 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Senate Education. It's Wednesday, March 24th at 327 in the afternoon. Senators, today we are hearing, first we'll hear from Ledger Council, Becky Wasserman. She has a cut off time, so she can be here until about 345. So we've asked her to take us through H26. And then we'll hear from the bill sponsors or two members of House Education, representatives Coupoli and Erison, their thoughts and give us some background on the bill. We'll then get an update on school ventilation and air quality from Dan Riley and Jodi Lesko. I am hoping that we can wrap up by 430 today as I believe many of you have received, hopefully read the email from me that Senators Kitchell, Starr, Ballant and I are gonna meet at 430 to see if there's a path forward on S100, the universal school meals slash agriculture bill. And a number of things I'd say are happening right now. I know many of you have been in contact with me and very much appreciated. And we'll just see how things go over the next couple of days. One thing, one bit of information that I did receive that I haven't shared yet, but I will email out to everybody is that ESSER funds are a no-go for these kinds of projects. So I might make it harder to actually find the necessary funding. So we did receive that from Joint Fiscal today. So I'm glad we're coming back now to air quality, but I don't want raid on and I don't want lead to get lost in any of this. And so we'll have the agency in to talk a little bit more about this bill as well as give us an update and I'll talk to Senator Kitchell around ESSER dollars and additional dollars to deal with raid on center perspective. I don't know if you have any updates or anything on or heard anything. I know you've followed this kind of work, but go ahead. Okay. Okay. Mr. Riley and Ms. Lesko, thanks for joining us. Welcome to Senate education. You are here to give us an update on school ventilation and air quality. I don't know which of you would like to start, but we'd appreciate a little background. This is a new committee and a little bit of how did we get here? Why did you do this work? What did this work entail and where are we at this point? So welcome. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman, for having us for the record. My name is Dan Riley and I'm a director of public affairs. And joining me is my colleague Jodi and I'll let her introduce herself. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, committee. My name is Jodi Lesko and I'm the director of programs and implementation for efficiency, Vermont. We have a brief presentation. I'm just gonna go ahead and share my screen now. It looks like the host has disabled. Jeannie, would you allow Mr. Riley to share screens, please? Here we go. Just give me one second. Okay. Thank you so much for having us today. I just wanna make sure everybody can see the screen. Got it. I'm just gonna give you a... Jodi and I are just gonna give you a quick update on sort of where we've been, what we've accomplished and sort of what lies ahead for the school IAQ program. Very briefly, as a quick background on efficiency, Vermont, over the past 20 years, efficiency Vermont as the state's energy efficiency utility has developed a statewide infrastructure for delivering energy savings to Vermonters. That statewide infrastructure was so important in the standing up and the success of this program. We have staff in nearly every county in the state. We've developed a network of partners throughout the state. We have strong relationships up and down the supply chain with customers who view us as a trusted partner. And we really think the results speak for themselves. Over 2.6 billion in energy savings through energy efficiency upgrades, over 12 million metric tons of CO2 reduced over the 20 years that we've been in operation. And we support a workforce of over 400 businesses with training, workforce development and marketing support, which has been really critical in terms of standing up this program, of understanding the supply chain, of working with these HVAC contractors, and it's allowed us to have some high degree of success, we believe. Very quickly, just the overall program timeline, it started last June when the legislature passed the school indoor air quality grant program with an initial $6.5 million funding allocation. As far as we know, it really was the first of its kind in the nation, and we think it just showed an incredible foresight from the legislature to do this. It really helped the state of Vermont get out ahead of this issue. And there's been indoor air quality improvements and in this discussion in every subsequent stimulus bill that's come out of Congress. And so we've heard from the Department of Energy, we've heard from states as far away as Hawaii, just contacting us, wanting to learn more about the program and what we've done. Governor Scott enacted the program on July 1st, and I call attention to that July 1st date because just eight days later on July 8th, we officially launched the program and began accepting school intakes. And really we were able to stand that up so fast. I mean, I think first and foremost because of Jody and her team and the success that they've had in terms of designing a program and understanding these complex guidelines from the different organizations, the CDC and ASHRAE and from sort of understanding that, working with a lot of these buildings, facilities managers in schools. And so we created it very quickly and the response was immediate and overwhelming really. By September 15th, over 300 schools were enrolled in the program. And so we were able to do marketing. A lot of direct outreach, that was a big part of it that we had these relationships in these school districts and we were able to really reach out to them directly. We did see that, I should say throughout the entire year, one reoccurring theme is demand for this, for the services, for the equipment as far outstrip the supply, right? Every school district, every school wants to create as safe and as healthy a learning environment as possible. And so consistently, we've seen the demand for this be sky high. And we did see in August and September, the supply chain and the workforce, it looked like they did have excess capacity to be able to do more this year. And as more federal stimulus funding came in, there was a second $11.5 million appropriation to the program in two separate acts. And so that kind of takes us to the December, to March bullet, I just wanna clarify that 16.3 figure that you see, that's the total amount that's been allocated to schools. That's not a third appropriation, that's just combining the 6.5 and the 11.5, which leads us to where we are today, where there is an additional 15 million for the program that's being discussed as a part of S315, the COVID response bill, that's still working its way through the legislature and through the process. I would just note for this committee that all of the discussion so far in both the House and the Senate Appropriations Committee has seemed to have been supportive of the idea of additional funding for this program. And to be clear, Efficiency Vermont firmly believes we can put additional funding to good use. We're still in the midst of the pandemic, there's still more work to be done as Jody's gonna touch on in just a minute. And we still wanna do as much as possible, as quickly as possible to get schools to be able to open as fully and as safely as they can, especially come the fall of the next school year. So with that, oh, go ahead, Senator. Senator Perslick, Mr. Raleigh may know this, did we did put the money in the expedited budget for this? Correct, in the, yes, in S315, that's right. So Senator Perslick, did you wanna comment on it? Okay, Jody, anything else on the timeline? But let me turn it over to you. Nope, you did great, Dan, thank you. And thank you again, committee for having us here. So I have had the immense privilege of leading the schools indoor air quality program on behalf of the state. And I wanna echo what Dan said about the foresight that Vermont really showed at the state and the legislative level to put this in place really before anyone else. And that allowed us to do I think a lot more because the supply chain, well, it did become constrained. We definitely gave the supply chain a run for its money. I think we were able to do a lot more because we were out of the gate really early. And that's really thanks to the leadership of folks like yourself. So thank you for that. So I am here really to talk about what we've accomplished together and how we've been able to do that. And I'll start with the how, which for me as a program designer and an implementer starts with program design. So I wanna go through the program components and then I'll go through the impact that we've had now that we're sort of winding down the implementation phase of this program from last year. So my motto every day in the planning and delivering of this program was to simplify the complex. I appreciated Senator Campion's call to give a little bit of background because I have to remind myself I used to not know what HVAC stood for either before I started working in the energy efficiency world. So HVAC systems are in the buildings that even have them are largely invisible unless you were the person who's working on that system. Many people don't know what HVAC stands for let alone how to improve an HVAC system to optimize indoor air quality. So last year in particular knowing how much was on school officials' plates, how little they may know about their HVAC system if they had one and how little time we really had to have an impact within the initial time constraints of the program. It was really critical for us to make it from start to finish as easy as we could for schools to take action. Ultimately, we didn't want schools to be overwhelmed at the outset so that they didn't take action. So we made it as easy for them to take action as possible. So this is the process that we have it started with just what exactly are the milestones for schools? So we had a very easy intake form on our website that just asked for the name of the school and the name of the contact person at the school. We then would work with the school and their contracted entities on scoping. And then when the project was completed we simplified the reimbursement process to the extent that we were able knowing that these are federal dollars. We took a lot of that administrative burden on ourselves so that it wasn't falling to the schools in that regard. We provided clear technical guidance at the outset of the program with every school that submitted an intake form. We provided this written technical guidance that we put together in relationship to the national guidelines. So the Centers for Disease Control, excuse me, I'll just say the CDC. The CDC and ASHRAE who are the engineers. We distilled those national guidelines for indoor air quality and the specifications around indoor air quality and also elicited a lot of input from school administrators, from facilities managers, from local health experts and HVAC experts and created this written document that schools could have access to and refer to as they scoped out their projects with their contractors. We also provided ongoing support throughout the program in the form of bi-weekly webinars. So we would walk through a portion of our written guidance or respond to some of the themes of questions that we were getting from the one-on-one support that we were providing to any and all eligible school that contacted us to ask about the program or how they could improve indoor air quality. You can go ahead to the next slide. So I have a sample project described here and it's funny. Again, I'm grateful that you gave me permission to do a little bit of background, Senator Campion. It's always a little bit of a question of how much background to provide or context but I do want to give you a sense of how these projects go because I think that helps you understand, you know, how, like what is exactly happening in the buildings in the state? So I'm grateful for the clarity and then being able to provide this context. So the, in most schools, they had not completed a recent assessment of any existing HVAC equipment or duct work and the like. And so for most schools, we recommended that as their starting point, has someone do a walkthrough of their building, assess the existing condition of their equipment and provide recommendations for improvement. And those recommendations could be quite a long list. And so then we worked with the school, with their HVAC professionals to look at what was going to have the highest amount of impact within the constraints that we were working under, both with funding, with time, with the availability of equipment and installers. And so we really picked out what the highest impact measures would be from the recommendations that came out of those assessments. The school would then go under contract with their installers and, you know, procure equipment. And at the end of that construction phase or the installation, they would ensure that what we had approved as a grant fundable project, all of those criteria were met. They would submit those invoices to us and we would provide reimbursement to them out of the grant funds. Look at my notes, make sure I didn't forget anything. Ms. Lesko, were these all initiated by schools themselves? In other words, you know, we just finished a conversation around prioritizing need in the state. Was it schools or were in some ways, how did you maybe connect to schools that might need these kinds of, this kind of work done, but it might not be on the radar or they don't have the resources to initiate it? It's a great question. So in the design phase, when I talked about the input that we had from HVAC professionals and from schools officials, one of the steps in that process was actually serving superintendents and facilities managers themselves to get a sense of the state of their HVAC system at that moment. And that allowed us some sense of where the greatest needs were and what schools were doing okay. And I'll say that we've been in a lot of these schools as with our efficiency Vermont hats on over the years, right? We know the folks that are working in these schools. And even we were surprised by I think that the state of the HVAC systems. And because, I've said in other forums, the pandemic really shown a light. It really highlighted indoor air quality as an issue that we needed to prioritize. And I think if not for that, it's not like these systems were not in need before, but it just became the highest priority. So what we decided in seeing that assessment was that the level of prioritization and how we would work through kind of again within these constraints is to see what the recommendations were that the school and their HVAC professional came with and basically prioritize the two main things that we prioritized were ventilation. So that's bringing outside air into the building and moving it around and filtration. So those are the two things that the CDC and ASHRAE say were the most important. And so there are lots of things that fall on the lower level of prioritization that we chose not to fund at the right out of the gate just to make sure that we reserve enough funding for those two primary needs for as many schools as we possibly could. Does that make sense, Senator Campion? Yes, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we can go to the next slide. Yep, so I'm gonna transition into results and impact at this point. And the first thing that I wanna show here is the geographic distribution of these projects. So each of these dots represents a location of a project. It could be a school or in some instances, it's at the district or supervisory union level. But you can see we really covered the whole state. Places where there are larger circles, there are just more than one project in that zip code. So clearly where there's higher population and there are more school buildings, the circles are a little bigger. And the colors of the dots are just who I assigned the project to on my team. So that doesn't have anything to do with the projects themselves. That's just an internal marker for me to know who's responsible for which of these projects. But this is really, it was called out in the bill that geographic equity is important and equity in general is a part of efficiency of Vermont's DNA as well. And so it's great to see that with the sort of broad outreach that we did and the prioritization with those two, with ventilation and filtration, it allowed us to do quite a lot in every corner of the state. And next slide please. So here's the impact by the numbers and you'll see these numbers reflected in the official report that we provided on the 15th of March. And so the number of schools that participated in the program is 365. There are 411 eligible schools in the state. So that means that 90% of the eligible schools in the state participated in some way in that program. Participation took three forms. Schools did either asked, it responded to our offer of an indoor air quality monitor. We did a bulk purchase of indoor air quality monitors. They did an actual construction project or use grant funds for a project at their school or they did both, right? So 90% of the schools participated in one of those three ways in this program which is really quite remarkable. With the projects themselves, with grant funded projects in school buildings, there are over 62,000 students that are now going to school in buildings that have improved HVAC systems. 6,500 teachers are now teaching in schools that have improved HVAC systems. The total universe of square footage for schools in Vermont is 17 million square feet and 13 million square feet of school building space now has improved HVAC conditions. We also monitored the number of schools that had no ventilation, had no centralized HVAC system at all. We are roughly the numbers about 80 schools based on the assessments that we are getting back that had no ability to bring outside air into their building and move it around. And we were able to serve 40 of those schools, so about half of the schools. And I can talk a little bit about why we couldn't do more but I think it's a phenomenal thing that we were able to provide the funding and the technical expertise to bring ventilation and filtration into 40 schools for the first time ever. And then finally, we monitored the economic activity that was spurred by this level of investment in schools market. And so this number will continue to go up as we have some projects that had an extended deadline. And so we're seeing some new companies submit invoices but to date over 100 companies in the state engaged in a project at a school building and that ranges anywhere from some of our largest controls or HVAC companies in the state that employ over a hundred people all the way down to a family electricians business with two or three people who are working in the trades. So it really spans all of those. And this is where the capacity comes in that Dan talked about at the beginning where that was, we weren't sure what the capacity would be for the workforce in Vermont and they really just delivered way more than we thought they could. And it's great to see that this number of companies were engaged in the program. Great. Next slide please Dan. And I also wanted to provide a couple of quotes from schools officials who have completed projects through the program. So I'll just briefly cover these. So Andrew Lundin who's the director of finance and operations at Lemoyle South says that this was... I'm sorry for interrupting this, let's go. I think we're gonna have to read the quotes on our own at our leisure, if you don't mind. Not at all. For a little bit of a time crunch. But no, I think I see that you also put them in our in the packet. So... Yes. They are very supportive. They're very supportive of the program, they're supportive. That's great. Thank you. Committee, questions for either Mr. Riley or Ms. Lesko. This is absolutely incredible work. I know that Senator Persley was instrumental in getting this going. So thank you to him as well. Senator Persley. Well, I have questions about the report. Maybe I'll just send those to Dan and Jody about what was in there. Maybe there's a supplemental report that we could get because I don't want to burden you guys with a reporting when you're still actively trying to do these projects and spend more money. But I, you know, and you responded to an email about having more money because there's nothing in there about the fund other than the big number. You know, we spent $12 million or whatever, but it'd be good to know like how much was spent on different schools and by county, not just by project, dots, math. So I can let you know what some of my other interests are. You know, I just, I guess I was expecting more, but I totally understand why you wouldn't want to spend time on a dumb report, you know, at this point. And as we asked for reports that we don't read, but this one, I'd be interested in a little more, but we don't have to take time to go through. Absolutely, we can follow up with that. And especially as some of the numbers are more finalized at the end of this month and then, you know, pending S315 and that allocation, you know, as we get final numbers, we're happy to work with you Senator and hopefully to be able to provide as much data analysis and context as we can. One quick question of the 15 million, hopefully that goes through quickly. Do you have an estimate on how much you would already say is kind of like earmarked from the last round, like schools that you would just go to right away or is that all unencumbered or do you kind of feel like a big chunk of that's already sort of planned out? Well, the news media has let schools know that this is a possibility. So we've certainly been fielding a lot of questions. And one of the things that we saw happen in the middle of the fall is the availability of large equipment that could be delivered in time for the end of the year deadline, that original deadline. We had to make some pivots starting in October to some smaller equipment that could be delivered in time for that original deadline. So those projects, all of that is still scoped out, that sort of bigger equipment projects. So that is really, those are just ready to go. And then we know that there are some other, like with those 80 schools that we know of that didn't have any ventilation and that there's still about half of them that we know about those as well. So we have a pretty good sense of some quick places where we could go. And there were also about a hundred schools that didn't do any kind of project. They might have had an air quality monitor but they didn't do a project with us. So we wanna push a little bit there as well to see what are the needs, make sure that we're reaching out more proactively to understand what the needs are there. So I think it's a mix, but we definitely have a pretty clear sense of some folks who are ready as soon as we give them the green light. That's great, it's really great. Senator Hooker, I think I saw your hand up with one. No, actually Senator Perch will ask my question and it had to do with the scope of the projects. I mean, how big and how small were they? And then you can send that information along and that would be excellent, thanks. Yeah, that would be helpful as well as a breakdown of districts and giving us a sense of which schools. Cause maybe it's, we need to sort of give a push or be in touch with our school districts that aren't taking advantage of it for some reason. Senator Hooker, I'm sorry, I just, did you hand just go up? No, no, I just think that's a great idea. We should make sure that all the schools know about this and I'm sure efficiency Vermont is gonna work on that. Terrific, it's incredible work. I thank all three of you and it's incredible. I love that it's become this nationwide pilot, if you will, and has expanded throughout the country and that we're at the forefront and that we're the state of Vermont, all of you are being asked to advise and help other states which clearly is going to make a huge difference in the lives of children, teachers, staff, everyone that comes into these structures. So thank you very much, very much. Thank you for the foresight to create it and as the process continues, we're happy to come back and provide an update anytime you want. Great, thank you. Okay, thank you both. Thank you, committee. Thank you.