So welcome back to Senate Education. We have the chair of the State Board of Education, Jennifer Samuelson from Manchester, Vermont. Not actually not me. What town are you in? You're in Windhall. So talk with us about the State Board of Education and I don't know, you've been in this room because the last couple years was That is correct. This is my first time in my capacity. On the state board? On the state board. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you. And you guys got me in person because I testified twice before House Ed over Zoom. You made the right choice. I'm happy to be here. So we have the Secretary of State coming in at 3.15. Does that work for you? Sure. I will go through as much as I can. And then I think if there are questions, maybe what would be helpful is just, you know, we can have more of a conversation. And if you need me to come back, I'm happy to do that. Thank you. In fact, why don't we see. Can you ask the Secretary of State if you can reach them just to give us maybe five extra minutes? Yeah, so maybe come at 3.20 or 3.25. Thanks. Okay. So I think if you guys have the presentation up, I'm going to blow past the first page because we all know that. So I wanted to just really give an overview about the State Board of Education. For those of you who might not be aware of how we need to be where we are. So we are essentially a volunteer board comprised of 10 members, the 10th being the Secretary of Education. And we have two student members who typically serve two years. So the first year they're non-voting and then the second year they are voting and they graduate off. So I included on the second slide just an overview of all of our current members where they're from as well as when their attorneys expire. But I think the thing that's important with this slide is that we run the gamut of, you know, I'm a lawyer. I don't necessarily have an education background. I'm sort of taught here and there. We have former principals, heads of school, substitute teachers, teachers, certainly the students, regional business people. And I think the one thing that we all share in common is this, you know, commitment to education. So we really bring a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds to our conversations, which I think is really helpful. The next slide. I thought it would be helpful because in a way that, you know, frankly, I'm still trying to keep straight in my head the relationship between the agency of education and the State Board of Education. Can I just give some context here if you don't mind for one second? Sure. Absolutely. Just a reminder, as your French mentioned this years ago, the agency was the State Board that hired and fired the then commissioner of education. And that commissioner reported directly to the State Board of Education and it was under Representative Donovan's leadership in the House and others that really felt as though, okay, we've got to move away from this person. The person needs a seat at the table. If you're running to be governor of the state, you have to answer education questions and that's why we now have all of you more involved with just betting who the candidates are. In the end, the governor chooses his or her choice to be secretary of education. And there's less reporting to all of you? Correct. Yeah, I mean it's more of a consultation. Okay. It's not, we do not have an oversight. So I think you said far more eloquently than I did. But slide three kind of goes through that historic relationship with the agency of the State Board. And it was really in 2012 that that switch that Senator Campion just mentioned occurred where prior to that we were really a board overseeing a commissioner who worked for the Department of Education and supervised the commissioner's activities. In 2012, which is the next slide, it was at 98, established the agency of education, elevated the commissioner to now a cabinet level secretary. And we no longer oversee the agency's policies, programs or resources, but we still retain oversight with respect to the rulemaking process. Which I will sort of circle back to at the end of the presentation because, you know, all except for the district quality standards which are currently being written. Currently the State Board of Ed owns the rules. And I, you know, I guess is that that will probably change, but as it is now, there's still our rules, even though a lot of the work when you get into it is really more agency work. So then next slide is the unit position of the State Board and this is really what we offer. As I mentioned before, we're essentially volunteers. We are independent. So, you know, we haven't been hired really by me. We've been selected by the governor, but, you know, we're not hired to perform a certain function. We are a neutral body. And so our primary goal is to act within the constraints of legislative intent and always sort of determining what that intent is and making sure that we stay in our lane. We advise the general assembly when asked, such as, you know, moments like today, we provide a public meeting space. And I think this is really, really important. And maybe one of the things that the State Board does best is that we have this open space. Every meeting is open to the public. We begin every meeting with public comment. We end every meeting with public comment.  And we're an instrumentality of the general assembly. So again, that goes back to, you know, we are here kind of at the behest of the legislature. And so for instance, Act 46 of 2015, the State Board of Ed implemented the legislative vision for consolidation of school governance as a means of improving equity, excellence, and efficiency in the state's pre-K to 12 education system. So that was something that the legislature could identify as a priority. We were then given the work of figuring out how to implement Act 46. Senator Hashim. Quick question, and this is just my own experience because I'm new to this Secretary of Governor. But members of this board, are they all appointed by the governor? Yes. Except for, well, I'm the secretary because he is a non-voting member of the board. But everyone else is appointed by the governor. Thank you. Sure. So the next slide is current State Board of Ed activities. As I mentioned before, you know, we're a public forum. So we often have regular diversity, equity, and inclusion presentations where we have people from around the state who come and talk about the good work that we're doing. We also invited, you know, schools or supervisory unions in to our meetings to talk about the work that they're doing or challenges that they've faced and how they've handled it. So, you know, again, I'm really trying to sort of honor this space where we have this opportunity to be a good exchange of ideas. And how did those ideas advance? That is a good question. At this point, I don't know. I mean, it's really, I think we have good turnout particularly since we've gone mostly online with people from the public tuning into our meetings. So I hope that that's a really good point that other members of the public would hear something or see something on the agenda and say, wow, I really like to do that. Or you could bring it to us or Secretary of Friends. Exactly. Something rises to the top. Yeah, exactly. We also serve in a quasi-judicial role. There are specific rules and statutes that provide us with this judicial authority. For instance, we handle rate appeals, tuition appeals. Those are two of the things that we've done in the last couple of years. So we sometimes will hire someone to serve as legal counsel as a hearing officer. Sometimes we don't really depending on the matter of hand. Sorry. Just to understand the difference between rate appeals and tuition appeals. I understand the tuition appeals, but what about a rate appeal? Would that be the rate like a tech center sets to charge its students? It could be the rate appeal that, you know, I was thinking of, I believe it was a therapeutic independent school where they were negotiating with the agency for the rate that they were charging for a particular time period. There was a disagreement, and so it came to the State Board of Ed where we took testimony, deliberated, and reached a decision. And we did have the assistance of hearing officer with that. Thank you. Any other questions before I go on? We also handle withdrawals from supervisory union supervisor districts. And this is another example of, you know, a good working relationship with the General Assembly where there wasn't a good roadmap for withdrawals and last year. From Act 46. Mostly from Act 46.  If you were force-merged pursuant to Act 46, it's involuntarily more merged pursuant to Act 46. And basically depending on what your status was and the circumstances under which you merged, the law had different outcomes, which really seemed unfair. So last year the General Assembly came together and took a lot of time, I think, to craft some legislation to really create a more unified process so that it doesn't matter how you came to be merged. There's now, you know, clear law that's in the books that would allow talents who are interested in withdrawing to go through this process. So that was good working with the General Assembly, and then based on this new law we were able to work with different school districts. Some who chose to go back to their supervisory unions, some didn't, you know, really depending on the school district. We also have oversight over independent school approvals, which is, you know, we're sort of the final step in a very, you know, thoughtful, multi-month long process before we get to the State Board that are approving or not an independent school. And then, as I mentioned, we also oversee rulemaking. So in 2022 we did updates to the World 2200 series, which governs independent schools. And we also, this was a much smaller amount of work, but we did updates to the World 7000 series, which was largely non-substantive, but for we basically lifted accrediting agencies that were listed in the 7000 series and put them into the 2200 series. And currently we're looking at updates to education quality standards, which are the World 2000 series. Would you find the difference between an approved independent school and a recognized independent school? Yes, so, well, and I'll start at the very bottom. So kind of at the bottom you have homeschool in terms of oversight by any regulatory authority. So homeschool, I mean, I know that, you know, parents have to have a curriculum, but there's, it's kind of the lowest wrong in terms of oversight. The next level is a recognized independent school where you might have a building, and I think you probably have to have a building. You are more than a homeschool, you have multiple students from different families, but you're recognized. The next phase is... Is done oversight there? Not a whole lot. I think it's more of like a filing and, you know, we are aware that a recognized school exists, but we don't have much oversight authority over a recognized school. The next level would be an approved independent school and effective July 1st, 2023, that label is going to bifurcate. And so you're going to have approved independent schools that are eligible to receive public funds, and then you will have approved independent schools, which by definition are approved to receive public funds. So the carve out now is to be an approved independent school, but not eligible to receive public funds. And the distinguishing characteristic there is pursuant to Act 173. There are now special ed requirements that an approved independent school would have to comply with in order to continue to receive public tuition dollars. The other parts of Act 170, well, it was not related to Act 173, but there were updates to the 2200 series, have to do with discrimination. We spent a lot of time as a subcommittee making updates to the 2200 rules to make it clear that any approved independent school must comply with our anti discrimination laws that are already on the books. And those laws went into effect last night. That went through the Elkhart process and those portions of the updates to 2200 became effective 15 days after we met with Elkhart. And just again a little historical background, our committee took that up last year also after hearing from our alleged council and there was some disagreement around it from attorneys as to whether or not it would be more our attorney recommended be more powerful if we put something in statute. And that's why this committee passed out as 219. Right, so it isn't rule. Yeah, which is great. Which is big help. Thank you. And then just scooting on to the next slide, which is slide seven. The authority to engage in rulemaking derives from 16 VSA section 1647, which gives us the authority to carry out the powers and duties of the board as directed by the General Assembly within the limitations of legislative intent. So I always, you know, when I'm looking at work that the state board is doing, I'm always sort of looking at it through that lens. And so as long as the work we're doing falls within that lens, you know, we are acting within the scope of our authority. If it's outside of that, then, you know, I would say that we're not acting within the scope of our authority. The next slide is an overview of state board of that rulemaking. So in this I pulled from, I put the website at the bottom, but basically, you know, again saying that we have the authority to create rules. And once a rule series is open, we follow the Administrative Procedure Act formal rulemaking process. So I don't know how interested you are in going through the rulemaking process, or if there are other things that I can answer. Certainly, the next few slides sort of talk about, from start to finish, you know, A to Z, what it looks like for the state board of Ed to update the rule series. And I'm happy to go into detail, but basically, the formal AK rulemaking process is an eight month period. From the time a proposed rule is filed with the Secretary of State, and we go before ICAR, which is the Interagency Commission on Administrative Rules. We have eight months from that time that the proposed rules are filed with the Secretary of State to go through the public comment period, make any revisions necessary, and appear before LCAR. What the state board has done, at least since I've been on the board, and I know beforehand as well, is we actually go through a pretty robust prefiling process. So right now, like we're working on the rules governing education quality standards. Those rules are not officially open, but we've had, I mean, it started with the Act 1 advisory group. They did a whole bunch of work on the rules. So the Act 1 advisory group sort of took the first bite at the rules. Then that version of the rules came before the state board of education. I believe it was last spring. And at that point, we stood up a subcommittee, and that subcommittee has been working since last spring to do its work before we even get to the formal APA rulemaking process. So they've already had a series of meetings that are open to the public. They've invited stakeholders in to talk about updates to the rules. They had a public hearing where they took testimony from anyone who wanted to call in. So by the time we get to the formal APA rulemaking process, we've already done a pretty deep dive on the rules. So slide 10, slide 11 really goes through that process, and then I included in the next few slides a case study which basically just goes through and summarizes the updates to the rule series 2200. So I'm happy to go into more detail on that. Why don't you go through the case study? That might be helpful. So this is slide 12. This began with the General Assembly's passage of Act 173 of 2018. And again, there was an advisory group that was created in the language of Act 173 itself with, I think it was a 14-member committee. And the language of the Act stated, you know, each of the organizations that would have a seat at the table in this advisory group. The Act also directed the Agency of Education to make recommendations to the State Board of Ed for, you know, the State Board's consideration. And it also provided the State Board of Ed with the direction necessary for it to develop amendments to its rules, particularly Rule 2200 series, governing the approval of independent schools. So slide 13, the advisory group convened its first meeting September 14, 2019. I think by the terms of the Act, they had roughly eight meetings per year. And then of course COVID happened, so it kind of threw the timeline out a little bit for everybody. But it came to the State Board December of 2020. And then the 2200 subcommittee was formed by the State Board of Ed to sort of pick up the work from the advisory group. The State Board had its first meeting on January 8, 2021 and met 10 times during the pre-filing process. So this is even before the rules are officially open to identify rules that can be updated independent of Act 173. So the important thing is once a rule series is open, we can open a rule series if we want. But if a rule series is open, we have the ability to update any rule within that rule series still consistent with legislative intent. And so as a State Board, we looked at it and said, you know, what rules could we update and sort of hitch them on to the Act 173 timeline and make some improvements to our rules because they're open and, you know, why not take advantage of this. So some of the things that the subcommittee recommended was adding ASNE, which is the Association of Independent Schools in New England, as a recognized accrediting agency. This was in addition to NEASC, which everyone might be more familiar with. I'm sorry if you already covered this, but when a rule series is open, how does that happen? What opens a rule series? So for this case, then this was a good question. It was opened by virtue of Act 173. So the legislature directed us to update our rules consistent with Act 173. I think on our own initiative, the board could look at a rule series and say, you know, it's probably time to update it. We're going to open it. So really, you know, two different ways. So it's opened either through legislation or you folks decide that it's open? And usually if it's open by legislation, we're given a deadline by which we would have to commence the APA rulemaking process. Thank you. Anyone else? So the first thing we did is we added ASNE. The benefit with ASNE is they offer a similar accreditation as NEASC, but work more with K-8 schools and their price point is based on the size of the school. So for smaller schools, it seemed to be a more affordable option to have this through-party accreditation, which we felt was very important. Another thing is we added a requirement that any independent school that boards students must either be accredited by a state or regional agency, such as NEASC or ASNE, or licensed by Department of Children and Families as a residential child care facility. So just adding a little bit more oversight to any school that is boarding a student. Just a quick question. Are public schools also accredited by NEASC? No. I do believe that public schools, I don't know if they can. I know their website, I remember when the summer, it had some section on public schools. If you don't mind that. The schools I've worked in a lot were accredited by NEASC because every ten years we'd have to go through this fairly intense process. So there may be some. And I know public schools, the agency makes visits, I believe, over three years. NEASC accreditation according to the 2200 rules. An independent school can be accredited by NEASC for longer than five years, but the state board requires a review at least every five years. And for initial approvals, the initial approval is only for a period of two years. So again, just trying to have some oversight on that process. And then the final thing that we decided to do while the rule series was open was to update the procedure for enrolling publicly funded students in approved independent schools. So let's go to the next slide. And this is just going through the timeline. So we voted to, we had the ten pre-filing meetings as a subcommittee that we brought, you know, our proposed changes before the full state board in May of 2021. Then we initiated the formal APA rulemaking process. We don't have to have any public comment hearings by statute. We felt it was important to have them. And in fact, we scheduled four that we tried to offer at different times of the day, different days of the week, you know, really trying to capture public comment and really get, it was very important for us to have feedback from members of the public as well as significant input from stakeholders because this was, you know, we wanted really to come up with something that we thought was meeting the needs as articulated by, you know, the General Assembly but also in keeping with our rules. Yes. Just to get a sense of public engagement, what kind of public comment do you get? Do you have like, you know, 10, 20 people show up for public comment or just a few? Well, it was funny that, and that's a good question. So, you know, we had a bunch of stakeholder input when we were drafting the rules because again, our meetings are open to the public and we would invite, you know, people to come. With these four public comment hearings, I think maybe in the first three we might have had two people, which was like, okay, I think the fourth one we might have had a couple and then the interesting thing is is we've received a lot of written comment literally in the last three days of the public comment period before it closed. And that's really where the work began. So, you know, as much as I was trying to sort of give every opportunity and, you know, really have a nice, you know, amount of time to go through the work, it was really like in the last three days that things, and it was mostly written comment. And I think if I'm remembering, there was probably 11 people who between them had somewhere in the 80s, like 80-something comments that as a subcommittee had to address. And so, you know, we were assisted in this by the Agency of Education and Emily Simmons had just a, you know, fantastic spreadsheet. But we went through and had to accept or deny and explain if we were denying every public comment. So, again, it was a very, you know, comprehensive process. So, but I mean, I would say that it all paid off because the rules were unanimously approved at Elkhart last April. So, the next slide, slide 15, really breaks down the non-ACT 173-related rules, which again, you know, we just took advantage of the fact that the rules were open. Those changes that are not related to Act 173 became effective last May. So, that includes Rule 2223, which is procedure including revocation or suspension of approval. We also updated the complaint process and crafted a new probation status. So, we really kind of built in more language for that. Rule 2224 also went into effect last May and that was the one that added ASME. Rule 2226 is the application and Rule 2227 is sort of like the mirror approval by the state board. But that's really where we put in the language of non-discrimination that is consistent with Vermont Public Accommodations Act as well as the Vermont Fair Employment Practices Act. And then also we added in a 2227 this accreditation requirement for schools that board. The Act 173-related rules, and those are all of the changes that pertain to Special Ed, those go into effect this July. And so at that point, we're going to have this bifurcation with approved independent schools, depending on how this work has been done. Interesting, I believe the NEA that was in saying that they want Act 173 appealed. Appealed or repealed? Repealed, I'm sorry. So, yeah, these rules are on the books. Right, right, right. And so much of it was special education work. It was during when Senator Booth was the chair of the committee I remember burning. Yeah, I don't quite follow their logic. What do you mean by board students? So, is that under approval? Yeah, I would require more free independent schools like board students. So, like this would be a student that would be staying in a dorm, or in a facility that houses students, like sort of sneaking out overnight. Senator Booth? Probably just remembering the testimony by the Vermont Principles Association. There was only one, Jack who was here, was only talking about amending one part of Act 173. Oh, it wasn't a repeal. I thought I saw the prior word as a repeal. What was it? I'm just going to bug me now, sorry. Are there any conflicts between you and the agency of education in terms of, you know, here you are, you're two separate bodies still. You both have different rules and responsibilities. Anything there that, any kinks that we would need to work out legislatively so that it's more smooth? So, yeah. I mean, I think we have a very good working relationship with the agency for sure. And, you know, they have been wonderful in terms of providing us with administrative assistance, helping scheduling meetings, doing minutes for our full monthly board meetings, which are a problem in this. I think where it gets a little bit tricky is we're still kind of running into each other because even though Act 98, which, you know, created this secretary level position who no longer reports to the board, if you look at the rules, a lot of the rules still have this language of, you know, commissioner. And, you know, the secretary does not report to the board. And so, you know, some of these rules are kind of in this no man's land because, and I think I have one of the slides, maybe it's the last slide. You know, I could look at the rule series 1100. It was last revised in 1992, arguably, needs to be updated. And then the next category are rules that, you know, they still belong to us, but the substantive of them is really more aligned with what the agency does. So for instance, setting the length of the school day and year, driver education courses, school building sites, construction, all of those rules I think are probably more appropriately placed with the agency. So I think the big challenge for us is we really need to figure out this final division of roles and responsibilities between the two organizations. And I think we work well together and I think that we offer things that the agency doesn't and vice versa. And then importantly, what goes along with that is more and more a lot of the work that we're doing does require legal knowledge, legal counsel. And I think it would be helpful for us to have our own dedicated legal counsel to assist us in the work. So I can't agree more with that. I think it's a lot to have Emily Simmons doing both the work for AOE and for you. The other concern or problem I have in addition to any possible conflict is that you all do, I recognize how much work you all do and you really don't get anything for it except reimbursements. Yeah. So that's, you don't comment on that. I'm happy to come back and talk about that. Yeah, but that is certainly a concern as well. Yeah. So I think one of the goals that I have, and again because we're volunteering, we all have jobs apart from this, is to reconstitute that roles and responsibilities subcommittee. I think as a practical matter, we need to get the education quality standard rules put into the APA rulemaking process. And then that will give us a little bit of time to breathe where we can reconstitute that subcommittee. And I really know in our ideal world, I would love to have this buttoned up this legislative session. Maybe next one. But I think it's important for us to be able to do our work and then really attend to update your rules. It would be helpful. Who was your predecessor? Oliver Olson. Prior to Oliver. John Terrell. John. You also, they came up with the document. And that was something that I think was dropped a few years ago that I want to return to. Looking at, again, those roles and responsibilities of each and kind of working to divide them up. Thank you so much. That was terrific. Oh, thank you. Really, really helpful. Well, and I'm happy.  I'd say A minus 10 A. She's a constituent of mine.  Can we have beef less? No, that was really helpful. It was a great overview. And feel free to follow up if you have any questions. Yeah. And I think we'll have you back in or by Zoom if you want to. At some point we're going to have to pull apart more of the independent school stuff. You know, it sounds like I'd be curious more what that middle group is in particular that might not have any oversight and whether or not we should be sending that, some of that work to you to help us to give them a little oversight or something. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks very much. You feel free to stick around. Yeah. I mean, or. I would love to take you up on that. Okay. All right. Madam Secretary. Hello. Hello. Please join us. And you have a guest that you would like to also join you. I have my chief of staff, Brian Mills, who's going to hang with me and, you know, take notes. Thank you. Great to see you.  Please take one and pass them. And we'll talk a little bit about what I'm giving to you. There's one for your committee assistant as well and an extra one in general. In case you have a favorite committee friend who wants one. One of the, one of the roles of the Secretary of State's office has always, can you hand that to your committee assistant, has been to provide pocket constitution so that if you ever wonder about the, something that you're contemplating, you can refer back to the constitution. Newly updated, fresh with the new amendments that we just voted on this past November. Great. So, civic education has been something that has popped up in this committee for the past several years. And we have, over the past couple of years, and I think it will probably happen this year as well. Somebody always puts a bill in that says something along the lines of either it's requiring a class or requiring students to upon, you know, in order to graduate, pass the US Citizens Test or something like that. And civic education, we're also expecting a report. And if you would remind me to the email agency of education, last year we asked them to kind of give us what was happening out there. And there's no question that there are a lot of interesting things happening at a lot of different schools. And I'm sure this, I have no evidence, but I'm sure in some areas it might not be as vibrant as in other institutions. But civic education also, it's one of those things that we all recognize it doesn't end in high school. It doesn't begin in high school. And one of the most interesting witnesses we have had last year was Mar 11, symptom Harvard Ed, who said to us, it's John Dewey, get people to do it. Get people to do civic education like they do other things, whether it's biology or math. And that means getting people like our media assistant in a room like this as a senior in high school. That means perhaps volunteering. But we thought, since there was a huge headline, breaking news coming out of your office, that you had appointed somebody to oversee civic education. We thought it would be interesting to start the conversation with you and see what you're doing and see if there are ways that we can help or maybe there are gaps that we can fill in, et cetera. So with that. I appreciate the opportunity for this conversation. And thank you so much for having me, Secretary of State Sarah Copeland-Hanses. I am bringing this idea forward in part because I think a lot of the work that we've done under my predecessor Jim Kondos to make voting accessible for Vermonters has gone a long way in terms of increasing the number of people who participate in elections. Having been a state representative for 18 years, 18 years of watching how people engage in the process and standing out on election day, you hear a lot of, you get into a lot of conversations with your neighbors about why they're voting and sometimes conversations about why they're not voting. And some of the frustrations that people brought to our attention over the years around, I came here to vote and my clerk told me I wasn't registered and that I needed to have done that last week and I'm really angry. We've dealt with some of those things with some of the reforms on seeing voter registration and automatic voter registration and now I think I want to really tackle the next reason why you might engage with someone and find that they don't vote. And that is a whole suite of reasons that sort of range from, oh my vote doesn't matter or I don't even know who any of those people are or I have no idea what all those offices are or I hate politics because all they hear about politics is whatever the sensational headline was or they assume that Vermont is just like Washington, D.C. when in reality you can have a really regular conversation with your elected official once you know who they are because you're probably going to see them in line at the grocery store or on the sidelines of the ballgame or no matter what party. No matter what party and we have a very open and accessible government in Vermont and so I think that this is the next phase of what we need to do to tackle the voter apathy or the reasons why people don't participate. I'm going to point out just a subset of the population that I think makes this work really, really important and that is the young adult population. These are folks who have come through some of the biggest and most tumultuous times in our lives. These are young people whose first memory is 9-11 who came through what we call the Great Recession and I think we just didn't even realize what was coming at us with the pandemic and with the war on terror. These are young people who don't have the opportunities that maybe your generation or my generation had in terms of being able to expect home ownership, to be able to expect to graduate from college and relatively shortly be debt free and able to start saving for retirement future or starting a family. And so I think engaging with the young adult population who have such a tremendous, well, the future of our country is in their hands, right? If we don't train them and bring them up in the ways of participating in our democracy and in the ways of influencing the decisions that are made by their government on their behalf, then I don't know where we go in the future when this generation of leaders is ready to step aside. And so it's really important to me that we think about ways to sort of unpack this problem and fix it here in Vermont tonight and I say this on a number of different levels about different issues. If there was a place in the union where we could come up with the answers to these challenges, it is in Vermont because we are small, we are close-knit communities, we talk to each other even across political divides. We have a lot of the sort of markers of good civic participation already embedded in our way of being in small Vermont communities. And we just need to add a little bit more substance to what people have for information so that they know how to participate, so that they know how to vet a candidate. I mean, one of the offices that we often vote for that people just don't understand is the Office of Sheriff. Or they think, oh, this is just police, right? So I'm just voting on a police officer. Well, that's not really the role of the sheriff. And it has a much larger impact on your community than you might think, but so a few people really know what the role is about. So let me talk just a little bit about sort of what our plan is in the office and then I'm happy to take questions, hear suggestions. I'm glad that you were talking with the Board of Education. A lot of this work around civics education is going to rely on a collaboration between the agency and the board and our education and civic engagement work. So we are in the process of hiring a person for this position right now. We have at least 15 applicants and that number will probably increase as I scanned the list this morning and didn't see a few names that I thought might be there so they're probably still going to apply. This would be a full-time position within the Secretary of State's office. This would be somebody who would work closely with the executive team, the secretary and deputy secretary, but also work along with our municipal assistance team and with our elections team. The phase one of this project would be to create Vermont-relevant civics curriculum that is standards-based, that can easily be brought in and plugged in by a Vermont school teacher and is accessible for them to be able to check off those standards that they need to teach to anyway. In the lower grades, it would probably look like maybe seasonal units on town meeting day or on election years, a November unit around... Sure. It's a state center. Yeah. And I think it would also include lessons just in what does it mean to be in a democracy? What does it mean to make a decision as a group about something in a direction that we might go in? And I know that a lot of elementary school teachers already incorporate this into their lessons, but what can we do for our group as a whole that you wouldn't be able to do individually for yourself and start prompting that kind of contemplation by young elementary students about what's the point of living in a democracy? All of your point is all of those things. And then, of course, when you get into the high school years, then you want it to start looking more like voter preparation. Like how do you register to vote? What does a ballot look like? What is the experience of voting? How do you participate in town meeting? I'm learning a lot from what other states do and there are other states who will actually allow town clerks to use registered voters, pre-registered voters. These are young people who will be 18 by the election and so they can register ahead of time in voting that primary, but allowing them to serve as poll workers so that they get the opportunity to see what it's like to be in a polling place and to assist. And if you recall some of the challenges that we had during the pandemic figuring out how do we safely conduct elections when so many of our poll workers are your retired school teacher or you're retired postmaster and people in that demographic who shouldn't be greeting folks face to face all day long during a pandemic. So a great idea, I think, would be to try to figure out ways to bring young people into that process and get them working in our elections. So phase one is that curriculum. We will set up a teacher advisory group and so I went to the Association of Teachers of Social Studies last December and invited folks to just be aware that we're going to set this advisory group up and we really want to make sure that we have the help and advice of folks who are in the classroom so that what we're creating is easy for them to use. And so with the help of that teacher advisory group we'll set up this set of civics curriculum for different grade levels. Phase two of the role, the project for the Education and Civic Engagement Coordinator is to then adapt that for interaction with adults out in the communities because I want us to be out, you know, tabling at farmers markets and festivals, engaging with Vermonters where they are because over the years, as an elected representative, I would have conversations with people, you know, all over the state and, you know, talking about, you know, are you planning to vote? Do you know how you plan to vote? You know, is there anything that you need? And, you know, now that the general election is universal vote by mail, folks have a pretty clear idea of how easy and straightforward it is to vote in the general election, but there are still people who are unsure of how to participate in the primary, particularly because we have a three-party system and folks forget that, you know, you're going to get three ballots, you can only fill out one, and I'm sorry if the person that you wanted to vote for isn't on this ballot that you are planning to fill out, that's, you know, that's part of partisan politics, the person you want to vote for, you know, maybe isn't in the party that you identify with, but I guess you can write them in. So phase two is to talk with adults and start interacting with adults on civic participation. I haven't exactly figured out how to craft this enough, but I hear from so many local municipal leaders about how hard it is to get people to participate in their local government, and I think a lot of what we ought to be thinking about doing is really helping people feel ready and prepared to step up and serve on that school board or that planning commission or the library board or whatever it might be because so many of these institutions in our small communities are just starving for people to come and be part of it. Board of Civil Authority. Yes. I mean, is there a requirement that poll workers be on the board? So the town clerk can enlist people because many towns need way more poll workers than they have members of the Board of Civil Authority. So the town clerk will set up a system for training and appointing for that day. So the final thing that I want to talk with you about that I'm hoping our... Sorry, I've got a little tickle in my throat. I suppose you have any water in here. Do you want to pour this in water? Sure. We have chocolate. Can you keep that one? Chocolate always helps. It does. Definitely. So now that people are going to get their general election ballot in the mail, I would also like my office to begin creating a voter guide. Yes. Because when you get your ballot in the mail, it's all well and good that you have, you know, 45 days to fill out your ballot. But again, you don't know what a share-off does or a high bailiff. How many of us really know what the high bailiff does? If you don't know what the office is, how do you discern which of the candidates who is on your ballot is the one who's going to do the job the best? And so that voter guide, ideally, would be a QR code associated with your ballot style that has your county level, your state representative level, your state senate level candidates. And in the description of what the office does so that you can spend that time researching. Maybe the candidate has a website. Maybe they have a social media presence. We will require them to put a mailing address and a phone number so that you could reach out to them and ask them the question that's important to you in your high bailiff. I don't know if it's, you know, it's interesting. I just think of people, maybe my parents, the Egyptian, I'm not sure if the QR code is, you know, but I know some people also who are just amazing and people my age, you know, who aren't great, you know, so it's not an age thing, but is there a way to get something? Yes, there will be an option to order a paper copy of it. And I think that we're going to try to make this as accessible as possible. It needs to be translated into other languages when we've got folks whose native language maybe isn't English. But making this available and accessible to voters when they get their ballots is really the key so that you can spend some time in the center weeks. So, phenomenal idea. Saw it while I was on active duty in California. California's voters guide is very, very helpful. If you want to see a copy, I've got a copy. Do you? I do. Great to see you, Robbie. Yeah, phenomenal. But what's the mechanism for making that a reality?  You know, the first step in that is tied to the new election management system that we're going out to bid for right now because what we want to do is we want to, when you register to be a candidate, have the majority of the information that's going to go into the voter guide be information that you provide as a candidate when you get yourself on the ballot. Once it's then in the system, then it's a little bit of back-end work on the software to get it out on an outward-facing website and then print it. Is it a personal goal or is it a state goal to do this by 2024 or 2026? It is my goal to do this for the general election in 2024. And if, you know, in an ideal world, we would build this module in the software such that we could then hand the module off to your municipal officials so that when you have a municipal election, they could use it as well to create a voter guide. But that is sort of, you know, an out-ears vision that I'm hoping can be made into a reality because so many town clerks say, gosh, during election time, they get so many calls and they want me to say who's so-and-so. You know, and it's very uncomfortable for town clerks to really ask that question. And at least if they have the ability to point folks to a listing of at least what the candidates say about themselves. And then, obviously, there's a little discerning that you have to do because you have to read between those. We're going back to your original conversation, which was about civic literacy. I believe, first, in the school, secondly, potentially, you know, global engagement and such. But do you have any gotten to maturity yet where you have kind of like a scope or a scale of what you want to do and how it would potentially fit into the current school curriculum? Is that true? And you're not yet. And this is where it becomes helpful to have this back-and-forth conversation because I know that the conversation around requiring civics education has come up in this building many times in recent years and what does that curriculum look like. And there have been legitimate reasons why that requirement hasn't moved into law. And so, given that the Secretary of State doesn't have influence on education policy, my thought is to make it a carrot. Let's make it as easy to use as possible. Let's make it Vermont relevant and accessible and exciting and provide it and, you know, if you build it, maybe they will come up. May I make a recommendation? Absolutely. So we've had a couple conversations in here about financial leaders. Maybe, just as a recommendation, partner with the Treasurer and say, hey, we've got this. It's almost as if you were standing just outside of Earshot of the conversation I had with Treasurer Pichak. Yes, I pitched to him that, you know, if we're working on work to get critical lessons out into schools that maybe his office could collaborate with us, because they know that there's a lot of work that they would like to do in terms of improving financial literacy. It's a great idea and he's going to be here tomorrow and raise it with them. But I was also thinking, you know, the Attorney General, law class, I mean, there's something that you've started here that's really, really intriguing. Center Williams and then Center Good. Thank you, Chair. I'm sorry, when I get called on, I like freeze. I have this moment of total... And you're on camera all the way. I know. Oh, my God. I know I had a question. No, I think what I was going to say was there is a bill that will be coming to us at some point about civics education. And my question for you was, is that helpful? Or is that to what you're doing or is that kind of in conflict with what you're doing? And then I had a second question too. Well, I would hope that it would be in alignment with what we're trying to do because what I want us to do first and foremost is reach out to the education community and find out what they would need in order to use what we're creating. I don't want to create something that's going to sit in a box over at 128 and never be looked at again. Okay. So maybe we should all work together when that bill comes around and would be happy to publicize it. And my other question was just around professional development for teachers because I know there are a lot of teachers, just adults that's basic. We've all sort of taken our democracy for granted for a long time. And I just, I hope that there's going to be some structured professional development for folks who will be stepping into that arena. I would love for us to be able to offer professional development credits as we roll this curriculum out to teachers. People know what percentage of eligible voters vote in the state. Well, it's generally between 40 and 60, depending on the election. Okay. And the high watermark elections, as you can imagine, tend to coincide with the presidential years. And a lot of what motivates people to get out and vote is the excitement of somebody who's at the top of that to get in. And I think it's important for folks to also understand that sometimes the places on the ballot that might be most impactful for their lives are those places further down on the ballot or on the back of the ballot where you're local or your state rep and state senator level officials. Even school board and city council.  Right. It's what happens on the permanent and city council. Yeah. I mean, it's your property tax bill. Yeah. Those are the people who are making the decisions that impact one of your most significant bills. We did talk to Susie Glowski about recruiting. Can they start a little bit more of a campaign to recruit people to run for school board? Because that at least, I mean, at least in my area, that's where people, you're always looking for folks. And they have a brochure where we suggested, you know, maybe they could, you know, get something going, you know, on Facebook or social media or whatever the kids are watching today. Tic-toc. Tic-toc. I believe it's Tic-toc. You've got to get a chance to write a file about school boards. Right. Cool.  They're in California, New York, and I mean, you don't have... Irrhythm. Irrhythm. Right. It really is the folks that you know that I think you're going to perhaps get out and try this work. But I also have this, I don't know, I'd be curious to know if the more rural states, smaller populated states, if our percentage of voter turnout is higher than larger states. You know, I don't know. I mean, when the founders, you know, we've got 50 of these, should we have 100?  You really know who those folks are. I don't have a bill that does that. Yeah, I think the voter guide is great. Yeah. Professional development credits, all sorts of great stuff here. Any other questions for Secretary of State? Hey, you registered to vote? I'm not yet. I need to. Okay. Do you have a driver's license? I do. And so when you applied for your driver's license, did you opt out of being automatically registered to vote? Oh, actually, no, I didn't. So you might check with your temp clerk, because you might find yourself on the voter rolls. I just did that, too. Yeah. Yeah. Great. So I would also, as we continue the conversation, Act 77, flexible pathways. You were into the legislature when that was passed. That's why Hayden's here from Spalding High School as a senior. It's, you know, are there ways that we can, you and AOE can work together? Could you have a database in some ways that would give students a resource and a place to go to find jobs in their communities or internships or paid experiences related to Act 77, but they also might make a few bucks in the summer, that kind of thing. So I know everybody's going to be throwing different ideas out, but I think it's just the voter guide itself in the fact you're doing this. It's great. Well, when we go into phase two, which is getting out there in communities, we would be looking for a whole host of interns to help us get out and table at the local farmers market. Great. Thanks a million. Thank you. Thank you. And please do be in touch. Congratulations. Especially, thank you. I appreciate it. Be in touch when you continue the conversation around Simmons. Does it feel like they're Matt Henshin? If you're looking for Matt Henshin, I'll try to get his contact information. He came into this committee last year and testified. A few other teachers did as well. They were very impressive in terms of what they were teaching. Yeah. Yeah. And some of those folks I'm hoping will join our advisory group to help inform our curriculum development. Thank you so much. Thank you. Nice to see you all. You too. Wonderful to be in the corner room. Yeah. Great. Thanks for the water. All right. Thank you. How did I do? What's my grade? Hey, listen. It's a solid. It's a solid. Solid. It's a solid. As was Jennifer Sanderson. Wow. Yeah. I want to use that. I want to make sure the chocolate, you guys get an A as well. Yeah. It's our committee. Thank you for the water. Thank you. Committee. We've got 350. All right. So we've got about five minutes before our next, our final witness. So let's take a quick stretch. Thanks. You're welcome. Welcome back to the Senate. We're closing the day with Rebecca Wasserman, legislative council, who wrote act 72 school facilities bill. When did we pass that? In 21. So it was my first year. Okay. So two years ago. And so what, we have four new senators to this work. And so we thought we would just have an opportunity to hear an overview and take some, you take some questions in the next 15 minutes or so. I can do that. Thank you. Rebecca Wasserman, legislative council. Also, this bill, as you mentioned, is relating to the needs of school facilities in the state. And there's a background to it with the moratorium on the state aid for school construction program. So I can go through the bill and I can give you a quick overview of that now. I can just go through the bill and sort of highlight where there's a reference to that and why decisions were made in this bill. I don't know what would be. There's an overview of the bill, what it does, what work we should be expecting back in, as it relates to our work. Great. So this bill starts off with section one, which is some findings. I don't know if we have a copy of the bill in front of us. We do. Okay, great. Thank you. I love it. Great. I can see it. We have a lot of cuts in room. I can also pull it up on zoom and heavily. I can just share the screen with that. Great. Let's do that and we can get some copies of the bill. I hope they still have the sound of shop line papers. Do you? Not yet. Great. Thank you. Great. So very quickly, the findings section is sort of acknowledging that the state April construction program, there was a moratorium based on that. It's full construction. It used to be paid for through a general obligation funds out of the capital bill. And the legislature made a decision in 2007 to pause that program and sort of continue to that moratorium, that suspension, until all the money that, excuse me, the debt that was incurred was paid back until 2016. And so the findings is sort of acknowledging that moratorium was put into place. However, there is a need in the state in subsection B that between 2008 and 2019 school districts in Vermont issued approximately 211 million in bonds for school construction projects. And as of... What's that? Just curious, any data on how that 211 million was used to the normal flow of school construction projects preceding? I can get JFO to give you that information. I remember at the time this was done that they had... They worked, I think, with a municipal bond bank. I had sort of a chart that they put together. So I can... I think it has... The answer is that it has grown, but I don't know by how much. Okay. But I will get you that information. And then this bill at the time in 2020 there was an estimated 445 million in planned bonding. But I know that that number is updated since then. And then there are some more findings about the backlog in the state school construction projects. And then some intent about developing a plan to address the needs and conditions in the state school buildings. And also subsection E of the bill there was a purpose of the funding appropriating the act was done through the ESSER funds that came, the allocations that came to the state from the federal government and that was used to improve the conditions for health and safety of students and staff and to address other eligible facility needs and to the backlog of the school facility needs in an efficient and equitable manner. So that was sort of the purpose behind the bill. Section 2 of the bill subsection A was directing the secretary of education to work with the superintendent's association and the chair of the state board and the commissioner of BGS to update the school construction facility standards on January 15th of this year. I don't actually have a status update on whether that has been completed but I can look into that. And so keeping in mind that the program that was in place what has not been used since 2007 there was some sort of standards and rules that applied in that program that were very updated. So section 2 is trying to sort of get new facility standards for all schools. And subsection B was directing the state board of education to update and adopt a new rule on the capital outlay financing formula that was used under the old school construction program by January 15th of this year as well. Do we have that can we see a copy of that? Is that available? Of the updated rule. I think you want to introduce yourself and just mention. I was just in building presenting on this. So happy to come in and give you a more thorough presentation but the capital outlay financing formula is being delayed because we're conducting facilities assessment which I can be talking about in just a moment and that's going to inform that work. And the district facilities standards that we're referencing just a moment ago those are essentially in alignment with those district quality standards that Secretary French was presenting to you all on last week so that work is essentially overlapping. That's what we heard about last Thursday with the superintendents but they're all looking to upgrade their facility. Yes. And then finally in section 2 there was some money appropriated to the agency of education for this work to provide technical assistance to the state board and that was $100,000 that could be used out of the full amount of the extra funding appropriated in the bill. Section 3 of the bill includes an inventory and conditions assessment of all the schools in the state so the secretary of education was directed to work with BGS to issue an RFP and that was required by September 1st of 2021 and that would be for school facilities inventory and conditions assessment to ascertain the extent of need for additional support to school districts as a result of COVID-19 and to inform AOB of the state-wide school facilities needs and costs. Not noting the October 1 completion, has that been extended or is that completed? The inventory is complete and the assessment work was extended to 2023 October 2023 that work is underway and will be completed. If the deadline was extended the last session in, I want to see this one because I'm not sure. When you say assessment that's costing of each project and if you look in the language of 72 it's a really detailed comprehensive facilities assessment including a two-year energy product as well. So this section basically required the project to be done in two phases, the inventory and then the assessment phase was looking at evaluating and collecting information to develop like a ranking system to prioritize schools with the highest needs for school construction and as was mentioned there's sort of a list of how that prioritization was done in the bill. There was an appropriation of $2.5 million in the ESSER funds for this work of the inventory and the assessment and then AOE was also asked to create a database to enter all the information from the assessment to have it all in one place. I think historically this information came in in not all together and so it was hard to track what all the needs were across the state. And then there was a report due last year on the findings of the inventory and a progress update on the assessment as you heard the assessment has been the report has been pushed up. Section 4 of the bill on page 6 asks the Secretary of Education by January 15 to submit a report to the General Assembly and funding construction projects so that is looking at the challenges and opportunities to the state of funding school construction projects recommendations for a funding source for the projects that are linked to that inventory needs and conditions and an analysis of how funding is done in other states for school construction projects. And then section 5 of the bill on page 7 is very fast. There are some requirements in this bill on school districts so section 5 is asked the Secretary of Education to come up with this training and certification guidelines for each person designated responsible for facilities management at a school district or supervisory union and that also requires the superintendent of each school district or supervisory union to designate a person responsible for facilities management and that person has to receive that ALE certification and training. Thank you. Does it already exist? There was not a requirement in statute. I think some districts had such a person but I don't think state-wide Thank you. Page 8 of the bill requires a school district to develop and maintain a 5-year capital operations and improvement plan for the school district and supervisory union and there's a requirement that that is updated annually and the Secretary of Education was directed in subsection B to come up with a form to be used by all schools to do that plan. Thank you. What's the date on that? When do they need to have that 5-year capital operation? I believe that section was effective on passage of the bill so I think it somewhat relies on the Secretary of Education having the form developed which I actually don't know if that's been done. We would expect the facilities assessment work to result in a comprehensive assessment report that also goes into a database that's called asset calc that actually puts in dollar amounts on those needs. That work would come before we would expect any district to develop a 5-year capital plan so there is a logical it feels like these are all disparate elements but there's actually a really logical step-by-step process to this particular bill assessment work is sort of the critical pivot point for a lot of the things that are following downhill from it. How are the districts the compliance are in terms of the response to the assessment and inventory so the inventory was a self-reported inventory last year and all that six schools in the entire state responded so that's extraordinary frankly I wish I could get that kind of response and with the assessment the work is underway, the boots are on the ground right now and that's on the contractor to ensure that every public school building is assessed so we expect 100% on that. A curiosity, the 5-year capital operations plan in my mind it would seem that there's actually like two plans one plan, they have current budgets, they have projected budgets they're not anticipating big investment, they just have to continue. I assume that would be one set of plans or one plan and then secondary would be the larger wish list of we really have to address this within the next five-year period or what have you. Exactly, we would want ideally every district to have maintenance and operation so that's been one of the big issues that we've run into is deferred maintenance costs if you defer your maintenance long enough it becomes construction so having that kind of plan for ongoing maintenance and operations and then your big investment wish list some districts do this already I want to be really clear, there's some districts Montpelier Rocks but it has a 5-year plan but it is inconsistent and not all districts have it so it's creating a standard that they would have those plans and you're exactly right, there's the big projects that need to be bonded or state potential state funding and then there's your ongoing maintenance. Thank you. So where is all this money going to come from? Is it going to be bonds? It's an excellent question. So we are here from Treasurer P-Check tomorrow some of his ideas and we're also meeting with, who are we meeting with tomorrow from the feds? We have agreements from Rebecca Ellis and I invited the other person and Treasurer P-Check is also in conversation with Secretary French so that we're working collaboratively on your construction funding It's going to be a lot. Senator Gould, please tell us you have a chapel. No, I just this is just a great opportunity to have a little mini conversation which was before that we had to bond for $165 million we had to bond for $39 million because we had so much deferred maintenance on our schools around the Burlington. This is before the PCB. Oh yeah, before the high school totally separate from the high school because we have some really old buildings and so those have all fallen on the Burlington taxpayers just FYI but I do think it was a really great point the other day at our presentation that those bond, the bonding that you do in a municipality ends up getting tacked down to your per pupil number, which is really creates a strange conflict in your district when it comes time to voting on a school budget so that's one of the things that we'll have to talk about. There's not a property tax. Yeah and just that number just really scares people but it is all part of that pot. Now I know and I think it's a good one and I hope we get to dig into it more because it's important. And the willingness of you know the ability and willingness for some communities to pass those bond measures and others to not as wide as we have the inequities across our city and like facilities. Sure. So page 8, section 7 is creating some positions to do all this work. So there is one limited service position that was funded out of ESSER funds through January 15th of 2023. Actually I don't know if that was extended in another but I'll have to check on that. Section 8 amend bottom of page 8 and then did the threshold that requires schools to go out to bid for school construction projects from 15,000 to 40,000. Section 9 of the bill authorized the secretary of education to hire a consultant using ESSER funds until September 30th of 2023 to essentially help schools use the money that was received from the federal ESSER allocation to improve the health and safety of the district school facilities. So the consultant's duties are things like project coordination and acting as a lease on between the school and the agency and there was an allocation for this consultant position. Section 10 of the bill on page 11 has the agency education coming back to this committee and the House education committee and then the institutions committees in the House and Senate. After consulting with BGS to submit a report on how the state's energy management program can be used to support schools making energy efficiency and conservation measure implement needed energy efficiency and conservation measures at schools. And those that's something that I'm not sure can be done at this point because it was supposed to be measures identified in the assessment which is not there. Yeah I mean we'll have this report to you but schools are not eligible for those funds so there was discussion about making them eligible in the last session but it did not is there a reason why they're not eligible? I mean they're specifically made ineligible in statute. It's a statutory issue. It's an entire issue. This is coming back to me now. Are you kidding? You know this. She hasn't had to touch it in two years. So on page section 11 there was established a renewable energy and efficiency heating system grant program to award grants to schools for renewable and efficient heating systems. This program was included in this bill it was something that was going to be administered by efficiency for months. I don't know the status of it but it was included in the bill without an appropriation so I don't know if anything so that one was not funded but a parallel program using ARPA SFR funds which is called the High Poverty Heating Program is run through the Department of Public Service and your section 12 of the bill as each public school and approved independent school to perform radon testing in the school if that facility had not had a test completed in five years or more but if a school was engaging in implementing an indoor air quality improvement project prior to June 30th 2023 then they have to their sort of date to do this radon measurement was pushed to June 30th 2024 and then the schools were asked to make the results of that testing and they all go to each employee and student at the school and then the effective date section 30 was that the bill is effective on passenger Any questions or final comments for Mr. Wasserman? I don't know because I don't know the ropes but how can you pass a bill with mandates without appropriating money to do it? Well there was an appropriation for the bill itself oh yes that particular program there was a subsection that said that during the 2022 legislative session last year the general assembly would determine a source of funding for the program so it pushed it to the second year of the biennium for them to figure out how to fund it and that did not happen did not happen and just one last one the rate on testing again it was the miscellaneous ed bill that deadline was pushed out to June of 2025 to better align it with the PCD requirements so there is that the next day Hey would you print a copy of the bill just leave it for us for tomorrow just taking it all yeah I know it's a lot and I think we'll have a copy in front of us for additional questions great thank you committee tomorrow we will as you know hear from at least Senator Welch's office on this issue and the state treasurer's office and then we are also going to pick up both we're hearing a number of witnesses on the school safety issue and the teach in Vermont campaign


This study examined the impact of various factors on photovoltaic, PV, module performance across Eurasia and Africa. It found that shallow angle reflectivity has a minimal effect on PV performance, while spectral effects can vary significantly depending on location and module type. Additionally, the study showed that the dependence on irradiance and module temperature can be quite significant, ranging from minus 20% to plus 5%. This article was authored by Thomas Hould and Anna M. Gracia Amillo.


QuickBooks Online 2023 Interpayroll for the second month. Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Here we are in our Get Great Guitars practice file. We started up in a prior presentation using the 30-day free trial. We also have open the free QuickBooks Online sample company. If you want the two open at the same time, we suggest using Incognito window or another browser. You can open Incognito if using Google Chrome by selecting the three dots in the browser. Incognito window typing into the search engine. QuickBooks Online Test Drive. We're using the sample company to compare the account in view. The one Get Great Guitars is in to the business view. The one the sample company is in. You can change between the two views by going to the cog up top and switch the view on down below. We're going to open up and duplicate tabs like we do every time to put reports in. Right-click it on the tab up top to duplicate it. Right-click it on the tab up top to duplicate it. Going back to the tab to the middle as the tab to the right is thinking. Going down to the reports on the left and open up. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below. Giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website. Out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. One of the favorites, that's the balance sheet. By the way, if you're in the business view, the reports are located in the business overview on the left hand side and then the reports, that's where they're at. Let's go to the tab to the right so we can open the other favorite report on the left. That being the income statement, the profit and loss. Closing up the hand buggy and changing the range in from 010123 tab to let's go to 022823. I'm going to check this out on a side by side month by month comparison and then run it. We've got Jan, we've got Fed, we've got the total tab to the middle. Close up the buggy and change in the range in from 010123 to 022823. We're going to run it running and that's the setup process that we do every time. We're going to be processing payroll for the second month this time. So we process payroll on a monthly basis. Let's just kind of recap the flow of the payroll process. So I'm going to do that in our flow chart down below. So we're in the payroll basically like a vendor cycle. If it wasn't for all the complexities with taxes, then it would be basically shake hands with somebody.   We've got the federal and possibly state to deal with. So what we need to do then is possibly enter the time first if they're hourly employees. Although this time entry is not really required to process the payroll because you might be tracking time in some other way or you might be using an hourly, I mean a salaried type of system. But you can also use this time entry for the billing process as we've discussed in the past. Then of course we're going to process the payroll which will generate payroll checks which will be distinct forms different than other check forms in that they'll be marked off as like a payroll type of checks. We can determine which checks are payroll versus non-payroll type of checks and this will also generate the withholdings that are taken out of the employee checks and put into a liability account as well as calculate our taxes on the employer taxes and put those into a liability account and payroll taxes. Then of course at some point after that which we'll do shortly we'll have to pay the payroll liabilities for the withholdings that we took and our payroll taxes. We're also going to have to deal with the 941s that are quarterly information returns the 940 at the end of the year, the W2 and W3s at the end of the year. So that's the general process.  Those are the big ones and in that case you wouldn't have to do so much detailed tracking internally but you can have them do the detailed tracking and then you make the adjustments for your financial reporting so that at the least you can get your tax returns prepared properly at the end of the year and those are kind of the two main payroll options. So we turned on payroll in the system. I'm going to go back to the tab to the left because it was part of the free 30-day trial so we turned on the payroll. Payroll is a little bit difficult so if I go into the payroll and the overview up top it's a little bit difficult to follow along with the payroll in a practice problem because payroll is one of those things that generally needs to be run real time. So if you're working way out into the future for example as you're looking at this practice problem you might not be able to process payroll in exactly the same way. That's part of the problems with the payroll. Also just realize that the payroll will change from quarter to quarter so you usually want like a whole years of payroll in one payroll system. You don't really want to change payroll in the middle of the year. You can but it's not preferred because there's caps on things like social security and federal income tax so obviously when you do like the 941s or process payroll from one period to the prior period you compare it to the prior period that's what we always do with accounting but it'll change as the year goes as people hit some of these caps for like federal unemployment tax and social security and that kind of stuff. So just a couple things to keep aware of. So we're just going to go in we've set up the payroll the payroll set up. We've added our employees. We've got our two employees. We set up to be paying payroll on a monthly basis as opposed to weekly semi monthly and so on. And so now we'll just go up here and process the payroll. So I'm just going to run the payroll and hope that they'll allow me to run it even though I'm not in the real time here. So I'm going to hit the dropdown. This period by period has been set up when we set up the payroll so that the next period that we would run would be 2023. So February there we February 2023. There's the pay range the period because we have a monthly period. So it's the full month. The pay date happens to be the same day as the end of the period, which may not always be the case. You might have a pay date that's a little bit after the end of the period. So you have a little bit of time to process the payroll after the pay period. But we're going to keep the same date here to keep it in that second month that we're working on. And then if everything was laid out properly, you might be able to just process from here. But we need to go in and make some adjustments because of the practice problem. And so I'm going to go into Hamilton and actually that's going into his information stuff. I'm going to close that. I'm going to go into the pencil on the right hand side so I can see the calculation this way. So we've got the summary of the information. We've got the pay. He's a salaried employee. So this is the salaried amount.  Where's the calculator? It's not in the recent area. I've been using it all the time. So we're going to say this is going to be, I think it was 55,000 divided by 12. That's where the 4583, 55,000 a year. And then if I go into the employees, this federal income tax is one of the most confusing ones. We would populate it from tables and whatnot and the information that was populated in the W-4. But that's one of the things you're paying for for QuickBooks because it's not a flat tax. So that's one of the confusing ones to calculate. So I'm going to make a number up that matches our practice problem that's not coming from the W-4. I just wanted to match the numbers in our practice problems so it'll tie out to our bank reconciliations. Now the social security and Medicare should be easier because that's just going to be the 4583.33 times .062. I think is currently the calculation. So that's a nice, easy one to do because it basically is a flat tax although there is a cap. So if they get above the wage cap, this number will change. It'll be lower and that's what I mean about the payroll possibly being different from period to period as you go through the year. And then we've got the Medicare. We've got the 4583.33 times .0145. That gives us the 6646 about I'm not going to do any California tax because I want to make it kind of like a generic problem on the payroll side. And then you've got the employer taxes which are matching social security and Medicare. So and there would also be the federal unemployment tax which I didn't add because that's a much smaller tax. And again, I want to keep it kind of generic for our practice problem. So up top then if we think about this we've got this would be what they earned. This is what we're taking out of their earnings. These are in essence the mandatory withholdings for federal taxes. You could also have mandatory withholdings for your state and local taxes as for example, California might be but that will be changing from place to place. You can also have voluntary withholdings which might include things like health insurance 401k and that kind of stuff. We have a whole course that goes into at least setting that up and more detail. If you want to dive into that in more detail it's a whole thing in and of itself. And then down here we've got the employer taxes which are matching the social security. So what's going to be the transaction for this one employee as I go through it. Remember that you can think about the financial transactions. What's going to happen to the financial statements on an employee by employee basis or as though all employees were kind of like one employee. So if I was doing my payroll from a third party provider and entering them into my system I might think of all the transactions as one big employee and enter a journal entry or something like that into the system although I still need to reconcile the bank's accounts. But that's the way that you can think of it. If you're doing this stuff internally it's useful to think of it as one big employee what's the impact on the financials but you also need all this added detail so that you can provide what you need to the employees on the pay stubs and on the reports the 941s the 940 and W2s and W3s that's why it gets messy. So that means this is going to be a debit or an increase to the payroll expense and then all of this stuff is going to be decreasing or increasing a liability for the liability account and the difference between the two 4583.33.33 minus the 105.62 that's what's going to be decreasing the cash account and then down here this is going to be increasing the expense account for payroll expense, payroll tax expense and the other side is going to be increasing a liability account and then we'll have to pay off the liabilities in the future. Okay let's save that. Does that make sense? I think everything is proper. Okay so let's close that up and let's do this for Erica. Let's check out Erica. I mean I'm checking out her wages. Her wages.  I am the HR department. We're payroll over here. I'm just looking at Erica's wages. So we're going to say Erica, let's say that Erica had hours of 360 and so update the timesheet hours. I'm going to say so it's trying to link to the timesheet because I put the timesheet on the payroll but I was basically using the timesheet to populate the information for the invoices more than pull it in for the purposes of the payroll. So I'm going to kind of discard the timesheet here. So that's going to give us 15. That's going to be then hold on a second. I'm going to put in here not 360. I'm going to put 160 and so that'll be 2400. Okay and then what we're going to withhold, I'm going to change this again. I know it's really high but I'm going to change it to 360 to tie it to our numbers in our practice problem and remove the California tax. So that means that the 2400 times .062, that's where they came out with that 14880 and the 2400 times the .1045 is where they come up with that 3480 and then we've got our match down here. So for this employee, the transaction would be when we record this, we're going to have, you can think of it first as a payroll check. So you might say well the payroll check is going to go, cash is going to go down by 2400, 2400 minus the 543.6. It's going to go down by that 185640 and then the other side is going to be payroll expense but it's going to go on there for the full amount of the 2400. The difference, the liability, this kind of sounds like sales tax maybe to you. The liability which is their taxes, the employee's taxes kind of like the sales tax is supposed to be the customer's taxes is going to go into the liability account for the liabilities and then we're going to pay taxes over and above. These are our taxes. So we have payroll expense, payroll tax expense for the 18360 and liabilities going up for that amount as well. So again, you can see that check by check and you can also see it in total. So if I was to think of both employees as one large employee, you could think of the transaction that way as well. Let me just double check these numbers. So that looks good and that looks good, I think. So remember payroll is one of those things you want to measure twice and cut once. You don't want to have to reprocess payroll generally because it's a pain to do that. You have to delete the paychecks generally to do that and run it again. So you can save it for later if you needed to go to coffee before processing but I'm going to go to the preview page. Let's do a preview and so we've got the preview information, the total payroll cost. Now if you were to do a transfer into like a payroll checking account which could be useful sometimes so that you have one checking account that just processes payroll then you might just transfer the money from your checking account to the payroll account and then process payroll out of it. That way if there's a problem with payroll you can have a checking account that just has payroll transactions in it which sometimes can be a little bit easier and this can be a spot where you could say okay now I'm going to transfer money into the payroll account so I can process payroll but we're just going to take it directly out of the checking account. Then down here we've got save for later again or submit payroll and we've got the preview. Let's go to the preview. It gives us a nice little report in essence of the information. So let's check it out. We've got Adam, we've got Erica and then we've got the net on the total. So this is kind of what I mean about us being able to see each employee as like group together one employee right because now I've got the salary for the both of them which is going to increase the payroll expense. We've got then the withholdings for all of them, the federal, the social security and Medicare. Those things are going to be increasing the liability and then the difference between those items which I believe is going to be the 4583.33 and plus the other pay of 2400 minus the 1060 minus the 432. Well, hold let me do that one more time. We've got the 4583.33 plus 2400 minus the 1060 minus the 432.96 minus the 101.26. That would be the net impact on the checking account but it would be done with two paychecks. So that's kind of the tricky thing. If you were thinking about it as just one lump sum, what's the impact because you got to do the bank reconciliations and the bank reconciliations are going to have two checks to tie out. And then you've got the employer portion of these two items that are going to be increasing payroll tax expense and the other side going to payroll liability. And they also have the summary down here which probably another an easier way to see it. This 6933 represents the 4583 and the 24, the 4583 and the 24. So this is the 6983.33 minus the withholdings minus the 1594.22 would be the impact on the checking account and then you've got the taxes for the employer side. All right, let's check it out. Enough of this submit. I can submit or say for later, let's submit it. Let's just do it, man. For crying out loud, just do it. Okay, so I think the next check number we were on was 1022. So I'm going to do that and then I'll just put this at 1023. Let's do that. Okay, and then if I check out the paystubs that we need to provide to the employees, we've got the information on it. I'm going to close this out and then close this out. And can I make this a little bit larger? Like so they changed the layout of my Adobe page. But here's our pay stub information on a paycheck by paycheck. So notice that you have to have the current information and the year to date information, what they actually earned and then what was taken out of and then what was taken out in order to get the net pay on the current pay and the year to date pay. So that's going to be that.  Finish him. So then take payroll off your to-do list. So let's say remind me later and then there it is. So now let's go to my check register and check out what happens. I'm going to go down to the, let's say the accounting on the left-hand side. And then I'm in the chart of accounts. And I can find that in the business view by the way. If you wanted to check it out on the business view, it's under the book. That's not the business view. The business view is here. And let's go to the bookkeeping and then the chart of accounts. That's where it's located there. You got to turn it on if you're in the sample company. And then I'm going to go into the check register. So if I go into the check register, there's our two checks that have been put in place. Now let's go to our financials. Going to go to the balance sheet, run it. And then if I zoom in a bit and we go down to the lia. Well, we've got the checking account obviously went down. Checking account went down here by the two checks that we wrote. And they're going to be payroll checks, especially marked payroll checks. Now that's for the net amount that it went down by after the withholdings. And then if I go back up and the other side is going to be on the income statement. So now you got the FEB payroll. The FEB payroll. So here's the wages. So if I go into that, this is the full amount, including not having taken out the taxes. And then we're going to go to the difference, which is going to be on the first balance sheet page where we have the liabilities down below. So now we've got the payroll liabilities. And so here's the federal. This includes both the employee and employer portions on the liabilities. And then going back up finally, we have our portion of the payroll taxes down here on the income statement, our portion of Social Security and Medicare. And it would include the federal unemployment tax, but that's a small tax so we didn't add it in our practice. So I'm going to right click on the tab to the right and duplicate. And let's just take a look at some of these sub ledger reports. You've got a whole host of sub ledger reports to help you to generate the information needed for the employees, as well as the payroll forms, the 941s, 940, W2s, W3s. So let's go to the reports on the left, close up the bookie and scroll down. So we've got our sales tax, employees, payroll reports. So here's all the payroll reports, a lot of information. So let's go to the payroll summary by employee. I think it's a good kind of registered type of report. So up top we've got just for 228. So this is the information for 228 now being broken out in terms of the gross pay.  And then you've got the withholdings on the total here. And then for Adam and Erica gives us the net pay, the impact on the actual checking account. So again, this is where it gets a little tricky when you think of it as a journal entry, because when you reconcile the bank accounts, it will show up as two separate checks. So if you record it in your checking account, just like when we use the undeposited fund or the clearing account or the payment to deposit accounts, if you record it as one lump sum, because you're recording it from a third party, for example, that did the payroll into the system, then you're going to have to be careful when you do the bank reconciliation for it, because obviously it's going to be multiple checks that you're reconciling to. And then you've got our portion, the Social Security and Medicare down here for the employer side. Let's try to change this to starting in January through the 28th and apply that out. So now we've got the gross pay at the $13,966.66. So let's see if that will tie out to the, that should tie out to our income statement. So if I run the income statement for the total for the two periods and run and roll down to wages, we're at the $13,966.66, right? So see how your payroll reports should basically tie into that. Now, some of the tax stuff isn't going to tie out because we made an adjustment last time in our practice problem to match out to the bank reconciliation. And that's where you need to be careful with the payroll because we did that for practice problem purposes, but you don't really want to do that in practice because this information is going to be used to make your information returns to the 940s, the 941, the W2s and the W3s. And what you want to have happen, of course, is for that information on those information returns, the information on the pay stubs and the information reflected on your financial statements to mirror each other, to be correct. You want to be able to double check them at the end of the year because if there's an audit or any kind of problem, everything should tie out. Usually when things don't tie out, it's not due to malice. It's not because there's someone's intentionally trying to mess something up. It's because they were trying to fix something and they did a workaround and instead of like deleting the payroll or adjusting the payroll items, they made like a journal entry to fix something or something like that. And now the payroll reports don't tie out to what's on the financial statement. And so that's what you need to be careful of. Everything works smoothly if the whole payroll system is set up properly and then you don't report anything else. Like if you reported something to a journal entry to this wages expense, that's going to clearly mess things up because it should only have stuff in there that's from the processing of the payroll. And if you post something to this and not do it through the payroll processing, it won't be reflected on the payroll reports. And the payroll reports are used to create the 940s, the 941s and the W2s and all that kind of stuff. So if there's a problem, we'll talk more about this next time. You really would like to, in practice, delete the payroll and reprocess the payroll instead of trying to fix it. That's why you want to do payroll basically right the first time because going back and fixing it usually means you've got to kind of start over and that can cause all kind of complications, especially if you already filed the 941s on the quarterly tax returns or something like that. Okay, enough with that. Let's go to the tab to the right. Let's take a look at our trial balance or trustee TB by going to the reports on the left-hand side. And then we're going to go down and just type in trial balance. Trial balance. And then we'll change that range up top from 010123 to 022823 and then run it. And let's do it side by side just for the fun of it because it is fun. It's good times. And if your numbers tie out to what we have, we're in the same spot. That's good. We're going to do a transaction detailed report at the end of the second month of data input to drill down on any differences.