Yeah, hello everyone and welcome to my talk. My name is Martin Jäger and I'm from LibreSolar which is a project and as well as small company and we develop open source hardware for renewable energy systems, especially tiny solar systems and we also do some contracting work for Zephyr lighted stuff ideally also in the renewable energy sector and Yeah, today I will talk about a project that is not directly related to solar, but It's something we developed During the past years in different projects and it's called things that which is kind of a protocol that is transport agnostic and can be used for many purposes and Yeah, we found it to be very useful in our project and hopefully you can find it useful in your project as well so let's have a look at a Yeah diagram with typical data flows you have in an embedded device. So if we look at the Device in the center you have your MCU with your RAM inside and you often have Some kind of persistent memory like either a flash or an EEPROM or both where you store your settings and Yeah, many devices have some kind of sensor as an input and actuators as an output Where they communicate with which would be simple protocols like SPI or I2C But we also usually have lots of more communication interfaces For our devices for example, it could be a mobile app Communicating via Bluetooth Some kind of cloud connection via MQTT web sockets or co-app for example Yeah, and these are all the communication interface that are kind of relevant to the user of the app But also as a developer we need some other means for communication with the device Usually during development we need some logging That's unidirectional in this picture. So it's just eight output information But often we also need to interact with the device during testing and go into some test settings Yeah, tune some set points. So that would be by directional interface Where you can for example use the Zephyr shell Yeah, so that would be a serial interface as well as the the log data interface and Looking from the manufacturer's perspective also they have to Yeah, during end-of-line testing somehow put data into the device for example for provisioning of keys for calibration of sensors Yeah, end-of-line testing and so on and all these Different interfaces usually use completely different protocols and there are solutions for all of them, but What if we could use exactly the same protocol and the same data for all of these interfaces? and that's exactly what the things that project is about and I'm going to tell you about the yeah, how it works and Yeah, how you can use it for your projects First of all, it's all open source. So you can download all the software and the app that I'm going to show at the end Which is written in Flutter the software is all in C and Zephyr based of course Yeah, so that's the The points I will try to cover in the presentation the first step In order to make the data useful is to have a very defined structure of the data We call it the semantic data model Then we have the protocol that allows to access this data It's kind of a query language. You will see later on but a very simple one Yeah, then we have the different transports because I said it's transport agnostic So there must be at least a few transports it can be used with and some mappings which are Protocols where it can be integrated, but which do not fit for all features of the things that protocol Yeah, at the end I will show how it's all integrated with Zephyr and which features we leveraged and Show it in a demo where we develop a small sensor. That's connected to an app and the app will display useful data Okay, yeah, I wanted to come up with some sort of example application So I thought a smart thermostat could be something useful because we have a simple sensor like a temperature sensor an actuator and Yeah, we need to set some target values I didn't find any picture that was vendor neutral So they all had logos on them. So I asked a stable diffusion for a thermostat in Prague at sunset That's what came out. So that's what we are going to develop now And take as an example because examples are usually better to understand the concepts behind it So, yeah, we have measured temperature as an input a target temperature as an input as well by the user So that should be configurable by an app and the output is whether the heater is on or off Now let's go directly to the data model. So this is Yeah, displayed as a Jason structure and Jason is actually one of the formats we use for the transport But we can also use co-op for more constrained devices and then yeah You send a binary send binary data and you can even use IDs instead of the names here There are a few terms to clarify So one is a data object. That's all of these single lines basically And then we have basically four types of data objects. One is the data item. That's actually useful data so the Data like a measurement value or in this case if you look at the first line It's the node ID. So that's a string and that's a leaf node of the tree like structure you see Then a group is something to gather some useful data into one group as the name suggests Like we can use it for sensor data or For controlled data. So it's just to to have a better structure of the whole thing Then we have something that's called subsets and Subsets are used to reference existing data in the structure so that you can Use only a subset of the whole data to generate reports regular reports that you want to send out to the cloud or via your app And they are basically links to the path inside the Structure so if we look at this subset here the sensor room temperature and degree C is this path so here and then the slash and then this item and An overlay is kind of similar to the Zephyr device tree overlays has a slightly different meaning It's it can hold some meta data. That's not necessary for the Most important understanding of the data But still sometimes you can't code everything into just one single string what you need about the data so that can be put on top of the whole structure of the data and in our case it is used for configuring the reporting of these Subsets of data so you would then create an overlay With the prefix of an underscore and then you have the same name as you have in the original data structure above and then you can Configure how this subset should be reported. We will see that later on and then it will get more clear Now as you have already seen some of those data objects have Prefixes and some do not have prefixes. So the the groups Don't have prefixes and all these naming conventions are really important for the whole model to work and to generate the app out of it at the end and So that's it's just a convention that yeah, if you stick to it You will generate a nice user interface and also the idea is that If you have a device and you don't know anything about it, then you can find out what data it exposes and Most importantly like what unit is the temperature in for example So sometimes you see APIs where there is just temperature and then you think well, is it far and high? Does it degree C? Yeah, and that should all be part of the data I'm yeah, the main objectives of this data model is that it's schema less and self-explanatory So the ideal case would really be that in 20 30 years If that simple protocol that can be used for this for things that is still Useful then you can connect to the device find out the data from the device You don't need any manual or anything like in Modbus for example where you need a huge catalog of register numbers Yeah, that's the probably the most important objective and it should be easy to use in human readable That's why one mode is in Jason and there's a second mode I already briefly touched that that has a more compact footprint and that uses seabor and numeric IDs optionally instead of the String names here, so it can be really used for Laura van for example That's one of our use cases where you have they are like tens of bytes per message And you really don't want to send strings in each message same for can bus That's also one of our main applications You would use the binary ID and then just send the payload value via seabor Quickly touching on these prefixes so our data items the they have For example this P prefix, which means it's a protected item that can usually not be changed by the user And our prefix is a read-only value. So that's suitable for measurement values Because you want don't want to change them And an s is a stored value. That means it's stored in non-volatile memory So our target set point of the thermostat should be stored even if the device runs out of battery It has to be restarted and there's also a W for written values that are stored in RAM only they can be used for control loops where you don't want to write to the eeprom or flash memory every time and Wear it off quite quickly. So here's an overview again about the different prefixes We didn't cover constant So constant are not Changing so if the back end received a constant value it can expect that it stays the same all the time So it only stores it once and not in a time series database for example and read-only values are changing values like measurements Then we have a T prefix for timestamps because they are special and sometimes Yeah sent in every message. So it should be really short and executable items Which call a function internally in the C code for the subsets We also have different prefixes to categorize them That's mainly for back ends so that they understand if this is changing data or is it is it static data That's just sent to the device usually and the groups and the overlays don't have any prefix So you can distinguish them from normal data items now coming to the excess protocol so if we think of this Jason's Structure as something like a database that we have in RAM in our device. We somehow want to access these single items and Yeah, we have two ways to do this one is a request response model and the other one is that you send out regular reports But don't expect a response That's usual useful for the measurement data and also for canvas You would just send it to the bus and don't flood the bus with all the packages Yeah, and the last one is a desire that would be a message that's sent to the device But you don't expect a response either because yeah The device will just try to receive the packet and Pass it and use it and if it can't use it it will be silently ignored or for example if there are data items It doesn't understand it would ignore them Now the protocol is really pretty simple. Here's the basic layout the message layout it Yeah It's just a stream of bytes starting with the first byte which distinguishes What type of message we have so this is just the first byte and it can be either a text byte like the question mark and The question mark would be a get request an equivalent of a get request in HTTP or a co-op in Binary it would be the zero one which is actually the same as the co-op get request Then we have a few other request response functions the Equal sign is to update data Plus is to create new data Data items delete is to delete something from like an array for example And the exclamation mark is an executable eight item responses always use the colon and an additional response code and the response code is mapped to seabor and HTTP response codes so that it can be easily integrated with web environments and so on Okay, let's have a look at some examples of the protocol itself We have the same data structure again at the left and now we want to retrieve all the sensor values So we would send this command to the device. So it's the question mark and then sensor is the path And in this case, it's not nested. It's so it's on the highest level of the hierarchy and Then we will just get back all the JSON that's behind it and that's exactly how the protocol works It takes the values from RAM Puts them serializes them into the JSON structure and sends them out the 85 is the response code for Yeah values with content. It's the 200 in HTTP. I guess Um, yeah, and we have an update request here So we want to update the target temperature and this is a stored value and not a read-only value and So we use the equal sign and the control path and then provide the Yeah, only the data items we want to update in that group and We get 84 as response code which is it has been successfully updated And of course, there are also error responses, which tell you our data object not found and things like that Yeah, and last request response example is to delete the humidity sensor values from the live metric subject subset which would Take so the m life is this live metric subset and it has been this before and This command would delete that sensor out of the list and then it would not be sent out anymore Then we have this other communication pattern the it's more public subscribe like report and desire and That can by the way also be It's more suitable for asynchronous communication. So if you have a server back end and you have some Yeah devices that are not connected regularly You would place the desire in the back end and then the device connects get the desire and applies it to its own data And likewise in the other direction a device can connect to the cloud Then send out the report and then disconnect So here's an example of a report. It also starts with one character in this In case it's the hash sign then it has the sender path again and the JSON structure That's behind this sender path. So that can be used for for a group or you can use it for the Subset in this case the live metric subset So this would be the path and then we don't put this error array anymore, but the actual values that are behind these links and then last but not least the Yeah, a desire to change the control target temperature and Yeah, in this case, we would not get a response as we got previously with the request response message messaging pattern Yeah, the the whole thing can be used over lots of different transport protocols as I mentioned already and This is an example of a possible networking topology. So you could either directly connect to a device For example via Bluetooth or via can so that would be and a desktop application or a mobile app Getting directly onto the device which has Bluetooth and exposed data via things set or you could also have a back end in between and then you could communicate via IP networks for example and Yeah, the back end could forward requests from a web front end or an app as well to the devices that are connected behind the Back ends or you could also have multiple devices or even legacy devices which would for example transfer Modbus Registers into the things that protocol to make the data more useful than just register names But then you have to put the manual information into that gateway Yeah, so Most of these things are already working But I found it would be most interesting to have a small application that Communicates via Bluetooth and that's what I'm going to demonstrate in a few minutes Looking quickly at the time Okay so Yeah, the transport protocols Have only a very basic requirement, which is they must be message oriented bidirectional and Have reliable transport Because we don't do any error checking inside the protocol itself. It relies on error checking in the underlying protocols So of course you can easily use a serial interface, but you could get data corruption So for the serial protocol, we have a CRC. That's part of the serial Implementation but not part of the core things that protocol for web sockets For example, they are really the ideal transport mechanism I would say because they are already have some frames already, so they are message oriented and of course bidirectional HTTP is not very ideal because you don't easily Get the bidirectional communication Yeah for can the message sizes are really small at least for classical can We can only have eight bytes and that's why we use the ISO TP transport protocol Which can hugely increase the the number of Bites you can transfer in one message and then it's also message or message oriented at the same time for Bluetooth Yeah, that's a bit of a tricky case in the Bluetooth classic. There was a Bluetooth serial interface or device Specification, I don't know what the correct term is for Bluetooth Profile, okay for thank you for Bluetooth low energy, there is no such profile anymore and Of course Bluetooth already provides very similar things like we have in our structure You can create different services and characteristics for all your data structure But it's not as flexible as we wanted it to be So our Bluetooth protocol is really simple. We have two services and one service and two characteristics one for sending and one for receiving We have a simple packetization mechanism. So it just Yeah, it tells you where the end of a packet is and then the other end will realize that it's similar to the slip protocol and for serial line communication of IP packets and With that, yeah, we're kind of abusing the the Bluetooth a little bit, but I think that's allowed You can also use it for with SMS We actually did that in an application with 2g modem and you could send basic commands via SMS to the devices with the modem for mappings you can Yeah, use other protocols that are not directly compatible So you can use MQTT for synchronous communication with Request response, but you have to come up with the message ID That's encoded inside the topic and things like that. So that's not the ideal use case So we would say you can map it and for example encode the path We are using in things that into the MQTT topic. That's ideal Yeah, and you can use it for the desires and reports. We just talked about Laura one Of course does not support all the features because it's so low power and low Yeah, data rate But it can be Integrated very well because it has the concept of ports and a port is a number from an 8-bit number And you can use those for the data object IDs in the binary protocol variant So that's also quite easily Integratable and co-op is also quite useful Because we have similar requests like HTTP and co-op already so it can be directly mapped Now looking at the Zephyr integration. We have quite a few modules that we use There are two things that related modules one is the things at node library and that does all the parsing and basically taking the data from RAM putting them into the JSON structures and so on and for that library. We are also using the Zet seaboard library from Nordic Which is also part of Zephyr Yeah, and We have developed and things at SDK Which integrates all the communication interfaces you need like the Bluetooth part the serial part the canvas part It also integrates with the EEPROM and the NVM Subsystems so that you can store your values and also use the same protocol or the same data format for all your settings in the device Yeah, and that's part of this SDK, which is also a Zephyr module and you can just use that and Yeah, you just need a few lines of code and then you're almost done and that's what I'm going to show now Yeah, so the used features from Zephyr are iterable sections if you haven't heard about them that's You can specify special structs inside anywhere in your code and the linker picks them up and Puts all the structs of the same type in a row into memory So you basically get an array which you can define Anywhere in your code and we are using that to define all the data items and objects anywhere in the code So you can define them where you need them and then they are all put together into the database so to say Then we're using work use some peripheral drivers as already mentioned Bluetooth the shell subsystem and you can also use Thinkset as a custom logger back end so you can send the log data out to your cloud if you have that connection already Okay for the demo I'm using a Nordic Nrf 52840 Development kit that you can see here. The original one is here on my desk we're using Zephyr version 3.4 with a Bosch BME 180 sensor that's an environmental sensor it sends temperatures humidity pressure and some air quality value and We will use things that up which is also open source But not yet published in the app store, but you can download it on our repository Which is written in flutter. So that's also cross-platform. You can run it on linux system on Windows systems on iOS and I'm using Android at the moment Okay, let's switch to the code so that you don't see me typing all the time I prepared some git commits in a row Which I will leverage But we start with the simple hello world program. So on the right we can see the terminal I press hello world I press reset and that's the hello world. So that's our starting point now Let's integrate the sensor so I will cherry pick this commit and It adds a board overlay file With the Bosch BME 680 yeah, device tree nodes and Yeah, we were lucky that this sensor was already supported by Zephyr as many sensors are so the programming effort was not too much Everything we have to do here is integrate the Yeah, include the the sensor driver Then we are specifying to floating point variables the room temperature and the humidity that are read from the sensor We get the device tree Driver the Yeah, the device struct pointer Here that's all something you probably know and Yeah, here we check if the sensor is ready and in our endless loop we just sample the sensor and Convert the sensor samples into floating point variables, which are specified here and Stop for five seconds and repeat So let's flash this Okay, there we go. We have our sensor and it's now just printing to our console So that's usually the the first simple test But now we want to make the data more useful include the units and use things that instead So what we are going to do now us are well the the next step would actually be We want to have a controller in the end and not just have Measurements printed, but we also want to do an action based on the actual measurements. So we include implement a really simple control loop Which is here. So we have another function It's called run controller and it checks if the room temperature is below a target temperature the target temperature is now hard-coded to 222 degree C and We also introduce another variable that is heater on a Boolean and we add an LED So that's currently our actuator Which is switched on based on the target temperature and the room temperature We initialize also the the GPIO driver and here at the end we run the controller and afterwards sleep nothing else has changed so far and Of course, we had to add all these functions into our project configuration I'm using picolip see with the floating points so that we get the floating point point printed out here We include I squared C and the sensor drivers and we use log mode minimal because then With this tiny screen we can easily more easily see the log messages. So let's flash that and meanwhile We can go into the west yaml for a second Okay, now we see that the heater is on We have another value and I could now test the controller by hard coding that value and changing it But that wouldn't really make sense. We want to have some interaction with the device So that's where we are going to introduce things that and how do we get it into our code base? It's just this piece of Change in the west yaml. So we pull in the Zephyr the things that Zephyr SDK Which itself includes the things that node which does the parsing module So we have to put import true and it will also include C's ZC bore Yeah, so that we have everything we need Now let's go to the next step and Enable the things that SDK and define some objects Jerry pick this one Now we have some more changes First of all, let's look into the project configuration So now we enable the things that node library the parsing library That's this one and we enabled the SDK and we select a node name So each of the things that nodes I didn't really cover that yet Has a unique ID and it can have a yeah more human-friendly node name. That's optional And they have a special name in their structure. That's all specified in the specification Yeah, and it can be used to pass the data afterwards Now we also enable the con the things that serial interface Which is one of the subsystems all of the many interfaces we can enable from the SDK and then it will automatically use the serial interface here and The exciting part is now happening in our application So here we include the things that dot H and the things that SDK dot H and then we start defining our Database so to say and it's yeah really quite simple. There are some macros They are all documented in our on the the website if you browse to the code repository Then you get the rendered documentation and you will see what these parameters mean so basically these have this Iterable section feature behind them and we have to Yeah configure some parameters to build up this tree like structure and that's done by Numbers and these numbers are also the numbers used for the binary encoding if you use the ID based approach for very tiny packages You would probably in an actual application have a centralized H dot h file where you Define your number space here. I did it just here and Yeah, let's also documented which numbers are reserved by the SDK and by the node library Here we just take some numbers So this would be the sensor group and then we have the sub items temperature and humidity and the same for the control group So we use the things that add group macro. You could place it anywhere in the code really So it doesn't matter it would be picked up automatically by the linker and put in the right place Then we use the root ID. So that's the parent ID of This data object then we use the ID of this object itself it has to be passed here then the name obviously and This group should not have any callback assigned We'll come through that later Then we define two floating point items They have one more parameter or two more parameters So these are the same so parent group ID of the this float item itself then the name with the unit separated with an underscore and then we have the pointer to the floating point variable in RAM and Here we can define the number of significant digits we want to display because in Jason you can have infinite number of digits and if you Print floating points. Sometimes. Yeah, you you have huge number of digits behind the comma. You don't really need So that's specified here and we can specify some access rights So this one should be Readable by anyone and these macros are also part of the library which and documented there And an important aspect here is that this should be part of the subset for live reporting Yeah, same for all the other items basically all the same The only interesting thing is here Which is our stored? Target temperature and here we don't have the read only anymore But we set the right flag as well. So that means this item can be written to by the protocol Yeah, and now let's flash that Okay reset Okay, now we see we can see the reporting in the things that format and we could also send request via the serial interface now But sending direct request via serial interface is not ideal. So let's take the serial the Things that the shell of Zephyr instead So this is already integrated the only thing we have to do is replace the serial What we had activated before with the things that shell and in this case We are disabling the reporting because otherwise it will spam our shell all the time so now All right, so now we have a log message as well and we can use the things that protocol So it's the it's called things that the command here in this in the shell And then we can do this the question mark and we get all the data behind the root object And we can also do control For example and get the data behind the control. We can also set values and so on But I'm running out a little out of time a little bit and want to answer some questions. So I'll go a bit quicker The next one would be Currently we don't have enabled the storage backend yet So if we were to store the value or send the right to the stored value It would not be stored in in non-volatile memory actually So we have to enable that and that's also just a matter of a few lines of Kconfig What was changed in the main IA we had To add this to the non-volatile memory Subset as well and then it would be stored and the last part Would be to add the Bluetooth interface and That's really just a change in the Kconfig. So we enable Bluetooth Set the Bluetooth device name and we increase the package size as much as we can in Bluetooth and enable things set BLE here So yeah, and I'll go to the last no, I'll check out this one and So this is also all online already and you can have a look at it and into further detail Now let's see Okay, there we go. It puts out some logging information related to Bluetooth and Now I will open my phone and Get into this one So this is a screen copy of my phone and this is the things that app also open source Which can be used to interact with the protocol via Bluetooth now and we go here and scan for Bluetooth devices Here we got the Zephyr developer summit sensor, then we click at it and then we can access the device and now we can compare with our database we just defined so this is the database and This is the user interface that was completely automatically generated by the Bluetooth application and you see It takes the units generates a user interface out of it and now we can even configure the Publications here we can enable and disable them and we can go into the live Screen and see our sensor data So I can increase the temperature a little bit and then this should also go up All right. Yeah, that's it. We have time for one or two questions. I guess Yeah, Carlos Thanks for the demo really cool and the in general everything looks, you know, really sound to me So inevitable question why separate module why not upstream this in the main to the main repo? Well, we could think about that in the future. No problem with that Currently, it's it was still quite a bit in the flow because I almost rewrote the entire library because of some issues and Some legacy issues, but I would be more than happy to upstream it in the future Just I think this could this could fit pretty well into our subsist management folder where we have similar systems where you know You can manage the device sort of, you know, which in the end it's a data model So I think it could be a good fit. Of course, you know, there's details to be but Why not, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah for sure. Yeah, it also supports device firmware upgrade and things So it's it's really easy to just add some items you need and transfer data as you like and so yeah, okay. Thank you Thanks. Yeah Okay. Yeah Yeah, I think we have to stop. Can we have one question? Okay. Yeah, so just Yeah, getting contact with me. I will be around somewhere here and Otherwise, there's also my Contact details here Um


Okay, welcome everybody. May 7th, 2020, remote meeting of Senate education. The main purpose for today's hearing is to have hopefully a somewhat long detailed conversation with the Secretary of Ed about reopening plans. I might have mentioned before I was talking to some people in a couple of districts. They seem to think that May 8th, i.e. tomorrow was a big day for renewed guidance for schools. So that's my first question to the Secretary is, is tomorrow a day when AOE is going to come out with new extended rules or changed rules? And if so, can we get a preview of what those might be? But the main question goes to something we've talked about a number of times, which is will schools be opening? If so, when? Burlington announced yesterday that they're going to be running summer programs. Who was that? Was that? That was me testing my microphone. I got to figure it out. Okay. Good to hear you. So I'd be curious to know if AOE is going to be encouraging opening during the summer for summer offerings or if they plan on waiting until normal start time for school before they formally open things. I know others of you have had questions along these lines. So we have about 20, 25 minutes before the Secretary gets on. Any thoughts about what we should be asking? One, I mean, it's not just schools, but I know he's not going to do childcare, but one that came up yesterday and something I got is some of these people are asking for a month's notice before they reopen. How's the administration going to be on my concern? I feel like two weeks is a long time. But are we going to be looking, if we got to give a month's notice for childcare and a month's notice potentially for schools because they have similar concerns, are they taking that into consideration? A month seems like a long time for me to prepare for something. If that's what it takes to prepare, are we asking them to do too much, if you will? Yeah. So that's a good general question is what's the appropriate amount of lead time before you can make the decision? I imagine they want to wait as long as they can to see whether there are secondary spikes in our infection rates. I was also thinking about to what extent as the NEA and the teachers union been brought in on the discussions, our discussion last time touched on the possibility that reopening might wind up with additional numbers of classes for teachers, additional hours of classes for teachers. Those are not the kind of things you want to spring on the teachers union several weeks before they're supposed to go live. So to what extent have they been consulting with the teachers union and are they developing things in tandem? That would be a question I would want to ask. Other thoughts? Yeah, Ruth. So just a couple hours ago I had a conversation with one of the superintendents of my district and AOE issued a bunch of new guidance yesterday that's relevant to some of the questions that we were just talking about specifically summer. And so they did issue at least preliminary guidance on summer and I think that they are putting that out there as a possibility, although not specifically about how you would do summer, but that summer education specifically for some districts that get special funding. So we could ask him more details about that. And then I think one of the things that people are anticipating for tomorrow is guidance on how to deal with high school graduation ceremonies. So that was a big thing that a lot of parents are waiting for. And I think that's coming out tomorrow and they allude to that and the guidance they issued. I can email this to you all that my superintendent sent it to me. Okay. I think one of the things that is problematic for superintendents is they're kind of being overwhelmed with guidance. Like do this, do this, do this, do this, do this. And so I'm not sure and some of it's contradictory, you know. So it's not clear. But to Corey's point about the month in advance, I think for a big operation like a school district, they're going to need a lot of time to plan. And so springing it on them in the last minute would be difficult. It's hard for me to imagine, given the moves that the administration has already made toward you know, quote unquote reopening. It's hard for me to imagine that they're not planning for normal enrollment come August, September in person congregate instruction. I could be wrong about that, but all signs point that way.  If not, I would, I would think they should be issuing guidelines now saying don't plan for that because that's the natural flow of these decisions. Especially since they're talking about come June hotels being able to operate again, book guests, have guests in the in the building in restaurants with social distancing being practiced. But still we'd be somewhat back in a more normal environment. Other thoughts on where we should go with the secretary. Yeah, Debbie. Well, yeah, so that brings up. I mean, I'd be curious about what kinds of healthcare protocols they're going to require. They may, you know, may not know all of them in detail now because I know we're continuing to monitor how bad the situation is going to be. But yeah, are they going to require kids to wear masks?  Are they going to check temperatures, you know, when they come in, you know, what, you know, will they have the authority to kick the kid out even if their parents aren't keeping them home if they're showing symptoms or, you know, all these kinds of things. And how are they going to do, how are they going to make these decisions? Are they going to, you know, work with VDH? And is it going to be a statewide thing or are they going to leave it local school boards or the local, you know, superintendents, all those kinds of questions. Yeah, great, great question. I don't know if you guys have been walking around your neighborhoods the way I have for exercise, but, you know, every day there are more groups of kids playing in more yards, clearly without any social distancing going on, none of them in masks. So again, when we get to September and kids are back in school, it's hard to imagine masks being a real part of what students are doing. I don't know about teachers. I don't know about, you know, custodians and food service workers and bus drivers. But I assume those will be covered in whatever they put out for guidance. So why don't all those questions are great ones. Why don't I'll ask the Secretary of the General question, let him make a presentation and then the four of you who just offered those questions, feel free to to offer them to the Secretary. Andy? Jim had his hand up, too. Oh, I didn't see. Jim?  I'll go after you. All right, thanks, Jim. I had a question about guidance about if what they're going to do if there's another flare up or if there's students that are teachers or staff that come down with COVID-19, it seems like it would be good learning what we learned from the closure before to have a plan ahead of time, like if this happens then, you know, we are going to close down or if this happens, this is what we're going to do. So people are prepared for that. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, my other committee is judiciary and I have had a something of a running dispute with acting Commissioner Baker about testing in the prisons and my feeling was our prison population compared to national standards is minuscule. So we now have about 1400 prisoners. I asked him, why aren't we testing them all? It seems to me you could get those tests at this point in time and within a three or four day period you could probably test the entire population and they are, you know, stubbornly in my opinion refusing to go down that road. So what they're doing is if somebody shows symptoms, then they test that person. If that person is negative, they conduct no further tests. If that person is positive, then they test the whole prison population. And so if you take that logic and you map it over onto public schools which, you know, have far more, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of more people involved, are they going to use the same logic? So to go back to the question that Andy asked, if two students come down with COVID-19, do you test the school? Everybody in the school, do you test everybody in their class? It's going to require in terms of testing kits and protocols and money a lot more preparation than we've seen so far. So that's the $64,000 question in my estimation is there are going to be COVID cases that crop up in schools. What do you do at that point? Yeah, Ruth. Well, based on what we heard last week from the commissioner of health, they would, they're implementing that sort of phased in increase of testing and that would include contact tracing and testing of anybody with whom someone has come in contact with. So if you had a second grade teacher test positive, presumably all of the students that she's been in touch with in contact with and all of the, you know, staff and everybody would also have to be tested on out 14 days prior to her testing positive. So that was my understanding of what the commissioner said. So if that's not what they're doing or what they plan to be doing, I'd be curious to know why. And it's a good question. What does contact tracing look like if you have, you know, 200 students in a building and the building is L shaped and the students are everywhere as are the teachers over a 14 day period. I would think contact tracing, if you were faithful to the concept would include testing everybody in the building. Yeah. But if we say, Oh, we're only going to test this other students in that teacher's class, then it seems like we're making a compromise that we should at least bring to consciousness. If that's the way it's going to be. So, okay, so that's plenty for us to explore there. So, go ahead, Jim. Yeah, I just want to go back to summer camps if they are going to open up. I'm hoping that there'd be a good possibility that maybe having a nurse on staff if these kids are going to summer camp. As we know, the kids are excited to go to camps and the parents would love to send them out seeing the adamant inside for like the last two months, two and a half months. I was wondering if they're going to plan on taking their temperatures and if they are sick, if there's a place that they could probably seclude them from the other kids until their parents come to pick them up or I'm sure something similar to this will happen at school when that opens, taking kids and segregating them from the other ones until the parents can come and pick them up. I was just wondering if there's going to be enough staff in the nurse's office and enough that they don't leave the children alone if they don't feel well, you know, there's got to be a separate room for some of these kids that they do come down with this. So I was just wondering if there's some kind of a plan there for the help with the nurse station and also for your checks. No, and that goes back to that question of more resources being necessary. We talked last time about mental health professionals, but it's a good point nurses are usually kind of one per operation, sometimes part-time, but if you're going to take temperatures, if you're going to isolate kids that are experiencing symptoms, then you have to have people who are going to be there all the hours of operation maybe more than one because I could see one person getting really stretched, especially if that person is going to be maintaining the correct procedures around the school. So okay, great question. So one of the two new committees met already and that was Debbie and Ruth's. You want to give us a quick anything of interest happen that we should know about? They asked us to, they presented us with was it five, four or five broad areas. And then they asked us to rank our preference, they want to form subgroups of two people each and they asked us to rank our preferences. One was education, one was economics, one was health care. Do you remember Ruth, what was the? I can't remember. I wrote them down. So I'm guessing Debbie put health care and Ruth put education number one? Yeah, well, you're right about me. Well, I put education number one, but I haven't actually sent the email with my number two. So I haven't figured that out, but we only 25 minutes, so we didn't really get two into it. It was just a preliminary. Yeah, I put education number two, but out of the people who are on the committee, I mean, there's so much to learn about health care and all the, you know, it's announced, I thought I actually think it would be the only ones. It would be better for us in a way if you were on the health care. Debbie and Ruth was on education, and then you could feed both streams back into us. Yeah, yeah. Oh, judiciary was one of them. Judiciary. Right. And Alice would be doing that. And Alice would be. Okay. One thing I brought up, and I'd be curious what the secretary's thinking about this too, is the whole school finance situation with the education fund where it's at. So, you know, I asked Richie about that, who's Senator Westman and Senator Campion, who are chairing this transition committee about whether or not the committee is going to be talking about that kind of level of things, the finance and budget stuff, or if that will be the money committee's talking about it. And I mean, their response was basically like, hey, if you have any good ideas, I'm sure they'd love to hear them. So I don't think we'll be talking about it directly, but I am curious what AOE's thoughts on it are. And I am trying to work out a few possible options. Yeah. Well, I mean, as you all know, there's a fight going on in Washington. The Democrats and the Senate and the House are fighting to loosen the restrictions on the Money in the Cares Act to allow us to backfill budget holes. And if they can get that in a trade, even if it's a painful trade-off, then that would help us immeasurably. Jane was talking this morning on another call about, she has this worry, Mitzi echoed the same thing. They have this worry that we will have to wind up sending back hundreds of millions of dollars because we can't spend them by December 31, according to these very narrow guidelines, which would be just be lunacy. But we'll see. I'm hopeful that the pain in the red states is growing as well because they're now experiencing their peaks and their economies are going to experience the exact same things that all of the rest of us have been dealing with for the last couple of months. So that may change the calculus. Okay. Our committee met as well. Oh, yeah. What happened there? They divided up by the Senate committees, basically. And then they had three subgroups, and each subgroup has the different Senate committees, plus a couple extras. And then, so the subcommittees are going to go out, and then some of our parents are going to be on the Education one, and I'm going to be doing the Transportation one, and things like that. So it sounds similar to what the other committee was doing. We're doing pre-K through 16. So any concerns, thoughts that we could do better in that? Just drop me a note. I'm meeting Tuesday morning with my group on that. Our first mini-group meeting is Tuesday morning. So we have a few days. Did everybody get, I sent the memo to Campion and Westman. You all got that? And you should feel free, Andy, to take that into that committee as well, or Corey. Corey's right now. You know, if it's helpful in one way or another. We're very impressed that you were first out of the gate and among the chairs to get your memo. Yeah, I just stayed at my desk for a couple of hours after our meeting. We have five minutes, so I just can't help but passing on this. So I read today in the paper that Donald Trump's valet tested positive for COVID-19. His personal valet. So he's obviously very freaked out. And so the White House has been saying for the last couple of days that they don't want to do increased testing. They're not saying anymore that they're going to do it in time. They're now saying they think it's a bad idea to do testing, as Trump said, because it makes us look bad. And yet in the White House, everybody who goes into the presence of Trump has to be tested, including his valet. So this proves, first of all, the false sense of security that the testing can give. Second of all, it proves this double standard where Trump is insisting on instant testing in a bubble around him and then saying other people aren't going to have it. Now here's the final layer of hypocrisy. Because of this, he's now insisting that everybody off-camera around him wear a mask.  As he's telling America, don't wear a mask and you don't need tests. So this is what we're dealing with at the highest reaches of the government. With that, I just want to again say, I think our administration by and large has done a fantastic job. I think the House and the Senate have worked hand in glove with them. If you look at our numbers, they're going exactly in the direction we would want them to go. I think the small turns of this bigot that we've been doing are about right. Again, we're blessed with a Republican governor who has no problem contravening the president on all of these things. Yeah, go ahead, Debbie. I was just going to comment that along those lines. I make jokes with my sister who lives in Savannah, Georgia near where we grew up, but it's really not funny to have the opposite, to have a governor that pays no attention to health indicators to continue the science and is just making these decisions based solely on the pressure that he's getting, political pressure, and trying to appeal to his base. Because I really fear for her health. Well, yeah, my mother-in-law in Sweden is 85, and in Sweden, they've been pursuing a different strategy. They have the highest rate of deaths. Their rate of deaths are about like ours, as opposed to the rest of Scandinavia, where they have much lower rates of death because they've locked down in more the German model. But at this point, the data's all out there. There was a really interesting graph that showed out of almost all the countries that are dealing with this, there are four, the US, the UK, Sweden, and Russia, that have a much different outcome where their spike is still going up or plateauing. It's not coming down. And you start to wonder to what extent this is an unexpressed strategy at the national level. I know for the first few months in England, they were pursuing a herd immunity strategy without copying to it. And Sweden, similarly, they won't admit that's what they're doing. It sounds to me more and more like the administration here is moving toward admitting that that's what they're doing, that everybody has to be a warrior for the economy and take more risk. So, you know, all the way of saying that this is not over for us. And the decisions will get harder as we leave unanimity about what to do. Well, it's not really going to be completely ever until there's a vaccine, right? Yeah. And even then, you wonder like if it mutates to the point where the vaccine can't deal with it.  Yeah. Yeah.  And so she was punished really harshly out of this incredible fear that she'd catch it. So, Jeannie, any word from Secretary French yet? Not yet. He has a couple minutes. I know that he was in another meeting, so. I see. Oh, here he is. I'm admitting him now. Perfect. Welcome, Secretary French. You're muted. There we go. How are you, sir? Good. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for joining us. Much appreciate it. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at the agenda, but you're mostly the only thing on the agenda. And that's because we're hoping to have a somewhat longer thoughtful conversation with you about what, in your opinion at this point, the opening of schools might look like, what a timeline might look like, and then all the attendant questions on that about testing, you know, whether the union has been brought in on those consultations, whole host of questions. So why don't we just start with you speaking about whatever you like along those lines, and then we'll, when you're done, we'll ask questions as we see the name. Sounds good. Good afternoon, and French Secretary of Education. I think I'll start with sort of a chronological approach to this topic.  So it's a little faint, but yeah, the volume's not very high. Something. Is that better? That's better. Yes. Okay, there we go. So Dan French Secretary of Education, I thought I'd perhaps start this on a chronological basis a little bit, because it's going to get into complex interrelated sort of decision making. Our first thinking on this, and I would say the approach to COVID-19 from an educational perspective and perhaps most areas is, I think fair to say it's gone through a series of transitions. And we're certainly one of the big ones we're about to embark upon is closing out the school year. And that milestone is really centered around tomorrow. There's a deadline the governor had given me originally of May 8th to produce guidance on end of year celebrations and graduations. And that was when he then enacted the Stay Home, Stay Safe Order, which expires on the 15th. He still asked me to maintain the May 8th deadline on end of year celebrations and graduations. So the idea there was to go as late as possible to understand as best we could the trajectory of the virus, but also knowing that schools need ample time to plan for the rest of the year. So it's sort of that compromise that sort of May 8th figures out. So that guidance will be coming out tomorrow. And it's a part of the governor's press conference. So we'll be producing that and I'll be participating in the press conference and then formal guidance will be coming out shortly thereafter. So the first part of this was to firstly just sort of engage in a conversation about how to end the school year. And then what's been emerging almost simultaneously is a conversation, I would say nationally through my organization, the council of two state school officers and other states around the country thinking about how to deal with summer and what is the purpose of summer. And what appeared there to be sort of a fork in the road. So to speak of choice between two options of framing that conversation. This was I think pretty much last week we're in sort of the initial framing of that. So one way to think of the summer was as it typically would be like summer school, you know, basically a remediation opportunity to to look backwards to the spring, the semester and say, okay, what, you know, what do students need now the school year is over? How would we use summer to help remediate those that situation? The other school of thought is to say, well, even though the school year is over, the emergency is not. And though things are getting better, we still arguably have have to manage that that context. So that that's that scenario focuses our planning on a successful launch in the fall and using summer to help prepare that. So instead of sort of say looking retroactively from a remediation standpoint is to look proactively forward acknowledging that the emergency isn't necessarily over. We're certainly optimistic about the ability to have students in our school buildings in the fall. But, you know, that's going to come no doubt with safety protocols. And we're also going to need to attend to doing remote learning even better than what we did before because there are no that will come a time where perhaps not all schools will be closed, maybe they will, but certainly we can anticipate some schools being closed as you know, an outbreak occurs and we seek to react to that. So that sort of framing is where I'll come back to in a minute because I think that's sort of I can embellish that conversation a little bit and talk a little bit about some of that sort of national understanding around that. I think the third leg of the stool on this is funding, you know, so we can talk sort of, you know, or intellectualized the issue of strategic planning and our hopes analyzing public health information, how we might control things, but the bottom line is we're going to have to figure out how to make the investments to do all that. So whether it would be remediation or sort of proactive planning for the fall, either way, we'd be relying on financial resources in particular federal funds to finance those activities. My experience summer school, for instance, is largely funded on a title $1 to a certain extent pretty consistently across the state. So we have other pots of money also, but now of course we have CARES Act. So part of the understanding of where to go next has also been informed by the CARES Act funding, which, you know, just to give you an update, and when I'm talking about CARES Act, I'm talking about the elementary secondary school emergency relief fund, which is a, you know, the subsection of CARES that's the better, the bigger pot of money that's reserved to school districts. That's in Vermont's case, $30 million of which 90% has to be delivered to the LEAs. So the state of Vermont, the agency of education has applied for that money. We've been approved for that money. We're in the process of turning on an application to local school districts. We're in a bit of a sort of seeking clarity along with other states on some particular guidance that the U.S. Department of Education put out last Friday night relative to equitable share of those services with private schools. But once that is stabilized, then we'll be able to turn on that application. So, you know, the bottom line is, I think now we have greater clarity on the financial resources, though, as you know, we have a number of school districts that still don't have a stable financial context relative to their budgets. But I think what we're starting to do is engage in a planning activity, certainly at the high level in cooperation with CCSSO, about how to approach the fall relative to that sort of second lens, like using the summer as an opportunity to plan for the fall, as opposed to using the summer for more of the traditional remediation activities, thinking that the fall was going to be just returned to normal. Because we're pretty confident it won't be returned to normal, though. Once again, we're very, very hopeful that we'll be able to have students inside the school buildings to a certain extent. So, I think, you know, trying to weave it together in a complex way, I hope, chronologically, that helped a little bit. I could talk more specifically of some of those sort of broad strategic planning tools that are emanating from CCSSO. We had the first draft of that last week. There's basically four sort of containers of that. One is continuity of learning, you know, the issue of preparing for more remote learning. We have the issue of student supports, which is a big area of activity, social and emotional supports, mental health, anticipating those needs, preparing the facilities themselves and staff for that work. You mentioned working conditions, so, you know, what are the disinfection protocols? You know, what are the hygiene protocols? What are those thresholds we're going to use? And then we have the fourth bucket, which is back to sort of the policy and financial, you know, how are we going to sustain and what policies or guidance might be necessary? For instance, I do a weekly call with superintendents and in today's call, you know, someone asked, would it be possible to, you know, to have some students stay in remote learning where others are showing up physically and still have that count as, you know, an attendance day, if you will? So, those kinds of issues will emerge from a policy perspective, and that necessarily require change in statute. But, you know, we can work within a framework of the emergency order, assuming that it's in place to provide clarity on those kinds of issues. We are working on the issues of truancy, obviously, that's the old regulations aren't really pertinent to the situation. So, we're working in partnership with the AHS and the state's attorney's office to work through the sort of guidance on that issue. But if I could ask a very basic question, so I understand the idea of using the summer to make a successful launch in the fall, implicit in that is the idea that all the planning is going into congregate education in the fall. What's the thinking so far on will social distancing be in place in classrooms, you know, if you've got a classroom that ordinarily seats 25, and it's full with the teacher, do you run that class at 25, or do you run it in shifts? You know, what's the thinking? Yeah, I think it's, we're going to have to get to a place, sort of a fish or cut bait, for lack of a better phrase, deadline by which we're going to have to run with our best public health information on these things. So, what we're doing once again through CCSSO is we're gathering how other states are doing this, we're also gathering how other countries are doing it. So, we've had, I think so far, some general guidance produced by VOSHA and Department of Labor with coordination with Department of Health on how, you know, as we're opening up the broader economy, how social distancing should be enacted in workplaces. I suspect we're going to need very specific guidance for the school place setting. Because it's fairly unique in our ability to control necessarily what children can do any given moment. And certainly, when can anticipate that guidance having to be developmentally responsive to the different ability levels of students to follow direction and be safe without, you know, direct supervision. Younger children obviously need more direct supervision. So, those are all good questions. I think, you know, right now we have, let's say in the broader economic standard from Department of Health, we have a limitation of 10, you know, the group of 10. I think we certainly would expect that number to increase. But I think once again, we're going to need specific guidance in the school setting on how schools should behave in that regard. And we have, we're starting to pull together those examples from other places in the world and CDC is starting to weigh in a little bit on that as well. So, I think, you know, the next, we're in the middle of May now, I would say by the end of June, we'll have a real solid understanding of the answers to those questions. But I think it's fair to say just to embark on the planning process that we're committed to having students in the buildings as much as we can. So, therefore, we have essentially a series of problems to solve in order to do that. We might come back and test our some test those assumptions at the beginning, but it's hard to go forward with the analysis if we don't come up with a sort of the assumption of the leading assumptions that students would be in the building. And then we have to work through a series of problems relative, can we do that safely? And what are the public health conditions and so forth to do that? So, one more question that I'll turn it over to the committee, because I know they have some. So, when we were at the beginning of the emergency and there was a quick attempt to stand up essential childcare and districts were being asked to do that. Some teachers were being asked to do that who chose not to. There was an immediate standoff between the NEA and the administration and it wound up with the administration to its credit, I think, loosening what it was doing and allowing for more voluntary program. I'm assuming there were lessons learned there and that the teachers and staff are being or will be brought in on these discussions about what the school day looks like. Is that a good assumption? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a fair characterization of the beginning of this. It was an emergency, so we had to take certain actions. And I think it's also representative of sort of these transition periods. And it is an iterative process, I think, as much as we can reflect back on and say it was a process. But certainly, we knew there were tension points for that policy. And we also knew that some of these issues would be resolved literally as every day goes on. The issue of childcare, for example, we were ramping up a need for services, but also starting a policy of stay home, stay safe that we knew would essentially undermine the need for services, meaning that we were asking people to provision services, but also starting to send a signal of parents to stay home with their kids. So those kinds of transition moments were awkward. And I'm sure we'll have more going forward. But I think the issue of communication, now that we are through that period, I think we've enacted a very stable communication structures that will serve us well into these next phases. Because we do, the difference now is we have a planning opportunity where before it was very much a reactive process. So we have, and it came to me, it wasn't what I organized. The V's, shall we call them, including Vermont NEA, reached out to me with the offer of help to say, you know, it wasn't so much we want to be at the table. It was like, what can we do to help? And every Friday we have that meeting with the leadership of all those organizations, largely focused on what can we do to help? It's not, it's not about, well, we have issue with this or we want to see that. Though we certainly, as you can imagine, get into those kinds of conversations. But we've really tried to keep that space like in terms of, you know, how are we going to work this through together? You know, but the labor issues are challenging. And I think, you know, we'll, what's going to, you'll hear tomorrow, I think, from the governor's is some conversation about opening up childcare. And it's just the one thing I've learned from this is, you know, all aspects of our economy and society are interconnected. And it's really hard to turn things back on. It was much easier to turn things off. And it's hard to ramp some things back on without turning other things on as well. So it'll be a challenge, I think, but we're, you know, we're not alone as a state in navigating those issues, but we'll certainly do that cooperative cooperation, all stakeholders. Okay, great. Committee members, questions for the secretary. I know you have them because I wrote them down. Senator Hardy. Thanks. And sorry, I had to step out for a second. I had to deal with my son, who's home remote learning, quote, unquote. But I had a couple questions. And if you already covered this while I had to step out, I'm sorry, but the for the summer plans, are you thinking about the summer would be like summer school or more of summer planning for the fall? Is the summer part of the compensatory education kind of plan? And then second, related to summer, and this may be a question for Rosie, but I continue to be concerned about school lunches over the summer or school meals and wondering, I know that you applied for a waiver and to be able to continue to provide those meals. And I'm wondering what the status of that waiver is. Okay, so summer first. Yeah, so I think it'll be a mixture of things. I see us having to and people desiring to offer traditional summer programming, I'll call it. So you'll see that unfold certainly within the public health guidelines. But you'll also see resources. Once again, the financial piece is an important part of this. I think you'll see resources dedicated to planning because that's sort of the dilemma we're in. You know, if you, if you, I'm sure you're well aware, teachers work a finite number of contract days per year. Part of our strategy with embarking on enacting the April vacations, the schedule was preserved maximum number of teacher days in the June, so that we would have the flexibility to start looking at some of these issues. And likewise, I think we'll start to hear conversations pretty quickly from schools about how can, you know, how can we compensate teachers to come in for additional days? That's pretty commonly done for professional development. But I think it'll, you'll start to see patterns where it's not only for professional development, but also for planning. Once we understand, once again, what that context will be. And if the context, if we start to agree now that that context will be as much as you're enjoying remote learning, we need to make it work better. It's not something we're going to abandon as a tool. I think it would be on wise for us to do at this point. Now, once again, our, our goal should be to get all students into school. But I would not be surprised if many schools, if not all schools are closed at some period, during the coming winter or whatever, as this until this until we have a firm or handle on the contagion. So we need to plan for doing all all of the above. So I think summer will be a mix. And I think, you know, feeding kids has been a priority in our state much to our, you know, I think credit and it remains a priority for us.  And we, we work hard with our congressional delegation to, you know, address issues. And we are part of a regional group in New England that's been pretty good on that. But US Department of Agriculture has been challenging to work with at times, you know, and so we have to put pressure on where we need to. And I said the other day to the superintendents, I'm confident in our ability to sort of problem solve through some of the regulatory burdens. I'm my concern right now, honestly, is sustainability of the programs. They're, they're running straight out in a manner they were never designed to do. And that means a burnout rate on staff and also facilities we count on during the summer to have a shutdown of those programs so that we can take them apart, clean them, do inventory and prepare. So they were never designed to run nonstop as they are. So we have to start thinking about sustainability, not only from a financial and personnel standpoint, but just the facility standpoint. So, but that's going to be ongoing and we're going to have to figure that out as a state. But we don't want to back away from our commitment to support families and kids. But we'll, we'll continue to tackle those regulation issues as they emerge. But we're still, I don't have an update, nothing's resolved yet on that specific issue. So we're still pursuing that. Great. Other, other questions? Senator Ingram. So, yeah, most of my questions were, were around the, the kind of healthcare protocols, which you, are you touched on? And I know it's a little too early for you to know details, but I'm just wondering things like will anticipate kids being required to wear masks or teachers being required to wear masks or, you know, if you take a student's temperature, you know, when they come in, if they have a fever or you're going to send them home, or, you know, how are you going to work with the parents? If the parents apply one standard and the school has a different one, you know, how will that work? Will it be done more on the local level? Or do you anticipate it coming down from, from the agency? And, you know, just in general, what, what are we? Yeah, I think, you know, I think a lot of those will be decided through the Department of Health, you know, I think that's, we'll use the best science. And, you know, there's some of the things that will be different come fall. I mean, we'll probably have different therapies available and so forth. But it's just interesting listening to you, you know, take through that with Senator Ingram. It just sort of reminded me, like we were having this, I'll call it a false dichotomy discussion, well, should we make the summer remediation or should we prepare for the fall? And just listening to the length of the list of the things you went through, and I could, I could add to that, you know, 100 fold, that sort of just made it a no brainer that we have to spend our time planning for the fall. I mean, we just don't have the time. We have a limited amount of time, as I was going to mention previously with, with the planning capacity. So we have, you know, we to turn the corner now to land the school year takes some time and planning. And then, you know, for the July weekend, we'll be here and gone. And then, you know, really, it's in the second week of July, somewhere in that time period, we need to know what we're doing so we can plan what we're going to need to do. So it's, you know, there's a very limited amount of time actually to plan for the fall. So that's why, from my perspective, I think we're going to put our efforts into using the summer largely to help plan for the fall, though, as I mentioned, we'll certainly have the more traditional activities as well. When is the start date of the school year for the fall? Each their regional school counters for a month, they more or less all start the week before Labor Day to a certain extent. Other questions. Andy, you're muted. There you go. So, Secretary French, I just want to repeat what I think you said is that you're working on the guidance for graduation and celebration that'll be out tomorrow. And we really won't now tell July for the following school to give you time to plan and think about and go through the 101 things that there are to think about. But also, as the pandemic rolls out, you know, things will change. So is that right that we won't really know anything about the guidance for the opening till July? Is that your best estimate? Well, I think we'll, you know, we're going to point our planning towards the assumption that students will be in school, you know, and I think that's the appropriate framing. And from there, we'll encounter a series of problems that will need to be resolved through guidance or, you know, through positioning of resources and so forth. But I think absent the sort of general orientation is really challenging to make the decision. So I think, you know, we'll start with the assumption based on what we know today, it looks promising that we'll have students back in the building. And then we're going to have to, okay, if that's the case, what are we going to need to do to, you know, disinfect surfaces? So what are we going to need to do to provision distance learning? You know, what are we going to do for professional development or to provision distance learning? What are we going to need to do to break students into groups and and so forth? So I think it'll precipitate out a series of problems that no doubt can be categorized and so forth. But it's a once again, the good news is we're not alone. Other states are embarking on a similar planning process. So I think you'll see very quickly an assumption that we're going to seek to have students in buildings, you know, I think that's a reasonable conclusion based on what we see now as a very positive outcome of our social distancing and other mitigation efforts that we've undertaken in Vermont, knock on wood, we won't see that go any other direction. So with that assumption, you'll see a series of guidance documents unfold as we start to have to address certain issues. But I think, you know, the message, the overarching message to parents and students will be, we're going to get you back in school in the fall. It might look a little different, you know, than what you were used to prior to COVID-19, but we think we can come up with some ways to do that. So having survived the several fights in the legislature around vaccines, I'm imagining that as school opens, parents would have to give permission for their kid to be tested if that's a part of the strategy. So if it is a part of the strategy, I don't think there would be the same resistance that you encounter with vaccination, because although it's an invasive procedure, it doesn't involve putting something chemical into the body. But it seems to me another one of the 101 things is securing permission to be able to test children when you're in local parenthesis during the school day. So not that anybody's making it an exhaustive list, but just an example. Yeah. And it's hard to say. I think, you know, I think it was Japan. There's a couple countries that have students testing themselves with thermometers. I mean, so just taking the temperature might be that sort of level of standard that we enact if we're comfortable that the trajectory of the virus is in a suppression phase. And I think that's like below 1%. And we've been consistently around that number, below that number. So we feel pretty good about that. So when you get down to that point, I think, you know, this would be a better question for Dr. Levine. I mean, some of the protocols being enacted are not as invasive. They're more like taking a temperature of students at the entry of schools. They can test their own temperatures and so forth. So there might be other tests available that are less invasive and so forth. So we don't, some of those questions are unknown, but I think, yeah, certainly they're on a list of things. I would say the general concept of how we ensure the safety of the environment, both for staff and students, is going to be a priority. And then once we do identify the outbreak, how do we control that through disinfection and staying at home and so forth. All those protocols need to be mailed down. And once again, Department of Health will have a key role in that. But we're starting to see guidance from other, you know, the CDC and so forth starting to emerge. Senator McNeil. Good afternoon, Secretary French. Just a couple of quick questions. I was thinking on if summer camps, some of them may open, some may not. And I'm sure with Dr. Levine probably suggest maybe temperature checks or whatever. But that's going to, and then it's going to go into the school year. I would think that the nurse's office, she might need additional help. A lot of the schools share a nurse, you know, part morning, part afternoon, and they drive from one school to another within the supervisory union. I was just wondering if there are any plans on helping out the nurse. And if there is a child that temperature is high and sick, a place maybe they could segregate that child until the parents to come to pick it up. And as it is that I can see the parents are getting excited about sending the kids to camp. And I'm sure some of them are going to come, whether they don't feel that well or not. Anything in the works for that? Not specifically, I think at this point, but I will say the nurses have reached out and are part of that sort of group that wants to be actually at the table. Obviously, when you get down to the sort of nitty gritty of how to manage these things, their inputs are invaluable. And I've always found my school nurses to be critical of my leadership teams. I mean, they really can inform so many of the practices on running school building. So I think they'll be connected straight into the Department of Health conversation on how to produce that guidance specific to schools, and I'm confident we'll have those specific issues addressed as we head towards opening school. Thank you. Other questions? Senator Hardy. Thank you. I have two categories of questions, and one is just your thoughts on the school finance situation. You mentioned that $30 million of federal funding that's going directly to schools. My understanding is that that's to be distributed based on Title I formulas, but you mentioned something else, so I'm not sure. And then there's the broader CARES Act funding that we're all talking about ad nauseam. But I'm wondering if this might be a question for Emily, but just if she's done some, you and your department have done some research on what your, or if you've gotten guidance about what if any of that can be used for schools and how we might creatively be able to use some of that. And just what your department's thinking is right now about the school finance situation, which is rather bleak. So that's one question. And then the second question is more related to parents and students. It sounds like you're doing a great job with communicating with teachers and school nurses and superintendents and, you know, the list of all those people and doing regular check-ins. But I know parents are feeling a lot of angst and worry about what's going on. And I'm wondering if there's a way the department more broadly can communicate with parents about what you're doing. I'm trying to do that, but hearing directly from the secretary of education in some way might be helpful for parents. And bringing students into the conversation, they may have some really great ideas on how school could work, especially I'm thinking high school students and middle school students. They often have creative ideas because they know their peers better than we do. So just bringing them in. And then one final thought, which is about graduation and thinking about the graduation ceremonies. I have a lot of friends whose kids are in the class of 2020 and they're feeling lots of sadness about how their high school is ending. But also I have an eighth grader and so kids who are moving on to the next level of education at all various levels, I'm hoping that you'll at least give a nod to the younger kids who may be stepping up and what might be allowable for end of year celebrations or ceremonies for them as well. So that's my list. Yeah, I think I can take these in reverse order. I guess the guidance tomorrow will address end of year celebrations and graduations without drawing a distinction between the two. So guidance will could be applied to sixth grade as it easily could be for high school. So folks will hopefully find some clarity there, largely informed by the public health, you know, look at how things are tracking. The issue of parent communication, absolutely. I think, you know, we're, I think appropriately focused on the nitty-gritty of trying to make the transition to this. But particularly at this, you know, once again, I think we're at a critical transition with this guidance tomorrow. People are anxious about how the rest of the year will go, how the fall will go. And that shifts I think the need for more direct communication with parents. And I've been doing a lot of that along the way. I have one night had a Zoom call into a community of largely students in South Burlington, and they wanted to share with me their concerns about the upcoming lacrosse season and so forth. So I do a lot of those things, but I think we're from a policy perspective need to have the goals and the context just clarify, you know, so people know, here's what we're thinking here, the decision timelines when we reduce it to timelines and, you know, here are the concerns here are the things we're wrestling with. So, yes. In terms, I wrote down the first question as let me do with bleakness. That was the one note I wrote. Oh, bleakness. That must be financial context. Yeah, it's going to be a significant challenge. So, you know, I think the firstly, you know, when I was, I think Senator Bruth was there one day when I was a Senate Finance Committee, we didn't know a lot about the CARES Act, you know, we had some general understanding and it was important as we knew there are significant issues here. It's like an important piece of information we just need to nail down. So we have a better understanding of CARES Act. And yes, those funds are allocated to the districts on a formula. It's very similar, if not identical to how Title I funds are allocated to school districts. So the methodology by which, you know, how much goes to each district is based on the same formula. It's not to say the funds need to be spent the same way as Title I. It just means the allocation methodology is the same. The funds can be spent by locals. And once again, 90% of the funds go directly to the local school districts. The funds, they have significant flexibility in how they spend the funds. They just basically need to be spent in accordance with an approved federal education program. It could be Perkins. It could be Title I. It could be, you know, anything that's legitimate, basically federal education program. The issue that we're sort of alluded to, sort of a bump in the road right now, late last Friday, the U.S. Department of Education put out guidance so that we think, and most states think, is not consistently congressional intent. And it pertains to equal services, and to the what extent schools have to send federal dollars to private schools. And the methodology that historically has always been used under the Elementary, Secondary Education Act has been the Title I approach, which was, you figure out what percent of your students are in poverty in the district and you allocate funds to your private schools, accordingly. That's what we interpreted, and every state interpreted pretty much to be in the CARES Act. And what came out of the U.S. Department of Education late on Friday night was not that. And it was basically you should use a broader number of your total population, not just your poverty students. So it effectively would have a pretty significant impact on redirecting CARES Act, let's say redirecting, but create a greater responsibility for using the CARES Act funds for private schools. So we're in a process working with pretty much every professional education association in the country and our delegation to get some clarity from U.S. Department of Ed on that. That's the only thing that's sort of holding up that next level of the application. So back to the larger conversation, we were working on that just sort of getting clarity on the CARES Act. We're also working on revenue projections and sort of starting to wrap our arms around the magnitude of the problem. And we haven't been proposing any specific solutions from the agency's perspective. We've been sort of working with JFO to just provide the technical support necessary to understand what are probably all bad options, essentially. And on Monday, I think it was Monday, I was on a panel with Mark from JFO and someone from Representative Welch's office, you know, sort of, I think it was a statewide Zoom conference that or go-to meeting that had about 400 people on it, what are standard, maybe 200, something like that. So, you know, we're at that place where I think we understand the mag to the problem, but there's no easy way. There is no way, essentially, to redirect CARES money to the Ed fund. We could certainly do something along the line of a clawback and I've talked openly with districts about that meeting that we could short, you know, basically short them money. But all those things, once again, are unpalatable solutions, but it's not clear to me yet, you know, what those solutions will be. But I think my impression of having been not in as many conversations with Senator Baruth, but I've been this time of year in the legislature on financial issues, I think this is that time of year when these decisions tend to come to head. So, you know, we're available to help support that. And just let us know what you need. Thank you. Other follow-up? Just one. Is it one follow-up or several categories? It's one follow-up on the CARES Act, the $30 million. That's a very small amount of money. I know people keep talking about it as if it's a lot of money, but I mean, some districts, it's a couple, you know, $100,000 or something or less when you break it down on a district level. So, I was talking more about the larger CARES money and whether or not that, if you've done any research on whether you think your department thinks that's available, not as revenue fill, but as meeting some of the needs that will be out there. Yeah, I don't, you know, we haven't been directly as involved with that as more, you know, managing the education dedicated resources. I should mention also the GEAR Fund, which is the Governor's Education, Emergency Education Relief Fund. And that, you know, that's $4.4 million and Governors have some latitude in that. And that application was recently submitted and approved. It didn't require us to specify how the money would be spent. Governor Scott's indicating wants to work closely with the legislature to identify how that money will be spent. But just to let you know, we have applied for it and received essentially the green light to start drawing down those funds or at least get the money in our bank account. But I think the larger fund, you know, does affect education to the extent that education is a social service and tightly integrated with our broader social infrastructure in the state. And I throw broadband into that. I throw mental health and childcare.  So, we are in communication with AHS constantly on these issues. And, you know, I work closely with Department of Public Service on the broadband issues. So, I think we have the structures in place to navigate that. But the prioritization, I think, is really the legislature's job and, you know, but we're poised to enact that. But I don't, I think, you know, I think the issue of using the larger money for education is for K-12 is probably harder politically to make because there are dedicated resources for K-12. But to the extent things like mental health services and other parts of the infrastructure could be addressed, that's probably the place to go. Other questions for the Secretary? Corey, I thought you had one earlier. Yeah, it was just generally the timeline of what we're giving for notice. I mean, we're mostly talking about the fall here. But another topic similar to schools was childcare is mentioned. They want at least a month's notice before they open up. Have you heard that from schools, what they're looking at for kind of restart time? Yeah, in my conversations with superintendents, I think, you know, we're thinking that we need to come to agreement that we're going to put our planning efforts into the fall. And I think there's growing consensus. That's what we need to do. So I think we'll backtrack from there and come up with an appropriate implementation plan. But I think that initial framing is really the critical piece that we need to do first. And then certainly getting the resources deployed to school districts is a critical element of that. We can have a planning exercise, but absent the resources and understanding the scope of those resources is really hard to develop a concrete plan for action. Okay. I think that might be the the bulk of our questions for you at the moment, Secretary. I really appreciate the time you've given us and the thoughtful planning you've got in place. I do think it's good just to be reassured that the the default planning is to start as normal in the fall with obvious caveats around how social distancing will work in that environment. But that's good news. And hopefully that will get out starting tomorrow and become more broadly understood. So thanks very much. And to the extent you have anything you want to send our way in the form of the new guidance, you could just send it to Jeannie and she'll distribute it to the committee. But again, thanks for coming in. Thank you. I'll also share our planning documents as those evolve. You know, we'll start to get more clarity on on those plans and they'll be broadly shared within state government too, because it will require coordination with other agencies to an end. So have a good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So committee, that was our work for today. And so we'll we'll end a little bit early.  So 230 to four Tuesday and Thursday. And there was one other thing I wanted to share with you. Oh, did have a call this morning with the interim chancellor for the state colleges and with the chair of the board of trustees. And joint fiscal today was supposed to be in the final stage of hiring an independent analyst to look at the finances of the system. So hopefully that will be done either today or tomorrow. Beth Pierce has gotten involved in looking over the financial situation. So the first thing on the agenda is to get these other sets of eyes on the finances and then for the money committees to work with the trustees and this independent financial analyst to figure out exactly how much is needed for a bridge for the next year. So that is underway. It's mostly being conducted through joint fiscal and our money committees. But I was invited to be on the call and I'm keeping an eye on it. There is a plan to have a larger stakeholder group at a later point. But right now the focus and planning is on around verifying the numbers. And then once we're sure what the financial situation is looking at different options for levels of investment that the legislature can and should make for the next year. So I'll keep you up to date on what I know which is about that much at this point. But just in case you're contacted by anybody wanting to know if that's dropped off the radar it has not. It's in what I consider a very logical place at the moment which is trying to verify independently what the situation actually is before we start the process of appropriating funds. So any final comments? Seeing none? Have a great I guess weekend because we won't have a Senate session tomorrow. So I will see all of you probably Tuesday next time unless I see you on there's a call tomorrow on climate change which I'm trying to clear my schedule to be on. But if I don't see you then I'll see you next week. Did that ever get settled as to what time that's going to be? I don't think it was quite settled but I had some other stuff I have to do tomorrow afternoon so I may not wind up being on it in any event. I think three o'clock. Okay. Oh is it okay? All right everybody. Thank you. Have a good day. See you soon.