 Okay welcome back to Senate Education Tuesday May 18th, 2.30 in the afternoon. We have Secretary French with us for a little while. This is as we are ramping up a number of different bills. Secretary and his team have been with us certainly through this entire session. We are immensely grateful for their partnership being ready to testify and all the work that they have done to keep our students teachers staff families safe and so wanted to start by thank you Mr. Secretary for all that. This is looking more and more like the final week thankfully and so we thought we would just take some time and see if there are any questions that senators have. I did mention to senators that you and I had talked about final PCB language which is advancing and the budget may already be in there with a testing date by 2024 and that of course there would be we're all recognizing that there'll be a need to address whatever is found and how we do that we'll be working on together probably some of that work may happen this summer certainly upon our return and we'll monitor and make changes as needed so I just didn't know if you wanted to add anything there Mr. Secretary as it relates to the PCB piece. Good afternoon Dan French Secretary of Education and to echo your remarks Mr. Chair I just want to thank the committee for their support I think you know on behalf of all the agency staff we've felt tremendously supported by legislators and legislative leaders during our this session and particularly during this phase of the pandemic response has been challenging to manage you know both the emergency and respond to the legislative process but I think we've always felt tremendously supported by you and we really appreciate appreciate that and I think we've had ourselves on the back as Vermonters we've brought you know collaborated very well through unprecedented moments and very complex moments from a regulatory standpoint so I you know again really want to thank you for your leadership and your help in this last several months in terms of PCBs I think you know we do have a pretty concise language now in the budget bill what I've seen I think it'll you know get us down that path get the process started and also calls you know attention to the issue next year it's going to be a complex issue as you know the remediation aspects of PCBs are more complex than lead or radot even for that matter so but it'll get the get us moving down a path which I think is important. Any questions for the secretary on PCBs at this point thank you. The secretary and I also just touched base briefly about there the agencies issuing the memo regarding Kernhatt and Mr. Secretary I don't know if you just want to just remind us again you know you all have a certain purview as it relates to Kernhatt and if you wouldn't mind just refreshing our memories on that and what you all consider are able to consider and a little bit about your decision. Yeah sure thank you for the opportunity I think you know firstly the way I sort of frame this and I know our general counselor Emily Simmons did this when we we had that opportunity to speak to this issue before this committee I think it's important to acknowledge firstly the agency of education does not investigate crimes and sexual abuse is a crime that's done by the state police law enforcement DCF would have you but that's not our role as often is the case however these types of issues and particularly as it pertains to independent school operations can fall into an area where we do have oversight and that's essentially what's transpired in our previous testimony we talked a little bit about sort of that delay and how that got started we do have sort of two ways say the state board or the agency can get involved in the oversight of an independent school the older sort of traditional way is what's kind of transpired here with Kernhatt and under act 173 of I think 2018 which was the special ed reform law that we're implementing on the legislature also gave the state board some oversight functionality as it pertains to financial oversight of independent schools so that that sort of those two moments or those two regulatory pieces we had to sort out essentially in the fall and once once we figured out how that was going to proceed the agency took the lead in doing its part under sort of the older regulation which really pertains to independent school approval and upon review of our regulations we filed through on constituting a team to do that as required by the regulation and I charged a team to look at two areas in particular that I thought were germane to our regulations and they are to what extent the school the organization essentially failed or didn't fail to report mandatory sexual abuse and then to what extent the school was managing its background check process appropriately so those those were the two major areas of our regulatory oversight that were charged to the investigatory team they did their work they produced the recommendation to me and then I have the responsibility under our regulation to formulate a recommendation or some conclusion essentially and the options there are basically no further action is necessary or I could make a recommendation for revocation or suspension of their ability to operate as an independent school if I had decided the latter that would then go to a state board process for appeal and review I concluded that no further action was necessary however in my response back to the school I indicated that we were going to institute two sort of incremental oversight actions in the coming year to make sure that they're following through on some of the organizational and operational deficiencies that we did notice as part of the review so that's essentially the conclusion the only other piece I'd I'd observe is that you know we've been involved in the the rulemaking process under act 173 is you know that that involves special ed rules also involves independent school rules the state board's been working on that for a couple years now with the agency and the state board has sort of looked at the regular sort of non-special ed aspect of independent school rules and I think there's been some lessons learned not necessarily from the current hat investigation but through oversight of other schools in the last year or so and I think the state board's really done a good job of trying to modernize its regulations in this area and I'm hopeful that as part of the rulemaking process under 173 that there will be stronger regulations emerging in this area which I think will be useful to both independent schools into the agency and its oversight function thank you senators you'll find the report and a letter from Secretary French on our website which I would encourage you I know everyone's being inundated right now but if you can have an up take an opportunity while we're still in session to review and then we can be in touch with either Secretary French or Ms Simmons with any additional questions but wondering right now if there are any immediate questions that anyone has for Secretary French Senator Lyons well thank you and I honestly haven't read the I did look through the report earlier today and I just saw your letter with the conditions that you've placed for review and I think that that's helpful your authority allows for you to have unannounced visits to the school and mostly that is for the review of academic work but also for counseling support for kids is that right I mean so yeah I mean for me the counseling piece becomes important we all know counselors are integral to school environments whether it's for academic counseling or for helping kids through a bullying situation whatever it is so are you satisfied I guess is the first question with the counseling support available to kids at Kern-Hatton yeah I don't know if I could answer that at this moment I mean one of the things you'll read from the report it is a product of the COVID environment so there weren't site visits involved and I think the team was satisfied and I in my review of its work I was satisfied that the team did its best to focus in on the the questions that were essentially given to them as a charge but I think the broader what do you start talking about some of the broader issues involved in sort of a qualitative judgment of the program that would require more of a site review and that's that's not factored into this review here but I think you know that the sort of the general oversight of I would argue also public schools is a theme that that that we are working with with the state board and I think it is a theme that we'll try to work on as a result of the the work in front of us in examining the regulatory construct we've lost some of that over the years I think largely because particularly on the public school side as we stood up adequately progress under no child left behind act and all that was involved with really focusing on academics we lost what used to be called the public school approval process which was a site visit and focused on several different aspects of the school operations we still have what's called integrated field review which does get us on site and doing some things with the public schools but I think we we need to take a look at that sort of basic approach of you know the visitation and what does that mean for a state state review of an independent and a public school will you have a plan to do that I mean I mean obviously things have been a little bit crunched given the emergency but will your organization put together a plan for visitation and evaluation on current hatton going forward the plan as right now is represented in that letter for us to do those two site visits and I would say there's there's a sort of a dichotomy here between regular education and special education so the special education piece could involve more interaction as those regulations are are different essentially but for now on the regular inside our plan is to do sort of those two follow-up mechanisms that are laid out in the letter okay all right thanks and yeah no how much of what you of your conclusions that you drew are the result of some transformation on the part of the current current hatton administration yeah quite a bit I mean that is that's essentially one of the findings of the committee that just the act of doing the review caused the organization to change its procedures you know as the committee delineated off a series of compliance measures it would be looking for or wanted more information on which the team you know articulates as reviewing over 3000 different documents that surface deficiencies in the school was immediately responsive to that in terms of policy and procedure and governance practices and so forth and that I think your question gets to that that sense of responsiveness on the part of the school if they were interested in responding and addressing those issues and they were that did certainly weigh into my conclusion that they were they were really interested in trying to improve their organizational oversight and operation can I ask one more question mr chair absolutely so the as you're thinking about all the transition for the school and what I don't know what oversight you have with the school's relationship either with guardians or parents and is there what kind of provisions it has a school put in place to ensure those folks that their kids aren't going to experience what children in the past have experienced at Kern-hatten yeah those are great questions and I would agree those would be very useful mechanisms to have in place that's again sort of it was beyond the scope of this review but going forward I'd be very interested in any of those sort of qualitative measures that we it would allow our review to be very efficient of independent schools if we had some sense of customer satisfaction essentially or client satisfaction but that's that's currently not contemplated in the the review structure that's in regulation but it's a great idea but you have authority to do that you have authority to expand that assessment yeah I'm not sure I wasn't prepared to necessarily speak to those regulations today but again I would I would think it's a great idea and I know you know again the state board has worked on a revision to these regulations that I don't think have been reviewed in some time so it's it's a great idea and it's something I can bring forward that would be good I mean it would be great for us to to see what is contemplated by the board and by AOE I don't know what if any legislative action would have to be be engaged to to take that a next step yeah and now now that this review is complete we can talk rather openly about the process and try to extrapolate out some general you know themes and conclusions from the process is sufficient we can have that more open conversation I think there is a as we've John Carroll the chair and I brought to this committee there's a bigger scope of work here that needs to be sorted out in terms of modernizing the regulatory construct but that can happen I think fairly efficiently once we understand sort of the general themes but then to to have this conversation surface more generally in the general assembly next next session about well what what should be that construct and to what extent is additional statutory oversight necessarily or statutory direction I think that'd be a very useful conversation one last question would the overlay of a community school infrastructure help with current hatton and so obviously a community school is very special and if we were to suggest that current hatton become a community school just a thought it's probably too soon to ask that question yeah I don't I'm having trouble making the connection I think you know the the idea for me of a community school is it's it's idea of integrated service integrated service delivery and it's really talking about the public school structure and its intersection with social services but our independent schools in our independent schools function in many different ways in our landscape you know we have the academies that essentially function as public high schools large public high schools in their regions and then we have very very small oh called boutique therapeutic schools that serve a specific niche in a delivery landscape so you know there's everything in between so it's hard to I think make a general statement about you know like current hatton functioning as a community school I think we'd have to understand how it functions in the ecosystem around it is it more like a niche therapeutic school or filling a specific regional need or is it serving something more broad from a public edge perspective so I think we'd have to do that evaluation but it's interesting you know that would get at you know what are the requirements to be an independent school and to what extent they'd be required to provide community school like services as a condition of approval thank you thank you mr secretary and committee members again I would encourage everyone you know it's crunch time to review these documents and we can happy to ask secretary to have perhaps miss Simmons back if we have additional questions you know during the week as we find time to look into this a little bit more uh mr secretary we're getting on the floor in 10 minutes and I just want to there's any final comments from you I want to give everyone an opportunity to take a break before we return to the floor I know people have to make phone calls etc no I would just say thank you again right at this moment we are working on sort of ending the state of emergency I think is a easy way to describe it so part of that's from an education perspective uh articulating you know articulating out the course of action for the remaining part of the school year but also sending a signal as best we can as to what the fall will look like so we're in the process of doing that planning right now certainly you're familiar with the summer matters program and ramping through summer so I think right now we're in a pretty good place we still have as the chair noticed we have a lot of work in front of us for the next phase but not on what I think the system is exhausted right now but feeling pretty good about where the next couple of weeks are heading relative to the end of the school year so it's good thank you so much mr secretary my only request and I know it's already on your mind but if there are ways for us to continue lines of communication as you're opening things up we're on recess but for the committee to get periodic updates if that's something that you could just uh perhaps keep on your mind uh and think through with us maybe it's an email from mr fischer or dr boucher periodically letting us know how things are going uh that would be I know much appreciated by everyone yeah we'd be happy to do that and it's a good point um definitely yeah we'd really appreciate that thank you very much mr secretary uh good afternoon committee uh lest I see any final questions we're going to adjourn to the floor and this hopefully will give everybody a few minutes to uh be ready to uh