do we need to be more prescriptive about the local comprehensive assessment system? Just I'm making up an example of a question that we might ask ourselves on this. Is our schools able to use their local comprehensive assessment systems to really look at how performance is similar and different by particular student groups? And if not, that's something schools really should be using those local assessment systems to be thinking about and looking at as well. And what would the role of the agency be? It just really depends on what we're getting right now. I can also say that as of last Thursday, yeah, we can go today, then the needs assessment, which is the first part of the recovery plan started rolling in, we're really impressed with the quality of the review that schools are doing and identifying what those needs are, what the data sources that they're relying on are and what the data sources that they need help identifying are. And they're really thorough and impressive, especially when being asked to do it on a very short timeline and with the world continuing to fall apart around them. So I don't know that fully answers your question, but the last 14 months, there's just a whole lot of I don't know anymore and we'll just have to see where we land as we come out the other side. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. This has been very interesting conversation in looking at where we are with the EQ, what the EQS are, how they're assessed and looking at how we measure. There is a question in the waiting study that asks whether how to ensure school districts are using funding to meet EQS and improve student outcomes and opportunities. Do you see that as being something that would be a short or a lengthy process? I think it's work that they should already be, that most are already doing. So I don't think it would be because this is exactly what the continuous improvement plans are is looking at the results of their education quality reviews, annual snapshots, IFRs to identify what those needs are. Okay, thank you. Yeah. And I'd also just say that, something like the ed quality standards sounds overwhelming. I think it's a 14 page document. It's not something that that is, it's not like the law book. It's not like Title XVI that it would take you a year to get through because you fall asleep reading it or whatever. It's really a very accessible document. So I would encourage folks to look at it further if they have questions and I'm certainly willing to answer any of those and follow up. Thank you. And if there are sites on the website that would be helpful for links, would be helpful if you could send those to Jesse for us would be great. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Sometimes it's a little hard to find those things. Sure. Yeah, I'll send them to you for both for a couple of different things. Okay. Thank you. My pleasure. Okay. And with that, what I'd like to do, if it's okay, we have Brad James here, but I'd like to give the committee just about a five minute break. And I'm just looking to see if Brad is still here, Brad. Yes. Brad, where are you? How long? I don't know if I'm popping on the screen or not. I can see myself, but I'm here and have break is just fine with me. Okay. Five minutes. Okay. Or do you need 10? Five. Coup says five. We're gonna take a five minute break. So we'll be back at 1106. So, you know, about 1112, that's six minutes. See you at 1112.