Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Slightly rearranging the agenda, Mike Fisher, who was listening earlier into the conversation, there were some questions that came up about Medicaid and Medicare. He's going to speak generally to any health insurance questions, issues that may be of interest to us and to our areas of jurisdiction. And then we're going to hear specifically about the Bridges to Health program. That was also mentioned this morning. And we'll get into some testimony on the migrant education program. And I will say that those are two programs that we have not in the committee, I think, heard much about over the past few years. And I personally am not. It's not just the committee. I personally don't know very much about either. And I'm not expecting that we're going to become expert on them today. But I've asked just to get some testimony, keeping it consistent with the theme of what's been changing over the past few months that we should know about. And then we also have Jill Martin Diaz from the Asylum Assistance Program who may be joining us and may be able to answer any questions or also give us some insights there too. And then after that's all done, we'll be hearing about SNAP primarily and then some of forest industry. And I promise we will be done by four. With that, Will, if you want to unmute and just introduce yourself. I think you've been in the committee. You have been in the committee before. And perhaps Jose Ignacio has been as well. I'm not sure.

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: Thank you very much, Chair. Pleasure to see you all, even if on Zoom. And we're actually Zooming in from Randolph right now. We're at the the civil rights summit held by the Vermont Human Rights Commission. We're we'll be speaking on a couple panels later this afternoon, but happy to to that that this time slot worked, and thanks for having us on. Again, for the record, my name is Will Lamback. I'm with Magna Justice and I'm joined by Jose Ignacio. He'll be providing some testimony in Spanish. I'll be interpreting into English for the committee. And then later on, when he finishes, I might add some things in as well. But with that, I'll turn it over to Jose Ignacio, and he can introduce himself and share a little bit with you all.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you. Welcome.

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: So hi, everybody. I'd like to share with you a little bit about the changes that we're seeing right now and also speak about my personal experiences with that. And I want to share a couple of things that I think are really important. And the first of them is access to food. And I want to go back to when I first came to Vermont was during the first Trump administration.

[Jose Ignacio (Migrant Justice community member, testimony via interpreter)]: And I came to Rimon and I was working on a farm and the farm was close to the border. And our employer didn't allow us to leave the farm property out of fear that we would be detained by immigration authorities. And communication is always an issue, you know, many dairy workers don't speak English and it's not like it's the fault of the employer. I'm not saying that there's bad communication, the communication barrier and even using the translators on our phones which help a little bit, you have very limited communication because of the language barrier.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: And

[Jose Ignacio (Migrant Justice community member, testimony via interpreter)]: so, in our case, the employer offered to do the shopping for us. The farmer would go to the store and we would write down on a piece of paper and we would, you know, use our phone translator to figure out what the words to write should be if we wanted chicken or tomatoes or onions or whatever we wanted. But the language barrier created its problems, right? So even with the goodwill of our employer, if we wanted specific ingredients, we would do our best to write them down, but that wouldn't necessarily be the ingredient that was brought back. Maybe we wanted a certain type of spice, cumin or cilantro, but we wouldn't always get the food that we were hoping for. But that really that that limited the the the access to different types of meals. And so for ease, we ended up just sort of writing the same ingredients each time and would end up cooking the same thing every day. And so the farm worker community has tried to find other workarounds, finding other people who can bring different types of food, the types of food that we eat to the farms. But there's a difficulty there because Border Patrol also is an impediment for those people to be coming to our farms and coming to the farms and delivering food. I was on that farm for about a year and four months until some family members of mine who are working in a different area of the state said, hey, there's a job opening on our farm and you can come and there's a little bit more freedom of movement and it's easier to get to the store yourself. And I've been involved with the organization Migrant Justice because that's a way where collectively we can fight to try to change the situation in the state and expand access to different things to have greater freedom of movement, for example, which is what led to the expansion of driver's licenses in the state. So there's been these advances, but there's still difficulties. And so maybe some of you recognize my name, because now these years later, I'm no longer working on a farm, but occasionally I'll bring food out to farms when workers I know have requests. I'm sort of filling that role of helping provide access to food, But that brings me back to farms along the border and in the northern counties. And so after I delivered food on a farm, I was driving away. And I was pulled over by the border patrol. And I was detained and held in detention. And

[David Durfee (Chair)]: because I'm part

[Jose Ignacio (Migrant Justice community member, testimony via interpreter)]: of an organized community, we've always been organized. We mobilized and I was ended up I was able to be released. But that's unfortunately not the fate of many others in my community who have been detained. Most people who are picked up don't end up getting released. They're deported. And so right now, we're seeing a situation where things are sort of moving backwards and the same limitations and movement that I experienced when I first came to the state is what people are experiencing now. And not only for the farm workers themselves, but people like me who are part of the support system for farm workers bringing them food are also under attack. And so from my point of view, the impact of all of this isn't necessarily that the farms are going to close because they're losing their labor force. It's sort of the opposite because the workers live on the farm property, but they become more constrained and they have to remain on the property and that creates consequences for them. And then another consequence of this has to do with access to healthcare. And I can also share a personal experience. When I was working on a farm, had a pain in a tooth and the tooth had to be removed, but I couldn't find anybody who would bring me to a hospital. And so I worked for two weeks with that pain in my mouth. And so when I brought this up with with my employers, I you know, I said I need to go see a doctor about this and I could tell that they were afraid to bring me to the doctor. Because for two weeks, they just gave me some painkillers, some pills to take and said, here, take this. And but after two weeks, when when the issue hadn't resolved, they finally agreed to get me an appointment. But I could still see the fear that they had because they said, Okay, we're going to drive you to the hospital. But we need you to lie down in the back seat when we're driving you. And then when we got there, instead of using the main entrance, they like brought me in the back door through the emergency entrance. And that's how I left as well. And now we're seeing that same thing happening in the community again, a lack of access to healthcare, that if you're working on a farm and you get kicked by a cow, or have another workplace injury, many workers are experiencing that and don't have a way to go seek medical attention. They just have to deal with the pain. And that's why I think it's really important that you all find ways to support organizations that are providing access to health care, like Bridges to Health, for example, which is doing really needed work right now. So I could go on and on, but I want to make space for other people to speak as well. So I'll stop there.

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: Thank you for listening to me.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you very much, Jose Ignacio. And Will, did you say you wanted to say a few things? We may have some Let me just stop if it's okay and see if there are any questions before we go on. Committee members, any questions? Okay, well, why don't you proceed then?

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: Yeah, thank you very much. And thank you to Nacho for his testimony. And I think, yes, I mean, some of the themes to draw out of that is the sort of trend that we are hearing over and over again from farm workers, especially those who have been here for ten, fifteen, some twenty or more years, is this sense of under the current administration and with current practices being pulled backwards. That when the immigrant community first started fulfilling the labor demand on farms in Vermont, as you're hearing from Nacho, there was this great sense of fear and great sense of wanting the community to remain hidden and remain out of sight. And over the years, really because of the bravery and organized movement of workers, things have really changed in Vermont. And this community has really celebrated changes that they fought for and that the legislature has created, access to driver's licenses, fair and impartial policing policies to ensure that an encounter with law enforcement doesn't end with Border Patrol being called, more recently in the legislature expanding access to higher education and health care and housing. These are all changes that have been achieved in Vermont and have really made this tremendous difference in the quality of life of immigrant communities in the state, in particular, those who are living and working on the state's dairy farms. And that is just gonna look for some water here. But there's this sense now that in the past nine or ten months, a lot of those that a lot of that progress is being put at risk. And the types of experiences that Nacho talked about when he first came into the state are now people are living that again and feeling like they're being pulled back into the shadows. And in some ways, becomes even more difficult because the demographics of the community have changed so much as Vermont has become a more welcoming and opening place for immigrants and as there are more rights and protections for people. What used to be a community characterized primarily by single men has now become a community full of families. And increasingly, both men and women are working on farms. They're bringing kids with them or kids are being born in the state. It's a much more diverse and varied community. And that means when there are more restrictive immigration practices and policies being put in place, it's families that are suffering as well. So a little bit of statistics just to sort of understand the trend. This year, since the start of the Trump administration, migrant justice has documented and worked directly with over 100 immigrants in Vermont who have been detained by ICE and Border Patrol. Those detentions have happened in more than three dozen different enforcement actions. That includes very high profile ones that you all are surely familiar with, like a border patrol raid on a farm in Franklin County in April that resulted in the detention of eight farm workers. But it also happens in the more quotidian sense of traffic stops on Route 105 or back roads of border patrol pulling people over for driving while brown. These are clearly racially profiled based stops, like what happened to Nacho in June when he and a family member had just been dropping food off on the farm, were driving away, and were stopped by border patrol and ended up being detained for about a month before they were released. So, there's been this huge increase in detentions. Just to give a sense, this is more than a tenfold increase from the number of detentions we were seeing last year. And it has a tremendous impact because it's a relatively small community. It's a relatively tight knit community. Every time somebody is detained, it's this wide network of family and friends and people from their sending communities who are impacted. And we say, every detention is a person traumatized, a family separated, and a community terrorized. So as Nacho was saying, the impact of this isn't to, at least in the short term, isn't to deny farms their labor force because there still are workers who are on the farms who are doing the jobs. The level of detentions hasn't risen to the level where it's creating a disruption to the labor force. And I think we see news stories from around the country sometimes where it's crops going fallow in the fields because farmers find workers. That hasn't been the case in Vermont. To our knowledge, there haven't been any interruptions to dairy production. The real impact of these detentions is to interrupt that sense of progress, that freedom of movement that the farm worker community has achieved in recent decades and to make people more captive on the farms where they live and work. And that creates really severe material consequences. And Nacho talked about two of them, lack of access to food, lack of access to health care. But it goes beyond that as well. This creates a breeding ground for more labor abuses. And specifically, or I guess most particularly, we see that with sexual harassment, for example. If a woman is working on a farm and has experienced sexual harassment from coworkers, from managers, or from employers, but is trapped on that farm without freedom of movement, without an easy way to say, okay, things aren't going well for me here, I'm going to go elsewhere, or I'm going to try to look for resources to get support with this issue. That isolation breeds vulnerability and that vulnerability breeds abuses. And those are real consequences that we're seeing from the increase in immigration enforcement due to changing federal policies and practices. So, wish I could paint a rosier picture. This has really been a crisis that the community is experiencing. Increase in detentions is out of volume unlike anything we've seen before in Vermont. This vastly outstrips the increase in detentions and deportations that we saw in the first Trump administration. And by all indications, it's gonna continue to get worse. There is no relief on the horizon. We think detentions are going to continue to accelerate, both as policies develop and as capacity develops. Know, both ICE and Border Patrol are hiring more agents in the state. And with more agents, that's going to be in more capacity from those agencies to surveil, detain and deport community members. So this is quite a difficult moment and will continue to be in the coming session. We expect there to be some legislation put in. But I want to be realistic as well that the legislature is also quite limited in the tools that it has to really interrupt this pattern of increasing detentions. There are some things that can be done, and we look forward to talking about them in the coming session. But we know that this is it's also a federal matter. And the way that ICE and Border Patrol are persecuting community members in Vermont is unfortunately going to continue and continue to worsen. So on that quite dreary note, I'll take a pause and see if there are questions.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: You know, it didn't come up this morning with the federal delegation. One of the things in the one big beautiful bill, as you've just mentioned, think, Will, was a substantial increase in funding for ICE to staff up and to help meet the president's goals of deporting over many millions of immigrants who are not here authorized to work, including the very people that we're talking about here in Vermont. I was on my phone yesterday, and an ad popped up saying $50,000 signing bonus to come and work for ICE. And I think about the difficulty that we have in Vermont attracting people to our law enforcement jobs. And if I were somebody who was disposed to go work for the highest bidder, it's going be tough to hang on to people if that is part of the compensation package. So that was an observation. And then, Will, one of the last points you made, I wanted to just ask a question and then see if the committee has questions. You suggested that the environment that's here might be allowing for more unreported sexual harassment or more sexual harassment, which seems plausible. But do you have any data, or is there any way to quantify that?

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Yeah,

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: thank you for the question, Chair, and also for the comments about the budget, the big beautiful bill. I can come back to talk about that. Regarding sexual harassment, there's no hard data that I'm aware of. I don't think anybody is quantifying it. But I can certainly tell you that we see it at Migrant Justice. We operate a hotline and are getting more calls about sexual harassment, other types of labor reviews, where we can clearly see the nexus between the lack of independence and autonomy that workers have under the current immigration enforcement regime that's causing people to be less likely to change jobs is leaving indirectly to more of these types of abuses from happening. And it's not that any of these are totally new to Vermont. I mean, these are things that migrant justice has seen on farms throughout the existence of the organization, unfortunately. But this is a moment where we see a greater vulnerability and that is leading to an increase in cases. Can't really quantify it for the committee, but I can say that anecdotally. And then regarding the hiring, yeah, absolutely. There's a big hiring push. We know that the ICE office in Vermont has already brought on additional staff, and we know that they expect to be hiring more. And there's just yeah, there's a one to one ratio of more agents means more detentions, means more deportations.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Committee, questions? Are you able to stay for a little while, Will, in case something comes up, or do you need to?

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: Sure, yeah, we can be on maybe fifteen more minutes.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Okay. All right. We're going to keep going then just because we have more that we want to do. Thank you very much.

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: Thank you, members of the committee.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: And I'm going to ask Mike Fischer to join us, the healthcare advocate. You probably recognize And

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: I'm bringing with me Amelie Shia. We will invite Mike Fisher, healthcare advocate.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: And sorry to interrupt, Mike. Folks who might have something they want to put up on the screen at some point, if you're presenting, Our practice here is to have you share your own screen. So if you need a link to do that, we will get it to you. But please let

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Let's address that right now because I forgot about it. Thank you. We need to make sure Alicia is the presenter. Alicia, why don't you introduce yourself?

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: Hello, thank you for allowing me to join you all today. My name is Alicia Rodfried. I work with the Office of the Healthcare Advocate.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Welcome. Thank you. So thanks for inviting us. Alicia and I are going to go through a brief presentation. Did want to just sort of recognize that thank you for inviting me to this room. I spent a session a couple of lifetimes ago serving in this room in government operations under the fierce leadership of coalition. So I think that's probably 2002, 2003. I don't know. What were you all doing? I served with Cola Hudson ten years prior. Ten years prior, okay. In the 80s. He was

[John O'Brien (Member)]: on the wall until what, about a year ago?

[David Durfee (Chair)]: In his part trip, yeah, it was there. So

[Will Lambek (Migrant Justice)]: it's nice to come back to

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: the studio. So yes, we're going to go through a brief presentation. Why don't you go ahead and start it, Alicia, and we'll plug some room.

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: Yes, I will attempt to share my screen right now. I sent a request to the host to allow me to have that capacity. Let me give it a shot. And it seems like as though right now the host is denying that capacity. Let me know if there is anything I'm able to do.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: The host is that she is denying that.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: There she is.

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: Kicked me out

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: of the room.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Oh, dear. I'm going to go ahead and start or you

[David Durfee (Chair)]: can So pick it

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: the HCA is a office, a position and an office defined in statute. And so appreciate your support for creating our office and helping to assure that we can do as good a job as we can. And we have just to be very brief, we have 15 people at the HCA today, eight of them are advocates who are on the phone helping Vermonters out who are having some kind of challenge getting the care they supervised by an attorney. I got to make sort of, when I say this beginning, I'm say it at the end again, we are a resource to you both for your constituents and for policy. It is written right into the statute that we're supposed to be supportive of healthcare decision makers. And so we take that seriously and do our best to be responsive and to be something of a watchdog. We are independent, contracted through state, through from state government to Vermont Legal Aid and to be there, to be know, raising the flag when we see something going on that's we can really get. We still don't have a presentation up. So

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: So it does not look like I am able to share in this particular format. Mike, if you are fine, I am more than happy to just go forward and, like, have a conversation with you all today.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: And if anybody's got a computer or a phone nearby, it is posted on our web page. Yes. Pull it up to you.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: We'll we'll follow along. Okay. Yes. Go ahead.

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: Exactly. Yeah. I love more of a conversation based format anyway, so this makes it much easier for me all to look at your faces this afternoon. So as Mike had mentioned, we are the office of the health care advocate, and again, Alicia Rodrigue. And I am here today essentially to lay out HR one impacts on health insurance eligibility for non citizens in Vermont. And when I talk about that, that is a big topic. So I just wanna be straightforward at the beginning that I am gonna put parameters around some of the information that I discussed today. So I'm gonna be talking about how this impacts Medicaid in 2026, and I'm also gonna be talking about how this impacts qualified health plans, mostly for 2026, but also briefly at the beginning of 2027 as well. And the reason I put such strict parameters around that is because I do not want to disseminate misinformation or give people rules based information that will enable them to comply with these policies in advance. I want one of the key takeaways I wanna bring to you all during this meeting today is to just recognize that there's a lot of information, there's a lot of confusion, and there's a lot of fear out there. And while people are still eligible for benefits that will help them access and afford care, I want them to take advantage of those benefits that will help them access and afford care. Insurance is not necessarily the key to accessing and affording care as migrant justice had mentioned, fear, safety, other larger systemic access concerns are still going to exist, but it can be a tool for individuals to help get the care that they need. So let's talk about the first benefit that I plan to outline. So I'm gonna discuss health insurance changes to Medicaid as it pertains to immigration status for 2026. So I just wanna say first, health insurance is complicated, the intersection of health insurance eligibility and immigration status feels even more complicated. HR1 has both simplified and compounded some of the factors that add to those complications as well. But the first big change that the Office of the Healthcare Advocate has been tracking in relation to Medicaid eligibility for 2026 is going to take place at the October, so 10/01/2026. And specifically for those of you who may not be aware, Medicaid, specifically Medicaid for adults is the program that I'm talking about here, is a program that individuals 19 and 65 who have qualified income, so incomes under 138% of the federal poverty limit are able to take advantage of. And when I talk about immigration status and Medicaid, the way that I typically start is that currently most non citizens in Vermont are ineligible to access Medicaid for Vermont, but for some pretty significant carve outs. So the first carve out is lawful permanent residents who have had that status for five years, in addition to a number of humanitarian based status, so these could be a refugee status, asylee status, you know, special immigrant statuses and a handful of others that I'm not going to go into too deep of detail here. However, the big change that I'd mentioned before that's happening as of 10/01/2026 is that those exceptions are going to become even more narrow. So the immigration status component for accessing Medicaid for adults is going to become more narrow. So the only individuals who are going to have a qualifying immigration status for this benefit are going to be individuals who are lawful permanent residents who have had that status for five years. In addition to two categories of immigration status, Cuban or Haitian entrances or a specific status called COFA migrants as well. So that will be a really significant change that's gonna take place starting in October. One thing that I do wanna tease out a little bit further is that when we talk about these changes, those changes are specific to Medicaid for adults coverage. They are not gonna have implications to another form of Medicaid called Doctor. Dinosaur coverage. So that's for children 19 and pregnant people as well. And there are no real immigration restrictions for Doctor. Dinosaur for pregnancy or Ken's 19 currently, you just have to have a lawfully residing immigration status and meet all the other criteria for that benefit. Another program that I wanna highlight as well that will not be impacted by these changes is the immigrant health insurance plan, what we abbreviate as IHIP, and it is essentially a doctor dinosaur lookalike program for those in Vermont who do not have a lawfully residing immigration status. So for undocumented pregnant people and children 19 as well. I really like to tease that out because there can be a lot of information out there in the community, and I absolutely do not want fear and misinformation to enable people to not take advantage of the benefits that they're eligible for.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: We've got I think we may have given you the permission you need to share the presentation if you want if you want to.

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: Yeah. Let's see if I can get this screen up. You know, when we talk about health insurance, sometimes having something to refer to can make the process a little bit easier. So I will attempt to share my screen, but I will not let it sidetrack us if we're not able to. Let's take a look. Oh, great.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: I just paused for a second and asked, does the committee, is the committee aware of the IAP program? Just want to pause on that for a second. Program? IAP, Homeland Health Insurance Program. So this is something that the legislature passed Looking at you, Alicia, handful

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: Yeah, of it was passed in 2021 and enacted in 2022. It is as old as my child. And

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: so it's relatively new and it's up and running and very proud of this legislature for moving it along. And it continues to be active and adaptable to children and pregnant.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: I think I'm going next. Is that right, Alicia?

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: Whatever you would like to do, Mike, I'm here to support whatever progression and we can also tag team this if any questions come up. So I'll give it to you.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: So we wanna talk for a minute about the premium tax credit changes. And and so this has been in the news a great deal. I wanna emphasize something that we should already said, say it again. There is a great deal of misinformation out there. And that misinformation is honestly coming from the political sphere because people in politics, some people in politics are needing to talk about what a devastating impact this has on monitors and on our healthcare system. And we want to, in our presentation today and our presentation to promoters to pause and say, hey, this is going have a big impact on some Vermonters. Other Vermonters are still have very good affordable programs available to them. And so again, and again, we want to say, check out what this means for you and your family. And if you have a constituent who have that question, please send them to us. So yes, you've heard this in the news, the elimination of the premium tax credits over 400% of poverty, that will bring back what we used to call the premium tax credit cliff, which will be indeed significant for families that fall just over that limit. And the reduction in premium tax credits for families between one hundred and thirty nine and three ninety nine percent of the federal poverty. Say it again, there will be premium tax credits available to those families, but I see old income limits. There's been a number of people out there saying premium tax credits are going away, they're not, the enhanced tax credits are

[John O'Brien (Member)]: going So

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: individuals who are subject to the five year bar and under 100% FPL are no longer eligible for premium tax credits or advanced premium tax credits. Most people in this impacted group are senior immigrants, international students, and other well integrated immigrants. This is about 200 Vermonters and I want to pause on that point. I've heard Diva say recently that the coming immigration changes, changing access to coverage is going to impact around 600 Vermonters. They are working at understanding that number, trying to be confident that their number is not accurate at this point. They don't ask a question about immigration status if it does not apply to their application. And so we

[David Durfee (Chair)]: are working to get as accurate a number as we can about that. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that total number of 600 goes Mike, I'm just gonna ask somebody, some enterprising person in the room to look up and tell us what 400% of the poverty, or 100% of the poverty level is for a two person household.

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: 2,800. 71,960 for a household of one, one hundred

[David Durfee (Chair)]: and forty seven thousand nine

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: hundred and twenty from a household of four. That's 400%?

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Yes. That's what according

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: to Google.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: So what was the first number?

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: If you're just a single

[David Durfee (Chair)]: person, yeah. 71,960. So in a two person, then it's gonna be $80.90 something. Yeah.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Okay. 97, two eighty. Okay.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Is currently this year? Yeah. You're looking at AI.

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: Probably AI on Google.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: But anyway, just for ballpark, that's helpful to have. We

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: can make sure you have the chart fresh. Alicia, were you gonna say something about that?

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: I was gonna say the same thing, Mike. The income limits for Vermont Health Connect are really simple to look up and we can absolutely provide that to the committee afterwards.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: And then the last point, last change is a change for DACA status Vermonters. Our understanding is that this may impact a few individuals, but not many. There are very few in this category. So the other major changes to mention is that there is a change it's an elimination of the repayment caps. Now you might not have known that there was a repayment cap but today for 2025 for lower income people, there is a cap on how much people have to repay if they got too much advanced premium tax credits come tax time when they reconcile it. And this is a very important protection. As you may know, premium tax credits can be tens of thousands of dollars, can be huge. And that protection has been very important. And the elimination of those repayment caps make it super important, but even more important that people accurately report their income Vermont Health Connect. Now, if you're an employee who gets a W-two and you know exactly what you're going to get every month and you know through the year, that's easy, easier. You really know what you're going to get, but as you know if you're an employee, if you're a Vermonter who is a contractor or an artisan or a farmer who is whose income is subject to things completely out of your control, it makes it much, much harder to accurately estimate your income and report it. So I'm going to say, Alicia, want to ask you if I'm saying this right, if you're a Vermonter who has that kind of a change in your income, a volatility in your income, I think it really makes sense to call and get some help from the likes of the healthcare advocacy office to do it in such a way that protects you from having to pay back much amounts of money. What do you think Alicia?

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: Yes, absolutely. I think there are strategies we can talk to people about in relation to taking less advanced premium tax credit, potentially reporting out slightly higher income or lowering taxable income at tax time. I do not want to say that we are going to have answers for every situation because complicated. Right? And when people make more money than expected, it is typically a good thing rather the thing that they imagine is going to have implications on their taxes. But we have worked with many members of the agricultural community to problem solve on these issues. And we're actually partnering with rural Vermont and NOFA to do some webinars around this for individuals in those populations too to strategize. But the Office of the Healthcare Advocate is certainly a resource.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative O'Brien had a question.

[John O'Brien (Member)]: Oh, I just didn't know what DACA was or or in general, just remember we're ag and we're not. Yes. We're committee on health.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Alicia, I'm gonna call on you to discredit DACA. You've got it.

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. I believe it was a status that was founded in the Obama administration. Don't quote me on that. I work in health care and immigration law. And I believe that it is essentially a a protective status for individuals who were brought to The United States as young people to try to have a pathway to a more stable status. But again, an immigration lawyer would be able to give a much better explanation.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Mr. Chair, I wanna do a time check.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah. But we should probably we should be through your last two slides.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: So so let's let's let's go a little fast. Fantastic.

[Alicia Rodriguez (Office of the Health Care Advocate)]: And very quickly, one impact that I do see having a pretty significant effect on agricultural workers in Vermont as it relates to affording and accessing healthcare is a change that is going to take place to advance premium tax credit at the 2027. So we had talked about restrictions in relation to Medicaid and being eligible for that benefit. That restriction is actually going to carry over for advanced premium tax credit in 2027. So Mike had described a change for immigrants who are under 100% of the federal poverty limit in 2026, that is going to be more systemic and extend to all individuals who do not have the following statuses. So the following statuses are the exception to the rule. So individuals with lawful permanent resident status who have had that status for five years will be able to get advanced premium tax credit, Cuban and Haitian entrances, and that category of immigrants referred to as COFA migrants as well. So those are the only exceptions to non citizens who will be able to access advanced premium tax credit to help lower that cost of affording a qualified health plan on Vermont Health Connect as of 2027. And when we talk about this rule change in relation to the agricultural community in Vermont, I do think this is going to have a big impact specifically on seasonal agricultural workers such as H2A workers who are eligible currently to sign up for a qualified health plan and get advanced premium tax credit if they meet all the other eligibility characteristics. So I do see that as something that is coming that will help making affording healthcare much more complicated in the future. So very quickly, just to summarize some of my big key takeaways that I hope came out throughout this presentation is that these changes are not going to go into effect for Medicaid until October 2026 and in January 2027 for the advanced premium tax credit that I had just described briefly. What I want to recognize is that these rules are complicated. They are intended to make people be afraid of taking advantage of these coverage, this coverage and benefit. However, the office of the healthcare advocate is a resource and we are encouraging people not to comply with these changes in policy in advance. So take advantage of the health insurance you are eligible for at this time. Additionally, one other scope of advice that we are going to be working with populations with or without health insurance is to promote some of the changes in hospital financial assistance. So Act 119 expanded hospital financial assistance. So Vermonters who have qualified incomes can apply for financial assistance with hospital regardless of immigration status and regardless of insurance enrollment. And this is just a way you can get in touch with our office. Thank you all.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Great. Thank Representative Nelson.

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: Signing up for healthcare is like trying to build a school budget before you had all the data from the state. You know, schools are trying to build budgets now, and we don't know what the dollar level, dollar yield's gonna be, we don't know, the equal, you know, all this stuff, we don't know, and you try to build a budget. Why could we set up healthcare so you enroll using your so you're rolling for '26, and then when you file your taxes on '27 on your earnings in '26, and then they can come back and scold you, and this happened to me, had to pay out $8,000 apartment was stupid when it made money, it was abnormal but if you followed for your '26 with your 27 returns and you filed for 27 you use your 26 returns and there's no going forward to steer

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: you

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: backwards because if you file and you estimate high, they don't give you money back

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: on your health care.

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: Am I right?

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: I think that Vermont Americans with, so first off, let me just recognize this is

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: federal law. I understand.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: And I also wanna recognize it is not, from my opinion, not the right to finance our healthcare system, but we're living under. But my understanding is, Alicia, please tell me if I go astray that Vermont has an opportunity to take their premium tax credits that they're owed in an advanced fashion month to month to pay their premiums or to say, it's easier said than done if you can't come up with money for your premium to say, I'm going to go ahead and fund my premiums and I'll get my tax credits come tax time when it's reconciled.

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: So You can get. You can. Okay. Yeah,

[David Durfee (Chair)]: I think that's true if you have a back, if you are owed money, think you do get it back. Yes. So let's And Meg, I want to just thank you for being mindful of the clock. I want to move as quickly as I can to the Bridges program, but anything you want to wrap up with?

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: I wanna wrap up with a comment about Bridges.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah, good.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: So you tasked us with working to do our very best to help all Vermonters get access, improve access to care. And what does it mean to be a Vermonter? It means you're here, quite literally what it means that you've lived in Vermont. And so we are very proud, we are proud to partner with other organizations and know that we need the help of other organizations to reach sometimes hard to reach populations. Bridges to Health is a key partner in that effort. We're a helpline, if you ask me how many people have this problem or that problem, I always have to say, the universe of people who might have this fact pattern, how many know to call the healthcare advocate's office may be relatively small. So we know that it's imperative that we have different approaches to reach different populations. And so Bridges has been a key partner helping us, helping assure that the population they serve has gaze access. We worked hand in hand with them on many cases, helping people get coverage. And in particular, and I say again, the immigrant health insurance plan that the state set up a few years ago, I don't know what percentage of Vermonters who came through that program got bridges, got health, direct health? Eighty five percent, I was going to guess even higher. Bridges to Health is the reason that program has been successful. So I'll just say, I'll even make the ask, I know that you are not a committee who's able to direct funding, but making sure that Bridges has stable funding going forward and a long term future here in Vermont with a long term home is imperative, it's very important, and I wanted to give you that opinion from a healthcare advocate's perspective.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Good, thank you for that. Yeah, and as we transition here, and I'm just gonna editorialize that we, as a committee, haven't so we've been hearing just now about this program. And I suspect that most of us on the committee aren't very familiar or aware of even the existence of it. And if we were here in January, if we would black out an hour plus to take testimony to learn about it just from the beginning, we've got roughly fifteen minutes to understand enough about what VRIGIT is to be able to give some context for why we're having the conversation today, the impact on if there is an impact, we're going to hear on our farm community. And do you wanna put something up or just wanna chat?

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: With interest of time, we're focus on a few

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Before you get started, Representative O'Brien. Just, well, Michael, I wonder from

[John O'Brien (Member)]: the conversations earlier today if there's ever been a thought of finding insurance for an occupation, in this case farming. If we could cobble together either nationally or regionally farmers and offer because in bigger groups, the terms go down if there's ever been some sort of thought into that.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: I think the right thing for me to say is, I am easily accessible and would love to chat with any member of the committee about questions like this or I know there was a question earlier about Medicaid versus Medicare. Longer answer to that question, reach out to me. My phone number's on the presentation, happy to.

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: Thank you.

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: My name is Naomi. I lead my program.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Naomi, I'm sorry, could you say

[David Durfee (Chair)]: your full name for the record?

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: This is not my usual place where I'm talking to folks, but Naomi Wilcox and migrant health programs UVM expansion. Thank you for passing it off and providing a little context. I think to start, I do wanna give a little bit of a background of what Bridges Health is, as well as some numbers around who are we even talking about right here. We've heard some situations, but I don't know how much committee members know about as kids of immigrant or migrant workers. I wanna touch on that and then talk about the impacts that we're hearing about within health access in the folks that we work with. So the main body of work with Minor Health Promotions is for GIST Health. It's health access programming that uses community health workers to focus on health promotion, health education, and health access with immigrant and migrant workers across the state. We actually started in Franklin County, where I grew up on a small dairy farm in 2010, and then over time expanded to be statewide. We use bilingual regional staff, community health workers, and they work with individuals and households and families and farms to make sure that they understand what the health needs are. They understand what the priorities are of the people that they work with. And more importantly, what are those barriers that exist for any one person to access care and how do we get around those barriers? So as I mentioned, we do work with immigrant and migrant workers, not just farm workers, but today I'll be talking about our work with farm workers. I often talk about our work as kind of being a program of last resort, in some ways a catch all. So we've worked with individuals that don't have the support of other organizations and aren't able to access healthcare services independently. I think that's an important point in terms of why we exist or who we serve. We are in the middle of a fall immunization outreach campaign that we do every year with the Department of Health. And when we do those clinics on farms, that's open to anyone on the farm. So farm owners, family members, farm workers. And we've done, I think we're up to ten days so far. We do about 15, it's how we stay on farms, so 50 to 60 farms every year. I mentioned it's important to recognize who we're talking about. I tend to think about two different buckets of immigrant workers. So we have year round immigrant workers. Those individuals tend to be on dairy farms, but not exclusively. They tend to be from Mexico, and this is a population that Will was talking about, where there's been a shift from primarily male individuals on farms doing farmworker to family members, spouses and children. So as an example, we went from survey in 2020, 33 kids, 2024, 141 kids. Wow. Huge, yeah, exactly. And within that, I think it was the last three years, we've seen forty three babies born to individuals that live on farms. The other group of people that we talk about when we talk about agricultural workers are seasonal workers. Alicia mentioned some of the impacts that they're gonna be seeing in terms of health insurance eligibility. There are around six sixty positions for seasonal migrant workers. It changes every year. Employers have to go through a whole process of first trying to identify local workers and then become eligible to apply for workers that come from out of the country. They're here anywhere from six weeks to ten months. Some people transition from one job to another, so we'll see someone maybe is out tapping right now. They prefer this because there's not a lot of snow, but they're tapping in the winter, they transition to crops, and then around ten months are headed back home and then might come again for another twenty months. What else do I want to say about seasonal workers? Oh, they're on 81 farms. We've seen a huge increase in the number of farms that are requesting seasonal workers because they're having trouble filling the jobs that they have on their farms. So ten years ago, that was about 40 farms. Now we're at 81 farms this past year.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Representing Robrein. Are

[John O'Brien (Member)]: these all H2A or are there other programs too?

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: All H2A, what I'm talking about is just H2A, which is specific to agriculture. Yep. Most of the workers are from Jamaica. Most of them, over half of them work on apple orchards, but that increase in the number of farms requesting workers is an increase really in diversified farms. So you're seeing ground crops, you're seeing people coming in sugaring, that's kind of a new thing in the past few years. People involved in honey production, some raising of livestock. So again, there's challenges with workforce issues on farms, and there's an increased reliance on immigrant and migrant workers. Let me think. I think that's all I wanted to say. They already mentioned most are from Jamaica, and the rest that we know of, H2A workers are coming from Spanish speaking countries, Guatemala, Mexico, places like that. Everyone we work with has their own unique set of barriers. Some of those challenges really are connected to systems issues. So the fact that health service providers aren't really well set up to serve immigrant populations as a whole, and that includes immigrant and migrant farm workers. And then some are in these individual barriers. Again, Nacho talked about those, Will talked about those. It can include lack of transportation, concern about costs, access to trans, I had mentioned access to transportation, work schedule, fear of leaving the farm, a whole myriad of barriers that really impacts whether or not they can access services. And that's not even talking about the current state of healthcare access in the state. If anyone knows anyone new coming into the state who needs a PCP or needs a dentist, it's months, maybe years to really get in, and that's the same for migrant workers and workers coming into the state. I mentioned that we have our community health workers. Each person has a region. We have eight of them around the state. Their region is really looking at how big of a size they're covering, and in addition to that, looking at what do we know about the population they might serve. So we have a lot more people in Chitney County, but we have a bigger region in the NAK, for example.

[John O'Brien (Member)]: Just quickly, with HTA workers, farmers who hire them are responsible for housing, right? Where does healthcare fall then? Who's responsible for that?

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: Nobody is officially responsible, well, the worker is responsible for healthcare. In the past, I think it was probably around 2010 or 2012, it was right around the time time that we started doing this outreach work. Up until that point, was a health insurance program that, at least for Jamaican workers, they came with that health insurance program, that ended, and since then it's been really complicated. One thing that I should probably weigh in and mention when we're talking about the federal changes, but the removal of that cap of what a repayment would look like if you don't estimate your income correctly is gonna have significant consequences for Jamaican workers and we already have seen that. When they have to sign a line saying, if you misestimated what your income is gonna be, you're gonna have to pay back money. People are like, well, I'm gonna be back in Jamaica. I don't know if I'm able to come back next year, I'm not gonna necessarily have the money to do that. And so that already deters people from getting health insurance. So with the removal of that cap, it's gonna increase that concern and probably decrease folks signing up for health insurance. And then they're not gonna be able to, I guess, in 2027. I just wanna say one more thing, think, a few more things about community health workers and kind of what that role is. They provide a lot of health education. They make sure people are aware of what services are available in their local communities. They identify barriers. So again, I mentioned transportation. We work with a lot of community volunteers. We work through health insurance to make sure people have transportation. They do a ton of paperwork. Mike already mentioned the IGNET program that includes probably like you've written your name seven times and dated it 15 times. And it's a lot of paperwork, right? So we're helping people kind of navigate those things. A lot of the time that community health workers are spending are really focused on using the existing healthcare system, which isn't really easy to access. And as I mentioned before, currently it's hard to even find appointments. So not to mention the tooth issue. Somebody calls us with a toothache right now, unless they are in significant pain, they're not gonna be able to get seen anywhere other than urgent care. So again, anything that you've heard about access to care generally disproportionately impacts farm workers because they have all these other barriers that are layered on top of it. Over the past three years, I kind of looked back to see, well, if we're just talking about farm workers, who have we worked with? We've worked with eleven twenty eight farm workers on 167 farms across all corners of the state. So it's a lot of people. We coordinate almost 3,000 appointments, so about a thousand appointments a year just with farm workers. And 35% of those appointments that we coordinated with farm workers or family members were with people that didn't have reliable access to transportation. And so we were working with people to figure out how do we make sure not just that they can make an appointment, but they actually can get there and get the follow-up that they need. A lot of things to say. Oh, and then the last two things I wanna say about the health access piece, and then I'll talk about what we're hearing from community members in terms of the changes on the federal level. When we see that there are collective needs on a farm, so vaccine interest, for example, that's when we work a little bit outside of the system to try and bring healthcare access to farms. The collaboration of the Department of Health has been happening for the past few years and has really been instrumental in making sure that not just farm workers, but farm owners access vaccines. They often say, yeah, there's no way I would have gone off the farm to do this, but I'm glad that I have that protection. And then occasionally, particularly within our H2A community, we'll have a handful of people that have a chronic health issue, in particular high blood pressure. And so sometimes they're bringing meds from Jamaica, they run out of beds or they're gonna run out of meds partway through, they don't have a primary care provider here. And so we work with volunteer providers to make sure that they can continue their meds until they can see their provider back home. And then the final piece around kind of outreach that we do, we work and connect it again to something that Nacho, I didn't talk to Nacho ahead of time, but it really aligns with what I was planning on saying. In Northern Vermont, there's a handful of food shelves that are really committed to making sure that everyone in our community has access to food. And so we collaborate with them, and there's a few 100 farm workers every two weeks that get food boxes delivered through community volunteers to make sure that we're filling some of that food access gap that Nacho talked about, that's particularly acute right now. In terms of what we're hearing from clients related to changes at a federal level, some of this has already been spoken about. So going back to the health insurance piece, mainly that will impact H2A workers, but will also impact some of our year round workers as well. We're seeing an increased reluctance and an increased need for conversation about risks associated with applying for programs or even accessing care. If I go to the hospital, is there a risk of me giving my name when I'm at the hospital? Is there a risk of applying for Three Squares SNAP benefits for my child? There's been a lot of stuff in the news about data sharing and what does that mean for how people can access information. We're seeing some out migration as a result of some federal changes. We're also seeing some people just saying, I'm limiting time outside. I had someone this year who said, I'm not gardening this year because I'm concerned about racial profiling. If someone sees me and drives by and sees that I'm brown, I'm concerned about health. So that type of thing comes up, which are our families, and as I mentioned, we have more of our families on farms, are being really concerned about being separated from their families. They're concerned about the economic impact if someone is detained within their family. And then within seasonal workers, we are seeing that there's concerns about whether or not the resale program will continue next year. Will there be changes at a federal level that means that H-2A workers are no longer able to come to Vermont, as well as concerns about rising healthcare costs. So they're aware of some of those conversations that are happening, not as much on a state level, but within The US. And then the final area that we see impacts is specific to health access programming. There is a concern, as Will mentioned, and that I just mentioned around racial profiling, and that impacts who's willing to transport people to appointments. And so community volunteers, farm owners, coworkers are less likely to give someone a ride if someone doesn't have transportation. We feel they're gonna delay care. If they delay care, they're more likely to end up in the emergency department, which is more costly for everybody involved. Oh, and then this kind of random thing came to be as I think Mike was talking. There's a number of FQHCs that rely on international dentists to

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Sorry, FQHCs.

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: Oh, sorry, community health center, federally qualified health centers are also known as community health centers. So it's not in Franklin County and CHC and whether it's not CHC. So there's maybe 10 or 11 across the state. And it's where someone can apply for a sliding fee. And depending on income and family size, might get reduced care. Many of them rely on dentists that come from out of the country. You may have read the news, there's a cost now associated to specialized visas. And so they're trying to figure out whether or not they can hire dentists anymore. And so someone in this situation like Nacho may have to go a month or two instead of two or three weeks, which is, in my opinion, bad enough to suffer with toothpaste. Maybe the last thing around the impact of changes at a federal level on health access programs, specifically our program, is just that there aren't federal funds for health equity work. And so that has an institution for the type of work that we're able to do, breadth and depth of the work that we can do. We know that having healthy workers means we have productive workers and we need productive workers for the farms. I think most people in Vermont have seen that at this point. We also know that if people miss work or they have to leave work for any reason, there's a cost associated with that. You lose knowledge, you lose skills, so the farm owner or farm manager has to take more time to train new people. And again, another point I just wanna underscore again is when people delay care, they're more likely to end up being ED, which is again, not helpful for anyone. So the last thing I'll say, and then I'll hand it off to Espeh, is just that we know how important this work is. We know that health access is really important for healthy farms, and we're gonna just continue to do whatever we can to make sure that we can continue doing this work.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you for fitting all that into Sorry, meant a lot. Was Just a few minutes, really. Yeah, very quite interesting and interesting data. As I say, I wasn't really familiar with what the program involved. And hopefully, it'll come back in January, and we can learn even more. Why don't we, in the interest of time, have you take places with as take through while they're getting situated is By the time I find it, you're gonna be able to say. Program lead. Yes. So. Yeah, please introduce yourself.

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: I'm S. B. Hamilton. I am the program lead for farmworker education programs at Union Extension. I would

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: say that in a week.

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: And so we help farm workers and their children, migratory farm workers and their children to access educational opportunities, both within and outside of the school system.

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: We have two main programs.

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: One is the federal migrant education program, Title I C, that's subgranting test by the agency of education. Whether that program will continue or not, nobody knows. We didn't know, this year our funding was significantly delayed, but we did get it funded at the 2022 rate. Unknown whether that will continue. That program works with kids who are in school, to age 22 in school or out of school, as long as they don't have a high school diploma and they meet this technical criteria of migratory, which means that you've moved across school district lines in the last year to seek or engage in temporary or seasonal agriculture. So as Naomi said, there are a lot more workers on farms than qualify for the federal migrant education program. But we work with kids in that program, and then we also, since 2020, we've had the farm worker education hub that's funded by a few different grants that ultimately go back to USDA to do online and on farm classes, specifically for Spanish speaking farm workers that are English for the workplace and some of their workplace, skilled workplace orientation kind of stuff. So we work with kids, we work with, and their families, we work with adults. The program for kids, are able to do much more like wraparound service. We're doing instruction for them. We're doing supplemental instruction for, for example, a 16 year old kid who just got here with his family and is in school, but just started school, doesn't speak any English. And the school, the rural school is trying to hire their first English language instructor. And in the interim, we're providing some supplemental English instruction for that kid. Tutoring all kinds of services, it looks like helping children enroll in school. All these kids that Naomi was just talking about, those 43 babies who were born in the last few years, those kids are needing childcare, they're entering preschool, their families are trying to figure out the logistics of transportation to preschool, to a preschool program that's two hours a day, five days a week, something like that. There's no public transportation to preschool. So we spend a lot of time with families trying to navigate those logistics, getting scholarships for after school programs, going to parent teacher conferences with them, everything that a family needs to support kids who are in school. And for young workers who were not in school, but meet the requirements, a lot of young dairy workers, they used to be almost exclusively men, as Naomi was saying, we are now up to 20% female in our out of school population. So that's been really interesting. And then different dynamics on young women who are parents, young women who are parents of kids who are back in their home country and how is that affecting them. Families that are reunited. So a worker who has been here for five years and has finally gotten the money and the stability to bring a family here, and then suddenly is the parent of a six year old that they have maybe not met, they maybe only knew when they were a baby, the parent of a teenager that they haven't seen since they were five. And how does that parent narrate, navigate parenting? How do they navigate interacting with the school systems? So we're there to try and support everything that's going to help the students who qualify to meet their educational goals. I think a lot of what has been said already, I would also say that the young workers are experiencing. So I'm gonna focus a little more on kids with the time that we have, but we are seeing, people are afraid to even open their blinds. People are afraid of roach racial profiling. They're afraid to go out and people are not sending their kids to school. They don't want their kids to be exposed, waiting for the bus. They don't want their kids to be walking to school. They are concerned about the bullying that they're hearing about at school and kids who are repeating things that they hear at home or they're repeating things that they hear on the news and people are feeling threatened. So we have a lot of conversations with families and with schools about how to navigate that. I was just talking to one of our regional coordinators. We have a staff of four regional coordinators, kind of like Naomi's community health workers that, and I was just talking to one of them who said that in the last couple of months, he's talked to four different families and schools to navigate racist comments and bullying that's happening in schools. And I know that if four people are calling someone, there are a lot of people who are experiencing that. These are schools in farming communities, and a lot of times it's the one kid or the two kids.

[John O'Brien (Member)]: Question from Representative O'Brien. What's the population of the school age

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: Last year we had, don't quote me on this, like 120 kids in school. The graph of age, I was just looking at it, we're almost 43 and four year olds, so preschool age. So the graph kind of goes like this. You know, we have five high schoolers this year, but you know, the three and four year olds, and that bump I expect if people stay, will start to move. So that's a lot to navigate with childcare subsidies and people wanting to work and navigating kids at home and kids being really isolated. If you're a three year old and you're on a farm and your parents are both working, then what are you doing all day? What kids are you playing with? How are you learning the language? All of that. Schools are concerned. Employers are concerned. So one of the things I haven't heard, because I know we don't have time, is that employers, as not just employers, employers are now also asking back to asking their staff to stay home, that fear of racial profiling. We're also hearing from farmers who live close to the border that they're scared and they're upset that immigration enforcement is parking on their property and is sitting there kind of using that as a place to watch the road from. And they don't feel like they're able to do anything about that. Let's see, what else do we wanna say? People have been detained, right? And so I was at one of our students' graduations last year when I heard about the detention of one of our other students who had graduated the day before. And so people are concerned about racial profiling because what they're hearing on the news, but also what they're hearing from their friends and family. And that impact is really big. And it's intense on kids, especially when they hear this thing from their colleagues at school. And our staff, especially our staff who are brown, are feeling also concerned about being racially profiled while they're out delivering educational services and supporting families and working with them. And I think I'll leave it there, but I would love to, I'd love to come back in January and give you more of a rundown of of our program, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you, Esme. Really helpful, just again, to get an intro to the program and obviously to hear some of what you're hearing out in the field. And you mentioned so funding wise, you you get federal funding. It sounded like

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: Yeah. Most of our funding is the federal program that goes into Passes through the state? Yeah. Passes through the state. It's subgranted to us.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah, and so right now, given where we are with the federal budget, you're good until January the way you Until June.

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: June 30.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Okay.

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: But usually we find out in the spring what the allocation is for the following year. It's a renewing grant and it's a formula grant, but last year we didn't find out that we were gonna get anything until the middle of the summer, at which point we had, we were already working on the rainy day funds that had been held by the state.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Any other questions?

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: If I have a four year old that's the best translator ever.

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: They learn so fast. People are so worried about also the, you know, in terms of federal education funding, like, will we continue to find English language education?

[David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative O'Brien, question?

[John O'Brien (Member)]: Yeah, just wondered, do towns pay the tuition or the per pupil costs for the 120 students, depending on what town they're going to school in? Does it come through you, your organization? Yeah,

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: it all comes to us for the whole state and it goes where it needs to go.

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: But, so sorry, just want to clarify, do you need the tuition for the person to attend the school or the support that they provide?

[John O'Brien (Member)]: The tuition, so if I'm in Newport and I'm going to high school, say at North Country,

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: is Oh, Newport yeah, Sorry, I didn't think

[Richard Nelson (Member)]: you You're one of the average daily members.

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: Yep. Everyone who's enrolled in school is to, yeah.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: It's counted.

[John O'Brien (Member)]: And same rules for like, you were talking about the ten hours in pre K.

[Esme Hamilton (Program Lead, Farmworker Education Programs – UVM Extension)]: Yeah, Yeah. And that's one of the also concerns. Like currently, anyone who is a resident of the state of Vermont has access to a free and doesn't already have a diploma and is within the age band has access to free education.

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Okay.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: All right, thank you.

[Naomi Wilcox (Program Lead, Bridges to Health – UVM Extension)]: Thank you so much. Jill,

[David Durfee (Chair)]: are you online?

[Mike Fisher (Chief Health Care Advocate, VT Legal Aid)]: Okay.

[David Durfee (Chair)]: We're going to stand up and just move around for three or four minutes, and then we'll