SmartTranscript of House Education - 2025-01-15 - 1:05 PM

[Zoe Founders ]: Anytime, and you are live. Great. [Speaker 1 ]: Thank you. We are the house education committee. We are meeting on Tuesday, January fourteenth twenty twenty five. For our listening audience, everybody else, this is really about the second time we've met as a group. We still get to know one another, but we're also here to get to know our state and really lay a good foundation for all of our new members and was always good to have anything education related repeated for our. For veteran members, and we're continuing that work a lot of this week. So today, we have our regular crew from the AOE back. We're gonna see a lot of each other this week, and we're gonna report really often people say, well well, what does what is the the the data of our entire state? You know? How many kids do we have? Sometimes you hear eighty five thousand. Sometimes you hear eighty thousand. How many schools do we have? How many all of that. And so we're here. Get money that those questions answered today. I think we'll just dive right in and have you reintroduce yourselves and go go for it. Still running out, we have a a we get through on the screen There those are really subject matter experts from the AOE available for any questions that may pop up as as we go along. Mhmm. Yeah. Great. Thank you. [Zoe Founders ]: Thank you. Thank you for having us. I'm Zoe Founders, secretary of education. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: And I'm Jill Briggs Campbell, the interim deputy secretary of education. [Speaker 3 ]: Well, I just wanna tell [Speaker 1 ]: the committee and everybody else. Okay. The documents are not yet posted. Any will Yeah. They just They are now. [Zoe Founders ]: And we're also joined by Emily Simmons, our legal counsel. We do have a number of our subject matter experts on the call. What I will do is walk through the overall presentation. And then if you have specific questions to get into more of the weeds, we do have others who can expand and provide more context with around the data or the programming as well. So just to begin, this data presentation is part of the report that we rereleased, the state education profile report. This work has been really important in driving our listen and learn tour. It was really critical to us at the agency that we'll need to engage in these conversations. We do this in a way that's really data driven and building an understanding of our current education context. I wanna recognize that all this is a range of data that we'll be walking through today, and it really has been a collective effort of our entire staff. So our data division and all of our programmatic staff have been working really diligently to enhance our data reporting, and we've done that in partnership with the field. We actually built in a very intentional data validation protocol through our listen and learn tour so that we could address long standing data issues and ensure that there was coding consistency across all of our districts and schools. [Speaker 3 ]: So [Zoe Founders ]: we're we're really pleased to be able to to share this with you today. So today, we'll walk through statewide trends. We're looking at the supervisory union and school district level. We do have supplementary reports that drill down further, which [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: we can share with you and make sure you have access to. And, also, can I note that all of the data that you'll see here is also available in an open source data file? We're happy to send the link. It's on the agency website, and that was really critical to us that you'd be able to dive into the the validated data to recreate it. And the state profile report actually also includes what we call recipe cards. So for every one of the sort of analysis that we presented, you actually have the ability to go recreate that data, which is really important and will be sort of standard practice for us moving forward. [Zoe Founders ]: Yeah. We're really excited to bring that into our standard process. It's really important for us to promote transparency and also understanding of the data. As Jill mentioned, this allows for you to recreate the analysis and also for those in the field as well. It was part of a very explicit process to ensure that we all were working off of the same dataset. I think that'll be critical for you and your policy making decisions that we're bringing you validated data from the field. So the same profile report will look at a range of indicators. We will walk through trends related to enrollment, student demographics, student outcomes, staffing, and expenditures. It's really important for us to bring in a comprehensive overview, of our education system. When we started this work, we counted the number of reports that we provide to the federal government. I think it was the upwards of three hundred different reports data report that we are required to produce in federal government. So we have a lot of data. And our intent was how do we bring that data together in a way that's gonna be really meaningful to drive decision making. And part of that effort was pulling together a lot of disparate datasets to make broader meaning around, the holistic, overview of our state. And so that's what we'll share with you today. So things to consider as we walk through this presentation, there's a lot of different data collections that we oversee as an agency. Many of those are required for federal reporting, and this is really one of the first times that we've brought brought together all these different data collections in a way, to make meaning, holistically. So what we've done, throughout this presentation is we'll clarify the definitions of the the data, to make sure you're understanding what is represented in that. And that was some feedback too we received from the field just making sure that we could really provide clear context. Because as you mentioned, how many students do we really have? It depends on how you count the student, and we'll talk about that throughout the the presentation. But as we mentioned, the data that we're bringing to forward today has been validated by the field. I really wanna thank all that were involved in that because that was a very detailed process going into health spreadsheet that they're looking at and making some corrections to ensure that we have a really high quality dataset to drive our planning this cycle. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: And so can we just make a note? So, of course, we would love to be able to bring you, know, last year's data and and this year's data. Mhmm. But because of that validation and the reporting cycle, most of the information that you're going to see here is f y twenty three, and that is the most recent final and valuable data. So, for example, the f y twenty four expenditure data, we hope to be able to actually update and provide last year's data, but that is still going through validation of the field. So there's always that lag, and I know that it can be something where it looks really eager to get the most up to date, but there is a a full sort of review and finalization process that is really important to do. So that's where we're at more to come. I think that, Zoe, and I would love for this to be a report that you all get annually with annually updated information. Peter, you know, it's been a dream of mine for a long time, and I think we're actually [Zoe Founders ]: at a point now where [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: we can generate this kind of reporting that we we all will get at the beginning of the session, right, that you'd be able to introduce. [Speaker 1 ]: That'd be great. [Zoe Founders ]: Wouldn't it? [Speaker 1 ]: Yeah. I [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: think we're dead. [Speaker 1 ]: And just for everybody's verification, we're talking about f y twenty three. We're gonna talk about twenty two, twenty three school year. [Zoe Founders ]: Yeah. Absolutely. And as we're bringing together all these data reports, it's intentionally designed to drive continuous improvement. If we think about getting into a regular cadence, that's gonna be important for us as a state as we're really monitoring our progress towards goals that we're establishing, really working with the field and looking at those best practices and being able to elevate things that are working really well to share that across the state. So we're we're really excited about doing that in a very data driven way. So we'll start by just high level overview to get a sense of overall, enrollment patterns, and our structure. So this is an overview of the Can I ask Yeah? [Speaker 1 ]: Could we [Zoe Founders ]: introduce someone? Yeah. Yeah. Hang on. I'm Emily Simmons. I'm the agency's general counsel. So in charge of the legal division and helping out with policy matters and supporting these experts. It would be fun if you would throw me a question about this data and you could see how much I do not know about that here in the work. But if you have a legal question, I would love to talk through that. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: And we just wanted to make sure that you got to meet Emily Simmons, and she'll be here on the Flash this week, which is very exciting, and we [Zoe Founders ]: could even see again tomorrow as well. Okay. So I think we'll switch out. Yeah. Yes. I don't know. I mean oh oh, okay. Okay. So this is at a glance. So overall, as you can see in the chart, we have over eighty three thousand students that are publicly funded in our education system. The majority of those students attend a traditional public school. Four percent of those students attend an independent school, and among those of the vast majority attend, one of the law historic academies. And then you can see too that we have, little over lessons to come through that attend a therapeutic school. Therapeutic schools are separate schools for those students that need extraordinary support beyond what the public school can provide for special education services. I'm wondering how I can start. Yeah. It's important to remember that students attend their student schools from districts that operate schools at Albright as well as some districts that have tuition for the purpose of general education. That's the Yeah. [Speaker 1 ]: One quick question before we go ahead. Students enrolled in public schools or or the total number, does this include pre k or just not pre k? [Zoe Founders ]: This number, I'm gonna go we're gonna break down all the different types of enrollment by program and then couple slides [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: So you'll be able to do that in the overall time for [Zoe Founders ]: the time. The next slide is map of Vermont, and this is our current structure, for supervisor unions and school districts. So I believe you received the presentation from JFO on our overall governance structure in the state of Vermont. This is based on the twenty eight, twenty two, twenty three school year. Since then, we have actually added another supervisory union and another district. So the current is fifty two supervisory unions. And then under those structures, we have a hundred and nineteen district as of this current year. They offered two hundred and eighty seven schools serving a little over eighty thousand public school students. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: As you look at the boundaries, you can see [Zoe Founders ]: that they vary. Some serve a very large geography and some are smaller geography. Overall, the total number of students served range from about four hundred. I think it's a thousand. That's in my notes, so I could just validate that. So there's a lot of variability in this terms of how we're organized and the number of students served. Another point here that we're in this map, we're looking at enrollment. So this is representing students that are attending a public school, not necessarily all of the students that a district would be responsible for. So average daily membership is another map that will show you that actually shows also those students that attend an independent school. So when you're looking at the map and on the next slide, we'll be able to show some broader tuitioning patterns. But here, I just wanted to make that note that you can see in certain areas of our state, there like, so for example, the Northeast Kingdom, there are more students that are served in independent group than are represented on this chart. This next slide, is looking at tuitioning patterns across the state, and this is tuitioning to, an independent school and also tuitioning to another public school. The blue is indicating that they these districts fully operate a k twelve system. The green is representing a hybrid. So within these structures, they might have some like, it operate maybe in elementary school, and then they might tuition for middle and high school. The yellow is representing those that fully tuition and do not operate their own schools, and then the reddish color is overlapping classification. So that would be an example where within the you would have a a district that would offer it via an update date, and then there's an overlap lane high school that they would feed into. Anything you wanna add to that, Pimmons, on the district? Moving on to how Vermont compares on some key indicators, we, tend to have very small school, very small schools. So we're ranked forty six in the country in terms of smallest schools. We tend to have very high for people expenditures. Depending on the report that [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: you reference, we can be [Zoe Founders ]: ranked either number five or number one depending on data source. So definitely within the top five, as we're looking at overall spending per pupil. We are also, very low when you look at the teacher ratio, teacher to one hundred students. We are first in that in the country. So that is a very lower, [Speaker 1 ]: you know, [Zoe Founders ]: lowest class sizes ratios. And that holds also not just for teachers, but also for staff. Moving into looking at some assessment data, the national assessment of educational progress is the one test that we have where we can compare how we're doing in Vermont to other states. This is administered every two years. It is a random sample, and it's an interesting gives us an interesting perspective of our overall performance. So we tend to do tend to outperform in reading. So when we look at it, we are in fourth grade reading, we rank eleven. And in eighth grade reading, we're fifth. One thing we'll show you later is kind of the trend over time that we're also paying attention to. In math, we're scoring a little bit lower as we compare ourselves to other states. And in fourth grade math, we ranked twenty eighth, and in eighth grade math, [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: twenty first. [Zoe Founders ]: So this is the beginning to the question around who's included in that overall enrollment number. So we're showing our our trend back to two thousand four. The bright green line is looking at our total enrollment in public schools. So this is all students that attend. This would include pre k, includes CTE students as well. And then the dotted blue line are those students that are enrolled in a k twelve public school. One thing to note here is that we've had an over twenty percent decline in enrollment on a k twelve public school. Much of that decrease in enrollment, occurred before the pandemic, and has been continuing. When you look at the red line below, that is looking at our enrollment at independent schools. This is both for those students that receive public tuition to attend an independent school and those that have private pay to attend. We can see that there was an uptick as we think about the COVID years during that enrollment. One thing I wanna note as you're looking at these trend lines, you probably noticed when we've received questions why the trend lines all go back to two thousand four. Some of this is just around data availability. So as we have discussed, we're really in a process of doing some data infrastructure improvements. And what we thought is important to go ahead and present what was validated to see that is accessible back to two thousand four. It will just take us some more time to pull that together and validate. And we felt like the number of years we could present still is a really valuable timeline. So that's what we're bringing forward. So overall, CTE enrollment has remained relatively consistent over time. The blue line is representing a home study. And so what you can see is home study definitely increased during the pandemic, and it's kinda come back to pre pandemic levels. Next, we'll look at student demographic trends. So in the table, we're looking at the statewide averages along with the range so you can kinda see their variability when we're making across our state. The statewide average, So we're looking from two thousand nineteen twenty to the two thousand twenty two, twenty three school year. Something to note here is we are reporting a reduction in the number of students that qualify for free and reduced lunch. It's also important to note that we have changed to universal school meals, and so we might see a decline in this in terms of, how we're collecting that information because parents may not be submitting the form. We have been doing a big push, to to get those funds collected. And, also, looking forward, we have Medicaid eligibility, which will be a helpful resource for us to really have more stable measure of poverty. And then we also are looking at special education services, and then we serve the number of students that have an an individualized education plan. And you can see too that there there's certainly a range when you're looking at this data, you know, from six percent to thirty five percent. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the patterns that we're seeing in terms of need. Same with English language learners. We'll show on a map in a couple slides that if there's different concentrations of where those student needs are are presenting. So there's, overall, five point two percent, are English language learners, but you can see in some district that might be as high as thirty four percent. So as part of our analysis, we started to look at trends by size of our supervisor unions and school districts. And so you'll see that throughout our presentation today. We grouped them accordingly. And so I think what what we're seeing in terms of overall trends is that our smaller supervisory unions tend to serve higher needs students, and we see that in terms of the percentage of green and blue slunch and special educations students as early as English language learners that that term does not hold. It's more geographic. Sure. Here, we're looking at the overall distribution of fruit and goose lunch student. Looking at the the map here, and you can certainly see that there's certain areas of our states where there's higher concentrations of poverty with our student enrollment. They're looking in the venues in area or just, you know, for example, at least some higher rates. [Speaker 1 ]: I have a quick question on that last graph. You can open look at the Northeast Kingdom. The the Newport one is much more purple than the next one over to the right. And they also take the the next one device toggle with the Kingdom Choice area. So it was they're more of a function of not having the data one way to two different it's it's very much the same geographic area, same demographics, I imagine. The ones that they and then I'm is it safe to assume that's because in choice, it's probably harder to get the data from? [Zoe Founders ]: I mean, it may be. Again, a lot of this is dependent on the data collection that we get from parents. So we we may not have that. I don't know, Amanda or Justin, if you wanna weigh in on anything specific to that area. We've seen any additional patterns. No. Nothing [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: additional nothing nothing additional [Zoe Founders ]: to add, Zoe. I think I think you're exactly right. This is really only as good as the data that districts receive from families and report up to AOE. I do just wanna highlight, you know, this is the three year average, so we were seeing fairly consistent reporting across the three years that we used. But, yes, there still can be district to different strict variation in in the forms that they receive from families that would impact this. Thank you. And, Amanda Brown is with ABA Consulting who's been supporting us, so thank you, Amanda, for for writing. [Speaker 1 ]: And the little striped part of the map, I'm assuming that is linked in. [Zoe Founders ]: Alright. So moving in, this is the representation of English language learners across the state. So where you see there grayed out, there's a a very small number, so it's not representing the data or there are not students. So I think that the main picture here is it's concentrated really by geography. We see more English learner learners in the Sherman Valley region and the southwest region. So you can see pockets also in the northeast India. So, again, just something the password is for thinking about, you know, differentiating support based on need. So I'll I'll pause there and just see if there's any questions. So that's kind of an overview, just broad enrollment trends and demographics. We're gonna move up to the next section talking about student outcomes. Just wanted to know if you have any questions at this point. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: Well, you skipped by the special education map, and I was just I did. [Zoe Founders ]: So I actually hit that map only because one thing that called out to me that we need to correct as you can see for those of you guys on their screen. Brickendell is coming out as a very dark blue, but I I think there's a data error there with an interstate Mhmm. Denominator. So that's something I'm looking to correct and will be published for you. [Speaker 3 ]: Okay. I I I you can see the percentages when you look at the actual map. It'd be great to be able to see those beside each. The numbers beside Yeah. [Zoe Founders ]: As a table, would you like to Yeah. And it [Speaker 3 ]: would be great if the on all of these, if it was listed there [Zoe Founders ]: as well. Ten percent profile before. So we'll do [Speaker 3 ]: Got it. It just Yeah. It's easier to see. It will. It's a link to each. That's all. [Zoe Founders ]: Absolutely. So something else we can show also, we can bring up the state education profile. We can go to the appendix. And if there's still additional detail of how you want those tables created, we can do that so you have that So moving into the next part of the presentation, we're focused on student outcomes. And, you know, as we talked about with the listen and learn tour, we've heard I apologize. [Speaker 3 ]: Oh, yeah. [Speaker 1 ]: Oh, yeah. But we went back in the into the previous one, and maybe you're gonna touch more on the student outcomes. We were looking at LEAP scores. Yeah. Do they only test up through eighth grade? They [Zoe Founders ]: yeah. That's correct. [Speaker 1 ]: And is And it's [Zoe Founders ]: a randomized sample so that it's representative of each state. [Speaker 1 ]: And is there no information on higher grades because we continually switch assessment tools, or is higher grade data considered being really ridiculous because kids don't take it as a high stakes test? [Zoe Founders ]: So we have different indicators at the high school level within our state accountability plan that we can bring in. We're gonna talk about some of those with the graduation rate and some college and career readiness indicators as well. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: But NEET is one test Yeah. That hasn't changed. So Yeah. We're gonna you're you'll see when we get to the state, the student outcomes that we'll be looking at actually several different assessment. NEAP is a good measure in that it it has been consistent. You can go back fifteen years and really look at that trend data, you know, kind of long term and be able to compare state to state. You can't do that with really any other assessment. Erin, did you wanna have because then in, like No. High school there is no national high school Yeah. Assessment that you compare every state. You would say SAT, ACT data, but, obviously, that's a can be a very skewed some places are using it universally. Some places, it's just kids who are clearly college bound. So it's not really a natural linear comparison. So Nate is the gold standard in terms of Right. [Speaker 3 ]: And I just have to [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: note that in terms of the narrative out there, the Nate results are far higher than I realized. In reading. Yeah. Yeah. We're out reporting and reading. Yeah. That was a real And we'll see, though. It's thrilled to see it. And Yeah. I'm Yeah. There's a very false narrative, I think, around some of our outcomes. I know there's And that's plenty of challenges in our outcomes. Yeah. I feel like that NAEP data is very good news. Yeah. [Zoe Founders ]: Yeah. The yes. The good news is [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: that we are on the higher end literacy. The bad news is that we're all everyone is trending down. Well yeah. So and that's [Zoe Founders ]: why you're seeing a lot of states. Like, we are are focusing on literacy because overall, we're seeing that decline. But certainly, as we compare ourselves, we are performing well in literacy, but but we know that there's real opportunity to better prepare our students. And that's across the board, across the country. There's a big focus on this. And and before before [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: you dive in, I just want to let you know we we have our our phone of friends. So Anne, Bordeaux, who leads our best team and has the child nutrition team underneath, did confirm kind of your instinct there, which is that in the northwest of kingdom, there's so many tuitioning students, and that relies on the independent school census for FRL data, which is generally less high quality and contrast. So you were you're on the money. Yeah. [Zoe Founders ]: And so if we're looking at these maps, it's it's interesting because there's so many things you can layer on top of them, and so you can start to see those trends when you look at it side by side in in terms [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: of those patterns. And so [Zoe Founders ]: appreciate you picking that up. But, also, as we look at outcome data, we we do have the assessment data related to ninth grade. And then beyond that, we have different college and career readiness indicators, which we'll walk through. But as we, you know, we reflected on last Friday with our listen and learn for, Vermonters really value holistic measures of student success. And so as we walk through this data, we will talk about the core fundamentals and how we measure those, and we'll also talk about concurrency in them and those factors that contribute to the conditions of of students' best in mind. So here, if you're looking at this is the Vermont assessment data. So just as a point of context, we have changed our set. This is looking at results from a smarter balanced assessment. We now are administering the Vermont app assessment. It's hard to compare those out of the staff, but we certainly will be able to share kind of persistent gaps that we're seeing as we look at subgroups. So this is just looking at the smarter balance data. During the COVID two thousand nineteen twenty era, we did not administer the assessment. The next year, there was a lot of variability in terms of participation. I'm talking to a lot of folks that are educators and schools that you're very well aware. And so those have been blocked out because it's really hard for us to make those types of, comparisons. Here, you're looking at the the line for elementary school, middle grade, and high and the high school. So you can certainly see from two thousand to twenty twenty one, which you did see a decline, and probably a large factor of that was because of COVID. In terms of math results, when we're looking at these trends, we're seeing a lot more variation by grade band, which is important for us to focus on. So overall, we're seeing lower performance in the high school grades. And so that's just something we we need to be prepared for as we're thinking about parent our students. And overall, our math results tend to be lower, and that's consistent with what we're seeing on the national assessment as [Speaker 1 ]: well. [Zoe Founders ]: So we've already highlighted, you know, where we are in terms of ranking using the NAEP assessment both in reading and in math. This is showing us the trend line for fourth and eighth grade comparing Vermont, which is represented in the solid green line to the northeast, which is in the dotted line based on it, and then compared to the national average, which is the blue data line. Something that we're focused on here as we look at reading is that there has been more of a deeper decline in terms of our reading performance. And so that's we're trending more towards the average. So that's an area that we certainly are focused on as we move forward, we cannot and other initiatives. So this is looking at our our math data. So as we've noted, our math data were not as strong in our overall math performance. Then you can see again the timeline as a decline from, you know, fourth grade from forty three percent to thirty four percent, and then eighth grade from forty two percent to twenty seven percent. So, this is, certainly an area we're focusing on. We will have a new release of the new data at the end of this month. So we'll certainly bring that back to you to see what the how the trends are are paying out. [Speaker 1 ]: Certainly, very much shows the impact of the pandemic. [Zoe Founders ]: Yeah. Right. Exactly. So as I mentioned, we transitioned to the Vermont comprehensive assessment program, which we call Vermont CAP, in twenty twenty two, twenty three. This is the first year of that assessment data. This is the most recent final published data that we have. And so what we've shown here is the overall results for ELA and math by by grade level, which I think is important to note also as we're looking at kind of the early grades too and some of our, [Speaker 1 ]: you know, [Zoe Founders ]: pandemic cohort of kids in that, we're seeing slower as well. We do have preliminary results that we have published for the twenty twenty four, twenty five school year, and the final results will be published this winter. We're seeing pretty consistent performance, relative to last year, and overall a consistent gap as we're looking at, the subgroup comparison data. So on this slide, is where we're starting to talk about, really that that conversation around equity and making sure that every child will also perform, at high levels. We're comparing this chart to different assessment, but we're still seeing that there's pretty consistent gaps. I think there's, like, thirty percent gap. Right? Mhmm. As we're looking at performance for those students that are bringing reduced lunch. So that's definitely something we are focused on to ensure that we can close that achievement gap. Moving into graduation rates, overall here, what we're showing is graduation for a four year cohort and for a six year. Looking back two thousand seventeen to the two thousand twenty twenty three school year, Overall, we have seen a decline in our graduation rate over time, and we had kind of a a spike there right around right before the pandemic where our rates were improving. So something also to keep in mind is we're comparing graduation rates across supervisor unions is that there's different variables that are determined from a proficiency based graduation requirement. It sometimes make it challenging for us to compare graduation rates for one, this supervisor even to another. This right now is an aggregate, so it is looking at the the overall trend. But that is something to know, as we drill down deeper and and compare the qualms. So we know that chronic absenteeism really contributes to students' overall performance. We want them to be able to be in school, benefit from that direct instruction and support of their teachers to be successful. I will do a little bit of definitions, and then we'll show you some data around Comcast to use them. So that is defined by students missing ten percent or more of the school days in the academic year. And this is an area where we look at our next slide as you're seeing overall trends. We have definitely this is an area we're focusing on women. About one in three students are chronically absent. We definitely we're seeing the spike after the pandemic, and it's an area that we're focusing very intentionally on. This is also an area where we have opportunities to partner with community providers and the pediatric community. That gave grand rounds in partnership with UVM to talk about the importance of chronic absenteeism and the role of the whole community and being able to reinforce the importance of, you know, participating in attending school. I think one of the really challenging parts of this is we look at chronic absenteeism is that it's higher for our more vulnerable populations. You can see that on the chart here. We're seeing higher rates of chronic absenteeism for our students that are unhoused, our students that qualify for free and reduced lunch, fosters, foster care students, migrant students. So this is really an area of focus for us. It's really thinking about how do we close that achievement gap. So we looked at the data before and saw that there was no big gaps in terms of performance by subgroups. And we know that participation in school is a factor of that. So we are focusing really closely with our agency partners and then we'll be able to really support higher rates of [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: school. And if I can just decrease this this so there's actually quite a lot of conversations happening around. I'd say this is a priority, not just for our agency, but it is field. It's for other agency partners. And as Zoe mentioned, we have sort of the pediatric community is sort of coming online and really understanding there's there's how do you think mental health kind of contributors? There's a whole variety. Part of the reason that chronic absenteeism is a hard thing to tackle is there's a whole variety of reasons why students may be chronically absent. And so really trying to understand all of those sort of factors, address kind of your high leverage strategies. Right? You know, what can we do with the transportation and the barrier? What can we do? You know, there's some really great evidence based practices. The major focus of the Department of Education as well right now is it as suitable as having someone who calls and reminds parents every day? Right? Is that a high leverage and low investment opportunity that we can really kind of expand across the state? We have some really great shining examples of districts that are doing as well. And we're trying to spotlight those, kind of have a network of, you know, participants. I think one other piece of this that is also important is just engagement. Right? So there's lots of factors, but one of those is also just student interest and the sense that the value and worth of their education. And so that a different piece that we have to address for all students, how do we really get them to understand, feel that they're part of the community, that there's value in their education, that what they're doing has real world kind of usefulness for them. And so that's another piece of it that I think we're trying to address in different ways. Right? You know, how I really heard that in the listening as well. So there's a lot of the question. Yeah. [Speaker 3 ]: Yeah. Just really quickly. Thank you [Speaker 1 ]: for that. That was that's [Speaker 3 ]: really important. I love looking at models. The absence. So I'm I'm gonna assume, and then you'll correct me if I'm wrong. When I look at this chronically absent, this the the areas where students are more absent, does that reflect in the size of the school district, the rurality of the school district? So I'm trying to get at are the more rural smaller schools are the ones where we're seeing these higher temp trends based on things you'd said before would make sense, but I just want us [Zoe Founders ]: I'm wondering if you could call. Yeah. I yeah. I think, Anne, if you would like to expand on that, any broader patterns that you're seeing chronic absenteeism related to the demographics of the community. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: So I believe that we have the data. I have not seen it myself, but I I think that it's data that we could get from our team and break out that way for you all. I would suspect that that's probably the case, but I can't say because I haven't seen it myself. But the data is reported. My understanding is the data is required to be reported to the federal government by each supervisory union. But well, on broken out by supervisory union, I should say. We report it. So we've got it. I just haven't seen it. It's really interesting in analysis. [Speaker 1 ]: It's a little hard to hear it here. So when Anne Warner said I I suspect that's the case, what was the case that you were saying? Like, you said that there's higher CA in rural areas? [Speaker 3 ]: My suspicion was based on the previous things that you had said about when we look at these yellow lines here, the students that that that will be higher, you know, the incidence of students' absence in rural areas or [Zoe Founders ]: Yeah. Although, typically, that's that's that's why [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: it might be it might be the poverty. So it might be a more urban areas, especially [Zoe Founders ]: poverty spread after yeah. That I think it's interesting [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: to do that analysis. Mhmm. And Thank you. [Zoe Founders ]: And I know you're talking about that. Yeah. As we're talking, I think, in a a future session, we'll talk about kind of college and career pathways overall and some of the spotlights that we see programmatically. And we are seeing that there's some really great examples of schools that are, you know, increasing attendance through, you know, community schools and other types of initiatives that are really having a positive impact. The other thing around just overall engagement is an important factor. So we looked at the graduation rate data. We also have graduation rate data for those students that are enrolled in career and technical education pathways and the statement, they have higher graduation rates. So pointing to when students really feel like they're engaged in their learning that's meaningful and applicable, we're seeing higher rates of graduation. So that's something else to consider in addition to the demographics of the school and the community, but the overall engagement with the programming, that's offered at school. And and we would expect too that when you look at you know, I'd like to analyze it early into after school [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: as well. So if there's [Zoe Founders ]: a really encouraging after school program, are we seeing that students are are or not. Out of school. Right? So, again, as we're all engaging in this work, we recognize that these it's really a holistic approach that needs to take as we're really analyzing root cause and also identifying best practices that are supporting the type of success we'd like for students to have. So moving into staffing data, we'll walk through staffing ratio, salaries, and also some high level licensure trends. So in this slide, there's a lot of different data that we're putting forward. So one is just looking at the average staff per one student. So you may ask why we look at it that way. That allows us to do some national comparisons, and we're also in the process of doing another data collection with the fields to be able to be more refined with how we can depict your class size because the label that data is collected needs a little bit more nuance. And so this gives us a really good sense for now, and we know that there's interest in in drilling down further. So, overall, we highlighted that we have some of the highest or some of the most staff in our schools, and that's true. As you look at teacher support service, student service, and leaders, this is the way that we're collecting our data. You have seen overall an increase in all areas of staffing. [Speaker 1 ]: Just a very quick question. When you're validating the data, there's always been questions with staffing because there's a lot of contract staff that might be in that school building where they count it as part of this. It's like if you have if you have a contracted launch program that where it's a private company or janitorial staff. [Zoe Founders ]: I I believe that this the state is representative of staff, not contracted, not contracts. Okay. Yeah. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: This comes from the teacher Yeah. Staff survey data that's submitted by districts every year, which I wanna double check this, but I think it's FTEs and not and not like, so many object code, it says one hundred, two hundred, and not one hundred. Okay. But as we we can go later [Zoe Founders ]: in the presentation, we think about overall spending. So those contracted services are part of overall spending because we love that special education. Right? So that's not just inclusive of staff. Yeah. Right. So, again, we're starting to do some analysis also by size. And so, you know, I think what what we would expect is that you tend to have, you know, more staffing in our our we just want to get kind of the scale in our smaller, supervisor meetings and settings. And you're seeing that play out, across the different staffing categories, and also across as you're comparing, by by date as well. So our higher needs, we just tend to have a little bit more in terms of staff and the teachers. Okay. Moving into salaries. So this is looking again at all of those categories and understanding overall staff salaries. So we have seen, across all categories that there has been, an increase, in salaries, since two thousand nineteen twenty. And then we looked at that also by really analyzing that in terms of need and size. So then the big picture trend that we saw was that, you know, our our smaller supervisor unions tend to to serve higher needs students, which we discussed, and they tend to pay their teachers less. And so that's something that is concerning from a recruiting and retention perspective and also equity as we're thinking about really recruiting high quality teachers for every classroom across the state. [Speaker 1 ]: Interesting that there is probably more it's it's a much part more level across support services staff than [Speaker 3 ]: it is over to staff. Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. [Zoe Founders ]: Something we've talked about. So we do have, you know, probably more teachers and staff in our in our system. It's something to think about is the workforce that we have to build those open positions. Oftentimes, our schools are struggling in our offices to to hire staff to build those roles. So what you're looking at here is we have a number in terms of teacher perspective, a really large increase in the number that are on provisional and emergency licenses. And so that's what you're looking at despite with that green line. So, obviously, that also requires some additional training and support for the district as well as their onboarding those those new teachers to the field. The the other slide is looking at retention. This is a pretty unique measure of retention that's looking at those that have stayed in their role for a three year period. The reason this is recorded is it's part of our annual state plan that's required for the federal government. It does provide some interesting trends, but we're also in the process of drilling that deeper to look at annual retention rates, which I think is really thinking about planning, the decisions that are made at the local level. Mhmm. But but overall, we're seeing, you know, just in these trends, lower retention or declining retention for our principles and super. I mean, you have certain teachers. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: Didn't say into the superintendent line, which just seems [Zoe Founders ]: a little bit different than the other two. It does. And I actually was one of those that I was gonna hide that was on this project. I think I We wanna dig into that. I I said I wanna dig into that because just we know I mean, what we've seen is about a thirty percent turnover with our superintendents year over year. Just and so we're checking that data, and that's why it's okay. This is a very unique pleasure of retention with everything we wanna check on. So if you allow us, we wanna dig into this and be able to report this back to you so that we're dealing with really accurate numbers for good. We have questions as well. [Speaker 1 ]: Working on three. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: Do you know how this compares nationally to our attention piece? [Speaker 1 ]: This is person. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: If Andrew is Andrew, do you have a sense for our national comparison? [Andrew ]: No. I I I don't have that. I I will say, though, the the superintendent piece, this was provided this morning from from DMAD, so this is what's going to be published in in the annual snapshot. But, yeah, definitely doing some double checking. I did do some asking around too, like, anecdotally. We definitely had a major hit for superintendents when when COVID came through, and and maybe this this, folks are are it's the same superintendents over the past couple of years, which is why there would be such a jump. But as, secretary Sander said, we were gonna be definitely be double checking that. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: And I think, like, what we have observed at the agency level is a a real fragility in our what we call the central offices of districts and a lot of turnover. So something I think really starting in in during the COVID times, I remember there was the very first year, someone seventeen superintendents turned over one year. And we've seen about that much every year. So that's, you know, a third, basically, of our our district leadership turning over every year. And one thing that we observed this last year because we really started paying a lot of attention to it because we had some systems that were very fragile. One thing that we observed is that you might have one system that goes down a superintendent and business manager and maybe a special education reactor. So that system becomes really destabilized. I mean, we all start sort of looking at it and going, okay. Uh-oh. That's when we really need to pay attention to. And what we found is by the time they hired everyone, it had actually destabilized other systems [Speaker 1 ]: Yep. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: Because they were either hiring superintendents from other systems or what often happens is really talented principals. And so we also have a lot of destabilization in our principals as well. I like to share the anecdote that my children's elementary school went through six principles in about four years. Yeah. And so that that, like, building level leadership, we're not we're not really sustaining, right, which really creates a culture, and it's how you're able to invest and see strategic plans all the way through. So we're almost in this constant churn, and this is one of those places where we we sort of talk about the the scale and the number. Right? And that sort of the complexity of our governance is actually driving some destabilization within our systems, and we we really have started to pay attention to this over the last couple of years. And the implications for [Zoe Founders ]: those systems, you know, just think [Speaker 1 ]: about having to hire [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: a person and get them trained up, but something that we're concerned about. [Zoe Founders ]: And then and then the the last several months that I think the last spring and and the fall, the agency's been doing a lot of work to support, to stabilize, some districts that are are really experiencing those challenges with maintaining the central office staff. And another practical challenge is being able to bring in additional resources to support in the interim just because there's there's not the the capacity or the the structure in place to help support that when their when their district might want help, it is really challenging to plug in these resources. [Speaker 1 ]: I just did I'm just gonna move here in a few minutes. The representative tell you how you just step out for a chairs by chairs training [Zoe Founders ]: Okay. Alright. Good. So, here we just have a a breakdown of, the the type of, a provisional and emergency license that that that are being provided. And so you can see here that in terms of the provisional endorsement, there's a number that, highest would be in a special educator, category, and a lot also in elementary school settings, where we're really trying to position a lot of new staff. So, Andrew, do you wanna, you know, provide the distinction between provisional and emergency licenses just so everyone has a perspective of what these numbers represent? [Andrew ]: Absolutely. The short answer is provisional licenses are valid for two years and require certain qualifications in the content area. So a bachelor's degree in math for a math provisional, or they are a licensed teacher in a different area. An emergency license is one year. There's no options for an extension on that one year. And the qualifications are a bachelor's degree in any subject, and the hiring district has to provide evidence that they've made every effort to hire a licensed teacher. So the emergencies is definitely concerning because that's showing that they've made multiple attempts to fill that position. And anecdotally, it used to be maybe a dozen each year of retired educators. It's now about a hundred each year of of, you know, people from the community just just seeing the vacancies and stepping up. And we've actually even had through the standards board a number of waivers submitted requesting folks who are still working on their bachelor's degree to get an emergency license, which is is definitely concerning and and have been looking at that at a case by case basis. [Zoe Founders ]: As we highlighted on Friday, you know, from our listen and learn tour, we saw this in terms of the, increased needs of, for our special education, students and support. So the challenge is that we have a big, workforce shortage of special educators, and you can see this in terms of, the decline of those that are question licensed. So this is certainly a challenge to be able to staff, to support our students, for value fees. Next, we'll move into the financial data. And let's see if you need does anyone have any questions on the connection, the staffing? [Speaker 3 ]: Sure. K. [Zoe Founders ]: So I'll move into the financials here. So we're we're gonna talk about expenditures in a couple of different ways, and we like to think about this as peeling back the onion. So you can see here we're going to record expenditures by total expenditures, operating, and education funds. So total expenditures are all the source of funds. So that's including our federal dollars as well, the total amount that is available, to educate students. So that's helpful for us to think about as we're looking at the overall resources, that our districts and students have access to. Operating expenditures is also factoring in, those sources outside of the state funding, so federal dollars. But it's removing those expenses like debt service and capital, that are not ongoing annual expenses. And then we'll look at expenditures just from the education fund, and that's based on what the state funds, specifically. That's really where the taxpayer, dollars are. So one thing to note as we're looking at trend lines with expenditures, this does not adjust for inflation. And one of the things too is you're looking at these stacked parts as we're depicting the the source as well. So the grant the green is looking at the general fund. So that's our what we call our, you know, ex fund. The blue is special revenues. The dark blue the lighter blue is looking at other funds, and then that trend line is looking at overall total expenditures. And so you can see, an an increase in that. And a lot of, I think something to important to note is COVID really played a factor here. So we definitely had an infusion of federal dollars to provide some additional resources and support, in that time frame. So you're seeing, you know, within the dark blue, the special revenues are also including those federal dollars. And so now those have some vetted, and so we will not be able to draw down as much federal funding. So we know that that has put some specific pressures on schools if the needs are continuing. And and needs to be met, this is one of the resource. [Jill Briggs Campbell ]: So can I ask the question? So you're saying the dark blue there is largely the COVID phones. I see. Other phones. Mhmm. What is the light blue, the five percent on top of that mostly representing? Is there other things? [Zoe Founders ]: Would you have Amanda? She's Yep. So Amanda or Justin, if you could expand on just what exactly is included for getting into this Happy to hop in. So just as you were saying, the the dark blue is ESSER funds. It's also, you know, other funds that would could include capital funds, debt service, enterprise.

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