 I started timing certain for adjournment at 3, because I have to make an office at UVM by food. But with that said, I wanted to hear from Principal Superintendent's and NEA on the weighting study. And then Jim, I believe, has a new draft for us on the statewide health care. Good. So, Jay. Okay, for the record, Jay Nichols, Vermont Principal's Association, Executive Director. You've kept your testimony online and in front of you. So, just a few comments that I'll make on this and answer any questions that you might have for me. First of all, please consider this initial testimony as you go through and make changes. I'd obviously be interested in having the opportunity to weigh in on those. My best piece of advice is the same advice that I used to give my shortstop and second basements. I was teaching college baseball, high school baseball. So, be quick. Don't hurry. Try and turn your double play. Same thing here. There's moral imperative here. There's something that needs to be done. Obviously, we know that. But take your time to do it right. The best advice that I could give you is in terms of trying to come up with a deal with the weighting study. If you believe the validity of the points made in the study, which I do, especially around poverty, I think those of us that have been in public education for a long time could say that we've seen the effects of poverty. And the weighting that we've had consistently in the past doesn't make sense. I don't know where it came from. I share and hear that I believe the current weighting process is outdated. And I know of no research data that supports the formulation of current weights. And actually, we had a podcast yesterday or the day before. We had Paul Sealill from Public Assets on our EPA podcast. And Mike asked them, everybody had asked him the question about the funding formula. And he was saying that in the past past 60, those weights were already in fact, but they just basically carried them over from the foundation point of view. So, it's obviously been a long time. Nobody seems to know what the empirical research is behind that, if there ever was any. Also, and I'm just telling you some of the major issues in the report. I have, as some of you know, been critical of small schools grants for quite a while. I think that the small schools grants sometimes were given to schools that were not geographically isolated. Like in the case where I hired a principal in a town and his school was half full and a town literally five minutes away on the same main road was half full. And the resources that were being used there in both schools were being supported. We've tightened that out some of the last two years. This report talks about getting rid of the small schools grant using the people waiting for them. I think that's a better way to go. The report also mentions just briefly the concept of categorical funding for trauma, mental health needs for students for better support for students in trauma. So schools, and I actually talked to Corey about this yesterday, continue to serve as a branch of mental health. Much of what is happening in schools are things that happen in many other states through social services and schools. I think it's a lot of that. I'm not saying they shouldn't. Sometimes it may be the system, the reality of our state. However, there's a cost that comes with that. And so when we spend time, energy and resources on things that are not instructional in nature, that does take away from the instructional time on the cap. And it adds further burden to property taxpayers and school budgets. Do I have a solution on where the money would come from? No. But I think it's something that needs to be considered. The EPA has met with the governor's office. We've talked to them about it with another meeting with Sarah Squirrel, just to talk about the huge influx of students in trauma that are in schools that are being worked with. And until you get a kid regulated, you can instruct them. I was talking to the principal today who was telling me that a student in her school every day comes in, flips over desks, all kinds of stuff like this happen all day. Kids five years old. And kindergarten. And the school is trying to keep the kid in school and work with the kid. They haven't kicked him out. They haven't suspended him. They shortened his day. They tried lots of different things. And they're still really, really struggling. And the biggest problem they have is when he goes home. He's going home into an environment that's probably not conducive to being a supportive environment. We also believe that early childhood students should be counted in proportion to the amount of time they spend in the school. I've strongly advocated for preschool for a long time. I think full-day preschool programs and research is pretty clear. It's actually kind of embarrassing to me that North Carolina has every four-year-old in preschool and we in Vermont consider ourselves a progressive state. We don't have that option for kids. If we had a full-day ADM allowability so the school could make the decision themselves and you'd fund it at whatever level they did it just like you do kindergarten. And I think that would be an incentive for school systems to try to have full-day programs. I think there's a lot of research to support that. Dr. Colby talks about that a little bit in her study. And then the last point related to that is like other interviews in the waiting study other people that are interviewed. I do worry about districts that may see the ability to relieve taxpayer burden where really we would hope that they would spend the money creating more opportunities for students. I worry about some of my older communities where I was a superintendent. I was pretty fiscally conservative and we tried to save money where we could. I could see some of those places saying you know what we really don't have these programs but taxpayers would much rather have us do this. Let me anticipate Senator Perrin's question. Can you register any concern? What would your thought be on any kind of statutory restrictions on the ability to use that tax capacity? Right. So I thought about that a little bit and I can't come up with a good answer. I think there's something that we should think about whether or not there's a statutory fix to that or not. I don't know. But I think if there isn't what's going to happen is you're going to have the same in equalization that we're already dealing with. Act 60 equalized the paying cost for everybody to raise a dollar. So I give us one of the fairest funding systems in the nation and Act 60 made it even better. But on the opportunity side we still have huge disparity. Yeah. And you know inherent in local control that decisions are going to be made as close to the local level as possible. Right. So let me go back quickly to you mentioned possibility of the category we grant for trauma or themed around trauma. And you said you couldn't think of a source for the funding. I don't worry as much about that as I'm worried about how would one put in for the funds. What would be the, because it seems to me that in order to do that you have to essentially create a kind of register of students who are exhibiting these behaviors who have experienced trauma aces in their past. Right. So there was as the waiting study was done there was some modest support here and there that I would hear for having aces itself be a weighted category. Right. And I just I thought and thought about I can't understand how a school district would do that in the way that we do it free and reduced money. See I don't see it that way. I wasn't thinking that way at all. Okay. I was thinking more of an ice and more of how do we provide the training necessary for the teachers support staff in this system so that they're really trauma informed, not even more than trauma informed trauma experts so that they can really meet kids at their need. Knowing that there may also be a small subsection of kids that are going to need a lot of extra support outside of school. But if we're going to the point where there's two or three kids in every class of teachers, every teacher's really struggling to handle and that's what we're hearing from the field, how do we get to the front of that? How do we prevent be preventive on that to give the teachers the tools that you need? We're asking 22 year old kids to come out of college with very little training on this, putting in front of a classroom of students and seeing behaviors that they never anticipated they would see. No fair enough professional development in terms of proficiency based learning too. Right. So in almost all of these. Professional learning is a theme. Yeah. Yeah. A couple other thoughts, student economic disadvantage. So I basically just took the five factors and I think that they are the right five factors. The middle school one was a little new to me. The other ones were all things I obviously spent a lot of time thinking about. In terms of student economic disadvantage, you all know there's been a ton of research supporting that. Again, our weight that we've used for years doesn't even come close to the impact that national studies have shown on poverty. You can take and look, plot test scores, whether the SBAC test scores or NAIC or whatever and plot them around poverty line. It's unbelievable. It's like a straight line. It's crazy. You know, Bill Mathis said this many years ago and he's still superintendent. You can predict the success of schools in general just by looking at the financial package of the parents that they have and the poverty that they live in. Which is sad. We want to get to the point where a zip code is not a destination for a kid in terms of how successful they're going to be in life. Right. So how do we provide enough early intervention support? And to go back to Bill Mathis and Act 46, the State Board, that was one of their big motivators. Yeah. Was socio-economic integration by a larger distance. Stolen Morrisville being together. Yeah. Absolutely. ELL students. Don't need to spend a lot of time talking about them. But keep in mind two things about ELL students. When a student comes in who can speak fluently in another language and is very successful in his or her own home language, they tend to learn English and learn a lot quicker in science and math than a student who comes in that may not be literate in their own language. We have plenty of kids that come in that are not literate in their own language. I can remember being a principal in South Burlington and having a boy and a girl. The girl was at my middle school title and the boy was at the high school in South Burlington. Pat Burke and I were jogging one day and I said, how's this family doing for you? And I said, our girl's really struggling. She's really, really struggling. We're giving her lots of support. And he goes, oh, the boy will probably be our valetarian. So what are you talking about? The boy had gone to school. The girl had never been in school before. You know, the situation in that country where the girl didn't go to school. So if a kid comes in already, you know, deficit in their own language, it's so much harder to help them become English learners. So that's why your sources are important there. Middle and secondary, I think you realize that's a lot to do with licensing. You know, you need to have somebody who has an appropriate license to teach social studies or a higher level of sciences and stuff. So that tends to drive the cost up. You may need four teachers instead of one teacher who's an expert elementary that can teach four or five content areas in the first grade. So that's the cost that's there. Geographically necessary schools. I think that the legislature needs to spend some time on defining what that actually will look like and making sure that it really is geographically necessary. We need to consider Act 46 declining enrollment, increasing expectations that are put on schools, our substandard facilities, school construction bill, all those things together looking at in a real coherent package. And then on population density, as I say here, more dense populations and have better resources. And that's a fact. If you have a lot of poverty and you live in, I'll use your system, Senator, if you don't mind, if you live in St. Albany City, you're a lot closer to resources than you are if you live in Richmond, which is in the same count. Richmond is a huge transportation barrier to get to where most of the city side, which happened in the in St. Albany City, at least you're close to the services, you're more likely to get those, which is the reason why population density is something that I think is worth considering factor again. And then also I mentioned here, hopefully the population density can also move to a more reliable metric, get away from small schools grant system we have right now. Connection to Act 173. So I read the Secretary's testimony. It's very short. On the first part, he talks about the, around the weights, and I think I agree with him that the weights should be without students with disabilities counted. And the reason for that is we're going to stick with a census-based model of 173 purposes. I think that's going to be more consistent. I have not come to a conclusion on a second part of his testimony. The first part, though, I do agree with him. I think the legislature itself needs to understand the detail of the weighting study and what the implementation is going to look like across the state, what the impact might be. I think my suggestion, as I say here, is the study commission, a sign that is really giving the necessary resources to study the report in detail and come back with higher recommendations to the legislature by a certain date. Maybe it's October, maybe it's November 1st. And then they give recommendations, and the hope would be that in the beginning of the next biennium you folks would have a bill that could be implemented, that could be part of the budgeting process as you went forward in fiscal year 2022. That would be my thought. And you're not the only person I think who might suggest a study committee. I guess my feeling about it is we pay a quarter of a million dollars for this study. It seems to me to be very rigorous. So I'm not sure what a study committee would do in terms of implementation other than either change the weights or to think of some method of phasing them in. Well, phasing is certainly a conversation that some people have brought up as some of my members. Some of my members are writing me letters saying this needs to happen yesterday. Yep. Obviously, because it's the winners and losers side. There's some that are saying we need to phase this in over a decade and hunt everywhere in between. I'm just wondering how you're going to get to the understanding so that everybody in this building has enough understanding what this really means before you go to votes on it. Well, and I guess just to play devil's advocate, the report. It's a great report by the way. It's an amazing report and one of the more amazing aspects of it is it comes with very detailed simulations. So in terms of understanding, it takes about a half an hour for someone to look through the executive summary and the simulations of their county or their district and figure out the impact on their voters. Again, unless the intention is for a study committee to change the numbers and create new simulations, which then I feel like we're going back down the road to where you started, which is that the weights as they stand now are the political decisions not the current weights. Yes. They were not empirically derived just like what we think. So, but I don't want to dismiss what you're saying. No. I think there's an argument to be made that, and I believe in the House probably is the current state of play. They're more standoffish toward the study itself and I think would like to study the study or delay the study. So let me push back on one thing you said if you don't mind, and that is the point you made around people looking at their own towns and voting that way. I think the key is to get everybody to, and I don't know if you can do this. Everybody really understand that we are in a state funding system and so instead of looking at their own towns and it's higher and your own town voters are the people that elect you, we need to be looking at it statewide. What is this going to do statewide? How do we start thinking about all children as all of our children which was part of the promise of Act 46 and part of the promise of Brigham and part of the promise of the last Supreme Court case was to realize that public education is the responsibility of the whole state and we're only as strong as our weakest link. We're not providing resources necessary for poor towns, poor schools, poor communities, then we all lose and yet hurts us economically, hurts us socially. I just thank you for your testimony and I have spent a fair amount of time on the weighing study and I also have a good understanding of the school finance because of the background in it. I agree, even though I think this is something we should move forward with because I understand the implications of the big picture and the formula, et cetera. I am concerned about the lack of complete, not even complete, a lack of understanding of what the implications of a change this major to our school funding formula is. Even if I believe it is the right thing to do and you look at my districts and they're not big losers but they are in the sort of loser column but I still think it's the right thing to do because of the big picture and I am concerned about moving ahead with such a major change in our school funding formula without a larger understanding of the building. I don't really know if a study committee is the right thing. I don't think we should go back and rehash this because it's an excellent study. Tammy did a great job. What about how do you implement it? It's how do you implement it and how do you get people to understand and buy in because the last thing we want is to have the scenario where we do this and then districts freak out all over the state and try to get out of it and all this stuff. We have a lot enough upheaval in our K-12 system right now. I don't want to create more upheaval. So, you know, I've been trying to figure out how we thoughtfully move forward with this. So I appreciate your input. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Jeff. Is that your directory? Jeff. Jeff. Is that yours? The director. Yeah. Thanks, sir. Good afternoon. I'm Jeff Francis. I'm the executive director of the School of Superintendent Association. I had an eye exam at 11.40. And, you know, as I was leaving the office, I was like, where are those glasses that they give you so that you can actually see when you go outside? So it took me 40 minutes to get back to my office, which should be normally a 10-minute walk. That's a joke. But I was like pretty disoriented. So when I got back there, I was putting my testimony through a final check. I'm not sure how effective a check it was, but I wanted to let you know if I seem a little bit disoriented, more than normal. That's why. The second thing that I wanted to say is that I think some folks think that the associations that are located at Two Prospects Street are tighter in our coordination of testimony than we often actually are. Jay's testimony and my testimony are eerily similar, and we only spoke about it one time in very general terms. But I think that I tried to go into a fair amount of detail with regard to how the superintendent's association, how superintendents consider the implications and the magnitude of the waiting study. So what I've endeavored to do in order to be succinct is organize my thoughts in an outline that I'm going to run through with you. I've provided Jeannie with a copy of it, and I have hard copies as well. The other thing that I've done is I've brought a letter that you've received, but perhaps didn't study, which is from the superintendents in the Northeast Kingdom. It's a letter with a letterhead on it called the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative. As a class, the superintendents in school districts in that region, there are 44 schools up there, are eager to see the waiting study implemented because they think that they've been historically disadvantaged, and I think that's an important point. In order to prepare my testimony, I did an outline, a rough outline, that I shared with the officers of our association. We have five, and then I spoke with John Castle up in North Country Supervisory Union because he's a leader in the Rural Education Collaborative and has got a real interest in equity and the manifestation of our funding formula in terms of poverty implications and so on and so forth. Before I hit the outline, I want to also just indicate that I'm not sure that there were others who were engaged in public education for the implementation of Act 60, but I was. It was my first year on the job at VSA. And what I recall was that in the wake of the Brigham decision, the legislation that became Act 60 was heavily discussed in this building, and it was sold on two principal factors. One was equal educational opportunity and one was reduction in tax rates in a bunch of communities because that was the effect of Act 60. And that was a situation where I think you could apply the adage where you stand depended on where you sat because people both voted on that law on the basis of either of those two pictures, but they also explained it in their communities to voters on that same basis. So when John Nelson, Susa Glowski's predecessor, I think four times removed, and I traveled across the state of Vermont in 1997 talking with school board members and school administrators about the implementation of Act 60, what we often heard if we emphasized equal educational opportunity was we thought we were going to save money in our taxes. And when we talked about tax rate savings, what we sometimes heard was we thought that this was going to enable a more equitable investment in resources in the education delivery system. So here we are now 23 years later and we've got what I think is one of the major implications of our education funding system as we consider what the manifestations are of the weighting study. So when I think about this, I cannot help but think about that. And some of that theme will play out about how I think we should be considering the weighting study. So my first point is that the report is an expert analysis of Vermont's existing weighting system and related recommendations. Well, you might say that goes without saying. I was impressed with Tammy Colby's work. I also noted that she had the support of Bruce Baker from Rutgers, who's one of the foremost education finance experts in the country. So when I read that study, I got only through the executive summary and I said there is an immense amount of value here. And that was at the executive summary level. And then as you go through the report, you realize that, and this is not always the case, one would hope that it would be, but in this particular instance, I think the state got its money's worth. That was the first point. The second point that I want to make is that the report is not a law or a court decision. So unlike the Brigham case and decision, which for all intents and purposes compelled the state to act with Act 60, here you've got a body of information which I believe should be acted on, but there's in effect no mandate to act on it. And when you listen to people now 20 years post Act 60 and Act 68, talk about that study as though it has the force of law or court decision, that's understandable based on their experience, but it does not have the force of law or a court decision. Despite that, my belief, and I think most people would regard this as indisputable or irrefutable, the report provides strong evidence that changes to the Vermont weighting system within the education funding system are necessary to achieve a more equitable funding system. In fact, it is a call to action. So you've got the information you need there, in my opinion, to work with your colleagues to put into effect those weights. And I think it's a matter of how you do that. And I'm going to speak about that in a minute. But before I do, I want to touch upon something that both Jay spoke to and that Senator Hardy reiterated. The weights in our education funding system are but just one component in a complicated endeavor at a point in history where things have grown increasingly complex over time. So when I think about that, what I've written is that there are an abundance of policy issues that also should be considered in a review or evaluation of the funding system. They include, but are not limited to, implications from the moratorium on school construction aid, the growing need for investment in our buildings and education delivery system, the evolution of newly unified systems as they work to deliver more equity and efficiency over time, continuing declines in enrollment in many districts, the transition to Act 173 itself, implications of merging district tax rate transitions, so the mergers are still a recent event and communities are grappling with tax rate changes that exist under the current law even without adjustments to the weight. The policy practice and management levers that are recommended or being applied by the agency of education, like a statewide accounting system, statewide data system, et cetera. Now, I would not sit here and say that the system overall is in flux, but I would say that it is challenged and to, for example, just change the weights without consideration for unintended consequences, ripple effects, events or activities or findings or behavior that plays out in individual districts is something that I think needs to be contemplated. With all of that as a backdrop, I would still say that the need to evaluate these factors should not impede action and what I mean by that is I think that the weights in and of themselves are compelling and despite the fact that as a person who works with school districts day in and day out on the implementation of all these things, the reference to those things is not intended to be a barrier or an excuse or a recommendation that you don't act to the contrary. And I can elaborate on that if you have questions about it. My fifth point is as modeled in various simulations, there will be some dramatic changes in equalized pupils, education spending per pupil and associated tax rates. That is to be expected, but the implications of those changes should be considered and understood to the extent possible before the changes are made. This consideration is not intended to discourage or prevent the recommended changes. Districts will need support in communicating with their communities about inevitable changes. And I'm going to just give you an example. So when I sent the outline of my testimony to the officers of my association, I heard back from four out of five. So Gene Collins from the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union and David Yountz from the Mill River Unified Union School District, they thought that I had hit critical points. Elaine Pinckney also thought she's Champlain Valley School District. She also thought that I hit the critical points, but she pointed out to me that if you take the FY 2018 modeling, that the implications for Champlain Valley School District in real dollar terms are $15 million on a $75 million base. So it's 20% of their current operating budget. People might say, well, they've enjoyed the benefit of weights that have pointed in their favor over the last two decades. And I think that that may be indisputable, but when you think about the manifestation of a potential change like that, it could play out in a wide array of ways. It could play out in a way that had them cut that money or it could play out in a way that had them continue to spend that money, albeit at a higher tax rate. It's a pretty clear illustration of the fact that this is not something that you should go into lightly, and I'll say now for the fourth time, but it is something that we should go into. When I heard from Tracy Rendon, the Loyal Self Supervisory Union, who's very thoughtful, she sent me back an email four paragraphs long, the emphasis of which was the challenges and the transition in the Loyal South Supervisory Union and the fact that Morrisville and Peoples and Elmore, which would have been advantaged if they were a standalone district, now would be disadvantaged in the aggregation of the tax rate with the Stowe School District. And if you're following what's happening in the Loyal South and some of the controversy that has arisen, both attributed to Act 46 and otherwise, that's not something that I would put those communities through without giving them a real clear understanding of what was happening and why. So those were the points. I had five. My sixth point was when taken together, three, four, and five above present a compelling case for deliberate, well-informed, and timely action by the General Assembly. And I picked those three words for a reason. Deliberate, because it needs to be intentional and purposeful and without delay. Well-informed means there's a lot that needs to be consumed and disseminated in terms of the implications of this. And timely means I think that the study was so well developed and so clear in terms of Vermont and how to gauge and measure Vermont against a wide array of criteria, both in terms of what the academic science would say and what we know about experiences in other states. I think when I talk about an approach and other considerations, I wouldn't use the term a lawsuit waiting to happen, so as not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I think that's something that people ought to be thinking about. I just contradicted myself, but there you go. So then, after I sort of went through that in my own mind and conferred with other folks, including John Castle, who I already made reference to, and Tammy Colby herself, I devised an approach. And I was glad that Jay's in my testimony was similar, because I also have a commission of sorts. But I'm not going to call it a study commission. I refer to it as a commission on implementing the recommended waiting changes. And there may be some subtle difference in terms of how you would interpret that. But I will tell you, as an approach, this is something you might consider. And because of the reaction Jay got and otherwise, I'm not going to say it's a recommendation. It's an explanation of one thing you might do. So the first thing would be to develop a statement of legislative intent, indicating the need and expectation for action on the waiting study recommendations. And I think several of you have articulated why you would want to act on it as have I. So I think there's plenty of findings available. The second would be to create a commission on implementing the recommended waiting changes in related matters. And the related matters would extend into some of those other policy considerations that people ought to be thinking about if not addressing. The third thing would be charges to the commission. And this is where I got more specific. So the first one would be provide briefings on the rationale for and anticipated effects of the waiting changes for every member of the General Assembly. So make sure that 180 legislators know what's happening and why. And I'm going to cite an example as to why I think that's imperative. The Ways and Means Committee upstairs is pretty sophisticated in terms of ed finance taxation and by extension what happens in school district processes across Vermont. So one of the representatives up there had read this study and when Dan French or Tammy Colby, I can't recall which, I think it was, well, a witness, I will say, concluded their testimony. This particular representative said, I note that in the school district where I'm from, the tax rate increase associated with these wait adjustments is 40 cents. So, fair point. His eye was drawn to that tax rate change. He wasn't necessarily thinking about what all the implications would be. And I think based on people's human inclination to want to measure things in dollars and cents, you could probably garner a fair amount of support for a change to the waits among a number of legislators in this building simply by referring them to the simulation. Because if you look at the simulation, and I was talking 2018, I haven't had a chance to study 2020 yet, but 2018 there's a lot of, you know, five to 20 cent variabilities in terms of taxes coming down and a bunch of 40 to 50 cent variability in terms of tax rates going up. So I haven't plotted it or mapped it or even looked at the spreadsheet in terms of pluses and minuses, but it's not 50% benefit and 50% don't. It tilts more heavily toward the beneficiaries. So that's important for a couple of reasons. One, because you could probably gain political support outside of a more thorough analysis. But also, the expectation should not be that your community is gonna save 15 cents in the tax rate because the whole premise of the wait is you're gonna have money to invest to make the delivery of education more equitable, which is a reason why information about what this is and what it's supposed to achieve is so important. So briefings on the rationale and anticipated effects of the waiting changes for every member of the General Assembly. Remember, this is the potential charge of the commission. Two, engaging expert analysis and understanding potential interplay between weights, the funding system overall, Act 173 delivery, school construction aid, factors of morality, poverty, English language learners, mental health and related obligations for schools. So I agree with you, Senator Baruth, that the study does a great job in explaining the weights. But it doesn't pay a lot of attention to what to do with the resources that are now kind of come available to you. And you might say, school officials ought to know that already or you might say we're gonna leave that to local control. I'm not saying that you would, but you might, both of those are challengeable points because the way education is delivered right now, there's a fair amount of pressure in some communities to reduce costs irrespective of need. And if you needed evidence of that, you would only have had to go to the two hours of testimony on school construction yesterday where a lot of people talked about deficiencies in their school buildings, which is one marker. And they were asked, you know, how did it get to this point? And the response was, well, school board members, voters and school administrators were making decisions to disinvest in their buildings in favor of what they construed to be other priorities. It's a complicated picture. And I'm not saying that we ought to create a four-year college program and force every legislator to go through it, but it would be useful to have somebody talk to school officials and legislators alike about what this is, what opportunities it creates and how to turn into those opportunities. The third thing that the commission might do, and this, you know, I may get quizzical looks to this one, support the education associations in providing consistent information on opportunities and budget implications of the waiting changes. Now, here's what I mean by that. We'll have a conversation in this committee about an important piece of legislation and then we'll break. And the explanation of what happened and why starts to go through filters, goes through my filter when I talk to superintendents, goes through Jay's filter, goes through each of your filters in terms of constituents, to the extent that we had a uniform body of information that would be conveyed to legislators and local school officials in relatively similar forms would be of tremendous benefit, I think. And then the fourth thing is, and this is key, convene the commission in as many sessions as necessary between enactment and October 15, 2020 in order to produce a hard recommendation on enactment for immediate application or transition, i.e. phase in to inform both the process of school, district budget development for FY 2022. So I've now discovered something that I would have corrected had I been able to read this one. I got back to my office. So there's a typo in that line. But the point is, I think that if the General Assembly does not act to enact those waits in this session, that you need to come back ready to do it in the, in the, in the first half of the next biennium. And to, to, yeah. Yeah. Ask you what you think of this. So, so I hear too a little cognitive dissonance where you're saying we should act. Yeah. But also we should prepare carefully. So it is, it is possible to act this year on a bill that puts out a schedule of things to happen. Yeah. Act 173. So what would you think about instead of a commission being empaneled, getting up to speed, et cetera, and then, then figuring out how to go around the state. What if we assigned to the State Board a year of public outreach where they would convey the same message around the state and then, this is just a thought experiment on the timing, but we're already too late for the current budget years. So for the next year, they are rolling that out, explaining that. Then the following year, the first half of the phasing kicks in and the year following the second half of the phasing. So you'd have a three-year bill in green light this year, but that would roll forward on a three-year timeline. What would you think about that in terms of your two accountability? So I would say a couple things. One is mine was just one approach and then I'm going to apply alliteration. I think it's alliteration. Fundamentally, form follows function. So I think you could do it in a multitude of ways. As you want to do. And I think my points about education, understanding, general assembly should think about how it is they want to do this. If the state board was involved, I would say, because that was the example you cited, they need access to expertise that they currently do not have access to. But provided expertise, and I would say that the interest is so shared that the general assembly should weigh heavily on what type of expertise they would want them to have. Because we could, in the way we did with Act 46, there was a mandated interplay between AOE and the board. And essentially AOE developed the map. And then the state board went around with that map, and they made changes without having to have their own staff. So I just throw that out there as a way of saying I suppose what you don't like about the idea of creating another task force or another commission is that in a sense it redos the step that we've already done, which is we had the most authoritative study done. And I think that's good to build in. I feel like if we panel a commission or a study committee or a task force, what we will wind up with is what we have on our desks right now. Which is these are the things that we're going to do and we're going to do and we're going to do that right now. Which is these are the weights you can choose to do it at once or over a series of steps. Are they really going to be able to do very much in terms of the interplay between school construction and Act 173 in the weights? Probably not because they won't be policy makers. They'll be in an advisory room. That's a point well taken. I think that my main point is the context, education and careful planning that people need to have as a basis to move forward on this. But I am not I'm not wedded to any particular idea. I will always weigh in on whether I think an idea is going to be effective or not based on my own experience. But I think that the suggestion you make has merit. For me it's just a matter of not leaving people both in the general assembly and in the field thinking that this is something that it's not. And also understanding why the weights would be adjusted in the first place and that it's sort of a more complicated matter. What they could do to take advantage of the change or if they're going to get more opportunity and how to contend with it if they're going to have less monetary access as it were. But of course with our education funding system they would never have less monetary access it's just a question of what they want to tax themselves. I'll go very briefly through the rest because I know that so far. So I didn't anticipate your question precisely but I also included a note if you thought that you were under pressure to act immediately I think it's within the realm of possibility that you could do some partial weighting adjustments which you might have referred to as a phased approach. And I don't know what potential plaintiffs might tolerate but when I talked with some folks who have a real interest in seeing action on this as soon as they can what I heard from them was they have an interest in making sure that the study will get acted on and with a predictable timeline. So the other considerations that I will run through rapidly is one I think there's a need potential need to consider Act 173 funding timelines in the context of all of this. Two, two how to contend and some of these things I've touched on but these were important points that I wanted to pull back out how to contend with the potential that increased spending capacity will translate or will translate to increased investment in the areas associated with the respective weights and how to measure that over time. Like will people use the capacity for morality or English language learners or children with special needs in a way that should. Three, how do you best inform the policy making process in a manner that has decision makers both state and local understanding the purpose of the changes to the weighting system with an emphasis on using that understanding to better apply those changes. So you'll see my reputation for redundancy stays with me because that's a point that I made. Four, how to support or not the implications of the increase or decrease in access to resources associated with the weighting change. I've talked about that ad nauseam. Need to give due consideration to geographic sparsity. So one of the things that we know with our relatively dramatic declines in enrollment are there are schools where people are asserting viability and necessity when they're in proximity to places that have capacity and that's a big policy question that's one that the legislature has largely stayed out of but if you want to get your best dollar value moving forward that's something you might have to tackle or the state board might need to tackle. And then finally is a contingency necessary in case a lawsuit is brought and what I mean by that is you could have a beautiful legislative plan that extends over three years and then all of a sudden somebody utilizes that study in their own experience and goes to court and you need to plan B. So that's not anything that I have the answer to but it's something that occurred to me when I was thinking about this. And I've thought about the possibility of a lawsuit too especially in that these figures are as I said before apparently derived so I think it would be persuasive in the court of law to say we're being underfunded and the legislature knows we're being underfunded and you can bail them but it seems to me if the legislature were to act this year in the best case scenario if it's stripped over a number of years it's still we're still in the process of acting on it and producing a timeline that has a very finite implementation so I have a hard time feeling like a court would five, three years to be too long right I think in the racial age of these things that's right and that is a as I talked about this with a few people they had a comment very similar to yours I've brought the letter that you have but I told John Dassel that I'd deliver it to you he would like to testify as you extend these comments he and I had a conversation about it I believe everybody can stop so that that includes my testimony so my understanding the goal of this and I know we use words like equity and other things but ultimately what I'm calculating we're out of my mind is that we're saying that there's not enough money in the system as a state and we need to redo this waiting so that these districts have more taxing capacity to bring those dollars into to an equitable level right no because there's nothing in that report that says there's not enough money in the state when we talk, when you say we hope we won't use the extra taxing capacity they have to give tax breaks we hope that they use that to reinvest it's saying we're going to put up the system with more money from those areas that's not what I say but that's what we're getting to so if you said to me if you ask me the question about the system my response to that is yes do I feel like the needs that are reflected in the waiting study are accounted for properly in the current education funding system the answer to that question is no in this you think we'll fix it you know yeah I mean that's I'll answer the question but it's not me it's the people that did the study and it's your evaluation but you know I'll go out on a limb and say I would not want to be on the other side arguing that that study didn't have merit it didn't make sense I get it what I think is going to happen to this in my longer term concern this is going to blow school budgets completely up even more in the time and we're going to not have the tough discussions to have our communities across the state about getting spending in line we have two billion dollars when you add in teacher pension obligations and all that I think we're better off talking about how do we reimagine the whole system on how we spend that much so I would refer you to my discussion point number four which is you and I said it I said it in a different way than you have said it and we'll each have perspective but you're pretty far distance from for example capping per pupil expenditures which would be one approach that's been taken and attempted, taken in some states and attempted in others this weighting study is a pretty far distance from that type of a philosophy so if what I would say you know just now as an observer of public process if the intentions of the General Assembly are to get a handle on costs and somehow suppress or control costs that's not what this is and I'll you know I'm pretty familiar with the poll school construction issue because we've been spending a fair amount of time on that and a statistic that Mark brought to the House Education Committee recently that would cause one to wonder whether we've been putting our money in the right place without you know making accusations or casting as versions is that we're in the top five in terms of head spending per pupil and we're in the bottom five in terms of capital construction investment alright now what I would say parenthetically to that is throughout the conversations about Act 46 one of the principles was that if you created larger units of management you could get a handle better handle on ratios so we've also got the lowest ratios in the country so you know if you're looking for somebody to come in here and sort of defend the status quo I'm not going to do it what I'm doing is trying to give you my best thinking with regard to where you are today and we were asked to testify in the waiting setting I think while we're having this discussion if we don't have the discussion on caps property tax continue to draw to control people aren't going to be able to yeah that's for the six of you to talk about I know but I think not having that discussion with this discussion will be another missed opportunity another half a decade of rising property taxes okay well I mean that's what the that's you're the deliberative body 30 senators well I think Cory is quite well thank you for your testimony I think I agree with you on almost all of your points and I think Cory's question actually illustrates what I've been grappling with in terms of how do we help our own colleagues understand this and the implications of it and I think I appreciated that you brought in other things that could be and probably should be considered in the study school construction how do districts who are quote-unquote winners spend the money how do districts who are quote-unquote losers deal with their you know that $15 million budget indication I think that there's a lot that we have to take into account in making a change this big and I appreciate that you want to do it in a phased in approach and I think that potentially the state board of education is a body that could be helpful I do think that it needs to include people in this building though because I think that if I'm going to go back and talk to my school districts and my constituents and my superintendents and school boards about this I have the tools to be able to do that and most of us don't and I want to be able to make sure that we all have the tools that we need to have these conversations so you can explain it to your constituents and the implications and I think we should be putting in there some things if you are getting increased tax funding capacity these are the things you should be spending on because these are the things that are going to help students in poverty or ELL or rural students and making some policy decisions about that type of thing and then potentially making some policy decisions about you know the other end of it too spending tax not going to go there but I just think that implications and then the 173 implications are huge and just if I can say one last thing to Senator parents point so on the day this broke Mark Perlman I had a conversation and we both we asked it was a rhetorical question what happens if the places who see their taxes increase as a result of weight adjustments continue to spend at the same level and if you look at the characteristics that's within the realm of possibility I mean I cited Champlain Valley School District which has got an evolved system that it has heavy investment and I think that if they had tax rate effects associated with changes in whites then one might speculate that their spending would not drop at the level commensurate but and if the places that have capacity because they want to invest at you know students poverty more than they've been able to if they make those investments then the potential does exist for cost to increase that's what our system is the budgets that get approved get funded so I'm not going to argue your point I'm just going to tell you that I'm not going to take responsibility for the report or the current but I think I think that it's going to be an inflationary push you know and I look at you know my district the ones that get hit the hardest have been the most responsible I've got one community Fairfax they just voted down another school that you you know they're one of the hardest communities here town of Georgia hit a 52 cent tax rate but they're pure people spending around 13,000 dollars you know those are big issues that they're going to have to grapple with and they've acted responsibly from a Franklin County perspective of spending their dollars wisely we're going to have to go home and like Ruth said we're all going to have to explain whether I vote we vote for this or not and it does pass we still have to explain to our constituents what it means for them and you know just to point out the realities ideologically of I want to call it the two parties but of guest voters and nobody statewide I think nobody's on school budgets whether they're ward members or whether they're parents taxpayers whatever if they have extra capacity they're going to view it as their right to drop their tax rate because they've been underfunded so over tax over the years historically so I don't think you're going to win an argument with those people that they have a right to do that similarly in communities where they really believe in laying on the services that they need for these populations I think you're going to be able to persuade them either so we're going to be in the same world if we change the funding formula and some people are going to insist on dropping their tax rates and some people are going to insist on raising them what's the overall the problem I always have as funding is it's the classic case of the tragedy the commons way we do fund and it's a prisoner dilemma game theory you have no incentive to vote your budget down because of the overall impact of the state so we've driven them up over the last 20 years but this doesn't I don't think fix it and I think the discussion I think the monitor really wants to have is how do we get cost and their control and I agree there's an overall argument to be had that if we scrap the whole system and put something in that simpler and fair it would work better but it's just like the healthcare system we can say as you know democratic primaries Medicare for all once you get into the details it breeds its own complexity and then you're sort of back in the same universal how do you how do you provide a universal benefit when some people seem to be getting it harder and I think that a conversation that Vermonter really wants to have is how do we provide an equitable and equitable education across our entire state to all of our kids and that's what this study does it's a great vehicle for doing that what I'm concerned about is making sure that we all understand the implications and taking advantage of a change this big to make other policy changes and really dig into some of these other things which given this time in the session may be hard to do laying the groundwork for doing that I think we should absolutely do that I'm really as a former a fiscal analyst on school finance I'm really wary of a legislative body making decisions based on a spreadsheet that has winners and losers on it because then we're all just looking at our districts and going I don't know and then voting based on the spreadsheet rather than based on a full understanding of the policy implications and you know as a now a legislator I want to understand what I'm voting on and I want my colleagues to understand what they're voting on at that point I would argue that usually it happens through a reverse so usually what would happen is there would be a recommendation that we change the rating formula but there would be no simulations and then everybody would be up in arms trying to get something over on that I think this study did us a huge favor by saying look here you go it's all out there now because that's so transparent and easily digested one way or the other we can spend the time on what you're talking about which is the overall rationale I think that's where Jeff's going to make it clear that there is a moral advantage one that could turn into legal trouble for the state pretty easily so we're up against a hard deadline of three so I want to make sure that we have Jeff you have others you want to I'm around here in other words I want to complete this testimony it may mean that we're not going to get to the new draft on the statewide bargaining how long do you think you got I'll be brief and here's why Jeff and Jay did a nice job of summarizing I will emphasize a few points here if you don't mind Jeff for the record Jeff and Vermont and EA thanks for the opportunity to talk about the weighty study I think it should have and is having an influence on your conversation here today and going forward somebody I don't know if it's Jay or Jeff talked about opportunity for resources under Act 60 and 68 and this would adjust that and the question that you're grappling with is how do you I use this word perhaps inappropriately but the thought I have is do you require schools to adjust for the that they've been under supporting kids and do we how do you address that and that's going to be something that you have to tackle and I get it but it is important because some of these kids do have significant needs Jay talked about the kids with trauma that is what we see a lot I've got with me my member from Springfield Allison Sylvester fifth grade teacher talking about you know Springfield is front and center and sees a lot of kids with trauma and every day multiple kids in each classroom and so they are struggling with that issue and they could use those resources for social workers and other needs the kids have to address other needs the kids have they are arriving to kids the kids are arriving to school having spent the evening and the evening morning with parents who are not well regulated themselves and so we're asking the kids to be well regulated and that's not happening at home that's not seen as a model type of behavior so that's but we're asking a lot of the kids and therefore the teachers and support staff to work with those kids and we should the waiting study in fact would give them resources to do that and if they are all of our kids as Jay mentioned or Jeff mentioned we should think of it that way I very much do I'll speed up here a little bit there was mention of act 173 I can't emphasize it enough if you're going to do this waiting study we really really really need to look at act 173 and it's block grant funding I can come back and talk to you about act 173 more in depth but that is a big huge change that is in the process of being rolled out it's not yet rolled out so we have time to sort of write that shift but if you're going to make changes all the time work with a colleague who is a former science teacher and he talks about changing one lever at a time and studying it see how it works and then adjusting thereafter but we're switching a lot of levers as Jeff mentioned I'll hear it all at once in the last several years there is fatigue about that out in the field people talk about act 173 I've met with members around the state and they understand the numbers they don't understand 173 and it is seismic throw on top of that act 46 which is only about the governments here we're talking about the kids we're talking about waiting for kids we're talking about how we fund services and how we fund special ed under 173 so the combination could be toxic and we are concerned about the erosion of public support of the system so that's a legitimate concern and perfectly valid and one that I share I guess what I would say is 173 is for me the largest driver to implement this because the equalized pupils are it's all about the formula the formula that we're developing for the census grade for the equalized pupils so if we were to wait until 173 let's say we're going to wait 5 years to implement this we implement 173 we have implemented it with a formula that we now know will be substantially flawed because of the inequities built into the equalized pupils so then we would 5 years out having implemented a formula that we know to be inaccurate then we would correct it 5 years out so I guess what I'm trying to think of is is there a way to in advance of the full creation of the census grant formula which is going to draw on the equalized pupils is there a way to get us to at least substantial phasing of that change so that we can with a straight face the census grant formula when it's developed is accurate does that make sense? I think I understand it here's what I would say the answer is yes but I think you have to stop the implementation of 173 we're calling for repeal of 173 just to be very honest we haven't talked about it here and I'll mention it up in the house repeal would be entirely authoritative because they don't have enough pain I think so it's a good question for us for the rest of the session is there a way to spur professional development around Act 173 and also just to see the answer listening to the testimony yesterday PBGL, PBGRs or whatever I think that's your spot on PD is necessary for folks to the culture is out there and it is what it is good or bad that's how people are practicing their day-to-day teaching and educating kids if you want to change it and that may be a good and valid thing to do it is going to take some significant efforts to change it Nate Levinson testified from DMG which is the report that prompted 173 in large measure said that it was two to three years of intensive PD to change people and then ongoing regular PD thereafter and so that is it hasn't happened yet and so I think if we're going to change the weights and you may have some legal analysis from Ledge Council that suggests that you might need to in some way or another but maybe that's the thing that we should start with we think the weights are the conversation is a good one the report is very impressive and some of the things that Jay and Jeff have said are true these weights need to be adjusted they're from Act 60 and nobody knows where they came from they just were what they were I had already thought when you made a great timeline of Act 173 rollout we had already moved it a year but once this weighting study landed I had already thought about the possibility that if we wanted to have the weights phased in before terminal calculation then we might have to mess with the timeline so we'll hang out on the wall as something to be thinking about is what was a longer it may need to be yeah it doesn't it uses a 3 year average of 8am so it's just a student count of average of 3 years so not equalized no the only way so in New Gamers Report on the weighting study they said when the recommendations one of the average you could pursue is rather than making an adjustment to the census grant for areas that need more support one of the solutions is rather increasing the grant amount using less people's incapitalation of different cities implicitly but that's the thing they're allowed it's just a way of addressing that piece okay I must have swapped it out for 8am what is 8am 8am is just a student count taken every year between like for a 10 day period of enrolled students this actually extends in seats not justice Stanford average daily membership membership Jeff anything else no thanks so much I appreciate all the testimony today very useful and very thoughtful and we'll continue working along on it I think everybody's watchword is making sure we don't make things worse and yet acting as it is possible to do without a mistake so committee we're done I think I had hope that Jim could put out the new draft for statewide public school for the health benefits but I'm reluctant to have him just throw it out without a walkthrough so we'll save that and take it up on Tuesday don't call it coping yes and you'll be under the with hand of the vice chair for Thursday and Friday anything before we break we're going to talk about pvl not today we'll move that off until Tuesday Jim can I talk to you before we move on away alright see you so we have another one thank you