 Madam chair. Yes. I just want to remind you that for the people waiting bill will just need to factor in a trip to rules. Because it didn't it doesn't have a bill number or anything. We didn't we didn't meet the deadline for getting the bill introduced. The OK that's rules wants it rules wants it. It's not a problem. They'll fix it. OK, thanks. OK, I mean major bills tend to not make deadlines just because they take long. OK, so I am going to go on and our first witness is Thomas Candon. OK, Mr. Candon, welcome. And you are not the Tom Candon that we knew from DFR. I was not sure. I assume you know my father, then, Senator. Ah, I wonder if they say you grew up on Liberty Street. I did right around the corner from there. Yes. Yes. OK. All right. I thought your father still lived up in the Champlain Valley. And I saw you have moved to Norwich. Well, welcome. Yes. Thank you. Yes, they're in Shelburne. You asked to talk to us. I did. OK, thank you very much. And I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to come before you earlier in your decision making processes here. But I do thank you, Chair Cummings and members of the committee for providing me with the opportunity to testify today. My name is, as we've said, Tom Candon. I'm the chair of the Norwich School Board and as well as a member of the Dresden Interstate School Board serving the towns of Norwich, Vermont and Hanover, New Hampshire. I represent the district that, according to the task force on the implementation of the pupil waiting factors report, will see the single largest tax rate increase in the state with the implementation of either recommendation presented in the task force's report. With thanks to Senator Hardy and Brock for their service on the task force, I am not here today to argue the rationale for changing the waiting factors, but rather to provide an example of the potential impact that these new weights will have on our community, our school and our students. The results of the waiting study indicate that Norwich has been over-weighted and has benefited from the existing pupil waiting factors for many years. We do not deny this. By many metrics, Norwich is an affluent community. We have very low numbers of students or families in poverty. We are not a rural district. We have very few English language learners. All categories that are under consideration for adjustment in the pupil weights. The challenge of viewing this at the macro level is that we miss the individual implications related to the implementation of the recommendations. My colleagues and I on the Norwich School Board are very concerned about these implications of the implementation of either the recommendation to update the weights or to adopt a cost equity model as presented in task force's final report. Understanding that the task force recognizes that, and I quote, estimated impacts are fairly substantial for many school districts. Thus transition mechanisms would be necessary to ease the impact positive or negative on school districts, close quote. I strongly encourage you to consider these transition mechanisms along with the income-based funding model I know you're exploring. I provide here some background on the substantial estimated impact on the Norwich School District and the impact it could have on all of our students and residents. According to the estimates provided in the task force's report, Norwich's equalized pupil count using FY20 data sampling provided in the report would decrease from 580.19 to 475.73, a loss of 104.46 equalized pupils. This loss of equalized pupils would result in a 32.2% tax rate increase from $1.745 to $2.306. Estimates of the cost equity model show a slightly lower increase of 27.4% from $1.745 to $2.222. To put this in context, this represents an increase of roughly $1,500 in taxes on a $300,000 homestead and upwards of $2,000 in taxes on a $400,000 homestead for either model. And I've provided in my testimony that you have the calculations for both of those. The expectations tied to the change in weights is that underweighted school districts will now have excess tax and capacity and will likely increase budgets while maintaining a level tax rate. Likewise, overweighted districts will feel the pinch of the tax rate increase and likely decrease spending. While it's impossible to know what amount of increased Norwich voters will ultimately support, it is possible to look at how much the FY20 budget would have needed to be reduced to result in a lower tax rate increase. In order to keep the tax rate increase to just 5% or a tax rate of $1.832, an increase of almost nine cents, we would need to decrease the budget of $12,342,572 by just over $1.5 million. If the community were willing to accept a 10% tax rate increase, we would still need to decrease the budget by just over a million dollars. Even a 16% increase would require us to cut over $500,000 from the budget. Budget reductions of these amounts would obviously have a negative impact on our schools. The result would likely be a reduction of teaching and support staff, loss of programming and deferred maintenance, directly negatively impacting student learning and student safety. Norwich's ability to decrease the budget to meet these targets is further complicated by our status as a member of the Dresden Interstate School District, SU 70. Norwich's education spending is a combination of Marion Cross Elementary School budget serving pre-K through sixth grade in Norwich plus the Norwich portion of the Dresden School budget serving Norwich and Hanover New Hampshire students in grades seven through 12. Again, using the FY20 budget number referenced earlier, the Marion Cross School portion of the budget was $5,817,145 and the Dresden Assessment in Norwich was $6,525,427. Thus the Marion Cross School budget accounted for just over 47% of the education spending for Norwich. In order for us to achieve the budget reductions necessary to alleviate the tax rate increase in Norwich noted earlier, we also would need cooperation from our school board colleagues in Hanover, New Hampshire, as well as the voters of that town to affect the Dresden Assessment to Norwich. As you know, the education funding system in New Hampshire is different from that in Vermont whereas Vermont has attempted to address and with this waiting study continues to address the inequities of our funding and tax system for education spending, New Hampshire has not followed suit despite multiple lawsuits. The end result is that the Hanover New Hampshire community does not feel the same pressure to address education spending nor the pressure on the resulting tax rate as Norwich residents do and will. Even if we could get the cooperation of some of our Hanover New Hampshire board members, the governance structure of our system would make the ask even more difficult. Our Dresden Interstate School Board consists of four members of the Norwich School Board and seven members of the Hanover School Board. This structure is set out in the Articles of Agreement in the Dresden Interstate School District and was based on the proportional number of students that each community has in our public education system. So even if all board members from Norwich supported budget decreases in Dresden, we would need two Hanover board members to agree to the reductions as well. After that, because the votes of both communities are commingled before counting the results, we would also need a significant portion of Hanover New Hampshire voters to approve the reductions. So while decreasing the Dresden budget would not be impossible, it would be very challenging. Again, while we recognize that as a whole, Norwich is considered an affluent community and we have been fortunate in what we've been able to provide for our school children, many within our community are not of means whereby an increase to their tax rate in excess of $2,000 is something they can afford. Whether levied all at once or spread out over three to five years, some may have to consider moving. Even those of means who can afford tax hikes may consider a move across the river to New Hampshire. There was a time when deciding to live in Vermont or New Hampshire strictly on a cost calculation was much more balanced. The thinking went that while Vermont had a state income tax and sales tax, property taxes were lower than New Hampshire. So it evened out to some extent. This is no longer the case when we already see a handful of people move from Norwich to Hanover each year. So as you work through the details regarding implementation of the new weights or cost equity model and your consideration of moving to an income-based funding model, I ask that you consider the potential impacts to those districts that are deemed overweight, the impact on everyone within those districts, the challenges to addressing these impacts for uniquely configured school districts, such as ours, and encourage you to consider the range of transition mechanisms outlined in the task force's report. If consideration continues toward an income-based funding model, I also encourage you to make available tools for Vermonters and school boards to analyze and project the impact of such change. Thank you for your time and consideration. And if there are any other questions or any information I or the school district can provide, please do let me know. Thank you, Senator. Okay. Committee, any questions? Senator Hardy. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you, Mr. Kanden, for your testimony. The task force was well aware that there were school districts like yours that would have a pretty significant impact on your tax rate and your potentially on your budgets. And I don't think there was anyone who thought that you or other school districts in your situation would just reduce your budgets by the full amount. We did try to take into consideration a bunch of potential transition mechanisms, which is something we will be discussing today. But I'm wondering, you know, the roll-in over five years is one of those with rolling in equalized pupils to roll in the tax rates changes. Are there other mechanisms that you think would be helpful to your situation? And is there anything in the governance structure that could be addressed as well? I think the governance structure would be challenging because we had to, we were establishing an act of Congress. So that's always hard to address. I know that. There it is, yeah. With regard to spreading it out, obviously over the course of the longer period of time, certainly would help things. I'm interested though in hearing more about the more income-based funding model that you're taking on too. But what also, as I mentioned earlier, really appreciate the opportunity to see how that type of model would potentially affect the people of our town prior to such a recommendation on implementation. So do you think the income-based funding system might be helpful in addressing some of the concerns that you have? I think there is potential for that. Like I said, it would be good to be able to model that out to have a better understanding across the board for our residents in Norwich. Right, of course. Because we are fortunate to be a property, our property values are significant. And the other factor here too, I think, which the whole state is going to be seeing with reappraisals over the course of the past couple of years with the skyrocket and real estate prices is seemingly going to have some significant impacts as well. And what about the spending threshold? Did you take a look at that? One of the recommendations that the task force made was to suspend that during the transition period. I'm assuming that that would be something you would be in favor of. I think that would probably also contribute to helping with the transitionary model here. Well, thank you very much. It's interesting to hear from you. I wish we'd had you into the task force. So thank you for coming. Well, again, I'm sorry it took so long for me to get here, but thank you for hearing from me today, Senator Hardy. Okay, other questions? Committee. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Senator Cummings. We're going to work through this. All right, next on the agenda is Anor Hot Horton. My Boston accent is showing up. And you're the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. That is correct, Senator Cummings. Hello. Hello, and just introduce yourself. I don't know. I guess we're going to have video records from now on, but tradition says introduce yourself for the record. I shall do so. Hello, Senator Cummings and Senate Finance Committee. I am Anor Horton, and I am the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. And thank you very much for having me in. Now, Hunger Free Vermont is not an expert on education funding. I'm here to speak to three very specific sections only of this bill, sections four, five and 18. But Hunger Free Vermont, we are an expert in the different ways in which the federal nutrition programs, in particular Three Squares Vermont and School Meals, that enrollment in those programs consistently results in a significant undercount of low-income students and of low-income households in our state. And so we are very excited about the changes in section four of this bill in which the committee is eliminating the use of Three Squares Vermont enrollment as the measurement of economically deprived students for purposes of the funding mechanisms in this bill. And we're also really, we really strongly support the elimination of that as the measurement. And we also strongly support the creation of a universal income declaration form along the lines that that process is outlined in section five. That the creation of that form, a very simple, very easy to use, easy to complete and easy for schools to process, universal income declaration form that school districts can require all families to complete is going to make a huge, huge difference in eliminating stigma around income in our schools. And it's going to result in a much more accurate count of how many pupils in each of our schools and school districts are in fact, meet, in fact, do meet the definition of being from an economically deprived background. And in fact, the creation and implementation of a universal income declaration form could very much help school districts like Norwich. And I was very interested to hear Mr. Candon's testimony just before my own because we don't have a very good or effective mechanism in place right now for actually documenting how many students live in households that would meet the definition of economic deprivation that is offered in this bill, which is ultimately 185% of as it's written right now the, or not lower than 185% of the 2021 federal poverty level. But we aren't really capturing all the students that meet that definition right now in our schools. And this bill would provide a mechanism for doing that and would provide a mechanism for the general assembly to make adjustments to that definition over time as more data is gathered about whether or not that is an adequate definition of what it is to be from an economically deprived background. And so I do think over time we have these provisions in this bill are going to help us to much more accurately identify those students in all school districts, including higher income and especially higher income districts like Norwich. So we are strongly in support of those efforts. And we are strongly in support also of the addition of six positions for the agency of education that is included in section 18 of this bill and including to provide the agency of education with the resources that it needs in order to actually work with school staff to design and implement a really effective form for collecting the income information that is needed from households in order to carry out the school funding formula as it's envisioned here. So we strongly support all of that. We do note that in this bill because it's going to take time for the agency of education to develop and implement this new universal income declaration form that for the 2022, 2023 school year, the measurement for determining economically pupils from economically deprived backgrounds is eligibility for the free and reduced price national school lunch program. And the challenge there is that families have not had to complete school meal applications for the last two years because of the federal pandemic waivers in the school meal program. I do think that there is a way to get around that challenge of the fact that families are not used to completing those forms and it may be quite difficult for schools to successfully collect those in a timely way this coming school year but there are multiple ways that schools can demonstrate how many students they have that are eligible for these programs and school meal applications is just one of those ways. Direct certification through their families participation in other federal programs that qualify is another way using the identified student percentage which is a calculation that schools providing universal meals prior to the pandemic through the community eligibility provision has to come up with is another and using the household income form which is the current version available to schools of what is envisioned in this bill as a universal income declaration form. And while that household income form is not it's not a great form it's not very clear it's pretty challenging for families to complete. It is still a form that's available right now to schools and that schools can distribute to all families and that schools can require all families to complete. And so I think there's nothing in this bill that per language that precludes schools from using any or a combination of all of those methods for determining how many students are eligible for free and reduced price school meals in this coming school year. But I think it would be great if schools explicitly had the flexibility to use any of those already approved and acceptable methods for determining that information. I think the most flexibility that we can offer schools during this really challenging time and in this really challenging transition year coming up the better able they're going to be to collect complete and accurate information that will be needed for the state to carry out the distribution of education funds envisioned by this bill. I'm gonna stop there. I submitted written these comments in writing with a little more detail this morning to the committee. If you have any questions for me right now I'd be very happy to answer them. I think that's been helpful. Committee, any questions? All right, thank you. These are the fine details that we'd probably miss. So that's helpful. And I think we can probably accommodate that. Thank you so much Senator. Very much. Okay, Brad James is here. We're going on to Brad James. And I will say I've talked to Brad. I talked to Professor Colby last night. And I think I understand better what's happening to some of my school districts. But there we go. A couple of letters, emails have come in one testimony last week talked about we're looking at this without looking at the impact of the new special ed block grants. And then there was one about the lunches or the free and reduced lunch. And I think we've got that straightened out. But Brad, the floor is yours. And I know you, are you gonna share? I know you did. And you sent us a couple of documents which are posted. Are you gonna screen share those? If I can figure out how to screen share, I will. I'm not always good at those things, but yeah. If not faith, it might take faith a few minutes, but if she's got them, she can do it. I do have them and I'll see. But anyway, first of all, Brad James, A&C of Education and yes, I've been in contact and talked to a lot of people about a lot of things. And Senator Cummings, I did send you an email because you asked specifically about two of your school districts. Yes, I got that. I don't know if you got that email or not. And I kind of broke out the numbers that you saw. So the first question to address, which is kind of along the idea of what I was talking to about with Senator Cummings is the counts and weights that were used for poverty. Just to clarify, and again, this was just covered by the last witness. We, what we used was, we used the FR eligibility counts as reported by the school districts. And we used the ones for FY20 because that fit with all the data that we had. Current law says that we use DCF counts. We receive those counts twice a year. So we have four data points that we average and that's what we've been using up until, you know, you all decide to make a change. The poverty eligibility counts, the FR eligibility counts are much more robust as you've heard from several people. The numbers are much higher. So it captures more people. There are issues that I'm not fluent with that Ms. Horton just brought up. And then I know that you've heard from Rosie Kruger also. She's brought those up, I think, when she testified a while ago. So anyway, that's what we used. We used the FR accounts in there and that's what you're seeing the results of. And somebody asked what was the weight, that weight for poverty and task force recommendation and from Professor Colby's group was 1.03. So that's what the weight factor is that we use. Okay, and one thing I learned talking to Professor Colby is the number she was using were 2018. So two years earlier than Brad's and before the mergers went into effect. She had Barry City and Barry town as two separate school districts. So her numbers did not reflect the merger. There are others. That's right. That's an excellent point, Senator Cummings, because the data that I gave Professor Colby and her group was 2018. And it was the mergers that we had as of that time. And in FY 19, I wanna say we probably had another 15 to 20 mergers. So they were not reflected in the original report that came out. And then we probably had another 10, 12, 15 or so. Quite a few in FY 20 also. So we had, we've had quite a few mergers since that came out. And those changes were not picked up in the original report that came out. When we were working with the task force, we did update everything. We were using FY 20 governance structure. So it basically took care of all the mergers. There's since been a few changes, but we don't need to worry about those right now. They're minor. But we did use, we, I made everything so that it worked as if FY 20 was in effect with all the mergers. And then Professors Colby group, then rerun numbers at one or two different times. I can't remember how many it represents. Senator Hardy and Brock might know how many times they've rerun numbers, but they did rerun with new numbers. And that's where the new waiting factors came from that were recommended. So covering that. So then the next question that Senator Cummings brought up was about the special education census block grant from Act 173 that's coming in. It's an excellent question and I don't have a good answer for it. We're using, okay. Everybody sit down and buckle up your seats for a moment here. We're using FY 20 numbers. Okay, that's the data that we're using. Act 173 is meant to be implemented beginning in FY 23. So the numbers that we're looking at that people have been talking about where they're not gonna get enough special education revenue compared to what they've given in the past or some people get more, but most don't. That's not the FY 20 data that we're looking at. So it would be extremely difficult to take those numbers, try to deflate them and do all the other calculations necessary to get it back to FY 20. An additional problem is, and I know that we've had this issue many times forward with JFO and business managers such is knowing what information they're putting into their offsetting revenues for special education aid. What we have is we have their census block grant from that we figure out what their proposed aid is going to be. I don't know what it's going to be actually, but they don't, business managers don't always put in the full amount of revenue they're expecting. Sometimes they put in more. So it's all over the place. So it'd be extremely difficult for me to try to make anything that resembled even a remotely accurate guess as to what's happening with special education in FY 20. So I'd like to beg off from that one. However, I do have a handout for you. It is posted on your website under the name Estimates of Changes in Special Education Funding, but let me see if I can share my screen first. And if so, let me make sure I have it open first. I do, there it is. And if so, I will pull it up if I could. Oh, look at that. You can see I don't do this part very often. It's where am I? Not seen. That's that one, that's that one. Oh, show all of them, that's what I need. I have too many things open. It does not seem to be appearing here. I hope I have a puzzled look on my face. For sure. Okay, it's on my screen. Brad, I have it up. I can just bring it up for you. Oh, okay, thank you. Thank you. Obviously, I don't do well with those things. Whoops, I just watched. You're not alone. Okay, thanks. You gotta blow that up. Well, I can see it on my screen, but I can't see it on the share screen. So what you're looking at here? That's good. Thank you. I did this for house education a couple of weeks ago. And they have been asking the same type of question as what is the impact going to be on census block grant? And I really couldn't tell. So what I ended up doing was I ended up asking the business managers, querying them and asking them how much do you think, and it was a gross estimate on their part. How much do you think your special education revenue shortfall or increase is going to be switching from the reimbursement model to the census block grant model? So that's what you're looking at here. There are, I don't know, a handful, maybe eight, nine, 10 that are in red. And those were not, those are people who did not report to us. So I'll come back to those in a second. But if we start at the top, the first year Mount Abe and Addison Northwest, these are organized by SU number. So this is the way I think it's not by county because SU's cross county borders. But this is how I think of data. But the first two Mount Abe and Addison Northwest, Mount Abe says that they think they're gonna get an increase of $50,000 in revenue, okay? That translates into about a decrease in education spending of about $35. That's the far right column, okay? So what I did was I took whatever they told me their increase or decrease, I then listed the equalized pupils in the second column. And then the next two columns are either an increase or a decrease. And I divided the increase or decrease by the equalized pupils to get a rough per pupil number. So if they're increasing then their special, then their education spending decreases so their tax rate would decrease slightly in the case of Mount Abe. In the case of Addison Northwest, they're expecting a rough estimate of about $150,000 decrease that they lost. They had 915 students, so that translates into about an additional $164 on their education spending. Now again, these are very rough estimates. They didn't have the proper information to make the estimates that they usually have. They don't know what kids are coming in. Population's changed, but these are their best estimates they gave us. So you can see what's going on as you kind of scroll down through this. So just to give you some indication, if we were to remember the December one letter with the tax ministry yields had two yields. It had the one that's going to use all the $90 million plus on the bottom line. Okay, that was over 13,000. And then the second was if they didn't use any of that $90 million, the yield was $12,937. I recommend to the business managers, they go at that one because it's conservative. They'll probably be around that point. It may go up a little bit, it may go down a little bit, but I didn't think that much that $90 million was going to go into increase the yield further. Because that $12,937 figure were already represented an increase of 14.3% over this year's yield. So it's a giant increase. So using the $12,937 as the yield, I'm not saying that's what it is using that. Basically for every $100 change in education spending per pupil up or down, it changed the tax rate by eight tenths of a cent. So 0.008 pennies. Okay, so not quite a penny. So just to give you an idea. So if I look at Addison Northwest, if their tax rate's going, if their per pupil spending is going up $164 per pupil, that would be about a tax rate change of about an increase of about 1.6 cents, roughly. You can have very rough terms, just so people have some idea of what these numbers translate into. So that's kind of what we're looking at here. And I'm afraid that's about the best I could do for you in terms of what the impact of the special education grant is going to be until I start getting a lot of information from business managers. And that's probably a good place to stop and ask what questions, which are probably many based on this. So Brett, are we spending the same bottom line? Cause there's an awful lot more losers than winners on that chart. Are we spending, are we really decreasing our special ed spend? The idea behind the block grant is that the practices will change. There's work in the background that I know nothing about to get there. But the answer to question is no. We are still at the same bottom line. We're not decreasing yet because we haven't begun the process. So what many business managers have told me is that for those who are losing significant amounts of money here, that is spilling directly over into their education spending. So they still have that same estimated cost, but they're not getting the same amount of revenues. So that increases their education spending and increases their overall tax rate. In terms of the education fund, it increases education spending but decreases the special education line. So that part comes out to be about the same in terms of the education fund, but not for individual districts. Okay. Committee. So it doesn't seem like this is gonna help any of those jobs. Well, the other thing, Madam Chair, is that it's hard to see it too because the census block grant, special education, is all the supervisory union level, not at the school. That's right. We went to the school. In about half the case is one of the same, but the other half, it's not. So it's very difficult to parse out. Okay. Committee. Questions. Senator Pearson. I think it's just worth reminding that this is done. I mean, this change was enacted what, three years ago or something, and it's now coming in. Curious if, when we did this in the legislature and I wasn't intimately involved, but I'm pretty sure I was here. Is there a phase in of this? We often make these changes with a phase in, and is this the last of that, or is this the first of that, or could you just orient us that way? There is a phase in. It's a five-year phase in. I'm gonna go from memory because I don't have the language here in front of me. It's a five-year phase in. It was supposed to be phase in. The first year was supposed to be FY21. It was postponed, and then it was postponed again. So now we're the first year's gonna be FY23. The block grant, the census block grant that supervisory unions are going to get under current law is based on what they receive for reimbursement in two categories, special education reimbursement for FY18, 19, and 20. So it's the average of those divided by their ADM, three-year ADM average, so that's their census block grant. When I was in house education last week, two weeks ago, they, when we were talking about this, they asked what would be the impact if instead of having the census block grant start from 18, 19, and 20 average, from 19, 20, and 21 average, pushing it up a year. So I ran that for them, but increased, it increased people's overall amounts probably roughly four and a half million dollars. I'm going from memory here. And so they have a draft bill that has changed that grant to the more current three years. That's year one. That happens in year two and three. That number, that calculation gets increased by, the net by camera what that X stands for. It's an inflation factor that I don't ever use except for this case now, but it's one that's out there. So it gets increased annually and then ultimately they're going to transition to whatever the census block grant is for the state, which is another three-year average calculation grown by the same index. And it gets a little more complicated in there, but that's basically what's happening. So it's a transition. And it's, you know, it's phasement. The idea was that costs would come down. The idea was that people wouldn't get hurt because of the inflation factor from the NIPA index. But when this was written back in 2018, I think it was, the pandemic wasn't here. And that changed a lot of things. Thanks. Kind of long, sorry. Senator Hardy. Thanks, Madam Chair. We did talk about this issue in the task force and it is also discussed in the original pupil waiting task force report from Professor Colby and her team. The recommendations that are in Act 173 came out of a report that was, I believe co-authored actually by Professor Colby. And one of the reasons that we made the shift was because of the, there was a concern about the high cost of special ed and also the over identification and the lack of flexibility in special education funding. So that's one of the shifts. And as Brad said, it's been delayed a couple of times. The task force didn't make any specific recommendations except for to have the education committees look at this issue and in the sort of breakdown of which committees were gonna take the lead on things, the house education committee was assigned this issue. And so that's why I'm glad to hear they are actually taking it up and looking at it. But the phase in of the two, there's a one year delay if we do the pupil waiting starting in FY24 and the special ed in FY23. There's a bit of a lag in the phase in which should help. But I do believe we should not continue to keep delaying this special education phase and there's a lot of research behind why we were making these changes. And a lot that will benefit the ability for schools to meet the needs of a broader array of students with special education needs and not just students who have specific IEP needs. So I think this is a good thing and it might be painful for some school districts or that's their perception. And I think a lot of it is we just need to get it started. And there will be some cross interaction with some school districts that gain on one will lose on another, et cetera. So I think it won't be as extreme as some districts might think. But it is really hard to model for the reasons that Brad talked about. And if I could add to that, speaking with business management and getting the feel for what superintendents think of most of them, not all. Most of them are supportive of moving forward with it. They built it into their, all of them have built it into their butts at this point. A lot of them are saying now is as good a year as any to do it because we're gonna be changing, but also because the yield is so high, it's such a big bump that that's gonna help them. And I don't know what's happened to CLA's yet. I don't, I haven't seen those numbers, but I'm sure that that's going to offset some of that yield bump, but most people say it's time just move forward and that they'll deal with it as time goes by. Okay, other questions? Okay, so Brad, you've got, this was just the footnote. That's just the footnote. Okay, so I did count weights. So I have two things that I can kind of bring up, I think. Did you, my understanding is you received the letter from Senate Education about their recommendation on the English language. Would you like to talk about that a little bit? Because that's one of the handouts that I have. Faith, could you do that again before we pull that one up? I wouldn't even bother trying. So you received the letter from Senate Education, which of course I did not bring with me, but they basically said, when I was doing the modeling for them, they were suggesting using the, thank you, perfect. They were suggesting using all the recommended weights by the task force, plus the ELL weight of 2.49. So that's what you're seeing, that's what this model is used, all the weights plus the ELL weight of 2.49. And what they wanted to do was they wanted to see how the tax rates would compare to what we had in there for the FY20 tax rates with all the caveats as to what we did to those, because they're not what people see. And I can go through those if you'd like me to. And they wanted to see three things. They wanted to see what would the tax rate change be just using the weights straight by themselves? What would the tax rate changes be if they said we're gonna use all the weights? Plus, if you have 25 or fewer ELL students, you get a grant of 25,000. And thirdly, same, but with a grant of 50,000. Both the grants were contingent upon having 25 or fewer ELL students. So that's what we're looking at here. They further refinded after I did this by saying, I think if you had five or fewer or $25,000 grant, I think it was more than five to 25 is a $50,000 grant. So what you're looking at here at the bound is not exactly what your runner says, but this is kind of the boundaries. So again, here we're looking at the state data, state school districts are organized by, first of all, by county then alphabetically. So Addison County is first. The first column then is the FY20 ELL counts first. Relax, I'm already in break. So the first column is the FY20 ELL counts. These are the numbers that we're dealing with. These are not the numbers. They're gonna be in effect when we're talking about this down the road. You know, this again, we're just using the numbers we've been using. There were 1,780 ELL students in the state or reported to us in the state that we know of that year. The next column over is the FY20 tax rate. That's that original FY20 tax rate. So that's kind of the base that we're comparing against. Again, this is not what people saw. And would you like me to go through the reasons for that or are we okay with that? I'm seeing one shake of the head. Committee, I can't see you. Does anyone want to go through? I remember Brad, you backed things out. We did. We backed out incentives for Mac 46. That changed the yield. So everybody's tax rate changed in a nutshell. That's what happened. And these are the resulting tax rates. But it's not what anybody remembers because that's not what they saw. So, oh yeah. The third column says estimated eight. That's supposed to be rate. Hi. Okay. Good, good type over, Brad. So what this is, is this is just the difference between the tax rate that would districts would see if they had all the weights plus the ELL weight. We're not talking about the grants yet, okay? And so it's just a plus minus versus the FY20 rate. And in order to make it a little more legible, I, it's a little hard to see on the screen at least on my laptop, the negative numbers are in yellow, okay? Just the high level, so it's a little bit easier to pick them out. I used the brighter yellow first, it was too bright, even for my eyes. So again, just going quickly from the top, Addison Central, they're seeing the tax increase if they use all weights of basically six cents. Whereas Addison Northwest would see a decrease of just a little over three cents, okay? The third, the one, two, three, fourth column, pardon me, the fourth column estimated rate change, ELL equals 2.4 and plus the grant of 25,000. That's if you had 25 or fewer ELL students, you got a grant of 25,000. So that reduced your education spending and that reduces your tax rate somewhat. So in Addison Central's case, it reduced their tax rate by one-tenth of a cent and in Addison Northwest case, it reduced their tax rate by, looks like three-tenths of a percent. So they're going down slightly. If there's, you know, a lot of them didn't change, they didn't have students. You can see that from the first column. And then the very last column is the exact same thing, but this time with the $50,000 grant, so the tax rate decreases, is again, slightly more, roughly doubled, okay? So that's kind of what you're seeing here. It's just showing the differences in tax rates in a couple of different scenarios. So you can think of the last two columns kind of being brackets or bounds as to what the change in tax rate should be roughly, you know, based on FY20 numbers. I like summer, you can look and ask questions or we can move on. Okay, I'm still looking for mine. Down towards the end, Washington County is on the second page. Yeah, it is. Okay, so you're starting with Barry. Barry was at FY20, 125, 1.254 with all the weights. They're up four cents and they're too large for the grant. So their tax rate doesn't change. They're too large. Oh, because they've got 38 students, right? They're losing everywhere. All right. Sorry. The Montpelier is picking up ELL students fairly rapidly. Yeah, and so this is probably a low number for them. And I'm sure that's a low number for Barry also. Again, because these are, you know, two years ago at this point, almost three. But I've heard that Montpelier is picking up quite a few. Yeah, there's a couple of families have moved into town. Okay, all right. Who's first, Brad? Of course I do. You know, man, I'm always full of numbers and good news, good news. I care, here we go. No, I don't know if we want to get into this now or not. This is a Senator Hardy question. And it's talking about the bill. It's talking about the phase in transition, the transition for going to equalize pupils. And that's something that we have to do. Okay, then shall we go over? So Faith, if you'd be so kind as to pull up the next one. So while Faith is getting that, what Senator Hardy asked me to do was to see if I could come up with some way of illustrating how the five year transition period for moving from where we are now to the equalized pupil count with the new weights. How that would look. Full of caveats we're going to talk about now. Okay. So let's just stay at the top for the time being here, please Faith, not show anything. Okay. So this is based on what I saw in the last draft of your committee bill. And it's a five year transition period. It's in section 10. And what it does is it talks about transitioning for FY24, FY25 and FY26 by taking the prior, taking the count for those years that likes, well, I'll talk after FY24. It's taking the actual count that I calculate for FY24 and averaging it with the count, the equalized pupil counts for the prior four years. So that would be FY23, 22, 21, how's my math, and 20, 23, 22, 20, yes, and 20, okay. So it would be taking those averages. And then in F, so you'd be looking at one year of the new weights and four years of the old weights. The next year, FY25, you'd be looking at FY25, 24, 23, 22 and 21, so you'd be looking at two years of new weights and three years of old weights. Following your FY26, you'd be looking at three years of new weights and two years of old weights. Then the averaging changes for the fourth year. So that would be FY27. And you use the prior three years of equalized pupils plus the current year. So that would be all new weights at that point. And then the last year is going to what it would be going forward in the change in statute as proposed. And that would be, so that would be FY28. And so that would be looking at the prior, that year plus the prior two years of equalized pupils that you would be averaged. So it's a completely different way of doing equalized pupils in terms of rolling forward. You're doing the equalized pupil calculation itself, but you're not using those numbers directly. You're averaging them with prior years worth numbers. That's what section 10 is doing in your bill. So that's what I attempted to do here, except we don't have that information. So what I did was I took FY20 because that's the number that we have with all the new weights. And I said, that's where we're starting. And then I took the prior four years before that. So that'd be from FY19, 18, 17, and 16. And that's the first section that you're looking at right there. So I averaged those. So we had one year new and four years of old. Then going to the next year, which would be for FY21 modeling, I decided I cannot justify trying to figure out what equalized pupils are gonna be in FY21. In order to actually make that run based on those recommendations, it would have taken more than the 12, 14 hours I had to do this for 24 hours, whatever it's been. So I didn't do that. I can do that when I have some time, but it's gonna take some time to do that. So what I did is I just used FY20, again, the new FY20 again. And that's what I did for all the out years. So I just kept them constant at FY20. So it's gonna look a little bit funny, but I couldn't figure out anything else to do. So that's what we're doing. So the first section here where it says about halfway down where it says prior equalized pupil counts used for transition years, old weights, that's what you're looking at. I chose 12 districts. Some gained, some lost, some had big gains, some had big losses, some had small gains, some had small, some big, some were small. So I tried to get a shmory score here. So again, organized by county and then the districts on the left. So the very first column is the actual FY20 equalized pupil count that we really use in FY20. And that's there for reference purposes. Then you're looking at what the actual FY16, 17, 18 and 19 counts were, and then what the count is with the new weights. So that's the top chart. That's the reference data. And that's what I use in the chart down below. So just going down a little bit more faith, please. So again, same districts, first column is the same FY20, actual numbers exact, same as right above. But now FY20 is an average. And it took the FY20 new weights and then those four years of actual equalized pupil counts and average them. That's what you're seeing here. So Addison Central has an FY20 average based on section 10 of 1781. Okay. The next column over it says FY21 average now uses that two year new weights from FY20 twice and then three years of old data. So the count goes down a little bit from 1781 to 1761. And then in FY22, we use three years of the new data, two years of old data and the count drops a little bit further to 1730. And then it's for FY23 and 24, it's all the same year that we're averaging. So it's pretty easy for me to do that math. So it's 1,086 or 86. In other words, the last two columns are exactly the same as that top right-hand column says FY20 new weights. Okay. Because that I did not try to project into out years. All right. So here you're looking at the numbers. Okay. I know a lot of people don't like to look at numbers. So if you'd scroll down, please paint or face the next page. I visualize things for people, which I don't always do very well. And what you're looking at now is the scale changes. I've got their 12 districts, so there are 12 graphs here showing each of the districts and how they change over the years. The very first one is FY20 actual, that's there for reference purposes. I used lines because people like to see trends better with lines than columns. Technically, I'm going to be geek. You should be using columns because there's nothing in between FY20 and FY21 and FY22. So it should be columns, discrete numbers, but people prefer the lines. So that's what I did. I threw in the lines. The first section is just FY20. It's there stricter for reference. I couldn't make that line green or red or purple or anything else. So Excel doesn't do that too well. But anyway, what we're looking at here is just kind of a visual representation of the numbers up above. And scale varies between graphs. I thought about making them all the same scale, but then you would start not see a lot of the curves and such in there. So I let the scale kind of do its own talking by itself. So just be aware of the scale changes and that the first column is just the FY20 numbers. It's not what's really happening. But you can see that the client in Addison Center, you can see that Vernon goes up at a fairly good angle. And again, I don't know what would happen in those last two years, but it levels off because that's how I did the calculation it had to. Cold Chester declines. Do you see Windows going up at a good clip and so on? So that's what we're looking at here. Just same thing you saw in numbers, but in visual form. And I'll be happy to entertain questions. Did all that make sense? I mean, it was a lot that I just threw at you because I've been doing it for the last 12 hours. Does it make sense? Yeah, there, that's a good question. I need you to holler because I, there you are. Okay, now I can see you. Questions? So based, okay, Senator Pearson. Brad, I've been thinking a lot of, I'm on Senator Brock and I are on the redistricting committee and we have to deal in deviations. And the way we look at that is the negative deviation and the positive deviation. Then you add them together and you get a overall deviation. And I guess I'm struggling in, you know, there's so many layers and overlays in what you're describing and you add money based on one way you take a little away, it juggles out. What, do you have a sense of when you add it all up? You know, I guess we heard from Norwich, which rings in as the folks that will see the biggest tax pressure. Is there a well to do district? I'm not sure exactly which one is at the bottom, but when you add those, you know, what is the spread that we're talking about in terms of impact? Or is it even possible, are you kind of saying between all of these layers that it's hard to know exactly the precise impact? I guess that's my question. Like what, how big a scale here are we really talking about in terms of this change? Hang on for a sec here. Probably in terms of tax rates. Me, if you bear with me for a moment, let's get it out of all that stuff. Sheet. I have, the answer is I have looked at it a little bit. I haven't studied it, but I have looked at it. And I can tell you what the range will be in terms of tax rate changes. I lied because I'm looking at, I'm not looking at what you guys are looking at what you're talking about. Give me one more second. Go back to here. I'm going to change the ELL weight. And the yield of the ELL weight change is also, you don't really have to listen to me. Okay, so here, let me get this data again, which should, but it's working well enough. It just decreased the, I guess, I mean, I don't need the number, but I'm not necessarily worried only about the tax rate. I'm just trying to get a sense of a lot of work and upheaval and are we moving the dial this much or? Yeah, and I, the tax rate swings, again, based on what we're looking at are pretty significant. Let me just sort it by that last column there. Okay, so what I'm seeing is a tax rate, a maximum tax rate decrease of using all the weights and the ELL weight, okay, versus FY20 numbers. I'm seeing a maximum decrease of about 62 cents. So I have one, two, three, four. I have 10 districts that I'm showing 10 districts that have tax rate decreases of over 30 cents. I'm showing nothing at the moment, there. And then tax rates that increase, there's Norwich, I'm showing nine that increase more than, I'm showing, I take it back, I'm showing 12. I'm showing about 12 that increase more than 15 cents. And that increase goes from 15 to 38 cents. And the decreases I was talking about went from 62 cents down to about 30 cents, because of 31 cents. So there are some pretty significant changes. There's, I would say the average decrease is good size. You'll bear with me one moment. The average decrease for 79 districts that seem to be going down is about 16 cents. And the average increase for the, I don't know how many, for the 35 going up is about 11 and a half cents. So does that help answer the question? Yeah, it does, thank you. It's a lot of numbers and it's hard because it's a pretty big spread. I haven't really looked at it, but I don't think it's sad. If I grafted and plot, I think you'd see it pretty big. It wouldn't be very clustered, I don't think. Yeah, I'm looking for one of those cluster grafts. I'll see what I can do for that. No, I think that does give us one answer. It's not as off as I thought it could be. The spreads and the number of winners and losers are fairly close. So Senator Hardy. Thanks, Madam Chair. I mean, one of the difficulties with all of this is because so much of it is dependent on individual local decisions and school district budgeting. It's really hard to predict. Some districts that see a tax rate increase may take it as a budget cut and reduce their spending. And some may not, or may not be able to, like what we just heard from Norwich and vice versa. Some districts that gain and have a tax rate decrease may not choose to increase their budget. It's so dependent on local decision making. And this was one of the challenges that we saw with the task force is that if we really want to make sure, you have to impose a lot more state oversight in it to make sure that things change the way we quote unquote want them to. And so there's not as much control as maybe we want or maybe we don't want. But I do have a question for Brad, which so Brad, the phase in the roll-in, as I was working to get this bill drafted to get something to the committee, I came up with that five-year roll-in that goes for five years and then goes down to four years and then three years. And it does, based on what I'm seeing in your numbers, it does do, it works. But then there still is that bump when you go from three to four, where there's a bigger decrease. And so I guess my question to you is do you think it works that way, or should we consider rolling it in differently? I think actually it works that way. I think it works reasonably. Well, I think what you're seeing is that bump. Everybody's flattening out those last two years. That's because I'm using the same numbers for those last two years. Because I didn't try to take FY21 counts and force them into the model to get an FY21 or an FY22, which is what I would really need to do in order to show it. Because I have the ADM counts, but getting them into the model takes time. Right, right, of course. But so the three years of five, one year of four, and then the continuation of three, you think that works? I think so. I mean, the alternative to me would be to just do five across the board. And you're getting more and more new weights as you go. What's happening here is in your third year, you've got three new years of new weights and two years of old weights. Then the following year, you just have four years of new weights. You don't have that old one and they're kind of mitigating it. It's not the case that it would be hit. It's going to vary from district to district. Right, so if we went with five years of five-year roll-in of five-year weights, then at the end, we would see a bump if we went back down to three years. Well, I think you'd probably see a bump, but it would all be new data. I mean, I think the way you have it set up, it decreases any potential bump one way or the other because the bump is on both directions. I think it decreases it because you've got that one year in between set up the five. So I think that's fine. It's hard to say what's going to happen in future years is just what it is. But it seems to me that either way, it would work. If you did five years across the board, then I think you'd probably see a bit of a bump. And again, I don't know which way would go. It depends on where you are. Most people probably go down because that's the general trend. It has been anyway. And so it's probably a slightly smaller bump, but it probably happens at an earlier point. So there's probably two minor bumps adding up to the hole by the way you've got it here. I mean, the end result is probably going to be roughly similar. It's a question of is it one year or two years where you're going to see that little bump? I guess I would just wonder what you think is better because I was probably two years. I think the way you have it. OK. OK. Well, if you change your mind, let me know. OK. Thank you. But you know, Senator Hardy said, if what we want to have happens, happens. And that may be the question for a low spending school that's going to lose in this, they're not going and has a hard time passing budgets. And we have a few of those. They're not going to improve their educational spending or quality just by the nature of their constituency and their ability to absorb. So those students arguably could get less of an education. I doubt that students in Norwich will see their test scores in math reading decline. And I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope that they do really well in an income-based system either because it's a wealthier community. So that gets us to the question, why are we doing this? I mean, what do we want to achieve? Do we just want to achieve more equity, which we probably do? Or are we hoping this results in better education? And that gets to our assessment tool. I don't know if anybody has heard. Is there testimony or evidence that the ELL students, which are the big swing, have been receiving lesser education under the present system? And what do we expect if we change the system and we provide more funds for their education? What do we expect? And they might be a different group than perhaps children that have grown up in generational poverty in this state. And we have a lot of those. What do we expect? What are we going to measure? We can play around with transitions. But in the end, whether it's year three or year five, there's going to be less money for education in some schools. And there's going to be more money for education in other schools. And what do we expect to see happen with that money? Senator Pearson. Well, to some of your question, what I hear locally is not that we've necessarily been inadequate in the approach to teaching English language learners. And in some of my school districts, there's dozens of languages spoken, right? I mean, 30 languages. But that was a number of years ago. But that meeting those needs has come out of somewhere. It has come out of somewhere. And to me, that's the concern. And so as I understand the answer to your question, I think it's a very valid one. The answer is our obligation under the Constitution and under Brigham to have education equity needs an ongoing test, if you like, to see how we're doing. And people with far more expertise than me have said it's time for a tune up of the way we would apply that. So to me, that's the goal. It's been well stated and taken us some time to get there because it's difficult and it's challenging. And from years ago in the way the legislature does, didn't take the leap to fix it. But took the leap to further analyze it and make sure we sort of walked in armed with the facts. And so I hope we will do this. But that's to answer your direct and very straightforward sensible question, Madam Chair. That's my understanding of why. Yeah, that's why. But we have a section in the bill that calls for an assessment tool. Remember, we had the auditor in. And if our goal is just to move the money around in a more equitable way, then arguably, this does it. But if we're doing it because we're putting all the resources into ELL, we're depriving other students of things, how do we want to even try doing that? Or do we just say, if it goes to a tax decrease, that's fine too. I mean, that's been the ongoing concern since we started this is, how do we make sure that we get some educational advancement or out of this? Or do we just use it to decrease tax rates and the students don't see anything? So I know Senator Hardy, what was the thought in the task force? Yes, this was a central question that we talked about a lot. And it is one of the reasons we actually recommended a categorical aid grant for students with English language learning needs so that we could be sure that the funding that we were providing by the state would be used for educating those students regardless of where they went to school. It's one of the reasons that we came up with an alternative to just using weights, using the cost equity formula, which would provide more transparency on the amount of funding that was going to individual school districts. So we struggled with this. And it is also one of the reasons that one of our strong recommendations is that we have a very good evaluation tool. Because as I've said before, the study is based on a very, very narrow definition of educational performance. And that is only on math and reading test scores. So having a much broader evaluation after we implement the change in weights is crucial to this. But we did see that districts spend a significantly different amount on ELL. There are some districts that are spending much, much more money on ELL than other districts. And in part, it's because of the greater needs, but in part, it's because of the difference in what their priorities are for their district. So really making sure this is this, I think ELL was the toughest one to make sure that we have the sufficient amount of resources for those students. And I think this compromise that the Education Committee sent over is fine. It gets us there for the most part, as long as we have pretty good evaluation tools and accountability tools in place. So there's not an easy answer to this. And I think we just need to continue to look at it and make sure that we are seeing the results of shifting this funding around. But I don't think there was any question ever on the task force that there are inequities in our system that need to be addressed. And a lot of it is based on the way that we are funding our schools. So we need to make those changes. It's just how do we do it and how do we ensure that it does what we want it to do? I think I'm not so worried about ELL because you can test that. How well do you do in the English language? Can you do math problems in English? I'm more worried about the kids in generational poverty. I'm worried about the kids we're hearing about in mental health crisis coming out of this COVID. I'm worried about when it is a challenge for a child to sit in their seat for more than 10 minutes without having anxiety or whatever. How do you and to get them to sit in their seat for 20 minutes is a major improvement. It may take a significant investment in personnel. But that's not going to show up in a test. And so to test schools with a significant number of children in poverty, you're not going to see this good chance. You won't see the same improvement that you will with somebody that's learning to communicate in a new language. I went to school with some students that came to college in Massachusetts from Latin America and did not speak a word of English. And they just started class and taught themselves English. It was mind-boggling, but they did it. There was no English as a second language in college in my day. But once you learn the language, and here we've got some cultural adjustments, but once you learn the language, you can probably take the test. But there's another whole subset of kids that are in a different spot. And I want to make sure that we're serving their needs. We're focused on ELL because it's a new problem. We've seen a large influx in the last decade. And it looks like we're going to be seeing some more. But I want us to think through, what about those kids in the kingdom? The Senator Pearson. So, Madam Chair, I'm kind of hearing two things from you. And I want to just ask them to make sure I understand. I'm very worried about the impact of poverty and generational poverty. And Senator McDonald is good to remind us of the shift of wealth from rural parts of the state maybe to the bigger cities. Well, some of these states, these families have never had wealth. But right, so I think we're agreeing. So the formula changes attempts to address that. ELL has been the kind of high profile thing. But equally, in fact, more impactful in terms of just raw numbers of students involved is an updated metric and weight for poverty. And so are you concerned that that's not enough? Or are you talking about you're worried about the way we measure whether or not that works? Or is it a combination? No, I'm not going to fight with Professor Colby about the updated weight. That is way beyond my pay grade. What I'm concerned about is two years from now, three years from now, we say, OK, we're going to judge the school's performance on a standardized test that from what we're hearing in health and welfare, just with the mental health stress in a lot of these families, standardized test performance is the least of their concerns. And I want to make sure we find a way to assess actual progress in that child's life towards being able to absorb and get a good education. I just want to make sure we get a measuring tool that measures actual progress in self-development. And that's a lot. Standardized tests are good for people like me who like to take tests, but they aren't so good for my two brothers with dyslexia. So Senator Hardy, help us. Yeah, no. So I totally agree, Madam Chair. And as I was trying to come up with an evaluation tool based off the good work that Senator Brock did in the task force and expanding on it, I was trying to look at measures that were beyond test scores, because I completely agree. Test scores are not a good measure of student performance. They are one measure of student performance and student success. And some students thrive with them, but they themselves are problematic. They have a lot of issues in and of themselves that would take an entire study or have taken many studies. So if you look in the bill, I tried to list a whole bunch of things, starting on page 24 that would. We can't open a fifth screen. I don't have room. That's OK. I can read some of them to you. But it includes that districts meeting the education quality standards, which is the whole sort of school performance standards for and then other relevant education standards, including the WIDA standards, which are the ELL standards, the Common Core Standards, and the Next Generation Science Standards. So first, starting with school standards and then going to student performance on proficiency-based learning assessments and graduation requirements. So this was part of what we did or what you all did, who are here with, I think it's Act 77, maybe, Brad, the multiple pathways so that there is a way to measure student performance beyond test scores, but proficiency-based learning. And then student performance on standardized tests, such as the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium Test, the SBACs, the NECAPs, the New England Common Assessment, the Portfolio Assessments, the WIDA English Language Learner, and the TOEFL English Language Learner Proficiency Exam. So trying to get a whole bunch of different exams that are used, then the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is done by the Department of Health and gets to some of the issues that we talk about in health and welfare, substance use, mental health issues, how does your community value you. So it's a much broader metric, not of performance, but of health and welfare. Then also, graduation and post-secondary enrollment rates, so what are students doing after they graduate? Education spending and homestead tax rates. And then educator compensation levels and licensure status. And this is one of the things that we heard from schools in the Northeast Kingdom or Northern Franklin County or rural parts of the state that it's harder to have licensed teachers and maintain them. So I was trying to get a whole slew if there are other measures that you can think of. I think we could add it. It's already a big lesson. I'm looking for something that says something more behaviorally based, but I think we're going to have to talk to perhaps the mental health agencies or the school counselors as to what that might look like. And I'm going to have to cut this off because we still have Julia Richter to get to from JFO. And she's got Julia. I know you've got some letters, writer time sequences that you wanted to talk to us about in this. Thank you and good afternoon, Julia Richter with JFO. So yes, as the chair referenced, I did put together a couple of slides after last week's discussion regarding all of the timing aspects in the bill and just laid it out to be helpful for the committee. So I've shared this with Faith, who's posted it on the website. And I'm happy to walk through the document or. Can you share the screen? Sure. Faith, share it. I'm happy to do so. Can you see my screen? You can see it just fine. Yes. OK. I'm going to blow it up a little. OK. Is that better? Yeah. All right. So I put together three slides here. The first slide that we're looking at now are sort of the relevant annual dates that you will find in the bill. This slide does not outline, as I noted on the bottom, it doesn't outline all dates in education finance, but really just the ones that are shifting around or changing with the bill. So on or before December 1st, there's kind of two main things that would happen. One, that the secretary shall determine the average daily membership of each school district for the current school year. And two, that the secretary shall determine that equalized pupil count for the next fiscal year for district review. And the other thing is that the Education Fund Advisory Committee, after consultation with the Joint Fiscal Office, shall calculate and recommend a property dollar equivalent yield, an income dollar equivalent yield, and a non-homestead property tax rate for the following fiscal year. And that this will be published and officially an annotated copy of the Education Fund Outlook. So it's a little similar to the current system, but I did just want to outline as the Education Fund Advisory Committee is a new topic. I thought it would be helpful to outline here. December 15th, the secretary shall make necessary corrections to the equalized pupil count that was referenced as they're coming up with that honor before December 1st. And then lastly, honor before January 15th, the Education Fund Advisory Committee shall make recommendations to the General Assembly regarding the recalculation and recalibration of pupil weights and categorical aids. Aid amounts as necessary. And then also the same, the yields and the non-homestead property tax rate as well as the stabilization reserve. So those are the dates that I really pulled out of the bill to help you folks after last week's discussion. I'll pause there to see if there's any questions about this slide. Any questions? And to date, we have not changed any of these, so. Madam Chair, I don't have a question for Julia, but maybe for Senator Hardy, can you remind us the thinking behind why we needed to shift some of this to a committee as opposed to the AOE or whoever does it now? Yeah, I think the task force felt that there was a need for ongoing expertise that was sort of overseeing the education finance system as a whole and making recommendations to the legislature. As Senator McDonald has said many times, there used to be a lot more understanding sort of broadly in the legislature about our education funding system. And one of the benefits that we found in the tax force was we were able to spend a lot of time really thinking about this and understanding it. But on a sort of regular basis, we don't have that time. So this would be a group of people that would have the time and expertise to really dig into the data, the make recommendations about not only the every year of things like the yield and the tax rates, but also the shift, the changes in weights, the changes in categorical aid amounts, and just have a group of people who are really keeping an eye on the system and making recommendations and noticing things when they change. And helping to evaluate whether or not what we do here is making the difference that we hope it will. And isn't that kind of what the state board of education does? It used to. The state board of education's role has been narrowed pretty significantly. And they are not doing this kind of work. And this would not be broadly speaking about education performance or curriculum or rules about education. It would be specific to education finance and the education fund. So not as broad as the state board of education's prior role. I think the testimony from the Secretary of Education and the tax commissioner was that everybody supported having this advisory group, but they didn't know why you needed to call them in to do what is purely an arithmetic and arithmetic problem, which was the November 1st letter. So that seemed to be the only place there was some issue with this. Right, and that certainly could be left the way it is and having the tax commissioner do that if the committee wanted that change. That's easy to change. OK. So Julia, is this it or do you have another one? So I do have two more slides. And we're getting into, we're cutting into break, folks. So Julia, why don't you go through those and we'll get the committee a little break? Yeah, I'm happy to walk through them. So here are the deadlines that are outlined in the bill. And I just pulled these together here. You'll see in green the deadline that's specified in bill, in the bill, in italics next to it, sort of the parties that are affected. The same slide up. Do we? It says, secretary shall determine average honor before December 1st. Isn't that the first one we just saw? That's what I see. Yeah. Huh. I'm not sure. I've changed slides. Faith, I'm not sure. Julia, I'll present the slides for you. OK, thank you. OK. There's been issues with technology recently. OK. OK, that's a new slide. All right. OK, thank you. So yeah, so here we're seeing the deadlines that are outlined in the bill. So in green, you'll see the date of the deadline. In italics, you'll see the affected parties. And then underneath, sort of, what those deadlines are. Would, Madam Chair, would you like me to walk through each one of these deadlines? Committee, do you want to walk through those? Or is it just good to have them outlined? Let's just go through. I think we can read them. So just go on to the next one. I think we can look at this. OK. Then Faith, if you wouldn't mind just moving to the next slide, please. This is also a reference slide pulled from the bill. So I thought it would be helpful for you all to see, because the Education Fund Advisory Committee would be a new committee. In this first box, we have the seven members that would be in the committee. And in the second box, we have the different parties that would provide administrative technical and legal assistance. So from my end, I'm happy to answer any questions about this. But I'll leave that up to you. OK. Any questions, committee? Thank you. I think everybody has reached tilt in their ability to absorb. So we're going to take about a 15 minute break. We are scheduled to be back here at 3.45. It's now 3.35. Take 15 minutes and.