We're now live on YouTube, so we're formally engaged in a continuation of House Appropriations afternoon meeting. We're pleased to have the Agency of Education and Secretary French with us, and we also have Brad Jay, I'm looking around the squares, and we have Kathy Flanagan with us, and also Candace Elmquist. And the governor's presentation is hot off the press. And so we have not had a chance to really dive into many areas. And so much that we will hear from you today, we have not had a chance to review. So we are going to look at the agency's budget, but if there's time, if you could give us an update on the $50 million for the HVAC system and the summer meals and how that money is going out and any other pressures that you see within our education system, that would be great. But let's take off the table first, let's get the budget done for the agency, and then we can jump into those other areas that we'd like to know a little more about. So Theresa will share the screen with your documents, and so Secretary French, if you would like to start in and tell us what you'd like to have up and where you are on the documents so we can follow, that would be helpful. Good afternoon. It's good to see you all. We do have members of our team, notably Bill Bates, who's our new CFO. Kathy Flanagan. Excuse me. I missed him. I'm sorry I didn't see Bill Bates. Ironically, he's going to be the person in the hot seat for most of this, but Bill's been our CFO for a bit now, he's doing a great job. So Bill Bates, CFO, Kathy Flanagan, long-serving member of our agency, Deputy CFO, and Brad James, our school finance, one of our school finance efforts. So have our core leadership team on finance here with you today. I'm going to go ahead and just unplug my headset for a second. And I don't want to be remiss. I need to welcome the House Education Committee is also joining us. Yes, we can, Secretary French. I did want to note that the House Education Committee is joining appropriations so that we can expedite the budget process and I want to welcome them. And please write in your questions and as soon as there's breaks in the presentation, if you have questions, just put up your virtual hand and we will make sure that they are asked. So welcome to everyone. Go ahead, Secretary French. So we'll work from the slide presentation that you see and Theresa put on the screen. We elected to use basically the same presentation that we had presented to you previously in the spring. We just updated it for our restatement of our budget. So just so you could see the complete sort of format, you know, once again the agency of education firstly is not funded by the education fund to the most extent. So that's the first point we always sort of that's put out there, but we're happy with Brad here particularly talk about the education fund. But also the point I'd make is that our overall operations are not significantly supported by the General Fund either we have a lot of federal grants and programs and so forth. So as we were contemplating working on a restated budget over the summer. It's not perhaps as challenging as some other agencies in terms of navigating sort of our budget targets and goals, but certainly, as you know, the agency has had reductions in staff over the years and that's something we've been building back capacity on and we can speak more to that directly with one of the key areas you'll see in this restatement is we moved our data division to be under the CFO sort of area to start to put together sort of an operations core team but that's just merely a reorganization piece. Why don't I turn it over to her CFO Bill Bates to walk you through the specific issue. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you for that. For the record, Bill Bates Agency of Education and Teresa, if you would be so kind as to advance to slide three, 17. This is what Secretary French was referring to on slide three, we show the governor's original recommended FY 21 budget and that is across all 12 appropriations and it's $1.977 billion. And then as Secretary French mentioned, we went through a budget exercise this summer and Teresa, if I can have you advance to slide four. Kitty, if I may just briefly, this is Peter. Yes, Peter. Can you just clarify because we don't deal with education a lot. I don't know what FNA and ES means, the acronyms that you use. Sure. Thank you for asking the question. So FNA would be Finance and Administration. ES would stand for Education Services. AEL would be Adult Education and Literacy. Does that help? Yes, it does. I had myself muted again. So thank you. That's quite all right. And so we're now on slide four and you can see from the executive summary here, we were able to reduce $502,000 from the originally submitted budget, which is about 3%. And you can see by appropriation how we came up with those savings. There is a net reduction of $127,000 in finance and admin, $183,000 for education services and so on and so forth. The key point I want to highlight here is that as Secretary French mentioned, we also have a restatement where we're reclassifying the data team, data and analysis from education services over to finance and admin. And that's $6 million, which we will highlight in the slides to come. Any questions on slide four before I move on? Excuse me, Bill, that is not a reduction, the $6 million, that's just moving it from one area to another. Is that correct? That is correct. Yes. Thank you for that. And if you do the reductions by appropriations, will you tell us the impact those reductions will have so we understand where the reductions are coming from and by administration and flexible pathways that we fully understand? Thank you. Absolutely. I wanted to give you a very high-level executive summary and then as we go through the slides, we'll drill into the details so that you can see how. Could I just go back to that slide? I just want to point out the state board item, in particular something perhaps for the committee to follow up on. So the state board of education previously was embedded in our budget. We sort of broke them out as their own standalone area. Our budget, I think previously was closer to $80,000, but they elected at some point during the year not to join their national organization. So that savings is $24,000 by not paying their dues. I'll just make the point that we haven't, this is our budget proposal from the administration side, but the state board of education, you might want to consult with them to see what they think in terms of that reduction. I'm sure they don't support it. They've been an advocate of getting additional revenues to support their activities. But from my perspective, as we were contemplating reductions across the board, I didn't feel comfortable not making a proposal. So what I did is I included their reduction based on their discontinuation of their national dues. Did they agree to the discontinuation of the national dues? They have no interest, I believe, in continuing that affiliation. However, I think they would disagree with having their budget cut by that amount. Thank you. They would prefer to use those funds for other support of their other activities. Thank you for that clarification. Other questions before we go to the next slide? I think we're ready to continue. Thank you. Lisa, if we could go to the next slide. And so this is going to do a deeper dive into the overview of the agency structure and the operation. And if we can advance the next slide, Teresa. This is where we were highlighting the reclassification of the data and assessment team. If you see, this is how we originally were structured when we submitted our proposed budget back in February. And if you look at the lower left hand corner of this org chart, data management is under Deputy Secretary Boucher. Teresa, if we move to the next slide, we can see that we've highlighted the effect that we've moved them now under the CFO, Teresa, the next slide. This slide is, should be familiar to many, if not most of you. This is our presentation slide from back in February, and it highlights, if you take a look at the green line that goes across the staffing at the agency from 2008 to the current year, we're right about at 159 full-time employees in FY21. That is down from a total of 213 in FY08. And there's been a number of reasons for that swing. One of the big ones was the fact that IT used to be embedded in the agencies that has since been taken out. And as you know, we now have ADS. And then there was the, what I refer to from my private sector days, the financial tsunami through all, and that had an impact on resource as well. So that's bringing us from the 213 down to the 159 that you see on this slide. There's no questions there. We can advance to the next slide. I want to make sure there's no questions. I'm not. Thank you. I have a question, if you don't mind. Sure. Just like, how many of the positions are positions that exist but are unfilled? Great question. Kathy, do you have the exact number from HR? This is Dan. I believe we're around 10 vacancies, which is where, you know, we've brought that down. I think a year and a half or so ago, we were as high of like 25 vacancies. So we're down. It's a normal sort of tradition or vacancy savings level of about 10 positions. So there's the 159 reflect positions or field positions. I believe the positions, positions, total positions. Thank you. Okay. We do other things. I have a question from Representative Hooper and then Lanford. Hi, I was going to ask this later. I see that since we're talking about vacancies, it appears to me that you're proposing additional vacancy savings later on. If you're already carrying 10 of what 159, that's a pretty significant vacancy allocation already. How's this going to affect your operations? What are you not doing as a result of this? Secretary French, did you want to respond to that? Maybe, Kathy, we can drill into that a little more specifically if you could. Sure. I'll try. So the bulk of the agency vacancies at this point, I believe there are two in education services. The rest of the vacancies are in the finance and administration area, and those are positions that we have been working to reclass since the agency did its reorganization of finance and administration starting when Bill came on. So that's what's driving those. We had in our original budget submission in February, we had a 3% vacancy savings built in there that we already had to meet. And so the amount on our restatement for additional vacancy savings is simply a calculation of the first several months of FY 21 while we are waiting for permission to fill those finance positions. So we're calculating that we will be able to meet the original budgeted vacancy savings. And then those positions hopefully will be hired in the next six to nine weeks. Is that answer the question? I got confused, but I'm sure because I don't understand your budget. So you're carrying 10 vacancies now, you're looking to have them reclassified and they will go into finance and administration. And I think you just said that you are hoping to fill them within the next X period of time, next several weeks. Are they now accounted for within your budget? Yes. The cost of those? Yes. So those 10 are going to be filled. And so the 18,000 that we're seeing in vacancy savings is just kind of a continuation of what I would consider the normal vacancy savings that any largeish organization has. Correct. And I think if I chime in, I think the difference between our original proposal was as a result of the hiring freeze. So we had slightly an increase here to our vacancy savings because of the first couple of months of this fiscal year as a result of the freeze that was enacted. Correct. Kathy? Yes. That's correct, Dan. But your proposed full year budget will cover the cost of filling those additional positions. Got it. Thank you. Yeah. You're just holding them for six to nine weeks to reach this savings. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Are they, do you have people that would fill them now or is it not? No, we are in the process right now of getting the administration HR approval under the hiring freeze rules. We have a question from Representative Blanford and then Representative Yekofoni. Thank you. Thank you. I was just wondering if you could tell me how many of the positions that were moved that were IT that are now in ADS, gives me a little bit more of a sense of, is it two, 20? No, there were 10. There were 10. Thank you. Dave? Yes. Thank you. Would you please go back to slide four of the previous slide, please? I just had a question on the adult education. I think it's a $108,000 reduction there is adult debt and literacy. About 20% of your total reduction, can you, can you help me understand a little bit of the impact of that reduction, please? Dan, do you want me to jump in with some information about the grant lines that are involved there? Yeah. Sure. Go ahead. 81,000 was a reduction to the actual provider grants. We have five providers in the state for adult education. And there was an, there's a proposed $81,000 reduction to the provider grants. And then the adult diploma program has a reduction of 27,000. And we did check those numbers with our leadership in those programs. Deputy Secretary Boucher, and they felt confident that the providers would be able to absorb that level of reduction. That's the 3%. Because of shifts that happen between all of the various adult services that are available between early college, dual enrollment, it does shift the population of where they're accepting their services. So the agency believes that that 3% reduction in adult ed and literacy will be fine with the providers. Will that be distributed evenly among all five providers? I believe so. I'm not in charge of allocating the program people are, but I believe it would be evenly distributed based on the current distribution, which is probably more in line with the number of students that they serve. And so there already is a difference between the regions based on the number of students served. And while we're here, could you just briefly speak to the 183,000 reduction in education services? I don't think I caught that the first time. Yes. So we had proposed. Matthew, just before you do that, are we going to see a slide on each one of these reductions that explains it? Or do we? We do break it down. We do break it down. Okay. I just wanted to make sure before we went through all of it. We can certainly. Thanks. No, if it comes up later in your presentation, thank you. I'll withhold any questions so we can move on. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. I think we'll do the questions as we see each of them independently. Thank you. Any other questions before we move on to slide nine? No, I think our questions will come when as you go through the slides, but as we get to each one of those 5% or 3% reductions. Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks to slide nine. This is just showing you the two main appropriations, finance and admin, and what makes that up. Communications, legal, finance and administration and then data management. And then under education services, you've got federal education and support programs, student support, education quality, and then student pathways. Those are the two main appropriations. Teresa, if we can advance to slide 10. And this is where we start drilling into the details. This is finance and administration. And you can see that we've got five components that make up the change. Internal service funds represents $57,853 of the reduction. We have supplies of 852. We talked briefly, previously about vacancy savings, that's 18,762. And then the fourth line item, contracts. Our legal counsel has indicated that there is a contract that her team will no longer need. That is savings of 18,000. And then we are able to reduce our contract with Bruce Dean. And that represents a $32,000 savings because the purchase order rolled over from the current year to the future year. And that makes up the $50,000. And then as I had mentioned on the executive summary, you can see the $6 million. That's the data and assessment reclass coming over from education services to finance and administration. Okay. And so the $127,000 reduction is made up in, I'm trying to do the math quickly in numbers one through four. That is correct. Okay. So Mary Hooper has a question. Yeah. Thank you. You're the first budget that we've seen with the reduction in the internal service funds. So I need to ask the question of what, how is, were you assigned these reduction costs or break that out a little bit for us? Absolutely. Thank you for that. These numbers come from finance and administration. And so it's made up of all of the internal service fund charges. And so you've got our property casualty insurance, which was a $94 savings, liability insurance was a thousand, HR was 1400 and I'm rounding these numbers, ADS, which is the IT allocation that's 2,700, workers comp is 1800 and then vision was the 3715. And then we had additional internal service charges that were a part of the reduction. And again, that is made up of property and liability insurance, the HR, IT and vision. Kathy, anything else that you'd like to add to that? Those are the major components of the internal service. Correct. Yep. So you're not seeing any reduction of services. What you're seeing is, is a reduction of the cost, I'm hoping, and that when we hear from HR and ADS and DFR, the insurance pieces, are they coming through DFR service charges? They come from BGS risk management. BGS, okay. We will get, I'm hoping the details that will help us fully understand what these reductions mean. But before I move to Representative Lamper, are you feeling any different services with any of these reductions? I'm not aware of any, Kathy, anything that you have insight on? No, I'm not aware of any, I believe the folks who are running the internal service accounts were given the same reduction instructions as all the rest of the agencies. And those are being passed on, because we get the original anticipated cost from the administration. And this is just an extension of the passing on the reduction that we should see. We should not see a change in service only cost. Thank you. Maria, would you just, I'm sorry to do this while everyone's listening. Would you, could you get us a list of all, all entities beyond ADS and BGS that have internal service funds so that when they come in, like with HR, we make sure to ask what the impacts are or how they came up with the savings. Please. I just need that list. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Madam chair. So this is a, this is a very nice high level kind of refresher because we've been away, but we've, these are things that we're seeing. I'm interested to see too at some point. And we're all about the details here. Typically. And maybe it's because my grandson just came in. We see each one of those items at 57,000. What made up that so we can see whether workers comp and things. So that crosswalk breakdown. Is that going to be coming at some point? That's a great question. I was under the impression that the, the detail had been shared. If it had not been shared, I can make sure that this gets. Over to you. So you can see that, for example, I'm looking at the worksheet. Yeah. It is reduced by $94. Yeah. So I mean, typically, Mr. Bates, we get like a crosswalk that has a total at the end 57, but it also has. We see each one of the, the reductions that we can, we can start to feel comfortable about not only that, but we can start to feel comfortable about not only that, but we can start to feel comfortable about not only that, although education is not the budget I have to bring to the floor. It's questions that we have to be prepared to answer from other members. The first thing they're going to say is what is that made up of? And why did that have to happen? And what was impacted because it's reduced. And, you know, and then I'll just leave with one other question. And I don't know if you can answer this or not, but I'm just going to give you a little bit of an answer. Just to give you an understanding of the three percent. Okay. Like what is the number of reductions, 3%. You're understanding of why you were given the goal of 7%. Or 3% reduction. It's okay, but he can say for a minute, just so you don't have to wrestle. Is it. I'm just trying to get at, like, if I'm working up a budget and I'm trying to find a 3%, reduction. What, what was there a reason for why you were finding that. So for clarifications sake, the original exercise to try to reduce our budget by 5% and then the agency of administration came back after they got better results and said that we could go with a 3% reduction. And so the exercise for Kathy and I was to take a look working with Deputy Secretary Boucher and Secretary French identifying how we could come up with that 3% reduction across our administrative or across our appropriations. And it's difficult because we don't have a lot of general fund to begin with. And so obviously we took we took full advantage of the internal service fund reductions. But then we actually had to take a look at the budget and that's where we came up with the contractual savings, the supply savings were reducing some out of state travel, which is also adding up. But unfortunately, the real cuts in order to get to the 3% are coming from grants, grant programs. And though those we will see not here, but we'll see those in another slide. Yes. And as I had mentioned, I thought that the detail breakdown line by line had been shared and it sounds like it has not been shared and so I will make sure to get that over to you so that you can see that crosswalk that brings down every single line. Right. So we I know we're going to we're going to be a short turnaround for the whole budget but it's still our, you know, our responsibility to help balance, you know, the big picture as well. So, so it's really important to understand, did the savings occur because it's just a natural $1,000 savings on a workers comp? Or was it something that you had to hard fought to go and find? And what was the impact of it so it kind of really makes us help help you to balance that as well as balancing when it was just a naturally organic occurring savings or one that was really fought fought to achieve. Does that make sense? Okay. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Katie. Thank you. Sorry, everybody for my grandsons just arrived in these three and doesn't really do quiet well. I was just going to represent my first question. This exercise was more of your ladder, you know, I would say exercise, you know, we're we're running in with a lot of information in terms of what the long term financial impact of COVID will be. So we're we're being cautious and, you know, we started at a 5% reduction, but we felt more optimistic in 103, but it was really starting from just a target to sort of approach the budgeting and we had to navigate that aspect of it. So just just for clarity so that you so that you can get my full picture or my appreciate. So we're just coming from this morning hearing about how it how there was a comfort in the administration's ability to use six million dollars for other things like mowing the lawns and to move it to transportation. So constantly as we're going through budgets, I'm going to be looking for did this need to have to happen instead of that. Does that make sense? So just so you know where I'm coming from. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get you. I mean, I know I've worked with school budgets for many years. So I know the flavors of both here and there's always and this is a much more complex budgeting process, obviously. But I think, you know, it's a mix of trying to know that we're going to be living within our means and trying to find that comfort level at the same time, identifying those strategic opportunities that would allow us to add value. So that's in that sort of analysis happens across the enterprise of state government. So thank you. I just wanted you to hear from a statement from where I'm where I was coming from when I asked that question. Thanks. Thank you for that. Thank you, Diane. And so for Chip Conquest has the the education budget, but also the Education Committee, you know, we've talked about the vacancy savings. The supplies is very small, but the contracts. What exactly do these reductions mean? And do we feel that they're made with no harm to the agency and that they're sustainable on reductions if need be. So let's do the next set. Yep. So this is education services. And again, you can see the four lines that make up the the reduction. We have grants in the total of 124,841 we have savings and travel, we have savings and vacancy savings. And then the data assessment reclass is an offset of the six million eight that you saw on finance and admin. And so on on the particular grants we have, and again, I will make sure that I share with Teresa the detail that breaks down each of these fine line item. But for the sake of conversation today, the grants that we're looking to propose reductions to our governor's institute teacher of the year outright Vermont and early reading. So the governor's institute is being reduced by 5,780. Teacher of the year is being reduced by 2,500. Outright Vermont is being reduced by 40,000. And then early reading is being reduced by 76,561. That's the makeup of the grant reduction. Savings on on travel because of the COVID incident. We are not doing any travel out of state actually registered for a couple of conferences that have been canceled. And so that is a real savings where we won't be doing as much out of state travel. We don't anticipate that. And so we were able to reduce that without any great pains. We had talked about the vacant space. We had talked about the vacancy savings already. And then we also highlighted earlier in an earlier slide, the data and assessment reclass. Kathy, anything to add to the grants or anything as far as education services that I might have missed? Nope. I think you listed them all. Hey, for the House committee members, either education or appropriation. Are there any questions regarding these reductions? Representative Austin. Yes. I'm just wondering for the early reading grant. Is that personnel that is being cut? So it's my understanding. And Kathy, correct me if I'm wrong here, the early reading grant of 76,000. That has not been used in recent years. Thank you. Representative Hooper. I wasn't writing, excuse me, fast enough when you listed off the grant reductions. I lost you after outright Vermont. So outright Vermont was 40,000. And then early reading was 76,561. And just to confirm the other two, Governor's Institute, it's a reduction of 5,780. And then teacher of the year is a reduction of 2,500. And the detail that you're sending us will enable us to see what the total grants were as well as this reduction. Absolutely. Yes. I have an action item to share that with Teresa. OK, thank you. I can't help but assume, and so I shouldn't, that the reduction to outright Vermont is going to significantly affect their operations. Do you have any insight into that? Kathy, I will defer to you as far as. I can just read in that as well. The they had previously, I believe, received a $20,000 grant from the agency, but it was through federal dollars that we had received. And that funding stopped. And there was a little bit of a don't say this is my characterization, a bit of a traffic jam of how that money went out. So in prior time, they had received sort of a chunk of that multiple years of the 20,000 all at once. So we had notified them last year, the year before that the federal grant went away and the General Assembly addressed that by not giving them a separate appropriation for the typical 20,000. They gave them $60,000 and that was sort of an anomaly you know, based on once again that sort of bulk of accumulating payments that went their way at one point. So actually bringing it to 20,000 is what they're typically used to. The 60,000 was an anomaly. But I'd secondly say that previously all of that subsidy came from a federal grant that we no longer have. So this would be state dollars being used to support their work. Thank you. Representative Townsend and then Representative Lanford. Thank you. With regard to the cut to the governor's institute, institutes, is this going to be diminishing the number of students that may participate? I would I would say I'm not sure. I think, you know, it's certainly a very worthy program. We've struggled with finding ways to add to this appropriation over the years, but they also have a considerable amount of other financial resources coming in.  So it's, I think, too early to say to what extent how this would be impacting our operations. So there wasn't any, let's see, how should I put this? So the amount by which their budget amount was cut was not based on any particular rationale other than money needed to be found. That's correct. And also understanding that they have other revenue sources available to sustain Thank you. Representative Blanford. Sorry, Kitty, I have a perpetual habit of not lowering my hand. So I apologize. OK. Any other questions? Does the House Education Committee members have any other questions? Let's move to the next set of three percent reductions. And so this next slide is a deeper dive and it shows the makeup of the five hundred and two thousand three hundred and five dollars and when I send over the the detail line by line support crosswalk as you refer to it, as you'll you'll be able to see for the internal service fund fifty seven thousand. What makes that up? And then also we talked about the vacancy savings of sixty two thousand. You'll see the two lines that make up the contractual changes of fifty thousand. And then you'll see the individual lines that we just talked about that make up the grants. Travel is just a single line reduction. And then the other three components. Making up the five hundred and two thousand three hundred and five dollars. Theresa, can you bring that to the bottom? I don't see the full screen. Oh, OK, I see. This is just the roundup. That was the presentation on the exercise to identify a three percent reduction to the Education General Fund. If there are any additional questions on that, we can take them now. And looking for questions, Representative Feltas. Yes, I'm curious about the AEL grants and the dual enrollment. Do you anticipate is is part of the reason you feel you can reduce those? You anticipate fewer participants due to number one. See the coronavirus problem as well as just inconvenience and lack of internet and all kinds of other reasons that you might have fewer participants during this next nine months for those programs. Yes, did you want to go into a deeper explanation? We talked about what made up those two. It's provider grants is being reduced by eighty one thousand one hundred and fifty. And then adult diploma program is getting reduced by twenty seven thousand, which makes up one hundred and eight thousand one hundred and fifty. Yeah, the dual enrollment. We did a straight three percent to be in line with the exercise instructions. The fifty nine thousand, I should point out, is a combination of General Fund and Ed Fund because by statute, dual enrollment program is fifty percent Ed Fund, fifty percent General Fund. So it would be twenty twenty nine thousand from both of those funds. For dual enrollment, I would say that that is a statutory program that allows students to participate if they meet certain requirements. And there is really no way of predicting from one year to the next how many students may or may not elect to go the dual and route and dual enrollment route in their education. So it was it was straight up a three percent exercise from that grant program. And I have a clarifier and I can understand that, but it would seem to me in the current environment that perhaps there might be fewer participants in both of those programs simply because of isolation issues and because of poor internet issues, people not being able to participate as much in those programs in the in the short term in the next nine months. As an example, yeah, I think there's no way unless and unless Secretary French can can talk about remote learning work that the agency is doing. I don't know that there's a way that we can predict exactly what students will or won't choose to do this year. Yeah, I think, you know, my impression, especially, you know, we come at the end of the year and we sort of find out sort of like special ed funding, we find out how much you need. There was because, as Kathy said, it's a statutory entitlement. I don't have any insight into what the trends will be. I expect our infrastructure relative to broad and to continue to improve. But it's hard really to predict how that will play out in the context of higher education and we are deploying us, you know, a lot more remote learning just for the regular K-12 curriculum. So I have no ability, even in any near to predictable enrollment this year, it's going to be seemingly uncertain in that regard. Thank you. Thank you, Marty. Kate, I think you had a question or comments. Yes, thank you. I don't have access to my little blue hand, so just yelling out a class here. I just have a clarifying question on the vacancy savings. Are you saying that those vacancy savings are particularly related to holding those positions and not filling for another six to eight weeks? Am I did I understand that correctly earlier or not? Yes, I would I would say, you know, Representative Hooper summary was I would summarize it as well as like any large organization, we have a certain amount of vacancy savings. So this is remain more or less unchanged from our previous budgetary projection. However, we have included the savings as a result of the hiring freeze. So it's our normal sort of wear and tear, if you will, on the term of hiring. And you are going to HR at this point. I understand to try to fill that one of my concerns that remains is that certainly we know that the the agency has suffered a loss of staffing for a number of years and certainly before the pandemic. My concern here and and interested in your response. We certainly know that since March, the the the requests and the needs from districts have increased to the agency. There's they're looking for more help. I know that you turned your whole flexible pathways into remote learning. And I'm I'm I've always been concerned about the lack of staffing that you have at the agency. But I'm really looking now at at a time where the needs are greater than they really have ever been. And if you are going to be considering looking for more support coming forward. Yeah, I think, you know, it's the impact of COVID is going to be long lasting. And one of the things we've done immediately is to try to automate our support. So as you mentioned, we basically had to reconfigure a whole division. But we also had to augment our communications team and bring people from other parts of the agency together. So we've we've deployed a help desk and a knowledge center, which will allow us to it has allowed us to handle a significant increase in the volume of communications and support requests that we receive. So we've done some of that through automation. But I think the long the longer term implications are where we haven't begun to really assess. I would expect, as I often say with COVID, I think we're going to see increased student needs at student support areas, such as special education and so forth. So as one end of the agency, which might was involved would be more immediate communications aspects of the emergency response. We'll see that transition to another section of the agency, student support, special ed and so forth become more urgent. So it's really it's kind of hard at this point to predict that. But I think, you know, yes, I would agree the assessment that I would see in the pattern is increased centralization on things like operations as part of our SSDVMS mission, trying to pull in sort of the back office functions to the state level as best we can. And there'll be more, I think, continued decentralization of the curriculum expertise, which is something that started back in 2008 or so. But the back office things, I think, should be centralized at the state level, done more efficiently. I could just one more, kid, if you don't mind. Yes, please. Also, I'm looking at the vacancies that you that you have in finance, and half of them are actually related to special ed, I believe. And given that the annual OSEP determination letter indicated that Vermont wasn't doing too well and that we've actually moved to the level of intervention, which seems to me costly. It's not good for children, but it's also expensive. And so I'm balancing the challenge of having a department that is understaffed, possibly likely, because the people you're looking for have advanced degrees. And so I stand concerned about that. And I'm asking if that's a concern that you're carrying as well, moving forward in relation to that OSEP letter. Yeah, I mean, I still I balance that concern with us making progress on some of those friends. The OSEP concerns are not new to us, really, from my perspective, the result of significant vacancies in our student supports division, including not having a state director of special education for some time. So as those programs come back online, we shouldn't be surprised to find the deficiencies. But I prefer to just, you know, sort of advocate for our agency based on what the need is. I think the needs are changing. But I also know, you know, that that agencies of education, the SEAs, if you will, are configured differently across the country. But there are some similarities. I was talking with my colleague in Maine, Elidae, she has exactly the same number of employees that serve the whole state of Maine and basically have twice as many students as Vermont. Connecticut has pretty much the same number of employees, a little higher, but they serve 500,000 students. So it's really hard to understand. I think what I've noticed is that we have, like most agencies, we have one person doing one thing. So when we have a turnover, we're very vulnerable to that. We haven't made pace with automating a lot of our practices. So we have integrated technology that we're also trying to build modern technology with at the same time. So I think there's light at the end of the tunnel. But I think there's a lot we can do on the back office side to simplify things for the field and bring that into the agency. So for those that the appropriation scheme might not be familiar with the SSDDMS initiative, which is a good example. This is the idea is to centralize the accounting and HR functions into one system. You know, it's been really problematic and challenging. I think that's moving forward OK now. But that concept allows us to simplify the system overall, meaning that we have one platform by which we can extract our data at the state level from and locals can use and it saves licensing costs and software right across the board. So those kinds of things are where we need to go as much as we talk about staffing. I'm not so keenly interested in staffing and equated technology or antiquated processes. I'm very interested in staffing modernization initiatives. And I think we're making progress on those things, but it will take some time. But I think, you know, to the observation of comparing Maine to Vermont, you know, we all have the same number of programs to administer and that's why SCAs are as big as they are. So whether you're California or Vermont or Maine, you still have the same number of federal programs to administer. So we're just going to have to learn to operate a little smarter, I think, in terms of modernizing how we deal with information technology and how we work together as teams inside the agency. That's starting that conversation. Yeah, sorry, you're very familiar with that. Secretary French, I understand that, you know, you need to support the governor's, you know, proposal and that you know, I know that you and your your team really worked hard on finding these 3% savings. However, they were more assigned than organically, you know, came to the table as places where, you know, you could really make reductions and perhaps some of them were organic and you would have come up with them anyway. Instead of, you know, we understand, you know, the travel is probably an easy one, a small amount for supplies, you may be able to make things work. And you talked about the vacancy savings and moving in a different direction with employees, not just about the number of employees, but what they do. Which one of which one of these reductions gives you a little unease or pain? Do you see any really having an impact on the administration of a program? And it didn't feel quite as easy as maybe another one does. Yeah, I would just, you know, start to, you know, as I've learned a secretary and as I would say as a superintendent, who was an advocate for having the secretary be an appointee of the governor. Part of the concept was that the agency of education is not a separate entity. It's part of the executive branch. So the governor's proposal, quote unquote, is my recommended. My slice of it is my recommended budget as well. And I appreciate that. There isn't much that doesn't give me unease, particularly the programmatic sides. You know, as an educator, I'm I'm focused on doing the best I can to protect the program viability and I'm on, you know, the grant cuts that we've named, I don't feel good about any of those.  Vermont governor's institutes do enrollment programs. Those have proven to be very valuable programs in the state. And we try to support them as best we can. But as you know, very well, that the budgets have to be balanced and those those issues have to be reconciled. So, you know, to the point that representative Web made, I'm going to be very protective of maintaining the capacity I do have in the agency because I do have, you know, stresses on that. And we have a lot of work to do, particularly with covid. So I don't want to lose positions at this point. So I'm doing the best I can to strike those balances. But I think my instinct would tell me that we're in for an era where we have to be tighter on things and it's going to be very challenging for you and for us to strike the right balance. But I think that's precisely the time we're in. So I've been in budgeting exercises, quote unquote, where you receive targets from school boards or or from a finance office and so forth. And that's not an invalid way to start a budget process, because at least it kind of gives you some flexibility or you know, where the touch points are, where you start to get discomfort. But I feel I feel very comfortable with what we're proposing. I am. I think the program, the grants are, you know, those are those are things I wouldn't feel good about regardless. But I think those kinds of things have to be addressed rationally in the context of living within our means. And I think it's going to be time for a little belt belt tightening, if you will, on the programs. And so we endeavor to get our agency in sync with the time, so to speak, in that regard. I'm sorry, I was muted. We have a question from Representative Conlon and Representative James. But thanks very much. Among those that give me unease is the cut to dual enrollment. I think that that has been a program with increasing demand. And I would actually have the concern that as students with online learning becoming so prevalent, that students are no longer limited by distance to campus, that actually the demand for dual enrollment, which, as you say, is an entitlement is actually going to grow. I'm not sure how we balance that growth with a proposed three percent cut. Yeah, you know, as we've talked in your committee briefly on this, I think we need to get clear on the policy intention of dual enrollment. You know, I think the intention was to subsidize those students, particularly first generation students who would have otherwise difficulty accessing higher education into focus on their needs. I think if we do that, we will find a different way to live within the budget, so to speak. But we know there are significant patterns in inequity in access to dual enrollment. And what we've seen, I think the agencies provided at least two years of reporting on this, if not three years, that those who probably don't need the subsidy are taking advantage of it more so than those that probably do need it. Yeah, I'm not sure we're going to solve that problem, though, for the FY 21 budget. Thank you, Representative Conlon. Representative James, your hand was up and then it was down. I do have a question. Yeah, thank you. Secretary French, I just I know you already addressed you know, you're unease with the with the size of the cut to outright Vermont. And I wondered if you considered at all a smaller budget cut. I was just out with my calculator and noticing that, you know, a cut to one small nonprofit equates to almost eight percent of your overall budget reductions. And, you know, we've been we've been reading that nonprofits in particular are having a hard time maybe accessing some of the grants that we made available through the CF funds because they're not seeing necessarily those revenue reductions, you know, in in the time period. You know, they're not necessarily seeing that 50 percent revenue reduction in the time period that we the legislature required. And nonprofits may also be having a hard time raising money through their annual fundraising campaigns that are that often come up in the fall. And so it seems to me that nonprofits are in a particular they're in a particularly difficult position sometimes or maybe this year. They're they're not often access, you know, they can't access the grants through the ACCD. They might have a tough time this fall raising private philanthropic dollars and a forty thousand dollar cut, you know, in the context of an overall five five hundred thousand dollar reduction in the AOE seems like a big hit. And I wondered if you guys considered a smaller reduction for outright. No, I think the, you know, to my point earlier, I probably didn't say as fluently. They're typical the money they received from us once again, past or from the federal government was twenty thousand dollars. So from our perspective, this brings it back to what their typical amount of revenue was. I think the sixty thousand dollars we didn't really have a part in putting that together, that was done outside of an agency recommendation through the legislative process. So sixty was an anomaly, if you will, in terms of that support. I think also what's an anomaly in this regard is we don't we're not really sure we don't have any assurance or sort of direct policy direction on what they're supposed to achieve for those dollars. So we have many, many, many, you know, nonprofits in the state doing great work, but we don't necessarily just give them money without some assurance of providing a service. So, for example, typically, and I would expect the a lot of the work that outright does is probably going to be increased as we go into the recovery of COVID-19 data we're seeing from youth risk behavior survey indicates that many of the students they serve are probably more vulnerable due to the stresses that we're seeing as a result of the emergency. So we're going to have need for additional services. But typically we would put out an RFP for those services and other agencies or other organizations say would compete, but would submit proposals and also identify the scope of the work they would do and what are the measures that we would know for this kind of appropriation where we weren't really involved in it and we really don't know to what extent the money is being utilized. I'm sure they're doing great work as I work with them all the time, but we don't have any kind of measure of how the work is going and we don't have any oversight of ensuring that the money is being spent in accordance with the policy direction because there is no policy direction attached. That's helpful. Thanks. Thank you. I'm paying attention to time. I want to be considered of your time. And is this our last slide bill or is there one more below the slide? So this is the last slide as it relates to the budget exercise. I did add a couple of slides at the end just to highlight the summary of the carry forward requests. But that's above and beyond the budget conversation. So this particular slide, the ups and down deeper dive with the last one of the budget. OK, so what of your carry forward, the 20,000 of carry forward, you reverted six point out of the 20 million, you reverted six point two. So there's two slides. I couldn't fit this on one slide without straining my eyes. And so I'm 13 and 14. So I'm 13 has a subtotal of six point two and then slide 14 has another subtotal of the reversion of seven point eight, which is a total of 14 and that is made up of the individual line items that we we see on both of these pages. OK, so state play student, you had I'm just taking the first one. You had to carry forward a million dollars and and out of that one million. I want to make sure I'm reading this correctly. You reverted back three point three. We're going to carry forward a million than we're reverting three point three. That's right. And so you're you're keeping six hundred six six point seven. No, six hundred and no, wait a minute. I'm not I'm not reading this correctly. The Kerry separate from the reversions. Yes. OK, so out of the carry forwards, how much of the carry forwards do you get to keep and how much are reverted back to the administration to be to go out elsewhere? And we're just talking a state place students as an example at the top of slide 14. And we're asking that we carry forward one million dollars for twenty obligation and the remaining balance or three point three million is getting reverted back. Can I just so in other words, you had four point three million and carry forward total. We were asking to carry forward one million and we're reverting back to three point three. Yes. So the total of it was the four point three. And that means yes, four point. OK, so with education spending grants, you're reverting the full amount. Yes. So when when Kathy, Brad and I took a look at the end of year balances, we took into consideration. All right, do we have any outstanding purchase orders? Do we have any anticipated FY 20 obligations that we'll want to make sure we have enough money available for? Balance is what we're recommending that we revert back. OK, just so I'm reading this correctly, when we get to the subtotal of carry forwards, you are carrying forward within your own budget. Two point six five million. You're keeping it. You're not reverting. You're not reverting any of that back. You're keeping that full carry forward. Right. That amount. The reversions that go back into the overall budget are seven point eight eight. On this particular page, on this page. OK, I just want to make sure I was reading it correctly. Can we see the next page? Want to get into as far as detail on the purchase orders or the carryovers? What are the purchase orders? I don't. Do we have detail on that, Kathy? I don't have any detail other than saying a purchase order would have been created for us to bring FY 20 funds forward against contractual obligations. So a purchase order is created in the state's accounting system to obligate funds to pay for contract obligations. So the biggest share of that, if you see is the Finance and Administration Education Fund. That is a contractual obligation to our contractor who is managing the SSDMS project, which is funded by the Ed fund. So all of the purchase orders are dollars that you need to keep to pay for those obligations. Exactly. OK, the carry forward is also money that you are keeping to carry forward for similar expenses or expenses in another area. Yes, the bulk of those are grant obligations. OK, and then the reversions are the totals that have gone back into the larger pool to be distributed throughout state government. Correct. OK, we have two questions. We have one from Kimberly, I believe. Thank you. I'm looking at slide 13 and I noted that the ethnic and social advisory group has a reversion of about 15,000. And I remembering that I think is act one. Was there a delay or another explanation for that? I don't know about a delay. Secretary French may be able to respond to that. But those were allocated for per diems that were the dot where the dollars were not ultimately requested by any of the committee members. And because there is a new allocation of funds for FY 21, we're able to revert the FY 20 remaining balance. Yes, I would concur. My understanding is that the appropriation was tied to their per diem rates and the committee, the advisory group took longer to organize themselves and select their members than was anticipated. So they did not meet for quite some time. Are they on track now? Yes. Great. Thank you. And funded in 21. Is that correct? I believe so. OK, thank you. OK, thank you. Mary Hopper, you have a question? Mary, I thought I saw your hand up, Mary. Yeah, I did. And I muted and unmuted and muted myself. I think we've run out of time or we're in the verge of running out of time, but in the proposed in the carry forwards and reversion sheets, there's some pretty significant amounts of money that we're talking about. And it strikes me that we ought to dig into these a little deeper to understand why funds weren't allocated. In particular, I'm looking at the special ed formula where we're looking at a total of twenty four million dollars that wasn't spent in 20. And I think we ought to understand that. I don't know what the special ed budget line is in total, but that's a lot of money. And similarly, I'm technical ed, you know, two point. I shouldn't try to do math. Two point three million that wasn't spent. And again, we ought to understand why. I think I may be asking the Ed committee and Chip to dig into this. These are very, very similar to do enrollment. The bottom line is we don't know how the programs will end. So special ed, obviously, is an entitlement program. So we budget based on a service plan work that districts do a year. They're about to do that now to predict what their special ed costs will be next year. But we never know until the fiscal year ends. Actually, what the actual special ed costs are. So there's always going to be those kinds of variations in special education. And I would I would argue do enrollments the same way it's an entitlement program. So we go with what we know to perform a budget that we're not quite sure what the ultimate cost. Yeah, I think special ed is one of the places where it really is an anomaly. And Brad could speak to some of the specifics of it. But we carried a large chunk of ed fund into current year. On purpose, because with the anticipation of special ed, moving to the block process, block grant system, which has now been delayed, like there was an anticipation that there's going to be sort of this payoff of a large tail in the next year. So we wanted to make sure we carried over enough money for that to happen. And now the special ed is not going to be converted to the block system until another two years, Brad. But I know there is some there is some level of detail that Brad could speak to for this special ed. And I've got it because we're so close on time. I want to continue this conversation with with Chip for our committee and also the committee of jurisdiction, dig into some of these details that we have. We have if there are two quick questions and I want to be respectful, Secretary, your time. Representative Yakovani and conquest each have a question. And if they can be answered quickly, let's do that. And if not, we will have Chip follow up. So, Dave, why don't you go first and then we'll finish with Chip. Thank you. I'll be quick and Secretary, this may be something you may want to get back to me on just given the time constraints. I'm I'm concerned about children with special education needs, their supervision and safety needs at home in this remote learning environment and wonder to what degree you're able to coordinate with AHS around these most vulnerable students and our school districts to utilize and maximize what some of us call the success beyond six program and leveraging those federal dollars with our designated agencies to provide those supports. Is this something on your radar? And could you share with me offline, if need be, what you may be doing in this area? I'll have you do it. Absolutely. On the front, almost on the front burner now, I think goal is to get schools reopened, but we're having a lot of conversations with the DSAs. I mean, right now, getting schools reopened is our biggest intervention that we could introduce. But we know there's going to be significant immediate need to support students as a result of the crisis. And this will probably continue for some time after we achieve some side of normal, same education. But happy to follow up. Thank you, Dave, and please share you learn with our committee and also with with with the Committee of Jurisdiction. And Chip, do you have a question or a comment? Well, I was going to say it, but I'll just say real quickly that I've always, but every year I have looked at the reversions and thought, oh, my gosh, that's a lot of money. And every year I asked Brad about it. And it turns out to be exactly what Secretary French said that a lot of it is just sort of the unpredictability of how much of the the fund is going to be used, how much demand there's going to be. I'm happy to ask Brad again this year if there's anything that stand out. And maybe this can be my asking him now if there's any any particular area that's unusual. But this is these reversions in my experience are not not out of line with the way it usually happens. So I'll look into it more, but I don't expect to find that there's anything, frankly, unusual. Thank you, Chip. And what you find out when we, when we hear back from the Education Committee that that would be a good time to weigh in with those pieces. I want to thank the secretary and the whole team from the Education Agency coming in. And with your budget, this is, I mean, it's a very tender time. As David Giacoboni said, with children not being able to attend schools or attend schools part-time or some families that are doing it remotely. What does it mean for the child? What's the pressure it's going to cause in the future? And there are endless questions about education out there and the impact, the negative impact as, as well as maybe new learning opportunities. But mostly I think we're, we're just very concerned what this is meaning for our learners, especially the young ones who cannot spend a lot of time on a screen and get what they need. And, and so these reductions are concerning. And what I would ask the, the Education Committee, we are not going to send a letter like we typically do because time is so short. And so as you work through the reductions and changes, we look forward to as soon as possible, a letter of recommendation. And if you would invite representative conquest into some of your deliberations, it would help coordinate these activities and, and then we can continue our questioning with, with the agency and the secretary as well. Our turnaround time is going to be approximately or less than two weeks. And so this is all expedited. And to find any of the language and any of the documents, please access the JFO website. If there's something in particular, you need to find a Teresa is really great. And thank you, Teresa and Maria for the information out to you. But this is, this is the new format that we're going to kind of work as a team. We'll work through chip and chip will bring information back to us. Thank you. And Mr. Secretary, we will work on a meeting with you very soon. Thank you for your thoughtful questions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And our team appreciates that level of scrutiny and the, we look forward to working with you in the coming weeks. Thank you. And we know the challenges, especially in this area are great and they're only going to be greater. Dave, did you have a final thought?  I'm good. I apologize. Okay. So unless there's anything else. I think we're going to close this session out and thank you, Secretary French for coming in and for your testimony. And bill for all the financial information. I'm looking around the screen. It's, it's so they jump around on me and Kathy. As well. Thank you. Candice, you are your position is just so that we know, I don't know because I don't work with education as much. That's okay. Chair toll. Thank you. I'm actually with the administration and budget and management, but education is my assignment. So I'm going to go ahead and say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm also with the administration and budget and management, but education is my assignment. Okay. So that's okay. Thank you. All right. Then we look forward to recommendations and figuring out if these reductions are something we all get comfortable with or there's changes we feel need to be made. I am going to sign out from YouTube then. So our official businesses.


Whether it's careful candle placement or checking the warning label on holiday lights, simple safety tips can go a long way in preventing fires and injuries this year. When purchasing an artificial tree, do look for the label for fire resistant. Although this label does not mean the tree won't catch fire, it does indicate the tree is more resistant to burning. When purchasing a live tree, do check for freshness. A fresh tree is green, needles are hard to pull off from branches, and do not break when bent between your fingers. The bottom of a fresh tree is sticky with resin. When tapped on the ground, the tree should not lose many needles. When setting up a tree at a home, do place it away from fireplaces, vents, and radiators. Because heated rooms dry out live trees rapidly, be sure to monitor water levels and keep the stand filled with water. Indoors or outside, do use only lights that have been tested for safety by a nationally recognized testing laboratory such as UL or ETL. Use only newer lights that have thicker wiring and safety fuses to prevent the wires from overheating. Check each set of lights new or old for broken or cracked sockets, frayed or bare wires, or loose connections. Throw out damaged sets. When using lights outdoors, do check labels to be sure that they have been certified for outdoor use and only plug them into a ground fault circuit interrupter. Keep burning candles within sight.  Keep lighted candles away from items that can catch fire and burn easily, such as trees, other evergreens, decorations, curtains, and furniture. Thanks for watching!


This show is proudly brought to you by these lovely people. Hey there lovely NPR enthusiasts! It's the first BNPR show for 2022! Let's get the show going! The highlights are grease pencil essential tips gelato rubato, stylish, and not a font. And watch a fighter pilot dancing. Welcome to the BNPR show! A celebration of stylized and non-photoreal rendering. As usual, we've gathered a feast of artworks for your eyes and hearts. Please enjoy! First, Phantom Flame by BBBN19. It's called the Phantom Flame because only the area outside the flame is visible, much like burning alcohol. Here's the summary on how to make it. First, we make a flame mask. It's done by multiplying the color ramps on the X and Y of the UV map. Then, add a 3D noise texture with distortion with vector add and multiply for animation later. Next, the noise texture is blended using linear light blend mode with the flame mask. To make the shading, mix a transparent and an emission shader and use the output from the linear light node as the factor. Set the alpha blend mode to alpha blend so that the shading looks closer to a flame. Now for the secret sauce. For the emission fall-off effect, add a color ramp with a black and white gradient. Add a minimum node with 0.999 and add a logarithm node with the first input of 0.9995, then link the minimum output to the second input. Then multiply the log output with the color ramp to fix the shading problem. To recolor the phantom flame, use the noise textures color as the input to a color ramp. To make the mesh deform over time, add a sub-div modifier. Add a vertex group to the top part of the flame. Then use the vertex group as part of the mesh that deforms in the displaced modifier with a cloud texture. To animate the deformation, add an empty and set the displaced coordinates to the empty. Then animate the empty using a driver. And just like that, you get a phantom flame. Bakery Shop. Grease Pencil Basics by Kevin Dramm. Let's return to the fundamentals, but this time we're making a bakery shop. There is a lot shown in the tutorial, but we still think there are a few key points you should know. Tip 1. Turn on these viewport overlays to help drawing be more intuitive. The grid, 3D cursor, and canvas. Tip number 2. You have to master the two most important settings, the stroke placement, and the drawing plane. You can adjust the angle of the drawing plane using the 3D cursor rotation parameter. Tip 3. Please change the view transform from filmic to standard. In fact, you should do this for all NPR artwork. Tip number 4. A common workflow using the drawing plane. Tab into edit mode to place the 3D cursor to the selected vert. Then change the drawing plane to the direction you want, then draw. Tip number 5. Set the camera view early in the process to make drawing easier from the camera view. This is also true with projection painting. Tip 6. Sometimes your stroke or fill will appear behind other grease pencil layers. Make sure the appropriate stroke depth order type is selected, which can be either 2D layers or 3D locations. You can arrange the draw order using the right-click menu or the special menu in edit mode. Tip 7. You can scale any selected stroke in edit mode using ALT-S. Tip 8. In further edit primitive grease pencil objects in edit mode. For example, an arch window can be made from a circle, then combined with a rectangle shape. Tip number 9. Toggle auto merge in draw mode to automatically join the endpoint of every stroke. Tip 10. Stroke and fill can be in material mode, which follows the material colors, or in vertex color mode, which will be in the color you set for the vertex. Use the material mode if you want to change the material color for many objects in one go. Use the vertex color mode when you want to draw in any color and do not want to worry about the material color. And lastly, tip 11. To change colors of any stroke and fill, you can either change the color in the material if the material mode is used, or use the tint tool, or use the vertex paint mode. And there you have it. All the key points to aid you in your grease pencil journey. Painterly Brushworks by Tausif. Tausif mentions a few color topics that we want to elaborate further here. First, doing color study. This is the process of picking color from paintings and seeing their relationship in the color selector. Even for expert color pickers, this exercise is important to discover new color relationships. You'll find new colors that match each other nicely. Some colors you thought that may not work may actually work in certain cases. The more you do color studies, the richer your color palette will be. Second, the relationship of warm light and cool shadows. Most shadows are cool because they have shades. Well, all joking aside, not all shadows are created equal. Some glow with subsurface scattering, and some reflect from the surrounding objects.  Thus, mix in your colors with all nature has to provide, and include them using your brushwork. And you know, if you want to master color instantly, insert shameless plug here, please grab our soul-stirring digital color mastery e-book. You'll master color very fast. A number of university students commented that the e-book is the best color education they have ever had, period. Ah, now for the animations. Love theme from Knucklehead Junction. The transition in the animation is superb. The grease pencil work blends very well with the 3D objects. Also, it uses mostly shadeless shading. We'll watch that on repeat. Gelato Roboto by Motif Studios. It has beautiful colors and designs. Robots duke it out in a cyberpunk frenzy over a mysterious package. Watch the video to find out what's in the package. Sci-Fi Pilot by Ginger Bear. This whole music video is an experiment. The dancing is motion-captured and put on by a fighter pilot character. In the helmet, is she a robot or someone gorgeous? You decide. Please do visit the show notes. We always leave a lot of goodies in there. Plus, this show is made possible by these kind-hearted people. Please thank them kindly. And before we go, one final question. Did you notice that most of the interesting artworks have really good color palettes?


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From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. This is theCUBE, Cube Virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE in SiliconANGLE. Two great guests here, two engineers and architects. Michael McCarthy is an architect and delivery engineering who's giving a talk with GameSys and Jorgen Wreck, who's a technical architect for the platform engineering team at GameSys. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Hello. Nice to see you. Coming in from London, coming in from Malta. You guys are doing a lot of engineering.  I want to get into some of the cool things you're doing. Obviously, Kubernetes, automation, platform engineering. This is what everyone's working on right now that's going to be positioned for the future. Before we get started though, tell me a little bit about what GameSys does and you guys' role. Michael, we'll start with you. Sure. So we're a gaming operator. We run multiple bingo-led and casino-led gaming websites, some of them are B2B, some are B2C. I think we've been doing it now for probably 14 or 15 years at least. I've been there for 12 and a half of those. So we essentially run gaming websites where people come and play their overgames. And what's your role there? What do you do? So I'm in the operations side of things. I used to be a developer for 12 or so years. We make sure that everything's kind of up and running. We keep the systems running. My team in particular focuses on the speed of delivery for developers. So we're constantly looking at how long is it taken to get things in front of the customers? Can we make it faster? Can we make it easier? And can we put cool stuff out there quicker? So it's a kind of platform-y type role that I do and I enjoy it a lot, so it's good.  Which is your role? Well, I've been with GamesX also for eight and a half years now. I hold the position of technical architect at the moment within this platform engineering group, which is mostly tasked with all things ops related. I am responsible for designing, implementing and validating strategies for continuous deployment, whilst always ensuring high availability on both production and pre-production systems. I'm also responsible for the design and implementation of automated dynamic environments to support the needs of the development teams and also collaborating with other architects, especially those on the development floors in order to optimize the deployment and operational strategies for both existing and new types of services alike. Awesome, thanks for sharing that good context. Well, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when you talk about gaming, it's uptime and high availability is critical. Having people being the login, you got to have the right data strategies. I mean, it can't be down, right? It's a critical app. People are not going to enjoy it if they're not on it. So I can see how scale is huge. Can you guys talk about how Ansible fits in because automation has been the theme here. You guys have been having a journey with automation. What's been your automation solution with Ansible? I'll go, Michael. Yeah. So basically back in July, 2014, we started to look at Ansible to replace those commonly used day-to-day best scripts which our ops team used to execute and which could lead to some human error. That was our main original goal of using Ansible at the time. At the time, also our infrastructure looked considerably different, definitely much, much smaller than the current private cloud footprint. And as I said, as early adopters within the operations team, it was imperative for us to automate as much as possible those repetitive tasks which involved the execution of various scripts and were prone to human error. Since then, however, our Ansible usage evolved quickly. Since 2014, we went through two major infrastructure overholes and automation using Ansible was always at the heart of each of those overholes. In fact, our latest private cloud which is based on OpenStack is completely built from the ground up using Ansible code. So this includes the provisioning of visual machines, our entire networking stacks, so switches, routers, firewall, the SDN which OpenStack is built upon, our internal DNS system, basically all you need to have a fully functional private cloud. At GameSys, we also have some workloads running into different public clouds. And even in this case, we are running Ansible code to set up all the required infrastructure components. Again, since we were fairly new adopters at the time of this technology, we wrapped all of those Ansible code using the original SDKs. However, now this evolved considerably and with the enhancements of the dedicated modules, Polish public cloud, we've made the code look much cleaner, readable and error proof. You made some great progress. Michael, you want to weigh in on this? Yeah. Any thoughts on? Yeah, I think it's kind of, adding to what Jürgen said, I think it's kind of everywhere. So you mentioned high availability, you mentioned kind of uptime. Imagine the people that operate the infra, the people that get called out and they're working 24-7. A lot of the things that they would do, the kind of run books they would use to restart something, their Ansible as well. So it's the deployment scripts, it's the kind of scripts that keep things running, it's the stuff that spins up the environments, as Jürgen said. I've noticed a lot on the development side where we look at continuous delivery, people are running their own build servers. A lot of the scripting that people do, which you'd imagine might be done with sort of say Bash, I think I've seen a lot of Ansible being used there amongst developers. I guess it's got an easy learning curve, it's got all of those modules. A lot of the scripting around CD I think is Ansible, it plays quite nicely. You know, URI module and FAR modules and, yeah, I think it's kind of everywhere, I think. It's quite amazing. I guess they wanted to get something going, good, it's awesome. Automation has got great success, so it's been a big theme of Ansible Fest 2020, automation, collections, et cetera. But the question I have for you guys as customers is how large of an IT estate were you looking to automate and where was the most imperative places to automate first? The most imperative items we wanted to automate first, as I said, were those operational day-to-day tasks handled by our network operations team. Our estate is massive, so we are running our infrastructure across five different data centers around the world. Thousands of virtual machines, hundreds of network components. So we deal with customers all around the world, so our point of presence is spread out around the world as well. And you can't really handle such kind of size without some sort of automation. And Ansible, the bill, perfectly in my opinion. And so your goal is to automate the entire landscape. Are you there now? Where are you on that progress? I would say we're at a very advanced stage in this process. Since 2014, we've made huge strides all of our most recent private cloud setups, as I said, have been built from the ground up using Ansible. And I would say a good 90% plus of our operational tasks are handled using some kind of Ansible Playbook. Yeah, that makes total sense. Michael, you brought up the, you start early and people, it spreads, those are my words, but you were actually saying that. What kind of systems do people tend to start with at Ansible? And where's that first sticky moment where it lands and expands? And which teams jump on at first? Is it the developers? Is it more the IT? Take us through some of how this all gets started and how it spreads. I think the first time I remember using it was probably, I think 2014, 2015. And it was what Jürgen mentioned. I was on the dev side and we wanted a way to have consistency in how we deployed. We wanted to be able to deploy the exact same way into earlier environments, into dev environments as we did in staging and production. And someone kind of found Ansible and then someone in operations kind of saw it and they were happy with it and they felt comfortable using the, kind of getting up to speed. And I think it was hard to know where it really started first but you sort of looked around and every team, every team kind of had it. So you know, who actually started? I'm not sure, but it's all over the place. You did. Yeah. And I think where people start with it first, it probably depends if you're on the ops or the dev side. I think on the dev side, we're encouraging people to own their own deployment playbooks. You're responsible for the deployment of your system to production. Obviously, you've got the network operations, the not group sort of thing for you, but your first exposure is probably gonna be writing a playbook to deploy your app or maybe it's around some build tooling, spinning up your own build environment, that's something you'll be doing with Ansible. And it's especially around the deployment stuff because everything's in Git. There's that collaboration which I never saw. Obviously, I saw people chatting over kind of slack and teams, but in terms of being able to sort of raise PRs, having developers raise PRs, having operations, comment on them the same way around, but that's been a massive change which I think has come from using Ansible. The collaboration piece is huge and I think it's one of those things early on. I have all the Ansible friends that I know that use it in customers and in the company. Probably was just good. It just word of mouth, spread it around. Be like, this is workable, saves a lot of time and it's a pain point remover. It also enables some things to happen with now automation, but now it's mature, right? So, Juergen, I got to ask you, in the maturation of all this automation, you're talking about scale, you mentioned it. OpenStack, you guys got the private cloud, people using it for public cloud, and obviously Red Hat has an angle on that. But when you think about the current modern state of the art today, you can't go anywhere without talking about Kubernetes. Kubernetes has really emerged on the scene to manage these clusters, but yet it's just getting started. You have a lot of experience with Ansible and Kubernetes. Can you share your journey with Kubernetes and Ansible and what's your reaction to that? Yes, so back in June, 2016, Gamesys was developing a new gaming platform which was to run on Kubernetes. Kubernetes at the time was fairly new to many at an enterprise level with only a handful of production systems online. So we were tasked to assess how we're going to bring Kubernetes into production. So with that, we identified the requirements to set up a production-grade cluster. And given our experience with Ansible, we embarked on a journey to automate this installation process. Again, using Ansible, this would ensure that all the required installation and configuration parameters, as Michael mentioned, were committed in it. The code is shared with all the respective development teams for ease of collaboration and feedback. And we decided to logically divide our code into two. And we said we're going to have an installation code in order to provide Kubernetes as a service. So this basically installs Docker onto every worker node. It installs Kubelet, all the master plane components of Kubernetes, installs Core DNS, the container storage interface, and a full blown-in cluster monitoring stack. Then we also had our configuration code, which basically sets up namespaces, set labels nodes for specific uses, at certain security policies according to the cluster use case, and creates all the required role-based access configurations. This need to split the code in two came about, really, with the growing adoption of Kubernetes, because at the inception stage, we only had the one team which had requirements to use Kubernetes. However, with various teams getting on board, each required their own flavor with their particular unique configurations. This is, of course, all managed quite easily through the use of different Ansible inventories. And it's all integrated now within Ansible Tower with different unique drop templates to install and configure the Kubernetes clusters. We started, as I said, with just one pre-production or staging cluster in 2016. Today we manage four to two different Kubernetes clusters, including six, which are in production. So as I mentioned earlier. I got to ask you, because Kubernetes, certainly when it came out, I mean, I was a big fanboy of that. I was promoting Kubernetes from the beginning. I saw it as a really great opportunity to bring things together with containers. It turns out that developers love it for that reason. What, you know, so getting your hands on is great, but as you moved it in practice, what problems did it solve for you? So using Ansible definitely solved the problem of ensuring that all of our four to two clusters across all the different data centers are running the same configuration. So they're running the same version. They're running the same security policies. They're running the same namespace according to the type. Each team has a similar deployment token. And it's very, very convenient to roll out changes and upgrades, especially when all of our code has been integrated with Ansible Tower through a simple user interface click. How's Ansible Tower working for you? Is that going well? Ansible Tower? I would say so, yes. Most of our code now is integrated with Ansible Tower. It's allowed us to also share some of the tasks with a wider group of people. Within PEG, we are the guardians of the production environments, really. However, we share the responsibility of staging environments with the respective development teams who primarily use those environments. So as such through the use of Ansible Tower, we've managed to also securely and consistently share the same way how they can install and upgrade these clusters themselves without our involvement. Thank you. Michael, you're giving a call. Oh, sorry, go ahead.  Sorry, no, no, go ahead. Michael, you're giving a presentation breakout session at Ansible Fest. Can you give us a sneak peek of what you're going to talk about? Yeah, sure. So I said we've been using Tower for a long time. We've been using it since 2015, I think. We've probably made some mistakes along the way, I guess, or we've learned a lot of stuff from how we started then to now. So what it does is it follows the timeline of how we started, why there was this big move to make an effort to put all of our deployment playbooks in Ansible, why you would go to Tower over and above Ansible itself. It talks about our early interactions with quite an old version of Tower Now, version 2. Things that we struggled with, then we saw version 3 came out. There was loads and loads of really good stuff in version 3. And it's really about how we use the new features, how it's worked out for us. It's kind of about what games have done with Tower, but I think it's probably applicable to everyone. Anyone that uses Tower, they'll probably come across the same things, how do I scale it for multiple teams? How do I give teams the ownership to own their own playbooks? How do I automate Tower itself? So it talks about that. Checkpointing every few years about where we'd got to and what was going well and what was going less well. So, and a bit of a look forward to what's going to come next with Tower. So we're constantly keeping it up to date and we've got a kind of roadmap for where we want to go. What's interesting about you guys is, you know, you think about, look at OpenStack and then how cloud came on the scene and private cloud has emerged with hybrid and obviously public. You guys are right on the wave of all this large scale stuff and your gaming app really kind of highlights that. And you've been through the paces with Ansible. So I guess my question, and you get a lot of scar tissue when you get success to show for it too, a lot of great stuff. What advice would you give people who are now getting on the new wave, the bigger wave that's coming, which is more users, more scale, more features, more automation, microservices are coming around the corner. It's only going to get more scale. What advice would you give someone who's coming on board with Ansible for the first time? I think you were talking before about Kubernetes and it was so where we were, I think we'd got into containers kind of relatively early and we were deploying Docker. And we had some pretty big kind of scary playbooks and they managed load balancers and deployed Docker containers and it was always interesting to think, you know, how is this all going to change when Kubernetes comes along? And I think that's been really smooth. I think there's a really nice Ansible module that's just called Cates. And I think it's really simple actually, it simplified a lot of the playbooks. And I think the technologies can coexist quite happily. You know, I don't think you have to feel like Kubernetes is going to change all of the investment you've made into Ansible.  So I still think it's a very relevant tool, even with Kubernetes being so kind of prevalent. Jürgen, what's your thoughts on folks getting in now who want to jump in and take advantage of the automation and all the cool stuff with Ansible? What advice would you give them? Yes, I would definitely recommend to look at their infrastructure setups as they would look at their code. So break it down into small, manageable components. Start small, build your roles, make sure to build your roles properly for each of that small component. And then definitely look at Ansible Tower as a way to visualize and control the execution of your code. Make sure you're running it with the proper security policies, with the proper credentials, nor they're not, of course, to break anything which is at the production level. Michael MacArthur, you're going to wreck two great engineers at GameSys. Congratulations on your success and love to unpack the infrastructure and the scale you have and certainly the automation, great success path. And it's going to get easier. I mean, that's what everyone's saying. It's going to get easier. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Take care. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. We're virtual, the CUBE virtual for AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. Thank you for watching.