 everybody, Senate Education, Thursday, June 4th, remote hearing still in the COVID emergency. So we're continuing testimony today on childcare generally. Last time we picked up the situation at UVM and St. Mike's and had just a bit of testimony. We're fortunate enough today to have the dean of the college involved and also the director of the UVM childcare center. And I wanted to open with them. And I will say in full disclosure, my child went to UVM daycare and it was a transformative experience for her and for my family. We thought it was absolutely the best care provided. And we were always grateful for it. I participated in the anniversary celebration not too long ago for UVM childcare. So I was especially devastated to read that it was closing. So I will let you decide Dean Thomas and Barbara Burrington what order you'd like to speak in. But if you could generally walk us through the decision making around it. And in particular, I noticed in President Garamela's note to the community today, he wrote, among other things, he used the phrase regulatory impacts as a reason for closure. And that caught my eye. And I wondered, are there regulations that have been propagated by the legislature that need changing in order to make the situation more tenable for daycare centers in the state? So feel free to introduce or jump into that anywhere you like, whichever of you you'd like to start with. Great. Well, thank you very much, Senator Ruth. And thank you to members of the committee for having us. I think I will give a general walkthrough how we got to where we are. Barbara, the director of the campus Children's School is versed in all matters operational and a lot of the policy he wants to you may be interested in as well. Let me start with how we got to where we are. And Senator Ruth, I'm appreciative of your your participation in our 50th anniversary. And it makes this moment particularly poignant for us. And I have to say that this is one of the by far hardest decisions that I've had to make is an academic or an administrator my entire career. And the campus Children's School, as you know, is a beloved institution that has made many contributions to families of UVM and has been an exemplar in the state and country. And we have visitors from from around the world coming to the school. So I just want to stipulate that the the outstanding experience and the quality of this school is is there high and well recognized. So it doesn't surprise me that you will rightfully ask how did we get here, if that's the case. There are a number of factors that went into the decision. For for many years for I've done a bit of a history on this from the Dean's office. I've been Dean at the College of Education and Social Services since 2016. My predecessor, Fannie Smiller, worked closely with the campus Children's School as well, trying to find economies of scale, trying to figure out what a sustainable budget model looked like. And struggled with that for a better part of a decade of her tenure as Dean and I've spoken to previous deans that have recounted similar challenges that they have faced as they have tried to find a point of sustainability for the campus Children's School. Nonetheless, we have kept it elevated as a priority for funding in the college through the college with a subsidy from the from the university broadly. Now, it was two weeks ago, as we were looking at the impacts of the budgets from COVID, from the enrollment impacts that we had in the spring and the uncertainty of enrollments that we're going to experience in the fall. I'm sure you're all aware of this through your connections to the colleges that it's perhaps most precarious time for for institutions of higher education that we could face. As we reckoned with what the realities were, it became clear that the subsidy from the campus was not going to be coming this year. And that the cuts, the priorities that the campus had to make around the academic mission of the institution, academic programs, and our student success is important as the campus Children's School was. President Garamella informed me that they would no longer be able to provide the subsidy that allowed us to make the proposition even viable from from within the college. That subsidy, I'm sorry, am I right that that was about 550,000? Yes, that's what I was about to say. The subsidy this year is about $550,000. That's been pretty stable over the last few years. And so we bring in roughly between $850,000 and $940,000 a year in tuition. You can figure out what the expenses are by looking at that gap. And that has been an ongoing concern. The school is run very well. We have had a series of very capable directors. I don't think that there is waste in the school. The realities of our staffing arrangements within the university context, the location and facilities maintenance within the university context are different than many preschools, early childhood education providers or daycare settings that you might compare us to. Those things drive our cost structure considerably higher, hence the subsidy. And we've gotten along but when the subsidy was pulled, we had to make a decision within the College of Education and Social Services of whether we could continue to sustain this. And in normal time, the answer would be it would be extremely difficult at best, because we run a very lean budget in the College of Education and Social Services. And again, the priorities are on our student programming and our student success. And as wonderful as the campus Children's School is, it isn't a key part of our research work in the college as it has been in periods historically. It is not that today. So in some ways, this is a campus service as much as it is an opportunity for our students to have placements in high quality, early childhood setting. So before the pandemic, the campus Children's School operated with about a $550,000 deficit. Given the budget challenges that UVM is faced combined with the small proportion of families, they're served by the campus Children's School and there are about 65, I'm sorry, 55 families served by the campus Children's School. And we have about 70 students, typically, the university determined on that basis that the subsidy couldn't be justified. And in the subsidy, it's important to recognize that any subsidy in the college, any subsidy of the university is driven largely by student tuition dollars. So we need to ask ourselves, is a subsidy that we're providing for any activity on campus? Since that's coming largely from student tuition dollars, is that subsidy speaking directly to the quality of the student experience, the strength of academic programming, and highlighting the priority of student success? And we weigh investments and programs on that basis, is we make decisions about how we're going to resource things. So we looked at just the normal ongoing operation. And then we considered the guidance that we received from the governor's office and the guidance we received from the CDC on reopening. And that guidance provided us with a lot of concern about whether or not we could actually achieve a reopening in the physical space that we are in. The physical space is the way that they're set up, challenge our ability to comply the ratios necessary and the ratios necessary of scaling back our students. While some of this we had to expand staff made the economics almost impossible for us. So that that 900, you know, say $900,000 revenue stream that we were talking about if we had to diminish that by a third or a half, in order to have the social distancing and meet the public health expectations in realities, our costs weren't going down. But our revenues were going to be cut pretty dramatically. And so the economies of scale began working against us pretty powerfully. Another issue that challenged us in this process was the location of the campus Children's School itself. And the campus Children's School is located in our living learning residence hall. And it's on the bottom floor of a student residence complex. And that presents a lot of risks in the best of cases. And it presents an untenable risk in in a pandemic, frankly, to be mixing college students coming from different places in different areas with preschoolers and parents picking up preschoolers they just look to us to be a very problematic risk proposition. And in discouraged us from from really getting excited about how that was going to work there. Now, the location for the campus Children's School has long been an issue at UVM. And there has been a bit of a perpetual hunt for a more appropriate space. The campus Children's School not only sits at the bottom of the dormitory, it sits at what is arguably Burlington's most treacherous crossing on Main Street. And so there are a number of concerns that spoke to us about facilities beyond just the the our constraints on configuration. And then the campus Children's School, unlike early learning facilities found on some campuses, doesn't really serve as a laboratory school in the way that it does in some places. It does provide very rich placement opportunities for our students in our early childhood education programs, early childhood and early childhood special education programs. But it's really only one site and a much larger constellation of sites to provide a diversity of settings throughout the Burlington and Chittenden County area by and large where we also have placements in other parts of the state. But it we have we have options in terms of where we're going to be placing our students across Vermont. The priority at the end of this was to protect the educational experiences of our students as we faced the significant budget challenge. And as important as the campus Children's School is to our history and the impact that we've had the support for our families. It was that on that basis, that we concluded that the subsidy was no longer going to be provided from the university and therefore within the college. This is something we're going to have to shift our resources away to preserve jobs and programs that we're going to protect the student experience. So I'll stop right there. I know that was perhaps more of a whirlwind tour through the logic of the decision making, but that was that was great. I just for clarification. I'm wondering, you know, the pandemic created an emergency situation. There were a couple of programs put into place to prevent this sort of closure, hopefully. Did the university participate in those? No, we did not. We made a commitment to all of our employees to fund them through May 31st. Yeah, and that was coincident with the terminus of the stabilization programs. And that worked quite well. We also had some challenges and Barbara, maybe you'd like to just speak to some of the challenges that we saw in terms of our values in the environment that we work in related to that stabilization. Sure, when the stabilization first came out, the period that would run from I think April 6th through the end of May, it came with a caveat that if parents chose not to or could not pay half, then they would be disenrolled. And we did consider how that would disproportionately affect staff who had children at the center if we had to disenroll them. And so obviously, wealthier families, you know, from different colleges or different areas of campus would not have to unenroll their children. And we did not think that that was a good, good policy. Yeah, I was just wondering because in addition to those two programs, there's now a restart program that's offering currently a one time payment to help with restarting, depending on how many students you have in the program. And we're pushing for more. This may be moot at this point, but those were attempts by the state to put resources in the hands of centers. But it sounds as though the scale of the shortfall with the subsidy no longer being provided would dwarf this money anyway. That's correct, Senator Bruce. And I would just add that this isn't as simple as saying, can you afford the campus Children's School? The budget's facing a crisis, unlike it's faced in decades, perhaps maybe ever. I can't quite go that far, but let's just say this is an existential threat to the university. Within my own college of education and social services, we're facing the $885,000 deficit this year. And the prospect of putting three $400,000 into any unit that's not core to our student programming is it's just not viable for us. So it's just it's not a matter of just saving one thing. It's a matter of limiting the amount of damage to our core mission and obligations as we go forward right now. Yeah, understood. Barbara Burrington, are there things you'd like to add? You know, I could I could I've been the interim director for three years and but previously like when your daughter was there a long time ago, I was the head teacher there for 14 years. So I have a historical perspective and all I can say is that I'm happy to answer any questions you have that that these three years as interim, we have starting in 2017, we worked with an external reviewer from the University of Illinois to really look at the model because the handwriting was on the wall that this is not fiscally sustainable. So we've been over the course of three years implementing some of those, most of those efficiencies that we could we've actually that 550 is less than it was three years ago by by a few hundred thousand. But we do suffer from all of the issues that childcare in Vermont and across the country, you know, face with turnover and staff and things like that. And we seized those things, the process of attrition, for example, to implement a more hierarchical structure of lead teachers and assistant teachers. But really, we couldn't keep pace with the fact that the cost kept rising. We have been raising tuition annually five and a quarter percent that next year's budget was looking at an eight and a quarter percent increase for families. You know, I think we had some we had some very creative thoughts about ways to not only make the campus school more sustainable, but also more integrated into the community to perhaps do things to say work with community partners, look at getting a more diverse child population. So it would be even a better experience for undergraduate students. So when Dean Thomas refers to 70 students, he means 70 children. We don't have that many students in like an infant toddler course, you know, using the school as a practicum site or pre case site for that matter. So we had looked at a number of things. Those hadn't happened. That doesn't mean that they won't now that the president and the provost have established the concept of an advisory board moving forward to look at child care as as an issue on campus and as a as the right thing to do for children and families as employees. So I'm hopeful that some of those ideas will get back on the table and maybe gain some traction. Great questions, Senator Ingram. Thank you. A few questions. So this has been always only for UVM employees. Is that is that right? Did you ever accept families from outside the center? Senator Ingram, in the last 30 years, it's only been a year round child care center for 30 years. And yes, it's been employee based. If a family left UVM while their children were enrolled, the policy has always been that they can stay. But it's definitely for UVM families. And if, for example, in our handbook, we say straight up, we make it very clear that your tuition dollars cover about half, and the rest is subsidy from the college. Yes. Historically, before that, Scott alluded to, we'd had that in Senator Bruce, that we'd had that celebration. It was a part time pre-K program, and it was 50-50, children from the community in the morning, and half the children stayed the rest of the day, and those were university children. There's had some iterations of that over the years. But for 30 years, it's been an employee based child care center. And I'm sorry, how many families did you say it was serving through the last year? Right. When we closed on March 17th, we were 55 UVM families and 53 non-UVM families. Now I'm confused. I'm sorry. So there were none. I thought you said there were, that it was designed for? Right. We had three families who had been employed at UVM, who had left for other employment opportunities, but the children stayed. I see. Okay. All right. Thank you. I heard her say 106 when I added that up, too. Yes, thank you. I appreciate the help. And here's my last question. I think is, so, President Garamillo's memo that we have does also allude to trying to help find placements for these children. Is that sort of happening now? And who's doing that at the university? Do you want me to address that? Barbara, if you would go ahead and if you spoke with our director for external relations today, or communicated with them. I did. Dr. Tiffany Spencer is, as Scott said, external relations. I think we're as a community liaison. She's going to be consulting with the child care resource in Williston. At this point, we have a list of questions for them, of course, because there's so much that's unknown in the child care community right now. We don't know how many spaces are actually going to be available. How many places that reopen? We'll have families returning. How many will be holding their spaces? So we want to make sure that their data is good before we actually suggest to families that we use them as a resource. I've had personal correspondence with colleagues. There's a group in the Chittenden County area of directors or 65 of us. We communicate through a listserv. Most are facing enrollment issues right now. And not to be crass, but when I have heard that there is a place that's facing an enrollment issue, I am noting that for our families that they may, if they want to put their child in group care at this time, they may want to contact those specific centers. Oh, yeah, I mean, it might be a boon for other child care facilities in some ways. I'm going to help you with that, sweetie. OK, other questions? Senator Hardy, then Senator Perchley. Thank you. So I just want to clarify. Did you take advantage of the stabilization payments or not? I wasn't clear. No, we did not. We did not. You did not. And it's partly in part because you felt uncomfortable with the unenrolling family. So that was part of it. And we as a university just made a commitment to our employees to fund everyone through May 31st, which covered that period as well. OK, because you could have received funding, stabilization funding from the state in order to help you pay for the salaries of those employees rather than charging it to your own budget. That's correct. Advantage of that program. So it seems kind of strange that you wouldn't have at least taken advantage of the assistance that the state did offer for child care centers during this time. And do any of you, the families, do you participate in the Pre-K program? Are you a certified Pre-K program so you get the stuff? Yes, we are compliant with Act 166. We're a five-star program. We have contracts with 11 school districts. We have about 31 children headed to kindergarten. OK. And do you have any students who are on subsidies, the CCFAP payments from the states? From the state? Three. You have three, OK. Out of the 55 families? Out of the 70 children. 55 families, 70 children. Children. OK. OK, so you have received some state funding for the program, but not a significant amount. It sounds like at least not from the subsidy payments. We have continued to operate remotely and continue to take the kind of attendance that's required by the public school districts. If that's what you're asking, I'm not quite sure. But we have done that. We are continuing to do that. We are still licensed and operating through the month of June. So our classroom teachers are still having Zoom meetings with their families. We're still posting activities to do at home. We're still engaging with individual families for conferences and things like that. OK, for the pre-K students, I was more asking about the general whether you got even during sort of quote unquote normal time, so that you got state assistance for some children in your program. And it sounds like you did get pre-K dollars and some subsidies for a few students. Well, I would argue that getting those pre-K dollars does nothing to help facilitate our budget issues. We have to give every one of those dollars to the families. Those that they receive, it comes right off their bill. It actually costs us money to participate because you have to have licensed teachers, which we do anyway because of our context. But it's a lot of overhead. Eleven school districts, eleven contracts. One of the things that we did actually to streamline our participation in Act 1 66 was centralize our billing over to, you know, whoever the finance people are in Waterman that could do that more efficiently than we could as a child care center with a part-time administrative assistant. So I don't know, you know, full-time child care centers that are making money, generating revenue off participating in Act 1 66. No, that wasn't my but it makes it more accessible to the families in your care because it reduces the tuition that they pay by a small amount, at least given that your tuition rate is fairly high. It sounds like our tuition rate is lower than some and higher than others. It's around $300 a week. Flat rate, infant toddler or preschooler. So for an infant toddler, it's quite a good deal. And for preschoolers, it's quite a good deal because, you know, it's they get that they get that $3,500 credit. Yeah, I was just trying to get a sense of what state funding you had taken advantage of in the past. And I'm just wondering, Dean Thomas, the this it sounds like the program, the $550,000 was part of the College of Education budget. And I'm curious why that wasn't a budget just, you know, not attributed to the College of Education because it's more, you say that the program is less of an educational service to your students, to UVM students and more of a service to UVM families, the families of people who are employed at UVM. And I'm wondering if the university may this question for Wendy more, but the university looked at just shifting the budget to a different part of the university ever, maybe not now, but in the past so that it wasn't being charged to an academic program, but was more being charged as sort of part of human resources or benefits for employees because it seems to me that that's what it ended up. It's been more than that. Certainly in the four years that I've been there, it has been directly located in an academic unit as most of these services are. We are the College of Education and Social Services. We do use it as a placement site for our students. So I think that logic is that we're the people who know most about that. And the College of Education and Social Services is a logical home for this unit and it would provide a subsidy for its operation. So that is the logic that I walked into. Wendy, you were here long before I, Barbara, you were here as well. So, you know, if there were times in the past where it was centralized differently or there's talk about it, maybe that's relevant. I don't know the answer to that, Ruth. I would have to research that for you. As long as I've been at UVM, it's been housed within the College. I would speculate that it started, as I had said, as that morning preschool program and that was situated within the Department of Integrated Professional Studies. It doesn't exist anymore. That's all that I would know about that. But in President and Provost communication today, to your point, it does say that this would be, I think, an initiative situated in human resources. Right. So does that effort to centralize it so there can be more equitable participation in these programs at the campus level? That would be one of the ideals in this. But the continuing pandemic and related financial and regulatory impacts brought us to a final recognition that continuing operations is unsustainable. I just want to make sure it sounds as though he's referencing regulatory guidelines around restarting post-pandemic. Is that, to your knowledge, what he means by regulatory impacts or are there other state regulations that he's referencing? My conversations with the President and the Provost have been around the healthcare guidance around reopening. So it's not necessarily, these aren't legislative regulations. These are health regulations and gubernatorial guidance that are making the reopening. Just putting this on very different terms than we would normally operate. Okay, well, that's reassuring to know that we're not doing something on the regulatory side that contributed to this. I think it's fair to say our whole discussion keep referencing the fact that all of these programs, large centers, home-based centers, everybody's gonna be facing reduced bottom lines as they allow fewer students. We're trying desperately to figure out how to get more money into the hands of these sorts of programs. In this situation, I'm only sorry that we weren't alerted at a previous point where we might have worked to see if there was something else the state could do for UVM and St. Mike's to keep the programs up and running. Committee members, any Senator Perchlich? Yeah, I guess as these different childcare centers close, I'm hoping that we captured their kind of intelligence on what made it different. And especially when they're closed, they're a little more free to maybe point out some of the regulations that maybe didn't cause them to close, but definitely made it more difficult. I hear from the childcare providers in my district about some of those difficulties. So it'd be great if the Campus Center did talk, kind of an after-action review, but just like here are the things that made it more difficult. There was other budget issues clearly, but it would be good as we looked to strengthen our childcare providers that we hear from those that closed what were the things that made it difficult to stay open and what kind of advice they would give to try to prevent future centers from closing. I think that, thank you for that. I serve on the policy committee for Let's Grow Kids. I have for the past couple of years and that is something that we are thinking about. And I'm sure that Let's Grow Kids would be a great ally in something like that. I can tell you from the people that are speaking together on the list of different directors that staffing is certainly a challenge on reopening. If people had let staff go, perhaps they're doing fine on unemployment or not. That is a reality. The other is that some providers and teachers just listen to the science of infectious disease and they weigh that against the science of child development and they just don't feel comfortable going back into a setting during a pandemic and having to alter their pedagogy in such a way as masks, physically separating children, changing clothes constantly, putting chicken wire or barricades on their playground. In our physical layout, we'd be greatly reduced because we have two classrooms that share a bathroom. We have a classroom that doesn't have that even though it has outdoor egress, it's not a way that parents could enter. So it's more of an emergency escape. So we were trying to figure and reconcile some of those things. And I know other centers have very similar issues. Dean Thomas. Senator Ruth and committee, I just wanna be clear that the University of Vermont and the College of Education and Social Services is not out of the business of early childhood education. In fact, we're squarely in it. We're very interested in finding solutions to the bigger problem. The loss of the campus children's school is just crushing to us locally. But the campus children's school didn't contribute a great deal to the bigger issues of inclusive, affordable, high quality early learning experiences for students across Vermont. And that's something that we are committed to working on and addressing. Over the last year, a year and a half, I have been involved with Kyle Dodson at the Burlington YMCA and Sean McBannon at Winooski Unified School District. And we have partnered to identify how we could establish prototypes of models to bring the strengths of these three partners as one example, together to come up with a model that might defy some of the issues that we're talking about today. And so we're working on what these little, calling the pop-ups because they would be pilots. And to see if we can identify pilots that have promise to sustainability and quality and then see what we might do to be able to scale those, not just in shit into county or IS across Vermont. And we're deeply committed to that work and to pursuing this. We've been set back right now, obviously, because of the pandemic. But this is a durable commitment from our college. And I know that we would welcome the opportunity to work with members of your committee and the state to pursue that at our phone list. Thank you. Philip, I was gonna say, I don't know if this is of interest to you or not. However, the Yale Child Development Center has a researcher, Elliot Haspel, and he has a new book out called Crawling Behind. It's about the childcare crisis and it has some fundamental policy advice in there. I just started it. It's fascinating in terms of how to address and how to possibly fix the childcare crisis. I mean, I don't subscribe to the term crisis. Let's say this opportunity to reform and think about how we care for our nation's children. Thank you. Thank you both. And Wendy for taking time today. I know that you're busy. Just wanna say again, nobody appreciates everything you've done over the years more than me. So we are saddened to see you go, but I understand that the college has a commitment. UVM has always been a fantastic community partner in terms of drawing in children of people with financial needs. So I look forward to seeing some future iteration that will hopefully get us back in a place similar to where we once were, but I understand the realities of the finances at this point. Thanks very much. We're gonna turn to boring legislation at this point. You're free to stay on, but we will not be offended if you immediately leave, I would, but thanks very much again. Thank you all. Thank you. Okay, committee members. Jim, are you still with us? Are you one of the non-video participants? I am, and my view is going on right now. Here I am. So Jim, looking at you now, I feel like I'm cast back into the 1850s or something. Between what's behind you and your hair, it's like looking at Ethan Allen or... Well... Somebody. Yeah, I already know, I have my hair cut to me. This is a cut version. But, you know, the antiques behind you just give it all this unified look. So it's great. Yes, so. Okay, so committee, I spoke with Senator Kitchell and then I was in appropriations to talk about a different bill and we discussed 224, which is our miscellaneous bill. And she was very amenable to what we were talking about. So Jim, she's asked if you can draft an amendment for appropriations. So it would be drafted in such a way that appropriations could present it and it would strip out the sections we talked about stripping out. Yeah, I've done that already. Actually, it's on your... Okay. I'm not sure if Jeannie has it. Let's do that. Yeah. Okay. And it's drafted coming from appropriations? Yep. Great. Is it on our website, Jim? It should be. Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah. 1.1 for appropriations. Okay. Yeah, yeah, draft 1.1. Okay. And don't go off through it. I mean... Yeah, just quickly. Okay, all right. So basically, section one and two is on the AVIC language in terms of school records for colleges that close. Section three is the repeal of the oath requirement. Yeah. Section four is the small school support section, the Bobby Starr language that prevents the pre-K program from knocking out a school from small school support. Section five deals with elections by union school districts. The very specific issue that AOE had deal with the mechanical issue about how elections are held. Six is the general balance on UVM and VST boards. And that is it. And then it's a messy effect today on passage. Okay. Any questions for Jim? I'll just, so this leaves out the two sections on school wellness and the menstrual hygiene which got delivered to age 660. Yeah, correct. Yeah. Nice. Okay. So I don't, doesn't look like anybody has any issues with this drafting. So Jim, can you pass that on to a crook? Or did you? Oh, Ruth. I just wanted to ask a question because maybe Andy was just going to ask this. There was, we were looking for clarification on the election section and Jim's explanation because we couldn't quite remember the genesis. The issue here is the problem is what happens when you have a union school district. And one of the members of that union school district is another union school district. And because usually what happens for a union school district is the members are towns and they have all the machinery to hold the election on mechanics. But if the member is another union school district who doesn't have that stuff, this mechanics. So what this does is it pass, it looks through the member union school district in the underlying towns of that district to do the mechanics. Okay. And this came from AOE, if I remember. Good, yeah. Yeah. Andy? My question is, why is it not just fixing that issue? If that's an underlying problem, this doesn't fix that underlying problem, it just kicks it to 2021. Yeah, it's the same reason we've been doing this for a couple of years in other areas as well. It's because AOE is working on that whole rewrite. I've chapter 11, which is the chapter that is used to form union school districts. And that chapter was borrowed to form a unified school districts, but it didn't work very well because it's not designed for that purpose. So AOE has a whole rewrite of this chapter. And so we're just doing small things for a couple of years until we get that chapter rewritten. And they were going to do it this year, but there's a desire, at least by Chair Webb, not to do anything that had any implications of that 46, this section. Fair enough. Okay, so just to clarify again, so if there is a member that's on the unified board that isn't from a unified district, but it's just like representing a town, you know, they're not all board members that become a vacant position on a unified board would be appointed this way. It's only in certain circumstances. That's not this language though. That language was taken out of this bill. Oh, okay. That's the more language you're thinking about, which is a different point. Okay. Yeah, we got rid of that because they're going to stick it in something else where in the house. Okay. And then we can decide what we think when it gets over to us. Okay, thank you. Okay, so Jim, I forget now. It was only a minute ago that I asked you, but did this already go to either Stephanie or Chrissy at Appropes? Nope. Okay, if you could send it maybe to Stephanie and then I think I'm going to be in Appropes tomorrow to talk about the other bill. I think it's Senator Kitchell's intention to vote it out this out tomorrow. So if you can send that to them, they'll be all ready to do that vote. Just one other thing. We did assign long ago in a land far away. We did assign presenters, but now we've pulled out certain sections. Do the people remember who we're presenting, which of these sections? Okay. All right. I think I was presenting the stuff that we pulled out and taken over to healthcare. Okay, well, let's go up to since it's now seven sections or so, I think it would be silly to have more than two people, but Jim McNeil has yet to report a bill. So I think Jim McNeil should maybe report the first half. Jim McNeil might not be present for this. Oh, okay. How come? What does Jim McNeil have to do? A rendezvous with my grandson on the way to North Carolina. So does that mean you're not going to be with us for the rest of the session? No, that means I'm going to be missing for about maybe three days or so. That's all right. Because I'm hoping to get the call sooner than later to head out of town and pick them up. So that's why I don't want to obligate myself to... Okay, to be safe then. Yeah, because if I get the call and things are good with my daughter, I head out. So I left it with that with my chair in transportation also. Okay, so... Either we're above. Corey, you want to pick up the first half of this? We need that first half. So that would be sections one, repeal of the oath. Oops, two is the transition. So one and two go together, three, and then small school support. Sure. And then I don't know, there's a... We have two people on the committee who have made gender equity a signature issue. Debbie and Ruth, I don't know, would one of you like to do the second half? Debbie, you can do it because it doesn't have any Latin in it. So I only do build... I mess them up. I like that. I can... You handled it fine. Well, I really like some of the stars' response though. He was sure that we had some of those critters in Vermont somewhere. I loved it, Ruth, when you threw it to Bobby because Bobby got this totally hunted look on his face. He was not going to know, but I was like, I didn't want to... He's the chair. So I almost actually was like, I bet this chair of education, I almost threw it to you, Phil, because I thought you would know. I'm glad you didn't because rat... What was it? Rattites? Rattites, yeah. I would have said rats. It's fine. Debbie busted me, but I didn't... I know, I was looking them up. I was googling them and trying to say too frantically. And I knew that Pearson was looking it up too, but I thought it would be an insult to throw it to him and not the chair. So anyway, but you can do this if you want, Debbie. I don't care. I had great respect for the fact that Chris copped to Googling it because the temptation must have been to just rattle it off, you know? Yeah, because I think that Lieutenant Governor actually knew that a rantite was a too late. Okay, so Cory and Debbie will report it, assuming it gets voted out. Tomorrow it would show up. We'd probably do it Wednesday, maybe. So just for timing's sake. Jim, did you have a... Good, I still want... Yeah, Cory, can I ask a question though about maybe Jim, because maybe Jim remembers this. So the sections that we sent over to Health and Welfare about the Wellness Council, Senator Lyons was asking whether we had talked about connecting with like the prevention, the Drug Prevention Council or behavioral intervention style or ACEs, or, you know, there are these other councils around. Does anybody remember whether we talked about... No, no, that's Health and Welfare territory. Yeah, so we can, now that's with Health and Welfare, we can just do anything we want, right? Absolutely. You don't care, okay, great. I trust you. Okay, let's go to our last item, which is Andy has a draft. Is that up on our website, Andy? Yes. Yes, it is. Okay, so let's take a look at that. And Andy, if you can just walk us through what you've been doing and what you've come up with so far. Yeah, thank you. And thanks to you for getting that up on the site quickly. Yeah, so, you know, we heard from Norm that, hey, you know, I've been in all the schools and I've worked with him in the past on energy issues. And I reached out to others. I've sent this to what we might call the regular cast of characters, mainly. And mainly I've been in communication with Jeff Francis of the superintendent association. He sent out an earlier version and gave me comments. Also, efficiency Vermont took an earlier version and put it into kind of a more present. I did like an outline. And one of the early issues was who administered this program and who could administer it quickly? And could AOE, you know, when they came in, they talked about needing staff. And I was trying to get BGS to do it, but they were like, you know, pleading with me not to make them do it. So it came up as a suggestion that efficiency Vermont I was already working in schools. This was from Norm. And so I reached out to them and they were great sports about saying, yeah, we could, we're happy to look at this and talk about it. So I gave them an earlier draft last few days. They've been talking, they have relationships with a little contractors that do this kind of work throughout the state because HVAC systems are often good places for energy saving. So, you know, efficiency Vermont's focus in the past has been on energy savings, but they work in this space a lot and know all the contractors and the folks that are doing this kind of work. So they've been a great help on trying to figure out what the details of the program would be and if they could administer it and they said they could. So these few pages here just kind of layout what it would be and more trying to do is something that could happen very quickly because it would ideally this work would happen before the kids get back in school. Even though we put December as the deadline because we're hoping to use the CARES Act money really would be good if it could happen soon. And there was some concern about whether there was enough contractors available, but the reports back have said that there is enough kind of capacity of the workforce to get a decent amount of work done. And one of the things, if you kind of look at the footnote, there's no dollar numbers really in here except there's a footnote there about a $5 million program. And one of the earlier drafts was less than that, mainly because we just didn't think we could get that much work done by December. But it kind of got up to a larger number of partially to get attention to folks that it's a serious program. If it's everybody that works in the space knows that the need is like 900 million. So if we issue a program that's 2 million, it's kind of like nobody takes it seriously and they'll pursue other work, but a $5 million program kind of gets noticed and people think, okay, there's some real money here. We can get the things done that we need to get done, but we can also get it. It's not too much that it can't get done in the timeframe. There's one of the things that Jeff Francis and Superintendent was concerned about is equity and how we kind of make sure the small schools or those schools that don't have experience getting grants or working with the state. So we're trying to run it as a program where they could basically do the work. They don't have to like file an application, wait to see if they score well and return back, but really the administers of the program would reach out to those schools and then the other schools would just like, there'd be a list of things that they could do. They kind of get a pre-approval of these projects, maybe even also of contractors and then they just get the work done and then we are reimbursing as long as the work that they did was within the dollar range that we have set in the list of measures. And the only other thing that I'll kind of highlight, like assuming you don't want me to go through every paragraph here is there's some statutory requirements on bidding for projects that kind of slow projects down. And so there was an interest of maybe if we have a pre-approved list of contractors, you don't need to follow the bidding requirements. You can just get the work done with the bidder that you could find. If you find somebody that's qualified and they can do the work, you just get the work done and then get reimbursed. So that's on the page three under statutory changes. So I don't know if that is a good... I like that very much because we should be lined up against the wall and shot if we don't take advantage of this opportunity from the federal government, when we're constantly talking about all the deferred maintenance we have and how we don't want to put it on the property tax and the education fund. So if we have to suspend some contracting rules to make sure that we can get this work done, I think on balance that makes sense to me, although ideally you'd want a bidding process for every job. Jim, my biggest question about this is, what's the most efficient way I look at this and it seems like a grant program that appropriations would develop? And like they did with the frontline worker pay, what did we call it, essential worker grants? And so our committee could pass it out but then it would take its various stops and then its various stops in the house and that would consume a month. We'd be lucky to get it over to the house by the time we adjourn. So I'm just wondering about ideas to streamline. I could, Andy, did you attach this to your email, right, Andy? To you, yeah, I sent it to you and the committee members. Well, I was thinking of Senator Ash and Senator Kitchell. No, I did send him an email, but that was just, because I knew they probably get too many emails and wouldn't read a long thing. So that was just a couple of paragraphs. I didn't attach this to them yet. So why don't we do this as just a starter because I'm just gonna explore before we do anything formal, if there isn't a way to advance it out of our committee into the hands of appropriations. So if you could send it to Senator Ash and Peter Sterling and say it comes from the Ed committee and maybe that I'll be in touch with Tim about it because I know he liked the idea. Senator Kitchell liked the idea. She was just worried about more than one conversation going on at once. So I do think it would be better if something this specific related to the grant funding was just picked up and worked on in appropriations. So if you can do that, I'll have a conversation with Tim today or tomorrow. By the time we come back on Tuesday, I'll try to report on that. Does anybody see anything in here that might need revision or that doesn't look like it's at a stage to be passed on? Ruth? I just had a question. Andy, you and I had talked about this a little bit when you started working on this and some of the concerns I'd heard or thought of were, there aren't standards in here for what kind of system the state would be paying for or at least I didn't see them. So would the state just pay for any kind of ventilation system? However it's installed, or is there some kind of requirement for it has to be to these standards? So that's one question. And then the second question is to this issue of the overall condition of school buildings, whether or not we wanna be investing in some school buildings that maybe shouldn't no longer be school buildings or only have are at 20% capacity or whatever. And there's sort of no standards for this is a worthwhile project because this building is worth saving and there are enough kids, you know what I mean? So I guess those issues about whether or not this, even though it is federal money and we should be using it and everything, we whether or not it's becoming tighter and tighter. So those kinds of questions. Well, your first question, if you look at the very first paragraph, number one under scope, the last part of the office all one run on sentence, the second sentence that talks about COVID-19 specific guidance for schools put out by the CDC and ASHRAE, both of those entities have put out guidance about what air handling systems. And so as far as COVID, that's the guidance that would be and then efficiency Vermont would definitely have guidance in ASHRAE has this too about how to do it the most energy efficient and cost effective ways. What is the ASHRAE? ASHRAE is the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioner Engineers. Oh, I should have been joined. It's popular, it's right there, the first paragraph. Oh, it is? Yeah. Oh, it's up there. I didn't scroll up far enough. It sounds bad. Yeah. The ratites are in charge of it. The ratites are in the air. To Ruth's other point, I guess my own feeling is if we're going to put kids in the school starting in the fall and this will make it a healthier environment and the federal government's going to pay, even if we were going to tear the school down in February, I would still say do it because otherwise we're deliberately not improving up to CDC guidelines, a school where children are going to be educated even for a year or two years. And again, if the state's paying for it, it would be one thing, but the money's there to improve the health experience for kids going back to school. So, okay, so then Andy, if you can mail that to Senator Ash and say I'll be following up with a discussion about it. Yeah, I'll CC you on that email. Okay, great. So that's what we had on the agenda for today.