to its resting place from hope, maybe today, maybe this afternoon. We don't hear from these folks, so if we don't do it this afternoon, we'll do it tomorrow morning. Okay, thank you so much. So you're welcome. You folks need to go through the whole belly, just want to go through the corrections, and change this rather. I love the whole belly. I mean, at some point before we go on it. What's your timing? You have a half hour now? You've got a half hour. Why don't we just go through the changes? Okay. Before we go on it, we'll go through the whole thing. Okay, yeah, okay. So for the record, Jim DeMarie lives console with... Hey, do you make that office a less console? There you go. We're walking through draft 8.4. So on the statement of purpose, we've made some changes. So this bill proposes to realign regulatory oversight by the agency of education and agency of human services, a pre-K ed program. So to realign is a bit vague. You're going to get more specific on that. But the idea, of course, is that what you're doing now in this draft is you have... You have dual regulation by AOE and AHS. Thank you. Early. Of public pre-K programs. Sorry. Of private pre-K programs, you have sole regulation by AOE of public programs. When it comes to monitoring those programs, therefore, you've got dual monitoring by both agencies of private programs. But only AOE is overseeing the monitoring of public programs. Keep that. Yeah. So you'll see that if you go through. But that's what the realign means there. So we're very specifically sort of unshackling the public programs from the dual. Correct. Correct. Privacy remain basically a status quo. Okay. Public... And we have joint rulemaking still. Right? Okay. Okay. And this also gives the other committee an opportunity to say we've got this one. You want to take a look at that one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Should I have question three now? Well, should I say statement or ask a question? Ask a question. Okay. Well, I want to change that by vacation. You want... Okay. So that's a really big thing. Right. So we'll film that you want to change the by vacation. Okay. Okay. And then a small change in line 11 to reference that simplify and clarify the program qualification criteria for pre-K providers. And then we've added a few more details here. Require reports on the availability of qualified teachers for pre-K programs and how to ensure that students who attend of district pre-K programs continue to receive special education services and five create grant programs and fund regional pre-K coordinators. Okay. Then we go to the definition of pre-K child. So based upon AOE's recommendation, we have taken out of the exception for five-year-olds students on a 504 plan. So now you can attend pre-K and get the voucher. If you're five years of age, but not yet more than kindergarten, if the child is on an IEP program and the child's program team recommends that the child receive pre-K education services, the 504 has been taken away from this exception. Pre-K education is defined as having the same meaning as defined in section 11. So what's happening here is we've had dual definitions have been inconsistent. And in the previous draft, we aligned those two definitions to be the same. This one, though, rather than having two definitions cross-references, so we don't get out of alignment going forward. That's the idea. And we'll come back to that definition at the end, because it's been revised. Okay. So none of this stuff has changed. I mean, one change here that the community did not ask for. So to point out, on line 12, this is the notification by a school board to private pre-K programs that the board intends on expanding or beginning a pre-K program. We heard that opening a law requires a genus to be posted two days before the meeting. So we had two days here, so after one day, so at least, you know, you have some notice. So they get to send them the link that they created. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes it easy. Yeah. Yeah. So but one day rather than two days before. Okay. Then we go on. The next part is, yeah, so K cover this. Okay. So if you remember, we had a conversation about where the qualified providers are going to be listed. And the existing, not existing, but unchanged, Subdivision A talks about the Agency of Human Services posting private providers on their website. Subdivision B shows the Agency of Education posting public providers on their website. And then Subdivision C has been rewritten to read that bright futures using the lists posted on the two respective websites would post on its own website a list of both private and public providers that satisfy the program requirements. And it specifies on line six and seven, which shall be searchable by program type and geographic region. Okay. Okay. Then we go forward. So you see this, this language here jointly developed, sorry, on line two and three jointly developed and implemented by the Agency of Education and Human Services. This refers to the statewide rate that has to be established and they are doing that jointly. So we unstruck that language to keep it back in the statute. Okay. So we are now in the section that deals with regulatory on my line nine, regulatory oversight and rules. So this says, and it's unchanged on my 10, the Agency of Education shall have sole regulatory oversight of pre-K educational program offered by a public provider with the exception of CFAP and stars as we talked about before. That's unchanged. Now, though, it says on page 12, the Department for Children and Families Child Development Division and the Agency of Education shall have joint regulatory oversight of a pre-K educational program offered by a private provider. That's where you get into that change there. And then it goes on, on line four unchanged, but just to point out that we've got joint rulemaking here still. So line six shall jointly develop and agree to rules. So that's unchanged. And the rules pretty much are the same as they were before until we come to monitoring. Okay. So the monitoring section has changed because now we've got to deal with dual regulation on one side and sole regulation on the other side. So now it says on line one, they have established rules to establish comparable monitoring systems. They're designed to promote optimal results for children that support the relevant population level outcomes that support the statute and to collect data that will inform future decisions by which the AOE and DCF shall jointly monitor and evaluate the implementation of publicly funded pre-K education programs offered by private programs. And the Agency of Education shall solely monitor and evaluate the implementation of publicly funded pre-K education programs offered by public programs. Okay. Just don't move on your words. Okay. Then. Hold on a second. There. So then it's. AOE. Joint monitoring of private. Direct monitoring. Sole AOE. Correct. So we're going to go along with that. Okay. Biprecation was talked about earlier. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a tricky corner in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because of the wording that the publicly funded programs offered by the private programs. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Okay. Sorry. Just got hung up for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then that says on line eight, which is unchanged. Sorry. Line 13 that the agency and department should be required to jointly report the results of the monitoring. So they might do something separately of the jointly reporting. And then the requirements for monitoring on line 16 are unchanged. So same as before. Okay. Then we come to, I put this in, if we didn't have a rule requirement that said this. And it says that the rules have to establish a process to verify that public and private providers satisfy and continue to satisfy the program quality requirements, which are the stars ratings or the teaching. So we didn't have it before. So I thought we should put that in. Okay. That's not how the kids are doing this is how the program is doing. This is just making sure that there are rules in place for the agencies to have a process for verifying that these are actually qualified programs. That's all. And then we go to, okay. This gets back into the definition of pre-K child. So this is the definition we're in. So our section three here on line five, we're mainly section 11. Section 11 are the definitions used throughout Pal 16. So there's the definition already pre-K education on line 10. So all we're doing here is saying when we were in the section on pre-K, we cross-referenced this section saying pre-K education means what this says. And what this says is that it means services designed to provide developmentally appropriate early development and learning experiences based upon all the learning standards to pre-K children as defined in H29, which is a pre-K section we went through. So that's basically saying, again, three, four-year-olds and five-year-olds if you are on IEP. So that's just again to make sure we don't have this issue going forward of having two sets of definitions that aren't aligned. Then on page 18, we moved out the date for this, for the secretary to develop uniform forms of processes. It happened over this summer. They want more time. So it's now March 15 of next year. But the idea here being after they do that, that all the school nurses have to have time to use those uniform forms of processes before the next school year. So hopefully that will give them enough time to do that. Then we come to, okay, so we have section seven left over this way? Sure. So this is the study that we've been looking at, looking at the availability of instructors moving forward. So the new language is that by December 15 of 2020, AHS and AOE are to study and report and submit that report to Education, Human Services, Health and Welfare. First, their five and 10-year vision for kindergarten. That's my fault, but actually there's going to be two of these here. That probably should say pre-K, I believe. And subdivision two, the capacity of public pre-K for children four years of age. Pause there for a second. That's what I think Sherwood, you asked for, but should that be kindergarten? Because we've been talking about expanding kindergarten times the fourth grade. So should this say kindergarten or pre-kindergarten? Kindergarten. Kindergarten, okay, yeah. Well, could we say kindergarten for children that are four years old? Yeah, that's what it looks like. Yeah, yeah. Okay. It'll be like junior kindergarten. Okay, so we'll put it up. Okay, so you want it to read the capacity of public kindergarten for children four years of age? Switch out those words. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And in subdivision three, bridging the gap between childcare, early education, work supports, and parent education. I don't understand if it should be parent engagement, I'm sorry that's my fault. Okay. That's my question. Yeah. I don't understand parent education. Okay. That's my fault. Okay. This is late last night. Yeah. Going back and forth with my words. Yeah. Okay. So that's, so this report here to note is by the two agencies to report by December 15, 2020, the previous section has two agencies reporting on the same date of all the teacher qualifications. So we don't want to, I don't want to at least combine this report here and seven without the teacher stuff because teacher stuff is so specific. Right. So I want to muddy that water. So we have a separate report. Yeah. And then we come to, we come to the grant program. So. The part you just skipped over, I know that's new, but that's the special affordability study. Yeah. That's the advisory group. And there are actually two things just to remind you. One of this is how to ensure portability of special education services when the student goes out of district. And the second is how to ensure that the funding for pre-K is not doubled because of the census grant. Right. Can I have? Yeah. Yeah. If a special ed student left the district, their district, their home district, am I to another school? Could the IEP and the funding fall now? Good. Good. Okay. So that's the part that takes a student away from the recommendation of the IEP team in the Supervisory Union, which is the LA, then the FAP goes away. But that doesn't mean that money can't fall out. But it's a choice at that point, not a requirement. Okay. So session nine, just read through this. This is a new grant program to encourage regions to hire pre-K coordinators. So it reads, A, the pre-K coordinators grant program is created to enable SUs to work together in a sustained and targeted manner to retain pre-K coordinators on a regional basis. In recognition that Supervisory Unions or regions within the state that retain pre-K coordinators deliver pre-K educational services in a more effective and coordinated manner than those SUs or regions that do not have this resource, this program is designed to assist SUs that work in collaboration by providing funding to retain pre-K coordinators. Administration, the agency of education shall master the grant program and shall determine the applicable, sorry, the application and the work criteria, provide that applicant to represent not less than three SUs that agree to work in collaboration to coordinate pre-K educational services to a pre-K coordinator whose service is region represented by these Supervisory Unions. The agency of education shall inform SUs of the availability of grants under the section and provide technical assistance to eligible applicants applying for these funds. The agency of education shall also advise SUs of other sources of funding that may be available to advance the purpose of this section. Program funding, the agency shall award grant funding under the program of up to, and it's a bracket, I'm not sure how much you want, for application to successful applicants. The amount of this funding shall be used, shall be based on SUs of the applicants proposed budget and total availability of funds, and I'm not sure there should be a second year of funding, so that's the question wrong for the committee to consider. And then D on before December 15, 2021, the agency of education shall report to the John Assembly and the governor on the impact of the grant program. The report shall be made publicly available on the agency's website. And then now we're seeing a provision of a lot of the contrary. X amount is appropriated from the education fund to the agency for fiscal year 21, designated for program grants under this section. And again, the agency shall include a special request for next year or more money if you're doing it through your program, I wasn't sure. And then the agency can't spend more than 2% of funds for technical assistance and not more than 2% of funding for the report. And that's it. Thank you. Peter. This grant program, I'm on what we were looking at here, page 28. And basically my question is the agency essentially will design this. They'll make the rules around it. They'll say we're only providing 30% and you need to provide a 70% match. Or do we need to be prescribing some of that? Well, this is a call for matching funds. So I don't think we have the authority here to demand matching funds. Just unlike the grant program for nursing, which is very detailed, all they're doing here is retaining a coordinator. It's much simpler program, I think, to a minister than the other one. We have lots of goals you want to see. We've got models, too. I was trying to think through sort of the same thing. So is the 150 intended to be salary and benefits for that person for one year? I think that they can use it in any way that they want to use it, not to find how they use it. Well, the purpose of the section is to retain, I didn't say employ or construct, but it's just retain, which is a more vague term. But somehow you get the services of the coordinator for that region. The hope is that what they're going to do is here's your seed money to get started. And then you're going to realize this is such a good idea that you're going to start putting in your budgets and you're going to be able to spread it out throughout supervisor units. Because what I was assuming that, so I'm thinking about the two-year thing because if you, just trying to think through the timing, if this new person starts in September and then budgets are due in January, you're not going to have time to show that person's impact before you're trying to build them into the budget. So it's sort of like, we've got this great new person, she's working across, you know, she or he is working across three SUs. Yeah, and we're already trying to, you know, move that cost over to the SU's budgets when the person hasn't had a chance to show the impact yet. So that would be my thought on that. And I don't have to fix that. But just a two-year program would be, I think, preferable to give this person time to really make some changes. I have the option for a second year. Would you like to do that?  Well, I want to do that. How many would like to do that? We've got a counter argument here. Okay, counter argument. All right, so I totally get what you're saying and understand that. However, I think the model has existed long enough in other areas that the argument to put it in the budget the next year is an argument that can be made. I hear you saying, but it's really a superintendent at school. We're going to have to sell them any more stuff then that the coordinator has to prove how effective they are. And we do have someone who recently walked into the room who actually started a program with 12 SUs. So we might be able to ask them how long it has been. Okay. Just hold that because we're going to want to talk with them. Okay, because I think this is a great discussion. You were at some point and went on and took you to get your 12 SUs going. We'll just hold on that. I guess I feel like one year, this is the kind of career that really needs to be owned by the supervisory means. That's why I was asking about, you know, matching funds because I just need to be skinning the game. So I guess I'm comfortable with one year. I suppose I can always come back and ask them how to be extended. Should we keep it for one year for now? Yeah. I'll keep it for one year for now and go through some of that. Should we do matching funds? Well, I think Jim made it. I think it was real for matching funds. The AOE described it as they can do it however they want to do it. Oh, they can do that? Yeah. They're going to design the grant fund. And that's what happened before. They weren't matching funds. There are organizations that would be very interested in that. Is that what you said? No, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's what I thought. Jim said that they can't because they can't require matching funds to do this. I think unless we say it, we've had language before that about the required matching funds. The grant has been express free of statute. Yeah. I don't know that the AC would have authority to require matching funds unless you say it. No, I don't think we were talking about requiring matching funds, but it's possible that's you to take in money from another organization. Yeah. And there's language here about having the AOE help them find funding. Right. That's here. But requiring matching funds is not here. No. You could draft this to require it or you could draft it to the HD authority to do it. Right. But if the agency said, okay, these are $30,000 grants matching funds is assumed. In other words, they don't have to fully fund. They would need it, in other words. Yeah. Yeah. And the agency is required to fully fund a position. They're required to fund the grant amount that they said that they would give. Yeah. And it may not be enough to fully fund something. Well, I see the language though is up to a certain amount. So right now it's bracket 150,000. But we based upon the budget that they actually come in with. Right. So if they come in with a budget of 100,000, they're going to get 100,000 under this language, I believe. And unless the agency comes up with rules that make them more of a competitive process, we're going to be... 100,000, I'm sorry, per application. Yeah. Yeah. That's $150,000 total. No, no. No. That's a bracket because that was just the amount you had in your literacy bill. Yeah. So it could be wherever you want. I don't know, $500,000? And how many... 30,000. No. And that's how the matching funds, the total fund. Yeah. This is $150,000. You figure this is three SCUs that are getting together. That's basically 50,000 each. But they're... Yeah. You know, in terms of... Yes. It would be 50,000 each sort of... Each sort of... Yes. Which sort of... Or if it was 12... Right. Right. Yeah. Three regions again? Four? Three or more, right? Three. No, the region... The regional... Yeah. No, the region, the regional... Would you say there's like four regions? Yeah. Is there no... The superintendents have... I think they have the four regions. Five. Do you have the five? Do you have Francis Montz? The superintendent association. Five regions. They have five. But that's not a state defined region. Yeah. Just because of time... I'm happy to come back to this after we have time to think about it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Serena. Do you want to hear more? Yes. Okay. Briefly, to say you have a concern about this, we won't discuss it, but you're concerned. Okay. So this is my concern. Then I've been thinking about all we can occur from quite five superintendents. Yeah. But one, I'm really concerned about the joint overseeing of the pretense. Yeah. They find it confusing. They find policies being administered differently by different individuals. Not out of... Yeah. Just because it's... So that's one. Yeah. So that's one. And, you know, what was really pointed out to me was the issue of equity and access, which I think is the foundation of the public school system. And a feeling that AOE should oversee the educational... The education portion of pre-K for both private and public. So this does... Everything you're concerned about this... Just do it there. Yeah. Yeah. The agency of education overseas and in private? Yeah. Along with... No, no. Along with AHS. Without... We don't want to do that. Okay. Okay. But that's committee, but the committee upstairs. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And just I'll finish. Yeah. That the AHS be in charge of safety and health for the privates. There we go. Okay. Yeah. You know, I mean we... We'll hear... We've got some time now to hear from... We have the bees, as we call them affectionately. And let's go kids. LGK to hear from. So thank you very much. Thank you. We have two just to hold because they're gonna... It's not... Let's not do the next draft quite yet. Okay. Okay. I'm gonna fill things. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Too much. Okay. But there may be some others. I mean we're gonna need to fill in that bracket. Yes, it is. Okay. Extremely. Jay, are you speaking for them? Yes. We're back here. Yeah, I'm sorry. Did you happen to see what we added in sexual 7? Did you walk in just as it was... I heard what you said, but I... I haven't looked at anything else. Yeah. So we'll give our testimony on 6.2 as we last saw. Okay. Okay. So Jay Nichols-Vermont, Principal Association. I'm here representing the organizations that are on the board behind me. This is joint testimony from us. Thanks for having us here today. Thank you. On behalf of our organizations, we welcome the opportunity to testify. We wanna really focus today on reemphasizing our long-standing calls for equity, quality, and simplicity in whatever pre-kidding garden delivery system model we have. And we wanna provide feedback on draft 6.2, 166. So first... So if we go through, let's do the check as to whether it was addressed or not. You guys can tell us if you addressed it. We've got, down below, we've got whether it was addressed on 6.2, the original 6.2 that we saw. So as you know, creating and maintaining any effective system requires a willingness to make adjustments. One of our concerns has been since the enactment of the law in 2014, despite a memo from Secretary Holcomb and Secretary Gaube, respectively of AOE and AHS at the time, in 2017, I believe it was, there have been no adjustments made to the act by the General Assembly. And there are persistent reports from the field of major concerns. I wanna do a quote from Kate Rogers, AOE Early Education Manager. She provided this definition on January 18th of 2020. What defines Vermont's universal pre-kidding garden education is the implementation of high quality, effective instruction by licensed educators who use evidence-based practices within intentionally designed early learning environments. We agree with that wholeheartedly, as does all the research. The House Education Committee's recent phone conference with the National Institute for Early Education Research provided clear guidance. Vermont has focus on access, and we've received a lot of credit for that across the nation. It's now time to focus on quality. The research is compelling. The credentials of both the lead teacher and the assistant teacher affect child outcomes. And I'm gonna take a drink because I'm battling a sore throat. Don't touch anything. I know. A lot better than I was three days ago. As we noted in our January 23rd testimony, the core principles that guide our recommendations, again, are equity, quality, and simplicity. By simplicity, we mean to take a complex law and make it as easily implementable as possible. So our main points act, students with disabilities do not have equitable access to educational services compared to their peers who do not have disabilities. That's a huge equity issue for us. There's inconsistency in the requirement of direct teaching time for credentialed staff. That's an equity issue. There's insufficient child outcome data necessary to evaluate the system. That's a quality issue. And there are many challenges with systems oversight and administration by the state. And that's the issue when we're talking about simplicity. That's what we're talking about. We do not support draft 6.2. Previous to the one you just put up there because we haven't seen that yet. As it does not make sufficient improvements to equity, quality, or simplicity in the pre-K delivery system. So here's our assessment. And again, you can question me on these. Can you sort of back up a mention? Yeah. A little bit more. There we go. It says the research is compelling credentials of both lead teacher and assistant teacher effect child outcomes. Yeah. And right below it, you say there's insufficient child outcome data necessary to evaluate the system. Right. There's national research about programs where you've had teachers teaching and the results that have come into play. In Vermont, we haven't tried that yet. We haven't looked at that. What we have in Vermont is two completely different systems. And we have no real assessment of how the systems are doing. That's the point we're trying to make. So how do we know there's a problem? We don't probably. We don't have the information to make any real judgment on it. What we have is national data that shows that kids with quality teachers show great improvements in terms of kindergarten readiness outcomes, how long their percentages towards graduation, those types of things. But we don't have Vermont data. That's our point. We need Vermont data. We need to look and see what the differences between kids who are getting quality instruction and kids who are getting licensed teacher instruction versus kids who may not be. Thank you for that distinction. You're welcome. Yeah, I have to say that. You're on fire. Yeah. And I wasn't trying to do that. I'm not trying to rile anybody up today. So for our... Does that answer your question? Yeah. No, not. Okay. So implementation goals not met in 6.2. Consistency across the delivery systems for settings in a licensed teacher qualification is in contact hours with kids. In draft 3.1, this was addressed by requiring a licensed teacher to provide direct instruction during the pre-kindergarten hours funded by the school district. That is a fundamental thing that we believe has to be in any bill. It should be licensed teachers providing instruction if it's going to be using education funds to pay for it. Draft 6.2, moves away from this goal by emitting any reference to increasing direct licensed teacher content. And you know that what we do in this bill is we study that. Yeah. We don't have the data on it. Yeah. So we start to get that data. No, that's... Yeah, we're going to get that. Right. And what we have is national data, as I just said. And we don't have these data. So we... Yeah. Is there the capacity to put a license? No. You know, we came into millions of dollars. Is there the capacity to put a licensed pre-K early educator in every private? I don't know. I don't know. So that's a male student. Yeah, I don't know. I have no idea. I have no idea. I'm just saying quality needs to be attended to. We know that a teacher needs to be present. We don't know what president means. We would say president means actually working with kids. But the interpretation around the state is very different. Right. Right. Again, so research clearly demonstrates the importance of having a high quality teacher providing instruction to pre-K in our children. That's national research.  And a qualified educator is what distinguishes pre-Kindergarten education from early childcare. So we want to make sure you recognize the difference between the two. We also have the goal of elimination of joint oversight. 3.1 addressed this objective by establishing regulatory oversight by AOE for public providers and oversight by AHS for private providers. And then they would do annual reports together. We believe that the advantages of bifurcating oversight with proper interagency coordination will prove better for both public schools to the AOE and private providers through AHS. Joint oversight has not worked well thus far. There's no school leaders that will tell you that it works well. Draft 6.2 requires dual oversight for the quality rating system. Monitoring quality and accountability, which we touched on a little bit. Draft 3.1 addressed this by requiring program operators to notify the respective agency in school districts within five calendar days when it no longer satisfies one or more requirements. I think that was a good step. And draft 6.2, at least the version that we've seen, requires the Secretary of Education and the Commissioner of DCF to establish a process for remedial action. The language doesn't have any timelines, provides no requirements in terms of actionable responses to serious violations by AOE or AHS. This is a special concern to us since it's been five years, and we still have not seen an introduction to a pre-K monitoring system, and that this new system that we're hearing about has not been introduced to the field as of yet. Okay, remember, we haven't seen 8.4 yet. She's saying you fixed that? Maybe. We will look at it. We will look at it. We will definitely look at it. Then we also thought there were some implementation goals that were partially met in 6.2. Okay, special education portability for providing a free and appropriate public education. So we support the inclusion of a special education study to examine the matter of equity. However, in draft 6.2, takes no immediate action to address the inequities experienced by students with disabilities and their families. This has been a five-year ongoing problem. We're discriminating against our disabled students, and we continue to do that. We support analysis, as we've said, and we also think the analysis should include but not be limited to pre-K pupil weighting, census-based block grant, and the triple E grants. Implementation goals met at 6.2 should be retained in any subsequent draft, excuse me. The two years of pre-K eligibility, you've made that much more clear. We think that that makes perfect sense. We agree with the removal of the three stars with a plan. We're moving to four stars as a minimum. We support any enhancement and quality requirements. We're removing liability of public school systems for private provider actions. That language that removes the liability makes sense. That's a positive step, as public schools should not be liable for actions of private providers for whom they have little, if any oversight or authority over. In conclusion, while we appreciate the efforts the committee has made to improve Act 166, coined by it, Version 6.2, we cannot support draft 6.2 because it does very little to address equity, quality, and simplicity, which would improve the quality of instruction and programming for pre-K children in the state of Vermont. And I've got a team here with me, and any of us can answer any questions you might have. I think it would be really helpful if maybe you guys could huddle while we're on the floor forever and just look at 8.4. Okay. If it looks like we're going to be on the floor for the rest of the day, I hope that we'll be able to do that. Many of us have a meeting with the AOB at 1 o'clock, so from 1 to 3, we're going to be tied up. We do. I think we've got a bit of a run to start. So, that's for kids. And you have not, you're not speaking, I'm really sorry. I got this sorted out this morning. Yes, I'm just kind of responding in the moment to a number of things. So, Sarah Kenney from Let's Grow Kids. Thanks for the opportunity to be back here. I'm going to be very brief, because I find myself in the rather uncomfortable and entirely unexpected position of agreeing with the position of both the agencies, which is a new thing for me to say on this topic, that the bifurcation that's proposed in the bill right now is not the best remedy to the situation we have now. It's not a small tweak. It's actually a very major change to the system, and that it's not advisable at this time when so much has been happening that the agencies have been doing together in terms of the monitoring system and the rules process that's underway. But I have already talked to you all about that, so I'm not going to belabor that point. Just a couple of thoughts that arose as you all just walked through the latest draft that I just wanted to flag. On page 8 of the new draft, where you're talking about Building Bright Futures being the one who administers a publicly available listing of all programs, again, highly recommend that you all actually talk to Building Bright Futures about their capacity to do that and what their work looks like. It's very possible that that does make sense. I just don't think any of us can speak on their behalf. And on page 25 of the new section 7, which is the report on sort of the vision from the agencies, the language that is in the bill, especially the third bullet, I think I'm not looking at it right now, but talks about bridging the gap and work supports, and I don't actually know what any of that means. So I would recommend adding some additional guidance to the agencies on what exactly it is that you're looking for them to report back on. I do think that it is, it totally makes sense, and it is time to have an evaluation from both the agencies under their current leadership about what do they see as the future for public pre-K, that that is a conversation that should be done in consultation with lots of stakeholders, everybody in the room right now. We would also, I think it would be really wonderful if that also included a parent survey of parents who are currently enrolled in, whose kids are currently enrolled in universal pre-K across all the settings. Can we just get that? Yes, yeah. But I think it would be interesting to hear. What I've heard from you all and from lots of other stakeholders is that that data was not what you were looking for and was not reliable somehow. So I think it would be great to again evaluate sort of what are parents thinking about, and especially parents with kids who are in the categories of children that we've been talking about, so students who don't seem to have equitable access right now, what would actually work for them? I think what that survey didn't get from parents was does 10 hours a week work for you? Would you prefer more hours? What should the future, what should the future of the system, we know what that many working families need full day, full year care. And so the question is, what would the best scenario look like for families? Do they need 20 hours a week? Do they need 50 hours a week? I think that's information that we don't have from the survey that was done. At least I haven't revisited it in a little while. So I do think fleshing out that sort of the vision section for what the agency should be reporting back on would be really helpful to make sure that you all get the information that you're looking for and to ensure that other folks are engaged in that conversation as the report is developed too. And that's all, oh sorry, the universal pre-K coordinators, I haven't honestly had a chance to really ingest any of that language yet, so I would love an opportunity to have some other folks I work with and look at it. So section seven is something that I worked with our lunch council to add last night. And part of that came from one of the reasons that I thought would be a good idea to address 166 was to look at stabilizing what we have now for the present pre-4 and 5-year-olds. Stabilizing that, but also keeping track of perhaps this isn't the model that we want and there's another direction to go. So the intention that I held which I'm going to take to the committee and see if this is a co-committing position is to stabilize now and look to the future as to where we're going. And the thought of we get caught up in a struggle between public and private programs that I don't think is really anything that those of us, all of us in this room really care about 3 and 4-year-olds think is helpful. So are we, right now, this is a public education program that 166 is. But it may not be meeting the needs of what else we're talking about. Child care, early education, parent engagement, workforce, all of those things. Is there another model perhaps that we're looking at going forward that we haven't considered that maybe puts 4-year-olds in public school? Maybe. I don't know. It's going to be for someone else in the side. And maybe we need to be looking at our child care for infants and 3-year-olds maybe we need to have a different model that doesn't get all tangled with the problems that we've gotten in with this. I don't know what that future is for the smart people out there that probably do. And having looked, I looked at what's happening around the states even though I had a nice weekend away, I of course had to go in and look at what's happening around the states. And the government structure around the states is different everywhere and everyone is dealing with this. And it's amazing. Some have everything in AOE and some of them have a whole separate department. Some have mixed, some have it all in their human services. So it's not like we are alone and struggle now. Years ago, kindergarten schools didn't have to do kindergarten. Maybe we're at that question again. I don't know. And then I'll stop here. But to say stabilize now and work towards the future. And if there's other language in this, I think when I look at, we're asking AOE to come back with this by December 15th. That might be a little ambitious. AOE and AHS to come back with that. That might be a little ambitious. But I think we do need to have a conversation about what our picture is for our zero to grade three. Yeah. I think you raised an excellent point, Madam Chair. And I think the question is is this study just looking at what the state does for four-year-olds? Or three and four-year-olds? Or is it because the way this is structured right now, it's not clear to me that it's looking across the fold. Like how do we support children prior to kindergarten? Or globally? Yes. So we're not looking at I think you raised an excellent question about we don't want to be looking at universal pre-kindergarten in a silo as completely separate from the rest of the supports that families rely on. And the early care and education that every kid in Vermont deserves. So this is language from the moment I was born. And I'm really happy to talk. I'm also happy to say maybe we're out of time and that language gets discussed upstairs. I think that there are different things that we can do, but I think we do need to remember that we are in transition, stabilized now and figure out what we're doing. I appreciate that and I think that's some of the concern that we have with the bifurcation proposal is that it seems actually destabilizing as we remember that one. I appreciate that. I'm just wondering I'm just wondering I just did a whole lot of things about it. If we send something upstairs can we put the committee strongly recommend something? We can say anything we want. Because we want to. And they can choose to change it and then we can agree or not agree. So does it come back to us? After that. It depends on how they structure it. Yeah. But we will have a vote committee vote on what they do. Okay. And then we can amend what they do on the floor. If that gets into a whole that's complicated. Okay. Just want to know what the options are. So you said bifurcation would be very destabilizing. I said we fear that it could be destabilizing as far as destabilizing. Are you referring to the what we're calling now a realignment under 8.4? Or are you referring to the full bifurcation under the previous version? I'm thinking about 6.2. I didn't see that that changed significantly in the draft you just looked at where AOE is exclusive. AHS has basically no involvement with public school programs, right? Yeah. What do you think why that's destabilizing? I think it's one more really big change in the field. I think it will it'll feel different for folks out in the field. I think it will feel unfair for private providers. And I don't want to dive deeply into this conversation because I know you're anticipating that human services will talk about the private providers impact on this. I feel like I've said a lot about our concerns around the universe and the fact that the agencies have just finally gotten to a place where they have developed a joint monitoring system. They spent the last year reviewing rules and regulations looking for duplication with a whole couple dozen public schools engaging as a part of that process. I think we've just reached this place where the agencies are actually being proactive in thinking about how to solve problems together and to just decouple all of that and that's it. I'm just afraid that it was helpful I think I would feel differently. What's that? If I had heard that having AHS involved was helpful in the public schools I would probably feel differently but I didn't You know I just add one thing I came into I got my license late 70s, early 80s I believe right around the time before 142 came in which was basically the basis of IDEA. At that time we had a place called Brandon Training School. Brandon Training School was definitely the only place you should put children with developmental disabilities that's the only place that they could be served it's in the institution where you have professionals. Well we found out maybe that was a good idea maybe there were other things that could happen so they started to come out and we put them in special classrooms and back in the day when I was there they had signs over the door that said TMR, EMR and Multi-Handicapped so that was trainably mentally retarded educationally mentally retarded and Multi-Handicapped and they were in their separate rooms and that was going to be the best thing we could do because that's the only way that you can make sure that these kids are getting served well it somehow took a long time it took 25-30 years to realize that they actually returned really well in the classrooms and they're members of the classrooms and they're not only learning in the classrooms they're socially engaged and they're teachers of children without handicaps so I just I just I guess I have more confidence in the public schools ability to handle this than I think perhaps you do I'm not saying that I don't think the public schools are able to handle this at all I think there are the agency of human services as we discussed brings a depth of expertise in terms of the early brain development zero to five I don't dispute that there are incredibly highly qualified wonderful people working in both kinds of settings across all settings and I think kids benefit from that level of expertise we have said that we support a licensure we support credentials and we're not just talking about pre-kindergarten we're working on many fronts to support development of credentials from birth to five we do believe in the research that indicates that the credentials of the teacher and the training and professional development of the teacher in a classroom whether you're talking about in a public education pre-k classroom or you're talking about in an infant room that person's ability to have the professional preparation that supports them doing a great job the most crucial things we can do in the settings across the board and the agency of human services also supports that and has been working really hard to support that across the board so I do think that there's benefit to maintaining that vision I also think that the concerns that the chair just raised related to what are the impacts of what we're doing in public schools and in pre-kindergarten you know public school what are the impacts of that on the rest of the system and on everything that families and children need is better considered with both agencies being engaged in that conversation together so I agree with you and that's part of I mean that's the big part of why the focus of our legislative work this year is not in this room but is in the rest of the building and in this room talking about the supports that we need to be able to continue to increase the credentials and the level of quality in terms of what we're providing to kids birth through five all around the state so I just finally got my own rule right? I just wanted to say that I think it's important to have an evidence based conversation when we're talking about anything in this building and you know the research again focusing on what's best for kids and again I'm not saying to overthrow but I think it can't just be people's like you said at the Brantford school Brantford school it can't be that we just think that this is what's best and I think technology is at the point now that we can really focus in on what advances learning so I'm just suggesting that we continue to look at evidence based outcomes as a you know and try to stay away from anecdotal or opinion kind of that and look at what actually in data says is the best program for all children okay committee terms of this draft are we going in the right direction? are we going in the right direction? you want to stand with us? I don't care


me JP. I'm a little loopy. Thanks for stopping by again.  It's Circuit Python Day. We're all excited about it. Right there, 818 Day. Today, we think maybe fourth annual Circuit Python Day. We have had a huge day packed to the brim with live streaming. I'm not miming the whole show, Todd, but you know what? If you want to make funny remarks, do it over here in our Discord. Head to Adafruit.it slash Discord. Live broadcast chat channel. You can hang out there all day long because we're pretty much live streaming all day long. And we're also keeping an eye over on the YouTube chat. So stop on by. And what have we got? Let's see. We've had, here's what we've had. I've got my notes. Here's what we've had already today. We had the 3D Hangouts this morning with Liz Noah and Pedro. SynthIO panel. Paul Cutler led that. Thank you so much. Paul Fomey Guy did a game jam. Super cool. Maker Melissa was working on a Matrix Portal build. That thing looked awesome. What else? CPy Circuit Python Day chat with Jeff, Dan, and Catney. I'm doing this here now. Then we've got a deep dive with Scott afterwards. Then show and tell. And finally ask an engineer. So it has, it has been pretty, pretty swell so far. Pretty filled with great content. And I hope you enjoy sticking around and seeing some more of it. So what's this? This is my workshop show that's usually on Thursdays, but it got slid over to our Circuit Python Day today. Not much else has changed, I don't think, except for we have one unified coupon code all day. So if you want to go buy some great stuff in the Adafruit shop, then head on over there and type in sir. Oh, I have that wrong, don't I? It's CirquePy Day. Right? CirquePy Day. I hope I didn't lie earlier. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I gotta, let me triple check my notes here. I think, I think that's it. Cirque, are you CirquePy Day? I think it is. Okay, yeah. So CirquePy Day should get you 10% off in the Adafruit store for the rest of the day.  No hurry. But before midnight tonight, you will East Coast US time, you will want to go ahead and fire that off and use that coupon code to yourself a nice little discount. Let's see, what else is up? I've got MIDI Maniacs as every day should be CirquePython Day. So I've got my show on Tuesdays, which is the product pick of the week. And that is usually a little 15 minute long show, but I reduce it down into a little one minute excerpt that you can digest right here. So check it out. The PC joystick seesaw adapter with Stema QT, the connector coming off my joystick, my X and Y mapped to the PC joystick seesaw adapter with Stema QT, the connector coming off my joystick, my X and Y mapped to the position on screen of this little triangle that I'm drawing on this little OLED. If I press some of these different thumb buttons rather, I'm going to bring up some different shapes. If I pull the trigger, I'm just changing the screen to all white there. You can see some tearing from the refresh rate there. And then when I have one of these held, I'm mapping my throttle to the X position of that little pill shape, the Y position of that little box shape. And if I'm showing them both, you can see that happening. So we can do some cute little things here. This would be really great for driving a little pan tilt servo type of thing. The PC joystick seesaw adapter, I square C with Stema QT slash quick connectors. Let me try that one more time with the microphone on. I was just saying this is a great time and day to do a circuit python parsec. It being circuit python day. So check it out. There we are. So for the circuit python parsec today, I wanted to show you inside of circuit playground, the circuit playground library, which makes things even easier than just straight circuit python. In circuit playground, how to use the temperature sensor. We have a thermometer essentially built into the circuit playground, blue fruit and the circuit playground express boards. You can use them really easily. Don't get scared by all this code down here. That's a second, second example. But the first example right here, look at this. It's like nine lines of code. All I can, all I going to do is import the time library and the Adafruit circuit playground library as CP. Then in my main loop, I'm setting a variable called temp to be CP dot temperature. That's all you have to do to ask for the temperature. It gives it back in Celsius. Then I'm also converting that to Fahrenheit with temp times 1.8 plus 32. And then I'm printing those out. So you can see here, I'm getting it about 28 degrees Celsius, 83 degrees Fahrenheit in the workshop here. It's kind of warm.  Not too much though. My finger exterior of the human body temperature isn't crazy hot. I can breathe on it. Let's try that. What does that do? Spiked it up to 86. All right. I wish I'd brought an ice cube or something. I forgot it was going to be kind of warm in here. So for a second example, what I'll do is I'll go ahead and comment that out. Let's uncomment this and I'll set my range so that we can use the LEDs, the Neopix LEDs on the circuit playground, blue fruit as a type of temperature meter. So I'll go ahead and save that code. It's going to reload. And now it's going to light up LEDs mapped to how hot it is. So actually, let's change that range. Let's make it say from 26 to 32. So these are the minimum and maximum that I'm going to allow. And then it's going to map pixel brightness or pixel light across that. So if I put a finger on this, oh no, I can't really move the dial. I'll try breathing out again. Kind of got one more lit. Shut a thought of that. Sorry. So again, you can see here all I'm doing is importing time, the circuit playground library. And then I'm setting pixels, cp.pixels, makes it really easy to use. And then we have a little bit of a function here to do the scaling of the values. And then we're setting a peak as the scale range. And then we're printing out the temperature. We're printing out the peak. And then we are remapping for all 10 of those pixels. It's going to be either lit, this 50-50 here, sort of an aqua blue, or it's going to be off depending on where it lives inside of that range. And so that is how you can use the temperature sensor built right on board the circuit playground blue fruit or the circuit playground express using the circuit playground library inside of circuit python right here on circuit python day. And that is your circuit python parsec. Question from the chat SF Dave says, what development environment are you in? This is just sublime text is what I'm using. Nothing too fancy. I just have it doing some color coding. What do you call it? I'm forgetting the word now. But it knows that I'm using python so it sets the grammar properly for that. You can do little add-ons here. I'm using a little terminal. It's called terminus inside of sublime text. And you can see here, if I quit out of it, let's TQ. If it'll pay attention, it doesn't want to. There it goes. Almost. It doesn't want to quit right now. But it's essentially just a terminal shell and then I'm running TO, which is a terminal viewer via disco tool, which just makes it easier to find the circuit python boards that are plugged in. Syntax highlighting. Thank you, foamy guy. That is exactly the phrase I was looking for. The syntax highlighting in here. You can pick different color schemes and so on. Let's see. I'm trying to think. Do I have? Yeah, I don't have a good way to really move the dial much on that thermometer. That was a bummer. Maybe I'll gin up a new example of that one for the video. Yeah, I'm curious what other environments people use. There we go. So there's just the straight terminal. You can see where I am here. And then I'm using disco tool, which will tell me what circuit python devices or devices with a serial port that I can connect to are available and then I can pick one by name. In this case, the circuit playground blue fruit and now I'm connected just to that one there. So yeah, somebody says VS code has a terminal built in. Just press shift return. VS code with circuit pi sometimes with the serial monitor extension, Todd mentions. I use atom on my main workstation, but it stopped working on this one for some reason. So I switched over using sublime text here works pretty well. Alright, so let's see. What do we have next? You know, one thing I wanted to do is a little recap. Actually, I got kind of two recaps. So one of them is of the new guide here. And that is make that a little bigger there, widen that out. There we go. That is the ambient machine. Excuse me. That is the ambient machine, ambient sound machine that I've been building. And I just published the guide for this last night. So if you've been interested in this, following along the progress of this project and want to go build your own or use this as a leaping off point for another project, I know someone who saw it online and said, Oh, that's great, because I kind of want to just do a button box. This is a helpful guide, I think for getting started on any kind of just control control button box type of creation doesn't have to do sound. But if you want to do one that's going to play back audio samples, which is what this this does, this uses wave samples and the mixer audio mixer library in circuit Python in order to basically listen to or mute any of the sounds. And I also have a couple of volume positions. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because someone wrote the mop that's the IKEA box this is built into. Pen Pengu wrote mop it mop it mop it mop it in a cute square over on discord. I'll show you this. It's it's the I don't know it's it's the the breakout surprise star of the show is that word. So here I've got a link to the original. I always want to credit Yuri Suzuki brilliant instrument designer interactive sound designer general creative person who who created the original that this is a remake of so you can check that link out there. Go over the parts that are used here and some parts that you'll need to get such as our favorite IKEA box there the mop it with lots left over I have plenty of extra drawers and things to use, even though I've used one of the medium and one of the small drawers for the build. Then I've got some circuit diagrams in both the fritzing breadboard view and in the schematic view there so that you can see how things are wired up. This is using the Metro m seven. As Jeff was saying in the synth IO panel earlier today, the Metro m seven is a is a powerful, powerful board has a lot of speed a lot of processing cycles to work with. And it happens to handle this very well. Then we've got a little quick install quick start for circuit Python on the board there. There's the lovely Metro m seven that we're using. The code page here will take you through downloading the bundle and if you're not familiar with this by the way one of the many things that have been done over the last few years to make it easy to learn programming and with circuit Python and get your projects up and running quickly if you're using tutorials from the learn system are these project bundles. So when I commit my code to the GitHub repository for the learn system, I also commit the sound files in this case. So if there are assets that are used, those get committed. And the system automatically grabs the proper libraries. It looks at what libraries I'm using and it throws those into this bundle.  So it's a it's a nice way to get all the stuff that has to get dragged over to the board when circuit Python, the correct version is up and running for your board. Put these files on and you're ready to ready to go. And here is the code for the ambient machine. And then I have an explainer here that tells you what all the libraries do and what the different sections of the code do from setting up your buttons to setting up I squared C for listening to the multiplexer. A pair of those I have in there setting up audio mixer. And then we're using an I to S amplifier out to a speaker built into the project. And then we get to fabrication and assembly. I have included if you click on this link here ambient box v one dot SVG. These are the scale CAD drawings that you need to either print out a template if you print it at one to one, you can use that to mark where you're going to drill holes to place all your switches. Same with where you need to drill holes on the back of it. Now, I used a laser cutter. So I'm able to do the drilling part very quickly and precisely. I'm also able to do a pattern on the back here that you wouldn't probably want to attempt without something CNC controlled. But you could. You could certainly drill a couple holes and use a small coping saw or something to create these rounded slots. But that is up to you. The only four that are super important are where you're going to screw in the speaker. So you can see we've got these these screws here connecting the speaker to the back of the small box. And then you'll want some holes in here to let some sound through. We're also using the enclosure as a sound board. So the back there is vibrating as well. And then I've also got in that template where you're going to cut and drill for the USB port on the back. In fact, let me got it sitting right over here. I'm talking about it and showing you pictures, but hold it up while I talk about it. So here you've got one of our panel mount USB C ports there. So you're going to drill. I used a Forstner bit, which is you can see it there in the picture actually. That's what I used to drill that hole there. I could have laser cut it, but I forgot. I forgot to include that in the file. So I just went went ahead and and drilled that out with a Forstner bit. Then we've got all of the parts how I've laid them out here on one of our swirly grids.  All of the wiring is using our arcade quick connection. You didn't have to solder a wire to every single switch and to the multiplexers. I soldered on the multiplexer side of things, but those are little spade lug connectors that go on to the little lugs on the base of the of the switches there. So that made life a little easier and you can see I'm running rounds to to all of the switches there as well. There's some cable neatening that I'm doing in here. You'll also notice actually this is you can see it here in this drawing. Since these types of switches require a small hole to be drilled or laser cut right above the shaft hole in order to prevent twisting, that's a little removable collar and I didn't really want those holes there. It's also a little more painful to do that by hand. So I didn't include those, but that meant that my switches, if they got a little torque on them, they start to get all wonky. So I built these little jigs here, these little, I call them switch locks, but it's just some thin plywood, birch plywood that I'm using to slot over the body of the switches so they can't rotate. So that's a fairly painless way. You can also hot glue them down while they're straight, include the hole for the little registration notch any any way you want to or just live with them sometimes being a little wonky. Then I've got all of the I mentioned trying to try to neaten the wiring a bit here. This is it in its kind of sloppy state. Here it is after throwing some zip ties on some bundles of wire essentially and then laying it into the case.  So it slots onto that pretty nicely, nice and snug. And then I encourage you to use either you could mask and paint this before you put your switches in or like I did, I just cut some cardstock, some yellow cardstock. So nowhere near as nice as the gorgeous yellow, I don't know if it's painted or acrylic or powder coated in the original, but it's an homage. And, and then you can go and play that. So that is our our new learn guide, my new learn guide for the week. And let's see, let me jump over to our chat and see if anyone's got any other questions. Let's see. SD Dave love the project bundles. Yes, they're fantastic. Absolutely. Any other things I can address? No. All right. Great. Some discussion going on there if you're interested about temperature monitoring on chips. Check that out in our discord. And then the other since it's circuit Python day, I thought I just talk a little bit about some of the many, many projects that circuit Python has enabled me to do. So let me go ahead and adjust this crop a little bit here, make this a little smaller window. There we go. So in our learn system here, I just did a search on the guides I'd written and then the filter for circuit Python. It gets it mostly right, I must have I'm not sure how that search works. If it's all keyword, we have a little category thing we click when we're building a guide, I think I saw a couple where it wasn't a circuit Python guide. But for the most part, this is I did the I did the math I have I think 96, maybe 97 now guides over the last few years that are circuit Python based. And this is the wide variety of things that that I've got here that I've put in. So we've got the touch deck DIY customizable TFT control pad. I promise you I'm not going to read all 96 titles. The Pip Boy there, you'll remember some mechanical keyboard projects, a bunch of different led matrix projects using matrix portal, got the Walkman, more keyboard keypad things. This one right here actually with the little animated GIF playing of the Bluetooth keyboard, this is a really, I think a really useful one for people who want to do accessibility type of projects, and other interfacing wirelessly with things like the iPad and iPhone works particularly well, I think you can also use this with Mac Oh, as I'm not sure on Windows, if it's as easy, but the ability to set up a microcontroller in this case, it's an RF 52 840 feather and send commands that are HID, just typing commands, it can also be media commands, so things like playing and pausing and volume.  That was the first Pico project there with that that board. That's just general. Hey, how do I use all the things that a Pico can do?   There was a box that had the cricket in it, and that had a bunch of robotics projects that I've done. There's a there's a flashback to a how much do we need to wash our hands kind of project. The flying saucer, there's our good friend Lars, he's made of circuit Python and love, I think. Walkman project, rotary phone dialer there. Got my Nintendo power glove as a wireless MIDI and that's actually also an RF 52 840 project sending MIDI over Bluetooth in this case. Chauncey, he does not belong there. Oh, no, he does. Yeah, I revised this guy. So this is my my plant watering robot. And he does have his circuit Python powered now using a clue. And there's our good friend pathfinder, the robot companion, Maypex Legends, Star Trek, L cars display, more phone stuff. I've got I've got a type. You can see it hacking holiday animatronics, some pipe portal projects there, more little turtle robots, sequencers, Minerva, the Ouija board. I revised the Lucio blaster to run this guy right here. Got a version of that that uses circuit Python instead of the original. Oh, God, Lars just took a dive. He'll be okay. Shake it off, Lars.  See and say with Brian Kessinger there. If you saw the synth IO panel earlier, that's the Tyrell building synthesizer I had there. Some more telecom things, computer perfection synth and those to the PlayStation spinner controller and the ambient sound machine. So which is to say, there are so many different kinds of projects that you can do using circuit Python. And if you look at those chronologically, which that list didn't, you can probably see some of the features and things evolving over time. Because a lot of the times the projects I do are based on sort of the latest things that we've put into circuit Python that need testing or new boards that come out that need testing. If you want, MIDI Maniac asks what's the link to those projects? I'll just, let me go back to page one of it and I'll paste that there.  For some reason, the click on your name thing wasn't working. It's working again, yeah. So if you click on the name of a learn guide author, you'll see all of the guides that they've worked on. But I don't think you can do further search within that. So I couldn't filter just circuit Python. So I used keyword search. So there you go. Thanks circuit Python. And thank you so much for the community and circuit Python team and all the people out there working on it and libraries and their own guides that help me learn how to how to do the things I want to do and build the things I want to build. So let's see the project thing I wanted to get into for today. This one is a little bit more of a behind the scenes thing of something I showed earlier today, which is the fabrication of this case, get my finger right there. This case that I built to do the demo earlier today of some modules explaining how synth IO works. So in order to explain how synth IO works in circuit Python, I wanted to show physical real world synthesizer modules. And these are modern ones, but they might as well be the same as modules created in the 1960s. So that's a real fundamental basics of a VCO and a VCA and an envelope generator and a LFO and a filter. All of those things were what I wanted to show here with real physical modules. And those are all the things that make up how the chain of audio processing or of synthesis rather works inside of synth IO. You can get great clarifications on what I just said, if you head, head to our YouTube page and check out past shows, because they're all archives pretty quickly, you can already check out all the all the live streams from today. Go check that out. And Jepler and Todd bot and cat knee. Paul Cutler have all got great, great insights and things to say about how this stuff works. But anyway, I wanted to build a little case here and not probably too surprising. If you know how your rack is priced, the stuff is expensive, the modules and all the trappings. And one of the things about your rack, which is a standard is it has a standard mounting system, which is three U high, so three rack units high. And then the horizontal pitch of the modules can vary. And they tend to use an M three screw. Sometimes people use M 2.5, but they tend to use an M three screw. And so the whole spacing at the top and the bottom of these modules wants to go and get screwed into something like that. So if you go and buy racks, they tend to be expensive. And so you can build your own, you can do it as easily as just screw them into some wood. And I've done that for sure in the past. But it isn't as easy to move things around and and change your mind about how stuff's put together. So if you want to go to a down shooter, where are you? There's the down shooter. If you want to do it on the cheap, you can pick up this threaded strip, and they sell it in different lengths, typical one to find as a pair of them, because you need them on the top and the bottom in the 84 HP width, which is a pretty popular width. And then you need a way to mount them to whatever your box is going to be. And also stabilize them a bit, because at longer lengths, these can be a little bendy. This stuff can be a little bit flexy, which you don't really want because you're pushing patch cables in and pulling them out and you're turning knobs and stuff. So I wanted you can buy something that looks like have any, I think I have any examples here, looks sort of like 8020 or T slot aluminum with these strips, but you can't use the standard stuff because there's no room for the screw. So there's some very specific sort of track that this can go into. And by the way, a lot of this comes from server and rack mount equipment. So a lot of these standards, you'll find them in related worlds. So you can get rails, which is what they're called, which will be a strip of aluminum extrusion that'll have either sliding nuts, or these strips inside of them. And then you build your case around that. I've done that before that's a fun way to go, but it is still a little bit pricey. So I was able to do I think this was $20 to do 84 HP, two strips, and you can find it cheaper, you can find about $8 or $9 online for one strip as cheap as I found. One of the reasons it costs that much is that these are tapped for your screws. So these aren't just holes, these are threaded and that takes time on a piece of machinery. So these aren't the cheapest of the cheap. But once you get these, so in my case, it's about $20, I think I was able to cut them down to the sizes that I needed, I wanted to do I think a 62 HP wide for that box. And then I needed to come up with ways to mount this and build a box. So I was someone said no, I did actually want to try one. And I may still. But the and I tried some Lego brick creations, but that didn't quite work out the way I wanted to. So I went to the sort of tried and true method for me, which is to design something to laser cut. It's one of my favorite ways of doing this kind of stuff. So you can see here, I've got my I'm in Rhino here, I have replicated my threaded strip, including even the detail of threading that. Oh, hold on, let me just change the resolution of the screen so the camera is angry at me. Let me set my camera target. There we go. So you can see here, I've got unnecessarily accurate CAD model I made of an 84 HP wide strip. And then what I did was I kind of copied an idea I've seen before. coma electronics in Germany, I think they're in Berlin, have a case I have one of their actually two other cases that use this idea of whatever your front panel is, if you can cut out some U shaped slots that match the whole spacing here, you can place the strip underneath a piece of material and then the screws bind the the faceplate to the strip and to your module, which is probably easier to show in the real I don't know, I don't think I made an actual 3d model of that in here. Ironically, I just I just designed it basically 2d and laser cut it. So that's what an 84 HP wide case would look like. This is what my 62 I think it is HP wide case looks like with the telltale finger joint construction of someone who's getting ready to laser cut something or get get real busy with a with a saw. And so you can see what sorry, you can see I've got a faceplate and a bottom that basically match I've got a hole cut out from the center. And then I've got a front back and sides.  So there's a power module, or power supply rather, and a distribution bus inside of the case so that all the modules can get plugged in because they each have a need for a little ribbon connector that gets plugged in. So what I'll do is I'll jump over to the bench and just pull pull the one I made here apart a little bit so you can see inside of that. Let me go to this view here. And I'll zoom in. You can see here, you know, this is what the acrylic that I've cut parts out from looks like I've thrown away some of the scrap but I've kept a bit here because this is a nice useful piece. Here's the middle. That was the hole that got cut out of it. So it's another nice piece of scrap there. And this in fact is the LED acrylic just because it was convenient and on hand. I didn't have enough material in one color. I have a bunch of different weird color ones and I decided to try to keep things somewhat uniform here. I also really like even though I'm not my intention isn't to do LED lighting inside of here. It's a possibility but it wasn't the intent. One thing I really like about this laser or LED acrylic is that it has a matte finish. On one side on the other side it has a fingerprint magnet which is the shiny acrylic. So you can probably that's not too bad. You see a big thumb print right there. So this matte finish just looks looks better to me. So I kept things simple by doing the finger joint construction those little tabs tabs and slots all around to essentially register everything and then I glued it. I didn't want to go and do captive nut and screw stuff. And I wanted to make it quick and easy so everything is glued but since I can remove the modules you can see inside of it. So what I'll do is try to pull these out pretty quick. You can see I'm not going to pull them all out at once because then the threaded strip is going to fall inside. There's actually nothing holding it in other than screws which is also how how coma electronics does their kits when you get one of their racks. As you can see here there's the inside view of the world there. I've got my power supply. There's a distribution bus under here. I'll show you in a second and then one of these ribbon cables is plugged in to provide power power and ground. This one uses 12 volt negative 12 volt and so positive 12 negative 12 and ground some modules none of them here but some modules also use 5 volt which is part of the specification but those will be a larger 20 pin connector for those. So if I pull that one out there I will now put a screw back in at the top so that's this is you can see zoom in the rest of the way there. So you can see my threaded strip is just underneath there screwed in from the top and there's really not a need to do anything fancier than that. You could find a way internally to secure that here cut a little slot and run the run the full width whatever you want but this works this works pretty well and again it wasn't very fussy. You can also see since I've got the clear ish acrylic there you can see how it runs just a little wider than than these oval slots that I put in place here. So that's now what's going to hold the strip in place as I pull out some more of these. Actually while I've still got modules in here I'm going to grab my power supply and turn it on just because it's fun to see what the LED acrylic does do with the the little power supply LEDs. This supply has I think colored LEDs on it for the different voltages. So if you see three I think it's three LEDs lit then you've got the plus 12 minus 12 and five volt are healthy. So you can see see the three of them they're shining through nicely. I kind of put a little blocker on the top of them a little scrap piece of acrylic because they were they were a little blinding but I see a blue a green and a yellow LED there which are telling me what's what's going on. So these look pretty nice through through the acrylic. So certainly you could do a light show big neopixel light show there. Plug that. Let's take off the next module here. By the way these are this iFixit kit of screwdriver and bits that we have in the shop is actually really I have a couple of these now and that's one of the features I love is this little ball bearing swivel top there for spinning the thing pretty fast when you're when you're doing this kind of stuff. So you can see there I've got my get a light on there. I've got a distribution bus of these IDC connectors in there. And again I'll just place a screw every so often to not lose the strip into there. I did debate using a latch of some kind for this top so I could just pull the whole thing off which is kind of nice. While I was building it it was kind of nice before I glued the top but I glued everything else to be able to just lift everything out to wire to place cables in and get in there and change stuff. Also sometimes you will find modules that have jumpers on the back. I think maybe maybe none of these do or maybe one of those do but sometimes there are jumpers for changing a range to go from negative five to positive five volt versus to go zero to 10 volt. Those are both things that happen inside of your rack synthesizer standard. Here I'm using these nylon M3 screws by the way on these modules and that's just to prevent from scratching the front of these. I also have washers on some of these here. So if you ever do dive into the your rack synth world or the module synth world you'll hear people talking about rack rash when they are selling modules that have been used. Sometimes there's dents and divots and things where the screws were in place there. Again this one has a FTDI dongle and a mini JTAG connector that you could want to do some reprogramming on if you were ambitious about it. I've bent one of those. So that's why sometimes you might want to pull things out and actually you'll see here as I as I remove these the the strip there is coming free. It's just one strip. It's not going to fall but you can see it kind of sagging there if I press on that. So that's not actually held in place by anything other than the screws coming in from above. And then I drilled out some holes on the bottom there to screw my distribution bus and my power supply. And then you can remove all of these ribbon cables. These ones are keyed which is nice. So you can't put them in backwards. But a lot of the modules are not for no good reason. So it's really easy to destroy modules that don't have reverse voltage protection. So you've got to be careful especially with DIY modules. But see that as far as I can take it apart because I glued everything but that is the basic design kind of my my version of the coma electronics case there. I've got two of theirs but they only come in 84 HP and I wanted a little smaller one that's still fairly deep. Sometimes you'll find cases that are very shallow. They're called skiffs and they'll work well for modules that aren't very deep but some modules are quite a bit deeper and so you need some of that extra room there to fit above all of the wiring and and distribution stuff. And then I've got my DC power panel mount plug there. That's what's running into this power supply. And since I didn't know exactly where I was going to put it I just left some holes. I put some holes in two other panels there. So those those are extra. You don't need them if you make your mind up before you put the rack together. But I could change my mind and put it on the back here. Sometimes it's a if you're up against other equipment you don't want wiring out the back and it's nicer out of one of the sides. So I was thinking there. So let me see if there's any questions or thoughts about that but that is my process there for putting that together. Oh good question. OK. So the question from SF Days. So does this project interface with any Adafruit hardware circuit Python. Yes. So I don't have it to show but in the past I've done some projects with a little circuit Python or circuit playground Bluefruit or circuit playground Express and created a simple LFO. That's the low frequency oscillator. So it can just be a sine wave or triangle wave of voltage which we can control the speed of it the shape of it the range of it. And with the little alligator clips we can use. These are really convenient actually for interfacing circuit playground Bluefruit with. See if I can find one here. Are you one of these. Oh I know I've taken them all out of here. We have alligator clip to mono 3.5 millimeter patch cable. So imagine this thing with two alligator clips on the end that you can attach to your digital GPIO output pin or an analog output pin and to ground. So in fact I'll I'll show you one of those real quick. Let's go to the shop. Mono. Let's just type mono. That won't find it. Mono cable. Here we go. So this is the one version of it. We also have the mail plug version of it. Which isn't showing up. Why not. Let's see. Mono. How about type in mono audio. That one. So one of those that's exactly the plug that all the Eurorack patch cables are. It's a mono. So just two conductor 3.5 millimeter. So that's how I plug things together. So for Eurorack there are many places where you can interface a board running circuit Python and one of the nice ones I find is to make a little LFO or other. Control voltage or gate output. So since the Eurorack modules are all just listening either for audio to run through in process or for control voltage DC or AC offset control voltage to tell the modules what to do. You can interface with circuit Python very easily. So that's my that's my answer on that. Otherwise it was just a behind the scenes on a workshoppy fabrication kind of thing. So that's what that looks like what that design looked like in in building it up there. Only half pick. What does that mean? Have I have I this my broadcast gone weird. Which half of what pick. Let's see. Cool. All right. I think that's going to do it then. We've got Scott coming up with a deep dive next. That's going to be in about 10 minutes. So I'll end this a little early today to give everyone a little break to go grab a snack and take a walk around the block and then come back and get ready for to have your mind expanded with a deep dive into circuit Python with Scott. And then after that we're going to have check my schedule. I believe show and tell at 4.30. And that's 7.30 sorry 7.30 Eastern time followed by eight o'clock ask an engineer. Oh someone told me that the the picture was only half of the cable I see I had cropped that off. There we go. That's better right. There's the full there's the full cable there. So those those are super super handy if you're trying to plug oscilloscopes into your synth gear and so on really really useful there. And since we're talking about the store let's talk about the discount Cirque Pi Day will get you 10% off in the Adafruit store.  It's good for anything that's real physical goods. You can't use it on gift certificates or subscriptions or software but you can get stuff. If you are getting lots of stuff then you can take advantage of our freebies. So if you go to Adafruit.com slash free you'll see if we have any offers running. We got a bunch of them right now. $99 or more you get a free PCB coaster with the gold Adafruit logo. $149 or more you'll get a KB2040 keyboard. For $199 or more you get free UPS ground shipping in the continental United States. And $299 or more you're going to get a free circuit playground express. You can stack all of those. They just automatically do it in fact. There's nothing you have to do. So if you spend $299 you're going to get the freebies for and the free UPS ground shipping all the way up to including that one.   Take advantage of those or don't. Just get what you want. Get what you need. And head on over to the Learn Guides for some inspiration. If you're looking for some projects to build. Oh that's good. Okay so someone just pointed out DCD thank you. Pointed out in the chat Scott's gonna be on at $230.  So go you know live your life for a little bit and then come on back and and keep joining us for Circuit Python Day. Thanks everyone for coming to the show and to Circuit Python Day in general. I'll see you later for Inferred Industries. I'm John Park and this has been John Park's workshop. Bye bye everyone.