 Okay, great good afternoon. Welcome to Senate Education Friday or Friday Wednesday, February 15th 130 we actually have a relatively abbreviated or somewhat like Jen agenda. I think today we may be finished by four Your school safety we're going to return to the walkthrough on S 56 have more of a pre-k conversation then we're going to wrap up with school construction and have some responses to Dulux draft bill which we went through yesterday, and I think we're going to generally hear, you know, pretty good stuff in endorsement, so I don't think they're folks are going to be very long so with that Barbara, do you mind joining us at the table, and we have secretary French with us on screen Secretary French welcome to back to Senate Ed and director Barbeck. We're here talking about school safety with a particular eye to the school safety bill that we have before us, but really first and foremost and a little bit of an update any additional information you can provide around what happened last week in any sort of lessons learned from that incident that we want to be thinking about as it relates to school safety bill going forward. So with that the floor is yours. Sure Good afternoon. Dan French secretary of education. Yeah, D and I are really pleased to be invited back in on this topic and certainly we had in our minds to provide you an update on last week's incident though that's that analysis is still unfolding, but again, you know, thank you for the opportunity to come in and testify on this very important topic. We're just going to provide some moral comments for you today and be happy to engage in question and answer but as you know, we did bring forward some recommendations on how to improve our statutory framework for school safety back in January. We know the committee has taken a lot of testimony since then and you know, firstly just want to express our gratitude and appreciation for your interest in working on this important issue. In January, our testimony basically was around shifting well established and what we we'd characterized as well resourced best practices that have been supported over the last decade or so and our recommendation is essentially to shift from those practices being recommendations to making them more permanent requirements and our main rationale for bringing forward this recommendation now really rests on this just assertion that only with a recommendation will we see consistently across the state an approach to school safety essentially to summarize that it's unacceptable in our view to have some schools be more safe than others and it's only through a requirement that we can ensure that all schools are safe. Our proposal that we brought forth in January is still where we strongly encourage the committee to take action the four requirement areas that we propose are options based drills the consistent approach to emergency operations planning which D will talk about in a minute relative to what happened last week requiring a policy on access control and visitor management and lastly sort of the newest innovation in this area is a requirement to maintain a behavior threat assessment team which we think is really integral to getting out in front of a lot of these issues I'd also just want to highlight I haven't I don't think we've testified on yet but we've also been working really from the inception of this work earlier in the fall with the understanding that the agency would be working on new regulations and you might be familiar last year with the pupil waiting law. There was a requirement that the agency engage in the creation of what are called district quality standards and also the articulation of a new quality assurance process. So we've embedded school safety in that regulatory work we just filed with ICAR last week so that should be on their agenda for their meeting later I guess next week but just want to reassure the committee that that regulatory approach you know we've done it in in in mind of making these recommendations and we think that regulatory approach will provide the necessary direction to the agency to adequately support and oversee the implementation of these requirements but again we think there is some urgency on this matter and wanted to express our appreciation for your interest in working on this and I would offer particularly from the agency of education's perspective as you work more towards finalizing a bill in this area and offer our legislative council and our legal team support to work with you and your ledge council to come up with a really solid version of this law but to underscore the urgency and the importance of it I'll turn it over to Dee now who will as you know heads up the governor's task force on violence prevention and then we'll make some remarks regarding the incident last week relative to this broader body of work great and before we do that yeah does anybody have any questions for secretary french and the one note I have uh and correct me if I'm wrong senator duick you were wondering about teacher training like I think it came up in this conversation that um you know teachers aren't coming to the table they're coming to teach french map whatever and there's a training component or something in it that some teachers might not want to be a part of does that make sense secretary french yeah maybe to a certain extent I think uh you know the experience I've had over the years I think when I came in in January you know my career as a teacher that a principal superintendent I've seen this work evolve over the years I haven't had direct experience as a school level leader with your threat assessment process that's sort of something that's been evolving in the last couple of years but I will say in terms of the all hazards sort of planning and the options based drills we don't we don't think about different classes of employees or different types of employees it's really for all employees it's it's everyone needs to be involved in that whether you're a custodian or a teacher so there isn't specific training relative to your type of status other than you might be in charge of a classroom and so forth but again um from our perspective there's been a lot of professional development resources offered on this the extent like anything we do in the state that it trickles down to an individual teacher saying well I'm unaware of it we think again that just underscores the need to make this a requirement so there is greater consistency and implementation across the state yeah and that's a good point senator and I will say this the idea of really you're speaking about the options based drills um that has evolved a lot uh as as the threats have evolved what I see now it's sort of best practice in that area is far more responsive to sort of the social emotional impact on the practitioners than it was originally like a lot of things you know we're reacting to certain circumstances to make our school safe but I think there's been more effort put into thinking about the impact of the practitioners um I also think you know it's one of the reasons I really strongly support the the behavior threat management approach because that really gets into it really starts on the premise of social psychology and from an assets perspective how to support people how to support students in particular um so I think you know I think all this work is evolving again I don't necessarily think it will not continue to evolve absent a change here but I think it's really important um by moving to a requirement we get some consistency around common language so we don't have people using old inversions of how to do this we we can really stay consistent across the state and evolve together that's really important with our professional development that we have a common language when we bring people together um and if you're familiar everything we do in Vermont when it's a local local decision we end up half the time when we bring people together it's just doing the translation of like well in your district it means this and this district it means that so it's really important that we move towards common language that I think a requirement would enable us to do oh yes I agree and I do consider myself a tough broad and I did lose my father to gun violence so I am you know I'm extremely sensitive to um any kind of media that's like over sensationalized which is what we had that day so anyway thank you very much I appreciate that and um for the record my name is Steve Barbeck I'm the director of violence prevention um to uh just um move along from what Secretary French had had started off within his testimony again and our goals are our consistency common language um and that all of our schools are able to have the same level of safety across the board um and again the four areas that we're looking to address um is options based drills the policy on visitor management that schools implement uh an emergency operations plan that's at least as comprehensive as the template that's provided by the Vermont school safety center and the behavioral threat assessment teams for supervisory unions and districts um with the experience that we had last week with the hoax calls I think that really brought to light some of the points that we're making with this proposal and that emergency operations plans um were critical in in those in dealing with those kinds of situations and part of emergency operations plans um include communications a huge part of that and and how critical those communications are um visitor management again um ensuring that the schools were secured had these in in fact actual events um and then um the options options based drills so that schools were able to make make a decision take um options that were most reasonable under the circumstances wherever that school was in the state and again we as you know we saw these throughout the state in a variety of different different areas in terms of the actual um hoax calls from last week there have been some um debriefings we're actually having one another one this afternoon and our goal is to understand where there are any gaps exist and identify those and how we can make improvements um we need to use these as a learning platform so you know thank goodness that none of these were actual events um however I think that we can use it as a tool to make our systems better make our schools safer and with that um we need to understand the responses that each school made in collaboration with law enforcement response again that communication um where things um you know could have been done better how things went very well um and I think when we look into each of these incidents my expectation will be that we'll see a variety of along that that platform um and that's what we are exactly looking to alleviate through our proposal is that all schools um have a plan in place that can respond to a variety of emergencies again this one was the hoax calls on the shooter but as I mentioned in past testimony it could be anything from electrical outages to fires to a number of different incidents so um you know we want to identify also um our ability to identify hoax calls in the future so I think um again we will look to do an assessment of these each of these 22 incidents more closely um but you know it communication being key is understanding that after receiving a number of very similar calls we start to you know say okay this this seems a little odd out of the ordinary um but I also um importantly is to ensure that our response to those doesn't diminish um just because there's an assumption oh this might be a hoax so every one of these calls was law enforcement did respond to them law enforcement did go to the schools and ensure that in fact there was not an active shooter so um you know we want to again do an assessment ensure how we can make improvements um in how responses were to these particular cases center machine can I just ask a question about the hoax calls um and if you can't speak to this I fully understand but you know from my perspective one of my biggest concerns is that it it almost seemed like a coordinated effort to stress test the system and and I was wondering I mean is this something that's also happened in other states recently or it is yeah um it during the summer or later part of the summer and in the fall um we were made aware of other states that were experiencing I can't name them off the top of my head though we were aware that other states were experiencing hoax calls of a similar nature and so we were aware and prepared to a degree that hey this is happening in other states so um to my knowledge in you know the last month or so I'm not aware of any other states that were experiencing these hoax calls we then got ours and my understanding is that there were other states um the same day or within a couple of days who were also experiencing the same the same thing yeah it's that to me that's even more concerning than than a 13 year old playing a prank but yeah I was just curious thank you thank you I just wanted to add to the center issues question that I did some visits on Monday to county schools the supervisor level and they were actually aware of the fact that other states had had a hoax so at least they had a sense sense of sight sensitization of such a unusual and I think the important thing too is that um with that knowledge the response was still the same so not making an assumption that oh this must just be a hoax that there was responses there should have been um for each of these so you felt as you felt confident you know across the board that the response was consistent and quick as you would have hoped yes and that's not so much our purview you know law enforcement but you feel you were pleased yeah with the um you know we were in communication direct communication with department of public safety with the commissioner and the colonel and we weren't sure that there was a law enforcement response to each of the the incidents and I feel um you know that that was handled quite well yeah thank you once you have your debrief and you had time to sort of put your thoughts together can we be debriefed yes as well yes that'd be great great do you have a timing on that I'm a timing a sense of when that ball when sort of the next stage of like the work that you're doing to understand what happened I don't I will know more after we meet this afternoon okay but right now I don't sure senator wins so in a former life we had what we call standard operating procedures and safety is everybody's business school safety is but when everybody's looking at it nobody in particular is looking at what agency is the head agency to establish a standard operating procedure in a situation with school quite well is everybody have a common language for example the secretary said is there anything in writing as it starts at the top and gets driven down to the local school then ESOP could expand upon different situations with unique situations that the schools might have and do we have any such thing as an SOP so in terms of the if I understand your question so the schools what we're proposing here is that every school have an SOP or what we call an emergency operations plan on how to to deal with a variety of situations and part of that is that they also collaborate with their local emergency management so their town so they're working very closely together and the town know okay this is the communication if there is an emergency at the school and then they collaborated this the town is aware of what the schools emergency operation plan is so from that perspective that's our goal is that every school has these in place so that they are prepared to deal with these so I'm suggesting is it be top driven maybe Department of Public Safety because I was an emergency management coordinator in my town and we had a lockdown in our high school and nobody in the town government knew about it so there's got to be communication that's going to go laterally up and down and it should start at the top and be driven to the local level and yes and you're absolutely right I was going to chime in uh center I you know that's I think the intention of what we're proposing to a certain extent but just to echo on on Dee's previous comment we have you know this long established partnership we call the Vermont School Safety Center which is a joint partnership between Department of Public Safety and the agency of education that is sort of the source of truth if you will in terms of the templates of the planning and so forth but because it's a recommendation people take that template out and do different things with it and we don't have a lot of visibility into the quality of the emergency operation plans essentially what this proposal will do in conjunction with the district quality standards it makes it a regulatory approach supervised by the agency of education so we would you know the agency of education is not expected to have public safety expertise we would still rely on our state partners and our outside resources to develop these models but we would by making it a requirement then bring it into a more stronger regulatory approach and we'd have a definitive oversight of that coming from the agency of education and following up on uh senator Williams question I and so yeah this bill will do it and then you we're all thinking about the other external coordinations that are yeah happening and yeah and that will be part of our conversation this afternoon as well thank you um and I don't I don't think any of that work ever goes away you know that sure that's that's the piece that has to be practiced and the professional development but we're eliminating one variable by creating a requirement here and that we're all working from the same recipe if you will as opposed to having the potential for 200 different recipes out in the landscape so people are working from a common template and then taking that template uh in the context of their specific ecosystem to consider what their specific resources are and so forth it still provides us with a real solid basis for convening professional development and providing technical support and and another key part of that is that in the proposal that schools reevaluate that every year annually and again there's so many things change you know there may be a change in the structure of the school or an addition of classrooms or a whole variety of things so having them review the EOPs annually and take into consideration those changes and make those modifications is really important as well I think also just to add on to this we're likely to experience a period of increased staffing volatility in the education system so anytime we see people turning over in key leadership positions as we are we are now it just underscores for me the importance of having SOPs of having standardized practices because if we rely on individuals to bring this work forward and people are turning over in key positions there's a real potential that this could get lost to Dee's point this looks need to be looked at annually by creating that sort of a requirement then we're or insulating ourselves from the volatility of the staffing patterns that are likely to be a part of our future as an education system there's just one more point I'm trying to find out you know when you develop an SOP everybody will copy the certain things that everybody has to do that way if you go to another school they should be able to go to that school learn CSLP and know where they're supposed to go when this happens and I'm not sure that the administration even has a plan to make that happen when I think that's partly correct me if I'm wrong that is ideally if we pass this then if I'm teaching math at one school I'll get the same training I could transfer to another school I'll be able to have the I mean it's basically the same kind of ready to roll correct and and as the secretary had mentioned it's utilizing the same template they're going to have to be minor changes because each school is a little bit different but that basic template that basic plan will be the same okay okay no no it's a really no no it's a good question and it's a key question and it's a key goal and you know this can you say a couple words for my own understanding of what exactly happened with this situation when you're talking about swatting the only thing I can think of and I'll just show me it's it's almost like a robo call kind of thing but I you know is that sort of what's going out different somebody's hitting something on a computer it's it's heading out a message is heading out to all these places phones are ringing they're picking up and they're hearing some kind of message it can happen in a number of different ways in this case my understanding is that it wasn't a computer generated voice okay so it wasn't the sort of the robo call like when you get the computerized voice on your cell phone robo call kind of thing you know call this number right give us your credit card information what have you vote for camp yeah so my understanding is that from from that respect it wasn't like a computerized voice in terms of the technicality of how these work I'm not sort of a phone IT person but my understanding is that there are ways that the the actual location can be concealed by bouncing these calls off of a variety of different places and they become very difficult to track down we our partners with the FBI are also involved in the investigation so you know that they have the the tools and the ability to to do more work in that area but again it is it's very difficult to to track the origin where those calls originated from do you say VPN yeah the virtual private network can it's how people access the dark web is through a VPN and then it bounces to a IP address in Switzerland and then Brazil and then Guatemala and then you know goes to the website address so has there been success out there generally to track these groups down or is it just so hard I know that it's very difficult and I don't know what the success rate is any other questions okay the um if I could just add one last thing um in testimony a couple of weeks ago there was some conversation about the behavioral threat assessments and the training and a little bit more information about those and I would offer to have Dr. Marissa Rondazo testify remotely and she is a subject matter expert in behavioral threat assessments and she has um started of um but she's a psychiatrist and she is basically one of the most yeah yeah um and she has she's actually done trainings for us in Vermont for schools and administrators on behavioral threat assessment and was also doing a very fantastic presentation at the governor's school safety conference in the fall and she is more than willing to testify remotely and give an overview of behavioral threat assessments and answer any questions you have related to that and I think it's great to have her come in if you have the availability and the time given that she does do trainings for us here in Vermont so she is um you know the person we go to for those things right yeah and her name is on the list and I couldn't remember when I saw the name who she was so yes thanks for bringing that up again you'll hopefully have her next week if she can she can do it okay great thank you thank you very much thanks for your work secretary friends thanks for your work I know it was a crazy couple days for all of you last week so can't even imagine thank you for your time all right thank you thank you is Beth zooming or she all right that'll be here any second okay welcome back to Senate education we started did a really good I thought uh overview of s56 thank you for that yesterday uh Miss St. James sort of understanding what it is how it works the pre-k piece uh and then we ran out of time so we thought another 15 20 minutes on it would be helpful so with that we'll let you kind of take us through it in a little bit more detail sure that's St. James office of legislative council I think we um I think we stopped around page eight or page nine that's accurate I have us at well I have us a button seven seven yeah eight that'd be great okay so we're talking about program requirements and so perhaps last we talked about was at the bottom of page seven um and you'll see that there's a lot of strikers here right so this is using the existing framework for the pre-k statute so there was already a section on um uh what it meant to pre-qualify and we're just kind of relabeling that as program requirements and you'll see that there are things that used to be required of a pre-k program pre-qualified pre-k program that are crossed out now um and then you'll see things that aren't crossed out that are current law that this draft proposes to keep and then you'll see underlying language that's a new program requirement so there was an accreditation requirement on page seven excuse me seven line 10 there was a teacher licensing requirement on page seven line 17 then if we go on to um and those those were um those were current requirements we go on page eight um new there's a couple new requirements here so one is that they meet the program meets the criteria for and remember this is the public pre-kindergarten education for you meets the criteria for hours of operation and minimum number of school days pursuant to section 1071 and we talked about the fact that um 1071 specifies that there are 175 days of student attendance in a school year um there are some waiver provisions that are not necessarily applicable to this um conversation but just to know that it's not a bright line um there and that was used I think during the pandemic um but minimum hours of operation is defined by state board rule and the state board defines minimums and then it's up to the school district to set the hours of operation for their schools so for kindergarten the minimum number of hours in state board rule for the day to count for student attendance is two hours a day that's the minimum two okay or an aggregate of 10 hours over a five-day week and then it's up to the school district to set the what the school day looks like okay so this is saying that and there'll be another requirement for the state board to amend their rules to bring in pre-k where it wasn't accounted for before so this would be an area where there was direction later on in the bill for the state board of education to amend their rules to define what a minimum number of hours for a pre-k program would look like um requirement online new requirement program requirement online five page eight is allowing a pre-k kindergarten child to attend on a part-time basis on a schedule established by school board policy and then there's a reference to uh section 563 in title 16 which is the school board uh duties section and that's just a reference to the fact that there are some procedures they have to follow when they're adopting policies and then the last um new requirement here on page eight line eight is the use uh use play-based curriculum and programming the program is required now to use play-based curriculum and program what does that mean I think that would be a question for uh the field at the ages yeah we um we have the same question in uh health and welfare and realize that we need to come back and there needs to be a definition play it's a play it's I mean my kids went to a play-based preschool it's you focus on learning through play as opposed to like sitting down and you know doing math problems or it's just instead of academic focused play focused I mean I'm putting it simply but that from my experience as an educator and a parent that's what it is in a nutshell and that was fair pre-k for them yeah so it's not xbox not xbox is not part of that I think does mr fischer do you want to say something oh yeah if there are your 10 fish of my agency of education and agencies director of communications and legislative affairs I really don't want to show them the water so I apologize but I believe the national association for the education of young children or I mean the mess of how to pronounce the acronym but nyac accreditation which is on line 10 of s of page seven I'm 95 percent sure that that is a play-based process perhaps there's a definition not 100 percent sure I'm fairly certain that accreditation is focused on a play-based are you looking at the bill mm-hmm yeah okay so it's so it's that's that's oh I saw one for oh okay so so we we noticed that Nate right one that was by definition the other okay and is this yeah and we can take some testimony more testimony to make sure that we're not heading down some paths that would work oh center weeks gentlemen no no okay I mean you're correct that term is not defined in this bill okay thanks so the next subsection page eight my nine is the the money part tuition budgets average daily membership you'll see that that language is not underlined or and there's no straight through there so that's the current subdivision heading um and so this set out this section sets out how uh how students how school district knows they have to pay for a pre-kindergarten child right because not every this is not a mandatory program so if you go down to pay a line 18 so if a district maintains a public pre-k program the parent or guardian can enroll their child in public pre-k simply by um enrolling their child in their district or residence with the school district if the district does not maintain around page nine now if the district does not maintain a public pre-k program the district um has to pay tuition and they pay tuition pursuant to subsection 823a of this title which is a reference to the um town tuition program chapter and that section is the elementary tuition section and it basically says that if you are tuitioning a student from a public school district to a public school district you're just paying the full tuition charged by the public elementary school so this would be paying the full tuition charged by the public pre-k program um but how does the district know to do that so that they have to there's a kind of a student two-step process so the district has to receive notice that the child is enrolled in a public pre-kindergarten or will be enrolled in a public pre-k program outside of the district and then the child also has to be concurrently enrolled in their district of residence to receive that tuition payment so it's a two-step process there um that's almost exactly what happens now so the tuition goes to the program yeah okay okay and that's that's what's happening now yes everyone so the parents and just go to the school they're choosing and according to the way this is right and then they go back and tell the town they okay yes we have a spot we are a resident here you owe us tuition and then yeah the tuition is paid um let's see um just some conforming changes um further down the page in subdivision adding that this is public referring to public pre-kindergarten education programs here requiring uh school districts to put pre-k costs in their budget subdivision four is this is current law and this is about average dealing membership and how we're calculating for people spending and we'll get to that a little bit later so you districts can include pre-k children um if they're providing education for them or if they paid tuition to them and their average daily membership okay and then there's a section here on the very top of page 10 that was struck because it's not applicable anymore it was about a private provider being able to charge more than what the school district was paying um for a program for you know for their private program but that's not relevant anymore because there's no private provision for for public funds to have a private organizations in this bill and then subsection e on page 10 is um requiring AOE in consultation with building bright futures to develop and present rules to the state board for adoption and what is required in those rules has been amended um and you'll if we want to jump to page 11 to what this bill proposes is required in those rules they have to on page four or line four they have to require the school district to provide uh opportunities for effective parental participation uh they have to establish a process uh for um enrollment uh jumping on page 12 line six the rules have to require a district to include identifiable costs um in its budget and reports to the community the rules have to require the district to report the agency of education um uh some uh uh annual expenditures to AOE to provide an administrative process for um complaints from a parent or guardian or provider to challenge the action of the school district or the state um and then on page 13 a monitoring system so AOE has to monitor the programs collect data on the programs and at a minimum that monitoring and evaluation program has to include um programmatic details including the number of children served the number of um public pre-kindergarten education programs operated financial investment made to ensure access to quality pre-k the quality of the public pre-k education the results um for children including school readiness and you'll see here that instead of proficiency and numeracy and literacy which is current law the this bill proposes to require readiness and social uh the results of school readiness and social emotional development um documenting for progress um to use that process to help individualized instruction and improve program practice and collect and report child progress yeah i do have a question i'm not sure you'll be able to necessarily answer but um it keeps coming up for me when as we talk about this bill um because we're talking about programmatic details um and i'm just wondering if if we have pre-k sort of pushed in at the public system will it not be sort of scrutinized in the same way that all other uh grade levels are scrutinized so will it be subject to like eqs for example and you know will it have to report uh outcomes and i yeah because that's not made super clear so the there are specific requirements here for um some reporting requirements um and this bill does not include any amendments to the eqs section and without pulling it up in front of the apple top of my head i don't know if it refers to a specific grade set or just public schools in general and so i would want to look at that um but i would say for the sake of walking through this bill um this bill lays out specific program specific monitoring and compliance requirements for pre-k specifically um okay and i will look at the eqs statute and and send an email to the group on i just don't know off the top of my head if it says public schools or k through 12 and there needs to be an amendment there which would be a policy decision okay thank you um and then there's um uh on uh page 14 subsection g is specifying that there's no limit or there's no prohibition on a private pre-kindergarten provider for providing private pre-kindergarten education in accordance with uh dcf's rules and then um the whole giant chunk that is struck out on page 14 subsection h is we touched briefly on this this geographic limitations concept we're currently the law does allow school districts to limit the area their students can seek those 10 hours of pre-k publicly funded pre-k from and this section uh lays out the framework for those geographic limitations um and that is repeal the proposal here is to repeal that page 16 there we're getting into some conforming amendments so um legal people the definition here is um amended to so the definition would read as used in this section legal people means an individual who is attained instead of five four years of age on or before september one of the school year however school district may require that students admitted to kindergarten have attained five years of age on or before any date between august 31st and january 1st so it doesn't change the kindergarten cutoff conundrum right um we're just including four-year-olds in the definition of legal for people the rest of that statute um there are a couple other sections that are um amended and that is this section uh included pre-k kindergarten an essential early education essential early education is essentially special education for birth through school age um and uh pre-k was lumped in here and so this is splitting them apart so pre-k children are now up in the definition of legal people and essential early education as its own subset and that's an individual who is not a legal people may be enrolled in a program of essential early education offered pursuant to 2956 of this title and that's referring to the special education chapter where early education essential early education is referenced and then there's just a um a drafting convention change in the next subdivision um funding on page 17 just one quick question um because you're obviously great for me with this does uh does the pre-k program become obligatory for the for the parents and the children or is it an optional for the parents it's not school attendance is only mandatory from great from ages six through 16 in the state so it doesn't change that thank you section six page 17 line three this is an amendment to the definition section of the school funding chapter it's the last chapter entitled 16 chapter 133 this is the definition section for it and so making an amendment to who is included in average daily membership year um and making it clear that pre-k children um uh in public pre-k programs are included here and then again you'll see at the bottom there in subdivision c pre-k children and children receiving essential early education services will lump together and now we're splitting them apart so this section would only apply to uh children receiving essential early education services and then um again an amendment to the pre-k kindergarten child on page 18 that definition um to conform with the rest of the bill and then a new definition of child receiving essential early education services to split them up uh section seven page 19 this is the waiting um statute so you'll see online 17 on page 19 pre-k kindergarten children in current law receive a weight of negative point five for determining weighted long-term membership you'll see that the next section there is grades six through eight right what happened to kindergarten through grades five well they have a way of one so they're not listed so by repealing the pre-k kindergarten weight you're automatically lumping them into the elementary school weight and then there are um two um conforming amendments on page 20 that are outside my area of expertise related to um transportation and um schools so just making sure that pre-k kindergarten programs are included in school zones and state speed zones and then page 21 section 10 um is uh the creation of the second deputy secretary position and then appropriation for funding that position um and you'll see that that's authorized to begin in fiscal year 2024 and then section 11 is um some rulemaking directives so it starts with the dcf rulemaking um requirements in sub section a and we're going to skip those and go to sub section beyond page 22 and so because of the changes that this bill proposes to make to the pre-k provision of pre-k kindergarten in the state the agency is um directed to consult with building bright futures and amend the following rules to incorporate the new changes to the public pre-k kindergarten education program so we talked about the length of the school day rule um the rule regarding full-time equivalent enrollment of pupils and then the pre-k kindergarten education rules themselves and then there are um i didn't the i didn't draft this abby shepard um who handles all of the tax matters in my office drafted the sections related to um property tax um and i just wanted to uh flag those because they do come before the dcf section of the bill and if you want to walk through of those i would recommend abby to come in but that's the pre-k section the public pre-k kindergarten education program section so again it looks like we've got two paths that a bill a separate bill will end up in this committee uh which will look like this basically these sections i think with a sponsor or multiple sponsors uh and so health and welfare will sounds like we'll work on this stuff the early childhood stuff we'll probably get a bill in here beyond the wall we'll start to do a little testimony not expected to take it up really seriously this year but more get ready to take it up i think in next year that being said there may be questions that come up over the next several weeks that we would need want answers to during the summer that so we might put together some kind of study program you know what is the universal pre-k what would it cost i'm putting down you know what would the impact economic impacts on the independent uh providers be when should the deputy secretary be put but you know those kinds of things we might want to work on or have a study committee put to you know work on over the summer so the thing that i'm kind of stuck on at the moment is uh you know we've heard some testimony that's you know generally in opposition to universal pre-k at the risk of um jeopardizing private providers um i've also heard that recently from some constituents and then there's the fact that it's not included at all in the ram report it just feels really counterintuitive that we now have this big thing in front of us that's not in the report doesn't seem to have much support from providers and i mean i i also recognize that there's always two or more sides to the story so i i'd like to hear from proponents um and supporters of this uh who will who can also address some of the concerns yeah that we've been hearing yeah absolutely so the answers get absolutely but just so you know we wouldn't because of timing and uh like you said you're here we're hearing more about the you know independent providers and giving people access zero to four and zero to five this is something we'll if we do decide to tape it up we would take it up next year in the meantime though we can hear from some some of the pro people over the next couple weeks saying hey this is this is why you guys should do it next year but there's no expectation from the corner office in fact no direction i should say from the corner office protem's office that we would be able to get to that to passing a pre-k bill this year thus that's why it sounds like it's going to be split off that we will pass some kind of the other part of it the other part of it but we won't do that because that's not our jurisdiction yeah does that make sense okay thank you thank you any questions from the st james thank you thank you let's take five minutes and we'll come back and we will hear from uh our two witnesses um talking a little bit more about pre-k welcome miss wet glad you're here uh we are talking about pre-k in uh this baker i see you also have joined us uh so this one your name was given to us uh as someone who could address a little bit of you know the some of the pre-k stuff that we're looking at as it relates to the intersection with the independent child care providers um you're at winewski valley well let's see you're the act 1 66 coordinator for the winewski valley superintendent's association yes so maybe say a little bit about that and then uh tell us what you're thinking yeah and then we have an addison county uh regional coordinator welcome thank you thank you um is winewski your district well so it's not actually winewski school districts because that's the that's the confusion um so my name is rebecca web um i am the act 1 66 coordinator for the winewski valley superintendents association so we're just going to call it wvsa it's a lot less confusing um they are 10 supervisor unions um so it's a very unified union central vermont harwood lamoille north and lamoille south mott pillar rocks great orange southwest um or lean southwest washington central and white river valley um so a pretty good swath of the state as noted in the rinton testimony we have over a thousand four hundred preschoolers between the ages of three and kindergarten that currently receive a universal preschool in a mix of those issues at act 1 66 is the universal creek program in the state yeah and meg and i are really happy that we've both been invited to do this we often code do presentations and um have similar but different roles um so my role is really this collaboration between these superintendents um and i really focus on quality improvement professional development accountability coaching and policy my days are really spent responding around act 1 66 universal preschool questions um i support the local school district contacts so at each of those 10 supervisory unions there's an individual person who's the the local contact right there's somebody sitting in mott pillar high school who answers those questions um i support the superintendents and their kind of conversations anything that has to do with preschool i'm usually in on that conversation um and then i'm lucky enough to be the person who partners with those pre-k people that you talked with yesterday with their roles in these districts um so i do all of the paperwork you've been hearing about the pre-qualification kind of qualities in the law it's my job to say the a we has made you a pre-qualified program let's form a partnership between your private child's care and our region i represent the 10 superintendents in that conversation uh we have community programs including home programs um centers and any school that money crosses over district lines um falls under my hat so as i prepare this testimony i really drew on my experiences as a community-based teacher and director that's where i started in this work almost 29 years ago um my role as a public preschool teacher and as an itinerant special educator i have a master's degree in early childhood special ed and a second master's in educational leadership um i have a endorsement through aoe in early childhood special ed and a new endorsement in um school principal so we share this background as a context for my testimony and an indication of the knowledge that i have in this field and as i'm listening to the questions this committee has really really great questions that are coming up and i think that having talked to meg and having looked at this testimony that i've prepared we can answer some of those questions that that keep coming up as we start or as i start this testimony i really want to make sure that there's a language clarification um when miss st james talked yesterday about regions right and that the school district can limit where their boundaries are when we talk about my region throughout this testimony it's the group of 10 supervisor unions um it's not the public pre-k region in the law that she was talking about so we really wanted to start off with a visual picture of what universal pre-k looks like for our 10 supervisory unions we have 49 community partners so people that play the roles that you heard from yesterday we have a preschool in almost every elementary school building within the 10 supervisory unions again like i said earlier we currently serve 1400 students that are living in this region between those two ages what we consider as preschool we partner with home and centers and we have several students who attend preschool classrooms that are not in their home districts but tuition to other districts so we have some roxbury students who transition and receive their universal preschool in northfield just as an example at a public place or at the or an independent provider uh mix it's a mix it's a mix right so the 49 community programs are private providers but we also have a number of students who go to public pre-k within kind of the 10 supervisory union region if that makes sense yes thank you so since 2018 we've had a unified partnership agreement so that partnering programs community programs who are within our who want to partner with any of our 10 school districts only have to fill out the paperwork once so they're essentially making the agreement with all 10 of the supervisory unions in one document so you've heard from other experts in the field including yesterday's testimony from some community partners and i really am here to share about that superintendent's um piece our 10 superintendents so many of our collaboratives supervisory unions do not have the additional space and their staffing to offer full day programming at this time we've depended on and we see our local community preschools as true partners in providing universal preschool to our region's youngest learners our superintendents agree that bringing four-year-olds into our public school locations is a positive move it eases the transition to kindergarten builds earlier relationships with families increases the ability to identify and serve children with special needs but when we're discussing repealing which is really what this proposed bill does act 166 universal preschool we need to think both on an early childhood level and on direct impacts to the schools our physical spaces in our schools are not designed to accommodate the the unique needs of our young students limited building space limits the creation of preschool classrooms when classroom space is available funding for this retrofitting that will need to be allocated to design classrooms which allow for students basic needs things such as lower toilets sinks furniture playground equipment will all need to be considered new construction and retrofitting of classrooms is not a quick process and impacts local school budgets unless there's state level funding that's allocated to offset these costs this current proposal does not include a mechanism for funding the startup costs the piece that I think will answer many of your questions around nacy and the accreditation and the quality improvement is this next section so currently we are across our private programs and our in-house preschool programs we are regulated by this dual oversight of the agency of ed and the department of children and families so while removing the current dual oversight within a school building is seen as a positive move the inclusion of meeting the national association of the education of young children so those nacy accreditation pieces feels to our superintendents like this only moves the current two regulatory system to a different and new set of criteria principles currently need to ensure that the preschools in their elementary buildings comply with two sets of health and safety staffing ratios and qualifications curriculum and assessment standards it's likely that the requirements of being nacy accredited will continue to offer this duality in operations if the current child's care licensing regulations are removed then adding the accreditation makes sense um however the implementation of this new standard criteria will require substantial early knowledge and substantial administrative support the developmental needs of young children pose unique differences to health to safety to curriculum and that use of play as that vehicle for learning I'm going to pause and just say that the nacy accreditation standards lay out those questions that you had yesterday around teacher qualifications that's in those standards um and the definition of play-based learning that was just asked is also within those standards and you have a link to those I dropped it in we also talk with um with my superintendents we also talk about staffing increasing the number of school-based preschool classrooms increases the staffing needs to meet nacy standards teachers must hold endorsements in either early childhood ed or early childhood special ed as you're aware from other conversations finding licensed teachers at any level is difficult and the opening of more preschool classrooms within school buildings will just increase the strain our collaborative region like many others has worked with the agency of ed to provisionally license both teachers in our public school locations so teachers who are already in public schools are on provisional licenses some of them and some of our pre-k programs within the community also have lead teachers who are provisionally licensed the provision of specialized education identification and service delivery models is not addressed in this bill beyond the option of bringing three-year-olds who with individualized education plans those IEPs into a classroom space curated for four-year-olds placing a subset of three-year-olds into a four-year-olds classroom does not provide an education with chronological age peers which is something that nacy the current field the rest of the research um and actually the agency of ed um all promote would you repeat that yeah so the bill yeah since we're moving fours we're moving three-year-olds out our current system maybe we're moving three years we're moving three-year-olds out of out of the public school building right okay this bill proposes it okay thank you three-year-olds who are identified with special needs following are all of this special ed rights right oftentimes those children there's a mix often children receive their IEP services within their community programs children with higher needs who are on APs often are served within their public school program based on resources availability lack of right what can we do for the dosage if we propose to move three-year-olds out of the public school building which will inevitably happen because we won't have funding for them and we have four-year-olds and we design a program that's strictly around four-year-olds the proposed bill does recognize that there will be a need to bring some of those three-year-olds who are on IEPs into the school program it does change the ADM functioning from from the current piece to that but the three-year-olds with IEPs would be the only three-year-olds within that space and so personally as a person with a background in early childhood special ed maybe children who most likely have significant delays into a classroom that's chronologically a year ahead of them does not provide an inclusive environment did that make sense it makes perfect sense and that's helpful I missed some of it it does make total sense but I just have to point out that yesterday we were given the exact opposite testimony that three-year-olds do actually benefit from being in a room for you that's why that's why I was asking but I think the difference is you're talking about kids who have high needs in terms of you know they're sort of developmental stuff and putting them in with fours could make it really challenging for those three-year-olds to feel good about themselves build their own self-comp that that's that's my take because Senator Pulek is absolutely right we heard that you know you've got five or six years old five-year-olds in a private program and not in pre-care four-year-olds you those four-year-olds can help you know the others sort of come along it's a yes and okay um and so I'll I'll try I'll try and I'll try and explain it and people can ask for clarity if I if I didn't get there what we know from national research right is that having a mixed age classroom a three to five-year-olds classroom like discussed yesterday right like Allison and Linda and Stacy presented that is best practice what this bill does is takes our current mixed age in many of our schools not all of our schools some of our schools currently have a three-year-old classroom and a four-year-old classroom but what this bill proposes to do for children who have IPs who are identified as special education it proposes that one of the options would be to keep them in the school building and we're essentially looking at kiddos who have special needs who are already delayed by definition of their classification and services and putting them in a classroom that unlike what we currently have which is threes and fours it's mixed is a four-year-old classroom so threes and fours and five-cent Miss kindergarten together best practice we're now proposing to move four straight-up threes out and still keep a segment of the population that we really want to be included with their same age peers does that answer it it totally answers it um I would just respond that that's what um license and highly qualified teachers do they differentiate instruction I mean that's through the whole system is that happens and I think that's less about highly qualified teachers and more about the idea that children should be educated with children who are their own age regardless of disability right yeah and I'm happy to and all of this being said the current bill that the proposed bill is the current law that the proposed bill is built off of um doesn't really touch specialist so that's it's the intersection of all of our worlds um yeah and then the last piece that that we just as a the art superintendents really just wanted to get the messaging across is that this fiscal impact is huge that there is a real difference between saying you're working as a as a supervisory union as a school district to really build classrooms slowly and be able to have it in a really thoughtful managed way and we are now mandated to have classrooms with capacity for all of our people um so I dropped in a bunch of resources for you which you may or may not find useful I think some of them are around the questions that that you've had around the brand report um some questions about the accreditation resources some questions about the early learning standards um the piece around rand that I want to um clarify is that rand was looking at how we're going to finance right the recommendations for financing and so UPK's intersection into that was mentioned in there as one of the like current funding pieces but it's really the systems analysis study which addresses the question that you had mentioned earlier to my same James thank you yeah chair can I take the liberty of two minutes of talking about my morning which will you have to relate to this please so and I'm happy to capture this in a written testimony too I'm really here's the example of the play-based and our current mixed delivery system um so we have several community programs as I've already mentioned I had the privilege of being in one that I've been in once a week I'm doing some student teachers supervision so community child care that has some universal pre-k students within it um I was in a preschool classroom of 13 kids I walked into the classroom and the teacher had prepared materials that addressed all of the domains that are in our early learning standards and our early learning standards are really looking at the grade level expectations that is in the k-12 system called the children together they worked through their transitions there were definitely some social emotional moments going on right we're talking about a group of threes and fours called them together for a circle introduced they're studying the rainforest and they're studying the parts of plants um and so there was an activity around what's a part of a plant versus what's a plant's needs right so very dynamic very grounded in developmentally appropriate and play-based practice um and then they were called together for a story they were engaged they asked the children were engaged the children asked questions um and then they moved back into their small group activities and then they were headed outside as I left and that is one little tiny microcosm of how UPK currently works in Vermont um and how we can really do a mixed delivery system really well and our kids are getting that that early childhood education that they need great yeah so good like out of my store box a lot of people in this room already heard you say this I'm going to say it again just because I feel it needs and it's to your point earlier um we're here in the legislature to try to fix problems like that's kind of what we do um and a lot of times when we're trying to change systemic or structural systems it's really uncomfortable for a lot of people and it's really hard and I think our for many folks the first reaction is no we can't we can't change and I appreciate getting data and I appreciate learning and I appreciate hearing stories um but I do think part of our job is to imagine a different future to to dream and think about possibilities that might not exist right now um so what I what I would love to hear first of all I just say if every single superintendent is like there's no way this could ever work that's to me our answer however if we get varying testimony if we get a lot of different voices on this then you know that that begs a different question and I guess what I want to start asking folks is because we have been hearing a lot of no please don't change the system is if you could if one could change the system to to reflect a little bit more what we're seeing in this bill how would you do it that's kind of I would love to hear some of that how could it work for you um and I would also just add to that as we're thinking about the the world and what we would like we also have to recognize it's a very unique state Burlington is one thing which I we all love world Vermont is another thing which is also very different and we want something I think that would work for everybody absolutely yeah I can start an answer um and then I didn't have a preview of um of next testimony and there are pieces of that answer that are within hers super my 10 superintendents and I want to be really clear like we're talking about 10 not the entire superintendent pieces out there they are not objecting to the movement of fours into the classrooms we we all understand in this region um that that is a positive move the feeling from my superintendents is we don't have space we're talking in the current proposal right I I heard that the change in tone and pieces throughout the the earlier testimony we're talking about a July one implementation date in the current proposal and that's the piece that doesn't work right now in in terms of a general feeling right we can't build classrooms we can't create teachers overnight even a professional and licensed system that lets us do that we can't add lamoille south has 40 classroom spaces right now they've run two preschool programs one in morrisville one in stowe they have 40 spaces for preschools there are 120 preschoolers who attend community programs I don't have to break down off hand I can certainly provide it of how many are threes and how many are forced currently but even if only 50 of those right are kiddos who are currently in the community who would be four years old and lamoille would be required to have them that much doesn't work and that's something that that our region which while it is big is you know still tight those are the pieces right it's not thank you for clarifying it's not this is bad it's it's this isn't the right time thank you for clarifying and to you sorry that just meant to respond to you what you said earlier burlington has a great mixed delivery right I know yeah yeah yeah yeah thank you you're welcome and certainly like any other questions and this is this is a snippet of mega my days so should we pass it over to miss baker did you want to add I think that we can pass it over to her does that make sense oh please feel free please stay there I'm just gonna move so I can not stray my neck oh okay yeah oh my gosh we all want to stand out here I'm hoping that you have uh written testimony from me because I did include a number of graphs which I can share screen but at least the separate handout that I'll get to at the near the end it's easier to look at either on your own screen or in paper copy so for the record I want to say my name is Meg Baker um and I'm the universal pre-k coordinator in Addison county I work with three school districts Addison central school district Addison northwest and Addison and Mount Abraham unified uh school districts um thank you for inviting me to speak about s 160 s 56 I um um have been the early childhood um the universal pre-k coordinator for the past eight years since the inception of act 166 for early adopting districts and I've been in the early childhood field in Vermont for over 20 years and have a master's in early childhood education the focus I have in my testimony today is on the universal pre-k portions of s 56 although I'm happy to also address any of the other impacts on the early childhood system I want to begin today with you thanks for your dedication to children families schools and preschool programming the system is very complex as I think you are gathering from all of this testimony and I appreciate your attempts both to understand it and to effect change for the children and families of Vermont from my perspective agreeing on the purpose of early childhood of education is the first step in creating a coherent system of governance and funding the benefits of early childhood education to young children are well documented and the core philosophy that has guided all of my work with universal pre-k is that all children and families deserve access to early childhood education all children and families should have supports in their child early childhood programs for success and that all programs and staff should be supported to deliver quality instruction so access supports and quality for all children that's what we expect from our public education systems and we should prioritize those concepts for our youngest children as well the other piece I'd like to call your attention to is that we need to consider the unique developmental needs of young children child care and early childhood education you're separating them out and they are inextricably linked to one another with this age group high quality early childhood program isn't just pre-kindergarten it's a holistic family centered approach that's tailored to the unique needs of this age group preschoolers they straddle a developmental shift from the individual responsive nurturing caregiver giving that infants and toddlers need and the academic knowledge and greater independence that we expect from school age to children I want to explicitly address a few points about preschool access and supports in s 56 so first moving preschool for four-year-olds into elementary schools especially if you're thinking about transportation might make it easier for some families to access preschool but it will also create challenges for working families to access school day and school year programming without before and after school programming and summer care it seems like it would be an easy fix to offer the after school and summer programs for younger children but developmentally younger children need fewer transitions and consistent caregiving so this supports the concept of sticking with a mixed delivery system for all children and families as noted by others current community preschool programs are likely to close if they lose most of their four-year-olds there was a great planet money episode recently called baby's first market failure and I strongly recommend it because it talks about how private programs rely on four-year-olds to balance the costs of care that's another reason to maintain a mixed delivery system Becca brought up this point about access to for three-year-olds to inclusive classrooms if you remove that age group from universal pre-k and abm weight weighting unless they have disabilities it will reduce three-year-old access to inclusive classrooms a comparison that I often do is I think about school-aged children if you had a classroom if you had a school and it had a second-grade classroom and a third-grade classroom there is no circumstance in which you would pull all the children who had IEPs from the second-grade classroom and put them in that third-grade classroom the same applies in the preschool world and there are also huge developmental shifts between threes and fours perhaps even more than you would think about between second and third grade so I would strongly encourage this committee to look at maintaining at least current levels of access for three-year-olds the next point is about ccfap subsidies they will serve more families based on changes to eligibility but they won't provide universal access for early care and education the way that current funds do also I'm a little concerned that families who qualify for full ccfap as a result of income may be less likely to move their children to the public school environments because they don't have an incentive to do so and the full day full year programs would be more convenient for families that means we may end up with concentrations of low-income families in those private programs instead of attending our public school programs inclusionary supports for preschoolers with disabilities and mental health needs are a critical need within the system and so I'm excited about the study of special accommodations grants these provide programs with resources to make accommodations or modifications within their programs and in their classrooms for children with disabilities that might be extra staff or it might be specialized equipment but there are some complications I was pleased to see an email this morning that made some changes to the program that perhaps will increase abilities of programs to meet the needs of children with disabilities in their private programs and then the last point about access and supports is that in our region we have a number of non-citizens and non-citizen children often experience multiple barriers to accessing and succeeding in early education programs and beyond including cost of programs language barriers poverty and transportation barriers we already have access to not for non-citizen children in our public education system for k through 12 and they're very disadvantaged when they excluded from high quality early childhood programs so I am excited to see that this was a provision of the bill the next pieces I wanted to bring your attention to relate to quality obviously quality is the primary reason that we would want to support early childhood education we all want what's best for young children and their families fortunately we have research on brain development and best practices and equality care and education that can help to guide us as Becca pointed out this model is going to require a substantial number of new early childhood and early childhood licensed teachers and administrators with early childhood expertise although we have many folks in the early childhood world who have lots of experience there are a lot of people who are not licensed as educators because there are not very many programs because the paperwork and expense is onerous and because historically there's not been any incentive to get a license and that is a big reason I've talked to a lot of people who say why would I bother I'm not going to get paid more in order to open more preschool classrooms and Becca covered some of this as well school districts need time they need administrative expertise and they are going to need significant startup and ongoing funding more than I see in the current bill school districts don't have a lot of experience with the unique developmental needs of preschoolers who require more supervision and health and safety precautions than older children more holistic learning through play and routines and greater family communications and supports than most older children as I note above early childhood education is designed to support the unique needs of young children without denigrating anybody in the public education system there's a substantial learning curve and investment needed for districts to fully implement high quality early childhood education programs that meet their developmental needs so nacy accreditation is the gold standard for high quality developmentally appropriate education programs but it's rigorous and it's time intensive and right now nobody knows how to do it in school systems well not very many school startup investments which Becca touched on it includes really concrete facility costs bathrooms that meet this the size and abilities of young children fencing age appropriate playground equipment and furniture but it also includes cultural shifts and professional development for teachers and administrators in implementing play-based curricula observational assessments family engagement embedded social services and possibly shifting school calendar hours or year to meet the needs of working families school districts will need time they need administrative supports and they will need substantial startup funding in order to implement and expand quality preschool programs the last piece in this section is about ongoing funding for district programming so s 56 changes the weighting of the adm preschool so currently it's 0.46 and it would move to be 1.0 like an elementary school student that's roughly doubling but you're looking at taking the number of hours from 10 hours to a per week to a school day which is more than double so district programs also already cost more than community based programs and these children are already included in the per pupil count for their districts so you're asking districts to do more with less ongoing funding if we're going to increase adm weights we need to we need to increase them proportionately to the number of hours so that we can reflect the higher staff ratios and the relatively high per pupil costs that a high quality preschool program demands the universal pre-k programs funds have provided community programs our private partners with a higher hourly rate than our ccfap subsidy funds which is why they were initially used community programs would lose access to funds that currently support quality and if we want to replace those with ccfap funds we need to create make sure that there is an incentive for programs to maintain that quality and we also want to make sure that those incentives and are tied to inflationary pressures the way that upk funds currently are tied to an index so that they don't stay level funded over time um universal pre-k we've seen some real shifts in quality in our area it has it really instituted some quality standards programs that want to partner need to meet certain quality guidance guidelines so they have to have a licensed teacher in an early childhood education or an early childhood special education they have to be participating in stars at a certain level they have to align their curriculum with the vermont learning early learning standards um the end of the very last page of this testimony is sort of a primer on this is how it looks in addison county and there's a bulleted list of what two public and private partner programs have to do in order to qualify those pieces would all disappear under your current model and we want to sustain quality in those community partner programs community programs will be overseen by the cvd this is about the governance piece while public programs will be overseen by the agency of education which leads to two separate systems of early childhood oversight i get concerned that there may be a lack of coherence between those two systems one run by the child development division one run by the agency of education and we want to make sure that quality is well-defined in a unified way so that there's not a division over time between early care versus early education a single system of governance for the birth to five population would be very helpful one shift that i really would love to see for creating access additional access and quality would be an increase in the number of hours provided by universal pre-k Becca and i did an october 2021 survey of 30 vermont school districts and that demonstrated and there's a graph i can share my screen maybe can you see the the graph now yes great um so we asked programs in an ideal world this is districts in an ideal world how much time should an high quality early childhood program offer children each week and you can see 50 percent said 25 to 40 hours a week and an additional 10 percent said 20 to 25 percent hours per week we have a question from uh senator weeks thank you mr just a quick question is this responses from program managers or parents so this is from this is from school district programming um okay so those that run the schools not those that send their kids to the school district that's right so in the school district the teachers and the directors of the program okay thank you and maybe i should tell you we have five minutes okay i will get through this quickly then so um let's see increasing um so increasing the access to universal um preschool by creating a universal pre-k program of 20 hours a week and shifting an adm weight to 1.0 and proportionately increasing tuition payments to community partner programs would support quality improvements and access for all children and families and then after that if families needed more care ccfap funds subsidy funds could support access in the same programs the last piece i want to share with you today is some information about how universal pre-k is working in our region in addison county so i want to emphasize that in our region universal pre-k is working for children families preschool programs and school districts there are administrative headaches but we have systems to make it be a seamless and accessible supported program for children and high-quality programs about 80 percent of our children are enrolled in addison county universal pre-k programs and even more are enrolled in non-partner programs so that's pretty rare for kids to come in with no early childhood experience to kindergarten almost everybody's enrolled access to early childhood education is linked to capacity and this year if you look at the graph you can see we have about 425 children they're enrolled in 36 total partner programs in addison ruttland and chitenden county we have two home-based registered homes and 34 centers we also have eight school-based classrooms that are taught by seven teachers because one is very part-time but about 76 percent of our publicly funded preschool children are in private programs 76 percent historically we have a very had a very even split of three-year-old and four-year-old children that are enrolled in our public and private programs most of our early childhood programs have served children in mixed-stage classrooms for children three through kindergarten and private programs are relying on preschool programming to balance the costs of infant toddler care with their preschool programming the last data i have is that t.s. gold data which is the pie charts it's this shows preschool outcomes so universal pre-k requires programs to use teaching strategies gold in order to assess preschool student knowledge and skills and across multiple developmental domains teachers do the checkpoints developmental checkpoints twice a year and the those expectations the children's outcomes are nor scored against normed developmental continued expectations so if you look at the graphs it shows developmental progress there's fall measurements that are on the left and spring measurements that are on the right green is meeting norm developmental expectations blue is exceeding and red is not yet meeting expectations so in an ideal world our red is going to shrink okay this longitudinal data it includes three and four-year-olds they're in both the schools and universal pre-k partner programs it's about 400 to 450 children and i'll remind you that we have 75 to 80 percent of our children in private settings so the trends i want to highlight in this are t.s. gold child progress data shows that high quality preschool education is making a difference to child outcomes across all domains if you look at the data from the fall to the spring there is consistent growth senator duke has a question about is the are the physical scores just is that like physical education so physical in it it includes gross motor and fine motor skills in the early childhood world we look at a holist much more holistic picture than academic but it it's some of those early writing skills as well how does a child hold a writing implement how do they walk how do they balance great thank you you're welcome um you can probably see there's a big blank space and that's a result we didn't do spring 2020 t.s. gold checkpoints because everybody was closed so anything before that is pre-covid everything after that is covid and we have seen some impacts to child development especially social emotional cognitive and language domains but i'm not seeing huge dramatic changes and then the last piece is that in our area social emotional and mathematics indicators are consistently among the lowest children often make huge amounts of growth but they continue to be our lowest areas and we have offered professional development in and and tried to bring some of those up as well so in conclusion i encourage you to maintain a mixed delivery service in high quality preschool programming to promote access support school development of high quality developmentally appropriate preschool programming unify early childhood oversight at a state level to remove the dual oversight and provide for greater expertise at a state level in understanding the specific needs of this age group maintain universal pre-k access at at least the current levels increase the number of universal pre-k hours through the increased adm weights and proportionately increased tuition payments to high quality pre-qualified community programs support working family non-citizen and infant toddler access and quality by implementing the eligibility changes to ccfap and maintain incentives for quality improvement in all settings thank you so much and i'm happy to entertain any questions thank you both very thorough very helpful uh and i came up with a list of you know as you were talking you know just the things that would need to be done to get to a universal pre-k like you said uh cultural changes you know what would it be like to have a pre-k in the school playground equipment uh just getting the schools up to certain standards and that sort of leaves out the teacher shortage which is huge and just the construction of classrooms so it's some work would certainly have to be done i'm not going to flip a switch that's for sure any final questions for either of our guests okay thank you for the opportunity to speak to you thank you all great thanks see you Meg hi ready for jay yeah i'm gonna have uh jay nipples in and they've seen senator gulik's uh yes fail something great let's see is banning also coming he says he's on the way jay nipples how's it going one okay one okay and at some point i would love to testify on s 66 yes please yeah and 56 both i mean i'm at 56 but also 66 do you want to come in on 50 yeah you mean on this section on the pre-k section 56 well we have a strong position statement to vpa about four-year-olds being in public schools that we've been supporting for about half a decade now so we can give a lot of information on why we think that's a good idea at some point if you if you wanted that would be that would be great that would be very very helpful for us to hear that yeah yeah great so i don't know if you're all speaking from one voice on senator uh gulik's uh draft proposal which we reviewed yesterday which i you know it's uh i guess the big best way to describe it um no no no as as a the the next step that would get us to working on our school buildings and school construction now s 66 does pass of course we'll be building 25 to 100 more schools but that's not included in here is it i think it is i think that's the estimate so with that who would like to go first i think i'm first on the list and we have not coordinated testimony i haven't seen sue since monday and jeff fann has spent half a day with me yesterday working with new principals but we haven't talked about okay okay okay mr uh so mr nickles okay so yeah j nickles executive director of remote principles association for the record thanks for the opportunity and allowing me to do this via zoom as i was working with new principals all day today in south brolington um in terms of the bill um you know we we don't have a problem with anything that's in the bill the only thing that i really had a problem with senator gulik was when you said the vpa had to be part of it i had to do part of the work but then i said you know i guess that's part of my job so you know we you know we see the need uh we really are happy that uh committee and that and uh treasurer are looking towards what road island has done because we think that might be the path forward for us something similar to what road island has done great you know we're supportive of the task force and making recommendations to ways and means and the education committees and we will engage in that work fully 100 percent and think it's it's desperately needed our school buildings are in bad disrepair um and i just heard senator gulik make the comment about um you know not having to build more schools but consolidating there may have to be some tough decisions made in some places we're at that point in vermont um and there are some buildings that we may decide collectively that it's not worth spending the money on that we're better off to move students or build a new school in an area that covers you know uh three or four current schools or something along those lines and we got to be thinking about that so my the last statement i'll say and i said i keep my my testimony to five minutes it'll be less than that is that we got to be playing the infinite game we could be thinking about 20 30 40 years from now and so that's the mindset that we need to have going into this what we've done the last 15 or 20 years is just patch working catches catch can and so i think we need a real comprehensive approach to to school construction in a way that really supports 21st century learning safe environments for kids and pleasant environments all of our kids deserve to have you know buildings that are have good age back that have um you know that are well heated that are safe um least lighting all those things and i think that's where we need to go and that's really yeah other subject to any questions fully support so you're good with with it overall yes i'm doing yes oh my comment about consolidation was sort of supposed to be off mic but since it was picked up into the world wide i was just i was basically echoing what we heard from Rhode Island which was that you know they weren't necessarily able to build build every single rebuild every single building and they did have to make some decisions um around i don't know consolidation is the right word but just some some strategic decisions i guess i'll say and i don't know i mean this will help us get to that point i don't know if ax 72 will i mean i think center and fuel it still will help us get to that more strategic thinking around what building might be close to what building and does it make sense to you know leave one side so yeah okay mr. Kulowski yes we also need you to come back in you probably know remember we were talking about the brochure you were working on for recruiting school board members yes and we said you know it'd be good to get something a little snappier yeah okay so i'm excited i've got this ongoing list of things okay i'm out of the snappy to my list susie glowski executive director for the vermont school boards association i was able to confer with jeff frances from the superintendent's association this morning and you know um both of our associations have a keen interest in um school construction issue and it's very high on our priority list um and i do have a few we're in support of the task force just have a few ideas for um perhaps even strengthening the um proposal a little bit and i apologize these aren't really in the order they appear in the bill but they're pretty straightforward i think um the first one would be to change the date for the report to january 15 2024 instead of february 1st um we feel like there's sort of a sense of urgency on the topic and that two weeks of time in the second half of the biannium could make a difference so i'm sorry what does it happen now february 1st is that right set february first okay yeah um the second is um we wondered if it would be possible to add the president of the vermont school custodians and maintenance association or their designee to the task force makes perfect sense they're an important great idea stakeholder so um and then um third is we wondered if the governor's appointee um if it could be specified that they should have expertise in um construction with um experience in projects of this scope and size um aligned with school facilities um next the governor's appointee on environmental or health issues so is there someone that would logically fit that you know i do not know of a specific person but i can certainly check into that okay so there is somebody that we checked in with my most grace on that okay great great okay the next one is um the governor's appointee on on environmental or health issues we thought um could benefit from a modifier to establish some connection to school facilities environmental or health issues in school facilities um for the powers and duties of the task force we suggest adding one more that specifically requires developing or outlining preliminary prioritization criteria for state and local investment in school construction funding uh requiring a duty of the task force to develop or outline preliminary prioritization criteria sort of what you're talking about about 72 but then you're saying maybe the next step with now you're looking at the map yes and seeing where there could be or what the criteria would be not necessarily looking at the map but thinking about the yeah you know how Rhode Island had the criteria right almost to the end um we wondered about asking the task force um to formally collect information on the school construction programs in the northeastern states what they do um and in the statement of purpose uh we thought it would make sense to more explicitly connect it to connect this draft bill to act 72 of 2021 put some language in there that since it's continued yeah and then lastly um for the legal assistance for the task force um we were hoping that it could um the office of legislative council could be added to that since this is a blended effort with um the treasurer's office and the agency of education um and that there might be some attorneys in legislative council's office that would um have some expertise with the goal of not drafting but just staff it to answer questions that kind of thing yes sound okay yeah so sound great yeah they all do sound great thank you would you mind um emailing that to leg council copying Hayden and just so we'll see a new draft as long as you know not seeing any major concerns there no and I I do know that Rebecca Wasserman would like it oh right today because I think she wants to finalize it by Friday so okay so email it to her um actually do you want to yeah could you just send it to me sure great yeah thank you cc cc Hayden okay yeah thank you thank you so much you found it good afternoon good afternoon uh for the record Jeff in Vermont yet good to see you again good afternoon um thank you for giving me an opportunity to speak to you about the school buildings state aid for construction it's been a more tour since 2007 and I think um it's pretty amazing I I read the draft and I was I was anxious to get at it we need to work on this which is really important for for schools for students for for educators for principals superintendents you know the last school was built by any chance the last school school that we had constructed in the state does anybody know I mean I think it was the middle school in Bennington but that was there have been large and this becomes an issue of equity right there have been some communities that were able to bond for and during the moratorium able to bond for uh school repairs significant or otherwise yeah and other communities could not there are buildings now or I think where there is an auditorium that's that's condemned essentially can't can't be used because it's not usable uh so the level of disparity is pretty dramatic and not good and every school should be a sanctuary for students it really should be and and uh so they're learning there that their learning environment are my members working environments you've got principals and superintendents spending time on uh band-aids as Jay suggested boilers breaking down that are you know way past their useful life um and so we're my father used to say was we're too poor to be cheap right buy good things take care of them and they will last you a whole lot longer and we're we're well beyond that point and so I'm pleased with this the draft here want to support it we do support it um couple thoughts I have uh we I heard from Rhode Island we met with them in the fall first any concerns with what Mrs. Gulaski put forward I suspect you're good with all that um I think generally and yeah as a general matter you were listening I didn't I was listening I mean the quote she had the change or whatever uh I like to see that in writing but I think it was a general matter yes right right uh I just said Rhode Island to be when it did his review look at schools that were beyond what I will call repairability that they said to there were incentives built into their whole structure and there were some places where they said that school I think it was 10 or 12 as I recall that they just said don't put another dime into it we're spending good money after bad if you do and we're not going to give you an incentives to do that again we're too poor to be cheap yeah and so then they said start over raise the building however you want to do it whatever and we'll give you incentives to create a new school building yeah I don't think it was consolidation that I heard now maybe I heard it differently but that's fair I think they probably did some assessments on the way signs of that state there must be some a little bit of easier to consolidate maybe I don't know in certain areas I don't know what was the language you know that state pretty well yeah 49 miles wide yeah yeah what was the language that they used I mean it was definitely like we knew we couldn't do it didn't make sense for us to take it down I don't know I just got the sense there was some merging of some programs pulling together yeah that's fair and like efficiencies yeah right well that was act 46 right there was some school governance and should we and act 46 was a bill not designed to close schools it was designed to provide educational opportunities for students because what we found was that schools in certain parts of the state didn't have what other school students had in other parts of the states so how many schools closed under act 46 or before any idea I don't know okay I don't know and again it wasn't about school closure right right it was about governance consolidation to hopefully provide more educational opportunities for students across the state and that's why it was done yeah and why we had incentives to do so so we're far afield there so one of your points is don't let people go toward the crummy old building that is going to fall apart like use some things to make sure that doesn't happen yes and I think that's what Rhode Island did yeah and I think that this task force is hopefully I suspect that they will do their job with fidelity and look at those things and I trust that they will yeah a couple thoughts on that with regards to the 11 I think it's a b excuse me the membership of the task force b 11 a person with expertise in environmental or public health issues appointed by the governor I think you should be in Vermont licensed industrial hygienist that's their job they look at buildings they look at exactly what they do NEA nationally brought on some industrial hygienists at the start of the pandemic because we now understood that indoor air quality for example and other factors were hugely important and there is the Association of Industrial Hygiene uh American Association of Industrial Hygiene Association uh Association I'm probably butchering it but anyway there is a national organization of industrial hygienists that probably should be the appointing authority I would say not the governor not no offense to the governor but let's have an expert appointing somebody to this task force who knows what it is we're looking at and just so we know so this is a national organization they sort of choose somebody within the state is that I think there's probably an industrial hygienist at least close because the only reason I ask is when we were looking at the bill yesterday we were talking about freedoms and all that kind of thing and what that might involve that that's listen if it gets us to the the good policy you know we don't want to be cheap but let's also that that was my only question about fair enough I'm not again no that goes to your point I'm trying to get specific yeah I think when industrial hygienists should be involved in the task force yeah yeah and I missed this was that an add-on or replacement I think replacement of number 11 I think that's the concept you're driving at with number 11 okay I'm adding to how's that but the governor still needs somebody that's still if somebody well he's got the the construction I think it's right up his down yeah in number 10 it's that liaison between what happens from the governor's office on this committee and vice versa I just want somebody there to right and there is a number 10 great v10 you've got the governor appointing somebody with construction experience and I support that great I agree with vsba and the superintendents January 15th the date was I agree every every chopping at the bit that's my you know I think that's great I think that is one of the note I had oh I wonder if the appropriation at the end of the bill is enough what was it a hundred thousand dollars to hire somebody uh appropriate to the office of state treasurer for the central fund to hire a school construction expert to assist the task force I just um I don't know where that never came from I just wonder if it's enough yeah salary benefits right uh it's a preliminary number that we talked to be totally honest we didn't give it a ton of thought and time so we can probably update that if needed I just think you know taxes you get it you know so what we usually do in these cases senator buick is the draft should go to joint fiscal and they should come back and tell us what it generally goes so that way we when we get up on the floor somebody'll say has joint fiscal seen this or where did the hundred thousand come in talk to joint fiscal and they said about 50 or whatever right I don't know I just I always just question yeah yeah great other than that supported wholeheartedly and great that it's uh uh 2000 since 2007 long overdue yeah I didn't get elected 2000 until 2009 so I'm guessing this was all just trying to you know turn off the spigot in terms of money's being spent right high school buildings that's why the moratorium is given you know 2007 we had started the recession yeah you know looking back we had started in 2007 everybody talks about the 2008 but it really started 2007 so I think there was increasing pressure on the fisk on the ed fund yeah um and then you throw into it should we be repairing buildings that uh are beyond their usefulness or if we're gonna look at consolidation or other things I think it was just let's just stop yeah I don't I you know frankly didn't should have but did not pay as as close attention to it back then as I should have we could quote Joel you could I know how to read so so with that thank you thank you for the the draft and look at yeah any final questions for any of our witnesses on this thank you thank you yeah so Senator uh feel like you'll take that and run with it with council sure and then join fiscal and then we'll try to get it out of here probably depends on what joint fiscal says right I'm guessing in about a week and a half something like that yeah yeah sounds good I think it's up on something worth prioritizing yeah yeah yeah it seems like the question is you know when can join fiscal turn it around sometimes it takes a little while because they're getting all the requests so anything that costs money you know nobody knows exactly how much it goes to joint fiscal for them but come up with an estimate so is it in that way we'll go to Jane and we'll say right this is what we're hearing if we are time bound this is am I you know I'm not I'm new at this so yeah please forgive my ignorance but could we um move forward with the 100k number and then ask in the meantime get information then amend it on the floor so it's going to go no matter what because it has money in it it's got to go to appropriate it has to go to appropriations gotta go so could we we're not we don't have a time crunch but we'll get five or six bills out by may by march 17th I mean that's a lot usually we are out remember we usually crossovers usually like the 7th of March 8th of March we have in legislative time a lot of time okay in my world that's a short time yeah so okay because we're getting as you'll see next week's agenda is tighter and tighter and tighter in terms of what we need to get out so things should leave here by around town meeting week great you good gotta wait till I ask that's five passes and fail us too because I don't think oh we haven't either right all right that's all right the one I've gotten 200 yeah 200 emails yeah kind of bunch of it's kept the pages it's oriented the pages to who we all are that's for sure I mean the difference between the pages that had really very little to do and now this yeah okay we're finished for the day in less than a few did you want to ask something on record well just yeah sure since we have um bsba and bs a you know the a yeah I was getting there um here uh I just would like to sort of reiterate that we are we'd love to hear testimony around act 56 because the pre-k keys yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah thanks yeah great anything else we're done