We are back on the subject of pre-K and I am really delighted to start the conversation with Meg Baker. Yeah, so come and just sit in the amen and give us your testimony. All right. So thank you for inviting me here today. I am the Act 166, the Universal Pre-K Coordinator for Addison County. We have three districts or three school districts within our region that have collaborated to form this position. So that's Addison Central School District, which is the Middlebury area, Mount Abraham Unified School District, which is the Bristol area, and Addison Northwest School District, which is the Virginia area. 17 pounds and we have roughly 430 or so children who are served by pre-K. Almost 80% of those kids are served in private programs outside of the schools. Currently we have, I've written 29, but in the past three days we've signed three criminal contracts, so it's actually now 32 community-based pre-K programs, including center and home-based programs. So we've seen a lot of strengths for universal pre-K in our region. Locally, Act 166 has increased our pre-K participation. In the year before universal pre-K was implemented, we served 228 children between our three districts with publicly funded pre-K. And as I said before, this is now up to 430 children. We've also seen an increase in quality. We've seen the number of programs with a licensed early educator, and STARS quality ratings of three or more has risen as a direct result of pre-K. At least nine local programs have either increased their STARS rating or hired or filled the vacancy with a licensed teacher in order to be able to contract with the district. Right now we have, and these are within our district, we have 14 licensed community programs, three home-based programs, and six school-based programs that are pre-qualified. One of the strengths that we've identified is consistency. Partially because of our regional administration, we developed, beginning back in 2015 and 2016, one central contract timeline and attendance and enrollment paperwork. And in the past year or so, we, I've been working with other regions in our state to further align contracts and practices so that we are more consistent with what's happening in Chittenden County and White River Valley so that we've got a crosswalk and we are trying to refine our language to be more consistent. We found that meeting family needs, families appreciate the portability of the tuition and the variety of choices that are available. We have full-time, full-year programs. We also have part-time pre-K programs. There's schools, there's homes, and there's programs with a variety of philosophies. The information about children has also been helpful in terms of school budgeting and kindergarten transition knowing more about the kids who are coming up. Another strength has been our increased public-private partnerships. Thinking about awareness of early learning standards and child progress. We held a kindergarten transition summit a few years back and developed some coordination between pre-K teachers and kindergarten teachers around what does kindergarten readiness look like and what information is helpful to kindergarten teachers as children are moving up. So it's not just T.S. school child progress but also who should this child be placed with, who shouldn't this child be placed with. We've looked at collaborative professional development opportunities. We've used some of our T.S. school data to think about what is the data telling us about where we need to spend more time. And as a result of that, we've formed some professional learning communities and communities of practice. We're offering professional development on the pyramid model, the social-emotional pyramid model to our private programs and we've also offered to mathematics. And as I mentioned before, regional administration has been a key component of that. We, like others in the state, have seen some limits to the universal pre-K law. One of those pieces does have to do with capacity although we have good capacity in our region to serve in terms of the number of spots for children. We have families have very disparate needs in terms of schedules and locations and program characteristics. And so what that means is that occasionally transportation is a barrier. Finding mid-year openings for kids who come to our homeless shelter which doesn't open until mid-October in Middlebury. Those kinds of things has been a real challenge. It generally works out, but that is one of the limitations that we've seen. Special education portability, I know you've heard some testimony, has been a challenge. The districts have a finite pool of resources and although they're meeting the needs, it does continue to be a challenge. Equity, we anecdotally have seen that at-risk students seem to be concentrated into certain programs. I would say that that's both school-based programs and some of our full-time, full-year programs depending on family needs and that other programs are less accessible. It's something that I think that there needs to be additional data and research done on. Dual administration has been a major concern. Having both the agency of education and the CDD responsible has been unwieldy for both community programs and school-based programs. And it's also very unclear sometimes how school-age policies like the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Act might impact pre-K and ELL services, other kinds of services like that. And it's something that I hope that as you look at a bifurcation of the system that you consider how issues like that will be resolved for individual students. The local administrative concerns have been very challenging. Administrative costs are high, right?  And the other piece is that there is no recourse for schools. Schools are mandated to partner. And if a program doesn't return paperwork or doesn't obey the law, we've gotten limited guidance from the state around those and we don't have a lot of recourse that is built into our ability to negotiate on those issues. Quality assurance? That remains even if we buy it. I think it would if school districts are mandated to partner with a qualified program, then there needs to be some sort of recourse for what you do if a program is not living up to their side. Say they don't give you the attendance information that you need in order to be able to count those kids in your census. Or they have the quality monitoring piece around calendars or having a licensed educator on staff. If there are concerns, a school district needs to have some kind of negotiation power to discontinue their contracts or discontinue their funding or renegotiate what those situations look like. And that is a challenge at the moment. And then quality assurance that sort of feeds into that same piece. If school districts are in the place right now of needing to monitor for pre-K compliance with Act 166 and there has not been significant guidance from the state around those pieces, it also creates some real budgetary and ethical issues. If a program loses their licensed teacher mid-year, for example, do you discontinue the tuition funding for those children mid-year knowing that the cost then is going to be passed on to those families? Fortunately, that's not been a situation that we've had to get to, but we've come close a couple of times. It also creates all kinds of issues for school budgets at that point because you're counting kids and then you suddenly aren't able to count them. The lack of early educators has been a concern. There's currently insufficient numbers of licensed educators to fully meet the demand. Peer review processes are backed up and provisional licenses are not available for early educators in community programs. The other piece I would say is in terms of transparency. Families don't understand how the pre-K is involved, how the public funds and the education fund is involved in funding for their tuition payments and so that can lead to confusion for families in there and how that funding is applied, especially if there are question marks about families moving districts or meeting services beyond the hours of pre-K. The creation of regions, geographic regions in some districts has been confusing and very frustrating for many of our local programs and families. We have a geographic region just south and many of the families come north to programs in our area and a number of those families have been denied tuition to programs in our area and what typically happens in that situation is the families continue with that program and either they're paying more or the private programs are using their limited resources to provide scholarships for those families or a combination thereof. So just to clarify, these are people that are outside of your district and the district down there has set a region that did not include yours. That's exactly right. So the region just to our south which encompasses a little bit of Addison County so the Leicester, Brandon area, they have a geographic region where students may only be served within their school district and families can request that the funding be delivered to private programs up in our region and that has not happened to my knowledge ever and so that has been very frustrating for families who have their children enrolled in a full-time program and some of them for legitimate reasons need their kids closer to where they work or in a full-time full-year program or with their siblings. So that has been complicated. The other piece around limitations is the hours of pre-K. Most early childhood educators would agree that 10 hours a week is insufficient to fully meet learning goals and to see significant progress and it's a challenge for working families as well. If there was a waiting or tuition system that promoted a minimum of 10 hours a week but incentivized a more full-day program, that might be something that would incentivize more full-time programming. Five-year-olds, there's been a lot of back and forth about kindergarten eligible children. I would love to see because I think that there are situations in which children do need to be retained for an additional year in pre-K and that the schools should be involved in that decision. I'd love to see a retention policy that is comparable to what we might see in a kindergarten through 12th grade. So in most of the situations that we have had kids retained, they have had an IEP. We rarely have kids who are on a 504. But there are some situations in which children with late summer birthdays, for example, might benefit from an additional year in a less structured environment. And similar to retaining kids in other grades, there are times that I would recommend that for a pre-K child. Rarely do we see two years of kindergarten. But I think that two years of kindergarten might be the right choice for some children. It's also kindergarten programs are more structured than pre-K programs. And in the same way that if a child's not ready to move into that level of structure, it's possible that a district might want to keep them in a pre-K program. And then the last piece is there's been a lot of back and forth in terms of requirements at the state level. There's been statewide memos. There's been, you don't have to spend anybody in the room, but lots of legislative conversation about pre-K. And that's made the whole system feel pretty unstable for districts and pre-K programs alike. And so I think that has been a real challenge. And in general, knowing how we're going to move forward and having some guidance around creating those needed policies is a key and critical need from this point forward. You sort of list three areas of uncertainty that are hanging out there. One of which is legislative conversations about potential changes. Where does that rank in that list of three? I would say the things that have caused the most immediate furor have been the statewide memos from the agency of education that have come out that have changed things immediately. The things that create the most long-term instability, that feeling of I don't know where we're going to be next year, that's the legislative piece. So the last piece is our pre-K enrollment over the past several years. And it says 2014 through 15 Addison Northeast, which is now Mount Abraham Unified School District, was an early adopter of the program. So you can see a slight bump there. And then when Addison Central and Addison Northwest joined is where we saw the largest increases. And now it appears to have leveled out in terms of enrollment. So the other piece that I wanted to bring up was some specific comments about the draft that I saw. And I know it's just a draft. And I think you've gone a long ways towards looking at what some of the concerns are in compromise. There were a couple of questions that came to mind for me. The first piece is around pre-K eligibility and monitoring. It looks as though you've removed pre-qualification from that bill. But now it seems a little unclear who is establishing and monitoring that private program eligibility for partnership. And specifically, I want to make sure that if districts are responsible for the monitoring of those private pre-K programs, that they have the ability to modify contracts. Because that's in there as well, that there's going to be a uniform contract piece. But if districts don't have the ability to modify that for specific circumstances and they're responsible for the monitoring, it could put districts in a tricky place. The other piece is around uniform processes. I think what would happen is we have the AOA monitoring public term, they just monitor amber. I also have the SQs are monitoring as well. Right, so that was correct. So when the SQs are monitoring the district programs, is that the way it's written? So it wasn't clear to me in that draft if they were just monitoring the district programs or if they were responsible for the monitoring of other programs as well. So that does help clarify. In terms of the uniform forms and processes, I think it's fabulous to try to align pieces. I do think that there are specific circumstances in which districts do need to make the modifications. I didn't think about things like the birth date. The kindergarten entrance date is not the same throughout the state. So it would be hard to write a contract saying we will serve kids between these ages without having even that level of similarity around the state. The other piece in terms of it thinking about enrollment and attendance forms, we don't have consistent enrollment and attendance forms K through 12. We don't even have the same school databases. And thinking about right now how our districts all share a similar, we all use a shared power school. We've been able to manage much of this regionally. I'm not sure, you know, I'm in this conversation with Chittenden County about some of these pieces and even thinking about, you know, Burlington does all of their enrollment pieces online. That is not something that in Addison County we have moved to. And so that level of enrollment would be complicated to make entirely uniform. I'd love to see something in the bill about the Vermont Early Learning Standards, that that's the backbone of what we understand about what children should know and be able to do at various level stages. And our curriculum and assessment tools should be connected to that at a deep level in both public and private partner programs. Is there in those Vermont Early Learning Standards, you know, we're also talking a lot about literacy. I'm just wondering, are there standards in terms of literacy and assessment at the pre-K level? So the standards, the Vermont Early Learning Standards there are, they cover birth through third grade and they cover, I want to say, eight different domains, social-emotional approaches to learning, language and literacy, which are broken up separately, mathematics, history, mathematics, social studies, physical health and development and science, it's nine. And they are tied to the Common Core as well. And so when you get to the K through third, kindergarten through third grade, all of those Vermont Early Learning Standards actually link back directly to those Common Core. But with the addition of social-emotional, physical health and development, right, some of those pieces that Common Core doesn't touch. And other assessments in the pre-K? So the assessment tool that we use in pre-K is actually TS Gold, Teaching Strategies Gold. And it is tied to the Vermont Early Learning Standards. There's a crosswalk of the two. They are not identical. TS Gold is a formative observation-based assessment tool that does have, you know, a reliability, inter-rater reliability testing and so forth. So it is a, you know, you can use a portfolio and observations and document, other documentation to demonstrate kids meeting those goals. And struggling readers possibly, you know, because they're so young and talking about, I think would be at least, you know, looked at, you know, be noted on those assessments. That's right. So when we, right now, districts can look at those TS Gold. In fact, I recently ran those reports for all of our pre-K programs. And I can look across those and note when there are kids who are not meeting those expectations. And address that with the program occasionally. There are times where those results lead me to have a conversation about making a referral for early intervention services, that kind of thing. Yeah. So, and that is actually kind of leads in, right now I have access to look at all of those child assessment, child progress information. And I wonder, and this may just be a logistical question, but if there is a bifurcation of the system, how districts will be able to access that child progress data in the future? Because that has been incredibly valuable and I think does play into conversations around early intervention. And then the last two questions I have, one has to do with the grievance process. I'm wondering, there's two paths that you can take. And I can see that if there was a private program that had a grievance with a district, that that district might similarly have a grievance with the private program. And right now, there's two different agencies that would become involved. And I'm wondering how that grievance process might be worked out between those two different agencies. And then the last piece has to do with ongoing alignment of systems in a bifurcated system. So if we are setting up two different systems for public and private early childhood programs, we're really relying on ongoing alignment and agreement between those two agencies. And I think that it has the potential to bifurcate the system in inequitable ways for those families, children, and programs. So if this is the way we move forward, it's going to be incumbent upon the agencies to demonstrate how they are going to work together to coordinate those alignment, coordinate and align those systems. And to be perfectly honest, how that would be different from what's happened over the past couple of years. Your final point, could you elaborate just a little bit on, maybe give some examples of inequities that you could see evolving. And then totally unrelated, I needed a little bit better understanding of the problems with special ed portability, which was many bullet points up. So in terms of the alignment of systems, I think we in the field have had less guidance around most topics than we would really like. Certainly there have been times that I have contacted the agency of education, the Act 166 coordinator or others, and asked for specific guidance on how to handle a residency situation, for example, with a child who is maybe homeless and being served under McKinney-Vento. And there's been a general sort of either inability to answer some of those questions or an inability to get together with the other agency to get a timely answer. So I think that because there's so many parties involved at a state level, it can be challenging to get those answers in a timely way, or even at all. The other thing that has happened a lot to districts is in situations where there are concerns about private programs, and we've contacted either the agency of education or the agency of human services. What we have most frequently been told is to go back and look at our individual district contracts and address it locally, which has led to lots of different methods around the state of dealing with those kinds of issues. I'm lucky at this point that we've got a solid network of Act 166 coordinators around the state, and so we're usually at this point calling one another and saying, have you ever seen this before and what did you do? So at a local level, we're handling those, but it has led to inconsistency across the state. And in terms of the special education portability, I would say we are meeting. I don't oversee the special education piece, so I would defer that to our directors of special education, but I would say we are meeting the needs of the families, but we have a finite pool of resources to be able to do that, and serving children out of district is not currently a possibility. So financially, we are not able to send our staff out of the district to just the logistics involved of getting outreach staff to Burlington say are not feasible. The federal law allows you to use the resources within the district. It's called giving up your free and appropriate public education, your faith, and districts can decide how far they will go. So if your child needs those services, but you live in Ripton and work in Burlington. You would need to return to the district to receive those, so you wouldn't necessarily have to give them up? Right, but you would have to find a place in district.  So we do have outreach special educators who go to children's homes, who go into programs within our districts to serve those kids, and there are children who come to the school building as well. So it could be a kind of logistical inequity if there's a parent who leaves every morning at 7 to drop their kid off at a place in Burlington where they work. Okay, thank you. I've been having a hard time with that one. It's a little bit easier when you're looking at K-12. It's just much more complicated when you're looking for something that's just a 10-hour program and it's a three-year old. Right. Peter? So as we look at this, one thing I'm sort of hesitant to get in the way of is the way things have been developing organically. I think that districts came together, created positions like yours. You're now talking with other people who have similar positions to yours. We haven't been involved in that. And it seems to be evolving in a wonderful way that I think that in the way, you know, the success of the areas that are doing pre-K correctly are because we have reached out to coordinators. And then now you're talking about Chicken County and all that. So I guess I'd be more interested in ways to incentivize that organic improvement as opposed to using the heavy hand of government to do it. Any thoughts on that? How we can better incentivize that? Well, I guess what I would say is that it is working pretty well in Addison County. I mean, it limits notwithstanding that we have made it work that I think a part of that is that the districts have come together to really coordinate. The other piece to that is that we have always in Addison County or for a very long time have had a very strong early childhood community with resources. We were the first place in the state to have a parent child center. And we have the Mary Johnson program, which is fairly large and has been around for 50 plus years at this point. And so there was a long history of high quality early education. So that's a piece of it. I think that, but I do think that the regional coordination has been key in terms of helping families and programs navigate and districts for that matter, navigate a lot. It's been fairly complicated. I think we'd be interested at some point in talking with regional coordinators to find out how they set up that, how they set that up and how we might be able to find a way to help other districts with a similar kind of problem. Ours was set up in a conversation between Building Bright Futures and the districts themselves. It was before I was hired. So shortly after this law was passed, and as they were thinking about how are we going to enact it? So I have a question about the licensed lack of early educators. So currently you're working with 32 programs. And that would include programs that are in districts, that are at centers and that are in homes. That's right. And so each of those different environments has kind of a different requirement for the teachers and for the hours of direct instruction. So I guess the question that I've been kind of trying to probe a little bit is if those 32 programs of that capacity were to migrate into, let's just say, a purely public delivery system, what would that do to the number of educators? Would that actually make it, for just as an example, would that make it harder because we've got more direct instruction and more educators? Or would there also be a countering effect that those people, like budgets aside, that those people would be compensated more in line with the rest of K-12 public teachers? I'm just kind of wondering, is this kind of a zero-sum game? Is there something we can do that would be dynamic that would kind of help to... And I guess on the other question, what if more of these programs came into the smallest programs where you had the least direct instruction required? Does that somehow help to alleviate the shortage? I was kind of wondering where the sliders are in that kind of thing. Yeah. So in Addison County a few years ago, we created a mentor-teacher position. Mary Johnson, it was an initiative that we developed where Mary Johnson hired a teacher and sent that person out into some of the local programs that didn't have licensed teachers. So we had at that point three home-based programs and one center-based program that that mentor-teacher was supporting and that those programs were contracting to pay for. And that person received what I would say was a reasonable wage for that, but it was complicated to administer that piece. Since then, we still have a mentor-teacher who visits two of those home-based programs, one of the home-based programs closed. And the last one had a teacher who was in process with licensure and she finished her licensure and is now their licensed teacher. So I think the real complicating factor with early education is that for so long there wasn't really a point to having an early childhood teaching license because there was no pay benefit. And so now the field is playing catch-up in a lot of ways. There still isn't equity in wages in the private field and the private sector and the public sector or in benefits. And so I think we would need time to be able to get there. The other piece that I'm not sure about is 10 hours a week is a really hard, that's a hard position to fail. You're not going to necessarily hire a teacher for just those 10 hours, but the realities of childcare being what they are in the private sector, you're not going to be able to afford the wages full-time for a teacher based on those other 30 to 40 hours of private tuition. I'm just looking at the time. I want to make sure that we get Janice Stockman in and then it might be that we would be directed in questions for both of you. So Janice, thank you. Do I just go back here? Yes. Thank you. Hi. I'm Janice Stockman and I'm the early childhood coordinator for the Wyndham Southeast Supervisor Union and the Wyndham Southeast School District. Thank you for inviting me today. So my job title and my job is a little bit different than Meg's. As the early childhood coordinator, I oversee early childhood special education and public pre-K, our partnerships, and I also serve as a resource to our public pre-K classrooms in our school district for coaching, for resource support, and to navigate the morass of legislation and regulations and policies and programs that govern early childhood in our state. Wyndham Southeast is a small district compared to what Meg represents. We're Brattleboro, Guilford, Vernon, Dumberston, and Putney. Vernon is not technically in our school district. It's part of our supervisory union. I'm in my 11th year there. Prior to that, I was a consultant to the Child Development Division in the Head Start State Collaboration Office, and during that time is when many of the discussions around public pre-K were happening. Act 62 was the former legislation that allowed and made kind of pathways for education dollars to flow out to community private programs. At that time, I wasn't a policymaker, but I was at a lot of meetings, and there were many discussions about how to distinguish between the kinds of programs that would qualify for this high-quality pre-K education and how to distinguish those from the ones that met the minimum quality standards that were put forth by our Child Development Division's program regulations. One of the things that really stood out to me and was really impressive to me was that we were going to allow kids all around the state to receive a higher level, higher standards, and higher expectations for their education programs than what were formerly available to them. Because we were publicly funding it, we were making some requirements for quality standards, and that kids and families would have more access to high-quality education. So the criteria that you see in Act 166 is a result of compromises made during those discussions. So we have a licensed teacher endorsed in early childhood ed or early childhood special education who may not actually be the classroom teacher. They may be a teacher in a classroom down the hall. They may be the director who doesn't have teaching responsibilities. They had to have stars levels, three or four or five stars, a curriculum that follows the Vermont Early Learning Standards and using ongoing progress monitoring tools using the state-approved assessment teaching strategies goals. While I support a lot of the changes that your draft legislation is talking about, I hope you don't change one thing, that universal pre-K or UPK represents a higher standard than what's available if there were no pre-K legislation. So I'm going to tell you what I think is working well in Wyndham Southeast, what changes I would like to see that could improve pre-K, and then I want to give you some of my responses and reactions to the draft. So what's working well? We have 312 preschoolers enrolled in pre-K in our district. We've seen an increase every year that we've been doing this. So 312 is the most that we've had. We have four public classrooms serving children who are four years old by September 1st. All of these classrooms offer a full day, so in excess of the 10 required hours, they're there for the same amount of time as K through 6. Just for you, Ellen. Just for you. We have 18 partnerships with private early childhood programs, 17 centers, including Head Start, and one family child care home. We've not limited our pre-K region, and our neighboring SUs have not either. Another real positive thing is that families have choices, just like Meg described. Families can choose programs with a specific educational philosophy. They can choose programs that are located near where they work or where they live. They can choose public school, a private independent program. They can choose a part day, a full day, a school year, a full year, and that has really worked for families, and I think people appreciate that. I would say, for the most part, pre-K has increased the quality of early education in the community because of those standards that they have to meet. We have more licensed teachers now than before we started. However, not all of those licensed teachers are actually teaching in the classroom. Some of them are the administrators of the program, and we'll talk more about that later. The tuition reduction for families is significant, and it's the thing that allows more children access to pre-K. Some children are even able to access a 10-hour limited, 10-hours-a-week program at no cost to their families. Even though most families need more than 10-hours, and I will talk about that later too, some are able to access just the 10-hours, but not every private provider offers that limited program. Another benefit is that we've created a professional community of early childhood educators across the public and private settings. We developed bridges between both sectors that have mutual benefit. Our schools know more about the kids that are coming into kindergarten, and private programs feel elevated because of their partnership with the school district, which offers them professional development, access to the local standards board for teacher license renewal, and a voice at the table at our school board meetings. That was something that was initiated last year. So, actually, prior to our merger, the private providers were coming to school board meetings to give a report, a monthly report. We believe across the board, across both sectors, that children and families need both strong early childhood programs in their community and strong public schools. And so, Pre-K has been a way for us to work together on that. So, there are some changes that I would like to see happen, much of which you have addressed in your draft. I think the first one is I really like the idea of separating out the administrative oversight of... I'm not separating out. I would like to see administrative oversight go with the agency of education. Having the two separate state agencies with regulatory oversight of Pre-K programs is confusing and it's inefficient. I understand that there are capacity issues at the agency of education and so I hope that with more responsibility for AOE to oversee all of Pre-K by itself, those capacity issues will be addressed. Because my role does involve our public Pre-K classrooms, I am extremely aware of the duplication of having public schools also have to follow the Child Development Division program regulations in addition to our local and state board policies. I would recommend that for the public programs we just start with a clean slate and then add in regulations that are critical to maintain health safety and early childhood program quality for the benefit of kids and families. I think the current regulations from the Child Development Division are a good place to start for health and safety standards, but the majority of the regulations are duplicative, they're unnecessary or inefficient for school systems. And it's burdensome and onerous for public providers to comply with the current regulations and leads to duplication of effort. Professional development is one thing. The staff and student files where they're kept, fingerprinting and background checks, these are all things that have created a lot of hair pulling and extra work. Sometimes the regulations are even in contradiction to negotiated contracts for teachers and paraeducators. So I would say release the public providers from having to comply with those regulations. The most significant factor in effective early education is the teacher. And teachers with professional credentials and specific knowledge and skills about teaching other children are more effective than those without those equivalent credentials. I believe that every child that receives public funding for pre-k should be taught by a licensed teacher. I don't have data to show you, but I go into lots of classrooms and I see the difference between classrooms that are managed and taught and by someone with a teaching background. That's not to say that there aren't excellent early childhood educators who aren't licensed teachers, but finding a way to acknowledge and recognize their skills and bring them to a level of having teacher certification is something I think that has been a strength of our system in the past and I would hope to see that continue. Also, I urge you to consider allowing teachers with preschool Montessori certification to meet the teacher licensure requirements for universal pre-k. I don't think we ever talk about that and I don't have any particular investment in Montessori except that I know in my community that is a program that has struggled to maintain its ability to partner with us because their teachers go through a very highly structured and very thorough training program. It just is different than our state licensing process and I think those are highly qualified teachers. They do get a Montessori certificate. They get a Montessori certificate. They have to go through a lot of education and specific training in order to get that. We need clear guidelines and a process for monitoring and I understand that this is something the AOE has been working on for a number of years. We are looking forward to it being unveiled and I hope that this committee will be hearing from them pretty soon about that. I also think that within our school districts and within our partnerships that the monitoring should be done by an outside body. I think it's hard for us to be good partners and monitor them as well. I would just ask you to think about what is the most appropriate body to provide that monitoring. I too feel like 10 hours a week of pre-K education isn't enough and I don't have the evidence or the research to cite saying how much is the right dose or what's too little but I just anecdotally and given people's families situations 10 hours is not enough. Maybe when I was in kindergarten, maybe we had 10 hours of kindergarten but I think we even had more then. We had a nap too. Yeah, it's not enough time to develop the social emotional skills and all of those early academic skills that we want kids to have by the time they're in kindergarten. And finally, the private partners that I speak to want me to mention that there are administrative costs that they must bear in order to maintain the requirements that we want them to maintain in providing high quality pre-K. Everything from filling out forms to doing the ongoing progress monitoring to a high level of quality and reliability. They would like to be able to retain some of the tuition to defray those costs. And I don't know how that would happen but I support a way for us to talk about how some of that money could be allocated to overhead costs of partnering. I do want to say something about five-year-olds and I didn't even, I didn't write that. We were talking, you were talking about that a little bit before. I personally support the idea of five-year-olds being in kindergarten and I wouldn't want to see our school districts saying this child or this child should be retained in preschool. I think our schools should find ways to accommodate learners who are struggling and I think our schools are doing that very well. I also think that with partnerships, with vibrant partnerships, we should be able to accommodate kids' needs in whatever setting or whatever at the appropriate grade level and there is a complication when it comes to special education. So if we are saying a five-year-old isn't ready for kindergarten and they should repeat preschool, maybe there are some developmental delays that have yet to be identified. And if we keep five-year-olds in preschool and then discover that they need special education and they turn six at some point during that year, then our early childhood special ed system isn't licensed to serve them beyond the age of six. So I think it's very complicated when we're talking about that. So my reactions to the draft bill, I love, thank you so much for taking out the word pre-qualified. It's confusing. People don't know are they pre-qualified and then they are going to get qualified. So thank you for taking that away. I'm a little confused about the organizing structure and maybe you can help me understand it. So I read that AOE is responsible to administer pre-K. But the public programs go under AOE for monitoring and the private programs go under the Child Development Division or AHS for monitoring. All of the oversight, as it currently stands in draft, whatever draft it is that we have, the guidelines for running your pre-K program and the public program are under the agency of education. And if it's a private program, it's under AHS. And then we're looking at what we make sure gets drawn back and forth between those two. And it's complicated and this is where the draft is right now. Okay. This is not a done deal. Did I explain that correctly? I'm looking at our council over here. I think that could work as long as there's a strong umbrella over it that is AOE's responsibility. Because I don't really think like a legal counsel or anything, but those are education fund dollars, right, that come out of education. That definitely remains a question that the community will be looking at. Because at the moment it's bifurcated completely. There's a conversation that we'll look at that as well. Thank you. I want to make sure that we have a little time on also where we've got some other folks. We have some people checking in at the moment. So I think we can keep going. I just want to, I have just a couple of questions that we are going to be thinking about. One is the current legislation says that it has to be a licensed teacher. Not the licensed teacher that's, you know, in the building, the licensed teacher that's teaching for those hours. We also hear that we are understaffed at the moment. We don't have enough early childhood educators or special educators. How long do you think it would take? I mean, how many programs for you right now would you say, I'm just going to ask you three questions over once, but I guess what I'm just trying to get to is, how's your area doing in terms of having licensed teachers already teaching in the private programs versus their, you know, in the building, coming into maybe their supervising, maybe their teaching for part of the time? I would say that probably, I think about seven or eight of our partner programs do not have licensed teachers in the classroom. For the most part, they have licensed teachers as the director or the administrator. Or they might have a teacher in one classroom, but not in the other. So there would be a ramp-up period of ramp-up. And I think that, you know, I think there were more vibrant initiatives to increase the availability of supported peer review with a provisional license. And actually in my district, our superintendent does sign off on provisional license occasionally for private. I know, and it takes a bit of convincing. And the candidate has to approve their commitment to following through on it. But I feel like this may be beyond the bounds of scope of your committee, but we are never going to get to the place where we want with results for young kids if we continue to have inequality in qualifications and compensation for early childhood educators. So we just need to figure that out. And it's hard. It's why we haven't figured it out so far. But those struggling private programs are not going to make huge gains that we want to see unless they can pay their teachers, unless they can find a teacher who's willing to work there and then pay them at an equivalent rate to some of these working in the public sector. Just a technical question. If we take UPK vouchers aside, does a four-star, or maybe C-certified private provider have a licensed teacher in the classroom? No. Okay. Not now. Right. But they do in order to receive the voucher. This is sort of contrary to what you actually said. I'm really glad you said it because it made me think more about it. But whenever we've gone to visit a private four-star, NACI-certified center, I always ask, okay, could I ever tell the difference between when pre-K is going on and when childcare is going on and they universally know you're always watching high-quality childcare, which then makes me wonder about the necessity of having a licensed teacher. I mean, if you are already reaching four-stars or NACI certification, are we adding an unnecessary level by saying, and you have to have a 10-hour-a-week licensed teacher on the system? I don't think it's an unnecessary level. I think the stars and NACI accreditation value structural elements and reward them with that level of accreditation. And the structural elements like classroom size, materials, those are really important, too. The environment is really important. But I think all of the research that I read is the teacher and the skills of the teacher are the critical factors in high-quality education, whether it's pre-K or fourth grade. You can have a beautiful classroom with all the right materials and you can wash your hands at all the right time. But if the teacher doesn't know how to teach and manage a classroom... I guess what I would say, Peter, is... Sorry, I can't see you. I would say all of the research around what makes an effective professional development has to do with coaching and having a teacher with background and professional experience in education as that mentor in the room has a far greater impact than anything else. So in the situations where we only have a licensed teacher on site who's not in the room, I think that doesn't happen. But in the situations where the licensed teacher might be there and be absent for a day, things can carry on because she's going with she, it's usually she. Because she's been there most of the time. Does that make sense? Thank you. You get the start? Okay, great. So I'm Tiffany Hubbard and I oversee the school-based programs that are provided through Washington County Mental Health to our local community schools, our educational partners in the Washington County area. I'm Andrew Ripley and I provide the clinical oversight and supervision for approximately a third of our programs. We have a couple of other clinical supervisors as well. And as I look around the room, there are also other educational mental health leaders in the room. Amy Irish from NCSS is also in. And there are some DMH folks who are very privy to the mental health services that are provided in our public school system. So Andrew and I are really just going to speak about the services that Washington County provides to our local youth and our education system. And I think each of you have, maybe you do or maybe you don't, we'll sort of move it along in this PowerPoint. But just as we go through, there are some slides that we'll review and then some that we'll just skim over. But please don't hesitate to ask us questions along the way. It will be very helpful if there's information that we're providing or acronyms that we're using that you'd like more information about. But I would say is that the mental health services locally in our, I think in our state, across our state certainly have changed tremendously in the years that I've been involved. So in 1995, Washington County created the very first behavioral interventionist position in the state of Vermont. That position is now duplicated across all designated agencies in the state and serve hundreds of youth. We run a BI conference every year and we have about an average of 600 attendees of people who are providing mental health services to students in public schools. Is that inspirational? How are you doing? Oh, yeah. So Ed was one of the pioneers. Yeah. Oh, the services. In our time, over the time, those services have changed so greatly from one-on-one contracts serving one youth with a behavioral interventionist, a behavior consultant and a case manager wrapping up that youth, to building a system that really looks at and is supporting a multi-tiered system of support within schools. The needs of the youth have changed drastically over the years. We'll talk about that. Our ability to employ quality mental health professionals in schools to address the acuity of need and the numbers of students who are in need of those services and support have also changed dramatically. So there are a number of challenges that we face, but there is some fantastic work that's being done statewide in different ways, addressing the mental health services that we can provide to the local youth. As we look, just moving through some of these pieces, I can't come back. Some of the trends that we've seen over time, I think this is a good place to start, of the students that are in schools, that teachers who are trained as educators to train on academics and academic subject area are now faced with a student population with a demographic that is entrenched in trauma. We're talking community trauma, family systems trauma, and that trauma is manifesting itself every day in school in the form of aggression, isolation, self-injury, mental illness for young children all the way up through elementary, middle, and high school. At this time, we serve a greater number of youth in the programs that we oversee, and we'll talk in a moment specifically about those numbers. Pre-K through 4th grade, the population in K-1-2 is our highest population of the students that we serve. Some of the things that we see on a regular basis for the students that we serve is some of this abuse and abuse as a family factor. It's almost a contributing, or almost a universal contributing factor for children that are in the services that we're providing within the schools. There's an increase in mental health need in the caregiving system, poverty, and economic stress. There's an abundance of DCF involvement. Many of the youth that we serve have been either in residential placements and or on track to either be hospitalized and or placed in residential care based on their level of need. When we look at some of the lists of the trends that we're seeing, this wasn't the presentation of the youth that were referred a number of years ago. They were more developmentally delayed. They were children who had significant learning impairments, who their behavior presented in such a way that created some difficulty in their ability to learn. So 15 years ago, 20 years ago, we would get contracts to help support students in school around managing their behavior so that education staff could then teach them the necessary skills. Now, we are working with children who come to school with far more in their backpack every day than the books and the pencils and the paper that is going to and from school. Do you want to say about that, Andrew? Yeah. So just a little bit of my perspective. I started this work about 12 years ago. I had, not long before that, completed my undergraduate degree at UVM and taught at an international school. I really started to miss Vermont and my family, the connections and the cold weather even, the changing lights of the day, the whole night. And so I moved back, and I was looking around for teaching positions and this was about 2008. It was really difficult to find a teaching position at that time. Teachers weren't retiring. They were like, we need to kind of hold on. So I continued to look around, look in the area where I'm connected, I'm from this area, and landed in what was then called Tavis. So that was the one-on-one BI program that Tiffany's talking about. I worked in one of these schools that was entrenched with this trauma. The young kid that I was supporting, witness to domestic violence, substance abuse, parental incarceration, a lot of risk factors kind of stacked up against them. Today, kind of fast forward a little bit to now, and I'm overseeing a lot of the clinical work that's happening within these programs. And like Tiffany was saying, the level of acuity has just continued to rise and increase, which is really changing how we're working with these students and the teachers and schools that are supporting them. And the kid that I worked with so many years ago, one-on-one, would now almost, I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty, would not have been given a referral for one-on-one services. They would have been referred to one of our less intense programs that serve kids with ratios of close to 10 to one. So mental health professionals embedded kind of in the schools working under our clinical oversight supervision to train and support teachers in helping these students. And so that kind of is the position that I'm coming from with all this. It's a really... We're doing a lot of things really right, and I think we still have a long way that we can go to continue to kind of build and support these communities to get through and pass all of the adverse events that are occurring in these kids' lives. The list just delineates just a few of those. When we speak about the services that we've provided in time from the position that Andrew's referring to, we currently in Washington County alone have 40 clinical staff that oversee 350 youth receiving mental health school-based services. 49 of those staff or 49 staff, in addition to the clinical staff, provide one-on-one services to youth. And those 49 youth... I mean, those 49 staff are serving some of our most or the most intensive-need youth in the community. As a result, we have a high number of working comp claims because of the aggression, the violence, the risk of harm that's taking place on a regular basis. The behavior that we once were addressing in school, which was oppositional defiant disorder, ADHD, distraction, has shifted gears so significantly. Violence, physical intervention to keep the students safe, our staff safe, education teams safe. The involvement with law enforcement that's in school around some of the level of need that's incredibly disruptive in classrooms in the school community are just some, to name a few, of the changes that we've seen manifest over time. When we think about programs that we have, as I think I created a slide here when I just looked at sort of the services that Washington County alone has put together in an effort to support our local school system and the ever-growing need of the students, behind me is a number of the programs and the dates and the years in which they started in an effort to meet the overwhelming demand that schools were contracting with us for, reaching out on a regular basis for referrals. That has not stopped with about approximately 100 clinicians working in our local schools. We have referrals of about 15 to 20 referrals for services, for students that we are unable to address at this time. A number of those students are not even in school. They're receiving two hours of tutorial instruction outside of the school building each day because their level of need has been determined to be so unsafe that they're not able to be managed in the school. These students are receiving tutorial services in local police stations and local libraries. Wherever the school or the educational teams and administration can find space that's available to offer that tutorial service, all while waiting for mental health to be able to pick up the referral. Some of the challenges for us to be able to pick up those referrals is staffing. We currently have about 40 staff vacancies in school-based services alone. Alone. And yet we still serve over 350 students locally in our community. There are, at this time, two active PBIS clinician referrals. That particular program, here the Positive Behavioral Intervention Support Clinician Program created in 2019, was created under the idea of doing more with less, providing more mental health services with fewer number of professionals to serve as many kids as we possibly could within a school system. In 2013, we started with one clinician. We now have 13 clinicians with two to three referrals waiting for us to hire those clinician physicians. That is proven to be incredibly difficult for us because they require a master's degree and specialized training and support and applied behavioral analysis to be able to work with and provide the mental health needs that these students require. And our ability to pay those physicians in a way that's able to maintain them and sustain them is so incredibly limited. As a result, a number of the qualified staff are hired by the public school system because they can make more money to work through the school system. And yet the need of the students are so intense that the school system needs the designated agency to provide the designated agency services. And yet we're having a very difficult time hiring and maintaining the qualified staff to provide that set of service. So that is an ongoing challenge that we face on a regular basis because the acuity of need for the students that are being referred require the psychiatric oversight. They require the mental health services to support through counseling. They require the respite services that the designated agency has that's able to be provided. For us, within the school system, we provide a lot of the behavioral support, run a lot of mental health groups, and can push counseling services in. But it's not meeting the need of the students that are there in terms of numbers, in terms of numbers. So we battle every year vacancies. We battle the ability to be able to pick up all of the referrals for students who are not in school at this time waiting to be educated based on our ability to provide staffing. To some of you. So just a little bit about that project behavior support clinician position that I think is so powerful and I think it's really important that we continue to pursue and kind of develop that program. The professionals who fill those roles are collaborating with their local school teams to kind of build and support the systems that are designed to meet the needs of every student in the school. So they're kind of informing that universal level of social emotional learning within these different schools. And then they're working in a more targeted capacity with the students whose needs aren't met with that universal level instruction. So we're helping bring schools into using best practice and kind of helping shape and mold that along the way and then providing those kind of targeted services that bring in the psychiatric support the additional case management that comes with these positions and the needs of those students over time. So I wasn't the first one, but I was the second right around the same time. The needs of the students when I first started were very different than the needs of the students whom I'm overseeing now. In 2013, 2014 the internal systems within school communities weren't robust enough to kind of support all of their students. And so that's why we had all of these referrals coming in. And I think as we helped develop those systems we're able to, schools are able to meet more of the need, but it's still not enough. And so the referrals that my clinicians get are for pretty aggressive and intense behaviors. Really major mental health diagnoses, developmental diagnoses and those children bring with them this huge set of complex challenges with trauma, with their disability and then even within the schools that are supporting them trying to understand how do we make this person a part of our community? How do we keep them a part of our community? Within our programs we have a saying called within multi-tier systems of support there's universal secondary and tertiary levels and we have what we call 2.9ers. So those are the kids at the very top of that secondary level that ten years ago those were tier three students and they were served in an individual capacity with a one-on-one interventionist and a case manager and a behavior consultant. And now we're asking our school-based clinicians to work with these kids with less resources both at the schools have and when we're able to find the folks to fill these positions they're just kind of overrun sometimes with a feeling of urgency and need to help all these kids because I think that's really why everyone gets into it is to help the kids. So what used to be one of the unique sort of make-ups or infrastructure for how we provided services in Washington County that has now been duplicated also across the state is that we provide a significant level of wraparound mental health services to you so the wraparound being a case manager or clinician as well as a behaviorist and an individual who provides that one-on-one capacity. Much of the case management work or the school clinician work is spent in the homes in these children's homes working with their families the family system varies by significant degree for so many of the students we have, last year we served one of the highest levels of homeless population that we had served in my 20-some odd years of doing this work we had youth every day that we would have a staff that would meet the student at a parking ride where that family was living homeless in their car so when we picked the children up to bring them to school for many of them we were going to a parking lot to pick them up from their car where they were staying for that evening we fill bags of food at the end of the day for a number of our youth so that they have food to eat when they go home because home is a question that we answer almost every afternoon for a sadly larger than ever should be population of students when they say where am I going today where am I going to be staying tonight feeding these students picking them up in parking lots from cars that they had slept in helping them get items out of their bags their backpacks at school and pulling out jewels and pulling out bags of marijuana and picking up the Bacardi the empty Bacardi rum bottle that fell out of our preschoolers bag on Tuesday morning at school this is the stuff that our staff are working with these youth on a regular basis and yet these students come to school and there's this overwhelming expectation that they're going to attend and they're going to learn and they're going to follow instruction and they're going to walk perfectly well in a straight line and they're only going to raise their hand and they're going to respond when called upon and that's just not how it is that's just not how it is our Becley Day program I just want to jump to that really quickly in 2010 as in an effort to not to reduce the need for alternative school placements for some of the youth that we were supporting in school who were boarding at the ER waiting for placements at the Browell Law Retreat at Barrett Center at NFI for assessments and evaluations we created the Becley Day program which is part of our school based mental health services and support it's a crisis stabilization program that in an effort to keep youth in their community and to provide them with a high quality of education mental health services at our children's department we provide a program a crisis oriented program that provides stimulus control educational, social, emotional and behavioral support in this way through the children's division around wrapping youth up in keeping them within the community without needing to have them be hospitalized that program has the capacity to serve 12 youth those 12 youth come with 12 behavior interventionist a board certified behavior consultant a program manager a program clinician and a case manager that program in terms of its staffing has increased dramatically over the last 9 now 10 years that it's been in place because the youth that were coming to that program and or who are referred to that program the amount of home support that we provide to those youth in their home to stabilize their home in an effort to allow them to transfer from one environment to the next a school environment, a mental health environment and a home environment that allows them conducive to build skills both academic skills as well as social and emotional skills requires such significant oversight based on the behavioral presentation that we see of these youth we have on average anywhere between 6 to 8 referrals for that program that run every single month that we are unable to staff so when you think about the level of youth that are generally served in a hospital setting in our effort to keep them in the community that both are not able to be hospitalized at this time because of the wait list and are not able to be served through the weekly day program they are pushed into their education system and these students show up in public schools every day when they can't they receive that tutorial service outside of the school the pressure for us to be able to serve those youth because none of us want to know that there is children that are not being served led us to move all the way down to this base piece to this pod model was to create a service provision that would allow us to serve more youth with the staff that we currently have available to us so we took or we moved away from what once was individual service contracts for one youth when schools would need to refer to a youth to mental health to provide mental health services and we now bundled a contract where school systems can purchase a set of professionals mental health professionals that we then place into a school system that have the ability to serve up to an identified amount of youth based on their clinical capacity and need this was in a response to mental health needing to do more with what service, what staff what qualified staff they had available we started the first year with about seven pods, eight pods and in our second year we now have ten pod contracts so there are in the eight supervisory unions in the 27 schools that we support we have ten pod contracts where school districts or supervisory union are purchasing a set of mental health professionals to be placed in their local school districts and then mental health and education are sitting together in a clinical capacity asking educators to come on board in the administration to sit in a clinical capacity with us to review the students that are in need and to help identify which students almost triaging need are in need of the mental health services and support that conversation that is evolving on a regular basis for us we're just a couple of years in we're working out some of the kinks we're finding some challenges in that the clinical teams that we've placed in the school are feeling a bit overwhelmed with the need that are seeing the students in the school classroom and teachers coming up to them in the hallway saying please what do I need to do to get a student on your team and there's a student that's moving but I have four students that need to come on in so we are stretched regularly to try to still even with this new effort to place a team of up to eight mental health professionals in a pod in a supervisory union still to be able to stay on top of the need when we look at schools services that we're able to provide through the designated agency as well as what the local education agencies are able to provide if they do the services on their own when they look at the children that they have for need we've just lined out here and this is not a a closed list meaning there are far more we just hit a number of the bulleted ones but here's some of the services that the schools are able to access when they receive mental health services for their youth in school so their efforts to be able to or when they have to decide can we get a child into the mental health services is there enough staffing available is there enough resources available if there's not then here's how we serve them this is what we have available we're constantly juggling how we provide the mental health services to the robust population of students that are in school that are on our wait lists regularly and the challenge for the school systems is that there's not enough service and support for all of them so we have to be able to do what we can do for those who don't you know make the cut for the mental health services so we're constantly looking at different ways to provide those services and how we can help meet the needs I'm going to move back here just a little bit in 1997 we created what was what we still refer to today as a governance board and this is unique to Washington County at this time although I tout it as much as I possibly can across the state since 1997 all school administrators, sped directors, building principals and myself, the Children's Director of Washington County as well as the Director of Choice Academy which is our alternative school come together once a month and all of us sit around a table at a conference center for about two and a half hours and we talk about the needs of the students in our schools and how we can build programming and how we can provide services that has proven to be incredibly effective and beneficial to so many students in our area that is how all of the programs that you've seen listed have been created over time in collaboration with our educators around here's what we're experiencing here's the presentation how can we partner with you how can we get some of these needs met despite the services we were able to provide despite the number of students we serve there is always and there continues to be an ongoing conversation around we're not doing enough we collectively mental health education we have far more youth that need these sets of services than what we're able to provide what about the other students how do we continue to provide it as we speak as I'm here today I'm not in our governance board which was today for this month's meeting where they're talking about building where some of the conversation is talking about building alternative programming within the public schools because our ability to serve them outside of the school is compromising school budgets and their ability to provide educational staffing so the governance board has proven to be incredibly beneficial for us we talk about the challenges we talk about the successes we talk about family systems that move from district to district so there's an awareness of need and services that can be provided I'm not sure exactly how it lines up with governance board but one of our one of our local partners one of the SU's that we partner with really closely has contracted for that set of professional services that's the pod there are BI's across their supervisory union and in every school in that district there is a positive behavior support clinician and so seeing how the programs can kind of work together to meet the needs of the entire supervisory union has been a really high opening kind of experience and is an ongoing challenge to find the right people to do it it takes a pretty unique set of skills to be able to build an alternative program within a public school how do you prevent students from needing to be outplaced you support them earlier and better to the greatest extent possible you support the adults who are interacting with them in learning how to do that and when I think about this SU we've recently kind of undergone some changes in how we're structuring our class clinicians within some of their schools to create more of a fluid pre K through 12 model to allow for some of the things that Tiffany's talking about following a family when there are multiple students who are being referred for these more intense levels of service so that there's a unified point of contact there's not a loss of information when a student goes from an elementary school to a middle school just because they're changing buildings the same team the same set of connected professionals to continue to support them and it's a it's a pretty powerful it's a pretty powerful thing to witness when schools come together and they have a list of students that's a mile long these are small communities and the numbers are really staggering and what's what the schools are doing and what we're trying to help them with is how do we do that triage how do we look through this list and say these can be best met with which supports how do we get the most help for the kids the most right help because it's not all the same so how do we get the right help for the kids and as many of them as possible and kind of helping schools and learning how schools think about that and witnessing their process and taking part in it has allowed me to really see the extent of the mental health crisis that is essentially within these communities I'm mindful of the time and I want to make sure that we have time for our committee members to ask you questions so I don't go up to you yeah that's a great time absolutely it's it's starting to hear your testimony on the number of children that you're trying to serve how many statewide have you connected with other mental health services in terms of numbers a guess so I don't have those numbers exactly but oh for the record Tracy Munging from the department of mental health but that's certainly something that we can get for you absolutely yes I have a question your governance board what is the makeup of that board so the makeup of that board is the director of children and youth services from Washington County myself the director of school-based services and the director of alternative school placement and then all the SPED directors and in some districts where the SPED director can't be represented the director of curriculum and or a building principal represents the schools or the SU of the students of contracts that they have with us law enforcement there is not law enforcement because the way the governance board there's not a reason for them to not attend we've had broader based meetings where law enforcement has participated most recently this year we have the district director of DCF participates in our governance board but for many years it was the collaboration between education and mental health and the provision of the contractual services that we were providing to the schools and the department project vision in Rutland I'll see if I can get some information but it's made a significant difference in our community significant particularly with drug related issues and children law enforcement sits on it absolutely as the collaborative part of it is the hospital school system, police departments I mean there's that it's amazing how many people have come together and it made a significant difference in housing and a multitude of different things I'll see if I can grab you some thank you I will look into that you can look it up for each school in which we have a clinician each of them sits in the school's EST team and there are law enforcement officers that sit in many of those EST teams but those are smaller the more school specific versus the broader looking at the entire county and the services through the county but yeah thank you for that Act 264 1988 set the relationship between the designated agencies and the school do we need to pull that out and nest it off or is it working well so I sit on the Act 264 committee for the state and I have for eight years I believe we talk about this regularly at the Act 264 board in Tracy if you were going to say something feel free to jump in each of the youth all of the youth that we serve we have a coordinated services plan and we have the reviews every six month and we use them actively and there's been a huge push and proponent of that really driven through the Federation of Families as well as the Act 264 board to take a lot of data to make sure that across the state because it's an entitlement that every youth has the right or family has the right to a coordinated services plan and it's annual review we do use those at least in Washington County I can speak to our designated agency significantly it's helpful to bring everybody to the table I was on the the child trauma yeah a few years ago and one of the things that we were looking at was that 264 got lost somewhere in the senate but I do remember hearing some schools that had to deal with more than one designated agency and sometimes they had a great relationship with one but it didn't work as well with the other and then there was criticism about the school but in reality it was that complexity any thoughts I think they said we could just have one designated agency that we worked with yeah so I can see where that might be the case we certainly, and we have for years Washington County has crossed county lines so we provide well we have three pods, four pods I'm just thinking clinicians off the top of my head two, four, six clinical staff probably about 24 bi staff in two clinical coordinators that oversee staff that work outside of Washington County work in the Caledonia central supervisor union area so that would be an example of a school system who would have both Northeast Kingdom and Washington County and so if we open a case if we're providing services and those students are identified through our designated agency then we would run the CSP for those who are not a part of our contractual agreement with the school then they would be served through Northeast Kingdom so I can see where that, I mean that there's a couple that would receive different designated agency supports just a quick one my favorite topic are prisons in Woodside how do we support our children in Woodside who are supposedly the worst of the worst and that's why they're there is it community high school of Vermont do they have to do that or who encompasses these kids I know there might not be any right now and they might be closing out but we still don't know what's going to happen to them help there are great conversations in the state there's also a significant amount of conversation that's taking place within our agency around how we support some of the youth that are either being discharged or will be leaving Woodside I think those are the same student that's what I'm trying to I think it's important for us to say that we serve a similar population to the youth that are residing at Woodside right now there are still a number of those youth with similar presentations with legal charges that look quite similar to those youth that are in our community right now so how we talk about providing housing, residential care, mental health wraparound services to support providing services to education systems for these children set in education certainly those are conversations that have started to be dabbled in at our government's board and certain that they will likely continue as time increases for the I worry about those children it's one thing it's a horrible thing in the high schools but I also worry so much about the ones that have been removed from that setting that very first student that I worked with twelve years ago had three younger brothers and one of them went to Woodside one of them is currently served in an unidentified school and so I think the best tact is prevention how do we stop the kids from having to get there it's with those community based supports it's with the intensive in-home push in parent training with the behavior intervention with the school staff training it's like how do we make these kids feel like they're a part of our community like they're connected like we all feel like we're part of communities because when you're a part of something you're less likely to be disruptive towards it making those kids really be a part of the community I think it's the best way to help the kids that might end up in Woodside is to how do we stop them from getting there so glad you brought up the issue of prevention so I'm going to give you kind of a pick one or the other for the difference here we're talking about a universal after school program funded with all the receipts from marijuana sales if we go down that path if you have the choice of putting all that money into high quality early education child care or is it after school which do you think would be the more effective use of that money oh that is oh I don't think it's a joint alright you can agree to take that question go ahead I mean it is a tough question I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer and you could sit on both sides of the fence there is such a significant need for one, getting children off the streets and two, the latch-a-key children who are at home or in home environments after school that are not conducive to mental health or mental well-being and so much of the behavior and aggression and volatility that we deal with every day is what they're exposed to after school hours so that's huge we all know that early ed, early prevention early child care infant toddler care providing necessary support to that developing brain has a lifetime impact and I've always been for the 25 years of doing this have always been a huge supporter of catching children when they're young because if we can build their foundation that developmental foundation being built on a fragmented foundation and everything we teach beyond that is being built from a fragmented foundation where we're just trying to fill in the gaps constantly so that as they continue to develop that that foundation those cracks don't get wider and wider is so beneficial it is absolutely so beneficial and early children's mental health is so important so yeah, I mean I don't know if I would pick one of the other or the other that's tough to fight it in half with a little meat right, right brain science so let's have you be the last question because I want to make sure we have a little break yeah, I just want to make a statement just about the what you just said about the developing brain I just read a study that trauma increases the size of the hippocampus in our brain which is in charge of controlling emotions and attention and it never grows back down so I really support getting in really early with families because I think once that happens once that hippocampus increases because of trauma it's really hard for a kid to master the skills they need the other question I have I was a school guidance counselor addressing mental health when I left was one of the biggest dilemmas for me in terms of but it sounds like you're developing like this pod system sounds fabulous in terms of where it's evolved but I'm just wondering in terms of the other children the children that don't need your services do you feel like the children that are struggling with mental illness have a big impact on other kids being able to access their learning I'll take a step back I think they are impacted when students are in classes together they go to lunch together they go to recess together see the trials and tribulations and successes of all of your classmates regardless of what those are those will have an impact on your fellow students but I think the real the real target there is how do we help teach the rest of our community how to be supportive allies and advocates for their community members that have disabilities how do we make sure that they know okay this is not about me the teacher just said and how do we equip those young children with the skills to talk about it with the same adult to identify their own emotions about it to kind of navigate some of those challenges I think it's oftentimes you know we have to we all live together and so we have to learn how to coexist and that's on both sides and so whether the students are suffering from illness or are neurotypical how do we support both of them to live together because we can't have anymore people leaving need more people here how do we teach them folks to coexist really in terms of the access to the education I'm not sure I can speak specifically about because I think it's so variable do you think it's safe to say it's a significant impact it's hard not to be impacted when there's desk being flipped chairs being thrown and you are at risk of being injured and that's a everyday occurrence in our public school system there's no doubt about that and so we are mindful and cognizant all the time about the ripple effect of the behavior of one or two students in a classroom and how to create and promote safety because if you're going to school or result of a system then it's really hard to learn when you're questioning your safety on a regular basis and if I could just say one piece about the developing brain and the hippocampus yes, while indeed that is true there is such plasticity in our neurology and for that all of us should be incredibly grateful the work that all mental health clinicians do on a regular basis for young students and adults alike is creating new neural pathways so that they can learn new ways to respond, to regulate to monitor and modulate their behavior and they can learn it with repetition and routine despite the life experiences that continue to be thrown at them so the brain's ability to change and adapt is also as true at later years as it is in those early developmental years where trauma is changing the way it is initially designed and developed thank you very much thank you for your work we'll take another break we'll come back to you great, my name is Amy Irish from Northwestern Catholic and Support Services and I would love to put a shameless plug out here since you're all on the table because every year the success beyond six BI directors from the state of Vermont and all the other agencies put on a BI conference for all these BI's to testify again about every year and the last two years I sat as a chair for that program and I sent letters to each of you and emails inviting you to that conference and I'm going to do so again in August and I would really encourage you to come Senator Ash came last year we've invited the governor this year and we're seeing anywhere from 500 to 600 behavior undergraduates that are working in public schools and sitting on this community I think it's really important for you to be a part of that and see what that looks like thank you thank you thank you so much okay, thank you so much for coming in it's been quite a topic that we've been finding ourselves waiting through and we very much appreciate your testimony so for the record could you tell us who you are sure, I'm Beth Cobb, superintendent at Essex Westbridge School District and I'm Jackie Tolman, I'm the director of learning and instructional impact for Essex Westbridge thank you right so we are going to explain what we are doing in Essex Westbridge School District to meet our literacy needs and what we've done and our plan to move forward our testimony that we turned in to all of you is really the why behind we're doing it and state some research so the impact of what has hit home for us and the impact of literacy and how important it really is so we quoted and have some in there so we began looking at literacy we are a newly formed district, this is our third year and I am the, in my third year superintendent for Essex Westbridge I came from the Bradford area superintendent very excited to start with a new district and really hone in the needs of all our students in the district we created through a lot of large needs assessment created our continuous improvement plan which we actually call our instructional strategic plan as well the continuous improvement plan is the AOE is named for it but we believe it really guides and does everything that that's our plan, that's our plan forward we made some pretty bold statements in our aspirations and measurable outcomes looking at our data so the one that we will focus on today because you want to know about literacy is that by the end of third grade all students will read on grade level so it's a whole statement to make we have pushback in the beginning for people saying well how are you going to do that and shouldn't we say, in the end from teachers shouldn't we say 80% my comment is what do we do with the other 20 so you're leaving 20% behind and what if your child was in that 20% so we really went full force we're questioned about that by the board last night you know how long do you think 100% so that is our statement and what it's really done for us by stating that has had us very extremely focused we have really dove into our achievement gaps in literacy and have been presenting that to the board our achievement gap is large for those that are on an IEP and those that from our racial communities so we know we have that it's I feel like it's the first time that we have really dove into that and pulled that data and it's hard to see it's courageous conversations around it but we're doing it so Jackie joined us this year and has done a phenomenal job on getting us focused on that measurable outcome so I'll be quiet for a minute and let Jackie talk yeah so I think to what Beth was saying one of the most critical components of achievement of a goal especially one such as lofty as this that all children will read on grade level by the end of grade is to really look at what your current reality is and paint an accurate picture of that current reality and so as Beth mentioned what we've done is we've looked at multiple sources of data and on one hand where people might have said in the past well you know 75% of our kids at grade four are reading on grade level and so we're above the state standard in reading on SBAC scores so that's good for us but then when you disaggregate that further you look at our gaps of upwards 100% of our kids dependent on demographic qualifier are not reading on grade level and that that trend actually goes third grade through our high school and so again a demographic should never define a destination and so that's what we are saying in essence Westford we are getting away from that idea just because you might come to us with this specific characteristic or this you know this will be your fate but to do that right so how do we do that as a system so we really are paying close attention to our data and we're paying very close attention to the technical skill sets that our teachers need to analyze data and not just the 30,000 foot data you know such as SBAC and what that gives us at the state level but our tri-annual local assessment data and then we are further developing our data literacy uh, colleague ship to look at the ground level data and we are developing a system in which that each grade level are going to be looking at data on a bi-weekly basis of what is actually happening for their kids in their classroom so with the intent of closing that achievement gap through data analysis at a time when there's actually something that we can do about it versus waiting sometimes months sometimes years for our kids to get the intervention that they need so we have created a system where we have the belief of professional learning communities and teachers learning from one another. We have experts and we it's the only profession, it is a profession that's been very isolated for many years so to open those doors and have people communicating with each other, planning together looking at each other's student work, looking at each other's assessments and really learning how do we move the system forward particularly in literacy and mathematics but again we're focused on literacy for this so we have a viable, sustainable curriculum that is needed. So we have teachers currently working on literacy essential standards and every standard that the teacher can have at those standards we really have to narrow those down to make sure that I'll use great to. At grade two every student meets the standard in three or four within reading. The others are great to know but we are going to really focus in on certain standards so that and when those students don't get that standard the classroom teacher will try other strategies, intervention within the first instruction and then if that doesn't work call on others to help with an intervention system that is woven around the data and I think this is powerful work because it's teachers themselves who we are charging doing this work for our kids looking at the vast majority of standards that they previously have been accountable to but what has been lacking is that systemic approach to truly identifying what is most essential for kids to be able to succeed at the next level to matriculate to that next level and so when you have the folks that are on the ground actually doing this work and really wrapping their expertise around that and then working with interventionists and special educators and coaches to identify again what is most essential and then match that instructional strategy and that assessment to what is most essential that again that develops your guaranteed and you can vertically align that and you will have powerful systemic shifts so this year we are both Jackie and I are in an instructional leadership course which is a majority of our principals are in and we are conducting learning how to do walkthroughs and what we're looking for in the literacy classroom so our principals can offer feedback to teachers so we are working together as a leadership team really defining what do we want to see in the literacy classroom a well balanced including the FOMIMA awareness where does that fit into our balanced assessments and balanced literacy program so we're working with our leadership team doing that they're practicing we all are practicing good guided feedback so they can really coach teachers to move forward and learn we're trying to I keep saying Jackie what we want is a learning system where everybody is learning including us where we need to be learning as well can I have a clarifier do you use the term balanced literacy is that capital B, capital L or small b, small l capital b, capital l and we speak to those individual components of the balanced literacy approach in our testimony you'll see it referenced in a few different areas yes and there's there's misconceptions out there what balanced literacy program is I feel like as when I went through my pre in college to learn about reading I think I had two courses and my minor was reading so to come out I learned about balanced literacy but I learned more about how to teach comprehension how to use visual and I did not learn a lot about FOMIMA awareness I only did that when I started to dabble in what is this reading recovery stuff and what are the sounds kids need to know so just to piggyback on what Beth just said so I went through the system actually the same system but a little bit of a time after and also had a minor in reading but the curriculum that I was exposed to again at the same university in Vermont one of our Vermont University was entirely different and then when I started teaching in the early 90s I was actually teaching in St. John's which was one of the reading recovery pilot schools so I was working behind the glass as some of you may know but then to think about how the pedagogical shift over the years and really what it comes down to is that balanced approach and truly analyzing data so that we are truly identifying instruction strategy with a skill gap and teachers need the deep pockets to be able to do that and they need to have that immediate opportunity for professional reflection and growth so that they can meet the needs of our kids so along with our principals learning about what is needed in literacy our teachers we have some literacy really focused professional development happening right now and Jackie can speak to that where we found need is in some of the phonemic awareness when we looked at data so Jackie is going to talk to you. Yeah so we have one of one of our schools is actually partnering with the Stern Center so all teachers in K1 2 and 3 are working very closely on and the principal and our literacy coach analyzing data and then matching that data with the appropriate instructional strategy specifically around phonemic awareness and phonics now we have multiple schools that serve children K through 3 in Essex Westford and some of our other schools are instructional coaches that are focused on literacy are also doing phonics pilots if you will with classrooms at various grade levels too we're beginning to do the work of analyzing program versus preparation and what do our teachers need and teachers are identifying that they need this skill set and they need this opportunity to practice that skill so that they can then meet the needs of our students one of the plans that we have to continue to grow our capacity our collective efficacy in Essex Westford these to have teachers self-identify along the balanced literacy curriculum where they feel they need the most support and then we will then create that professional development opportunity within Essex Westford to truly build that capacity so yes we are partnering with the Stern Center in one school right now we're also doing the work internally in hopes to build that collective efficacy for all of our teachers so that they can get to the table and they can have those colleagues to colleagues discussions around what is most effective practice what I've seen I spend 90 minutes I spend an hour a month I teach principal individually on principal issues and their own goals and then I'm 90 minutes a month within the school doing walkthroughs with a principal and what I've noticed in those walkthroughs and those that really focus on the phonemic awareness is unbelievable and the teachers confidence in the skills that they now have that they can look at so within the balanced literacy and teaching comprehension and word work and all of that we're giving the tools to teachers now to know what to do and so when I speak with teachers from that are learning with the Stern Center they feel like they have the tools now and that they don't need to send their children to someone else no I can do this which is really powerful and then we have a teacher at one of our schools doing a similar not that kind of learning but still has that confidence and the kids do too I heard kids talk about a silent E in first grade if we're truly going to improve outcomes for all kids we have to give all kids the instruction that we believe is going to improve outcomes and where do all kids get instruction it's at that first tier in their classrooms especially in those early years it's absolutely essential so one of the things that we are putting into our budget we have reinvested monies and we are proposal to the board and we did this last night which they have been set up week after week after week on our literacy data so they knew something was coming we have right currently two literacy coaches we now would like four more so we are providing each grade level a whole K grade across the system with a coach all first three teachers will have a coach this will guide them the coaches will be able to guide them and not deep dive into data looking at student work what are the next steps in instruction and they'll really focus in on that grade level which developmentally we feel that's the best way instead of giving each school that teaches grade K to 5 same number of coaches but their own coach we feel that if we do it to convince me she did a good job if we have them because I was an instructional coach at a school and I know the impact but when you have it at grade level they can work with Jackie to make sure that it's systemic when we look at act 173 we are extremely excited about that because it focuses in on literacy it's exactly what we need to be able to do and be able to be flexible with money so we feel like in our act 173 and with the ed quality standards this work is there it's holding us accountable to it so is that we believe if the agency would hold us accountable to it and support districts that need it that's where the power that is where the power is we have to be accountable yes because again systemically we have a guide we have VTMTSS we have 173 we have the education quality standards it's up to the individual districts to analyze their needs to put resources in place that are adequately going to achieve those outcomes for their students so this is this is great have you shared this with your other superintendents or other schools I mean I mean this is charged charged 9 to 5 speed Chelsea my eyes from for the record we the instructional leadership academy with those learning walks that they're talking about is through the VSA so we have our first year of cohorts so that work is being shared amongst a specific cohort and we're working on a model for next year to disseminate that system and I think that's a lot of the core of that coaching and it is embedded in the instructional leadership component so that is something that is being shared with all of the superintendents so their specific reading program I would say not as much other than the informal discussions with the colleagues our supervision and evaluation which we now revamped and it's called the professional growth model is based on principals giving feedback to teachers and being in classrooms and that's really hard when you have social and emotional learning things happening over here and they get pulled so we've made a real focus on helping our principals to be the guiding teachers are number one impact for kids principals are next we all need to hold each other accountable so kids learn what they need to learn and I think it's really important to state that we are not going to re-mediate ourselves out of the achievement gaps that we have not only in Essex Westbrook but in Vermont in general we really have to look at what's happening again in that first instruction what are all kids getting what are we guaranteeing that all kids are going to be able to know and be able to do as they matriculate through our school system and that's really where the rubber hits the rubber I was just really interested to hear about what you're doing and that you set this lofty goal which seems really critical so I'm curious about I'm glad to hear that you think it maps well into 173 and that's what I've been certainly hoping to hear we've been hearing so much about screening and assessments as sometimes an obstacle to get in certain additional supports early and that there's seems differences of methodology, differences of opinion in terms of what assessments might be most appropriate and then what remediation steps might be most appropriate to follow up on that assessment and leaving the remediation out of it can you talk a little bit about screening and assessment and how that works in for pre-K and kindergarten aged kids because I'm assuming we want to get to this point by grade 3 we can't start in grade 2 yeah you want to do joint so I think clarity precedes confidence so again I'm going to start with not just assessment but with that guarantee viable curriculum and that essential standard work and what is it that we want all kids to know and be able to do to be effective graders so when you have those essential standards and you're clear about where you're going then you can match your assessment, your screenings and your plan to those standards what I see in systems is a current lack of understanding all screeners and assessments are connected to that first instruction and so if as a system you want to improve outcomes for kids you have to identify screeners and assessments that are going to give you that data that is actionable at a closer amount of time time span versus waiting for an entire year because by then again it's too late to intervene right we can't wait so I think we have to be mindful of what we're choosing yes I do not see it necessarily as a barrier I think it can be perceived as a barrier if people don't see, understand the clear connection between what data the screeners and assessments are giving us and how that is directly connected to the strategies that we are using with our kids to close those gaps and that's why we feel that if we have data that we're looking at regularly and we're working with coaches to look at that data then a teacher won't feel like I don't even know what to do this child is not but I don't have the skills and we will have a person there at grade level to assist and help now that's we're asking a lot of our coaches and I have total faith in Jackie that she will find the right coaches so in up for instance an actual example from the field aspect data so third grade aspect data we often look at that it's used to report to our to our boards you know sometimes to administrative teams it's the 30 thousand foot view one of the things that we started to do in sx westward is actually break down the subsets of the so into the reading the writing you know the speaking the listening etc and then further drill down that data is there so the data is in the aspect you can drill down into reading to the exact targets at the grade levels and then there are resources available that can help teachers match instructional strategy and activities with those with those deficits but again that's new for the field like I have worked in in three districts in the relatively recent past and to do that work it's it's a new idea I think that and I'm not sure a relatively new idea there may be some that are doing it but I don't know that intentionality yeah I agree good yes so all the challenges we have is we're late people we're not experts in this field and sort of balancing what we're hearing and so for example yesterday we heard testimony from Mark professor in Wisconsin who wrote language at the speed of light which is a book that is also promoted by the Stern Center at least the head of the Stern Center and I think he would pull up points that are listed up there and grow a little frustrated saying we've studied literacy for decades we have the knowledge the data the evidence that says you know frankly the structured literacy instruction is the way to go and so I one question is how you know you guys are on a balance literacy track you get the Stern Center in there they sort of promote this track and how that all sort of comes out but also I guess the bigger question is I mean the statement that the research has been done the evidence is in we know what works and what doesn't why do we continue to study it I get you folks are on the ground in the classroom you have a real-world experience and I just want to hear how we resolve that conflict. My thought reaction is we can find research for anything we want to promote in jail. So I feel like we were you know when I went to school it was Harry with no Dick and Jane whenever they were supposed to be Sally Dick and Jane. And spot. And spot I loved spot. So we were over here doing that and puff. I don't remember puff. So that was like one end of the pendulum right and then we swayed this whole literacy or this whole language and forgot about that we used to call it sounding out a word right and then it was like we were forbidden as a teacher to say sound out a word. We know there's sounds in letters what are their 44 sounds to our alphabet we know that we forgot about it though so it needs to be I believe that when we say when I think about a balance of literacy I picture a balance and if you do it has to be a balance it can't be one or the other otherwise we're going to leave some kids behind and that's what I think we've done we have so we have to to deepen the pockets if you will of the educators that were charging at the first tier to meet the needs of these students so I'm never going to say that there isn't a place in our curriculum in our instruction for that approach that structured literacy approach absolutely but it has to be in balance and it has to be in the biggest factor in that balance or the needs of the kids in that classroom so while that approach might work absolutely fine for one cohort it may not work as well for another cohort and again if we don't balance the approach and ensure that our teachers have access to the level of expertise that they need we are going to continue if we go too far down this one path the fear is that we will then now develop an entire other cohort of kids down this path that we will then need to pay attention to whereas if we truly balance our approaches and truly look at how we're analyzing data what are we using for assessments and what are we expecting all kids to know and be able to do we will then create those systems that will have that collective teacher efficacy which more students will be achieving now I'm just going to speak from a little anecdote so I dug back into my own research through the reading minor I'm working with children in special education and as a first grade teacher and my binder of how to teach reading is thick it's 30 years old now but it has in it multiple tabs and the tabs are labeled phonics instruction comprehension I have a whole language tab I have a fluency tab right and it's an eclectic blend of strategies within each of those tabs to meet the needs of the children that were in my classroom and on my caseload and that is what has worked over time and I have supervised I've been a principal and I've supervised multiple classrooms curriculum director now in a few districts and I've seen that when we truly create these environments where teachers can be vulnerable and can say wow this is something that I need to know more about so that I can effectively meet the needs of our kids that's where the power is so acknowledging that there are thousands of instructional approaches that can be combined to meet the needs of learners and we have to again acknowledge that I think as a system our Vermont MTSS guide is phenomenal it's phenomenal we should be held accountable to using that it should be our educational bible right there I wish I had brought my copy Beth knows so my copy is cross reference in color coded with professional learning community ideology act 173 education quality standards is as color coded as far as how all of this links and how it fits together and how it presents it and how it fits more importantly yes our social emotional initiative how it you know all kids on grade level so we've done that work MTSS field guide yeah and I present that you know it's connected so we've heard from the Champlain Valley which is a large school district well resourced we're hearing from Ethics Westford another Chittenden County large well resourced surrounded by colleges so I'm actually not so worried about you my concern has to do with so if you guys are you guys are pulling together I'll say a balanced program with a small B that is including the elements that we know have to be involved but we have other districts that are still struggling with that 46 and are trying to get a divorce we have districts that are so small you're looking at six coaches Champlain Valley has four I think plus one in the central office and then we have these small districts that's how do we leave us alone we've got MTSS we're all set I'm going well you are but there are places that aren't so when I worked at Orange East it was 1700 students and I had Newberry School which was very small I was able to use federal funding to have coaches we focused in at that time on math and I was working at Bud Myers was doing research around the math that we were doing we did the same thing as Essex-Wesford we just used our money differently we were able to find the resources through federal funding and I will say so I'm new to Essex-Wesford this year but I've spent the past prior to this the past five years working in the very supervisory union as both the principal and as a curriculum director and I can say that we did the same with federal dollars, title money to increase and this was unfortunately I left but we increased our coaching capacity for this current school year again the same idea and I also worked as a special educator and classroom teacher in Orleans Southwest so I actually traveled from like Union Elementary School and Woodbury Elementary School and all of those schools in my job was to create collective teacher efficacy around working with students primarily who were on the autism spectrum back then and a truly meaningful inclusionary model and worked myself out of a job actually because it was so effective with this idea of building that again I'm going to go back to what we said earlier collective teacher efficacy and that knowledge base of how to truly analyze the data of the individual student data of what you have in front of you and then match that to instructional strategy I'm just remembering this initiative of getting all children to read by the third grade is that like how old is that is that like and just what results are you seeing so that's one question and then last night we put public testimony from the public and we heard story after story from parents who were told by their relative schools that their kid was fine they would be in grade level and then at seventh grade and this was mainly dyslexia that they were talking about that their child wasn't reading fine and I'm just like wondering how that can be avoided or how people can trust when you say they are reading a grade level they will be okay that they can trust them it's new for Essex Westbrook we're a new district so we put that into place and again it's a bold statement I felt confident confident as superintendent saying that and believing wholeheartedly we can do it part of the belief is in each other as well and we need teachers to believe in each other that we can do this and it's only a beginning for us the work that we're doing around creating our essential standards and we said last year we started with our professional learning communities but they really were about gaining trust building that culture and this year it was like I said to Jackie when she came on board we are going to have essential standards by the end of this year and she said okay by January we will have literacy by the end by March we'll have math and I'm like alright we're going and now we have teachers who fought it are saying this is what we need and they were fighting in the beginning we're no we're near we were doing a futures protocol this morning with our leadership team and we were pretending it was 2023 wow if we can get there in 2023 and looked back on Jackie how to do this thing where it was like okay so now you're in 2023 what were you doing in 2020 that wasn't working wow that was really powerful so we are only in the very beginning but we believe we believe that we will go to we have a huge commitment and our teachers are getting on board I love using data as a school board member it was just like showing the data that the kids are reaching proficiency let's say 70% but I also agree with you when I left the education you could drill down you know with that data and get the resources and the specific skills that the kids needed so I'm just really so excited to hear that you're utilizing that well we also have opened up our data system and I kept asking when I first was super into there like why are we looking at this data like why you can't because of FERPA no we can these are our kids so we opened that up and now we're like what is going on so that is new for our system to do and I feel badly saying why so I'm just going to look over to Ted and just to remind you that we are desperate for data around the state we are not we of course can't drill down the way you can right your data but we can get some help to really get an idea of where are the whole I don't know anything you can decide to get to show us in terms of poverty but we're hungry for that data for the record Ted Fisher from our agency of vegetation so the level that is speaking about we can't absolutely not because of FERPA but there's a lot that we can drill down into I'm not going to say on the record but we're working on scheduling of initial status update from you and then hopefully we'll have some more updates by the end of the session as we roll out some new even in larger cohorts you know so we can go district by district but we can also do I think generally you we're still committed to coming back to have a talk about how we're doing generally and then we're working on some additional data resources that are not ready for private time yet but we have a whole new update a picture of regions we're looking at the subspace planning model and looking at how we might do that how much of a constraint on your goals there's a lot of coaching and what not is your teacher's contract in terms of available time that wasn't too positive we so we have early release on Tuesdays that helps us to be able to work with teachers for a longer period of time on Tuesday so it's early release which is an hour that's not ideal for parents at all but that's what our constraint to our negotiations that's what our contract holds us to so we wanted two hours of time on Tuesdays to be able to do PLC work and dive into our contract doesn't actually specify times when they have to arrive and when they leave on any given day a principal can hold have a faculty meeting or whatever and hold them until seven o'clock if they wanted to but that's not the culture so we're trying to break that culture and when we decided if we gave like did a little give and take so we'll give you an hour but you'll give us another hour if not 90 more minutes of your time it's hard on families I almost want to say let's stop that and you're going to do that so there's that I'm also working right now with a few principals around their master schedule and we're looking at next year and they've identified the MTSS work in literacy a definite priority as you've heard today we've identified that for our entire district so looking at especially in kindergarten, grade one grade two and grade three how we're allocating that resource of time during the school day so it may look a bit different for us next year so that teachers truly do have the time to do that collaboration during the school day about what's happening in their classrooms and do that data analysis so I anticipate that there will be some shifts there as well did you have direct support from DMG? we had a report done on the year the year before we merged in 2016 that report actually our leadership team probably is still we are revisiting it and we use it all the time we used it to do our to create our continuous improvement plan it's how we came up with the measurable outcome of all students well they told us to give them percent that's worked with DMG and I'm saying to this one here here's your MTSS I'm going to do a good job we're going to be watching your data it's my it's where I am feeling responsible that we need to do something about that rather than just handing this over to four representatives can barely read themselves I do think it is about that systemic support creating a network whether you're a superintendent or a curriculum director what we're talking about is creating that collective system efficacy and we're all learners we're all figuring this out but I think what we've done in S6 Westford is we've identified where we can go to get the additional support like I say all the time I'm not exactly sure about this you have to start somewhere so I think again systemic resources where can people go to can the agency help in that way that might help some of the others move along one of our interests is how do we get that systematic coaching I do think at the agency someone that has a strong literacy knowledge along with how do you move a system forward what's that systemic what's changed all about transitions how do you do that that's hard to find with what they're paying at the agency you're not going to find they'll take a course at UVM for three credits over the summer come back and you'll be all fat it's about that system analysis and then that cultural and technical piece and marrying that to the individual needs of the district which is what the engineer is talking about yes absolutely I'm sorry to throw this one out there but we've taken some testimony and asked about definitions they're very important so the different proposals have evidence based structure literacy instruction is a definition another contemplates research base another contemplates defining dyslexia and I'm just I'm wondering I mean to the extent that we're looking at that big picture of how are we going to do it in all of our districts so all our kids had the same opportunities and the same support to achieve success do you think the definitions work or do you think that there's some caution there around how we define those terms I think that especially around dyslexia not that there isn't a need for our teachers again to increase their level of effectiveness and perhaps working in some areas with children who have this diagnosis I know that this recent diagnostic manual I think DSM 5 has done some work around dyslexia and they've now I haven't pulled up on my phone a good friend of mine is a researcher at Harvard and I was just talking to her about this on the way here yesterday we did too so I was talking to her and she said just cautionary in that again that idea of sort of paging holding us into one where DSM is actually in the definition of the specific learning disability at this point again and I think it speaks to our need for that eclectic blend of targeted approaches dependent on the profiles of the students so it's not just about this one categorization but it's really about collective efficacy and understanding what it all means we're asking our teachers to do a lot we are and the term initiative fatigue is one that we hear which I think in our perspective at this point we're looking at how do we move forward with what DMG recommending of literacy and now provided not standard to you as another initiative but where's the support that's needed to make this happen the research based I think that it should be research based it should practices out there that we know are effective why we don't all use them that's the whole systemic change right and when we do our grant writing we have to base in research base we don't get approved anymore but that's newer than it was anybody can write anything and it would get approved but not anymore and it has to be research based and you have to prove and you have to show your outcomes you can find research to support exactly and I realize we're short on time but I also think the administration has a significant responsibility to the communities in which they serve to help our teachers and community as a whole understand how all of these things are truly connected together and that makes that initiative fatigue maybe up feel a little bit less and that's some of the work that we're also doing and I don't know that we spoke about that specifically but it really is again about that color coding the MTSS right it is all connected but again we need to be transparent about how it's connected and then what we're going to do to move forward anything else thank you this is very helpful it's appreciated you're welcome thank you thank you this is hope for the future I don't think we have enough students from the school from the school we're taking a look at the students oh it wasn't I just heard oh you did yeah I'm I'm I'm I'm pre-k and I I want to I'm calling so we're going to have it quite finished I'm sorry we still have a little bit more testimony but this is some pre-k so calm please thank you shifting gears I will actually try and lead them together a little bit bear with me and I will keep it brief because I do recognize that I am between you and lunch lunch and then the house floor so for the record calm Robinson political director Vermont NEA I have some prepared testimony that is probably going to pull up but as it relates specifically to draft 2.1 of the pre-k bill I wanted to thank you all on behalf of our members for tackling this issue obviously it's been an issue that this committee has taken on over the years and specifically working to address some of these technical but impactful changes I want to start out by just echoing quite frankly what Representative James and I spoke to you yesterday and you also heard from the folks in Washington County Mental Health earlier this morning just by way of context for the conversation on pre-k because I think we all recognize that having access to high quality early caring learning is incredibly impactful on children's future success in the public education system and all the challenges that students are coming to school with we need to be addressing as early as possible Vermont NEA has justified in previous sessions that we believe the best way to provide high quality universal pre-k is inside our public schools and it's only through that that we'll truly be able to create an equitable and sustainable system and we also I think other colleagues from the school board association and superintendents as well have spoken to some of the reports that you've seen that have highlighted the facts that the public programs and some of the folks you heard from this morning spoke to this as well are have higher enrollment from students that are on free or reduced lunch or on IEPs and quite frankly we believe it makes sense because that's where students are going to be able to receive the most comprehensive services they're going to streamline their access to their education as they move on and so with it's all kind of in that context that I'm offering comments on the draft today so I want to sort of highlight a couple specific things first of all we're happy to see the move towards improvement of quality by moving to four stars we also obviously I think you heard from folks this morning and your web has indicated and I believe you requested JFO I think we all recognize that 10 hours is not adequate and we obviously support increasing that on the license educator and this is already spoken to as well but I just the current draft says that private programs have a license educator either present or to provide regular active supervision or training of the private provider staff and we believe that if a license educator is required for public programs and we're trying to ensure equity across the system that having a license educator providing that direct instruction is critical and quite frankly it's interesting in the echoes of the conversation around literacy and talking about making sure that our educators have the skills they need to provide effective instruction to struggling readers that we would be looking at a situation where we wouldn't be ensuring that folks with a licensed the education licensure wouldn't be providing that same education in a public program even if it's provided in a private setting so that's an adjustment that we'd like to see we also appreciate the draft recognizes that it's good public policy to allow local communities through their public schools through community engagement to have a conversation about their needs and lifting that requirement that they get approval beyond their normal course of community conversations for possible expansion of pre-K program that is a positive step we do have a sort of echo some of the comments this morning we do have some pauses about the bifurcation of the regulation obviously this has been a fraught conversation for those of you who have been in this committee for previous sessions and on a fundamental level believe