Hey everyone, welcome to this week's video update for pro members. Today is Friday, February 19th. Market just closed. Taking a look at the S&P 500. A little bit of red, not nothing crazy here. We did hit all-time highs back on Tuesday of this week, but we've kind of pushed lower since then. Now, in relation to what I think is going to happen from here, I don't think we're going to fall apart. I think this is just kind of a minor pullback on our way to new all-time highs. I think this is going to continue. We've been talking about this really since after the election that I thought we would just continue to push and hit new all-time highs, and that's certainly what's happened. I think it'll continue to happen, at least in the foreseeable future. What's interesting today is, and actually the last couple days, is if you look at the implied volatility, I've got two different ones on the screen here. One is our normal comparison looking back over the last year, so IV comparing itself to itself over the last year, and the other one is a shorter duration one, so this is just looking back 21 trading days or about a month. What's interesting is, even in the wake of this little sell-off the last couple days, we've seen a pretty decent collapse in implied volatility. Now, actually, that's not true. We're looking at the ES. You got to look at SPX. It's not that drastic, but at the same time, even with the market selling off, we are seeing a little contraction in implied volatility. I do look at this as just a minor pullback, I would say next week. We rip into new highs again, but we do have short delta. If this thing does fall apart, our portfolio will benefit from that. We're about one-to-one on our short delta versus our theta ratio when you beta weighted to spy. I wouldn't mind a little downside. In fact, that would pop the IV up and give us some more trading opportunities, but keep in mind, this is not a normal all-time high, meaning, I mean, look at the VIX. The VIX is over 20. The VIX is we're continuing to hit new all-time highs, and the VIX is still staying above 20 here. If we look at this going back a long time, I mean, back in 2017, which is just a brutal year, the VIX was hovering, we're grinding higher hitting new all-time highs. The VIX was bouncing around between 10 and 12 a lot of the year. This is a much better uphill climb with the market where the implied volatility is nice. There's still a lot of juice in these premiums, which is good for trading options. So just keep that in perspective. And then the other thing is, even though it seemed like a little bit of a down week, we're still just barely off all-time highs. If you look at year-to-date, the S&P is currently up about 5.5%. NDX, the NASDAQ is up 7%. A year-to-date, the Russell is up 16.5%. So still very positive for the year, and I think that's going to continue. So that's just a quick look at the markets. Before we jump into the alerts, let's take a look at day trading. Another good week for day trading. Mighty 90s strategy had 11 trades, a little over $1,600 in profits with an excellent winning percentage. Nice bounce back after last week, which is a red week with a pretty low winning percentage bounce back nicely in the Mighty 90s. Didn't take any pairs trades this week. And then on the runners, booked $849. So not as good as the previous two weeks, which were multiple four-figure type weeks, but still green nonetheless. So total for the week plus a little over $2,500, which puts us almost at $48,000 since we started tracking these back at the end of August. So day trading continues to do awesome and it's a lot of fun. So we'll be streaming all next week as well and the following week as well. So hope to see you in there. All right, let's take a look at the alerts. So starting with the 15th, 16th excuse me, the 15th was a holiday. So shortened four-day week. Starting with DE, we had this long put vertical. And actually, that was our initial strategy. We ended up converting it a couple of cycles ago back into a short call vertical. So we went ahead and rolled that from Feb to March.  I accidentally rolled this to the next weekly cycle with 10 days instead of out to March. And so what I did is I just kept it and said, you know, we'll just give it some time as it gets closer to expiration. Again, we'll roll it out. It actually moved lower for us and we ended up rolling it again this week. And so I'll go through that when we get to that alert. Apple rolling adjusting trade did a lot of our rolls. We still had several positions left into Feb. So we needed to roll those out. In this case, with Apple, we rolled this from Feb to April. April had 59 days. So we're under that 60 days to expiration. So instead of rolling out to March, we just skip March, roll directly out to April. So let's take a look at Apple. Oops, Apple, Apple, Apple. So actually seeing some downside in Apple. If we look at a chart first the last few weeks we have seen, that's the year today. Let me get on the yearly here. Come on, there we go. All right, so Apple, you know, hit a high of a little over 145. It's down in the one below 130 now. So that having that short Delta in the last couple of weeks in Apple has been good. So we rolled this out and we're up about about 100 bucks almost since we did this last roll. But this is one of those positions that we're keeping on for the short Delta exposure. Next trade was Rut. Did a open iron duck and Rut did this one with 17 days to expiration. Just adding some ducks as we saw movements down in the market to get a little bit extra credit, a little bit further away from the current price. So we took a lake. If we take a look, excuse me, at Rut, Rut's up 2% today. Pretty close to where we put it on, not even no P&L since we've put this on. But we've got at this point, we've now got 14 days to expiration. So we got a couple weeks before this one expires. Next trade, DIA, rolling adjusting trade. So this is another one of our short Delta plays. Rolled this from Feb out to April again, Skip March adjusted those strikes accordingly. So if you take a look at DIA, you can see it's pretty close to where we put it on prices hanging out right here right in range. But we got a lot of room to the upside if we do get a little bit of a sell off in the market. Next trade here, Twilio. So we opened up a post earnings short put vertical in Twilio. Twilio opened well above the expected move after its earnings announcement. So just like we teach in the course, it's a very high probability chance that price is going to kind of stay steady to higher.  We're not just going to buy calls, they're a little bit expensive.  So doing a short put vertical fits the bill for the portfolio size that we're using for the alerts. And so that's what we did here, a short put vertical. So take a look at Twilio. What's interesting is so they announced their earnings and then the next day they come out and say they're issuing another billion dollars in stock, which is interesting. Why wouldn't they do that during the earnings announcement? I don't know. But that sent the stock down a little bit today. So it's a little bit out of our range. So really, I mean, you know, you got a position size, these that are defined risk for with a size that you say, okay, if this thing goes bad, if it really goes against me, I'm willing to take full max loss on this, you know, it's defined, you're defining your risk at order entry. But what I would say is, you know, we may, we may exit early. I mean, this is kind of, this would be my line in the sand is kind of that 420 level, really, the top of the price of where, where, where it the top price of that day before earnings is kind of my line in the sand. So if it closes below that level, it starts getting below that 420 level, we'll probably just close it out instead of taking max loss. But I would say there's still a decent chance that this thing's going to bounce. And we could potentially still book a profit on it. So got to play the probabilities and let it play out. Next trade. ES. So we got this long put vertical, another one of our short Delta plays got down to one day of expiration on this one. So went ahead and rolled that out to 57 DTE, taking a look at ES down about 11, 11 points today. But pretty close to where we where we rolled it. So right inside the range, looking for some more downside to benefit that one. Next trade, DE. So this is the second roll we did in DE this week. Remember, we accidentally rolled it out to the weeklies. So in this case, now we had eight days to exp, expiration, we went ahead and rolled it out to extend duration. Plus, John Deere had earnings coming up. And we were over 50% of max profit. So what happened with DE pre earnings is it's sold off pretty good, allowed us a chance to kind of lock in that 50% of max profit. We rolled it out to the next cycle. Unfortunately, after earnings, this thing really rallied, we actually tried to put on a post earnings play, but the options were just a little bit wide. And, and, you know, I put it on and it just kind of ran away. So missed an opportunity to get in. But it, you know, when you have options as wide as they were, especially at the open, you can't, you don't really want to chase and try to pay up for those. So I just put my price in.  And I said, you know, if price comes to me, I'll get filled. If not, I'll, I'll, I'm not, I'm not willing to chase this one. And sure enough, it just ripped higher. So did not get in to participate in that post earnings play, but we're still holding our, our short Delta play in, in DE. Roku opening trade. So it did an earnings iron duck in Roku. It's just one day to expiration. So we put these on right before the earnings announcement. Roku opened up pretty close to where it, where it closed. So not much movement. And then later in the day, it started to sell off. I thought we had a chance at a duck head and then it just ripped higher. So we ended up booking beak profit on this. So a small profit on that earnings iron duck in Roku, eBay, rolling, justing trade. So this was another post earnings play. In this case, eBay is a low price stock. It's only, you know, 60, 60 ish dollars. So we did a post earnings long call where we just bought in the money calls. And so to kind of recap what we did, well, let me go over this trade and then I'll recap what we did. So we don't usually roll calls, but in this case, I still am anticipating higher prices in eBay. And so we had one set of calls that we're expiring today. So we just, we just rolled those out, extended duration, paid, paid a tiny debit, paid 47 cents to do that. And, and we still have our other calls with, which still have seven days. So now we've got 60 calls with seven days to expiration. We've got 60 calls with 14. We've already booked some profits on one set of calls. I think it was a 58 and a half last week. So if we take a look at eBay, let's take a look at the chart first. eBay. So eBay announced earnings here. This was the expected move. It opened up above the expected move, kind of came down, kind of hit this, hit this kind of price level here, bounce back up. And it's just been holding above this expected move, holding, holding, holding, came back down two, three, four, five times, right to this expected move line now closed, you know, right at it today. So next week, if this thing, you know, starts to fall apart, we'll probably just close those out. But I'm anticipating that we still get a bounce. I want to see us break above the, the all time highs and the highs that it hit right after earnings. So we'll see if that happens, but we've, we've got a couple sets of calls here. And so, you know, if it gets up to that 65 level with both sets, you know, hoping to book another eight, seven, eight hundred dollars, but we'll see what happens. If it does fall apart, we'll just take them off. And again, you know, we put these on small enough so that we're willing to take kind of full loss of this thing really falls apart or goes against us. And anytime you do defined risk, you really want to have that state of mind that, that, hey, I need to position size this in a way that if I take, take max loss, that's kind of my stop that, you know, that's my, that's my, that's my max pain that I can take. And so that's how we're position sizing these next trade SPY. So we did a vertigo in SPY. And this is the closing of that trade ended up taking a loss on this one. So yesterday, as the price was moving down, I was actually looking to get out for close to a scratch or book a little profit and then price really just bounced. And I thought me, I thought we may get a little bit of a continuation lower today, which as I showed you, we certainly did. Unfortunately, that came later in the day. And, you know, this is the last day of trading and I didn't, and those in the theta really starts to decay on these quickly.  You can't, you can't trade like that. So ended up taking a loss on that one, but we'll look to, you know, if we get some more implied volatility contraction, a little bit more up movement, we'll look to put on some more vertigos next week. I'm looking at, you know, I was looking through a lot of different stocks to see if there's any opportunities in stocks with higher implied volatility in the front week versus some, some later dated options. And there's, there really just wasn't many options available. And so, you know, we'll look at SPY or an index next week to see if we can find an opportunity to get some more vertigos on the ones that we've traded so far since the class. When we've put those on, there hasn't been a lot of movement when we had those positions on.  So we'll, we'll continue to trade those. So it continues to be a high probability play. This one just did not work out for us. Next trade, opening trade, weekly double calendar. So we added a weekly double calendar in SPX today. So let's take a look at SPX. We've got a, yeah, so here's this. So I did move this a little bit. Now price has moved down, but I also skewed this a little bit so that price was a little bit lower than center to give us a little bit more room to the upside because like I've been saying, I think there's a little bit more upside into next week. So I wanted to give us a little, a little bit more of a buffer if that does come to fruition. But we'll book this closer to expiration or if obviously if it busts out of our range, we have an exit criteria to get out at that point as well. While we're here on SPX though, I'll show you, we also have an iron duck. Price is hanging out right here in the beak. This expires to 25. So still a decent chance that this thing could come down in the head if we do get some downside action in the markets. So we'll see what happens there in SPX. Next trade, my computer's not freezing up on me. Got a little spinning, there we go. SPX and then ZB. Oh, yeah. So we got to, we have this short strangle in ZB. We were really close a couple different times of getting out, getting out of this trade with a profit. And then the bottom kind of fell out of bonds. And so we just, we went ahead and rolled our calls down today. The cycle had 35 days left. So we just stayed in the same cycle with, with 35 days, we just simply rolled our calls down from 170 down to 164. So if we take a look at ZB, I mean, down another 0.81% today. So I mean, look at this slide that we've seen in bonds.  We ended up rolling it for another cycle. Obviously in hindsight, I wish we'd have closed that out because we, now we're still battling, battling the bonds, but I would say eventually these things are going to bounce sooner rather than later. And that'll benefit us. Now we are inverted here. Now keep in mind, when you look at this risk profile graph, it's showing, you know, under the zero line, but that's because we already, we booked the profits on those 70, 170 calls that we took off. So the, the Analyze tab does not reflect that. But what we're really looking for is a move back to center. So if we get a little bounce in bonds, then we'll roll this out. We'll probably un-invert because these, these start to get a little bit illiquid. If you go that far in the money. So we'll probably in un-invert and then just continue to manage this for a couple more cycles and try to get back to profitability. So that's the plan in bonds. Next trade, quite a few trades this week for a four-day work week. Roku closing trades. So this is that earnings iron duck that we closed out booked to be profit. We probably could have been safe just letting it expire, but no reason to take the risk. Don't want to deal with the after-hours shenanigans. Remember on, on, on when options expire, the exchanges actually have 90 minutes after the market close to, to take institutional orders. And so that can actually throw the price. And if it comes and it hits between your, so if we have our duck here, you know, if you land in this area or this area, you're going to get assigned. Now price was way up here in the beak, but you know, had it after hours come down here, there's nothing we can do about it. And it happens to end up in that little area.  So there's, there's no reason to take that risk. So we just closed it out booked beak profit on the trade. And then right after that, with Roku, we also, Roku kind of, like I said, started to push lower and then really rally later later in the day, looking like it's going to have some more upside. And so we added a long call diagonal, wanted to add, I was looking for an opportunity to add some more longs in our portfolio to kind of balance out our, our short delta. And so Roku was the victim of choice. So if you take a look at our long call diagonal, we've been doing some of these lately, some of them leading up to earnings in this case, Roku just announced earnings, but it had a good IV differential where you see in the front week, actually when I put this on, this was higher than this, the front week was higher than the back. So that, that always benefits. So 14 days out in the front week, 21 days in the back week, looking for a little upside, you know, risking again, on these defined risk, risking 453. So if this thing falls apart, that's our, that's what our, that's what we're willing to risk. This thing goes up and let's say, you know, here in seven, 10 days or so, this thing pushes up, we could book near a hundred percent profit, even just well within the expected move. So that is the plan in Roku.  So seeing if we can get a continuation, if we get up to, you know, just new highs, kind of that 500 level, we should book about a hundred percent profit on the, on the trade. So that's the plan. All right. So those are all the alerts. Let's take a look at some of our other positions. I already mentioned ES. We've got Natty Gas. We are profitable on Natty Gas after all rolls and adjustments. I'm hoping next week, we just get a little bit move into center. And if we can do that, we will, so $600 profit on this piece, that's basically break even. So we're basically up about $140 total, after all rolls and adjustments. So I'm just seeing if we can get a little bit of down movement back to center and book a little bit more profit before we take this off. You can kind of think of this almost as a straddle. I mean, the strikes aren't exactly the same. There's a little bit of width between the 2.8 and the 2.9. But if you're, if you're managing a straddle, kind of best practices is to close those out at about 25, 30% of max profit. And so we're pretty close to that. And if we get back to center, we will go ahead and just book this one. I mentioned ZB, I mentioned Apple, Airbnb, another long call diagonal. Now this one's leading up to earnings. Earnings are on 225 after market close. So early next week, we'll be taking this one off. We had this up move and then a little pullback is when we got into this, hoping for a little continuation up into earnings. Still might get that. You know, we've got, we've got a few days to get there. So we may get a pop into earnings and be able to salvage a little profit in that one, but we'll see what happens. Amazon, Amazon late day sell off today. It's been strong. Even with the market being weak, weak all week, Amazon has been strong. But today, just kind of a late day sell off, we've got an iron duck in Amazon. And you can see prices still pretty close to where we put it on. So we still have a huge buffer to the downside here. About a, still about 85% probability of profit. I thought we were just going to continue higher and close out for a beak profit early. But with this sell off, we've still got a chance at a duck head. This one expires next Friday. So we will see if we get a little downside. It'd be nice to hit a couple duck heads next week. I mentioned DEDIA. This is one of our short call verticals here. I think I already showed that one. DKNG, another long, long call diagonal. This is another one leading up into earnings, earnings on 226 before market. So we'll be out of this on 225 as well. Same with Airbnb. So you've got a big bounce in DKNG today. Again, this thing kind of pulled back. We were hoping for an extension higher. It did just kind of chop around down to sideways on us, but got a big pop today. If we can get a continuation into early next week, I should be able to book a profit. We're up just, well, we're about breakeven on the trade right now. eBay, I mentioned IWM, a long put vertical here. We're up about $160 on this one since we did our last roll, looking for some downside to benefit that. LIFT, this is another post earnings play. In this one, we just did a long call, just down slightly 29 bucks on that one at this point. See if we can get some more upside action. Again, this was a post earnings open above the expected move, did sell off right back down to kind of the peak pre earnings and has held that, held that bounced and bouncing again. So if we get another little push early next week, we'll book profits on that one. QQQ, another short delta play, short call vertical, up about 187 since we did our last roll on that one. Another short delta play, I mentioned Roku, Rut, I think I mentioned we've got this Iron Duck. SMH, we've got a short strangle here. This thing's been pretty strong hanging out in the upper end of the range, looking for some downside to get back into center on our short strangle there. Tesla, we've got a duck. Tesla's shown a little bit of weakness, not the mighty Tesla that it was just a few weeks ago, but we are in prime position here, right dead center. Now we got a week, so that can happen, but if we end up in this area, hopefully we'd book a little duck head. Max profit on that is 615. Twilio, I mentioned XLK, another short delta position. This is a long put vertical, up about 180 some since we did that last roll. So we could use some more downside to benefit that. And then lastly, Zoom, another bullish play. And this one's another long call diagonal leading up into earnings, which is three ones. We got a little bit longer duration on this one. We're pretty much at break even on that trade, but if we can get a little upside action, should be able to book some profits, you know, looking for about into earnings on Zoom Zoom. So those are all the alerts, those are all the positions. Hope everybody has a fantastic weekend. We will see you next week.


The study found that enteral nutrition, EN, increased levels of the adipokine omentine in patients with acute pancreatis, AP, while it did not affect other adipokines such as leptin, adiponectin, resistin, and visfatin. This suggests that omentine may play a role in the beneficial effects of EN in AP. Further studies should focus on investigating the potential mechanisms underlying this relationship. This article was authored by Sarah J. L. Mackenzie, Rakesh Premkamo, Catherine J. Askelund, and others.


Marriage is a pretty big deal. Everyone wants to marry who they love, and who can make them happy. Choosing one spouse can be more difficult than completing a doctorate degree in physics. The apprehension that the wrong choice might be made has often scared many away from settling down. How then can one know when it is the right time to settle? In this video, I am going to share with you 9 signs that you have found the woman you should marry. 1. She shares similar interests with you. When she laughs at your type of jokes and enjoys the same type of movies, this is not enough proof that she shares similar interests with you. You need to actually engage in a lot of conversations to figure this out. Some key things to consider include whether she has the same financial blueprint with you, does she think money is made for spending, or does she talk about investment and interest rates, whether or not she is a democrat or republican may play an insignificant role. Find out whether she reads if you do. Whether she is interested in constant learning and travelling, if those are the things you love doing, there is nothing as bad as living with someone that doesn't understand you. Do not be in a hurry to call it quits or commit. Take your time. Be patient. It is better to marry a bit later than marry sooner and have problems. 2. She is accommodating of your flaws. It is not always easy to find someone that gets you. You may like your coffee black, just because.  This may be offensive to most ladies. Your flaws can be anything at all. Finding someone who still likes you despite your flaws is a really great sign that the relationship may work long term. She may influence you in the long run, to become more organized like her. But her willingness to not dismiss you simply because of your flaw is a great sign. It is important to know that not everyone who accommodates your flaws is a good fit. And most people who are good feats will do so. 3. She respects your opinion. Every man craves respect in a relationship, above everything else. A lady who respects your views and defends it in public is an asset. When you are young, you are likely to be more opinionated than when you are older. Having a partner who doesn't always criticize you can be super helpful. Does she laugh at your views with her friends? You need to be extremely careful when deciding to commit. Long term relationships are not easy to come out of. It's best to avoid such relationships if you have not met the person you are comfortable with. According to Shinty Feldham, marriage expert and researcher, a man's highest need is to feel respect, whereas a woman's highest need is to feel loved. If you don't feel she respects you or your values, this is a red flag. If you persist in such a relationship, you will only end up unhappy. 4. She apologizes when she does something wrong. Some think they are right, but in relationships, if one person doesn't apologize, the agreements are bound to become the order of the day. When you have arguments, does she ever apologize, even if she was not at fault? Apologizing sometimes isn't about who is right or wrong. It is about valuing your partner more than you value being right. If she never apologizes, this is a red flag. If she always apologizes, this is a good sign. It can mean that in the future, the two of you will have fewer arguments. 5. She fills your pain.  What did she say? What did she do? When you are ill, does she call? The goal is not to find the perfect woman. No such woman exists. It is finding the one who is the right fit and then growing into a perfect couple together. A woman who doesn't show empathy when you are in pain now is unlikely to start when you are both in a long term relationship. Does she relate with your sense of loss of investment and the conscious that you have worked hard at? Does she dismiss your feelings as unnecessary? Be as attentive as possible and spot this things as they are core. Picking who you will marry is a tricky business. If you make any mistake, your unhappiness may not even end in just divorce. 6. She makes you happy. You need to ask yourself whether you enjoy having her around and answer sincerely. Are you always excited when you guys have a date or are you indifferent? Does her calling bring a smile to your face? Do you look forward to speaking with her at night after a long day at work? Does having her as a part of your life make you feel grateful? If your answer to all this is yes, then you are already on a smooth journey to a great long term relationship. If someone doesn't make you happy, the totals are present. The way you put her calls on mute. The way you have other plans when it's time for you guys to hang out. The way you always have work to do when she calls. She makes you unhappy. You will know.  7. She gives you a sense of peace and comfort. Have you ever met a woman when you think of her? You feel at a strange feeling of comfort and peace. You may not even currently be dating now. But this is one of the signs that you have found a woman you can marry. Does she appear flawless to you? Does her smile also make you smile? Does she hold your hand and hug you on days you are super exhausted from work? If you find such a woman, do not let her go. Some women will add to your troubles rather than your peace. Those who bring peace with them are very valuable. 8. She makes you comfortable being yourself. You may already know by now that some women make you feel kept on your toes all the time. You dress in an uncomfortable suit to go out on dates and take an Uber, even though you would rather ride your bike. Identifying that you do not feel comfortable around any woman will help you see how incompatible you are with them. For long term relationships, it is best to be yourself. Nobody likes surprises in relationships. If she doesn't want you for you, let her be. If she makes you feel comfortable around her, this is a good sign. 9. She drives you crazy.  Does she make you feel like she is the only thing that matters? If she drives you crazy, this is also a great sign. It means that you probably love her more than you realize. The signs will point out that the lady is eligible. It will, however, not decide for you. Take your time, consider your options, and make your decision. Your long term happiness depends on it. When you are young, you need all the love and support you can get. Man who have married wrong, seldom achieve their goals.


Hi, I'm Geoff Watts and I'm here to tell you about different options you might consider when coaching a team. Because not all teams are the same and indeed not all situations that a team face will be the same, so your role as a coach might be different. I'm going to share this model with you, not because it's the one exhaustive or complete model applicable to every scenario. Also, it's not a linear model with bad at one end of the scale and amazing at the other. Every option within this model has the potential to be either a good or a bad option, depending on the context. Now, to get the most out of this video, I'm going to ask you to think of a scenario that a team you're coaching is facing right now. If you're not working with a team right now, or you can't think of a specific challenge they're facing, then try and think of something from your recent path. Shortly, I'm going to invite you to click pause while you write something down. If it helps, think of it in the form of a request that the team are asking for. Perhaps, can you help us resolve some tension between us? Or, can you help us go faster? Or, perhaps it's a request that somebody else is making from outside of the team. For example, can you coach the team on their attention to detail? Okay, so here you go. Now's the time to hit pause while you think. When you've thought of something and written it down, click play again. I'll still be here. Did you do it? Or did you just want to see the answers about putting your own effort in? Well, I'm going to assume that you are someone who wants to get the most out of this video. And you gave it some thought. So, well done you. Okay, the next step is to think of all the things you could think of, that you could do to help the team with this problem. Now, I want quantity here, not quality. So, don't critique or judge your ideas. If you've got sticky notes to hand, then you could use them, because that'll make it easier to group them if we want to later on. But don't worry if you haven't, because a list will work just as well. If you're struggling to think of options, then maybe consider another coach. He's asking you what they could do to help a team in this situation. And you're responding with, well, you could try or you could try this. Remember, your challenge is to think of as many options as you can, not to find the best one or the right one or the one that you think you would do. Click pause and come back when you've run out of ideas. Well done. The reason I wanted you to do this before I shared the model with you, is to try and avoid biasing you with the model. One benefit you'll get from this approach is reflecting on your preferences and your default approaches as a team coach.  So, imagine a purely hypothetical scenario where a team that I'm coaching is regularly coming up with things that need improving, but they're rarely taking any action to improve these things. Okay, so on to the model. Speed is the acronym. And it's a handy acronym because there is a temporal element to the model. Starting with S, which stands for Suggestions, this is the quickest type of action for a coach to take, and you'll often see results very quickly as well. Giving the team something quite specific is often comforting to the team as well, because they don't really have to do much thinking. They've got a specific need and you're giving them something they can try. Have a look at your options and either create a cluster of suggestions or write an S next to the ones that you think are things that you think they should do. Back to my example, I could, for example, invite them to watch this great YouTube video by a guy called Jeff Watts, who talks about how great teams swap their actions. Hint, hint. Now, even if you frame this as a question, like, have you seen this video? It will often come across as a veiled suggestion, because why would you be asking about it if you didn't think that they should do it? Next in our speed acronym is P, and this stands for Proof. So here as a coach, you could gather some data that may or may not be of interest to the team when thinking of how to deal with their situation. If, for example, you can see that they tend to come up with, on average, 7.2 ideas for improvements every fortnight, but only actually put 1.4 of them on average into practice, but that the last two improvement ideas have coincided with an increase in the team's happiness rating of 14% and an improvement in delivery, that data might be enough to convince them to use their time differently in their retrospectives without you having to suggest it directly. You could also invite the team to consider what data they're already aware of, and what data would be useful to them when deciding their next steps. This obviously takes a little bit longer than making a suggestion, and it's not as guaranteed perhaps as an absolute killer idea you have for what the team should do, but it does open up alternative reactions and responses from the team. Moving down the speed acronym, we hit the first E, we hit the first E, which stands for Enablers, and here the coach is effectively turning the tables on the requester and asking them what they need from us to get unstuck. So as a coach, I might ask, what could I do that could help you take action? Now back to my example, perhaps I simply ask them that question, or I could also experiment with some enabling constraints. For example, I might suggest that the team pick just two items for improvement and no more next time around, or perhaps I give them a template for framing their actions or commitments to see if that helps, or I might invite the team to write things down, rather than me writing it for them. Again, this has the potential of being a little bit slower than gathering data and certainly slower than me giving them my idea of what they should do, but one payoff here is that we're asking the team to consider a very specific request rather than just say, help us. And the more specific their requests, the more they increase the chances of finding ways to resolve their future issues without your help, because they begin to realize that some of these requests are actually within their control. The second E in speed refers to environment and here the coach is focusing on aspects that surround the team rather than the team itself. What's going on in the wider system that would make it easier for the team to move forward? What tweaks to the surroundings or the context that the team are in might open up new thought processes or perspectives. What might make unhelpful behavior less likely to naturally occur? Or alternative perspectives more easily occur naturally. Again, this can be a slow burner or require a lot of action around the edges, but it can also have a very big impact on the team at a deeper level. Going back to my team who aren't taking as much action as I or they would like, I might look at whether the scope of the team's authority could be extended or whether some publicity could be generated around the changes that the team have actually put in place. The final letter in our speed acronym refers to drivers and this involves getting to know the individuals within the team and the team itself as a unit. What drives them? What motivates them? What are their personal and professional goals? And how do the options that they face tie into those goals and drivers? Or how could they be maximized? If we found out, for example, that helping others or efficiency are things that people in our team hold dear, then we could tie our improvement ideas to these values, which could increase our motivation to see them through. Of course, getting to know people and them trusting you with their motivators and aspirations takes time, but this can be the most impactful intervention a coach can make because intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation or a sense of obligation. Now, I did say at the start that none of these interventions are inherently good or inherently bad, but some may have more of an impact for a specific team at a specific time. And there's a good chance that if you look at your list, you'll see that one part of the speed acronym is weighted much heavier with options than the others. Now, this isn't a bad thing either, but knowing where your defaults are can be useful because it's often what we revert to without thinking. Pushing ourselves to think about what other options we have increases our chances of successfully engaging with our teams. So here's a suggestion for you. Look at the proof you created at the start of this video and acknowledge your defaults.  Because I'm sure that's one of your drivers. You wouldn't be watching this video if it wasn't.


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