This is Friday, September 4th, 2020. This is the House Education Committee in the Vermont House of Representatives. And we're joined by members of the House Ways and Means Committee. And today we're going to be taking a look at homeschooling. There is a question on how that affects the ADM count, which affects, obviously, tax rates. So our interest today is to understand a little bit better about how the Agency of Education oversees homeschooling and to just help us understand that program a little bit better, as well as understanding what the impact is, the changes compared to where we were this time last year. So I want to welcome Anne Bordenaro and Alicia Hanrahan from the Agency of Education. Anne, can we start with you? You're muted, Anne. You're muted. Can you hear me now? Yes. Thank you. Sure. I'm Anne Bordenaro. I'm the Division Director of Federal Education Support Programs at the Agency. And I'm joined with my colleague, Alicia Hanrahan, who's the Interagency Programs Coordinator and the Home Study Manager. We've prepared a little bit of a presentation for you all, some of the questions we anticipated that you might have. So if you'd like, we can just tag team and go through that material. Or if you want to start with specific questions, either works for us. Let's start with your document. So Phil, if you could bring that up. Sure. And I can share my screen if you'd like. Yeah, I'm going to. I don't have the document, so I'm going to make you a co-host. OK. And in a moment, you should be able to share your screen. And if you can send that document to Phil as well, that would be the most helpful. Sure. I actually had sent it to Suzanne to share with you all, but I just did that this morning. I apologize. This is my first time doing testimony, so I wasn't sure of the protocol. OK, can you all see the document now? Yeah. Yeah. OK, great. So we thought we would give you a little bit of background on where we are in terms of home study numbers compared to a so-called normal year. As of August 27 of last year, we had 2,024 enrollments in home study. And that is not the final number for the year. However, that's pretty close to the final number for the year, because August 1, as well explained in a minute, is the usual deadline for home study enrollments. This year, on August 27, we had 4,455. And 2,706 of those have been processed. Another 1749, as of the 27th, were in process of being processed or enrolled. And we have more coming in every day. So that number, obviously, will be higher. We're now another 10 days or so past that date. So in terms of enrollment deadlines, and maybe I'll stop. We didn't put this in the presentation, but the question about who is a home study kid is probably helpful in this confusion around all the hybrid learning models and all. Home study is a specific program. You have to enroll in home study. You have to basically come out of enrollment in your public school and enroll in home study. You have to be enrolled in one or the other. So all of the different virtual learning options or remote learning options that schools are offering their students, which could be entirely virtual. It could be hybrid, some in person, virtual. It could be entirely in person. All it could be VTVLC enrollment through the school. All of those are not home study. So to be in home study, you have to go through a process of enrolling in home study, which means you're no longer enrolled as a public school student. It just so happens that this year, our public schools are offering a whole lot of at-home learning opportunities for students because of COVID, but that is not the same as home study. If I can add something else, Ann. Good morning. My name is Alicia Hanrahan, and I supervise the home study team. And one of the things that we're seeing a really big increase with this year is families who are opting for homeschooling, but they're using like a virtual academy. So in other states, there might be like a Liberty Online Academy or, I'm trying to think, Justin Morgan, or there's a variety of different virtual online academies that are not approved by the state of Vermont. So that is also, while they're enrolled in a virtual academy, they still need to fill out the home study paperwork. So we have a lot of families who are opting for that this year, which I think is a significant increase from previous years. And just to also let you know that by the end of the 2019-20 school year, we did have about 5,000 kids total enrolled for last year, and we're anticipating doubling that, I would say, this year. Scott Beck, you had a question? And you said that home study are people that are not, kids that are not enrolled in a public school, does that include kids that are from a district in a particular grade that tuition's out? No.  That school has an arrangement to transfer the funds or pay your college work. I'm talking about, for example, you have a 10th grader that's from a district that tuition's out the 10th grade, and that child decides to home study, and so the district doesn't pay public tuition, is that student counted towards your home study? Yes, so you can't use public funds to pay for any sort of home study program. Does that help? As some of these questions we may answer as we go along. So in terms of the enrollment deadline, this was a confusing thing this year because everyone in the beginning thought it was August 1. We do have an August 1 deadline for one component of it, but in general, a parent can enroll in home study at any point up to May 1 for that school year. And we had to set a deadline at some point because you have to submit end of year assessment material, for example, so May 1 seemed like a logical ending point. But a parent could enroll in December. They could enroll in January. They can enroll pretty much any time up to May 1 for that school year. They also can unenroll at any time and re-enroll in their local public school. August 1 is, however, the deadline if they want to qualify for an exemption from something called the Minimum Course of Study, which we'll explain in a minute. There's an exemption allowed in statute where after a certain period of time of submitting this MCOS Minimum Course of Study, then parents who have continuously enrolled their student and followed all the requirements cannot have to do that. Basically, you want to explain that a little bit, Alicia? Sure. The Minimum Course of Study is really the curriculum. So families are required to submit an enrollment form and a curriculum and a variety of other things to be able to enroll in a home study program. So they have to be able to show us how they're going to provide reading, writing, math, history, civics, government, all of the areas required in the Minimum Course of Study. If families provide all of the information and then the following at the end of the school year, they have to provide an end of the year assessment so we can see the progress that the students have made. And then if they get all of their information in plus their enrollment for the following year, by that time, on the third consecutive year, and there's a few other nuances, but the basics are on your third consecutive year and of enrollment, you are not required to provide your curriculum to us moving forward until you turn 12 and in 12, you automatically have to. To do it once at 12. Yeah, you have to do it again at 12. It's a little quirky and it's not my favorite part of this because it's a little odd. So that's kind of the exemption and it gives families kind of an advantage if they don't wanna have to provide it in subsequent years. And so that's where the August 1st deadline comes from and in normal years, the vast majority of families enrolled by August 1st in order that they can be in this process of qualifying for a minimum course of study exemptions at some point, even though technically they can do it at any point during the year. This year, parents are continuing to enroll.  They talked to other parents, many of the ones who enrolled may well unenroll and re-enroll in their local school as well. So we're gonna see a lot of in and out and in and out throughout this year, we think. Another question that I thought frequently is entitlement or eligibility for special ed services. Basically a child who enrolls in home study loses his or her eligibility for a free and appropriate public education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In other words, the LEA is no longer required to provide the services that the student might need or might have been receiving when they were enrolled previously in their public school. They can choose at their discretion, the LEA can, to provide what's called a services plan. That's not a legal entitlement like an IEP, but it's similar in purpose for home study students with special needs if requested and they can continue to provide those services to those students. But again, it's totally at the LEA's discretion. And Alicia, do you wanna explain the proportionate share piece? Sure, there's a proportionate share of money that goes to each LEA every year. And it's based on the previous year's child count, which is the number of special ed students in a supervisor reunion who have enrolled in previous years, either in a home study program or have been unilaterally placed in an independent school. It's not if LEA is placed students in independent schools. So there's a small amount of money that's available for the following year. And there's supposed to be a kind of a collaboration between the LEA representatives from the home school community and representatives from the independent school community who get together and say, well, so what do we wanna do with this money? And it could be a couple of thousand dollars, it could be 250, you know, it all depends on usually the number of the students and the size of the supervisory union. And so they get to say, well, let's put all of the services into one particular student. So we're gonna make sure that Susie gets speech and language services for the year until the money runs out or they can opt to provide the local independent school with a reading consultant to provide professional development or some screenings or something like that. It's not a ton of money. And while the schools, the parents and the, sorry, my dog is having a hissy fit, I apologize. Either the families might say, we wanna do something with this money, the independent schools may say, we wanna do something with this money, but it's up to the LEA on how they actually want to spend it. Thank you. So in terms of compulsory age of attendance, we get questions about this as well. Vermont requires students six to 16 to be enrolled in school or home study. And this comes up sometimes with children who are at home and they turn six during that year, we do not require them to enroll in home study until the fall of the year in which they turn six. So the school year. So, and they need to be continuously enrolled in either school or home study up until the age of 16. And school, as we know, can take many, many, many forms, but those are the two options. The AOE interprets a student as enrolled in home study, that's their primary enrollment. If 60% or more of their core academic subjects are taught via home study, via the parents or through the parents through some curriculum that they've bought or whatever. Non-core subjects include fine arts, PE and health. You don't have to cover those topics after age 12. And we've had a lot of questions this year with COVID around whether home study students can access their schools, public school courses and extracurricular activities. The law is very clear, Vermont Statue is very clear that students who are enrolled in home study can access or should be allowed to access on the same basis as other full-time LEA students, courses and extracurricular activities offered by the LEA. And school boards are required to have policies governing access of homeschool students to both academic courses and extracurriculars. The question now is with COVID. A number of home study parents have contacted us and said, well, I want my student to take art in the school or I want him to take math and I'm being totally can't. The agency's position is that while the state board rule does require schools to accept part-time enrollment from home study students quote unquote on the same basis as full-time students, this rule doesn't grant home study students an absolute right to access any particular course or section of a course. And obviously each board's policies will govern but they can deny access to courses due to logistical limits like with these pods if they're prioritizing their own students and they only have room for six per pod per course or if there's public health and safety considerations like we're not letting anyone who's not an enrolled student or teacher into our building then they can say that that's a reason to deny access to a particular activity or course. We would encourage LEAs to consider, for example, if the student wanted to say calculus and they couldn't get access to calculus and they're offering a virtual option for calculus to some of the LEA students, we would encourage the LEA to think about offering that option as well to the home study student who couldn't get into the in-person course, something like that. But we are not at this time interpreting that requirement to say that the home study students have a right, so to speak, to take what they wanna take in the school and do what they wanna do in the school. They have a right, but it's limited or it has limitations, reasonable limitations. So just to clarify, is there a limit where I'm now really considered enrolled but I'm just not coming all the time? So if I take 60% of my class, 60% of my work is in the public school, you let me into the public school programs, is there a place where I'm just called enrolled as a public school student? If you're doing 60% of your work in the public school, you're not a home study student because you have to do at least 60% of your work, your core academic subjects in, not in the school to be considered home study. So if there are part-time students in school, there always are, they're enrolled in school, maybe they're doing like work study where they only need three courses to graduate and they're taking two in the fall and one in the spring and they're doing internships and whatever, those students are enrolled in their school but on a part-time basis. So that's not home study, but as long as they're doing at least 60% of their core subjects through, not through the school, through their family or whatever their family organizes through their minimum course of study, then they're considered home study. So zero to 40% in the public program, you would still be considered or you wouldn't be required to do home study, you'd be required to apply for home study. Sure, you're required, that's a good question. I mean, if you were taking, if you were a high school student and you only needed to take a small amount of courses to graduate, let's say three courses, that might be less than 40% of a full-time course load. And if the school allows you to do that, I don't think they would say you're a home study student or that you have to enroll in home study, it's just that you're now attending your high school part-time because that's all you need and the school has allowed you to do that. So Alicia, can you clarify that? I'm... Immuted, Alicia. Sorry about that. So Anne's right, if you're only enrolled in one or two classes at the high school and that's really all you need to graduate, then you're considered a part-time student. So what's interesting about home study is you have to do every single year all year long, you have to do reading and writing, you have to do math, you have to do science, you have to do literature and you have to do your history, government and civics. You have to do that all year long to be enrolled in a home study program. So if all you need is maybe calculus and Western civ, then you're probably just gonna wanna take those at the public school because you're not considered enrolling it in a home study program because you're not taking all of these other pieces. So you can, there is a way for families to meet with the guidance department in their high schools to be able to look at what types of activities and courses the kids have taken during their homeschool years and kind of work that into a transcript. So there are opportunities for kids who have been homeschooled to receive a public school diploma because we don't issue diplomas at the state level, we just give them what's called a verification letter to say, hey, yeah, you've been enrolled for this amount of time and you've completed all of your requirements and here's your letter. But it's not a diploma. I don't know if that helps. Diploma is delivered by the school. It can be, it's not an automatic. So if families work with their local high school because they want a diploma, then they can talk about what classes they've taken during homeschool and what things have they learned and does it kind of meet the requirements for graduation in a public school. Or I suppose they could probably do an independent school as well if they wanted to like St. Jay Academy or Linden Institute. But I don't know if that's a possibility for all kids at independent schools. It's really confusing this year. I think the key thing to kind of keep in mind with homestudy is that you're opting out of participation in public school. Now in reality, some kids who are homes in homestudy enrolled in homestudy do participate in their local schools in some ways, extracurriculars, of course, here and there, whatever. But in general, you're opting out of whatever options your public school is offering. And so this year that's confusing because whether you're home or not is not the key. It's that you're opting out of being enrolled in having access to your public school's offerings. Before we move on to the ADM question, I think one question that some of us have is just in terms of safety in these students that people aren't seeing. We certainly saw some pretty horrendous stories coming out of California for children that were considered, you know, on a homestudy when it was actually a prison, a family prison. What kind of, that's one of the reasons I kind of like that they're in the public school now and then because we get to see them. Are there protections in there in terms of the safety of these children that people aren't necessarily seeing? Not really. I would say that, you know, we end up getting information from families at the beginning of the year or whenever they enroll and then we get information at the end of the year to say, here's the status, here's what we did during the course of the school year, our students made progress or they didn't, which is okay too. We don't have any additional protections for kids who enroll. I mean, we do talk to DCF on a very regular basis, not so much this year for sure, but you know, a lot of them call and say, we understand that these kids are not in school, can you let us know if they have been enrolled in a homestudy program? So we can look that up. The only way for us really to deny a homestudy enrollment, which we haven't done in a very long time is to take a family to a hearing. And realistically, as long as they, we're not considered an approval state, like we don't specifically approve a homestudy program. It's really, did you provide us the information based on state statute? So did you get us all of our paperwork? And if they've given us all of their paperwork, the only way that we could deny something is if we call a hearing. And really, it's very difficult for the secretary to be able to prove that a family can't provide their minimum course of study, but they're not able to provide some sort of curriculum. And it's really hard to prove. So we would need maybe the school or DCF or somebody similar to be able to help, you know, testify at a hearing to say, we don't think this family can provide, you know, homestudy program. So we really don't have many additional protections for kids other than, you know, based on family's word. So why don't we move on? Because we are meeting with ways in which we do have an interest in what the impact is on funding. Yes. So unfortunately, Alicia and I don't get into the funding side of things at all. I did try to reach out to our finance folks and I got a little bit of an answer from one of them. The other one that you're probably more familiar with, Brad, has been out. And I think I had suggested to Suzanne that you all would want to talk to Brad. What I did get from Sean Cousineau is that under statute, we believe this has been true and I don't think this has changed, but this was part of what I was trying to confirm with the finance folks. LEAs receive 0.03 of an FTE toward ADM for each activity in which a homeschool student participates. So I suppose that means each course, each sports team, each, you know, I don't know how they define activity, but I would imagine each play, drama, whatever. And Sean said that this may affect an LEAs equalized pupil count, which affects their tax rate. However, he didn't know whether it would affect an LEAs funding. He didn't think so, but he didn't really, that wasn't really his area of expertise. And he said that only Brad would really be able to answer whether, you know, whether this affects their actual state funding. I'm sorry, did you just clarify that? I think you just told me, did you say that if they are enrolled in something in the school, it's counted as a 0.3 FTE? Is that what you just said again? Yeah. Yes, so, this is what it was and I believe this is still the case. We're not as familiar with these parts of the statutes, but it's our understanding that under statute, LEAs receive 0.03 FTE toward ADM for each activity in which a home school student participates. Now, that would be an activity in their public school. How activity is defined in statute? I don't know or how it's defined in policy. So I would assume that means each course that they enroll in at the public school or each extracurricular activity, like sports team or whatever that they participate in. I don't know what the actual definition of activity is, but yes, so they do get some amount of FTE toward ADM and or it's our understanding that they do. And according to Sean, that could affect an LEAs equalized pupil count, which affects their tax rate. However, the impact on the school's funding, he didn't know and we don't know. We have our finance people in the room. So yeah, maybe they can explain it to us. Yes, Mark, do you have a response? Yeah, I believe it would affect their tax rate, but it wouldn't have any impact on the amount of money that they receive from the education fund. So it doesn't affect their funding directly, I don't think. Okay, well that was Sean's suspicion, but he wasn't confident saying that for sure. Right, that's also a point out that 0.03 per pupil is a very, very tiny number. So it wouldn't have a huge impact. Okay, was there more that you were gonna do before I open up to questions? Just one last thing, because we've had questions about this with a lot of new families enrolling this year because of COVID who aren't usually interested or have a predilection toward home study. There's been a lot of questions about, well, tell me what my curriculum should be or where can I get a curriculum? Or do you give us money for tuition if we're sending our kids to online courses? Or do you support us with materials or whatever? And the answer to those is no, we don't provide or recommend curricula. If they choose, I think Alicia said this earlier, if they choose to enroll their student full-time in a virtual academy, not to take their kid out of the public school and enroll in some virtual academy somewhere, they still have to enroll in home study so that they're accounted for under Vermont statute, but they have to pay for that themselves. We don't provide, we don't use any state funds for tuition or materials or online courses or whatever, any of that that they would access through their public school, through that 40% or less of their total enrollment that they use, take a class in the school, participate in sports, whatever, obviously that's publicly funded. But this is opting out of the public school system and public money doesn't follow them. So no, we don't provide any of that. There is a listserv and members, home study members who are on the listserv can recommend to one another curricula or whatever, but we don't get involved in curating that in any way. And if I can just clarify, the membership list is not a listserv. It's really where information goes out to the families. They don't have the opportunity to collaborate or talk amongst themselves. Oh, okay, yeah, I'm sorry. That's right. You do have a pretty active group. Yes, they set up on their own, not to do that. Yes, they do, you're right. Yeah, so that was all we had in terms of a presentation. You do not have the spread of, we had an interest in understanding where the heat is being felt here, whether it was in rural districts, in urban districts, in small districts, in large districts, or if it was pretty much spread throughout the state. I think it's spread throughout the state, honestly. I mean, we've had kids who are coming from public schools, who are coming from independent schools. It's pretty prevalent all over. I mean, I think in a few weeks we might be able, once we get out from underneath all of the enrollments, we might be able to provide better information about what's the increase in students in per county or per, well, not even that, probably per supervisory union. But we certainly can't do that now. Thank you, we have some questions. George Till? Yeah, if I might. Thank you, Kate. Go back to your enrollment and unenrollment at any time during the year. Can you give us a hint of what the usual churn is in a non-COVID year? I mean, how much enrollment, unenrollment do we typically see during a school year? I don't know if I could give you a specific answer in terms of numbers. I think it really depends on the year. I think right after the first semester or the first quarter, some families become a little unhappy with maybe their kid's situation. So we tend to see a little bit of an uptick in maybe November. We tend to see a little bit more of an uptick after December in terms of enrollments. I don't see as much of unenrolling during the school year in a typical year, although I would say, of course, this year isn't typical, but I've already seen probably at least a couple dozen in the last couple of weeks who've said, we really like what our school is doing for remote learning or in-person. So we're gonna unenroll with you. And I imagine we're gonna see a lot more of that this year. But I wouldn't say it's in a typical year, we're probably not losing more than 100 kids back to the public school. And we're probably seeing maybe 150 kids, maybe a year of an increase. It really all depends. We typically have about, last year was the highest number of kids we ever had and it was about 2,500. Thank you. Sure. Scott Betts, followed by Kayla Felder. Yeah, I look forward as the chair said, the question was, is it spread throughout the state? And your response was, yes, and that doesn't surprise me. I think the question though is what you alluded to after that, which was, is it spread evenly across the state? Is it spread proportionally across the state? So I'm eager to, that's this thing unfolds to learn what that data indicates. I think from what I'm hearing from a lot of families is they like the remote option or their kids had the remote option in the fall, in the spring when everything closed down and they hated it or it didn't work well for their families. So they're looking for something a little bit different. Or, and a lot of families have actually said, my kid flourished during the closing and we kind of did a little bit of remote with the school but then we said, we can do this ourselves and look at what we can do and provide our kids. A lot of families really liked the flexibility of being able to do a lot of different things with home study. So I think really it depends on what type of services and supports and options each individual supervised reunion has and what families comfort level is. Right, and that's what I'm looking to find. Is that spread evenly throughout the state or is it pocketed? Yeah. So two things, well, Alicia's absolutely right. We're up to our eyeballs. And beyond in terms of trying to get enrollments completed because school is starting and kids, we've already told superintendents the numbers that we have so far and the kids that we have in process so that they won't consider them truant, for example. But we have dozens coming in every day that aren't even entered into the database yet, much less reviewed. And so we're trying to get on top of that so that there's no kids in that dangerous situation where they're neither in school nor they're in home study and we don't know where they are or what's happening with them. So we're working on that. We probably could hopefully, I'm hoping in another month or two, that we'll be in a position where we could begin to disaggregate the data, as Alicia said, to, yeah, probably to a supervised reunion, yeah, to see where we might even be able to do some additional data possibly to disaggregate it in some other ways, possibly by income or something. I don't know, we'd have to talk to our data team. One thing that is comforting, that happened very abruptly this week, is that when people enroll in home study, as I said, they're disenrolling from their public school and that means they cannot access certain things, including school meals. During a typical school year, home study students are not eligible to enroll in the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program. But we just received word, and you might have heard this on Monday from USDA, that they are expanding the summer feeding program that is also the program that is used by USDA in emergency situations. They're expanding it through December 1st. So our LEAs are gonna have the option to do that program, Summer Food Service Program, instead of their National School Lunch Program. And the vast majority of them are gonna take that route for many reasons. It's much easier for them in terms of paperwork. But the good thing is it also was open to any child 18 and under. So children who are not yet in school, children who are home study students, as well as kids under 22 who are on IEPs. So if there was a concern that some students in poverty had enrolled in home study because of COVID or whatever, they are not losing access to meals for the fall, which they typically would. And that's one small reassurance. Kayla Belder. And I also want to allow these questions. And I also want to make sure that we have time for the principal's association to present an option to the committee. Committees. I'll hold my question. Did you want to? You want to? No, if you can turn it about time, I will hold it. Okay. Peter Anthony. Yes, thank you very much, Kate. I'm gonna go back to Scott Beck line of inquiry. Suppose there is a cluster unanticipated that's sizable in a district that may even tuition its students out and only has like 40 students for the whole town. All of a sudden gets a big burst of either increase or departure from the system in either of the senses that you're talking about. Obviously, because they are discrete windows where much of the budgeting, the funding and the state support happened. If that clustering and that awareness of those numbers doesn't, isn't captured in one of those windows. I'm just wondering, is there any kind of safety valve to avoid what somebody would call unconscionable effects on the local system or the local FISC? I don't feel like we could answer those questions. Those would be Brad James questions. I'm sorry. Or maybe Mark, I'm not sure, but. I'm sorry, Mark, did you want to respond? I can, I think, to the extent that school districts lose their kids, it's a sizable enough number it may reduce their spending, but under our system, school districts are gonna get whatever they spend. So the consequences of changing the ADM counter to affect the tax rate. And because we have a zero-sum tax collection system, we're gonna end up collecting the same amount of money. So I can't really answer the question the way you're asking it, I don't think. I pardon me for continuing. I'm thinking of a dramatic increase and the town is still obliged to school those children regardless of what prior decisions have been made. And it's particularly a surprise if the town has historically tuition those students. And now all of a sudden, it has to increase tuition payments to wherever they go by a noticeable number, 20% pick a number. I just didn't know if there was some way to avoid the onerous effects of a surprise increase in enrollment. I think it's easier to track a decrease. In terms of tax rates, if they have a significant increase in enrollment and that increases their budget, they would draw that full budget down from the education fund and then their tax rate would be adjusted. It would actually be a little bit lower. I'm sorry, I haven't thought about this a lot, but the issue is that you've got two things moving. You've got pupil count moving and you might have the budget moving as well. So I'm not sure I can answer it the way you've posed it. Sarita, no, you're gone. I'll go to Emily, go ahead, Sarah. Sorry, really quick question. The data that you're gonna have available by Supervisor Union, I know you're totally under water right now at the enrollments in the beginning of the school year. Do you know exactly when you'll be able to share that data? I just wanna know if we need to make decisions with it if we're gonna have it in time or not. I'm hoping that within the next couple of months for sure we'll have a good handle on it. I mean, we probably have, what do we say, at least 1,700 that we can't even get into our database and the database is what generates our lists. So we're talking January, that's fine. I just wanna get. I wasn't thinking that far. I was actually thinking maybe November, maybe late October. I'm trying to be hopeful. I don't wanna make promises that don't work for you. I'm just trying to understand how we could use it in decision making. It'll probably be at least a couple of months, if not a little bit longer. Okay, thank you. Sure. The other thing is that until, I'm sorry, until we start the school year and start seeing how numbers, enrollments and de-enrollments happen, any moment in time might not be a very accurate picture if there's a lot of flux going on all through the fall. So we'll get a better sense of that once we're probably a month or two into school, how much movement there actually is. Which that's the question, whether it's important to do now or to wait. And I'm gonna go to Larry Coopley. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. In terms of data, do we have any indication as, for example, today, the enrollments we have today of the ages of these children who are gonna be homeschooled? Great. We have the data, yes. Again, it's because we don't have all of the kids in the system, we'd only be able to give a partial list. It's a query that I don't, I think would have to be built into the system because I don't think we've actually done it by age. We don't keep track of grades so we would never have anything based on grades. I've had a lot of questions from, I think we're gonna see a lot of kindergarten age, like six, seven-year-old kids, five, six, seven. And we've actually, I'm gonna say we're probably seeing an uptick of high school kids as well. I think it's something that we can do. I think it's, again, something, it's a query that we'll have to build. So maybe again, in a couple of months, two, three months we'll be able to break it down by age. Yes, there's been an audit of the program at all. Or the last time someone actually hauled this out and took a look at the homeschool home study. I've been supervising the home study team for six years, so not in my tenure. And I don't think in my predecessor's tenure either. So I would say at least 10 years. I'm pretty sure that the state statute hasn't been changed in, I wanna say more than 15 or 20 years, at least. Okay, thank you for that. If there isn't more to add to that, what I'd like to do is call on Jay Nichols, who has a proposal from the Education Associations. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for having me today. Philip, did everybody receive the email that I sent you yesterday? There it is. They didn't receive the email, but I am going to share the screen. Okay, perfect. So before we walk through the screen really quick, I just wanna comment on a couple of comments that were made by folks. Representative Anthony talked about the funding impact, and that's kind of what we wanna talk about as our associations. So if a student, you know, Mark is right that there's not the overall impact that you would think, because it's not in real time. It always trails by a year. So for those schools that have more students come in than they're anticipating, the ADM will catch up to them a year later, and they will have to make some budget adjustments for kids coming in. However, it's a lot easier to adjust for a few kids coming into a classroom than it is for losing several kids, because when you lose a number of kids, you've also got budget implications there in terms of your staffing. So if you have to add a couple of kids to class, it's not as big a deal as it is if you start losing students, which is why we are putting forth this recommendation in terms of ADM adjustment. So if you look at the memo that we sent you yesterday, we're asking for in section three of your miscellaneous ed bill, that you simply remove the reference due to the student's enrollment and a home study program. We are finding that students are leaving public schools in some towns, it may not necessarily be because of home school enrollment. There are several examples where students are going from a public school to a private or religious school in that community or community close by. And they're doing so primarily because that other school is having full in-person instruction at the beginning of the year. Many of these schools believe that students are gonna come back to them within a few weeks. The way that we capture average daily membership in the state of Vermont is on the 11th day of school through the 30th day of school, we count the number of students that are enrolled on those days that are actually in attendance on those days. Now, I'm not a great math person, but my number is that somewhere around October 8th or October 9th, somewhere around there is when that's gonna end. It's very possible that a number of students will return to the public schools after October 9th and everybody believes that this is the case, especially in places that are opening remote, we believe in our medical community believes that the data is going to show reopening schools is very safe in Vermont and that kids are going to return to schools when they go to in-person instruction. So because of that, we are asking that the provision be put in that would allow for schools not to be harmed if they lose students because we really think the schools that are losing students may lose students in September and early October, but that over the course of the year, the loss is gonna be negligible. This is consistent with what the AOE has suggested. Dan French and I talked about this yesterday and I also believe it is in the version of the Senate miscellaneous ed bill. They've taken this recommendation that's built into their first draft. And I take any questions about that or any thoughts on homeschooling. I will add on the homeschooling part for the extracurricular piece. The VPA works with homeschool parents in schools all the time. Students that don't do anything else at school but wanna play soccer and reside in that town, we help the school make that happen for kids. Thank you. So the language in this memo is language that our committee has reviewed last week and you're recommending that we strike the home study portion and keep it broader. Right, and it's all about stability, Madam Chairperson, because it's such a flux year. Let's do whatever we can to make it stable for people so they can plan as they go into budgeting season. Thank you, Representative Ansel. Got it. So I'm looking at the language and I am puzzled what it means if you take that phrase out. And I also notice that the title of that section refers to home study. So I just, I'm trying to understand if that language is gone, what happens? And I'm happy to hear Jay tell me, but I also wonder if you could have Mark respond to that. And I would just say quick Representative Ansel, that I wouldn't even call the title. I would just call it ADM adjustment. I wouldn't have the decline in student enrollment due to home study. It'd just be decline in student enrollment would be my answer. Not sure if Mark wants to add to that or not. Sure. So I think the impact would be that any district that loses kids, you wouldn't reflect that in their ADM count. But since we have to raise the same amount of money, you're gonna be providing a lower tax rate to the districts that lose a lot of kids, but it's gonna be made up for with a tax rate increase in the districts that have gained kids or only lost a few kids. So you're spreading it out. Whether that creates stability or not, I don't know, but it's, we're gonna raise the same amount of money. We don't have any money following kids. So this would just affect the tax rate in towns that lose a significant number of kids. It's not that different than the provision that we just repealed in the, at the end of June that provided a three and a half percent hold harmless for districts that lost kids. This would go a little bit further and say, if you lose any, any loss of kids would not be counted. Well, just a clarification so that what this is intended to do, whatever the caption says, is to basically freeze enrollment at last year's level. So it doesn't matter why you might lose kids. I'm trying to understand it does, maybe it doesn't freeze it. It says that, so if you gain kids, those get counted. Is that correct? I think so. Yes. But if you lose them, it doesn't get counted. I just, I can't imagine how we could decide based on what we know right now that this is a fair outcome. Just so many unknowns about it and reasons why there might be an increase or why there might be decreases. Anyway, okay. And I want to get to Scott Beck, but I see that Jim Demere has a comment. So I'd like to go to Jim first. Okay. Two comments. I think this language here doesn't work as it's intended to work because this could mean that for all the seniors who graduated, they're not going to be counted, right? They'll all have to be kind of back in. So I think this issue with the drafting, but the other thing is there's another version of this which is the secretary's proposal, which is what it's education has, which basically says that the count for this year, we know less than the count for last year. Now what this says, that's what the secretary came in with. So, as Jenny mentioned, something similar happening, it's not the same as this. It's the secretary's proposal and it's different than this, but this is what the plan is for this. And we looked at that as one of the three proposals last week. Scott Beck, I want to get to you. Thank you. The way I read this language is what's going to happen is you're going to have a whole bunch of double counting of students. The normal churn in school districts throughout the state of Vermont where parents move, families move from one town to the next. I know my district, I think they said one seventh of our students move in or out of the district every year. That might be high relative to other districts who are on the state, but you're going to have all this double counting. Thousands of kids are going to be counted for two districts where they left, where they went to. What do you think, Mr. Scott? And in the end, you're going to have to rectify that. This would just, I think would just put a whole bunch of instability into ADM counts and tax rates in the next couple of years for districts. Oh, Mr. Murphy. Oh, Mr. Murphy. Are you one of the best dopers? Jim, could you meet? Jim Maslin, could you move you? Did I make it over Jim there? You did. Okay. Jim was a little bit more entertaining than you, but we got the information. Did you, Scott, did you have a question for me? No, I was just wondering why you're more entertaining than I am. Oh, jeez, I don't know. I've got dogs and cats here. Even if you can't see them. Okay, moving on. So I guess, Peter Conlon, excuse me. Thanks, I've raised my hand and taken it down as my question gets answered. I just, I think that this would not take into account or would take into account. I need some clarification. A school's natural, in most cases in Vermont right now, natural decline that is going on year to year as larger classes graduate and smaller classes enter. Am I correct in saying that that would not be taken into account using this proposed language? Mark, can you answer that? Yeah, I think it would just count any kids that have dropped out that you've had in previous year. So, no, it wouldn't. So there we are. That's the updated information that we have and the question I guess comes now to the committee. If we could go back to, yeah. Is there an interest in bringing back the three options that we looked at last week, considering those or postponing till next year? Some thoughts on that? I think I'll just, I'll chime in. I think that the option of letting people count and a student towards their ADM count if they were a home school or if they were a student last year, it doesn't cause any double counting and it smooths things out for the districts. So that's the proposal that... Yeah, that was one of the three that AOE sent over, similar to what we were thinking earlier. Yeah, that was the one actually that I think we came up with in a small group. The agency had the whole harmless, or the news last year's. George Till? Yeah, I wanna support what Scott just said. The VPA proposal, if I'll do respect, adds up a bunch of kids graduating seniors get still counted, people moving from, anybody moving from district to district. I think that's the slightly more narrow proposal that we came up with previously, I think is what makes the most sense and is the most cost-of-hewess complications. And Janet Enzel? Thank you. So this is an interesting discussion and I missed an earlier one. So I'm a little late to this, but since the impact of changing the ADM is on tax rates, not on resources, it's purely tax rates. And since it's a lagging effect and it's a two-year average, I just feel that there's too many things that we don't know about, sort of information that we're going to get and also just trying to understand we don't know how the year is going to play out until the end of the year. And I don't think any of us can really make a guess about what that is because we don't know what's going to happen with the virus. We don't know what's going to happen with family's decisions. You're just so many unknowns that looking at it purely from a tax perspective, I would feel much more comfortable holding off and letting giving us a chance to make a decision when we have the information, which will still give us enough time to affect the tax rates for next year, which is what we're talking about. Right, and we basically have up until the yield. Yeah, and my apologies to my committee members who've been working on this longer than I have, so those are my thoughts. Kayla Belder. Yeah, well, I just want to echo what we just heard from Representative Ansel. I think it's premature to do anything on this issue. I do think that it will be interesting to see if in fact we do see some students returning to the public schools, maybe even by October. I wonder about as the fully remote options become more known and proven if we might see some of that. So I think it's a little premature and I also think that I'm a little hesitant to make piecemeal changes of this nature to our funding formula just because the feedback loops are confusing enough for taxpayers, frankly, when we don't dicker with it. So I in general don't want to see just sort of little adjustments to little niches of our funding formula. And at this point, it does seem a little premature and unnecessary. It'll come in. Thanks, I'll take the contrary view here and say that the legislature will not be back in session until January, but before that, school districts will be trying to put together a budget. And I know we had this conversation previously, but when school boards and superintendents do that work, they're looking at the entire package of impact, not just taxes or tax rates, but they look at everything. And I think this is one of the areas that will cause concern if they say, well, gee, we know our ADM is gonna drop significantly as the rolling average catches up because of the number of homeschoolers that they may be making funding decisions in a world of poor information or a one year aberration in numbers. So I'd like to see us do something. And if we keep it limited to homeschool, I think that's fine. If we can come up with a better language, that's fine too. We're gonna have three months of experience with school opening as well. I would just remind us that we have three months of data that will be coming forward that we don't have now that we're making predictions. And I guess I would ask my school board members here that you need to kind of figure out what it's gonna cost to educate as is and be ready to make cuts regardless, correct? When you're making those decisions, you're looking at a whole, how much tax impact can the community tolerate? And ADM impacts cost per pupil, cost per pupil impacts tax rates. And so if you are bracing for a change in your ADM because at the October count, you were missing 50 students and then they all return in January, well, you're still going by that October count. And so it creates a certain amount of instability and not knowing something that could affect those decisions in a way that may not be relevant six months later. And it is the ability to pull the lever to say that we're gonna do the count differently, something that we could also consider. I'm just looking at the number of levers that we have on this and I'm taking up too much time here. I apologize. And I wanna kind of see if we can get this done in the next 10 minutes because we have to move on to another subject. So I've got Kathleen and Scott and Jay. So let's keep it. Yep. If we are gonna do something now, I did just wanna pass along feedback from my Takanakan Green School Board. And I think we heard this earlier in the conversation which is that there are other reasons beyond homeschooling that students are choosing to leave the schools right now such as attending other private schools that are offering in-person instructions. So I just don't wanna leave those folks out of the solution if we are choosing to move forward with something. Scott, back. I'd just like to add my voice to Representative Collins that I think this is an unstable piece that we could make stable. And I think that when we look out there at the landscape with the number of small districts and the number of districts that are bumping up against the excess spending threshold, that I think if we can make a preemptive move here to induce some stability into the system that I think that would be a good move. Okay, thank you. Just sort of an update on where we are. House Education had a miscellaneous ad language that we sent up to appropriations. We pulled any language related to ADM. So ADM is still sitting in a little spot on its own. And the question going forward is this because this is more of a tax rate issue? Oh, excuse me, Jay. Yeah. Okay, it's not more of a tax rate issue. For the schools that are developing their budgets, the issue about the number of kids they're gonna have there between September 8th and October 9th. I heard from one principal today that she's expecting so far they're gonna be down about 50 kids. And the reason now is because their superintendents made the decision to open back up mostly remote and they have a private school close by that's opening up five days in-person instruction. She's sure, parents are telling her that once they get back in-person instruction those kids are coming back to a public school. Budget's already gonna be, you know, be warned and who knows if they'll make those adjustments. The reason we had the ghost student provision previously, which I testified against many times was to protect schools from rapid changes like this. And I think we're in a situation where some schools are gonna get very hard by kids leaving for private schools and then coming back and budgets already being developed. That's my biggest worry, not just homeschool. Okay, here we are, Representative Ansel. We currently have language in the document. Can I, I mean, the impact of changing the ADM is, ADM is a tax rate question, budgets are budgets. I understand that they connect when you're putting the budget together, but I think the treatment of ADM whether we're dealing with it with homeschoolers or we're trying to freeze it as the principal's association has suggested to at last year's sort of at last year's level. Really, I understand how hard it is for school boards to be able to develop budgets given all the uncertainties, but the fix here is entirely tax rate. The budget question is gonna be there regardless if you have students coming in or students leaving or whatever, but I do think this is a tax rate issue. Dr. Till? It is both budgets and ADM, like the tax rate, but I think, to me, one of the important things is how many prescriptions am I gonna have to write for valium for school board members, superintendents, and we're providing a lot of anxiety to people here. And I think we can avoid that by giving them a little bit of certainty around one year. Yes, it's buffered by being ADM over two years, but the anxiety right now is palpable. And I think just as we set the tax rate early in our session this year to give people stability, comfort, I think it's important that we, that's why I think this is important. And yes, I think it'd be fine if we said homeschooling and transfer to private schools. But I think that if it's that many happening going to private schools, there's some small districts that this is gonna be really, really big, so I don't know how I can say it more strongly, but I really think we need to do something to protect people. So I mean, as the school districts are looking for a signal that we're gonna do something, they're looking for a signal. I'm just not sure if it's the value that they need or perhaps they need something else like surgery. Okay, so is there an interest in, let me just put it this way, who would like to continue on with this process and move forward with a bill to address this? Maybe you can do some blue hands. So can I jump in? Please do. So I appreciate being here and being able to participate in your meeting, but we don't get to vote today on this. If the bill includes the ADM language, I assume it comes to our committee and that's when we'll vote. I mean, we can do a show of hands, obviously a straw vote, but I just wanted to clarify that this is really your meeting that you've allowed us to join. Yeah, yeah, I was actually kind of hoping that you would just take the language and start working on it. Okay. Rather than, and then have it come back to us, but I'm gonna have to bring this, I think to a close because we have another bit of testimony and I guess I will take it back to my committee on Tuesday and we'll decide if we wanna move something forward or not. And if we do, it would go to you. Does that sound okay, folks? Think about it over the weekend and get back to me and we'll pull out those three solutions again. We're gonna be looking at another complex issue facing us as well on Tuesday related to challenges similar to these as in school districts that don't have a budget going forward. Are you saying goodbye to us now? Excuse me? Are you trying to say goodbye to us now? We, yeah, so if you don't wanna stay and hear about how things are going with after school, we'd love to have you stay, but otherwise we'll move on. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, that was easy. You get all the easy issues. What I'd like to do now is I followed up on a conversation that happened up in House Human Services. They were looking at what's happening with the hubs that are being created around the state and how that interplays with care for our students when school is actually not in operation. So I wanted to invite Holly Morehouse and Amy Schoenberger and to give us an update on that. So I don't know who wants to start. Amy or Holly? I would start if it's okay with you, Madam Chair. Please do. Hi, everyone. For the record, I am Amy Schoenberger and I am here representing Vermont after school. So first of all, before I start, I know everybody says it, but thank you for everything that you're doing. I've been following your committee quite a bit and really appreciating the deep discussions and actions that you're all taking. So thanks for that on a variety of topics. We're here, of course, as the Chairwoman said, to give you an update on after school and I will specifically say right up front, we're also here to ask you all to pass, once again, to ask you to pass S335, which is on your wall from the Senate. And I'll say why in a minute, but I wanted to say that up front because it is really one of our top priorities. So Holly's gonna be able to answer the more detailed information about what's going on with the hubs, but I kind of wanted to give you the context of what's going on with your process because I know that many of you don't get a chance to quote unquote, visit the other rooms in the building. So the hub program rolled out just a few weeks ago, the agency of human services got permission from joint fiscal office, joint fiscal committee, sorry, to spend $12 million to create a program, to cover the childcare needs of school-age children on basically remote learning days for working parents. That program, the money was approved by joint fiscal, but when they approved the money, they basically said, we want our policy committees to weigh in on the program, how it's rolling out because joint fiscal recognized at the time that they, and I'm not putting one out. This out loud, we're not a policy idea, but we want the policy committees to weigh in. The way the program is rolling out is the agency of human services is contracting with Vermont after school and with Let's Grow Kids as a public-private partnership to help figure out how to get these programs online and make sure that they're safe and they're meeting standards and that parents can get referred to them and all of that, but the program is being administered through the agency, through DCF, so the money is flowing through the state, not through the private partners. And Holley and other, and folks from DCF have been into committees to provide updates specifically in Senate Health and Welfare and House Human Services. So just to let you know the context of the process that's happening, yeah, I think it was yesterday up in House Human Services, there was an update given and a lot of discussion about the fact that this program is actually only designed to be in place through December. So there's this issue that come December, there's no expectation or requirement that whatever programs have signed up for this particular program will continue providing care for kids, youth on remote learning days. They might or might not, hence our request to move S335. So way back in January, the governor gave his speech and he said, we really need to focus on getting a system of after-school care and summer care in place for families that's more universal than it is right now. For my after-school has been advocating for that for a while. The bill came from basically from the governor, it started on the Senate side and Senate Ed. The idea is to create, they're calling it a task force in the bill that would really look at how can we do this and come back to you all with a plan in December. So the bill doesn't move any specific policy forward, it just tells this my group of people to come back with a plan. Obviously you didn't, for good reasons, you might not have thought this was urgent a couple of weeks ago, but now that this after-school hub program is sort of being built as the plane is taking off the runway and we're seeing all the different places where we really need to look at this issue, we're here to make the case that this is really more urgent than even it was before. And so that's why we're here to ask for this. And the House Human Services Committee seemed to, they were saying upstairs that, I say upstairs, like we're in the building, but they were saying that they thought it was also worth asking you all if you would consider moving that bill. I don't know if they've officially done that, but they did discuss it in their committee. And we can answer questions about the bill and I'm sure Holly's happy to give you an update on the hubs if you want that. But that's really our request. Thank you. We actually haven't taken it up yet. And see about doing that. I do know that one of the concerns is that what could you get done before why would it need to be done now versus when we come back in January? Well, I think one thing to say is a lot of work has already been done. And I think it would be the continued conversation rather than one that's just starting. However, the work that has been done in the past hasn't really been quote asked for by the legislature. And so I think it's really important for you all to ask for the plan so that you're actually considering the plan that you asked for come January. I think if you wait till January, then that task force wouldn't start up probably till next summer and it would be another year. And I think you're going to find that working families really need this plan to get moving faster than a year from January. And it looked like Holly wanted to say something too. So yeah. So yeah, I will get to you in a minute. Okay. Go ahead, Holly. Okay, for the record, this is Holly Morehouse with Vermont After School. Thank you for the chance to talk with you all today. As sort of the boots on the ground about this $12 million hub project, we are reaching out to every community we are trying to find partners and players that can set up programs and partner on spaces. And what it is bringing to the forefront so clear at this moment in time is that the landscape that we're starting with is unequal. So there are parts of the state where kids are in school five days a week. And then there's an after school program that's providing care from one to five and PM. So working families are pretty well supported in those areas. There are parts of the state right now that we're trying to set up hubs to meet this need. And we can't even find strong partners that already exist who understand child care and then the space. So the inequities that we've been talking and that your committee has been looking at for five or six years now are so stark right now when we're under this gun and in the time crunch. And when I look at the state recognizing that this is such a critical issue for working families to have care on the remote, learning days to have programs and opportunities for children and youth outside the school day for the safe meals that are safe that are following the health guidelines that we're stepping for $12 million. And I wish, I really wish that we had been given the task two months ago or four months ago because it'd be rolling out smoother and with time to think. So I look at that on one hand, what we're trying to do and with very little sleep because it's keeping me up at night when I think of these areas that we don't have programs to stand up quite yet versus the ones that were able to move forward. And I look at the $12 million. And then I think if we could have the task force now they could have the next four months at the same time we're looking at that same landscape and talking about the same inequities so that when this program ends in December we're not then in January scrambling for the next thing at the last minute sort of like how we've had to do with COVID but there has been a group of smart people as Amy said, that can come together and spend the four months as we're gathering all this information and we can share who's coming forward and where the gaps are and where the players are at the same moment that they're meeting and thinking about how do we move forward after December 31st when the HUD program ends and the HUD program ends at December 31st because of the federal funding not because we think that the problem is gonna be solved or that we're not gonna be completely through COVID and families are still gonna be struggling for care and that school schedules are all gonna be back to normal necessarily. It's really because of the federal funding that's driving that deadline. So can we take this moment in time as a state to plan and think thoughtfully and have this task force already set up and moving so that as the HUD programs moving forward as we're setting up the hubs as we're uncovering the inequities as we're looking at the geographic disparities and the challenges, they're able to work with that information and then as one is phasing out there's already a new plan that can be coming forward in January. So that's where I see and feel the urgency so strongly. Thank you. Sarita? Yep. Thank you. Chairman, Chairwoman Webb. I just want to share that when COVID hit, to me again, the problem, the concern I had was with childcare for parents, for working parents in order to supervise and make sure their kids were safe and also to access instruction on days that kids were learning remotely. And I was really pleased that the governor put this money in but I just realized it wasn't enough money because I think the inequities to me are parents never budgeted for these days that kids would be learning remotely. They assume they'd be in school and not have to worry about childcare and I feel like after December 31st, the parents in the lower socioeconomic section of Vermont will not be able to pay the childcare when their children are expected to be home remotely and parents that have the means will be able to pay to access childcare. And I agree with you, Amy and Holly. I think it's a huge inequity issue and I think it's unfair if there's not another allocation or if there's not a means for all families to be able to access childcare on those days that students are learning remotely. Thank you. You wanna clarify that the bill F335 doesn't have any money associated with it other than having a task force, but it does have a charge with thinking about how it is funded. So it does sort of work towards that plan and I wanna take two of the points. This landscape and this challenge of the hubs is not new to us, right? This is the landscape that we haven't talked about. There are families that can't find care in the summer. What your children have access to after school and on school vacation weeks depends on where you live in Vermont and the family resources that you have. It's not a new problem. It is just in dark. There's a spotlight on it right now because of the school reopening schedules. The other thing that's not new about this challenge that I think the task force could help is that when schools closed in mid-March and the governor did he pass the executive order around childcare and essential childcare, after school doesn't fit neatly in any one agency. And what happened was is they originally assigned zero to five childcare to the child development division and then childcare for essential workers of any child six and six years old through eighth grade was assigned to the agency of education, which you can imagine right when all the schools were transferring to remote learning there wasn't capacity in the agency of education to deal with it. And I had a 10 days where I didn't sleep because I was like, the whole field is being lost. And no one, we couldn't get answers and no one's paying attention and it really requires this cross-agency coordination and an agency to step forward. And in DCF and the child development division has and has with this hub program, but some of the struggles we're still facing and rolling it out are, what are the education school-based programs? What are the licensed childcare programs? Where do they fall between them? What are the different systems? And one of the reasons for the task force was to have a group that was looking across agency and really protecting the space because in our current structures we don't have a space that says after school or out of school time programming for children from kindergarten and all the way through high school falls to this agency and here's what it looks like. It's so varied and it's so diverse. That brings strengths, but it also brings these challenges. And I think that having a task force of people that are looking across agency right now at this critical time really could help to make some of those connections happen so that the system we end up with both for early childhood and for after school is stronger post COVID, not weakened in any way. I guess I'm just wondering who, what happens after December 31st, basically to all families who didn't budget the kids to be needing supervision for two days while they're either working remotely at home or working remotely away. I mean, no one budget that into their home budget. I doubt it and especially families that don't have any extra money. I mean, that just seems a really very unfair situation to me. Thank you. Kayla Builder. Thank you. And thank you Holly and Amy so much for being here today. So I wanted to just get on to support S335. This bill came over to us in February and of course with COVID, we were not able to take it up as we generally, I imagine would have fallen crossover. This bill, I think I'm ready to vote in concurrence with the Senate version. I've taken a look at it, I like it. I liked the testimony they took. I think that before COVID, we knew there was a clear need and post COVID, the work that has been delivered in the world of after school and these hubs is just really unbelievable. And if we're hearing from the advocates that this would be helpful, let's do it. I hope that the house could simply concur and this could get rolling. So I don't always feel that way about bills, but in this case, I like the Senate's version. Let's take it off the wall and vote it out, says I. Thank you. Kathleen James. Did I? Yes, I am muted. Here, here, Caleb, and I'm happy to take a look. I haven't had a chance to take a look at the Senate testimony either, but I agree, happy to move this bill along. After doing a little bit of due diligence, I think this is really important. And I agree with the arguments you guys make about timing and why we need to not wait until January. So I did have a couple of quick questions about the hubs. Just quickly, I was happy to see those popping up. And when they did was quickly moving to try to connect the BRSU superintendent down here with DCF to try to get, you know, try to make something happen here in Manchester. And I know that our superintendent is, you know, very busy, quite rightly with school reopening. I did have a question about the hubs. It's my understanding that the funding provides for those to be free the first month and then parents will be asked to pay tuition afterwards. That's correct, right? Or did I misunderstand? So, yes, for the most part, the hub funding grant pays for the cost for the first month of operation. Right. And then, but the expectation is that they will run through December. So they could get their month of September paid for, but they would continue to run. Some of the hub locations that we have vetted and move forward, DCF makes the final decisions and approval, but some of that we have move forward, have other funding streams. So this gets to the inequities of the underlying system. They have other partnerships and other funding streams that they're able to offer the programming at no or very low cost. And other parts of the state, it's a for-profit model or a different partner that's come forward and there's gonna be a higher cost associated with it. And that is due to the underlying network and the variety across our state of what happens. So back to my point of where you live in Vermont and how much money you have determines what you can access. And that underlying landscape, the hubs are being laid on top of. So wherever we can, we're trying to work with partners who have a way to help support that funding, but there will be hubs that will just have one month of grant funding. This is the way that it was set up. And then we'll have to sustain the program by charging fees if we don't have another income or funding source. Okay. And I'm gonna take five more minutes. CCSAP qualifies, sorry. Yeah, I'm gonna take five more minutes of questions and then I wanna let you know that I am happy to follow up with the speaker to see if this is something that we can take time for on Tuesday. And I need to work that out with the speaker. Peter Conlon. Thanks, I'll be brief. I love after school programs. Back in our previous reality, could support this completely. I'm looking through the members of the task force and I'm very much questioning whether with so much going on, many of these folks, whoever would be appointed would have the capacity or the bandwidth to kind of do what needs to be done to make this task force active between now and January. And so I'd sort of like to know the answer to that question if all of these folks can serve up themselves or a designee to get the work done. I don't leave it at that. That's a fair question. May I just offer on it? So I can't speak for the people, obviously, but I think it's fair to say it won't be the secretaries, it'll be the designees and so on down the line. And a lot of these folks are already working on this with the hub system. So I think this is just a more like a formalized way to have a conversation, to present a plan to the legislature for the most part. It's not perfect, but I think it would be great to move it along and at least invite the people to come in and have the conversation. I think for the most part, folks will welcome it as a good opportunity. And we'll do the last question from Casey, too. Thanks, Chair Webb. And thanks, Amy and Holly for coming in. I just wanna, I'll be brief. I'll just echo what Rep Elder had said. I would totally be in support of this. I think after school programs are just as important as childcare. And I do this a lot, but speaking as a parent, this is a really big issue for us. So I would just echo what Caleb had said and thank you. Okay, I will follow up over the weekend and see if this is something that we can bring forward on Tuesday. And I thank you very much, Amy and Holly and it's just, it's really a shame that we were not able to take this up earlier. But as we know, much changed in March. Thank you. So next week, Tuesday, I have invited in people from the Oxbow School District, School District whose budget just went down for the third time. And I think we just need to hear from them what's happening. And I think that they're trying to see if we can also bring in the first branch who also just not have a budget. So we have two districts right now without a budget. One that just went down and the other one, I think has a vote coming in October to see if there's something we can do. I don't know. I don't know if there's something we should do, but I think it's important that we at least hear from this group as to what they're facing. Both of those districts have confirmed their availability on Tuesday, Madam. Great. And we'll hold to see what we can do with the after-school program. And given that, if there are other things that people would like to hear from, I imagine that some of those things will be coming forward as schools start to open. There will be a lot of people looking for a legislative response, which may or may not be helpful. And January should be very interesting, not alone the next week. So thank you, everybody. I hear, I think that Peter Conlon, were you up in appropriations when they looked at our recommendations? So to speak. Yeah, I kind of tuned in a little late. However, my sense of it was a supported the independent colleges request. Now they still have to find the money for everything, of course. Basically supported what we had suggested. And actually, because the difference between full funding and the cut was so small with outright Vermont, they, I think, unanimously supported the full 60,000 for outright Vermont. Yeah, and those were kind of the two issues I tuned in for. Okay, thank you. Kathleen, James? No, okay, good. All right, everybody, have a good weekend. This is some hard work we're doing. And I appreciate, Lynn, did you have something? Just one thing, I need to make an apology for my ranting and raving on the telephone. I'm sorry about that. We were not live, I think, so you're okay. I hope not, but I'm sorry. Normally I'm very quiet and to me, I don't get excited, but these calls that come from your own district and you feel you have to answer the calls and you get on the calls and you're talking to nobody, you're talking to a machine, just to the point you'd like to reach through the phone and just strangle them. Good, because you're live now, so. I know I am, I know I am, but I apologize. Thank you. We all understand. We all understand. Thank you.


Have you ever heard of Melvier that abuses Z-Pack archives? Well, I haven't until I read an article by Xavier Mertens, they had this kind of Melvier in their honey pot, so it seems to be in the wild right now. And that got me interested. I analyzed this file and I decided to do a two-part series because analyzing it is like, it would take some time to get to the config. For part one of the series, we are going to unpack the Z-Pack archive, de-bloat the sample, we will decode the downloaded payload, perform some string decryption on the downloaded file, and then perform injection unpacking to get to the actual file that is being injected. The next second part of the series probably going to be online in one week from now. This will then finally cover obfuscator identification and de-obfuscation and then seeing what the config looks like. So that's basically it. Let's get to work. If you want to follow along, please check the video description below to download the sample so you can also do the same in your app. So this is the original article where I got this sample from Melvier dropped through a Z-PAQ archive. And this is quite unusual because I can imagine that many people will not be able to open this archive in the first place. So I really do wonder if there are any people who got infected this way. Anyway, when you check this sample, we have now the 4th of November and you can see here it's still at zero detections and that's because most of the Antivirus products cannot unpack this unusual archiving format. So when you unpack this, I do expect to see a rise in the detection rate. Now the person who found this Melvier said they had a quick look and that they couldn't figure out how to run the Melvier file and that it doesn't seem to work in their lab. So let's see if we can get it to work. Here I have our Melvier file and to unpack this archive I downloaded zpac.exe. This is a command line tool that's also available for Linux and I downloaded obviously the Windows version. So we check the help. We see it's using x to extract files. So we are doing this too, wait, without the minus and this extracted this exe file. So this file is almost one gigabyte in size and we do not really want that. So there are several ways you can deal with that. Firstly you can just have a look with a hex editor and when you scroll you should see oh wow this is all zero bytes here. So the quick and dirty method for me is to just select the blog up until the end and then cut this off.  So now we obviously still got way too much here. Let's see if we can delete a little bit more. It doesn't have to be exact as long as the program is not way too big. So this should do it. We select it from here and just save this one and now tools or sandbox systems shouldn't have a problem with this file anymore. So we can check here there's still a bunch of zeros in the overlay and if you really want to get rid of them you can check where the overlay starts and cut from this offset here or another alternative is a new command in binary refinery that's able to automatically de-blow samples. So this would work as well. It's not certainly necessary though to analyze this file. Let's check now how it behaves if we just execute it. I'm going to see in system informer if it's creating some child processes and whether it runs at all and we see it starts a child process and then it crashes with the Windows error reporting files at least started. That doesn't have to mean anything though. The article mentioned that this is a downloader. I don't have an internet connection on this machine so let's actually look into the strings. So this one doesn't seem to be too strongly obfuscated. We have some clear text strings one hinting to a media fire download dot wab file which is usually an audio file and this seems to be quite small this application. So let's look into it with the end spy. So this is the main and that's where it starts. This is looking a little bit weird. I'm going to check on is by also it's I'm not sure if this is all correct. So we go to main we go to this function. This is looking way better and here yeah that makes more sense and here we can actually see what it is doing. So it's loading this assembly that's coming from this function right here and then it gets this class from this function. So it's in the namespace wz yys that is the class name and this is the method name that it is calling on this assembly that is loaded right here. So we want to know how this assembly is loaded. We look into we look into this method and we can see here a triple d s decryption on what data that's the question where does the data come from. So this should be fairly easy. Here is the two base 64 strings that we saw are just the key and the IV. So you hover over that we see the first one is the key. This one this is the IV and the data comes from here. It's coming from this stream and the stream is loading the data from this function and this is the function that will load this audio file. So in this case good idea to check in is by because the code looked very weird and this is the actual download location. Now I checked the download location and it's not available anymore but I could find this file on VarusTotal. So the encrypted .var file. If you want to learn Java analysis from the ground up then check the link in the description below. There's a link to my Udemy course for beginners. It contains 11 hours of video content and the link is a coupon link that's a little bit cheaper for you than buying it from Udemy itself. So check it out and maybe I see you there. So I got the audio file. Let's first see. I mean we know it's encrypted. There's probably not much in turn when it comes to seeing any strings in here and indeed it's not. It's not useful in but it's still interesting to check just in case you find anything that's in plain text. Same thing we should check with a hex editor if there's anything that looks like a structure but this just looks like encrypted data if you scroll through. So it doesn't seem to be any additional data on that file. And now we can use our knowledge not from this one. This was useless but this knowledge to decode it. So you can use Cybershift. In this case I will be using binary refinery. So I'm telling binary refinery to use a base 64 string as the IV and as we know the IV is this part and then it expects the key so we take this part and we can verify now with peak that indeed this decoded some executable. And here we have our file. Same thing as before. Let's check with the strings. So that seems to be the name of this module and it's a DLL file. It's also .NET file and here we have some interesting strings that might contain some data references to several cryptographic algorithms and some resources the .NET resource here. So that's basically everything that's interesting. The strings seem to be encrypted at least I do not see much in terms of strings apart from general data, metadata. So I'm gonna rename it. So this isn't looking too well in terms of trying to understand this because the methods are barely readable. It's a smart assembly obfuscated file. Let's just run the for dot to clean up the methods a little bit. And this is a little bit better. I mean now we do not have an entry point in the DLL but we know what kind of method is called from this file. We saw that here in our let's see here. So the member that is being called or the method that's being called is this one gwjgucx in this class and that's where we find it. Now in terms of determining what this does if you go inside of those you will see it's kind of hard to determine. So for instance here we have a process start and the file name is being called with this s method 11. And if you check this one you will see it's calling some hash table and looking up the string. Now my go to method would be to use d for dot with a token to the string decoding method but in this case it didn't really work. So I'm gonna try something else and that is using PowerShell but not only that let's first actually try to see how the file behaves if we run it. So it's a DLL. So let's again observe the behavior right here in system informer. First we need to load the DLL and to do that we use a reflection assembly load file and you can do it like that drag and drop this inside note that this also runs the file so initialization code like code that's in cc-toro is already executed here. Now we are going to call the method that is also being called by the downloader that should be about correct. So and now let's hit run and the PowerShell EXE is gone. So there are two things that are possible. The first one is that this method exits on purpose and maybe it has some anti debugging things. Maybe it doesn't like that we don't have an internet connection or maybe something else is going on. Who knows and could have copied itself somewhere in the background. We didn't check that but let's see what we find in the code and if there's a way like to actually see what the code is doing by decoding those strings. Now the same way we ran this DLL method we can also run other methods. So that's a good thing and that means we can find out for instance what kind of process is supposed to be started here. So and why it doesn't do that or maybe it does that and we just didn't see it because of the refresh rate in system informer. Let's just load the file again and this time we will try to call this method instead. So it's class 3 as method 11 and put in the number that was used here that is 8510 and it can't find this type so I did something wrong. I know why that's the case so this is not public so we need to edit this actually. Edit the method and we say public scope. Okay now it has the public modifier and to do that we need to close this and then save the module. Right now we just run PowerShell again and it's still complaining that it couldn't find the type. The class is said also not public. You can actually check the available types so this is basically everything that we see so there are all of the other classes are not available and that's why it didn't work and the very reason for that is that this class here is internal so same thing we need to edit this class. Let me say right click on the name you say edit type and then we will say visibility public say okay so and now again we need to save the module and close this otherwise it won't do that. Okay and now let's try again and we say now get exported types it's still not working. I didn't load the cleaned one that's the reason. All right cleaned and now we see class three here and the powered by attribute is gone because we added because of d4.it removed this one and now we can also execute our method so all right it works so we have now a string decoder for this and that way we can slowly get to the bottom of what this all means so obviously this here meant cmd so if you really want to analyze what this file is doing you can go through all of these methods and while you have two choices basically you can decode this by hand now so you could just let's do it for this method here so we right click we say edit method so in this way you could slowly de-opposite all of the code the other way you could do it is if you write some sort of de-opposicator with the nlip that does this automatically but keeping in mind that we actually want to find the payload of this method let's take a step back and let's run this again and see at which of these methods it actually stops executing so we can find the culprit so we load the cleaned one it should be the right one we attach the process and we set the break point here so so let's now step through until this program exits so that we know where it stops so either if it's an entire debug method we will find the location where the debugging debugging check is taking place or if something else is going wrong we will also see where it ends up and so let's do this and just step at this point it executes a sweep so we have to wait until it's done so now it's done we step over again another sweep and we are already at the last method so all that comes before this one works and we should step into this one because um we can exclude these as being the culprit so here's a switch case statement it ends up in this method now we are here so this is interesting why that because we obtain a byte array and bytes arrays are generally interesting for process injection they might be used for that so if we step into that we are in this function that's the reverse function and we already get oh yeah we get an array full of data here but this can dump this save it it doesn't look like an image though we can still dump it just a quick look into the dump it's definitely just some encrypted data so let's continue with that it says it cannot obtain the value of this variable that's too bad and for some reason we exit now I'm not sure why this is happening like why it didn't continue like to one of the next steps like this one or this one um but anyways I would like to try and simply add some more breakpoints and see if that works so it will either lend in this function or in this one so let's put a break point here also very interesting because it really looks like it's dealing with some binary data so um looking at the parameters for these delegates here these are likely some api calls and they could have to do with some process injection because we have here process ID so that's the first one that's the second one let's just add a break point here as well and since this was executed this explains why the power shell window is gone after the maverick's finished because it just exits the whole environment so running this again we do not need this break point anymore actually because we set some other ones and we continue execution and again we need to wait because there are some sleeps in between and indeed we are in this method here so that's class 18 method zero we see it's attempting something 10 times and we have here a byte array so checking the byte array yes it starts with 4d5a so we have an executable image here which is likely the payload I uploaded the payload to varus total and this is what we get so it has a high detection rate which doesn't surprise because this file is not actually placed on the disk so all of the scanners that find this file right now it doesn't mean that they will find it when it is executed only in memory so a popular thread label here is agent slar which is agent tesla and we also see here esad says it's agent tesla pro tip esad is most of the time correct when it comes to the malware that is underneath um rising things that's red line well we will see so that's all for today we see each other next time with the payload deobfuscation and configuration extraction see ya and please post below if you have any questions