 Should we start? Yeah, the idea was you were going to give us some update on your Act 46 experience. Yes. Well, and also school budgets in general. Please. Okay, so I'm at this point where I have to sometimes have my glasses on and sometimes not because I'm middle-aged, so I'll try my best. So I just wanted to reintroduce myself because I know that all of you know me in a totally different context. And so I wanted to tell you about me as a school budget person. So I'm Ruth Hardy and I wanted to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for having me and Senator Bray for inviting me. It's an honor to talk to you all. And I am actually at this point, as of 10 days ago, a former member of the ACSD school board. I did not run for re-election. But I was first elected in 2010 to the IDE4 school board, which is the Middlebury Elementary School Board. And then as soon as I was elected to that, I became part of their regional education district study committee, which is a precursor to Act 46, as you probably know. And I also was on the supervisor union board, which is the board of boards, and was re-elected in 2013 and became chair of the IDE4 board. I also then chaired our study committee, our Act 46 study committee. And I started my career as a fiscal analyst for the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau, which is the equivalent of your JFO, and my assignment was school finance analysis. So I did all of their analysis in the 90s for their school finance system. And that included a massive change from one that was primarily property tax based to one that was two-thirds funded by income tax. So let's just say I've been there before. Exactly, so it's interesting to see this happening here. I also was the assistant budget director of Middlebury College for seven years. So I am a budget person and school and education budget expert, I will say. And I'm sort of known in Middlebury as the person who can explain school budgets and have done so in my community for the past eight years, pretty frequently, at town meetings, school meetings, libraries, in the grocery store, you know, over coffee in front of my kids over and over again. To relieve many hundreds of people. I think a lot of people are happy that I can explain it and then they feel more confident about what's going on with their schools. So our Act 46 merger was successfully voted on two years ago in 2016, exactly two years ago. And our district, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is... Would you mind just pointing it out behind you? Yeah. It is Addison Central School District, this one. And it's seven towns. Redport, Cornwall, Middlebury, Ripton, Salisbury, Shoreham and Weybridge. Alphabetically memorized. And it's an interesting district as they all are in Vermont because Middlebury is kind of the urban school. It's much, much bigger and ripped in as at the other end of the spectrum. It's super tiny. So we have this big divide between size and a lot of the things that we see in other parts of the country playing out actually play out in our district with urban, suburban and rural. So Cornwall and Weybridge kind of act as the suburban districts. They are the higher income. They have the lowest poverty rates. Until we merged, Weybridge was the highest spending district in the state. We remember. Yeah. And Middlebury was in the middle, sort of the average, almost exactly at the average spending. So we took that kind of range and merged them together into one district. So we have nine schools, a union middle and high school. And we had nine school boards. Each of the elementary schools had one. Then the high school, middle school had a union board. And then we had the supervisor a union board. So we came from nine down to one within a course of several years. And it was overwhelmingly approved. It was not a close vote. And the only town where it was even partly closed was ripped in. But other than that, it was a really overwhelmingly approved merger. And I think one of the reasons is because of the process we used. And prior to merging for act 46, the red study that we did, we did a ton of community engagement. We had community circles and talking to people in the community about emerging. But one of the things we found at the end when we asked people, what questions do you still have after 18 months of community engagement? The math, the major question everybody still had was what's the financial impact? What will this do to our school budgets? What will this do to my taxes? What will this do to the education of my kids in terms of spending? So I was really determined as the budget girl in my community to answer that question when we did our act 46 study committee. So I chaired that committee. It also happened to coincide with being between jobs. So I had a lot of extra time. And I created a model for our district, a financial model, much like I did back in the day in Wisconsin when we were looking at changes at the statewide level. I did it at the school district level to be able to answer people's questions, town by town, school by school. What would the impact be on my district and my taxes? And I went kind of on the road with this presentation. And I did get pushback because there were people, especially in the higher spending districts like Wavebridge, who didn't want that sort of information out there, that kind of comparison across districts. Why does Wavebridge spend more than Middlebury? But Middlebury, my town where most of the voters were really, really wanted to know. So I did, I had charts and graphs and a whole bunch of information. And I really tried to, as much as possible, present all the information, I guess the best word is with empathy, so that everybody felt like their town wasn't being the target of the information, but that it was just presented as this is what would happen. And during this time, we also got a new superintendent who was supposed to be here with me today but couldn't make it. And that was a huge impact on the process. It was a big leadership change for the better. He's a very good superintendent, but that helped the process enormously. And he came in and created a strategic plan and worked on a strategic plan. So it was simultaneous to our study committee. So that was really helpful that we had this financial and governance plan. And we also had an educational and sort of student services plan going on simultaneously. And I think that was a big benefit to the whole process. Then the study committee presented its report and it was, I think that their district in the state to have its Act 46 plan approved. And like I said, it was overwhelmingly supported. So you still have tax incentives playing out? Yes, in FY19, we're in the second year. We're in the eighth sense. So we got in and got the full tax incentives and that was one of the reasons we immediately jumped on it and did it in less than a year so that we could get that. But I don't think we could have done that. Have we not done this groundwork? Have we not had the red study? Have we not had a good leader? Have we frankly not had somebody like me who could do the financial analysis? One of the things we didn't have was such a good, was at the time a very good business manager. So I sort of did the analysis that a lot of business managers are doing in other states. Now we have a great business manager, but then we didn't. So after it passed, one of the first things that the new board did was actually approve a completely new curriculum for our school district. We're moving to the international baccalaureate curriculum, which if you're familiar with is a pretty intensive curriculum and we're doing the full K-12 international baccalaureate. It's not just the diploma program, but the early years, middle years and diploma program all at the same time. So we're implementing that as we are sort of implementing this new finance and governance structure. The first year of our budget for FY, the current year that we're living in right now, the FY 18 budget was, we decided to do just a carry forward budget. So we tried to keep everybody's budgets just where they were and carry them forward with the necessary pluses and minuses and tried also to keep everybody's tax rates as equal as possible so one town didn't feel like they were getting the short stick. So we did do what you guys did and we used some reserve funds in order to buy down the tax rate for Middlebury because Middlebury is the town that's going to have the biggest impact tax-wise because it was the lowest spending town. So we did that in the first year and we mostly did it because we'd done so much change all at the same time that we wanted people to feel stability. The second year budget, this was this year and I chaired the finance committee and it was pretty much my last, my goal. If I can get this budget through then I felt like it was okay for me to step away for a little bit and do something else. And we knew from the beginning that it was going to be a really tough budget not only from what we were hearing from Montpelier, from the legislature, the governor, from the BSBA, from everybody up here but also looking at our own demographics. We like almost every other school district has declining enrollments, especially in our smaller rural schools and actually at our high school and middle school. We expect to have 50 fewer students in our high school next year and 30 fewer students in our middle school. So, you know, a big enough impact that we felt like we could change the budget. It's not, it wasn't an incremental change. It was a big, you know, all at once change in enrollments. So one of the things that I really emphasized as chair of the finance committee was that we needed to be clear about what our goals were and what our message was to voters. So I immediately set out the goals for the committee and we talked about them and what we wanted to do with this budget. And the three things we really emphasized were long-term sustainability for our district. How can we continue to be the excellent district that's implementing IB and has good leadership and community support? How can we sustain that? How can we enhance equity, which was one of the major goals of Act 46 and one that often gets forgotten. But we were really clear that equity had to be part of this budget and how did we budget things to enhance equity and that we wanted to be fiscally responsible. I wish your Republican colleagues were here to hear me say this. I call myself a fiscal pragmatist and, you know, I really feel like when we're spending taxpayers' money we have to spend it wisely and responsibly and that just more is not always better and in some cases it's worse. And so I am really, I often will tell people that I've never seen a budget that I can't cut. When you understand budgets you can always find something to cut. And so I am not, I just wanted to make sure that we were budgeting in a way that was responsible. So we really looked at where we were seeing declining enrollments and where we were seeing changes in demographics basically. So we knew the high school, there was opportunity for reductions and the middle school and then in some of our elementary schools we looked at where could we combine classes so we could have like a third, fourth grade or something like that. And we reduced, we first came, when we thought our enrollments were going to be even lower a much more stringent budget reduction where we were proposing to reduce 34 positions. And I, as the chair of the finance committee sat in front of a completely packed room and explained the budget to people and it was not comfortable. And you know, so a lot of my friends that night were not my friends. And then that week one of the things that I find really challenging as local school board member is that the timing of everything is so difficult and the timing from when we get information from the state and the crunch time period in which we have to budget because town meeting is so early. So I would love to see town meeting later in the year because giving local school districts more time to put together their budgets would be extremely helpful. But in this one week period we got our enrollment numbers from the state. Brad? I'm so excited, I'm your warm-up. We got our enrollment numbers from Brad and they were higher than we expected. And so I was actually celebrating Hanukkah with my family and I got a text from our superintendent saying check your email, our equalized pupil numbers are up early, are up high. It's a Hanukkah miracle! So the next day at a meeting I said it was a Hanukkah miracle! And we were able to pull back on some of our budget reductions. How many positions ultimately were rift? Only one and a half were actually rift but we were able to do almost everything through attrition and early retirement. We had nine teaching positions I believe and six paraprofessionals and a half admin position in the end. But it did start out as 32 FTEs so we were able to back off on a lot of it. But what we did when we looked at the teachers like I said we targeted it and we did look at the thing that everybody seems to love to talk about which is ratios. We did look at ratios but we created our own ratios. We didn't use the ratios that were sort of being perpetrated or whatever at the state level. We were really looking at teaching class size ratios rather than full FTE of licensed professionals in the building. And as I was explaining to Chris when I met with him that we wanted to see who is actually in the classroom with the kids. There are a lot of positions in schools that aren't teachers but they're still licensed professionals so nursing, guidance, schools, psychologists and also even in our elementary school there are licensed teachers but they are not classroom teachers in the same way. So like your music teacher, your librarian, those kinds of things. So we really took those out. We looked at multiple ratios but we tried to look at sort of the reality ratios and enhance equity across the board. So we did end up with a budget that reduced about 11 or 12 FTE positions. We offered an early retirement incentive and I think 30, 36 people are taking it so we're having a pretty big retirement and we only had to actually riff one and a half positions. So that was a benefit. And we did have an overall budget reduction of 1.3% in expenditures and a reduction of per pupil spending of 1.8% in the end. Our revenue also was down partly because we had used some revenue last year but also our state and federal revenue is declining. So we, I think in the end we're able to do exactly, you know, one of the reasons why Senator Bray reached out to me is he read in the paper, well you guys did what we asked. You reduced your budget. And also the, frankly, the personnel which is one of the hardest things because as you implied people are so connected to their teachers that it's really, really difficult to even have one teacher that's not carried forward by attrition. So the fact that you were able to find the size of the savings that you did is pretty remarkable. Yeah, I mean, thank you for saying that. I think we worked really hard and I was very adamant that we were going to do what we needed to do. And we also enhanced equity because when you looked, when we looked at class sizes and expenditures per pupil we always calculate on a school by school basis too so we can look across our district. Our expenditures per pupil and our class sizes are getting closer together. So even in the largest school to the smallest school there used to be a huge difference between Middlebury and Weybridge and they are coming together closer. So we feel like we met all of our goals that we set out to do. The one thing that was a big theme throughout was because we were moving to international baccalaureate there were a lot of parents and teachers who kept saying are we still going to be able to do IV? Are we still going to be able to do IV? So we were constantly checking in making sure yes we are still going to be able to do it. These cuts are not going to offend that. So next year we'll have 50 fewer students in our district as a whole and that won't show up in our Equalized Pupil Count until the following year. So for our FY 19 budget or FY 20 budget that will actually come into our Equalized Pupil Count so we know that we're going to have to continue to reduce in order to meet the declining enrollment. So we really looked for opportunities for further efficiencies. Now I won't be at the table to implement these efficiencies but there's definitely room for administrative reductions. Right now we have principle in every single building. Full-time principles. So a school with 45 kids has a full-time principle and a school with 450 kids has a full-time principle. So there's definitely opportunity there. There's opportunity across the district for systems and this is one thing that I think is really across the state we see this is that everybody has different food service. Everybody has different transportation. Everybody has different technology. We literally started this year with seven different phone companies or something like that. So really getting all of those onto the same page will allow us to find efficiencies there. Our largest school is Overly staff with paraeducators. I was really adamant that we that we focus on if we're saving positions maybe the licensed teacher positions because there's a lot of studies that are coming out of all over the place but AOE has done one about the overuse of paraeducators in our state and I do think I see that in our district. The other thing that was excluded from Act 46 and I think there's opportunity is taking better look at technical education and career centers. They were not included in the Act 46 plan and our career center I think there's opportunity for us to work with them better and bring them into the fold. So one of the things that Senator Bray and I talked about when we met in person last week was things that you all do that are not directly related to education but that would have an effect on school spending and more than that how do we serve our students? One of the things that we did increase is we added to school psychologist positions so even though we were reducing in other areas we still needed to add school psychologist positions because we're seeing such a need for school psychologists. And so thinking more holistically and I know that you're working on this but I think it would have an effect on mental health services and how do we bolster up mental health services so that schools are not the last stop gap for families and kids who need mental health services because that is, we're seeing that more and more and more. Also housing we're seeing more homeless kids and requiring transporting homeless kids from outside of district and it's really expensive to do so and of course if kids don't have stable housing then they're not able to learn really trying to focus investments in housing would help our education system and finally I would put a plug in for paid family leave if you have families who are able to take time off and be there with their families when a new baby comes or an adopted kid that's going to help families as a whole be more stable and more stable families that are better for school so paid family leave and early investments in early childhood education those are not all directly in education budgets but if you invest in those then it will help our schools and it will help enable our schools to reduce budgets in a way that is not harmful to kids I also would say that protecting bargaining rights of teachers is extremely important if you look across the country and I know I'm speaking to the choir Wisconsin exactly I saw it happening in Wisconsin when I was there but protecting the rights of labor to bargain with their employers and also just remembering that education jobs are actually real jobs in our communities and that when you cut those jobs you're cutting you're cutting a well-paying highly educated job from our towns and especially in rural parts of Vermont those are some of the best jobs that there are in our communities and so really thinking about it in that perspective too that this isn't just education this is actually jobs so those are the things I would caution as you move forward it was really disappointed last week when the governor came out saying that he wanted to further cut education after school districts did what we were asked to do and we worked really really hard the rate of change for school districts has been enormous I stand before my community for five years in a row and say I'm not really sure what's going to happen next year but this is the best I can tell you for this year and I'm the one that's at my town meeting doing this and so I would just caution I know that there's another big bill to make massive change to the education system and it may be the right direction to move in but school districts need to get absorbed they need to have time for Act 46 to take effect we're only in our second year and we were one of the first districts to do it so making sure that you're giving school districts the time to do their work I know that they are they are committed to doing that work and just to be careful of the rhetoric that's coming out of Montpelier because it's disheartening for school board members for parents and for teachers what rhetoric in particular the sort of constant drum beat of we need to cut, cut, cut schools are so expensive school boards aren't doing what they're supposed to do teachers are there are too many teachers and I think that really focusing on making sure that we're one of the things when I was in the budget office at Middlebury College we had a worldwide financial downturn and we had to make pretty big cuts at Middlebury College we had this mantra of protect the academic core and so we didn't cut anything from the academic programs at the college we cut all in the outside we targeted budget reductions and I think that targeting budget reductions to things that are going to have the least impact on our kids is where we need to be doing it not across the board kind of you know the clawback that you all did last year or whatever those are the things that are harmful to the long range planning and long range sustainability of our school districts so really enabling school districts to do the work that they have to and not putting sort of imposing restrictions or budget reductions that aren't thoughtful I think is really important to consider I agree we were over a barrel last year as legislatures are with their executives along the governor's setting up a similar sort of rhetorical framework for this year I hope it doesn't wind up the same way with you know this arbitrary attempt to lower or to hold the tax rate steady as though that's the only good that we're talking about but rest assured that we will do our best to make sure that it's if there's anything that comes about in the way of cuts that they would be targeted and exclusive to the academic mission the core instructional I hope so as you know budgets overwhelmingly passed in communities across the state and I think that that was voters saying we're okay with these we think our school board they're doing a good job they're working hard they're responsive they are at our town meetings they are right here in our communities they're at our grocery stores and so I think it's really important to respect the decisions that the voters made in terms of school budgets too you know one of the terms that at first we were talking about helping schools continue to evolve productively it comes out of our experience around from I mean resilience really entered the vocabulary of a lot of planning it makes me think you know schools are going to continue to face challenges and we need to help them be more resilient not just cheaper yeah that's really great and actually that came up at some of our meetings when we had people complaining about reductions and things it was really well we expect our kids to be resilient and we try to teach our kids to be resilient and we hope that the grownups who are involved in these decisions are also exhibiting resilience and that change is okay if we are doing it in a way that is respectful so well thank you very much for we would have had you been here at the time you were 10 minutes late and some of you been here 40 minutes late don't just say you're been here but it works for you so oh smack talk you guys I need you to come down and talk to my district I would love to I would love to come and talk to any of your districts it's not nice and orange and big I'll come talk to your district's orca too I was always a big proponent of act 46 and I think if we give it time to do its job it will work in the way that you all intended it to so thank you very much I'm sorry you missed I would love to chat with you more thanks for Brad do you want to join us Brad I came in did you know you're a fan club oh come on Brad I really don't pay much attention I have to be honest so you know why you're here so much for the fan club it's the age old question of school choice and the decision original decision to not require any money change hands and so now we have Senator Rogers bill but it's the latest iteration of the request is there any way we have this already we have this oh that's right you're right this comes up I haven't talked about it for a while I was a little surprised when it came up for the record Brad James agency of education basically what I did is I spent the morning trying to collect my thoughts and put them down as to what this is I just kind of go through this and since I don't memorize things particularly well I will look at this but the first one that came to my mind was the special education cost if you transfer the EDM from the district of residence to where ever public high school choice that you're going to that district who pays for the special education federal law I believe and other people in the room can probably correct me because I'm not an expert on federal law the federal law I believe says it's the district of residence that pays for that yes and we're not I'm not sure what John's bill does but this is directed at general choice and not okay so let me tell you what I thought the charge was I took a quick look at what Senator Rogers bill was and that was basically having money be paid for public high school choice and then my understanding was that instead of that you would be looking at having the EDM so it's the same thing that's kind of that is what I'm coming for by place but essentially the question becomes then if the cost for special education stays at the resident district but the EDM is now over here another district then their cost for people has just gone up yes and so this is the you know the trade off is that the way it is now John has a district that is taking in 36 more students from out of district something like that and that was their all public high school choice is he tugging Lake region North Country North Country I think there's more of an exit in North Country in any event the example was let's take 25 students that exit their home district and are drawn to another one South Burlington is another example he gets kids from the island as far away as Alberg and North Hero come down and so let's say that's 50 kids as it stands I get complaints from South Burlington John gets complaints but if you change it so the EDM followed you would get complaints from the districts that were losing the kids we still have a governor on how many of those students can go right but the short question is there any way that those students whether we want to do it or not is it possible to track the students in the EDM and to accurately depict in the EDM where they are being educated rather than their home district yes I think we need to differentiate and make sure it's clear because when I was hearing you what you said if I'm conflating both public high school choice and regular tuition so the islands are regular tuition and they don't operate schools so they're coming but the kids from the islands are coming and that's where the vast majority of South Burmese kids are coming from and they're bringing the money with them because they are from tuition in towns if you have a situation I'll go to Senator Rogers I can't remember what he covers exactly but from North Country and Lake Region that I saw there are more kids going from North Country that are coming to Lake Region and so the number of the sick in them has like 10 somewhere around them but I can be completely wrong on that but what's happening then is if you have 10 kids coming in the money is not coming with them and I think that's the complaint the question is are you really incurring additional costs going back to your initial question can we track the students and we're talking about somewhere between 350 and 400 kids annually is how many kids we're talking about statewide who partake in public high school choice which is only open to 9 through 12th graders we do put out an annual report that I think comes to you guys that kind of delineates where the kids are going where they're coming from we don't say this child is going from here to here but we can find those reports saying but it is saying that these are the net sending schools, these are the net receiving schools so we can track them to get to that point so we do know I think the complaint is is there additional costs with these kids as they come in most schools have capacity if you have if you had 10th graders come in all at once in a small school then there could be a cost if you have 10 kids all together coming in to spread across 4 grades there probably isn't going to be much of a cost at all but even so we could change the ADM to more accurately reflect where they are well you could but ADM does a lot of different things ADM, I started out a special education just who pays but the other ADM is also used to to allocate IDAB money and also state special education block grants under current law so if you change that ADM count as removing kids from this resident district to another district over here you're going to be shorting them I understand there would be in a way it's like getting rid of phantom students right you're returning them to the actual state of affairs rather than now they're enjoying a higher ADM even though they're not educating all of those kids because they're sending 20 of them or 25 of them yes in that sense yes I can agree with that analogy the question is is their cost going to go down if they have 5 kids leave and the answer from talking to business managers is not really can I ask this as a way to close the loop with Senator Rogers can you give me the most up to date version of the breakdown 350 to 400 kids are going and we'll mess around with that a little bit and see maybe that the situations are minimal in all but three or four cases could we develop some sort of limited thing for those cases in other words acquire a payment district to district or something yeah but most districts have kids going out most districts have kids coming in or I should say high schools you're saying at the same time at the same time but sometimes they break even sometimes there's a plus sometimes there's a minus sometimes they're big disparities depending on where they are and I think that's what you're I can do that well thank you Brad that's all my questions that was great it was a great project staying in the room all the time we always have questions every day we're like where's Brad I'll try to show I appreciate that yes yeah what's up with yeah it's cold is that shooting together is that shooting together is that shooting together same word 19th and 7th so yeah I'm at a shawl person I'm in the room so I'm going to prefer the human being over the phone and witness all those okay that's alright I don't know is that a nice one can Brad anyways do did you see people I'm so what are we doing I'm just just talking talking I was thinking she definitely could see like this thought crawling all around okay encourage me All right, J. Nichols, executive director of the Vermont Principles Association, giving some testimony today on, I'm calling H897, if you guys are calling me that or not. So, my testimony's written out, I won't read through it for you, but I'll just hit the highlights and then answer any questions that you have because I can. So, I just basically took my thoughts and outlined them based on the sections. So, in the first section, I think we all agree that supervisory unions need to utilize the best practices educating all the kids. And I do think that the current funding mechanism gets in the way of that. And I think that, I think almost every principle in the state would tell you that. I think special education directors would tell you that. I think superintendents would tell you that. We can talk about the reason why. I gave you a couple of examples here. And essentially what happens now, it's not that principals are not trying to make the best decision they can around the behalf of kids. It's more about, I have limited resources, including human capital. And so I want to use that human capital as best I can. I've got people over here that I can use with this group of students, even though it'd probably be better if I use these people, but I can't use these people, I won't get reimbursement. And if I don't use these people over there, I won't be able to use them for reimbursement. So, it's a catch-22 situation. And the examples I gave were a math teacher and a paraprofessional. So, you have a situation where you're trying to provide reteach or extra intervention to a student who needs more support than they can get in a regular classroom. Oftentimes, the only person available to provide that support for special education kids is a paraprofessional. So, you get your least trained person providing reteach support to your students that need it the most. In a census-based model, you could actually have your math teacher doing reteach to groups of kids regardless if they were special ed or non-special ed or high honors or wouldn't make any difference at all. You could use your best teacher and teach the kids that are struggling the most with a given concept. So, it makes it a lot easier to regroup kids in a way that makes sense academically. So, that's one of the reasons why I'm supporting the census model in general. I'm not a skillful guy, I apologize. I got it pretty cold, but... Section two of the goals, again, talk about that. The current system is very cumbersome. It causes a lot of bureaucratic red tape. It makes it very tough, again, to allocate your resources in a way that makes sense. So, we have a lot of educators, and parents' educators too, they're spending a lot of time on paperwork, has nothing to do with servicing kids. And the model that we have because of the accountability provisions in there where you have to do time studies and you have to track certain things that are already spelled out by federal law and the IEBs, when we spend so much time doing that, we have less time than we're actually spending with students and providing the services to the kids that they need. In terms of early implementation, I did put I'm generally supportive of the idea. I think having early adopters makes sense. Like a pilot at any time, it makes sense. I do think that we're moving too fast on this. And I did say this to hell set. I would rather see this be something that would stay in over a two, three year period. Makes me a little bit nervous. Well, it is in the sense that... I mean, full adoption, I would like to see happen like 23, 24, 24, 25, or something like that. Or even earlier than I'm exaggerating a little bit. The idea is, if you want it bad, you'll get it bad. So I really want to make sure that we implement it correctly if we want to do that. But I do support the concept. In terms of changes to current special education law, that big section four part, just a few things I wanted to highlight on. Again, I mentioned I think it's an aggressive timeline. I'm worried about it being a little bit too quick. I like that it eliminates much of the reporting that's time consuming. And that is necessary in a reimbursement model because you're submitting the Feds to get reimbursement that would no longer be necessary in a block model or a census model. I think that that's good. I think sometimes we think that, well, because we're doing time studies and stuff, we're really making sure we're meeting the needs of all kids. It's really not true. It's really a compliance exercise, almost a checklist type of thing. It's got nothing to do with the quality of services you provide to kids. So I think moving away from that makes perfect sense. And I think all administrators would agree with that as would teachers. In terms of the extraordinary cost reimbursement, I talked about this quite a bit with Hal said. I'm not sure if the numbers in the bill are right. I don't know what the right numbers are. I do think that it's been 50,000 since the first day I was a principal. And it definitely needs to change. I think the numbers in there now are 60,095%. I think I'll talk about that a little bit later in the testimony. You mean just because inflation? Yeah, exactly. And what happens is, well, two things. One thing that happens is as the cost goes up for programs and stuff, more and more kids are being captured at that 50,000-foot level. And I think there's a compelling state interest for the state to make sure that that does raise a little bit. I also think, and I mentioned that later in this report, that at a certain threshold, I think 100% of students should be paid for them on the state, just philosophically. Especially when you're talking about small districts that may have their budget completely blown up. Now, since we've moved to at 153 and we're moving towards more consolidation, especially at the Supervisor Union level, that is less of a concern than it was previously. Well, I think isn't it 95 over 60 and so on? Yeah, it is. So that would, what do you think it should? Well, maybe at 100. What I talked to House Ed about was something where you'd start out with, and it was a scale thing, where you'd start out with 75% and then 85%, and then 90 or 100 or something on those lines. But I think this is fine. It's better than what we have right now, I think. I think it makes more sense. Let's see. Another concern that I have is around the compliance with maintenance of effort. We need to make sure that whatever we do, that we have the right amount of funding there so that the state doesn't lose money from the fence. And Emily can talk to you about this in detail. Tracy's story is going to come to us next week. She can talk about that in the end. Beautiful, beautiful. So that's a real important concern. Not to think we're involved, we're going to save $50 million. Really, if you're looking at it from a financial lens, it should be, if we do this right, we're going to give kids more support earlier on. And it's going to have us, we have less special ed costs down the road. And the second part of that would be if we can slow the growth of spending. I think that's key. In my concluding thoughts, I talked a little bit about how right now, the percentage, that special ed is taking up in the regular general education budget, the overall operating budget, has been increasing proportionately through the last half decade. It leaves maybe longer than that. And we can't keep doing that. That really is a huge problem. That's something that we should be thinking about addressing. Hopefully, in a sense, this block model would address that and would help in that area. Waiting, I'm totally supportive of that. As long as I'm not the one that's doing it. In terms of consulting services, I think school systems are going to need the support to move away from the current model. Essentially, we've been doing the current model for about 40 years since the passage of IDEA. And it's really the way that our special educators have been trained. And we have almost a mantra in some schools where those kids, as opposed to our kids, and breaking down those silos is going to take some work. And best practices are really clear. We should have our top instructors provide the instruction to our most needed students. And that doesn't happen in a lot of places right now because of, partly at least, because of the model that we're in. Can I ask you, Jay, a question that we've been kicking around since we picked up the bill. And that is on the unrestricted nature of the funding. So, in the positive sense, as you said, more flexibility. You can break down the silos. You can maybe more efficiently use those dollars for all the students rather than just special needs kids. The anxiety is that by breaking down the silos, having zero restrictions on that funds, that it would begin to be fungible to the rest of the system. And that you could wind up constraining the resources for kids on IEPs or 504 kids. So that's on that. Well, a couple things. First of all, in terms of 504 kids, those resources don't come from special education dollars anyway. They come out of the general budget anyway. Same thing with, I hate to use the word 504 kids, EST kids, but kids that are categorized in those areas that need plans. The only area that's separate is special education. So if a kid is on a 504 plan, then he's coming out of the general operating budget already. And you could have a kid on a 504 plan that has a lot more significant need than a kid who's special education. Yeah, for whatever reason. So to me, it makes more sense to pool the resources. I know that there's no worry about that, that you articulated. I know that some advocacy groups for special populations have advocated that. I'm not sure how much you hear, but certainly nationally. I think that the small size of our schools and the way that the principals and the teachers know all the kids. I think we can push the envelope with the training from DMG and other consulting groups so that people really understand what best practices are all about so that we can give the kids who need the most support the highest level of instruction, regardless of whatever category they might be in. If I'm really strong at teaching, I'm just making this up. Fractions, which I'm not. If I was really strong at teaching fractions at the elementary school, and we had several kids that were struggling with fractions after we'd gone through our regular unit of study, why not have me to re-teach the kids that are really struggling with fractions regardless of what grade they're in, regardless of whether they're special education or 5.04 or VLL. If I'm really strong in that, let me teach those kids. Since it's a model, you can do that easily in a re-inversible model. It's much harder to do that. So I definitely get your concern to something that you're just watching. You want to make sure that special education the doctors and superintendents and principals are on top of that. But I do think the greater good is that concern for my perception. Yep, yep, okay. Other questions for Jack? Well, sort of along those same lines. Do you, you know, we hear often that we have really too many para-educators, or we have, you know, yeah, too many. I was gonna say we do. Yeah, okay. So what do you think will happen in this switch? What will happen to those folks? Do you think we'll let someone go? Do you think we should try to provide incentives for them to become teachers or what do you mean? I think it really depends on the level of the para. When I was principal in South Burlington, when I was superintendent at Six Count, I had plenty of para's and teaching licenses. The system that I just ran nine years ago, I had zero para's and teaching licenses. So I think it depends on where the person's at at the time. I think you lose some para's by attrition. It's a very long ball to feel that we have quite a good turnover anyway. And I think that many para's are great, but where they're really valuable is when they're supporting a kid who really has trouble controlling themselves or some type of behavior type thing, helping them be able to access their education. To have them be the ones that are actually delivering the instruction to the kids, which in default happens a lot now. Yes. It's not appropriate and there's no research to support that at all. So I think you'd still have para's from your out. You're gonna have students that have high levels of autism or brain impairment or some total physical handicaps that may need some support. But whenever possible, having the instruction actually come from the class and teachers is the way to go. And my wife's a para. So I may cost her a job, but I think it's true. There you go. And I apologize, I might have cut you off before you were done with your section by section. The only other things I'll add and thank you for that is that VP is supportive, very supportive of the AOE piece of this. Nicole and I were just talking for most of us, she's still here. One of those things I think we do in Vermont is we keep adding more and more stuff without time for people that have really good chance to come to grips with it. We're just barely starting to come to grips with the graduation requirements for proficiency based principals are still nervous about not working on that. So having the time to do those things, I think that's gonna be really important that the AOE's properly staffed with the right people. And I really do have a big believer in district management group as well. Provided resources to principals, special educators, teachers, so that they actually can implement these instructional best practices in a way that makes sense. So they will need support. Just to say we're gonna leave it up to the principals and the superintendents. Some places where we have a really strong leadership that will probably be okay. Other places it'll be a nightmare. They really will need support in the agency of education. They're gonna have to leave this for the store. And you can see my comments on extraordinary services and then concluding thoughts. I think I've touched on all of those. And again, I think providing more flexibility, cutting red tape will allow us to use our resources better. So without the hate questions that you might have. Any other questions? Other questions? Yeah, you mentioned the DMG consulting. And I think that that's also to the good. One of my questions in terms of this is the UEM people who rolled out the plan originally are very clear. They said it about five times. If you want to spend less, you have to change the practices. Exactly. And so that's one of the pieces that's direct at changing the practices. But it's not articulated in the bill. It's we're gonna hire some consultants. And so in a certain way, we're jumping off a cliff here. We're changing the model to a census-based model. As you said, the timeline is somewhat aggressive. It's gonna start rolling. And then we're counting on this change in culture, change in practice, partially sparked by these consultants. Counting on that to go forward and manifest as opposed to the bill, describing what that new set of practices looks like. I'm not sure how or if that can be addressed in this bill, but it does make me a little nervous to just have one section that says, here's $200,000 for consulting services. That takes care of changing the system. The rest of the bill is mostly around changing the financing. So we're freeing up the financing, putting no restrictions on it, letting individual superintendents and principals and school boards make the decisions and teachers. And hoping that. And I like your optimism about, I think you're right, small schools and the fact that you've got eyes on the kids and their needs and their IEP teams, everything very localized. I think that gives us an advantage in hoping that that all pans out. But it is a little bit nerve-wracking. It's nice. Does the horse confirm it first or the car? It's one of those situations for sure. I think you could work with people on instructional best practices and delivery of services for students that have challenging issues, but until you can actually really do it until the mechanism allows you to do it in a way that makes sense at your local level, you're not, how can you do it? It sounds like you have to jump off the cliff a little bit. Before you go forward with trying to do that. So it is definitely a scary proposition. The other thing too is the instructional best practices that DMG sites and all of their work, they used to be district management council and they've, many systems have used many of those practices and have chief savings as well as improvement in educational outcomes. So I mean, there is research out there and they'll know what to do. The other thing I will add that in Vermont, we tend to add layers upon the layers. There have been times where our special ed rules in the state are even more tight than the federal's and remember IEPs will still be in place. Student goals will still be in there. IEP teams will still be holding education systems accountable to delivering the services that are in the IEP. But if it's me and it's my kid, I'd rather have a high nonce math teacher provide instruction than having a para educator giving them extra support now and then or whatever it might be or a special educator who may not know any more about math than my kid already does. Other questions or comments for Jay? Well, thank you, Jay. I appreciate it very much. Thank you. We've got something from DMG on the phone. What's that? And they have to be done by 3.30. So I want to make sure we, because I would like to hear about these consulting services for you. Hello, is this Nathan Levinson? Hi. Hi, I'm Phil Baruth. Senator from Chittenden County, I'm chairing the Senate Education Committee. And I'm joined by Senator Ballant, Senator Bray, Senator Ingram, and Senator Benning, as well as a few people watching in the room. I'm hoping that you might begin by, the bill we're looking at calls for an appropriation of a couple hundred thousand dollars for consulting services that DMG would provide around best practices for special ed services. I'm wondering if you can just give us a sketch of what you might do in those settings if you're hired. Sure, great. My pleasure, and I'm glad to answer all your questions, but also, so you know, I do have a hard stop at 3.30, so if we want to continue this at another time, I'm also happy to do that. I think the, but to answer that question, I think the model we would use is the model that we have been using in Vermont already in a couple different settings, one around special education work that led to our recent study, and also the work we've been doing with Act 46 districts. And the idea is to, first of all, to bring multiple districts and FUs together. And we want to do that for two reasons. One, there's actually a lot of positive peer pressure. When you have multiple districts or FUs together or where it's moving the quickest, actually helps set the pace for the others. There's obviously a lot of learning that comes from one district to another. A lot of support comes from one district to another, and it is a vastly more economical as well. So we can help a lot more people that way. We would be bringing folks together to really do, I think, three things. One is to provide more detailed learning, knowledge sharing about what are these best practices in far greater detail. Because if you can't really understand the nuances, the specifics of them, you run the risk of implementing something that looks kind of similar, but not actually what it should be. So there's a knowledge sharing component. The second part is we tend to structure this work so that there's a role of the sleeves kind of to actually work in plan. So we bring together leadership teams from the districts and FUs who are supporting and by creating kind of a safe, structured space. We help them plan and we have our own consultants available in real time to help them address challenges or share best practices. We also help the planning through what we call coaching calls where we will call in maybe once a month or once every other month with the team who are asking both for updates but also they get to share with us obstacles or challenges they're having that are very specific to their individual schools or district and we can help answer them. And then the last thing to do when we pull people together is we're constantly asking them what are the things that are getting in their way? What are they trying to implement that is challenging? And so they're setting the agenda and then we can share back with them how we've seen other districts and other ICU's be able to implement them and if we know there are other places in Vermont that have successfully implemented it, creating a forum for them to share how they've overcome it. So it's both knowledge, support, positive peer pressure, both on a group level and on an individual district or ICU level. So that's a quick overview. Well, thank you for that. I'm wondering in terms of the way this bill works, it's asking for the funding model to begin undergoing its change and then these best practices to feed in behind it. And I'm wondering does that strike you as realistic in terms of timeframe to make the changes in practice that need to be made? Probably not. But what we have found and we've helped a lot of attitudes in districts across the country make these changes. These are big changes. And I think they're great for kids, they're great for the budget, but they're not simple and they're not small. And I do think it's important for everybody to recognize that the current amount of money districts spend on specialization is required given their current practices. You know, there's not waste here. There's nothing, so our belief is and we fully support the findings of the UVM report, but that to spend differently, districts have to serve differently. And the two challenges are that districts cannot unilaterally change IEPs and that they're binding contracts with parents. So we need to help bring along parents and wanting to have a different service delivery model. We need to help districts and schools change their service delivery model, change the kinds of folks and the number of folks they're hiring. And when you do those things, I think the census-based funding model makes lots of sense and how good things can happen. But our experience is you have to change the services which will take time and buy in from others, our staff in particular, and then you can get all the good benefits that you may be hoping for, both academically, socially, emotionally, and financially. But it doesn't turn out a dime, unfortunately. Questions from the rest of the committee? Well, we have your report to work from and the thing that I was most hoping to find out from you was the shape of what you were planning to do. So I heard you saying you would be convening large or large-ish groups of administrators and teachers. And is there local, do you then follow up with something more specific with individuals or online stuff? Or after that first set of larger meetings, what would happen? So I have two points and great, so yet first is we believe that support needs to be multiple years, a year is not enough. Second is I agree completely that we want to share something to the large group collectively and then we also support each individual district or SU. There's specific requirements and that's done typically through coaching, no video conferences, sharing data back and forth. But yet it's definitely both group efforts and district specific efforts. The other piece, and again, depending on the funding level, this may be something that districts themselves would have to fund. One of the things you'll notice in our report and not have been all across your state talking about this report and these findings. I'm happy to say that a lot of people feel very excited by it, scared but very excited. But one area that's really come up is that better scheduling is a key part of getting kids extra time to learn. It's a key part to having far more social emotional behavioral supports with the staff you have. Better scheduling will lead to more kids getting high content, high quality reading instruction. And we've had a lot of requests from school systems to help with their schedules. And scheduling, as you can imagine, isn't even a district level activity. It is a building level activity. So whether that, so that's an element that may have to be above and beyond what you're thinking about because it's so micro school by school. Do you mean above and beyond what we're thinking about in terms of the appropriation or? Yeah. So it would just cost more to have you undertake that. Right, and that might be something that individual schools and districts could also afford on their own. Because the way I tend to think about it is, if I were in your shoes and I'm happy that I'm not, is there were lots of accountants for us to be able to help a state, to help multiple districts at once. And that seems to be perhaps a really powerful use of state dollars. I think when you get down to scheduling, there's very little economy of scale. Like how I schedule the Robert Kennedy School is of no value to anybody other than the principal and the teachers in that one school. And it doesn't lower my cost to then go help the school next door. So scheduling is just the one area in which there's definitely a need. There's a want, but there's very few accountants of scale. Fortunately, it's not super expensive on a school-by-school basis either. But that's maybe the one area in which, as I said, there are no accountants of scale. Where both the other kinds of things we can do really help us leverage whatever appropriation you can make. Ken, I know this is kind of an ignorant question, but can you just break down what you mean by scheduling? Sure, great. So if you think about some of the best practices and some of the opportunities we identify, one is that kids who struggle get extra time during the day to learn. Another is that kids never get pulled out of core instruction and reading and math. Those two examples require that the master's schedule for the building include time for when those kids could get that extra help. And it needs to coordinate all the schedules in the school so that a speech therapist or an occupational therapist or somebody isn't pulling a student out of his classroom while reading was being taught. All of those kind of activities are driven by school and staff schedules. And from what we have thought in our research and what I hear regularly is that building those kinds of schedules where all those good things happen and none of the bad things happen is challenging for a lot of people. We happen to be very good at it. We happen to have technology and techniques for doing it. But a lot of the principals and superintendents I've spoken to have said, hey, we want to implement many of these best practices, but our schedules don't allow it. It is an area in which there have been requests for help and some in an area which we can help folks but that it would I think increase the cost above what you're currently thinking about. And it may be a cost that schools and districts themselves might want to bear. Senator Brecker. So I have a question that's really a different related but not part of this exact conversation. And that is where there's a bill moving that pushes special education services into approved independent schools. And I don't know the total number of students that would be served in this way, but as part of your consulting, are you being asked to look at how the special education services in the state of Vermont will be affected either programmatically or fiscally by implementing services in that manner? No, that was not part of the scope of our work. So we may not look at that. I mean, if you came back. I'm afraid I need to find it again. Well, I think we're also talking of additional future consulting work, correct? That was my impression. Okay, all right, so certainly we have not normally, we would certainly be more than able to in the future. Okay, thank you. Well, thank you, Mr. Levinson. I know you have somewhere you have to be. So we will say goodbye for now, but keep you on our list. We may have additional questions about the consulting aspect of this, but I appreciate the help. I'm our pleasure and anything we can do to help you all in the state will be our pleasure. Thank you. You're welcome. He was here. That's only really familiar. Yeah. That's all we need to say. Yeah, but I just think it's funny with consultants in general, you know, because they're in the business of selling you their stuff. So he's like, you know, we've got this great scheduling thing that we won't be able to do for you because you're not spending a lot of money. And I'm thinking, what do you describe this scene relatively straightforward? Yeah. Hard to see how it's like software. Yeah, it sounded in some way like they're operated. Yeah, and maybe not even software. And it really is. Yeah, a couple of basic principles for how you would set up the schedule. You have a scheduler already with those basic principles. Couldn't somebody, but I think you're right. It's probably a software. Ask Jeannie about the simplicity of scheduling. I didn't hear the whole thing before. No, I mean, it's like it just gets complicated. Anyway, I'm going to go back through and reread the DMG report again. But I don't think that the suggestions are never as concrete as you. Quite. Would like them to be. That's how practice is sort of puts everything in this rosy light. But I just keep coming back to the idea that we're just built on a lot of hopeful. So yeah. And sometimes I'm not saying this is true in this case, but it does seem like fairly often when you're working on a consulting basis for someone, there'll be a glimpse of something, but it requires an extension of your work to get to that deliverable. Then there's a glimpse of something else. Right. Same to therapy. We've made really good progress this year. If you came to see me for another five years. You'll be. So I think that's all we're going to do for the week. So this week was trying to get up to speed on the bill. I think we have a pretty good understanding of what's in it, what the questions are. We've got next week, a couple of weeks or a couple of days of witnesses just to go over some of the ground that the house covered with witnesses. Just so you know, I think it's is it Wednesday of next week? We have, I don't know if you saw, but the students walk out. The house had the idea of having a joint hearing where we listened to those students about why they walked out, et cetera. So we will do that with them. Especially with someone we've got, there's no doubt. Yes. And Machiavelli in particular will be scheduled for next Wednesday. So it's going to go inside with that.