To send an education, it is Thursday, January 19th, 230. We just had a really productive, interesting conversation with the Vermont Superintendents Association, which was over at the Capitol Plaza for their annual lunch. Learned a lot on school construction and other fronts. And now we are jumping into the topic of test scores.  And then we're going to hear from some teachers about what it's like to teach in Vermont. And then we'll adjourn about 4.30. So with that, if you want to bring our guests in. They're looking at you, but they're coming in now. Great. And I believe, have you already shared with the committee in the documents for this? It's just this topic. Okay. So everybody has this. Are you Dr. Boucher? I am great. How is everyone else? Good.  Amanda is joining and she has the keys to the kingdom as it were because she has the presentation. In fact, I actually need to leave at 2.55. I have a hard stop. I have an interview. No, I'm interviewing someone. There's Amanda. Dr. Gore, I'm good to see you. Thanks for being with us. See you as well. Thank you. So to bring the committee and others back to where we left off. The question was asked last time, I believe it was the, may have been the research that you all presented or perhaps it was someone else that showed a pretty serious decline from about 2011 or 2012 to today with NAEP scores in math and literacy. And so those scores showed that a majority of Vermont's children were not reading and writing at grade level and doing math at grade level. We also looked at the rest of the country and we were, as I recall, kind of, you know, some areas we were maybe a little bit better, but other areas we weren't great. It was Senator Gulick who said, well, how do we compare to our peers in New England? So what I thought we'd do today is a couple of things. I want to take a look at the peers, but I also want you to help us understand, as me mentioned, what is it that kids, what can they or can they not do when we look at these test scores? I mean, help us understand these tests. Help us understand. I mean, when you read that third graders aren't reading at grade level, what is it that those that are passing these tests can do and those that aren't passing can't do? Help us with that a little bit. Help us understand the test scores here in New England. And then I think the other piece of it is start to talk to us a little bit about other assessments that are out there. How are we assessing kids? We just left, we were with the superintendents this afternoon. I for one remember as a boy taking the Iowa test of basic skills and I don't necessarily, and I do recall those scores coming back and they weren't saying, hey, this kid's an astronaut. They were kind of in the middle of the road. And so I don't want kids to get discouraged when these things come in the mail, but they're telling us something and, you know, how help us with this kind of thing. So we can talk to our constituents and our teachers and make policy more effectively. Thank you, chair. We can definitely do that. So I am prepared to I'll share that handout up on the screen that we provided earlier today and just pull that up here. OK, so I'll start just by going through the handout and then I noted your questions as you were sharing them. And so we'll make sure that we touch on those as well. What I have provided for you all to review today is the NAPES 2022 NAPE results by state. And this is split out by grade and subject for all of our New England states. And I included them in a table, but I do think it helps to be able to see this graph here. So I'm going to go ahead and scroll down knowing that I believe you all have the paper copy of this as well. So I'll highlight here that Vermont appropriately is the green bar on the graph, not intentional, but it works. And our other New England counterparts are here in these other colors. And we have a cluster of bars here for math, fourth grade, a cluster for math, eighth grade, a cluster for reading in fourth grade and a cluster for reading in eighth grade. And so we can see that there are some some differences here in performance across states. For example, New Hampshire is the yellow bar in all of these clusters and Massachusetts is the gray bar in all of these clusters. And they they do tend to be performing a bit above where Vermont is at. There are also some states that such as Maine that is performing slightly below. Also Rhode Island in some cases. And then we see, I believe, Connecticut is kind of hovering right around Vermont space across the grades and subject levels here as well. So there is some variability across New England for our 2022 results. But I wouldn't consider it to be, you know, incredibly striking any differences that we're seeing here with like Vermont is not standing out from these states in a particular way. I would say that we're we're really in the middle in most cases. Well, for those of us that have a healthy competition with state of New Hampshire, we'd like to be in New Hampshire. That's for sure. It looks like they are ahead of us. So unacceptable, unacceptable, unacceptable. It's soon you're new in here. Please continue to digress. So, Mr. Chair, you've asked, you know, what is it that kids can or cannot do as evidenced by these scores? And perhaps also the state summative scores as well. And so I want to express that these scores that are administered across the state are really intended to give us breadth more than depth. These assessments, like the NAIC, we only get state level scores. It's not broken out by school or by district. We don't get granular information from this assessment because it's really intended to get a comparison across states and a comparison to the nation at sort of a higher level. Similarly, with our statewide assessments, they're really intended to assess for breadth and not for depth. We try and keep our state assessments as long as they need to be to get reliable information without taking up too much instructional time. And so that means that we we do kind of make a sacrifice there that we don't have a 100 item test that allows us to drill down into each specific content standard and understand exactly what students can and cannot do in the aggregate level. You know, we have we have a 50 some item test and sub scores for a test that link aren't terribly reliable. So I think to learn the answer to that question of what is it that students need to work on that are at proficiency as evidenced by these assessments, you know, I think that really turns us to our local assessments. And that leads to your other question about what other assessments are out there and our districts and schools are are delivering other assessments. We might refer to them as interim or benchmark assessments. There there are smaller assessments that are given at certain times of the year, usually like the beginning, middle and end. And they they really have the rich information. Those assessments give us that depth where we can really dive in and understand what is it that a student can demonstrate for learning and what should they be working on next. And so at the local level, paring these summative assessments or the or our knowledge of NAEP in the state with those local assessments, I think is where we see, you know, powerful interpretations coming from. But I would recommend that the state summative assessments don't really give us that power to look back at that fine detail information. So what what do we get here? What are we getting then when you say, you know, not death? So tell me when you look at these, what how are these informing your work, your steps and what you might be saying as a manager at the agency where you need to put time and energy? Yeah, so I think that in normal circumstances, when we can look at data across years, you know, that our state summative assessments allow us to they allow us to look at gaps, right? Especially for our historically marginalized groups of students, we can monitor over time what is happening with any achievement gaps between groups of students or what is happening with achievement overall across all of our students over time so that we can have a sort of a dipstick, right, to say things that we said. Similarly, when we gathered together last time, you know, our our ELA scores seem to be kind of consistent across grades, but math didn't look that way. And so we should probably pay some attention to math and and look at some other measures to dig deeper into that. And so I think that our summative assessments provide us with a starting point and should always be used in conjunction with other other measures and other sources of information. And I think that over the past couple of years, we've we've struggled a bit with with seeing the real value in interpreting these results because we have had issues with the data quality due to the conditions of the pandemic, where we haven't really been able to look at results over time and patterns and trends and things that we would normally really want to be looking at. Senator Bullock, can you get your hand up? Oh, my God, I didn't actually hear a change. I was wondering, are we being filmed? OK, we don't want to capture the film screen. I mean, I'm not the. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I know that's not what we do. The things for the pieces get edited together. Got it. OK. So again, just to push a little bit more here. So what is it then? How can we, if we're running into constituents, they're seeing these numbers. How do we? I mean, it sounds like you're not maybe in agreement that this is an accurate assessment. I mean, I feel like I'm pushing, but it's important to push because I think we need to understand where our kids really are. So if if somebody said to me visiting my family member out of state and they said, OK, tell me about kids in reading right now. Where are Vermont kids? What can they do? What can they not do? Can you help us with that? Yeah, I don't want to overstep Deputy Secretary Heather Boucher, who has her hand raised. Great. Dr. Boucher. Sure. Sorry, I had a different point, but I'll address that one as well. So one of the things that we haven't actually presented on in a while that I think is really also useful for state level assessments is to look at broader subpopulation gaps in achievement. And so those are quite strong and maintain and have for quite a long time. So we know that we have achievement gaps, performance gaps on our state assessments for students with disabilities for students who qualify for free or reduced hot lunch. So those are some of the ways we actually think about that, too, that that we really use these at a state level for tracking inequity and outcomes, and that should be informing the supports that we're thinking about at a state level in terms of how we actually, you know, we want all of our students to actually succeed, obviously. The other thing I would say, Mr. Chair, I remember the Iowa Test of Basic Skills very well. And Amanda knows that I have often brought those up myself because those types of assessments were very different than what's available on the market now. So I am not even aware that the Iowa Test of Basic Skills exists anymore. The whole gamut of state assessments has really changed in the past decade. There's a lot more involved with a state's teachers actually setting the proficiency standards. And it's why we can't actually that's why we have to rely on NAEP for comparing from across states. The other piece that I wanted to say, and then I will get at your question, Mr. Chair, is one of the reasons, you know, we're we're kind of stuck in an interesting place in Vermont, because we don't have we don't have unlike some other states, we don't have a set of benchmark or interim assessments that really tap into what you're trying to get at that everyone uses. And so it really is left up to the individual LEA. So they all every district is required through EQS to have a local comprehensive assessment system. We just it would be very difficult for us to actually present what those results were to the committee. I think the best way to do that would be to ask some representative districts to come in and talk about what their local results look like. And we'd be happy to facilitate that for you. It's it's unfortunate. I think it's it's a function of the way our education governance is set up in Vermont and other states, they would be able to actually provide that at a state level. It's just not the way our education system is set up in terms of governance. So what we do have are and primarily it's because it's required for our federal funding are these high level state assessments that we've presented to you and Mr. Chair, could you repeat your question again so that I can make sure I attempt to answer it because I took us back on a little different tack. I realize I had a different point of view. Let's just stay on this for a second. So there is no way for the administration, correct me if I'm completely misunderstanding this, I feel like I'm still a new chair. I've only been at this a couple of years. So there's no way that the Agency of Education has an outlook for all schools in Vermont because they don't report all of those sort of ELA's don't report all those local scores. Is there some accuracy there? L.E.A.s, sorry. Yes, we at the state do not collect results from L.E.A.'s. Yes, Heather got bumped off, I was wondering. We do not collect results from L.E.A.'s local assessments. So we don't have that information at the state level. And that would have been, I think, my response to your question, Mr. Chair, is that our statewide summative assessment is the one tool that's administered to all students across the state. We also have NAEP to look at, but we can't break that down by district and school. So it does have value in allowing us to look at one common measure across all students in the state, especially like Deputy Secretary Boucher said, especially for identifying gaps with students, especially those that identify with historically marginalized groups. And we don't. That's just not the way our system is set up right now to collect information on those local assessments. Senator Goua. Did you want to follow yours up? Why are you just wondering, so then, how do we know what schools need our help if we don't have the data? And I don't know if there's a way that we can say to all of you legally collect the data. It just, again, seems to me if there are, let's say, for our own sake, there are 100 schools, there are some that clearly probably need some assistance. And I'm not saying in any bad way, we want to be helpful in knowing those scores would probably help us, not unlike I sit in the agriculture committee in the morning. We know what farms need our assistance in terms of water quality. I think we would have that information for kids. Yeah, and in a lot of ways, LEAs have been granted the, you know, the opportunity to select the assessments that they use at the local level. And so we run into issues with comparability across across districts and schools with what assessments are being used. We couldn't, we wouldn't really be able to make sense of scores with the current context that's out there because we we wouldn't we wouldn't be able to sort of compare scores from different assessments that are being used out there. So that would be one challenge that we would be presented with with the current state of things. Thank you for that. Thank you very much, Chair. I just want to say thank you for the these comparisons. I it's just really nice to be able to put yourself in a context. So thank you for that. I have a natural tendency to want to draw conclusions when I look at data like this and I'm trying not to. But I do want to just ask, I think maybe one of the things that Chair Campion is getting at is and correct me if I'm wrong, because I am certainly not an expert. But my understanding of the Massachusetts system, for example, is that it's actually quite quite centralized and that they are fairly uniform statewide and they often come up as the best public education system in the country. And I'm just wondering if we can draw any conclusions in terms of, you know, our system, which maybe maybe is less centralized than the Massachusetts system. And if if we again, like I guess I'm asking the question, can we draw any conclusions from that comparison? And is it worthwhile to do so? Yeah, does that make sense? Amanda, can I jump in? Absolutely. Hi. Hi, everyone. By the way, I'm sorry that I had wonderfully timed technical glitches right as I was finishing. I did not mean that and I apologize. So I wanted to address the issue first. And then certainly Senator Gulick, I think that's a great question. But we do actually track how individual schools and districts are doing. That's what our entire federal plan is about. And so we have these data actually are reported at the district and school level as well. They're not out yet this year. We're still working on those, but they are. So this is the SBAC data that is being presented. And we actually have a federally approved way of actually identifying schools that need additional supports from the agency as part of our ongoing continuous improvement efforts. And so I'd be very happy to come back in and actually drill down into that with folks as well. Because I don't want to leave the impression that there is no individual district or school information from these state assessments. It's a core part of actually what we're obligated to do. And that's where we also get into the inequity or equity among different subgroups of students. In terms of Senator Gulick, your question, I think it's a great one. I think in Vermont and in New England, we very much pride local control and having that voice around how our community, how our own community students are educated, how we want to have really clear input into that. And there are states that actually outperform us like New York, where I grew up, that are very centralized, just as you're saying. And Massachusetts has always been. Usually it's between Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York neck and neck on any kinds of standardized tests or other ways of actually thinking about performance from an achievement perspective. All three of them are usually neck and neck. Perhaps it's a coincidence that all three of them have a much more standardized curriculum and a much more standardized set of materials that local entities have to use. There's still flexibility in terms of unit set up, so learning unit set up. But they all have, all three of those have a sophisticated system of even course level tests that are state tests. We've never really had that capacity. I think that's another piece of it. We're a very small state compared to those three. So I think it's a good, I think it's a very good question. I'd be very happy for us to continue talking about that. We have in different channels throughout the past two years have heard about even from the field, like maybe we should have things more centralized. So we would be very happy to continue thinking about that. And looking at some ideas, if that's something that folks wanted to continue to do. Would you please send us or point us in the direction of SBACs for the state of Vermont over the past three testing periods so we can get a sense just on our own, on our own, excuse me, where areas perhaps in our district, particular schools, might be having a difficult time. Can you send us that information? I will direct you with some good materials to help you understand it to our state report card, which is where this is, all this information is. And I'd be happy to come back in and actually walk the committee through that. The other caveat, I would say, Mr. Chair, is again, you probably want to look at data before COVID. Sure. And then current, because again, what COVID has done to all states is really mess up the assessments in terms of the fidelity of them. And so we have to, so that's why the last three, I'm kind of like, let's look at at least the last five. And kind of take a look at those. But I'd be very happy to. And I can give you the link right now. Send us the link to our committee assistant, please. And he can share it with everybody. But the NAICS scores that we looked at went back to 2012. And it was a crackerly precipitous drop in all areas. So, yeah. Kind of piggybacking on the chairman's comment. So just curious if the NAICS scores, the trend lines which we saw last week, covering a little past 10 years, if those trends were mirrored in these other New England states that you've offered in this spotlight graphic? That would be a question for Amanda, Senator. I'm going to scoot and I apologize. I have to leave. Amanda, do you have this one? Yep. Thank you, Heather. Perfect. Yeah. So I did not prepare historical trend data across all the New England states for today, but it's something that I can absolutely look into so that we can see if we're seeing a similar situation across these states, you know, how student performance has changed over the past decade or so. Good. Thank you. Yes, please. That would be great. So then can you give us a sense, Amanda, of what, based on these scores, what students know and what they're not? Excuse us, aren't testing proficient? What are the things that they cannot do? I'm sorry. Could you repeat that question real quick? I was just noting down the request. If you're not proficient, I'll give you a specific example. If you're a kid in fourth grade and you're not proficient in math or literacy, what are the things that these kids cannot do? So I would say that these assessments are not designed to give the specific answer that you're looking for. And I know that that's not the best answer to give. But these, again, these are assessments that are looking at breadth and not depth. These are assessments that are designed for very specific purposes. And those local assessments, again, are going to give that information because our educators have helped us to develop these assessments to be able to measure proficiency across a number of, we'll call them, domains within each specific grade level and content area. So for math at the younger grade levels, we might have numeracy as a domain. We might have algebraic thinking as another domain and maybe data and statistics as another domain. And students are receiving a number of items in each domain. And we can't really draw a conclusion across all students that if they're not proficient, then they are really struggling in data science or data and statistics. It really does come down to looking at those more local assessments to understand the answer to that question because it wouldn't be the same answer for all students. We do receive information on those specific domains for these assessments. So we do have the ability to see what percent of students are sort of meeting the standard in each of those domains. The caveat is that some of those domains include as few as two test questions. And so it gets really hard to deal with that low level of reliability and it gets really hard to draw valid conclusions from that kind of information when we're only looking at, say, two items in one domain versus 10 in another domain. Can you give us some examples as it relates then to the kneecap scores as, again, proficient or not proficient? I'm sorry, do you mean me? No, I was thinking, Secretary Boucher just mentioned kneecap scores, I think they were, yeah, that. And again, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to jump in so that we're trying to be helpful here but understanding the data is key. It's also key because our constituents, there have been articles about this and we want to be able to respond effectively to them. So can you give us an example or two of what a kid who, again, is a proficient based on the kneecap scores does or doesn't know or what they're testing for? All of that would be, yeah. Okay, so thank you, Mr. Chair. What we might be able to provide that would be helpful. I'm not sure, I suppose providing both might be helpful but what we can provide is called the test blueprint for our state assessments. So as you know, we are entering into a new contract with a new assessment this year. So I could provide the test specifications or the test blueprint for this year, our new assessment and also for the smarter balance and the Vermont science assessments that we've used in the past and that shows you the breakdown of each assessment. So it would show you for ELA, for math and for science what are students being asked to demonstrate with these assessments and how much of the assessment is composed with that demand, we'll call it. And so I could share that information with you so that we could start to look at what exactly is being asked of students on these assessments. And that might help to inform thinking around what the assessments are actually telling us more contextually. Absolutely, that'd be great. Yes, can I be specific? Just to the specific along the same vein, if a student in grade four in math and reading is not proficient, what's the ramification? Are they moved to grade five or is there another test which indicates, validates that they're ready to move on? I'm just at a loss in that regard. Our student assessments do not have negative consequences imposed by the state for any students. So their score does not indicate at the state level. There's no advisement or recommendation that a score would indicate any decisions being made about a student. And again, we always encourage and recommend that this information is not used on its own for any decision-making and should always be used with other measures and information. Anything else from you, Dr. Corman? I don't believe so, Mr. Chair. I see that I have a couple of things to get back to you with, like the trends over time for all New England states with NAEP and also the test specifications for our previous assessment and the new assessment coming this year. And I know that Deputy Secretary Boucher will be sharing the state report card link with you folks and we'll be happy to continue this conversation. Yeah, it'd be great. And I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the agency's eye, are your eyes on those schools? Do you know those schools, those 25 schools that really need our help out there? Yes, that's something that the agency has very keen awareness of. It's not something that my folks on my team are particularly closely involved with working through, working with those schools in that process, but it's something that, like Heather, Deputy Secretary Boucher had said, we'd be happy to come back and take you all through that and share more on it. Any other questions? Secretary Burns can make about five, 10 minutes. Okay, thank you. Okay, welcome back to Senate Education on Thursday, January 19th. Secretary, great to see you. You too, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Deputy Secretary of Education. We had an interesting, we had a good afternoon with the superintendents, your former colleagues, and people who still continue to work with us, we went over and heard about it. I was out in the morning. Yeah, it was good, it was good. Give us an opportunity in particular to hear a lot about school construction. Oh, yeah, sure. And that's really, without a doubt, a top priority of theirs. Sure. What we're, next week, we have Treasury Secretary Pechak coming in to talk to us a little bit. We also have some of the federal delegation on you to talk to us a little bit about, you know, their staff around, is there anything on the federal side that can be helpful? And I understand Bernie Sanders did get appointed to education. Yes. So, how can we partner with him? Yeah, so. No, it is an important issue, and I'll touch on it and go to help briefly today, but I heard Treasury Pechak was working on some things. We have the General Assembly asked us to do a study of financing school construction. So we're working on that. When I heard he was doing it too, I reached out to him. So we're meeting next week to sort of collaborate on that. But I think the House Ed Committee asked today, I think you've met Jill. Okay. Grace Campbell. Yeah, Jill and I are going into House Ed on a list of issues. One of them is an update on Act 72, which is the school facility. So we can do that for you as well. Yeah, great. So, we have you today talking about equity, discrepancies in education. And this comes from partly some anecdotal information that we've all heard over the years. We'd be happy to be proven false that there are some schools that have some offerings, some schools that don't have other offerings, how and also in the world, and I think of you as somebody that's been in the forefront of education as a relationship technology, in particular over the years, how can we use technology to possibly boost some of these schools up? Are there discrepancies that we're hearing about true? So it's a big equity conversation. So, with that, where's yours? Yeah, thank you. It's a good wide open question to kind of respond to and I see you have, I brought a copy, several copies of this document. Yes, we all have it. Yeah, we all have it. If any of the audience wants some, I have some real touch, right? Yeah. So I think, yeah, when I think about the state's interest in education, I'd sort of back up. I think the Brigham decision, when I started my career in 1997, Act 60, the Brigham decision really established this logic that the state's ultimately responsible for education. So we start thinking about how education's enacted around the state, all different patterns and structures. At the end of the day, the state's responsible. And I think about that in two words, quality and equity, quality and equity. So our responsibility at the state level is to ensure that all students in the state have access to high quality education. Certainly, I think we knew patterns, I'll call it inequity, but patterns and differences, shall we say, in terms of how either quality is enacted or equity, those patterns have been in the landscape for a long time. I think they were highlighted during Act 46, part of the rationale behind Act 46 was to work a little more earnestly towards addressing some of those issues. I think it's fair to say that pandemic has exacerbated those issues. Similar to technology, I think events like the pandemic shine a light on things that were already there before. My experience with technology in schools, technology is neutral essentially in terms of what it does, but it does expose things, patterns that were already there, like we saw during the pandemic, when people didn't have bandwidth and students driving up to parking lots of schools, they can get on the wireless, that kind of thing. So the technology's always been there. It can be an equalizer. I think recently, as we were working together with the General Assembly on the pandemic relief, we acknowledged that in some of our planning. So as much, and I mentioned this last night to those of you who were at the, when we had a policy brief on education last night, the goals in our recovery are twofold. One is to address the impact of the pandemic on kids. So we definitely know learning loss and social emotional impact. But the other thing we wanted to do with the money, because it is one-time money, was to sort of invest strategically in things that would improve the quality of the education system. So when the money was gone, what would be left in a landscape would be an improved and stronger system. And as part of the work really with the pupil weights, if you're not familiar with that work is pretty complex, but I was asked early on into deliberation. So if we give districts extra spending capacity, essentially in the form of additional pupil weights, what guarantee or assurance does the state have that districts will actually take that capacity and make improvements, right? Yeah. And my response was, good question. We need to strengthen the regulatory framework. And I didn't come to that conclusion easy because I'm not necessarily a fan of more regulation, but one of the reasons, and I mentioned this the other day, one of the reasons we have patterns of difference or patterns of equity or inequity is the fact that we have a very loose and light regulatory framework in education. And we allow those things to exist at the state level and largely in the name of local control, but we haven't been really interested as a state in really touching into that space. And one of the things, when I mentioned that, the General Assembly challenged me to get more specific. What did I mean by that? And what came out of it is the work you have in front of you, which is the idea of what we call district quality standards. And also a new quality assurance process. So I thought I'd respond to your question on discrepancy by sharing this work with you, because I think it is probably some of the more important outcome of the COVID pandemic and some of the more important outcome of the people waiting. Though I would say none of the issues of quality and equity can be addressed if the funding system isn't working properly. So that's like that necessary precondition to do anything. So kudos to us for taking that on. It's complex work. But now that we've essentially, I think have an understanding that the funding system could work better and we've been after that and I would be phased in, then we're left to examine. Okay, so if we do have the money, what about, like what happens? And again, my diagnosis was looking at what other states do. We have a very light regulatory system in the state. So, and essentially to sum it up, when we came out of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was a very intrusive period of federal oversight of education, our reaction to that was to create a very light regulatory oversight system, which wasn't an unreasonable response in any means. You know, I remember as being superintendent, having to stand up and explain why all my schools were failing schools in 2014. And spite of them being some of the, I'ma say the better schools in the state of good schools. So we created a lighter scheme and now we're, I think, starting to question whether that was a good idea. So this work we're doing, there's a couple things I'd highlight for you. One is we are involved in drafting this currently. Our goal, this is work we're required to do in law that you set forward for us. The timeline for this is that we're required to produce a draft set of rules by February, a couple weeks. We're on track to do that. So this is work that's on track. Part of what we're trying to do in the left-hand column of this table, I think we try to, you know, this document I think is useful to a certain extent. It's more or less a one-pager that describes a lot of some complex issues. But the first thing was to list out all the key standards, just not all the standards, but the key standards that we think contribute to high quality education. So if I go down that list, the ones on the first page are all brand new. These don't exist in regulation. These are, this is part of the work we were required to do for the district quality standards. So we had no standards in business, budgeting and accounting, internal controls. When you see BUS, that's the bucket of the container domain that it belongs to. So we were charged for creating standards in business and operations, you know, how districts manage their funds, which is a critical part of operation. So that was broken down. And I could talk more about the process, working with stakeholders and so forth, but budgeting, accounting, internal controls, hiring and licensing, data management. Sorry, can I just ask you a quick question? What do these two columns mean exactly? I understand what, you know, budgeting and accounting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the thing you need to get there? So just hang on, yeah. Thank you. I'll try it, yeah. So first thing was to define what's in the left-hand column. You know, like what are the standards? So just to point out, these were new ones. And we, business ones we had to create essentially from scratch, working with business managers and so forth. Again, it's still in draft form, but we had new standards on facilities. So this, you know, part of your question about school construction, you know, part of the issue here is that we never had any regulations on school facilities. So, you know, one of the reasons we have a lot of disrepair or unequal quality facilities is that the state never really expressed any standards of quality. Other than if when you came to do a construction project, and then we would say, here's the standards you need to be. But other than that, we never said, that's not acceptable or, you know, so not an unimportant issue. Okay, so again, we're filling in some of the gaps that we think in our regulatory framework. So the idea of having standards on facilities is important. And also this comes out of that law, Act 72, which we can provide you an update on, having an operations plan for your facilities, like how you clean, when do you clean your unit ventilators? How do you maintain things? That's an essential ingredient that was found in Act 72, having a capital improvement plan, you know, connected to your budget, like when are you gonna make the investments, save up and reserve funds and so forth and so on. And then we did add the last point on the first page, emergency operations plan. We did add facility safety, and I mentioned school safety previously. So that was not required for us in a law. It kind of fit onto the container facilities, but we broke out safety issues separately. So we, there are essential elements, as I mentioned in my earlier testimony, that we think should be highlighted. So we're anticipating doing it in regulation. Another new area, our governance prior, governance regulation. So we had no understanding of governance standards, school board governance standards. So we asked the school board association to come up with them and they did. They went through an extensive process. Those are the three buckets, governance priorities, governance protocols, governance processes, that they came up with their membership. Really difficult work for them, but that was great. And then we include things from the education quality standards that are current regulation, like what are those essential inputs? So first thing was to define that left hand column. I will say we had a meeting this afternoon. I know several of you were talking about teacher evaluation the other day. Teacher evaluation is likely to end up in the left hand column. It's in our regulation currently. So we were discussing whether the state should have some assurance in that area. So that might be included. So then to your question, Senator, so now I'll move to sort of the construct of this table and to the right. But the first thing was to define the standards.  One are the local school districts. Second is the agency of education. And the third is the state board. So then figuring out part of what we're trying to do here is get clarity over who does what.  What is a state responsibility? And then ultimately what is the state board's responsibility? So like a lot of times when you're building these kinds of charts, we started on the far right hand column first because we know the state board's responsibility is already set up in law. So we fill that in. That's why the 16 VSA 165 is there. And that's pretty stern language. Basically what happens, and this language might be old, but basically the secretary makes a recommendation to the state board, one of five recommendations. You know, one is that, you know, this is one of schools been identified or a district's been identified as having issues. One is that we continue to provide technical support like nothing else needs to happen. The next recommendation, this is all from 165, is that the state board adjusts supervised reading boundaries or responsibilities of the superintendency. So, you know, this is pretty heavy-handed stuff. It's never been used, to my knowledge. Recommendation three, that the secretary assume administrative control of an individual school or district over supervised reading, including budgetary control. And then four, the state board close individual school or schools and require the district to pay tuition to send them out to either another public school and approved independent school. Or five, the state board, we can require more, the school districts to consolidate their governance structure. So those are pretty significant consequences. So then the challenge for us was like, well, how do we, if we start on the left here and this idea of local responsibility, agency responsibility in the state board, how do we pave a path from the left to the right? Like, we just don't end up in the far right-hand column. Like, what goes on in the middle part? You know, so we started with, okay, what are the local responsibilities? And the second row, this idea of annual assurance, annual, we call these the mechanisms.  Well, in the law, the state delegates responsibility to three entities, the electorate, school boards and superintendents. We can't do much about the authority we delegate to the electorate, because they vote on budgets and approve real estate transactions. That's pretty much it. But school boards and superintendents are delegated considerable authority in the law. School boards have broad powers. Superintendents are generically charged with the general administration of the school district, but they also have other specific duties and responsibilities. So the two mechanisms we came up with, with our annual assurance, like on an annual basis, the S means superintendent. We would ask the superintendent to sign on the dotted line and tell us they have certain things in place. Like, do you have facilities, that's why the X is in the column? These are the things we'd like them to attest to on an annual basis. That would be our assurance. The school board would be doing a self-assessment. That self-assessment, we'd create a rubric with school boards and other stakeholders like, well, on a scale of one to four, where is your budgeting and accounting system? Like, what does that look like right now?  So voters, taxpayers would see this stuff. So S is school board, X is... X just means do it. S is superintendent. Under that self-assessment column, B or S, I'm sorry, you're right, B is board, S is superintendent. Yeah, and X is... X just means we just haven't covered. AOE has it covered. Well, in the case of the annual assurance column, superintendent's doing all those things. Okay, oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. In the annual self-assessment, we have a mix of boards doing some things and the superintendent's doing other things. So the idea of the local responsibility piece would largely be done through two mechanisms, annual assurance statements, which that would give us authority over the license in the case of the superintendent. But we're trying to particularly entice boards into getting more involved in the quality of their operations. So we're asking boards to do a self-assessment on critical aspects. And again, we would publish those self-assessments. So then the question is, what does the agency do? And again, we're heading towards these pretty extreme consequences in 165. So we thought the further you move right on this, we'd better have some sort of less subjective indicators, like things that we could really measure and also things that really are tied to student outcomes. Like facilities, yeah, very important, but does it really impact student learning? Well, it can, but it's really hard to quantify that. We also have the issue of the federal government. The issues of accountability aren't going away anytime soon. So when it comes time to this identification, we're still gonna have issues of proficiency measurements and all those kinds of things. So the agency, what we're thinking has the first job of identifying schools and school districts that need more improvement. And that's a requirement of federal law. So what we would do is start with proficiency because we're required to do that. So the first cut, if you will, would be, for us as we're required to do now is to identify essentially the lowest group of school districts from a proficiency standpoint. And I'm using proficiency generally. It includes proficiency and growth. It includes subgroup proficiency and so forth. It's more than complex in this proficiency. Once we identify that group of schools, they're not fully identified for these purposes. We'd say, okay, now we have a subgroup of schools. The next thing we would do is then analyze their core practices. If you go on the second page where those X's are, kind of coordination of curriculum, local assessment, you'll see those X's. The agency would assess the core practices or the core district processes that actually contribute to student outcomes. Those, they're called EQS. They're in the current education quality standards and those X's that are on the second page sort of in the middle. Those are agency level responsibilities. So the four core processes that are in our regulation that leave we think directly to student outcomes are coordination of curriculum. You gotta have a formal curriculum as a school district. You have to have a local assessment plan so you have to be using data to analyze your results. You have to have a needs-based professional development system and you have to have a tiered system of support. Those are in the regulations for 20 years. We've seen them as essential processes. They were identified as essential to implement 173, the special ed reform. So this is where we think we can make a lot of progress. If we can really elevate these as important things for districts to get more formal on, I think we'll see an improvement of both the discrepancies as you've highlighted and the quality issues. So the agency would say, okay, what are our lowest performing schools in terms of proficiency? And then we would analyze those districts to the quality of these four district processes. Okay, so you have low scores. Do you also have a low quality curriculum? Do you also have a low quality local assessment plan? And we would do some analysis there and say, you're a district that needs really focused support. So we would send you a formal letter in accordance with the law. You'd work on those things. There might be districts that have, I suppose it's possible, they would have high results in poor quality processes. They wouldn't make it through our filter because they didn't have low proficiency to begin with, but we'd still identify them for continuous improvement. Continuous improvement resources would be available to every school district in the state. Senator? Yeah. I just wanted to take a breath. Yeah. That's a lot. But also, just for our group, EQS exists. That's correct. Exist or exist? Exists. Standards, exit, standards though. Anyway, exist. It's a group of standards. And then, but EQS do not. Brand new. They're brand new. And so. None of it's been implemented yet. And does the EQS live on this chart somewhere? Yes. They are the first group of standards that I was listing. I'm starting on the first page. The far left hand column. Business, internal controls, hiring, licensing, data management. Basically the first 16 are all. I just wanted to make sure that I. Anything that doesn't have EQS next to it is new DQS standards. They're not necessary. They're really administrative versus like instructional. That's correct. That's when we started to contemplate putting a one pager like this together. These are some of the decisions we've been testing with stakeholders. It's like, yeah, it's important. And we think we can leverage, particularly you'll see that a lot of those things fall in the local responsibility area. But if we highlight them, if we promote those data on our website, we think we'll get the cultivation of local responsibility that we need to help improve the systems. But we don't feel as comfortable as we move farther right. Leveraging a self assessment on internal controls as being deficient. And the other thing I should say by way of an introduction to the top paragraph, there are other monitoring systems we have. So if you fail to use your federal funds correctly, we come in in a different quality assurance process. So this thing doesn't represent the only quality assurance like special ed has a whole elaborate quality assurance process. Anyway, the point I make, there's a lot here to Senator's point. Just want to let you know this work is in motion, right? So we're working on district quality standards and new quality assurance process. This was the diagnosis in the cure, if you will, by the General Assembly to address the issue around the pupil weights. If we give you more capacity, what does that mean? And that gets to the heart of the issue of the equity and quality differences around the state whether it be rural or urban. So the diagnosis was the state's been, I would say deficient, but we could strengthen our regulatory framework to try to leverage our partnership in Vermont, which is a balance between local control and state responsibility, to try to get more out of the system, particularly out of those core processes and try to get a little more formal on things like curriculum and so forth, where there's a lot of informality. In particular, I think now looking on the post pandemic context, I think this approach is gonna be exceedingly useful because we're now seeing more turnover in staff, right? So I think Vermont's always been susceptible to informality because we have these large multi-district supervisory unions, you know? But now we see greater turnover in staff. So it's hard. I think I shared my story. I was superintendent, the senator knows a district that had 11 boards and 56 board members, right? So it took nine years to get that organization to operate as a system. Hard work. It's possible, but it's hard. As soon as you, if you have turnover, like we're seeing in principles now with 30% turnover, without state support to articulate a framework, those systems are not gonna be able to make progress. And I have at least two SCs right now that have complete brand new central offices, right?  They're just, they're underwater from day one. So the state, I think by doing this, will help the districts. I was talking with the superintendents like you today and talking to my colleague from Shantlein Valley School District. He's like, you know, this will help us. We're a high-performing district. I'm familiar with their, you know, they're a strong district, but just having a framework would help them as well. It helps you get focused, but certainly for the districts that don't know where to begin, it provides them a starting point. And you could imagine, like if I hired you as a new superintendent, I'd say, here's how you did last year.  They've identified some priorities. These are the core things you need to work on. Here's where you were before. Here are the strengths and weaknesses of your system. It allows you to hit the ground running as opposed to try to wait three years to figure out what the heck you're supposed to be doing. So I think there's a lot of merit to this. So we'll be, you know, we're still working through a lot of process and drafting. The next step is to turn this into actual language. So this is like a visual expression of a lot of complex topics as we're trying to make decisions about what should go and where. The next step is for actually us to draft this as rules. So when we do that, I'd be happy to share that with you and come back. We're scheduled to set that to ICAR, I think by February 7th, that's our deadline there. So that's getting close. And what we have to then anticipate doing are a couple other steps I put on your radar. One is we have to do an amendment to our S of state plan. That's our agreement with the federal government. So we have this idea of identification accountability. We have to have a plan for identifying schools and students. That's a requirement in order to accept federal dollars. And we can't operate the system without those federal dollars. So we are gonna do an amendment to our state plan that allows us to operationalize this. This would replace what we currently do in terms of IFR process and our data snapshot. So we'd be redoing our data platform, making it far simpler than it is now, which will add capacity to the agency because we have a very, very complex, overly complex data platform. And the IFR process, the integrated field review process is highly labor intensive. So we get additional capacity by getting to something tighter, more I would say appropriate for the scale of our state. So that we'd have to rewrite our state plan. That'll take most of the spring. We hope to really dig into that after the legislative session. And the last piece of it is to restructure the agency to supervise this. The agency always gets restructured based on the policies adopted by the state. So we would then have to revisit how we're deploying resources to provide technical support and oversight to operationalize this plan. But anyway, that's a diagnosis and a cure, if you will, on this pregnancy. So to help us understand the district quality standards will be decided in terms of academics. So is it each district individually will set their own standards? No, the construct in Vermont is that the State Board of Education adopts standards and then districts adopt their curriculum. But this would say it kind of gets in that middle space. Basically we're saying we're not comfortable just saying standards and then you go ahead and do what you want. We're basically saying we wanna know you have a formal plan to operationalize those standards. It's not sufficient for us to say we expect you to have curriculum. We wanna know you have curriculum. And this is one of the hardest things I think in school districts, but it gets at the issue, particularly with poverty. Students in poverty are the ones that suffer the most when there's not a well-articulated curriculum. It's really hard also to structure, I would say, support services like special education, 504 EST, if you don't have an articulated curriculum because what happens, a lot of your staff have to run around and try to figure out what is the curriculum before you can remediate or provide support. So there's a lot of wasted energy in our system right now doing that and also a lot of energy with teachers, individual teachers being their own curriculum developers. So, and I looked at other systems and I've been to Finland and so forth looking at high performing systems that have a high degree of teacher autonomy. None of those systems have a high degree of teacher autonomy and no formal curriculum. Like teacher autonomy is necessary but you have to have a framework for a curriculum. There's no successful education system in the world that has no curriculum and high degree of autonomy. So, this kind of gets at the heart of an issue and this won't solve that issue necessarily. It doesn't, you know, it gets closer to it but I think again, our diagnosis is we have a lot of really high quality schools in the state relatively speaking. If we just raise the bar a bit on some of these processes I think we're gonna see a dramatic improvement honestly in terms of closing equity gaps. We're also gonna chip away at the sustainability issues and the turnover of staff. People aren't gonna have to reinvent the wheel every time they move around. So, I think this is a critical piece of work in a lot of ways. We'll get to the issue that we've talked a little bit about just to throw it out there. Making certain that, you know, kids have a lot of opportunities around the foreign language. Yeah. A lot of opportunities. Because standards aren't requirements. Right. requirements aren't standards. Standard can say we want every student in Vermont to be exposed to a foreign language. Right. So, that school could then say, okay, we're gonna just do one language. It's gonna be over here. But what gets us to where I think a lot of us would like? This doesn't do that. Right. Right. So, that's where I think, you know, when I was talking last night and there were some questions about it. You know, we have to make more progress on our virtual learning capacity. Right. We are behind as a state in that regard. There's always been an aspiration. I can remember when Howard Dean was governor and I was up in Canaan and he was like, I want every kid in the state to have access every high school course. I like your imitation of Howard Dean. Yeah, it was pretty fun. And at first I thought he was sitting there and then I remember he was down there. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, everyone's been working on that goal for a long time. I think, unfortunately or fortunately, the pandemic dumped us right on the deep end of the pool, right? And, you know, I think last time we had a real significant downturn in our economy. You remember in 2008, and we had a pretty significant investment of federal dollars into the system. What was called the American Reinvestment Recovery Act. You know, districts with capacity made hay with that. You know, like our district in Manchester, we had a lot of capacity in technology. We built a wide area network all the way up from Paulette down to Sunroyd. You know, so we laid fiber. Amazing. You know? Yeah. And built the first wide area network among all those schools. Yeah. Because we knew how to do that. Yeah. But the poor districts didn't know, you know, they don't know how to begin to do that stuff. Yeah. So that just widened the gap. You know, that kind of thing, we really have to be committed to, I think, to laying down a really solid commitment to virtual learning. We've been making, you know, those strategic investments with our recovery dollars, that's been a central strategy that General Assembly's acknowledged. We've been putting more and more money into the Vermont Virtual Learning Collaborative. More recently this year, we've been expanding the elementary of virtual learning applications as a way to offer additional tutoring for kids. So it's, yeah, I was trying to describe last night, we think of virtual learning at the high school level. It's generally organized around courses, but elementary kids don't learn by courses. They have classes and there's more ad hoc basis of learning. And there's a lot that can happen with that virtual learning as a resource. Like, I used to be a geography teacher, so if I had Google Earth access behind me or using a learning management system, it just allows us to extend the school day into the afterschool program to provide resources that were available in a day to the afterschool programs, summer programs. You really start to really offer a more robust curriculum in a rural state, which is really part of the challenge for rural states. So you need to do, like, these sessions on YouTube afterwards, if, when I was a student, if I could have gone back when I was doing my homework and heard it again. That's how Khan Academy got started, you know? Guys, like, I'm gonna draw some tutorials for my nephews.  You know, if you could go math in particular, need practice, right? If you could go watch stuff over and over again, you know, you were sleeping in class, we'll go watch the YouTube. You know, it's like, yeah. Not to say I ever slept in class in this term. Yeah, there's a lot of bad application of technology, too. Again, I think technology is not a, it's not good or bad. It could be just like any tool that could be used inappropriately, but I think particularly for rural states, you know, we really have to, we have to be aggressive in that regard.  Yeah, yeah. If they're not using the tools, that's a problem, but then secondly, if they're not getting exposed to content, that's a huge problem. So it'll be one of our policy priorities to talk about computer science, for example. We think we can expand computer science through virtual learning. You know, computer science lends itself well to being taught online. Okay. But the DQS, there's standards, again, but not requirement. We're not gonna see any change in terms of requirement. You could still have a school. In terms of curriculum. Yeah, well, you could still end up with a school that might stop after three years of math. Yeah, well, that remains to be seen. We, I was talking about the left-hand column. Yeah, yeah. So the EQS, where a lot of that's included, we kind of didn't work on that. So the agency was charged with the DQS and the quality assurance. The state board is managing the EQS revisions. We have Jennifer coming in. Yeah, as a result of the Act One. Yeah. Okay. But there are things in there as we contemplate this comprehensive quality assurance model. We're trying to pull elements together and we had this conversation this afternoon around graduation requirements. Teacher evaluation. Like what are the things in EQS that really should be on here? So I think graduation requirements sort of survived our debate this afternoon as being one of those things that probably should be on the list. The Vermont, we have minimal graduation standards and we allow school boards to add on to that, basically. But there's been some concern around special ed advocates in particular. Like there's different standards for graduation. To what extent are schools enacting the state minimal standards for graduation? We don't, you know, we, the idea is what assurance does the state mean?  And I think it did survive. So that would be something we'd add on the column here is to really look at the graduation requirements. In most states, that's very descriptive because your diploma comes from the state, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we just had this conversation with Dr. Boucher and Dr. Gorham a little bit. Yeah. So I mean, who would raise the point? You know, you look at Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, generally, they look like they're doing better in terms of NEAP, NEAP, thank you. Scores, is it in part because of this, you know, the educational governance thing? Yeah, it's so many different things. Sure, of course. Yeah, and Massachusetts has an approach. I don't think that would fly well here, but what we're trying to do is really leverage the Vermont context and, you know, it's part of it's, we're our own worst enemy. You know, we're a pretty successful state, so we don't think we need to change, but then the idea of local control above all else, you know, and actually it's that, I think I mentioned thematically in my first testimony with you, anytime we don't regulate something, there's a potential for inequity. Okay, so something to consider, I'm not saying we regulate everything, but we have to understand that there's a risk that we contribute to the patterns of inequity by not holding people accountable to sort of the same base standards. That's kind of what we're wrestling here with this. So it'll be interesting to see how it comes along, but we'll have a, we'll have this written up, like in a rule format here shortly, we're setting, then we're setting that out for written feedback from the different education associations, and right now we're on schedule to file for February 7th, so anytime in there we could come back and show you more of what this actually starts to look like as we pull it together. I think it would be useful for you to understand the overall regulatory framework because it's a good orientation for new members. Any final questions for Secretary French? It was very helpful. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much. We'll continue in conversation. We're back here with some teachers to help us kind of understand what they've got with their scene on the ground. Thank you very much. Have a good afternoon. Yeah, let's go ahead and let them in. Welcome back to Senate Education. We have, I think, Jennifer, Michelle, and is it Megan or Megan? Megan, okay, great. Thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to Senate Education. I'm gonna have us just go around the room so you know each of us are districts and then we'll turn things over to the three of you. But I do wanna just say a big thanks for taking the time to do this. We know how incredibly busy you are. We are also immensely grateful for everything you did during COVID and continue to do for kids. And what we're trying to get a sense of is we get to hear from all sorts of your representatives, if you will. We hear from the NEA, we hear from the Principal's Association, the Superintendents Association, School Board Association, but it's great hearing directly from people who are on the ground doing the work. So, we'll start with Senator Hashim. Sure. Hi, I'm Nader Hashim. I'm from Domerson, representing Wyndham County. And standing to my left. Hi, this is Martin Larak-Ulik. I live in Burlington and I represent Chittenden Central. I'm Brian Campion. I represent Bennington County, Bloomington and London area. Good afternoon, I'm Dave Weitz, representing Rutland County from Proctor. And I'm Senator Terry Williams from Rutland County and I'm from Portley. And would you first tell us each where you're from? So, we know in your district and then we'll probably start with Megan. But let's just first hear where you're all from. I'm Megan Morgan-Biglisi. I'm from Senator Campion's district in Bennington. Great. I'm Michelle Eakin and I currently work at Slate Valley Union Middle High School and that's in Fairhaven. I'm Jennifer Fortier and I teach at Newport City. So, Megan, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you teach, how long you've been at it and tell us what you're seeing right now with your students and tell us how we can be helpful. All right, so thank you for inviting me, Senator Campion and Senate Ed committee. I'm a National Board Certified Teacher. I train educators and restorative practices. I serve as a local union president and I've taught high school math at Mount Anthony Union High School for 11 years. As you know, I'm sure all of you know, Bennington is one of the most economically depressed areas of our state. We have many students experiencing extreme trauma, daily as a result of the opioid epidemic, poverty, loss and other situations. Some of our elementary schools are currently in severe crisis.  They have to evacuate their rooms to keep other students safe and resupply materials anytime a student destroys property. We've had over 60 injuries at one school alone and are only at the halfway point of the year. While the schools try to implement restorative and other interventions, they lack both the staff and the time since they're constantly putting out fires. Our district has created a separate location for some of these students experiencing severe trauma for short periods of time, but it's not currently staffed by any clinical personnel. Our school-based clinicians in each building are at capacity. The district, and I wanna be clear, the district was headed this way long before COVID. Basically, things were building up and all of us were predicting something big was gonna happen somewhere around March or April of 2020 and then we shut down. COVID simply delayed the crisis point for about two years. Teachers and support staff have quit mid-year because of these conditions. We started the year with fewer educational support professionals than we need. Our ESPs are not paid a livable wage and have been fighting to get salaries increased. Over 55% of them do not take the district offered insurance because they simply can't afford it. We have no subs and they won't raise the sub pay to encourage people to become subs because it would cause them to be paid more than our ESPs. Our school boards remain reluctant to increase school budgets because residents can't afford our rising property taxes. So here's what we need. One, we need more funding for clinician and wraparound services. Our district has so many homeless students that we need the voucher program for hotels to continue. We need more community schools where students can access doctors, dentists and other services and families can access job and parenting support. We need the state to provide the funding for those resources. Two, we need higher wages. Teacher salaries in our district, one of the largest districts in the state remain lower than most other districts in the state. And we are the lowest paid in our area as well. So we lose staff every year to surrounding districts and surrounding states. So we're at the corner. So we lose people to New York, to Massachusetts and even sometimes to New Hampshire all the time. We need, so three, we need things taken off our plates. The high school needs to not worry about proficiency-based grading and graduation requirements. We're keeping dual grade books because colleges outside Vermont have made it clear that a proficiency-based transcript puts our students at a disadvantage. In addition- Could you just say something about that? A lot of folks are new on the committee. Tell us a little bit about that situation. Absolutely. So however many years ago now, the state was really encouraging proficiency, a proficiency-based rating system, graduation requirements, et cetera, K-12. And proficiency-based grading, the idea behind it is that instead of being kept to a hundred point system, you have students just demonstrating that they are proficient with standards. So for math, for example, let's take math because that's my wheelhouse. We have the Common Core State Standards and we have prioritized said standards to be like, all right, these are the big ones that our kids need to show proficiency in. And it sounds like a great idea, okay? So that you're not worrying about kids having to do it on, they just have to show proficiency, right? It definitely works in elementary school. It has merit in middle school. It gets really tricky in high school because there are so many things outside of our control, our students are applying for college, and all that kind of stuff that having a transcript that has no GPA or doesn't have a comparable, it has a proficiency-based GPA as opposed to a traditional GPA, a report card that doesn't have grades on it, all of that kind of stuff puts our students at a disadvantage because colleges will see a different transcript and we'll put it aside if they have so many other transcripts to look at. While colleges in the state of Vermont have said that they will accept a proficiency transcript, we can't control what other states do. We have also found, so through our own anecdotal research, we've also found that there are very few high schools that are still actually using the proficiency model for multiple reasons. And so currently our high school teachers are keeping two great books. We are keeping proficiencies and having to write, like the student is missing this, blah, blah, blah, blah, but then we're also keeping a traditional grade book. So it takes a lot more time, it's a lot more paperwork and ultimately our students don't really, proficiency-based learning is great, absolutely. We should have proficiencies, we should be teaching to those proficiencies. The grading is where it gets complicated and frustrating. Does that answer your question? It does, it's so cool, yeah, yeah, thank you. Do you want me to continue? Yes, please. Okay. Okay, in addition, so in talking about things being taken off our plate, in addition, the new special ed requirements are not specific enough to provide districts with guidance on how to implement them. So different districts are doing different things and our district has interpreted them to mean that all special education students need to be completely mainstreamed. And I've talked to other districts and other districts are not interpreting it that way. So we have students thrust into the general education setting without the supports they need without the special education staff necessary and just without the personnel. And so for example, I have a class of 18 students runs all year, where only one is not on an IEP or 504. Even with a math teacher, a special educator and a para educator in the room, we don't have enough support. Every single student in that room needs one-on-one attention and with three of us, it's not possible. And number four, perhaps most importantly, we need the state to rethink how it funds education. Tying funding so closely to property taxes sets educators and schools against residents. They blame us for property taxes going up. It creates a lot of animosity in our community. School boards won't raise our salaries to the levels necessary to make our district desirable because they don't wanna antagonize voters. Money is part of the reason why our district won't admit that we don't have the resources to serve some of our students. If we did, we would have to pay tens of hundreds, tens, 200s of thousands of dollars to send them somewhere else. We simply don't have the money. So we're trying to find ways to serve these students who we don't have the resources for. And I teach because I love my students and my colleagues. We conducted a listening campaign at the beginning of the school year and found that overwhelmingly our staff return every day because of our students and our colleagues. But conditions are making it harder and harder to keep going. Self-care isn't enough. We need structural change. COVID gave us the opportunity to reconsider how we do school, but we missed the chance to do that. I think our state is brave enough to rethink education altogether. We just need to do it. Senator Gullick has a question. Megan, thank you very much for that testimony. Your fourth point was the news. You talked about the new special ed requirements. Yep. Act 173. Can we? I'm sorry? No, please go ahead. Can we drill down? Yeah, Act 173. Yeah, my question is, can you drill down a little bit into that? There wasn't an ask there. You presented us with a problem, but what would be the ask with special ed? So I think a good start would be very clear guidance on what the state is looking for because I don't know two districts that are doing the same thing with that guidance. And it's causing a lot of issues. Like our district has completely eliminated self-contained classes. And yeah, yeah. I think a start would be guidance. Thanks. Megan, I just pulled out what the NEA handed us in terms of priorities this year. Do you help write these priorities? Did you vote on the priorities? Is that how they decided? So I'm just trying to understand process a little bit. So there are a number of ways that that happens. We have our representative assembly once a year where that's part of it. But there's also a lot of things are, certain things are decided by the Vermont NEA board, which is made up of those and support staff and all of that. So that's helpful. Thank you very much. Any other questions for Megan? Megan, can you stick around while we continue the conversation with the others? Okay, great. Michelle, please, thanks for joining us. No, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's kind of an honor to speak with you from our vantage point, I think. And Megan made a lot of points that I am going to make. I've been in education for 26 years, 21 of them teaching in schools around Vermont, five of them raising and teaching my young children. Currently, I am a lead teacher at the new district middle school in Fairhaven. Our four sending schools were consolidated this year in fall of 2022 to one district middle school. I am also a lead teacher for the eighth grade team there. I teach eighth grade ELA. I'm a member of the district instructional vision team. What we do is we prepare for in-services and act as liaisons between the curriculum coordinator and the staff. And then I'm also a master's candidate for the educational leadership program at UVM. So my kind of, what life is like for me? I went from Orwell Village School teaching all of middle school or sixth, seventh and eighth grade where I had the most students I had were 40 in one year to class sizes of 25 and 26 this year at our consolidated middle school. So I'm gonna echo Megan's point. It's with everyone of all the needs in the classroom, not enough para educators to serve our population, not enough, not enough.  We just, I have 90 ELA students and I have support in two of those classes. There's not enough support. We're told that we can't get any more. I have students, we have students with emotional disturbance in our classrooms. And we're told that we can't, they don't qualify to have a special educator or a para educator in the room. And so I'm trying to teach students, I'm trying to further their reading and writing and all these skills that they need to be a functional human being in conditions that are so far from optimal and the range of abilities because I teach middle school, we do not ability group. And so the range of abilities that I might have in a classroom is a student who might be reading on an 11th or 12th grade level and able to write on that level as well. And a student who simply can't write a sentence with a capital letter and a punctuation and knowing what a verb or a noun and how to even put the sentence together. And I'm told that we just simply don't have the resources to go to Megan's point there. I believe at this point in time, we have two subs for our entire middle school which means that when teachers have to be out for the self care that we're told to take and we're told to take care of ourselves if you need to take a day off, take a day off, our colleagues cover our classes. And we are compensated for that, but we're asked the day of. So we can go into work and think that we know what the day has in store. And then we're asked to fill in for one of our colleagues because we just simply don't have enough substitute teachers. And what Megan said is absolutely true. It's based on pay, but it's also based on the fact that you don't want to pay the subs too much because then why would anyone possibly work as a para educator? Why wouldn't you just work as a sub? So we have those issues as well. I spoke with some colleagues about this testimony and one of my colleagues pointed out that it seems as though staffing for para educators and teachers seems to be decreasing while there seems to be more and more admin positions added. So that's an issue that our district is having. We seem to be really heavy on admin or central office. But when it comes to adding teachers to this or para educators, that's just, it's too expensive. Also one real issue that I see is like Megan said, our decisions are being made that are best for students. They're being made because of the emphasis on passing the budget. So this district middle school was created to consolidate, to cut costs. And last year the budget passed. This year costs will go up because there's no more cuts to be made. And so this year, I fear that the budget will go down multiple times as usually happens in my district. But again, decisions, like I said, my class sizes, I have colleagues who have 26 students in a classroom and some of them have multiple support staff or one-on-ones for students. And so with those numbers, we've cut as much as we can and the burden is borne by the teachers. When Megan was talking I was thinking about proficiency which does work, it's a great idea but students are just passed through. We're at the end, the end of our semester is tomorrow. And what's going to happen is I have students who have not submitted any work or who have submitted very little work for the semester. And I'll indicate that on their report card but there's no consequences. Those students will still go on to ninth grade. So there's an issue of how do we, how do we catch these students up? It's a slippery slope, they just keep backsliding if there are, we don't have those supports for those students. Teacher expertise is undervalued in my district. Really if decisions need to be made that's why this is such an honor. If decisions need to be made really the teachers should always be, should always be involved because we're in on the front lines and we see these students on a daily basis. Wages are of course- That's your question. Yeah. When you say with the proficiency, so if you have a ninth grader that you really feel should not advance he or she is receiving a comment saying this is where they're at. They're doing these things well. They're not doing these things well. And that's it. It doesn't have a letter grade. It's, they're just receiving that narrative. No, so it's not a narrative. So it's indicated with numbers one through four. So four means they're exceeding proficiency. A three means they're proficient. A two means they're slightly below proficiency. And a one means they're far away from proficiency. The issue, and those students, I feel like we are trying really hard to work with. The issue that I'm having when you have a student who has not completed any assignments, you give them a no evidence. And a no evidence turns into a zero. But what a no evidence means is we don't know. We don't know what their level of proficiency is because we don't have any evidence. They haven't submitted any assignments. Those are the students that I'm mostly concerned about passing on. They're the students who we just don't know. Because they're not handing in any assignments. Correct. Yes. And you have to be passed on. Yes, yes, yes, for sure. So I'm gonna say our knee. So again, I think it really for me boils down to the way that we fund education in the state of Vermont. And this has been a longstanding issue. It is still not equitable. Even after everything that's been done, it still comes down to the community and the community's willingness to support the budget, to pay those taxes, to educate the students. And communities feel very, very differently about funding education. I used to live in the town of Middlebury. That is a town that will pass, in my experience, will pass any budget that you want. They, that is a community who does not, the majority of them, they will pass any school budget. There are always those people who say no, but those budgets always pass. The community that I'm part of that I teach in now is not like that at all. So that's not equitable. That means that if you go to a school in a community where the community, majority of the community supports education, those students receive better materials, better supplies, better technology. They can recruit better educators because they're more experienced educators because those educators, the wages are higher. Another thing that is always a struggle in my district, and I'm going to be honest and say I'm not sure where exactly this comes from, but personalized learning plans or PLPs are just, they're the bane, I'm just gonna say, they're the bane of my existence. And for middle schoolers and elementary school students, I understand that there's some value in high school students kind of presenting kind of like a passion project. But I think to base, a lot of schools are now basing graduation on that. And I really feel like we almost need to go back to those basic competencies. That's when I went to school in Vermont, when we had basic competencies. And I almost feel like we need to go back to some of that and leave, maybe you could connect the PLPs to basic competencies. But I really feel like the PLPs are, it's adding more to our plate as Megan was saying, it's adding more to our plate that just now is not the time. One more. Thank you. Go ahead, I just wanna make sure again at resident time. Oh, sorry. And then one more thing is, so like working conditions, I was put in a building this year that we have 200 students in a quarter of the size of the high school. I was in a meeting yesterday with the other lead teacher for seventh grade in administration. And we're trying to figure out how we, this is a brand new space. We're trying to figure out how to rearrange the bell system so that not all the students are in the hall at the same time. So these are things that are being put onto our plate that really have nothing to do with education. And it's because I believe that the priority is funding and not what's in the best interest of students. Thank you. Jennifer, thank you for joining us. Hi, thank you. I have to agree this is a great honor to have this opportunity. I think you're gonna hear a lot of repeats from me. I am lifelong resident of Vermont. I am a late bloomer in teaching. I started in accounting and went back to get my teaching degree when my kids were in elementary school. So I began teaching in 2005 at Glover and I taught second grade there for 14 years. And now I teach third grade at Newport City. This is my 18th year of teaching and I am also co-president of our union. Some positives that we have observed in our district, we feel like we're slowly working our way back to normal. Student attendance is improving from COVID days. Our administrators and school leaders are asking us to the table to brainstorm ways to attract and retain staff. So that is good. Working in a state with an engaged teachers union is a definite bonus when we look across our nation. And student success in building relationships are always fulfilling for every teacher. Some challenges, they are just repeats of what you've already heard. Student behavior is consuming a few resources we have. Our administrators are overwhelmed and almost unable to attend to improving our systems. Their duties extend them too thin. These jobs that they're doing are were done by others or not as numerous and to name some of those parent contacts that our administrators make on the daily keeps them here till five, six o'clock. Subbing some administrators in our district do sub, making daily plans to staff our building so that we can stay open, takes them often an hour to just get us up and running. IEP and 504 meetings, budgets, paperwork, student behavior are to name a few. Paperwork required to obtain student support is tedious, which often leads to under reported issues. Teachers in our district often question why we have students in our buildings or classrooms who we seem to not be able to meet their needs. It is often felt that mandates that come through are tying our hands behind our backs because so many more things are regulated. Another challenge is staffing shortages. Every school in our district has a subbing shortage. Students are not getting the service minutes on their plans. As I said, most mornings our administrators are pulling staff members from their actual jobs to fill classrooms. Support staff and non-classroom teachers have to be incredibly flexible right now. Behaviors get first coverage and academic needs seem to be second. We have a very big bus driver shortage that often makes our day start late or we have to have staff members cover children on the playground till the next bus can do the second run. Our district has the highest number of teachers on provisionals. Newport area, we have a big drug problem and there's not a lot of attraction to our area. We can only pull from the south. And so getting staffing our buildings is very difficult. There are few doing the work of several right now. Another challenge is students and families. Many students are disengaged. Poor habits established from COVID still exist while absences and attendance is better. Absences are still a problem. Students come in exhausted. Some are just not motivated and we still have an abuse of our sick policy. Staff safety is a concern every day. We deal with violent and dysregulated students as the other two ladies have discussed. Many teachers and possibly administrators don't feel supported by the community and particularly parents. The last challenge I speak of is staffing which I've kind of touched on. The demands of the job feel difficult and sometimes impossible to fulfill. Testing students when the majority are not present to learn feels very defeatist. This 200 year old system needs a revamp and before it crashes. The reason many used to enter the profession don't exist anymore. We used to have stellar affordable healthcare, flexible schedules, livable wages, part-time work for mothers. Our support staff, they can't afford daycare or healthcare if they have children of that age. Some solutions may be considered creative ways to meet the needs of staff and students, maybe abbreviated student weeks, systematic behavior policies and evaluate state mandates that rely on staff, special ed, MTSS. We did a deep dive into MTSS the other day and we noticed that a lot of it depends on interventionists and special educators which we are in short supply of. Raising wages while not a cure, it would definitely help. Ways to possibly attract. Teachers going into this profession maybe suspend practices, offer licensing reimbursement or student debt reimbursement that comes a little quicker than 10 years. Consider an alternative to the current state testing model for students is this best practice for our students right now and suspend initiatives that are not designed at the local level because in Vermont, we're all in different places right now. Senator Williams. Sir, are you all union members of the union? Yes. Thank you. Yes, please Senator. Thank you. Jennifer, you mentioned suspend practices and I'm not sure everyone on this committee knows what practices is. Could you just give us a quick description? Sure. Practice is the test that teachers, student teachers must take in their undergrad. So they often take it in their sophomore junior year. It is a rigorous test. Back when I did it, it was practice one and two. I think there's new terms now, but the first one is general knowledge and the second practice is designed to your certification. So if you're a high school math teacher, it will be designed to that and it's expensive. There are testing scores that you have to pass and it has eliminated many new educators from our profession. At the elementary level, the second one, the science and social studies portion hangs up a lot of our possible educators and they simply cannot come into this profession. Without passing it. And so really, it seems like a test of knowledge. So when we can carry around a device that we can look facts up, it seems unnecessary. And just to jump off of Jennifer, just to point out. So social studies and science tend to be the biggest hang-ups and there are plenty of schools in our state right now that in elementary school have pretty much eliminated, I say pretty much, eliminated science and social studies instruction in K through five because of all of the requirements for English and math. Colin, is practice a state requirement? For licensure, yes. I think that we've been talking about this recently and I really appreciate first of all, Jen and Michelle and Megan for making the time to do this. I was in house education yesterday and this conversation came up and we were talking about maybe there's value in the agency of education and the Vermont Standards Board for Professional Educators which is the licensing board for teachers for viewing alternative metrics other than the praxis. We wanna be careful not to lower standards, right? I don't think anybody wants to do that but obviously the praxis can be a barrier to some folks for various reasons. One that hasn't been mentioned, of course, is thinking about somebody who maybe English isn't their first language on a basic level that might not have anything to do with their ability to be a great teacher, manage a classroom, have content, and have expertise that if they're getting hung up by not being able to pass the praxis. Any final questions for our guests? This has been incredibly helpful. Do we have all of your email addresses? Yes, we do. I see Mr. Ross is telling us we do. We do. We may be back in touch. I would think that we very well may be. This is very helpful. Thank you all for taking the time. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Good night. Good night. Thank you.