Okay, good afternoon, everyone. It is February 2nd. This is Senate Education Committee meeting. Colleagues, just to give you an overview of the week ahead, we need to start to focus a little bit more on some of the key things that we hope to get out before crossover, even though we have plenty of time still. It seems to me that we can focus in on a literacy bill that I will show you the draft language from the administration, start to think about that after we take a look at their ideas. We talked about V-SAC's proposal. I put that on the table this week also for colleagues to weigh in on to see if that's the direction you want to go in with regard to scholarship assistance and financial aid relief. We're looking again today at the school discipline bill to see where and what direction we might head in with that. And then of course looming over us is this, how to address COVID deficits in our schools once students get back. And I have a 7 a.m. update tomorrow with Jeff Fennin on that. So hopefully they will be bringing something to the legislature here soon. Let's see, we also today, we're hearing a report on the ethnic studies bill. This is a bill that Senate education was very involved in, involved with, I think it was to the past, was it last year? 2019. 2019, thank you. And we're gonna have an update on that where things are with Act One. Additionally, one of the things that is going to be on our plate tomorrow is Professor Teachout. Many of you know him, constitutional scholar at Vermont Law School. We coming in more and more, we need to start to really address and look at the issue, the situation, the issue between separation of church and state in this state. He is going to weigh in, give us his thoughts on things with the possible, with now vouchers being okay for choice districts to go to religious institutions. He's gonna give us, walk us through that as well as give us his opinion. I think the other thing that I guess I'm looking for from all of you, and we can discuss this, I think we'll have a few minutes at the end of the meeting, is are there other things? I mean, for me, are there other things really that you wanna make sure get out before crossover? And I think we can hopefully get a lot more out than what we've already focused on. I'm certainly interested in, I think all of the bills that we've been introduced so far, but there are certain things that we will need to do before crossover. For those senators who are new, there is an opportunity to do things, of course, after crossover as well, because the house will be sending us bills that we can add things to. And I'm in contact with house education, if anybody wants to join our Sunday meetings with the chair of house education, we're working to make sure that we both, both committees have really a balance from which they can add things to after crossover. For example, I think they're interested in doing some things related to racial equity that we might not get to, but we need to give them a bill that they can attach some additional language to. I'm thinking that likely would be the way that the school discipline bill might end up handling that. They might wanna do something. We might wanna take up some issues and add them to a miscellaneous education bill that we might not get to, but that they would send us and we can work on those issues after crossover. So it's certainly not the end of the game, as you can imagine, when crossover comes, there's a lot of other opportunities. But right now I feel the bulk of our work has been focused on the school discipline bill, ESAC, literacy, hopefully this addressing COVID deficits.  So we can talk a little bit about that toward the end of today. So give you some time to marinate on it and come up with any ideas and things that I left out. Let's see, I think that's it for now unless anyone has any pressing questions. I'm delighted to see Amanda and Mark here and appreciate is pronounced garsis. I'm sorry, you're muted. Thank you for that, Garsis. Great, thank you. And look forward to hearing an update and an overview of Act One. So turning it over to you. Great, thank you. Thank you for having us again. My name is Amanda Garsis. I'm the director of policy education and outreach at the Vermont Human Rights Commission. And I am also the chair of Act One, which we will talk about. And I'm here with the vice chair and my colleague Mark H. Do you wanna quickly introduce Mark? Hi, folks. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. As Amanda said, I'm Mark Hage, vice chair of the Act One Working Group and I make my home in Montpelier. Great, so we're gonna, we have a little bit of a presentation just to keep us going instead of us talking so much. Well, we will be talking so much, but so I'll just start just to give you a little overview of Act One and the genesis for it. This is Paige Wiley-Bailey who is not longer with us, but her spirit is here. And I put always a picture of her just to remind us that this work, we have lots of people that have been doing this for a long time. And so in 1999, as you may all know, the Vermont Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights Publisher Report title Racial Harassment in Vermont Public Schools. And the report, like they went around all around the state and the finding was basically the racism in Vermont, what's in Vermont schools was pervasive. They did a follow-up report in 2003 and said that although some things have changed, there were still a lot of things that were needed. And one of the many problems highlighted at that time was curriculum materials and lesson plans that promoted racial stereotypes. And the conclusion was that we needed a free, a bias-free curriculum. In December of 2017, Act 54, report on racial disparities in the state system issued by the Attorney General and the Vermont Human Rights Commission also talked about education as one of the pillars of racial disparities that needed to be changed and addressed. So just to say that there were many people that have been working in our state to really see these changes happening to bring our state out of the racism that exists in our schools and who's, you know, our kids are really impacted by it. So in 2018, Representative Kaia Morris then with Representative Coach Christie, Ryan Cina and a few others introduced the first Ethnic Studies Bill. It did not pass, but it gathered a lot of consensus. So to give you really, there was a lot of work that went on in 2019 to really bring all the parties together. So negotiations with the Agency of Education, conversations with the Vermont NEA, the School Board Association, all those folks. And again, a lot of growth support in the community. It was a grassroots effort, really. So in 2017 did not pass. It was introduced at the beginning of the second biennium. So, but then it was the first bill that passed in 2019 which now we know as Act One. And it was signed by the government in March 29th. Like I said, it had a lot of growth support. And what the bill does is brings together 20 people, 11 are members of the community. The rest come from the different institutions that the Agency of Education, School Board Association, curriculum director, the same bodies. And what it does is gives us the work to recommend to the State Board updates for the school standards, which is the work that we're gonna be talking about today. And it also lets us look at statues, stable rules, school districts and supervisory union policies that concern impact standards for student performance in curriculum, ease in school. So that's broad, it's our big task for the next, for the three years that we are to be in existence. We started a little late because of, it took a long time to appoint the 11 members, but we did it. We met for the first time in November, 2019 and then COVID happened, but we still were able to submit a report in May. So our first report was very basic. Here's who the members of the group is. Here's our schedule. Here's how we hope to accomplish the work. And then we announced the development of a survey that was currently going to be, well, it's now being sent to all educators to support the way that we're gonna look at the educational standards. And I'm gonna pass it over to Mark to talk about the second report that we just submitted which you have today. Amanda, thank you. The survey that Amanda just referenced was really a foundational document. We began working on it in February, just prior to the pandemic. And the analytical and intellectual contents of that document became one of the tools we use to begin analyzing Vermont's education quality standards or EQS for short. And as you can see here, the EQS describes what a high quality education should look like for students attending Vermont's public schools. It's a very important document, about 17 pages in length. And in our second report, in addition to commenting on a number of things that we've been doing and updating our membership, et cetera, we submitted recommendations that we believe are essential to revising the EQS in order to bring it in line with the mandate of Act I. This slide reviews the major proposed revisions that we have submitted to the EQS. Perhaps most importantly, our recommendations mandate that ethnic and social equity studies be required of all schools in Vermont pre-K through grade 12. We've recommended the establishment and providing necessary support for local school community committees who can shape the development of ethnic studies and social equity curriculum and practices in their school districts. We want this process to be open and democratic and involve as many people as possible in the community and within our schools who really have an interest in making this reform work. We call for the promotion as this Act I for restorative and transformational justice programs for the development and funding of professional development and mentoring programs for school staff and also in restorative justice practices. We've called for broadening prohibited bias and discriminatory treatment to include the categories of ethnicity, caste, socioeconomic status, non-citizenship status, language and linguistic abilities. And we've also called for much closer detailed integration of career and vocational training with ethnic and social equity studies pedagogy. Our second report also lays out some exploratory initiatives that the Act I working group is very interested in continuing to research. So for example, we are interested in looking at establishing licensure and field work requirements for future educators, pre-K through grade 12 in ethnic and social equity studies. We're looking at the adoption of policies on racial justice, social equity and diversity hiring versus local school boards. We've called for a formal evaluation of the flexible pathways initiative of 2013 to see to what degree that initiative is truly serving and serving well historically marginalized students. And we are exploring a professional development collaborative with the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. A very interesting and for Amanda and I a very inspiring dialogue is now underway with professors and researchers and teachers at that college. This is the oldest ethnic studies program in the United States. It's been in existence for 50 years. It offers 350 courses annually to students in ethnic and social equity studies. It has some of the finest thinkers and researchers in the field. And they've expressed a real interest in exploring with us how they can collaborate and help us achieve our mission under Act I and also how it may be able to help local school districts and school personnel and local communities. So there's other projects that are underway and actually have been underway for some time. As we began reviewing the educational quality standards and again consistent with Act I it became obvious that we're gonna have to spend a whole lot of time looking at Title XVI education statutes. We have a subcommittee that's exploring avenues for advising and supporting local school boards with a review and amendment of their policies. There's a subcommittee that has now begun researching the intersection of strength and literacy instruction and advancing ethnic and social equity studies. As Amanda already noted, we are gonna be distributing our educational standards survey to educators and school staff, students and community members. And we have a group that's working on a version of that survey for students and for community members. As I noted, excuse me, I think Amanda may have touched on this. There's an ongoing collaboration between our Act I working group and the ethnic studies coalition that did so much important work to get Act I passed. And we have a dialogue ongoing with the social equity task force of the Vermont Principles Association. And we have a request to the legislature to expand our membership. We'd like to add two more students and also an additional representative of Vermont's indigenous nations. And I just wanna add that, like very important. So that was a request that we made after our first meeting in 2018. The students, we have two student representatives who felt that they couldn't really represent all the students and that they needed two more. And the same for the indigenous representative, we only have one that represents the Habanaki community. And it was a consensus, it was made in that first meeting in December. And we were trying at the beginning of last year, but then COVID happened in that kind of real, any conversations around anything non-COVID related. So right now, we're really, really hoping for your support in adding those three additional members. We feel that their voice is really imperative in our work moving forward. Yes, and I would just add that the contributions of the one indigenous member who is in the working group has really been seminal to our work. And also the two students, I'm a former school teacher of 10 years, as well as a parent and their contributions, their way of seeing the world has also enriched our work and also help us to see things that I think we might have missed. So with that, we are requesting for this year an appropriation of 108,500. I would say that the appropriation for act one is $15,000 per year that pays $50 in stipends for the working group members. And we have not, because of COVID and our meetings have been in Zoom, we really haven't spent much of it. I believe that when we submitted the report in January, we still had like $14,000 out of those $15,000. So we hadn't really spent much. And so there's a lot of work that is happening. So we are requesting $25,000 for this conversation that we've been having with San Francisco State and around really needing their support to help us. We need national specialists that can like that work on this, that can assistance in the analysis give us a tool to look at the Vermont educational standards, which when Mark and I started working on looking at how we will support the working group and moving forward. Yeah, we need some outside support as well. So that's $25,000 to begin that. And Mark, do you wanna add to that? No, I think you did a great job. Thanks. $71,500 subsidized, one half of the cost of 30 Vermont educators recruited by the working group and the Vermont Coalition for Ethnic and Social Equity studies who just to be transparent I'm also a member of, but to be for transparency. But that is the body that appointed the 11 members in the working group through an application process that happened. But this is really, to move this work, we're really looking at Act 1 as how do we support the teachers that are already doing this work? There's many, many, many that are already doing this work. And there's many that are in the midst of learning how to do this work in their schools, in their school districts. And we wanna be able to support that so that this doesn't become just another report but that we can actually show tangible things that can be happened in our way of writing a recommendation. So it's like the work needs to be at the same time, like walking the talk, right? Walking the talk, let's not just do another report, let's do at the same time. Let's walk and talk. So then $10,000 to hire an expert. And a lot of the work, I mentioned this last time, bringing community members that are not like done, that it's hard to read the statues, it's hard to read all these reports. And we do have some of our members who come from the disability rights communities who have rightly so advocating to make some of the documents that we share and some of the things that we talk about more accessible. That is not an expertise that I have or that Mark has that kind of requires a lot of time. And we wanna support that. And by us having someone that can support in making our documents accessible, we're also allowing community members to be part of our process, which is the whole goal of it. So it's small talking of $10,000 to hire someone to support us in making our language, our concepts, our regulations accessible. And then $2,000 to fund the technology costs and the to reimburse the additional working groups once we have the extra three. And so it's like $1,500 for it's only $500 to support right now, I'm paying out of pocket the survey monkey, monthly fee, the HRC is covering all the Zoom things that we do. So it's like, it's just gonna have to support that work. Anything you wanna add, Mark? I would just say that in respect to the 30 Vermont educators, we hope to recruit and bring in to this ethnic social equity studies collaborative with San Francisco State University. One of the things that's been really gratifying about the work that I'm on that I've been doing together with the actual working group is not only to discover that there are educators, community members who are very passionate about this work already and doing it, that didn't surprise us, but there's been a significant number of educators who have become much more interested in our work. And there's clearly, it's like a critical mass of those folks who wanna start sooner than later. And our hope is that this is a way to bring them in given the support they need, and not only to transform their classroom practice and to help their colleagues, but potentially to become trainers and to become members of regional pedagogical networks in Vermont, where they can begin to seed this work and help other educators advance it as well. So these folks are not only doing the work in their classroom with additional support at San Francisco State, and perhaps others can provide, but we see them as being in the vanguard of providing training and support to other educators in the future. Thank you, Mark. And one thing I wanna just quickly, this part on the research in the intersection of the spreading of literacy, and I noticed that you as we'll be looking at literacy this week or so. So the Act on Working Group currently has a committee chaired by our colleague, Internet Co-Closer, and they're starting to examine how that is, because there is a literacy piece in the education quality standards. And we know that there's this disparate when the numbers, when it comes to BIPOC students, I haven't actually seen the numbers, but he has seen them. And so they're creating, they have this subcommittee that are going to be looked into how to bring this work. So I just wanted to let you know that. And that's it, that's our presentation. Great. Committee, we have some time before Mr. Kias joins us. Questions? Comments? Senator Perchley. Thank you for the presentation. Amanda, what are you guys thinking is the vehicle? Are you guys, do you have other vehicles for this or are you just now kind of presenting it to different committees and hoping the legislators take it from there? Yes. So we are kind of trying to figure out what the vehicle is. And I did reach out to, we just started last week because I know that the house had the line of Friday for bills. So we had, we were hoping that Representative Cheena and Representative Coach who were both part of the introduction of the house side. And I wanna thank you Senator Perchin because I know that you, you were really important in our bill last year and also were part of the introduction. So thank you for that. So that we're hoping to just kind of like create the vehicles last week. I'm like, can you just put a bill so that we know, but right now I'm not even sure if it went through like I need to check with them. But yes, currently we don't have a vehicle. So any vehicle, I'm gonna hit check in. You know Senator Perchin, you might, I mean, I could see a number of different vehicles for this, you know, of course the house is gonna send us a budget and so we could wait and see what the house does in terms of funding and things like that. But I think for policy issues, I believe the house would like us to move something to them so that they can either continue our work or add things to it. I would say feel free to draft a standalone bill. The other possibility would be, and we're gonna have hopefully about an hour and a half discussion tomorrow on these bills that we are all working on, one of which being S16 and I wonder if there's a way to incorporate some of these things into S16 and start to build a larger bill in a conversation around these issues. And then Amanda and Mark, they could add to it as it goes along, you know, in the house and committee of conference, but it might be one way to get some of these things unless you're looking for it all to go in one bill all at the same time. I'm looking to you, Amanda. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, our, you know, I have like the fear of 2008, when like we're like, we'll just put it in this bill and then he ended up in the miscellaneous education bill and then like it just went and they went nowhere and then he failed. So like right now it's like so specific, like we're asking 180,000 to like support that, but we're also asking for those two students and indigenous and it's so important to have them because their voice is so critical. So, and so I'm not, you know, I would love to see a stand-in-alone bill that can like move really fast and I can try to gather all the support that we need different legislators and senators and representatives. So, but I, you know, that's kind of like my feeling, but that's just like my fear of like, adding it to something that might not go anywhere and then- Yeah, that's a good, and maybe Senator Persley wants to put together a bill and find sponsors because we, I think we would have the time to get something to the house before crossover on this. I mean, a lot of this stuff has been vetted. We've talked to a number of different people. I think most of our colleagues are cognizant of the situation and the work that's been done in the past. So if Senator Persley wants to take a lead on that, that would be great. Mr. Chair, do you want to do it as a committee bill? Like I could work with Jim and the act, one folks about the language, but we could bring in as a committee bill instead of going through the whole introduction, get a bill number. Yep, I mean, a committee bill is fine.  And I like to give people credit. So, and I, you know, so if you want to take the lead and get sponsors, please feel free to do that. If you want to do a committee bill, that's fine as well. Whatever works for you. Okay. Well, Amanda, maybe we can talk afterwards. See what- That would be great. And I'm sure we can, yeah, other, other, we have, you know, like other people that I think might be willing to support as well. To be co-sponsor as well, if needed. Sure. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate the walkthrough and the information. I think one of the things that might come up in Senate appropriations is, and you addressed it a little bit with us, is why San Diego State, you know, in those circumstances, I don't know, sounds like it's perfect institution to do this work. They seem to be steeped in this kind of research, but sometimes you need to put out, you know, bids and things like that kind of thing. I don't know if that'll have to happen, but I see Senator Lines may have, you want to say something? No, I put my hand up for a question. I'm just waiting. So that's just a heads up, but we'll see. Yes, and I would say, you know, not only some of us state the oldest in the country that has a think studies department, but the people that we're working with are very renowned nationally, internationally. One of them has been part of the think studies bill that happened in California statewide, like, and then the other ones, you know, they're both just like really amazing, national, international. They're both educators, so they're not just like some PhD people that are like really in the classrooms, they understand all the dynamics. So I think that that's what Mark and I were just like really excited about their level of comprehension of the whole system itself. Yeah, there are also individuals who not only teach themselves, but they work with schools and they work with faculty and community. And that was a really important element in our work. Senator Lines. Thank you. This has been really very informative. And so I have first, I have a question of clarification. So when Act one was passed, then and folks on the Education Committee will have to help me here. The working group now becomes is this a permanent working group that goes on over time? Or is it a time limited group? It's a time limited group is three years, our last report is going to do. But you know, there is always extensions that we can add and things. And I think that, yes, but it is a three year. Okay, and then, so then, and I want to get to the question on San Francisco in just a second, but as I'm looking through the report, one of the issues that stands out and stood out for me when we looked at the bill on the floor of the Senate was the need to revamp our statutes and go through some of the language that we have in our, in standards and so on. And so do you have like a three year plan to accomplish the work that is in the bill, in the law now? Mark? Yes, yes, we do. And what we do is we follow very closely, as you would expect the guidelines and mandates around deadlines that are in Act One. So we do have a plan to accomplish all the work, obviously COVID has thrown a monkey regent at things somewhat, but we are still Minor detail. Minor details, correct. We are still moving forward. We have submitted our two reports as required. We have subcommittees that are set up focused on the different domains that Act One requires us to address. And those subcommittees feed into the larger work group. And our goal is to meet all our deadlines and we have a channel of communication already open to the State Board of Education. We have talked with them once already. We have another conversation coming up with them this month by recall Amanda. So yeah, we've got a plan and we're just going to keep moving forward COVID or not. And just to say that we are hoping flexibility around like maybe extending time if needed. I'm always like, it's really important work that we don't also want to just like be like, here's a report, like we really want to make it something that is useful. And so if that means that something is gonna take us, you know, a little longer because of school districts, for example, or because we're not getting the information that we need, then, you know, I just want to give us a flexibility to be like, we're gonna do it right this time, that is not that. But we're, you have a group of 20 people that are really, really committed to this work, long-term that come from all walks. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done, of course, at the local level and do course. And we want to be able to be in the position to provide them with resources and tools and expert guidance to be able to do the work really effectively. Great, successful. So I'd like to ask a question then I'm go, and it kind of reflects the questioning that the questions that Senator Campion had, but I've had, I have significant experience in racial and ethnic diversification in the area of science and science education and research and have talked nationally on that. So I understand the issues before us and I do also understand that there are pockets of expertise that may be closer to home. So, you know, so I'm just wondering if the California experience is an experience that is going to translate into Vermont needs. So that's one question. And then the other question is, as I think about this in there, it's awesome. It's absolutely awesome to fully engage teachers in this process. But the teachers of teachers where, you know, I think one thing to start the process 2000 miles away, what about engaging more local folks who do have expertise? I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about those who might be in Boston. They could be at UVM, they could be at Tufts, they could be at NYU. I don't know where they are. They could be at University of Michigan, which is even closer. And I know they're doing a lot of racial and ethnic work regarding COVID. So that's just a question. It's an observation. And obviously you probably have thought of all of this, but I just like to hear your thoughts on all of that. I have a lot of things to say, Mark. Do you want to start? No, go ahead. I don't want to cut off this conversation, but if we could wrap it up in just a few minutes, we have a witness waiting. Yeah, so I mean, I'll just be brief and Mark, you can add that we do understand, I think the conceptual piece of this beginning conversation with San Francisco State of how do we tackle the standards right now and coming from somebody that really has been doing this work of what we're trying to see long term, like the vision is like, it's not ethnic studies within itself, it's also that intersectionality between the disability rights movement, the LGBTQI community. How do, like that is a program that they have shown that really has been successful at integrating all those things. So I, although I agree, like the questioning and that's something that we think about all the time, I think about like, how does that relate to the Vermont context? I think there are some expertise that they can give that is very different from others parts of the country. And I just add that, I'm sorry. There's so many great people in Vermont and like. Yeah, no, there's a lot of great people out there. And our next report to the legislature is due in June of this year. And we have to be able to report at that time on our work on the standards. And the individuals we're talking to at San Francisco State, they have that expertise. They're very familiar with the Common Core, for example. They've done research and writing on it. And I think we can hit the ground running with them and be able to meet that deadline in June. Right, and I'll start to interrupt. Just know that I think Senator Lyons' question is one that is gonna continue to come up throughout your work here. I think it's a good one. I think raises an important question. And so for now, we're gonna have to leave it there. Mr. Hage and Ms. Garsus, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. I know that Senator Percilic will be in touch with regard to how to move this forward. Great, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Muchos gracias. Gracias. Mr. Diaz. Hello, how are you? I'm doing well, how are you, Senator Campion? Good, it's great to see you. Appreciate your time to be with us. S16 is not new to you, you and Senator Sears and several of us for a long time have been looking at this kind of work. And I know that you were either the key author or one of the authors of Kicked Out, which we all have now in our online and take a look at it as you're talking. But we would love to get your thoughts on S16 as it's currently drafted. And a couple of things I should mention that have come up in committee discussions just for you to sort of think about as you're talking. Many, I think committee members would agree that there is a level of immediacy where people are looking for something to happen faster rather than wait a couple of years to gather data. People think that there should be certain things that could be put in place immediately and that we needed necessarily wait to collect data around suspensions and expulsion. Certain things could be done right away. I think the other thing that I picked up from past discussions, and I'm not speaking for everybody but I'd say broadly there was a question is there an overemphasis of law enforcement on the committee? That is something that was raised during earlier discussions. Amanda who just left us also raised the question around funding, is what kind of funding might be needed to support this kind of work? We know that the Agency of Education does incredible work with limited funds and is there, should we be thinking about some kind of appropriation related to that? With that, I hope that's not too overwhelming. In fact, knowing you for as long as I've known you it's not overwhelming at all. So Mr. Diaz, welcome to Senate Ed and take it away. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with Senate Education again and for those of you I haven't met, my name is Jay Diaz. I'm a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont. I, in my previous job about five years ago I was a staff attorney with Vermont Legal Aid's Disability Law Project and was also the Vermont Poverty Law Fellow. That's a Vermont Bar-funded position. And so during my time at Vermont Legal Aid I had extensive experience representing Vermont kids and their families in a variety of circumstances but mostly with regard to schools. My project at the time was to work on the issues of child poverty and what kids in poverty were dealing with. And the most important issue, the one that rose to the top was that the kids and families who were dealing with serious issues of poverty were getting kicked out of school regularly. And in ways that in many times for reasons that just weren't justified and weren't legal. And so with the help of an attorney we were able to get a lot of kids back in school or make sure that they had effective alternative services for a while they had to be out of school. Now, so over those two years I represented well over a hundred students and their families in these types of instances and I think learned a great deal. And so as a part of my project and as a part of my work at Legal Aid I developed this report kicked out in order to actually look at the data what is and combine it with the stories and see if it showed what I was seeing happen to on these individual cases. And sad to say, it did bear out. When I looked at the data across the state this is federally reported data from each school in the country. Although sadly, I think Senator Campion as you'll remember Bennington's public schools did not report their data for the year that I did to study. I think that's changed. What the data showed was that we had a significant number of suspensions. So a lot of school days lost thousands of thousands of school days lost every year for our kids. We had suspensions. And I think, I guess, and just to be clear when I talk about suspensions I'm talking about out of school suspensions. Suspensions of where kids are told either they can't come to school or have to leave for the rest of the day. And in Vermont, just to set the floor here a little bit a student can be suspended out of school for up to 10 school days without really any meaningful due process. And so there's really a very little chance to challenge that kind of a decision. And 10 days, 10 school days for a kid is a lot of time. I think any of you who have had kids in school will know that it's not just a lot of time for the kid but it's a lot of time for the parents. So I'll go through some of the particular effects but I just kind of wanted to set the stage a little bit about who I am and what I saw. I did a lot of, I could tell you instances of cases a lot of them are in the reports, if you go through it you can see some of the examples of cases that we took on. So when we talk about reforming school discipline whenever I talked about that early on most people ask why, what's the problem? And the problem is multifaceted. In short term, it has significant negative impacts on the children who are excluded. Of course they miss valuable education time and as I'll go on to talk about a lot of the kids who are excluded from school can least afford it, right? Secondly, if the kids at a school is a likelihood that the parent has to be home with them especially if they're younger. So the parents missing work sometimes they lose their job over things like this or if that's not the case a child may be left at home unsupervised and perhaps more likely to get into trouble or to be hurt frankly. Children who are on free and reduced lunch and we have a high percentage of free and reduced lunch kids in our schools these are schools who are at the poverty line they're going without their meals when they're not at school. And so more kids are going hungry and of course when a kid is excluded from school it's only teaching them that school is not where they belong a school is not for them.  And so those are some of the short term negative impacts. There's also short term costs to schools and their communities. You know when we look at data from around the country schools with more suspensions are actually less safe and have lower achievement than schools that do fewer suspensions and have more holistic approaches. It's a waste of resources of course because no matter how many students are excluded on a given day or the budget doesn't change and then for the communities we have unsupervised kids who may be getting in trouble or be at risk for their own safety and then be getting involved perhaps in the juvenile justice system which has all kinds of horrible effects long-term for those children. I'll move on to the long-term effects of exclusionary discipline. Studies have shown that when you know junior high and early high school students are suspended just once they're more likely to drop out. They're more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system. And if that's the case they're more likely to be incarcerated as adults or more likely to be in poverty as adults. And so of course this has long-term impacts not just for the individual but our whole society, our state. You know we have the more suspension it means we're gonna have less safe communities less productive communities less fiscally sound communities. We're gonna have to pay for kids to be in the juvenile justice system which is expensive as many of you know perhaps paying for additional benefits and things like that down the line. And so these are real costs. And so if we can do something to limit the amount of out of school suspension that we have we can do a lot for our future and the future of our children. And so the major findings of the report and they're listed in the executive summary and each of these is given greater detail throughout the report but I know it's a bit of a lengthy document. So I'll allow you to produce it at your own at your leisure. The first one you know public school students were suspended more than 8,000 days in 2011-2012. So that was the data that we had at the time 2011-2012. I think now we're up to 2017-2018 school year but for Vermont specifically, the last data we have is from the agency of education which this committee in around 2015-2016 required the agency to do or didn't require but asked the agency to do in a letter some data analysis. And so they did that for two years and then stopped doing it. So we have some data from 2016-17 school year and I believe that if you haven't reviewed I can send you those reports. I think the numbers did come down a bit but still thousands and thousands of school days missed over suspension largely from nothing involving violence or concerns about that from kids but largely about disobedience and just being disorderly or difficult or something like that. The second finding students with disabilities this is students on IEPs individualized education plans were about three times more likely to be suspended than non-disabled students. Number three, at least in the areas where we could get useful data black and African-American students and Abbenaki students were two or three times more likely to be suspended. Number four, the use of exclusionary and punitive discipline varied widely across the state and this included not just when we looked at this and included not just suspension or expulsion or an in school versus out of school suspension but also referrals to law enforcement and arrests in school. And then finding number five sadly data was largely unavailable in terms of looking at local structures. At the time there was no data reporting from the agency of education or schools that was publicly required, there still isn't. And so all we have and all we had was to go through the painstaking process of using the federal Department of Education's website to pull out each pull out the numbers from every single school in Vermont and then put it together ourselves. It was a painstaking effort that took months for us. And so we have, from the report we had four major recommendations. First, limit disciplinary exclusion and its collateral effects. Number two, allow students to continue learning during suspension if they need to be out of school. If they can be in school, many schools already will have them in a separate room but continuing their education and making sure they have stuff to work on, aren't missing quizzes, tests, things like that. But when they're out of school, there is no connection. There is no requirement to work at Centome. There is no excuses when you come back to not have been prepared for the test. I mean, it just puts kids back immediately. And this is something that a number of states picked up, including Massachusetts, if a student is suspended for a certain number of days they get alternative services guaranteed. Number three, ensure and upgrade students constitutional protections in the school discipline process. So, I talked about how it's 10 days a student can be suspended out of school without any real recourse. That is a problem. That's a long time. And so, if we can either bolster due process protections, bolster the change who is in control of that decision-making or reduce the number of days at which due process protections kick in, then I think we'll have a much fairer system. And four, let's get good data. I think that's certainly something that we need to see still to this day. Now, I think there's been a lot of good work done and I'll stop for questions. I think there's been a lot of work done across the state. I think many schools have taken on, by under their own initiative, looking at restorative justice programs using positive behavioral interventions and supports and trying to keep kids in school when they can. But based on the last data we have, we still saw so many kids and I think it was about half who were kicked out of school for very minor reasons. And I think that that is something, that's the low hanging fruit here that I think if we cut that out, we're cutting the number in half. If it's just, you can't exclude a kid from school entirely for that, for those minor reasons, we'll cut the number in half tomorrow if we did that. So I think these are, there are some simple things we can do and I'm happy to, Senator Campion, talk about more that are in the report and have been discussed before that we can do and I'm also happy to talk about the bill. So, but I'll stop there, I've been talking for a while. Thank you, Mr. Diaz. Senator Lyons, I believe you were up first and then Senator Taranze, please. Jay, thank you for this. I know the report, when you brought the report out, we heard it in health and welfare and it sometimes gets a little frustrating when we know that there are things that might help the health and welfare of kids in schools when that, it's not our jurisdiction, but now it's our jurisdiction. But, so one of the questions I have as you're looking, as I'm looking at your recommendations and thinking about the problems that confront kids and then what would really help them, a lot of what would really help them might require some parental consent or involvement. And I'm wondering if you reach down into the family dynamic as you were making recommendations and thinking about how to build relationships between the families and the kids. Because I see that as a, when kids act out, there's maybe something going on at home that causes that. So I don't know if you have any insight into some of those issues. So for the students I represented, I'll talk about them first. Their families were struggling, no doubt. Struggling with unemployment, struggling with disability, struggling with domestic violence in the past, struggling for sure. And that, the kids brought that stuff with them to school. I think a lot of our schools have taken on some trauma-informed training and I think that that's important, very important in fact. However, school discipline, exclusionary discipline is the wrong response to trauma. It's the opposite of what we need. It exacerbates the trauma. And so that's where I keep my focus with regard to this issue. Yes, there are substantial needs for some Vermont families. I totally agree. And I think that schools do their best to reach out to families. It's a very difficult problem. We can't ask schools to solve all these problems, right? That's not good enough. That is one of the problems. Yeah, and we do ask a lot of our schools, it's true, but we can ask them to solve society's problems. I think with changing or modifying school discipline policy, we're simply asking them not to exacerbate some of those problems. And because school is the way people can turn their lives around, generationally. And so my hope is that if we do have some changes in school discipline policy long-term, we can kind of shift a couple of these things for kids, giving them a fair chance, giving them that true equal opportunity. But I recognize that schools, they can't do it all. No, but the PBI work that's going on is really very effective in that, I would think. Anyway, that's good for me, Senator Campion. I'm fine. Thank you, Senator Lanz. Senator Taranzini. Thank you, Chair Campion. And Mr. Diaz, thanks for being here. Nice to meet you. This whole concept is new to me, and as I'm thinking through and digesting the different talking points. What are some, I mean, what are some behaviors that are just so egregious that we would still support out-of-school suspensions? I mean, we heard last week testimony from someone, it escapes me who it was now, but he talked about when he was a principal or a superintendent, they had a policy in the school district where if the student brought a pack of cigarettes to school and was caught, that was an automatic suspension. And I can see for obvious reasons, that might be a little ridiculous. We don't want our kids to have cigarettes, of course, but there has to be layers of discipline, and that to me seemed to be extreme. But there has to be, in my mind, still certain behaviors, whether it's bringing a weapon to school or something of that nature that would still constitute a out-of-school suspension. Do you have any input or thoughts on that? Thanks for the question. It's the right question to ask. When it comes to school discipline policy and changing or addressing at a high level, at the state level, what we're gonna say, you can't do, and this isn't what this bill is doing, but if we were saying something like that. The way I draw the line is students who make you, students who scare you and who do things that are scary and cause fear in the community, it's probably good reason to exclude them from the building. Doesn't mean they should be excluded from their education entirely, which is what happens, and so we do need to address that issue. But I'll add that that is the minority of situations, the gross minority of situations, where suspension is used. What I like to focus on, or what I think first we need to focus on, at least, is just the kids who make us mad. The kids who are causing us a problem, but aren't making us worried, are just making us mad, and that are ruining the plan for the day or something like that, in kind of being oppositional or just having a tough day, and not doing what we tell them, being disobedient. That's the kind of thing that seems to be the majority of the problems that result in high school suspension, and that, I think, is something that, if teachers and administrators are trained well enough, and if they have the resources to support those kids, then they don't need to be out of the building. Does that answer the question? It does, and can I ask a follow-up, Chair? Please. Thank you. What are, just from my own knowledge, and maybe the committees, you say these issues, the violence and weapons of those, are not a high percentage of suspensions. Can you give me more specific, like the number one reason right now to get suspended is because you're like a class clown, or you're not listening, or what's the? Yeah, well, the last that the H.C. of Education supplied data, which I think is a few years old now, but they did it for two years in a row, and the data didn't change over those two years at least. They have a matrix, and I'll make sure these documents are sent to the committee. And it goes through the main justifications for suspension, and about 50% of all suspensions across the state both years were for disorderly behavior. So that's just disobedience and now following low-level rules. Thank you. Senator Chittenden and then Senator Pershing. Well, mine's more of a comment than a question, but you're happy to welcome a reaction. I definitely agree with the thrust of your report, which is that expelling these students is one of the worst things we can do for them, and that finding other supports. What I'm, my pause is, is similar to where Senator Lyons' lines of question was, is I'm not necessarily persuaded by the data presented that the best thing to do is to continue educating them in these severe incidents. Educating, of course, is great, but I'm wondering what other interventions we might focus on within a structured environment like the school, but to just neglect the core reasons for why they're acting out, so to speak, and instead just carrying on and been pushing them through the education program, I think neglects one of the core reasons why they're having an issue in the first place. So I am new to state government, but I'm intrigued and I'm gonna follow up with my representative, Anne Pugh, who's the chair of the House of Health and Human Services, to understand how more state supports and structures can intertwine with our schooling systems so that they can get more directed and targeted and adapted assistance, rather than just expelling them and throwing them out into the woods in the wild. So I don't know if that makes any sense, what I'm saying, I just, I'm concerned with just forcing them to stay on their educational tract and neglecting whatever caused them to be considered for expulsion in the first place isn't addressing the core issue that's resulting in that behavior. And just to respond quickly, nothing I said was intended to say otherwise. I couldn't agree more. We kids need wraparound services, especially in these situations. And I think schools do reach out, schools that have social workers and counselors use them. I don't know the numbers and I'm definitely not a professional in that area, but when I was working with kids, a lot of times they were working with school counselors, outside therapists and, you know, power professionals, people on the disability team at different schools. So there are these resources, it's just in my experience at least, for the kids, you know, for kids that needed it, they weren't, it wasn't always provided and it wasn't always, and especially when they were suspended because they weren't at school anymore. For students with disabilities that are on IEPs, there are some more requirements, legal requirements that I think come into play, but for students that will get them those services, for students who are not on those plans, it's, it more rarely happens, sadly. Senator Hooker, I'm sorry, Senator Perslick and Senator Hooker. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thank you Mr. Diaz for the report, first of all, but also for going through it. So the one comment is that in my, since I'm on the after school task force learning of all the benefits of these out of school programs or extended learning opportunities and how a lot of the marginalized students, that's where they get some of that extra help. And then so I assume when they're suspended, they're also suspended from all those other after school programs, which is something we should think about. I don't know if that came up at all in your research, but my question is, have you looked at S16 and do you have any comments specifically on that? Yes, thank you. So for S16, which is similar to a bill from 2015 or 16 that we looked at, I think Senator Campion might have introduced it or Senator Sears. At the time I made some comments on it and there were some drafts with my comments and I can, but generally what it would involve is just certainly in terms of data collection, if that's where this is gonna go, more specifics on what data we're going to collect, what the report is going to look like, making sure it has, it's disaggregated by certain groups. And I would again, look to the report that the Agency of Education did a few years back, by and large, I think those are useful reports and a very comprehensive, I would quibble with a few things that they did, such as lumping all minority groups together in one category to get discipline rates and disparity rates, but by and large those are pretty good models and since the Agency already has that, it shouldn't be that difficult, they don't have to recreate the wheel necessarily. So they should be able to punch the numbers in, which they get annually and use that format or use that template. But so I said, be a little more specific with the reporting requirements and we can talk more specifically about those. Also for the council membership, I think it is by and large institutional members and I don't know how much, I think the Department of Corrections is on there and some others that I don't know how much they're, if their knowledge is gonna be as useful here and I think it really could use some of the members of the disability advocacy community, parents of students with disabilities, as well as parents and students who have been suspended, parents of those students and of course we need representation of the traditionally impacted students and parents and students of color and students from low income families. So I think if we can broaden the perspective of the council, I think it will get a much more comprehensive and practical output from it. If I may, just one thing that you mentioned in terms of lumping, if you will, all minorities into one category, I do believe we did hear from someone a couple of weeks ago that there was a concern around confidentiality. In other words, if there was, all of a sudden you're now saying one African-American student and you can somehow easily hone in on who that one student was if it's a particular school or particular district and that was one of the reasons why it was expanded. Yeah, I sympathize. I know that the, I know FERPA is pretty tight in some regards and it's complicated also. The thing is, I guess the problem is that you're getting a very incomplete picture and maybe a misleading picture because for whatever it's worth, for instance, Asian-American students or Asian students are typically suspended at much lower rates than white students. And so if you include Asian students with black students, you're getting a lower rate or a lower disparity rate than you might otherwise get. Does that make sense? So it's just something to think about. It is tricky, I recognize that. Well, Senator Hooker, please. My questions were answered. They really had to do with whether or not the council was necessary. If not, how would we collect this data? And I think most of my questions have been addressed. I do see if the council is implemented that there may be a need to include other players as far as parents and more students, but how large does that get? And then another question, and I don't know probably for the agency of education, why was the data collection stopped? Why isn't this just an ongoing thing within the Department of Education? Thank you for those questions. Just I think quickly I can say to the second question, it was voluntary from the agency. I mean, this committee sent a letter, asked them to produce the data so that the committee could make further findings. And the agency did so for two years and then there was no obligation and no further request. So I think, but I do think it is, there are a lot of annual data requirements and reporting requirements of the agency. My hope would be that since they already have this set up that it actually wouldn't be a huge lift for them to do on an annual basis. And it would be very useful. And not just for advocates or for the agency but for schools and school boards, like to really know and get more interested in what is happening at our school. And so that local communities can think about this and actually and have the information at their fingertips a little bit. So hopefully that's possible. And I think that'll also, of course with the data, it gives us all a lot more knowledge about how big is the problem? What are the levers that we need to pull in order to address different parts of the problem? And as a follow-up, if I may. Anxious to see the numbers even from the last report from the agency and perhaps to know again from the agency what they think caused the reduction in numbers as from your original report. Great. So committee, please correct me if I'm misreading the room. It sounds like there's momentum to do something on this. I think people recognize that there is a pipeline here. But we talk about nipping things early and we recognize that these kinds of issues can be with a child for their entire life. There's no question about it. It can spark something that as Mr. Diaz and others have said to us can spark something that can really last a lifetime. You get behind, you're out for 10 days. You get behind in math. And that could in some instances, you're just not catching up and you're failing math and then you're in a different kind of math. I mean, it's a complicated, complicated thing that we're trying to hopefully prevent happening. And I think speaking for myself, it is such a, not having been suspended nor expelled but having been punished as a kid by I remember throwing a pile of leaves over an elementary school teacher and being put on the wall as was. Taranzini, I see that look. I know you're surprised that I would ever do anything wrong. But you can see if I had been suspended for five or six days, you get behind, these things can bubble. And I think for a lot of us, we don't realize how grave of a situation it is when something like this happens for a child and that it really can spark a problem that could last a lifetime. So for me, it sounds like we'll work in some ways around the working group itself. Looks like it needs help. It looks like we need to hear from the agency again, Senator Lyons. I really didn't want to stop your flow, but when, so you finished, I did have one more. I did have another comment or question to ask. Sure, no, I think it's just, you look at, we're gonna be hearing from the disability community. We're gonna be hearing referred from, have testimony from the BIPOC community. We know, I think Senators Rahm and Sears put this in with an eye, I don't wanna speak for both of them. I know Senator Sears was in here, but an eye toward, this can end up these students, there is a school to prison suspension expulsion to prison pipeline that we want to address. So, I think how I wanna leave it, and then we'll hear from Senator Lyons is, please, as we're making our way through this in the next couple of days, if people have, if people have, people they wanna still hear from, again, we're still, we're gonna work tomorrow afternoon from about 3.30 to five, and part of our time tomorrow afternoon with James or Jim Demeray, hopefully we'll be really looking at this and pulling this apart and trying to decide how, what direction we're gonna go in. But it sounds to me that there is interest in working on this issue. And unless, okay, so, okay, good. Senator Lyons. No, yes, I think there is a lot of interest in working on this issue. And frequently when we start pulling it apart, we end up looking at what agency of human services might be required to do within the school system and what the school system is required to do that feels more like social services. And then we run into the brick wall of people not wanting to provide social services when they are school employees. It's very difficult. But I was, I did wanna say that a couple of years ago we established the Prevention Council and Department of Health. And part of that work is just what it sounds like is to build a culture of prevention. And we also have a new Chief Prevention Officer in the Agency of Administration, which also has the goal of breaking down silos and building new systems and new culture. So I think there's a real opportunity here at the very, you know, at the state level, on the, at the ground floor level, I just think it's way past time to do the work that we're doing, having, when I think about our children's integrated services and think about our special needs kids and we're gonna hear, I guess, from folks who are engaged in the disabilities community, but having Dale be a part of this, it's terrible, you know, it is terrible what happens. But we need to build a system that respects children regardless of who they are and whoever does it in the school, whether it's someone who is trained as a social worker or a counselor or a teacher who has a combination of skills, it really needs to happen. Cause I almost got kicked out of school once Senator Campion and- Now that I am going to actually try to dig up, I cannot imagine that.  My phone is lighting up, somebody's tipped off the Rutland Herald that looks like it leaves over my elementary school teacher. I'll save that one for another day when we're not on YouTube. All right, Mr. Diaz, thank you. Committee, let's take a 10 minute break and we will come back at three o'clock. Thank you all. Thank you all for your time. If you ever have any questions, feel free to reach out to me again. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. How are you? I'm here, I'm well, thank you. How are you? Good afternoon. Thanks for being with us. Well, thank you for allowing me to invite myself. Well, absolutely. You're considering an open invitation. Thank you, thank you very much. I appreciate that. So you are the staff attorney with the Disability Law Project with Vermont Legal Aid. Correct. Correct, great, thank you. And so welcome to Senate Education. And we are, as you know, looking at S16 and we will turn the floor over to you. Great, thank you very much. I appreciate it.  So if it gets to him, I may have to interrupt and remove it from him. This is a group of dog lovers. Oh good, oh good. Well, he may introduce himself at some point and no guarantees. Okay. So thank you, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon about this proposed legislation. It is somewhat challenging to follow Jay, my former colleague. So if you don't mind, I'm gonna move straight from my script a little bit which I have provided with you. There are some things I certainly wanna focus on but I also wanna try to address some of the questions you've already raised. But let me give you a little bit more background about myself. So I am a longtime disability law project attorney. I have been with Legal Aid for over 25 years. The disability law project represents children and student, I'm sorry, children and adults with disabilities who have legal problems arising out of their disabilities. So that involves a lot of different arenas. We do guardianship work, we represent children in special education, we do access to public benefits, we do anti-discrimination work, we do the range of disability work. Relative to special education in particular, I have extensive experience in representing students in administrative proceedings, filing complaints against the agency of education. I have attended many, many IEP and 504 meetings which are both part of the federal special education and disability law requirements. I've also filed for due process, which for those of you who are not familiar with special education is the dispute resolution process that's mandated by the IDEA. I'm also a member of the Census-based Funding Advisory Group and I am chair of the Disability Law Committee. I wanted to let you know that over 30% of the caseload that the disability law project receives over the course of a year involves complaints about students' education, including complaints involving students who have been restrained and secluded in school, students who have been suspended or excluded for disability-related behavior. We've also represented students who have been arrested and cited to juvenile court for disability-related behavior that occurs at school. So my prepared remarks focus on three areas. One is the impact of exclusionary discipline on students. And I'll just say briefly, Jay painted with a broad brush. I'm gonna winnow it down and I wanna share some examples of specific instances of students we've represented in the past five years who have been impacted by disciplinary exclusion. We also want to make you aware that disciplinary exclusion includes more than just the short-term in-school suspensions, long-term in-school suspensions and long-term exclusion. By that I mean, we have represented a number of students who have been sent home or parents called to come and pick them up because of disability-related behavior and invited not to return the next day without any sort of suspension or formal process. And then we also wanna focus a little bit on the agency, concerns we have about the collection of data by the agency. So, Jay talked to you about the data. The data in the last six years hasn't changed. We still see disproportionate numbers of students of color, students, indigenous students and students with disabilities being subject to exclusionary discipline. And that occurs not only nationally, but in Vermont. We know that students are impacted by this. It causes significant stress. It has long-term negative consequences for the students and their families, including poor health outcomes, higher school dropout rates and increased incarceration rates. Regarding students with disabilities in particular, the research also suggests that students may not be receiving appropriate behavioral interventions and supports in their IEP and 504 plans as required. So I'm gonna give you just four short examples of individual instances of students that we have represented. We've represented a 16-year-old student who has significant anxiety, attention deficit disorder and significant learning disability. The student was suspended for 10 days in November of 2019. That student has yet to return to school and likely never will. Between the start of the school year that year and his suspension in early November, the student had been referred 50 times for disciplinary referrals for insubordination, wandering the halls without a pass and defiant behavior. The incident that led to his arrest to his suspension and subsequent arrest involved an interaction with the school resource officer who seized his backpack and without probable cause searched the student's backpack. The student became agitated, which ultimately led to his being transported by ambulance to the hospital for a mental health screening and then the citation to juvenile court. That student has not been successful in offsite tutoring that's been occurring often on since November of 2019. It's only been exacerbated by the pandemic and according to his mother, he's despondent and suicidal and she's concerned that he will drop out and never graduate. In another instance, we represented a 16 year old student with anxiety, depression and a social communication disorder. She was expelled for three quarters of the school year. So within the fall after the school discovered traces of marijuana that were discovered in her backpack. So before the backpack was seized, she was in the park across the street from the school administration building where she received offsite tutoring. The school resource officer across the street and escorted her into the building because he smelled marijuana, he escorted her to the administrator's office and it was there that using scotch tape, they were able to lift trace amounts of marijuana from the student's backpack and she was suspended. I'm sorry, she was suspended and subsequently expelled. This was not her first expulsion. The prior year, the student had been expelled for multiple violations of the school district's tobacco policy. So following her second expulsion, the student effectively dropped out of school. We also represented a five year old student with a suspected autism spectrum disorder who began exhibiting extreme sensory behaviors, sensory seeking behaviors including climbing on tables, under structures and interacting in ways that made other students feel uncomfortable. The parents requested one-on-one support. Shortly thereafter, the student was suspended for 10 days for an incident involving other students. Shortly afterwards, the student was suspended for 10 days despite a manifestation that the, I'm sorry, despite a finding that the student's behavior was a manifestation of their disability. They were suspended, their placement was changed and for a period of five months, they received only two hours of tutoring a day. Following a comprehensive evaluation, the student was diagnosed with severe attention deficit disorder. One last example, this involves a 10 year old with post-traumatic stress disorder who prior to the end of a school year was placed in a prone restraint that restricted the student's breathing. Prone restraints are prohibited by the State Board of Education's Rule 4500. There are narrow exceptions to the use of prone restraints under that rule relative to the size and severity of the student's behavior and when other restraint has failed. The student's treating psychiatrist worked with the student throughout the summer and determined that this had exacerbated the student's prior existing trauma. The student was able to return to the school with minimal problems until after the school break. When he returned from the school break in winter, his one-on-one aid was absent, a substitute was provided, the substitute who was provided with someone with whom the student had already had known problems. There was an incident where the student escalated, his behavior escalated. He was once again placed in a prone restraint. The later the next week, the same substitute was again assigned to this student. Upon seeing the student or seeing the substitute, the student was triggered, attempted to escape, the school resource officer became involved. That resulted in further triggering an escalation by the student. The student lashed out, hit the teacher and ultimately was suspended and referred to General Port. Again, there was a manifestation determination, there was a determination that the student's disability that the behavior was related to the student's disability. And despite this, the student received for the period of time from January to June, only two hours of tutoring. I share those examples with you because those are real concrete examples that we represent and have represented and are currently representing. So discipline or exclusion is a real problem with serious consequences. We support the creation of advisory council but do have some concerns about its composition. You asked the question earlier, Senator Campion about whether it's heavily weighted with law enforcement, I would say yes. I think we need to add more students with disabilities, parents of students with disabilities. Obviously we need to include students of color, students or people of color, people of indigenous groups, we need to include local mental health agencies and other entities that support students. I think what, when I listen to Jay speak, and here's where I'm gonna kind of defer, stray a little bit from my prepared remarks, I was really struck by how the recommendations that were made in that January, 2015 report remain current. At that time, the recommendation was, eliminate exclusionary discipline, required continued education during periods of time when kids are suspended or excluded when they need to be. And I'm happy to address the question that was raised about what are those instances when kids should be suspended? Like what rises to that level? We should ensure and upgrade that students constitutional and civil rights are protected. Here Jay was talking about the 10 day rule. So within that first 10 day period of most suspensions, whether you're a student with or without a disability, you can pretty much be suspended without any due process. The state board rules requires that you get noticed, you get an opportunity to be heard, but that can happen after the suspension. In our experience, very infrequently, our parents notified until after the suspension has been imposed and the student has not been provided with an opportunity to state their side of the story. Then there's the 10 day rule which imposes greater protections. And this particularly impacts students with disability. So under federal law, if a student has a disability and there is a contemplation of the student being suspended for either a consistent 10 day period or a succession of days that result in 10 days, then there does need to be a manifestation determination review. That's what I was referring to earlier where the student's team needs to get together and determine whether or not the student's IEP was followed and whether or not the student's behavior was a manifestation of their disability. If it was a manifestation of their disability, then the school's rules cannot apply and alternatives need to be put into place to address the student's underlying behaviors. I think that was a question that was asked earlier, what are we gonna do? We can't just allow students to behave badly and violate the school rules. Well, there are things that we can do. We can strengthen current systems, right? We know that the solutions to these problems are school-wide positive behavior intervention systems, restorative justice programs, increased mental health workers. I mean, those are recommendations that you probably heard from Jay, Senator Hardy's intern has recently prepared a report, a draft report. This is relating to school resource officers, same recommendations. We need to strengthen positive behavior intervention supports in our schools and we need to strengthen restorative justice practices and we need to develop those with best practices. We have MTSS systems in all of our schools. Behavior is an important part of that. Social and emotional learning is an important part of that. It's not just for tier one reading instruction or math instruction, right? It's also required to address behaviors in the school across the board. If students' behaviors escalate to the point where they need greater interventions than the multi-tier system of support is supposed to provide them with those supports. What we know, and when I put on my Census-based Funding Advisory Committee hat, what we know is that there's tremendous variability among school districts and their ability to implement these programs, even though they've been required to do so for quite some time. So I'm not sure that we need to reinvent the wheel, we need to strengthen our existing programs. We also, and I kinda wanna go back to those constitutional rights because I think that there is something that this committee could do to actually make it clearer that students due process rights are valued and that they need to be protected. So you can go back and look and I'm happy to share you with the specific state board rules that involve discipline for both kids with disabilities, kids suspected of having disabilities, and then kids without disabilities and what's required. So there's more that we could do to ensure that school districts are actually following those rules and protecting students' rights and at the same time improving school climate. And what we know is that when research does support that when schools implement these programs with fidelity, students' academic achievement improves and school climate improves. So there's benefit to all of this. And I'm sorry, my dog is just whining obnoxiously. The other thing I wanted to touch on in terms of strengthening supports is I believe it was Senator Lyons who mentioned. I'm sorry to interrupt. I just don't want to not give people an opportunity to ask questions. So start to close things up. Absolutely. That would be terrific. So sort of focused more specifically on S16. A council is a good idea. I think as I said earlier, there needs to be broader representation. I think we need to look more carefully at the focus on law enforcement. I think that we want to move in the direction of removing law enforcement from our schools and not relying on that as a means to address student behavior. In terms of data collection, I think the AOE is a natural place for that data, but I do have concerns about it. I want to just point out that the Federal Office of Special Education Programs in June released a report on the agency relative to its implementation of IDEAB programs, which is special education programs in this state. We are now in a position where we are, we have a needs assistance status. And one of the rationales for that that the agency has stated is that they have longstanding challenges as do the field with data infrastructure and personnel levels to support that infrastructure. So I think if you're going to require them to collect data, we need to address the inadequacies they have within their system for that to be meaningful. The other thing I just want to say is that, it needs to be transparent. The agency has been transparent about the data that it's collecting. We do have concerns about the $35 million of CARE Act funding that were allocated to Vermont Elementary and Secondary Schools. We had asked that there be transparency in how that those funds were distributed. We're also aware that $14 million of that money has been unspent as of December, as at the end of December. I've already touched on the fact that we need to look at in-school suspensions and when kids are sent home or invited not to return to school the next day or the next couple of days without a formal suspension. So in terms of data collection, we need to address that. For kids with disabilities, that is a violation of federal law. Nonetheless, we see it over and over again. We also want to make sure that there's data collected on the use of restraint and seclusion. That's not then consistent even though real $4500 requires that. So- And do we have, is all of this in written testimony? You do have it. Okay. Cause that is going to be important for us to- Yeah. We need to dig into the bill. Sure. And then I'd be happy to address any questions. I was, you know, as I said, I strayed in part because I wanted to address some concerns already expressed. Absolutely. Committee, questions. Senator Taranzini. Thank you, Senator Campion. And thank you to our witness. Question in regards to school resource officers. I hear from some that, you know, they feel police shouldn't be in the school. And then I couldn't think of a better person to have in a school when a serious incident went down when you need a police officer. Why not have it both ways, have law enforcement to give them additional training to deal with some of these social and emotional behaviors that we're concerned about that lead to suspensions as what we're talking about, rather than us just saying, well, we want to get away from police in the school because, you know, as we know, we've had mass shootings across the country. And we know that police have in many cases stepped in and stopped it from getting much worse. So I would just like your opinion on that or feedback, if it's okay with our chair, Campion. Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean, I don't think, I don't know if that Bill and Jeannie would know if that is in our committee at this point. I know Senator Sears and I received an email. It might be in judiciary, but I know it is something that Senator Hardy is interested in and we might as well take a moment and get an answer to that. Okay, well, I can give you tons of data and information and resources about that. So prior to this new Senate Education Committee coming into being, I did send a letter to the Senate Education Committee. I know there's a new set of faces here that I'd be happy to share with you. I sent it in the summer relative to this issue about why police should not be in schools. There's a lot of data about the harm that school resource officers cause. If I could, I just want to keep us focused. Senator Taranzini's questions, why not do the both? Why not allow the person to be there and put forward, put him or her into additional training so that it might work out? Research doesn't prove that statement. That's a hypothesis that is not borne out by research. That in fact, school resource officers, there is no correlation between the presence of law enforcement and the protection of students even during mass events. And so I'm happy to share more data and information about that. I've outlined it in a letter. And if you would like to have me come back and testify on that, I'd be more than happy to address those questions more specifically. Yeah, no, I think it would be great to have you back. We end up taking up that bill. But in the meantime, if you would share that research specifically with the committee, you would email it to Senator Taranzini and the rest of us, including our committee, or our committee assistant, great. Any other questions? Yes, Senator Hooker. Thank you. Senator Campion, at the beginning of the afternoon, you expressed a concern that we wanna do something but we don't want it to take two years or whatever. And so I would ask Ms. Nohotsky about how you feel about the implementation of a council and how long it would take to set up such a thing. What can we do in the interim to help address these issues? And another question I had regarding, and I guess I should probably be asking the agency again, what's happened with those recommendations that were given in the 2015 report and the 2017 report? In terms of the agency's reports, I don't know the answer to those questions in terms of the data that they collected. I'm not even sure I've ever seen that data. So I don't know the answer to that. I'm happy to look at it and explore that further. In terms of what can we do now, I really think we have to move quickly on removing, on prohibiting exclusionary discipline. I think that if there is going to be a council created, the council needs to be empowered to act to change the policies, practices, and procedures in school districts to prohibit exclusionary discipline, except in the rarest of circumstances. And to the point about what are those rare circumstances, we already have a state law that allows reasonable and necessary force to quality disturbance, to obtain possession of weapons or other dangerous objects for the purpose of self-defense or the protection of persons or property. Those instances where a student would properly be suspended or expells would be when they're bringing a weapon to school or when their behavior is such that it causes significant threat of harm to themselves or another person. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for coming in and we'll stay in touch. Senator Lines. What kind of dog do you have? I have a standard poodle who's still. Okay. He's still a puppy so he can be quite obnoxious. Now he's asleep on the floor. Wouldn't you know it? You're lucky. Sounds adorable. Yes. Very cute. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. All right. We are now going to hear from our final witness, Ms. Aronoff. Hi. Good to see you. Good to see you. Nice to see some new faces on the Senate Education Committee. If you know me and some of you don't, so I'll just introduce myself for the record. I'm Susan Aronoff and I work for the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council. We are a federally funded council. Every state and territory has one. We're a creature of federal law and we exist to provide the voice of people with disabilities and their family members to try to provide access to that voice to the government and to that people who receive services can impact the services that they receive. So I'm going to be sharing my time with Krista Yajian, who is one of our council members. So you have a written statement from me. I'll just go over the high points and then turn it over to Krista Yajian. Terrific. First of all, thank you so much, Mr. Chair and committee members for taking up this very important issue and for spending the time on it that you're spending. The issue of exclusionary discipline in general, restraint and seclusion in particular is of huge importance to students with disabilities and their family members. As you heard from Jay and from Marilyn, the data nationally and the data in Vermont indicates that students with disabilities are excluded at far higher rates and this can have tremendous impacts. Then it also, as Marilyn Mohusky pointed out, implicates civil rights laws and federal education laws. But aside from the legal impacts, what I think Krista's going to be able to talk with you about better than I ever could is the family impact and how exclusionary discipline impacts children with disabilities and their family members. And I would encourage you to take more testimony from students who have been excluded and their family members. So just to address some of the points that the committee has asked about and that I do address in the written statement, we're not so sure that a commission is necessary. We do think action is necessary and we have a couple of specific actions we would like to recommend. So first and foremost, we think that the agency of education in that Vermont should really move in the direction to measurably reduce the amount of exclusionary discipline. And when I say measurably reduce, I think it's really important to know when you have a report like kicked out from 2015, now in 2021, are we better off? Are we worse off? How would we know instead of the reporting the data and kicked out instead of that being voluntary as a real concrete first step, we would like to support making that data reporting, the data that was collected and kicked out, make that mandatory and have the agency of education create a dashboard that with those indicators that would tell us are things getting better, they're getting better for students of color, they're getting better for students with disabilities, like how would we know? So I think that with the rule 4500 series, that's the restraint and seclusion series, there was a promise made at the time that there would be accountability built into the system to track the amount of restraint and seclusion and we just haven't seen follow through on that. So it doesn't always sound all that appealing, yay, we want better data collection, but in this case, we think that that is one of the strongest, most progressive actions the legislature could take this year. And now I'll turn it over to Chris. Hello there, thank you, Chair Campion and the members of the Senate Education Committee. My name is Christie Akshin and I am wanted to speak about this proposal for a school discipline advisory council. I live in Guilford, Vermont. I am a licensed special educator and reading specialist who has worked with elementary education age students for over 15 years. As part of my work, I have participated in many school initiatives and committees. I've been a standing EST, that's the Education Support Team Member, an active school leadership team member and a school leader as part of our district's work to improve our MTSS systems, which you all have been speaking a lot about this year. To note, I'm also a trained CPI, a CPI teacher, which CPI stands for Crisis Prevention Institute. I'm trained to respond to students who are in crisis. I am also parent to a curious outdoor loving and Batman Lego expert preteen named Nate, who has Down syndrome. He turns 13 this July and reminds me of this every single day. In addition, I have been a member of the Vermont Developmental Disability Council for the past two years and I'm a new panel member for the State Special Education Advisory Panel. Although I am involved or associated with several of the stakeholder groups that may share testimony, I share my perspectives based on my lived experiences. The nature of Nate's disability and how it manifests itself in his body requires many supports in order for him to learn and participate in school. He wears glasses, he has a cochlear hearing aid, he wears braces for joints that pop out and uses an augmentative communication device to help him express his thinking.  He has shared how frustrating this is for him. Two years ago he had his hip reconstructed at Boston Children's Hospital and this winter we learned that he has severe sleep apnea. This kid's got a lot going on. Despite some of the challenges gifted to him by having an extra chromosome, his desire to learn, to be a part of a community and to be independent remind me of all that he deserves in his education and in school. During his third grade year, Nate was placed into an intensive needs program by the school district and moved to a new school. It was really heartbreaking for us because we wanted him to be included in his home school and in the general education classroom. He was labeled as a student with behavioral challenges, which most likely were result of his disability. Within two months of being at the new school, Nate had not come home with one grovey and this is the little of the way that the school would honor with positive behaviors students that were doing the right thing, but a request to have a safety plan in place that would allow the school to call us and send Nate home on days when he had challenging behaviors. The document we were asked to sign stated that if he were sent home, it would be considered a school suspension. I refused to sign the document, but no, that that didn't keep the school from sending him home. He was sent home many, many days. This meant that me or my husband would have to leave work and pick up Nate. Nate learned that school was bad, that school was hard and that he didn't belong. And eventually he outright refused to go to school. When we did get him in school, Nate was taken off into the school's quiet room. There are lots of names for these kinds of rooms in our schools, the calm down room, the, I think there's all sorts of names. To note, Nate never had access to a guidance counselor, just the members of his IAP team, which did not include access to a guidance counselor, which I never really knew why. The school threatened restraint saying it would help him. And we responded by having a doctor write a note so that he couldn't be restrained. Trust was lost with the school and everything became a power struggle. I remember being criticized as a parent for not wanting to use food as an incentive, a commonly used strategy in their ABA applied behavior analysis approaches. I had a doctor write another note. It was exhausting. The message of their zero tolerance approach was that compliance was the goal. And it is compliance that leads to learning. As Nate's mom, I experienced many untrained teachers and inconsistent paras in a school system not really prepared to work and teach him. As I think about my son approaching middle school and high school, I can tell you that having a school resource officer would do nothing to help him participate any better. Know that it's pretty heartbreaking to have your child be called unsafe. I was willing to work with the district if they made a commitment to learning how to teach him and Nate, I mean, he had no consistent pairs or trained pairs most of the time. Our experience, which is really heartbreaking for me because I feel like I'm such a committed educator was to take him out of public education, to take him out of school, because we didn't wanna live another day of the power struggle or the conflicts we were having with the school and having him be sent home. In thinking about your proposal S16, these are just a few of my wishes. We need accountability for this rule. Besides the regular collection of data, parents and families deserves to know what is changing because of the data. We're often left out. As teachers, we are asked to consistently look at data and prove what we do. This is like the foundation of MTSS. I worry that children with disabilities are at more risk from disproportionate exclusionary responses, disciplinary responses. I also want the data to have more meeting at a local level. It would be great if these conversations were happening at my school board. Speaking of data, know that just looking at data related to suspensions, expulsions and restraints, do not tell the whole story. Look at what we experienced. It would be really important that if you do form an advisory council, that you include those most impacted by the rule. Last, I think there's another opportunity for improved family and school partnerships. Statute may require parent participation in the improvement of plans that schools create, but it feels like parent participation is representative and not authentic and often doesn't have representation from parents of children with disabilities. With the cloak of confidentiality, parents who had children with disabilities don't have access to one another or a real forum to address or talk about what's happening with the school. We can only talk about it at our individual IEP team meeting levels. We don't get to be a voice in the policies that are implemented for our children. There is a silo that separates us from many of the conversations that happen because special education is still seen as a different system. I still wonder about how a CPAC, a special education parent advisory committee would help improve partnerships between schools and families and also elevate parent and family voice. Last little recommendation you probably know, but the Office of Civil Rights also did a report on school discipline from 2019. It has some really great recommendations. I would encourage you all to read it. Thank you very much. I don't know if any of you have any questions. Thank you, Ms. Yaglin. Questions committee? Senator Persley. Yeah, thanks for that testimony and personal experience. Just to your last point there, the Office of Civil Rights, is that the commission or who? Yes, it's the US commission. Yep, had a report and we have school discipline disparities in Vermont. This is the Vermont advisory committee to the US commission on civil rights, published this report in December, 2019. And it has, yes. Okay, great. Yeah, it'd be good to look at that. I didn't know about it. Thank you. Christoph, you send that to me. I'll send it to the committee. Okay. Very helpful, grateful for you sharing your personal experiences. Committee, as you may have heard, I'm not sure if you're on the line, but is committed to advancing something this year. We're going to be spending some time tomorrow afternoon for lack of a better expression, pulling Bill apart a little bit, seeing where different senators land on different issues and seeing if we can start to build some consensus as well as make a list of additional witnesses from which we should hear. So thank you both. Thank you so much. So from the time, it means a lot to us and stay in touch. So committee, tomorrow afternoon, I have carved out from, I don't know if it'll take this long, but roughly 330 to five. I've not heard back from Jim yet, Demiray, but I'm hoping that we can take a careful look this evening if everyone has just a few moments. Just to go through S16, take a look, come in with your comments. I think this is the best way to approach it and just let's get ready to take our first stab at getting to some level of consensus as well as seeing where we might, oh, I see that Jim has confirmed for tomorrow afternoon. Also additional witnesses, people that you would like to hear from. So again, we're going to work on S16. So if everyone could just, you haven't read the bill, please do. If you have time to read it again and come in with your thoughts as to what you would like to do. Additionally, we're going to look at the administration's proposal for a literacy bill. This is taking us to what I think, and I appreciate the administration's partnership on this and Secretary French's commitment to how can we make some real improvements to literacy? And so they've put some ideas down on paper which may turn into a committee bill, but we'll also spend some time in the afternoon looking at that. For new senators, this is what people sometimes refer to as sausage making. It is working to get to a consensus where hopefully everybody's comfortable and for us to advance something that might make a difference that I think would make a difference in the lives of many Vermonters with regard to school discipline and then also with literacy. What's that? It's called marking up the bill. It's all... I don't even know if we're to marking up but I do think we do need to have some conversation to see what people would like in and out. Definitely to get to at least another stage. Senator Perslick. Are you in the Education Committee room? That was my question. I am in Senate natural resources and energy. I understand education. The education room is filled with computers and storage related things. So I... But I will take a look. I will wander down. I did get permission from Janet to stay in the room late this evening. And so I will wander down to take a look at that map that you have referenced. It's still there. Make sure it's still there. Yes, I think my plan is to stay here for the week since I'm here. I was gonna come up and pick up some files but yeah, it's a good spot to get things done. All I need is a Murphy bed and I'll be on that one. Okay, I know we have chairs meetings and I have a cable access network public service announcement to do. Our numbers of COVID in Bennington County are of concern as you know and we're hoping to do as much as we possibly can to make sure people stay masked up, et cetera. So stay healthy out there and thanks everybody for a good afternoon.