Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: did not bring extra handouts, but we did send them, but we can drive on the screen.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Good morning. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It's Tuesday, 02/03/2026. It's 10:15 a. M. And we are now joined by the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, VSNAT. And always a pleasure to welcome you to our committee to talk about the FY27 budget. If you would like to introduce yourselves and then tell us what you have.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: My name is Scott Giles. I'm the President and CEO of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation.

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Good morning, everybody. I'm Patrick Leduc. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of Vermont Student.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: And I'm having a technical issue here trying to shut the Oh, If you've got, do you have handouts?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: People have it either on their screen or I have my paper up so I'm happy.

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: There you go.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: If you've got that, then what

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: we can do I can also share the screen at some point if you want, maybe you just need to be made a poster. Yeah, you should be here.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: It is not not allowing me to bring it up.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, we'll talk from all of

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: our various pieces of paper. Okay. I will go ahead and do that. I've got to apologize for the kind of technical issues on my end, but what I thought, what I would like to do this morning, just begin by thanking you for the support that you all have historically given to VSAC and to the students and families that we serve. It's a privilege to enjoy the trust that you've given us. Think I we've got some exciting news to share about the investments that you've made in students. And we look forward to having the opportunity to share a little bit more about that. What I hope to do with this testimony is really three things. One, just provide a very brief reminder for the committee of the work that we do with both the programs that you all support and the programs that we provide using resources, both from the federal government and kind of from other resources that we have access to through our student loan programs. Talk a little bit about some significant changes that happened at the federal level. This is probably the largest change in federal financial aid occurred as part of the reconciliation bill this past year. And while the impact will be minor this year, you'll be hearing about that from the higher education community in much greater detail in the year following, we'll share that. And then kind of share one piece of information about something that we are doing to help mitigate all of that and then move right into our budget presentation, which relatively straightforward. So if I could just move to kind of slide two of our presentation, this is just a kind of brief outline, a reminder that we administer the Vermont SPAINT grant program for low income Vermonters, including the Vermont Emergency Micro Grant. This is a grant that we provide to individuals who, because of some life emergency, are at risk of stopping out of school. It may be that a car repair, it may be a utility bill. But one of the things that we have learned over time in partnership with colleges and with CCV is that sometimes a small setback in a student's life can have pretty profound impact on their ability to continue their education. And this is a key part of our retention strategy. We administer eight zero two Opportunity and the Freedom and Unity grant program. And we'll talk a little bit more about the outcomes from that. But starting with eight zero two Opportunity, it has had impact for students that far exceeds even our most optimistic expectations. This is a program with your support that provides Vermont students coming from families earning $100,000 or less the ability to attend CCV tuition free, tuition and fee free actually. And it has done a number of things. It has driven an increase in enrollment at CCV at a time when many community colleges saw declines in enrollment. And oftentimes when we think about these programs, we focus on traditional students, but some of the biggest beneficiaries of this program have been working adults, individuals who are earning just enough money not to be eligible for aid, but need skills in order to be able to obtain the next job. And then we administer a number of interest free workforce incentive programs, which we'll talk about as part of our budget request. Moving to slide three, this is just to touch on our federal or VSAC supported programs as a reminder. Using three federal grants, we provide career and education counseling to 5,800 students of all ages across the state. We are able to provide support to students in nearly every middle school and high school around the state. We've got our counselors living and working in the regions that they support. They'll work with students in multiple schools and we provide support to adults. I did pass around our sixtieth anniversary Capitol Hill stress ball for you all. We had the good fortune of having all three of our federal grants up for renewal this year and it has been a little bit of an adventure. I'm pleased to say that we got a continuation notice on one of them. We were able to arm wrestle out a new grant for our largest peer and education outreach grant, the GEAR Up program, which is a seven year award. We did get a cancellation notice from the department on our adult program, the Educational Opportunity Center grant program for alleged violation of diversity, equity, inclusion policies of the administration and a claim that the grant itself reflected the priorities of the prior administration and not the current one. Because we planned for the possibility that at least one of these grants would run into trouble, we were able to set aside enough money to keep that program moving forward for this particular year. And we expect that there will be a competition for a new five year grant sometime in the next two months. What I'd like to say is that one of our trade associations filed a case in federal court challenging the cancellation of these grants because the proper procedures weren't followed. And we recently received a preliminary injunction, which suggests that this grant will be considered for kind of reinstatement in the next month or so. This is an important grant for us because it really supports the workforce development strategy that we have in place for the state. We administer the five twenty nine plan, which is the college savings plan. And this has turned into one of our most successful programs. There's now over $720,000,000 are invested by Vermonters, and Vermonters are withdrawing nearly $60,000,000 a year to support education and training.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And how did the transition go to the new investment company or whoever it is?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: The new program manager. All transitions can be a little bit rocky for borrowers, but overall, we are pleased with the transition as it's moved forward. The technology that this vendor uses is much more user friendly and also has some enhanced security features in it. And once we have everybody up and running, I think 60% now of the account holders have kind of logged in and created their new credentials in our

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm one of the ones who has not. My daughter got out of college in 2010, but we still have a little 05/29. We're not your biggest client. Leftover to go to one of her kids.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Well, thank you for being a customer and I'm sure your daughter thinks you as

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: well. We

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: provide financial aid and forms nights, both in person and virtually. We provide these in nearly every high school in the state. We do offer a student loan program. It's a supplemental student loan program that is designed to meet the gap between what students have in grant aid and what they can borrow under the federal programs. This program is about to become much more important. We raise money using tax exempt bonds in order to be able to make these loans. It is not an obligation of the state. And when we use tax exempt financing, we can keep 2% of the earnings that we have on that student loan. And that 2% can be used for the administration of all of our programs, which is what has allowed us, even though we have the authority to draw a portion of our state appropriation, to be able to administer those programs without cost to the state so that 100% of your investment goes into the hands of students. We administer more than 150 scholarship programs. It's a growing area worth about $16,800,000 now. And these range everything from the Curtis Fund, for whom we administer nearly a million and a half dollars worth of scholarships to your local rotary club who may have raised enough money for a thousand dollars or a $2,000 scholarship and want to take advantage of our expertise doing financial aid need analysis and application kind of assessment for them. And we charge a small fee of roughly 5% of the amount that is awarded in part to kind of support that activity. And then independently, Patrick can talk more about this if there's more interest, we do administer an employer funded workforce opportunity forgivable loan program. The biggest one is really with the hospitals, and this is one in which they've provided some seed money. They identify employees who are working for them in nonclinical roles usually who they think would be good clinicians if they had access to the training that they need. The individual takes out a loan from the fund that the hospital provided. We administer it as a loan, but the hospital then pays it back in an annual amount in each year that that employee works for them in the new clinical capacity. And it's become an important addition to our efforts to address the nursing workforce shortage. So just jumping to kind of slide four, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but higher education is kind of in the crosshairs right now in many different ways. And the part that I do just wanna touch on because it's important context for the budget requests that we have made is that while Congress has not engaged in reauthorizing the Higher Education Act now for nearly twenty years, this is the core program that guides or governs the way the federal government administers and provides student aid in overseas colleges. The reconciliation bill, one big beautiful bill, made the most substantive changes to federal financial aid. Undoubtedly, I saw that there were nurses in the room. You've probably heard from nurses, at least a conversation about whether or not nursing programs counted as professional programs or not. And I can touch a little bit on what is involved there. But the biggest things that I wanted to mention really relate first to federal student loans. And that is that for the parents of undergraduates for probably thirty years, parents have been able to borrow up to the total cost of attendance from the federal government without regard to their credit or their ability to repay. It's been a program that has been both very important and controversial because oftentimes there are occasions when parents have gotten themselves in trouble. Under one big beautiful bill, this program was capped. The House Republicans proposed eliminating it. The Senate didn't go along. But as a result of this, a parent will now only be able to borrow for each student up to $20,000 a year or $25,000 a year with a student lifetime cap, dollars 60,000. I did for one year. So if you think about in particular an out of state student at the University of Vermont with a total cost of attendance that may be in the 38 to $40,000 range, you can see that that will create a gap. The bigger place that the changes are likely to have an impact is at the graduate level, where in the financial crisis, a program was created called the Graduate Plus program that allowed graduate students to borrow 100% of the cost of attendance of a graduate program. One of the challenges with that program has been that it became the fastest source of federal debt over the course of the last fifteen years, which both reflected increased attendance at graduate and professional programs, but also heightened concern that the access to unlimited borrowing was encouraging schools to increase their tuition fees for those programs, which is the reason that the federal government engaged in a debate about whether or not those would be kept. So they kept the amount that graduate students can borrow. So a graduate student who is not in a professional program can borrow $20,500 a year now as opposed to the total cost of attendance, which could have been anywhere upwards to $90,000 a year with a lifetime cap of $100,000 If you are a student in a professional program, you can borrow up to $50,000 a year with a lifetime cap of 200,000. And it is that definition of professional program that has really caused the controversy in many ways. So why did they create a separate cap for professional programs? Large part, it was their concern about med school. That was the group that was making, I think, the strongest case for this. And in the crafting process, they were looking for a definition of professional school. They grabbed an archaic definition from the Higher Education Act that identified 11 professional programs, which were medical doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, osteopaths, doctors of divinity, and a handful of other programs. And those programs currently are the only programs that will be eligible for the increase that $50,000 kind of- Because

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the nurses became not part of that program.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Not part of that program. So I'm just gonna jump to six and then we'll be able to jump immediately into our budget presentation. I'll just say things that we, VSAC, will be monitoring. So in the absence of alternate strategies, will some low income undergraduate students fall through the cracks? And this is something that we have to pay attention to. Will higher cost programs and professions, medical school, as an example, be limited to students from families with the means to pay tuition or borrow in the private credit markets. And then this is one that I think is going to be particularly important from a workforce perspective. Will high credential but low paid professions meet the new accountability measures that are gonna be in place? I skipped over this section in my presentation, but one additional change that was made, the federal government wants to make sure that any education program it invests in delivers an economic return for the student who participated. And as a result, next year, any program which cannot demonstrate that its graduates are earning more than they would have if they had the next degree below them. So if you think a psychology major at the University of Vermont, the psychology program will have to be able to demonstrate that its graduates are earning more than they would have with a high school diploma. And similarly for a graduate program, the graduate program will have to demonstrate that its graduates are earning more than they would with just an undergraduate degree. And one of the things we wanna draw attention to is that there's probably some vulnerability to those programs that we describe as being high credential, but kind of lower wage. Early childhood education would be a place that we want to flag for attention. And then some programs like licensed clinical mental health counselor, where the requirements are, and I know that we've got some expertise here in the room in this, requires a master's degree and three thousand hours of supervised clinical training before you're eligible for licensure and for billing, which are high need and high demand positions within the state, but may or may not meet the new accountability measures that they've drawn out.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Then they can't borrow federal funds.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: They can't borrow and eventually they may be totally ineligible for other financial aid programs depending on how it plays out. So I wanna jump to maybe some better news in here as we move. And I wanna touch on something we won't spend a lot of time on it on page seven, but this is an initiative that we have launched. And I wanna give Patrick all the credit for both conceding of it and for the execution of it. We describe, I like to think of this as a positive use of machine learning and AI, but one of the biggest challenges we always have is helping students and families be good consumers of education, picking education programs that are the most affordable for them. This is work that we do through our counseling programs, but there are thousands of students that are not able to participate in our programs And financial aid letters can be very confusing and hard to interpret. The Award Advisor is an app that you can download from the app store. We've made it available nationwide. We are partnering with other nonprofits around the country, and you can literally snap a picture of your financial aid award letter and the tool will translate it into common language terms. And if you've applied to five or six schools and you have multiple award letters, it will show you exactly what the net cost of each of those programs are, what it is that you will be expected to pay, and if you are going to need to borrow, how much that will be over the course of the program.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: There you go, Wayne, there's some more AI for you.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: And we think that this has become even more important with the changes that the federal government has made. It's going to make, put even a greater priority on being a smart consumer of education. So with that, I'd like to jump right to our budget request and just make one observation before I jump in, which is that with the support of the committee, I'm pleased to say that Vermont is actually in some ways better positioned to navigate these changes than many of our peers because of the investments that you have made, particularly in eight zero two opportunity and in the Freedom Immunity Program, as well as our workforce programs. So on page eight, VSAC is requesting and the governor included within his budget a 3% increase to our base appropriation. And this includes our core financial programs, eight zero two opportunity and the advancement grant in the trades forgivable loan program. So this would be the core piece. In addition, and we can talk more about this, you have given us permission over the course of the last decade to use a portion of our appropriation for what we refer to as our aspirations initiatives. This is just a carve out, it's not additional money. Last year, you provided us the authority to use $300,000 This is a program where we partner with a school that is interested in making sure that its students are graduating with a plan for either post secondary education or employment after high school. And we partner with them to design and develop a set of tools that they can implement with their students. The program has turned into one of our more successful initiatives. And our goal here is always to work with a school for a number of years, three to four years, and then really kind of hand the keys over to them. And then we can move on to work with another school that has a particularly significant gap in either their college going rate or has a concern about whether or not their students are effectively making or successfully making the transition into the world of work. We're asking that that carve out be increased from 300,000 to 400,000.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's the spending authority, no new money.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: That's not new money, that's just-

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: New money comes next. Yeah.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: New money comes next. Dual enrollment early college stipend, you may recall that we administer that stipend for students. This is a stipend that helps offset the transportation and textbook and other expenses for free and reduced lunch eligible students that are participating in dual enrollment. We're requesting level funding for that program, we think.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is that in the governor's recommended budget? Yes. That is there, okay. Yes,

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: is. And then the Freedom and Unity Scholarship, this was a program that you helped us launch last year. You gave us $1,500,000 that allowed us to make the regular tuition programs at Vermont State University tuition and fee free. We are requesting an $812,000 increase to 2,300,000.0 that we believe would allow us to take that income threshold to $80,000 a year.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: What's the income threshold now? 65. 65.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: We are in the process of collecting data because we are just starting second semester now, we don't have the complete enrollment data on that first year, but as a teaser to give you a sense for the impact in year one, with the launch of Freedom University, Patrick and his team report that we've seen a 7% increase in grant applicants interested in attending Vermont State University, which is a pretty remarkable statistic to see in the very first year of the program.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So the interesting number not rounded is because you figured out what would be to go to 80,000 and that's what you came up with.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Yes, yes. I think our goal is to always come to you with what we think is a reasonable and really targeted request rather than picking a round number. Let's round it up

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: to whatever. So yes, we appreciate that.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: No, our goal is to deliver what we've, we try to tell you what we're gonna do and then deliver on it. Great.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is this an increase or is it part of the 27,000,000?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: No, this would be separate from

[David Yacovone (Member)]: that. Separate. Okay.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: We separated that out because last year you provided the funding with one time dollars and Right. You would obviously welcome having that be part of BASE, but also wanted to just acknowledge the funding stream.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm sorry. Scott saw my hand then. So I just want to make sure that I'm understanding. So it is the aspirations program that is authorization to carve out, set aside 400 ks of your base appropriation. The others are additional asks. Yes. The dual enrollment, the freedom you just got. Dual enrollment.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Dual enrollment is actually a separate program that we administer. Okay. That is half general fund and half ed fund.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay, right. All

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: right. So that's a level funded.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But then there's three other acts. The next three are acts. Yes. I Thank got you.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: And then what we wanted to share was that with the support of this committee, VSAC has administered now actually for nearly twenty years, a nursing forgivable loan program. This is a program whereby we will award up to full tuition at the University of Vermont. That's the kind of the threshold for a student interested in pursuing nursing, who is willing to commit to work in Vermont for a year as a nurse for each year that we have provided them support. This has been funded historically with Global Commitment dollars. Last year, we received 3,200,000.0 from Global Commitment for this. The demand has grown so much over the course of the last several years that we could have awarded an additional $5,000,000 had we had it. We did put in a request to the governor for an additional $2,000,000 for this program. And as I think the committee learned during a presentation from AHS, these programs have not been funded. We can talk a little bit about the conversations that have taken place. We also wanted to highlight, and this was a conversation we started last year, and that was that in FY25, we had received funding. These were, I think ARPA dollars initially for this, for the Vermont Mental Health Professional Loan Program. It's the same structure and we were given a million dollars. Those funds have now been fully expended. And this is a program that, going back to the example I used, that federal example of licensed clinical mental health counselor, this program would allow somebody who's interested in pursuing that counseling degree, it could be an MSW, it could be any one of those master's degree programs, master's in psychology, We would pay for tuition in exchange for a commitment from them to work as a licensed professional. As we progressed through this process and we're engaging, the Senate raised the question very late in the process as to whether this too could have been eligible for global commitment dollars. That conversation ended up being dropped at the end of the year. We made the request, neither of these programs are contained within the governor's budget.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right. But you're requesting an additional 2,000,000 in the nurse forgivable loan, not a whole, because the other stuff is in there? No, none of this. So you're actually, you're requesting the 5,000,289?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Yes. Which would be 2,000,000 above the 3

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right, but right now it's

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: at zero, is what you're Yes.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay, so it would be really helpful, and maybe it's later on, as I'd love to see the history of the numbers of people who've gone through that have become nurses. Like Wayne is where I'm going. Then of the people that, and I'm glad we have a residency requirement, but I wonder if you also know how many people actually stay in Vermont after their required residency is up.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Does that make sense? Did I miss anything?

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: No, just to add a little bit. We've been working on this for a few years. Do you have any concept or are you doing any tracking on what the total need is and how rapidly we might be filling in that gap? Is this a twenty year project in order to get enough nurses or is it something that's doable in five years or some duration of time?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: I think we've heard a range of numbers out there. Can come back and provide either in person or in writing kind of some detailed information. We've heard numbers out there about with pending nursing retirements, how great that need is. We've heard numbers as high as 12,000. We have been thinking that as we take a look last year, Patrick, do remember how many nurses we actually funded?

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: About 300, three fifty.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: So we were able to fund

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: I'm sorry, heard that wrong. 176 that we funded with the appropriation that we had, we could have funded another three twenty two that applied last year.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: How many did you have before the three twenty two? I missed the first number.

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: 176 in the last academic year. We can come back, as Scott said, with the history of the total volume.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Great history, the total numbers and our experience has been is that if you do not fulfill your work obligation, this converts to a loan and that we begin the process of collecting. Historically, 90% of them fulfill their obligation through work.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Dave, two things. You mentioned about five minutes ago that you have a nurse loan program for those who go to UVM?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: No, what we do is it is for any institution that they want to have. But what we've done is we've capped the maximum award at the in state tuition at the university. Thank you, thank you for that.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Madam Chair, I don't know where to get this from.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And

[David Yacovone (Member)]: it may not be here, but we had, when AHS was here, they informed us about AHEC and the funding decision, referred to what I interpreted, perhaps inappropriately and incorrectly, other programs that might take care of that. And I'm looking for a spreadsheet that shows, here's what we lost, here's what we're gaining, have we really gained, or are we just holding even? And I thought VSAC was going to be some of that approach, and also, which we don't have here, some of the 195,000,000 special funding we're getting, we believe five years, think is going for scholarships. Do you know who we would ask to compose such a spreadsheet? Because I feel like now we're trying to piece it together. That's a

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: good point. I don't know, Scott, if you have some information on part of this, and then we should look at the world transformation. There's a whole list of the projects that they have to do, and we can't change those projects. But we can look at the projects and say, are these some of them?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: So, you for that question. That was actually the next point that I No, was this is perfect. It's the next point I was gonna raise. It's that we've been in conversations with AHS from the beginning because we administer the vast majority of their workforce related programs for them. So Patrick has been working closely kind of with Joe Olson. We've been in conversations with the secretary as well, trying to help them understand both the, are trying to understand kind of what it is they wanna try and accomplish with the grant so that we can help them with program design and also trying to communicate to them kind of what the timetable constraints are for these programs. One of the issues that we are engaging them in actively now is that one of the constraints that they have with the rural healthcare transformation that is a concern for us and for them is that there's a use it or lose it component to this, that if they do not fully obligate funds pretty quickly, those funds will not be available in subsequent years as part of the grant. And we are heading into a period where, put things in perspective, we would be making awards in the currently funded programs in that kind of April, May timetable in order to be able to effectively impact the decisions that students are having for the fall of this year. So as we try and navigate how these two program frameworks are gonna intersect, time is not our friend and it's something that we need to move pretty quickly on.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: So the nurses are all licensed nurses, who licenses them? There's a state licensure process. So whoever's licensing them should have numbers, right? Yes. Changes in those number of licenses.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: And I think there are a number of sources where we can get workforce information for you, I'm sure.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: And then if I can just continue down to page 11, and I think you've always asked us, there's nothing new in this information, just wanted to share with you that we have identified those sections for each of our funding and where the language

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: is traditionally. When we assign other policy committees to take a look at the budget.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Here it is. And then on page 14, just really for your information as you are thinking about kind of the health care forgivable loan programs, These are programs that we administer on behalf of AHS. And following that on page 15 is again section.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Not a second. Absorbing 14. So we funded one dentist because that's all the money we had?

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: I'd have to go back and see why that number did not get large, but I believe it is just because that's the funding that we had available for the month.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: This was just in FY '26?

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: This is with the exception of the mental health professional, which didn't have funding, these are all FY '26.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: And

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: then just if I can just kind of kind of walk through '15 16 really are just showing you where in the field the language and the program resides.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Very helpful. So these are all the things. Oh yes, the National Guard tuition benefit.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Can you help me fully understand, I'm making some assumptions. There seems to be a pretty profound difference between a scholarship program and a loan program. A loan program would seem one could much more rapidly impact the workforce shortage by saying, if I'm correct, to a nurse who comes from Rhode Island, we've got your loan. Whereas a scholarship program, the students got to matriculate, it's gonna take several years before that person's ready to go to work. Am I correct?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Yes, although remember that we are also able to support with this program kind of a range of what I'm calling nursing professions. So you got LPNs and two year nursing programs. We do have the ability So to provide support to not just four year, but professionals coming in with one, two year, and in some cases, three year programs. And then we do provide some additional information because we knew the committee might be interested in that on both aspirations. Some of the success we've seen with eight zero two opportunity, which we can talk about, if the committee is interested. And then last we did add, you may not have this, but it is in the material we updated this morning. We have a page 22 now that provides a timeline that we shared with AHS for development and implementation of programs. And if you do not have that, we can test.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Did you update and send that to Autumn?

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: We did this morning.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Okay, I think

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the new one. The Rural Health Prevention for NIKE grant?

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Yes, next yes.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Online, page 22. Yeah, so it's on our community webpage but it's not, you know, frequently found. So I can just print out that page. Oh, you have it?

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Yes, we have it.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Oh, you're making it up easy. Oh, now I don't have to print it. So

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: this affects you This is the whole world transformation grant, but

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: so So what we did was we were working with AHS. We wanted to share with them what the normal cycle would look like for us to stand up any new programs like the workforce. And so through the work that we've done with all of you over the years to stand up the other workforce programs, we kind of mirror those and said, we hit these milestones, we will be successful in helping students in Vermont in this year, therefore getting those monies out the door and not at risk of not being coming back in the following cycle.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So the timeline that you need in order to deliver on those programs, and then the money has to be spent by September, all of their 195,000,000.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: And so what we wanted to share with you, AHS continues to be a great partner, great partner historically. Standing up new programs is complicated and requires time. Part of that complication is of course, a little bit on our end, but the bigger part is that you have to be able to market and communicate the program to people so that you've got the applications coming in. I think that the good news from our perspective is that to use, just as an example, the programs we currently have now, knowing that the programs in order to be eligible for Rural Health Transformation have to be different than the programs that we're currently in some way, we do have kind of, what I would say our live bodies that are applying to us now for funding from the programs that we are currently administering. And so if we are able to execute the design quickly enough, that's money that would be able to move out the door pretty quickly.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And so have you started to draft eligibility requirements?

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Well, I think the last I heard, AHS was just finishing up the negotiations with CMS, and so we were kind of waiting for that to mature. And then we'll be reaching out to them again probably later this week to see where they stand and when they'd like to sit down and start wrapping.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Because February 20 is coming up in seventeen days.

[Patrick Leduc (Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: My mind is a little tight.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, so the Joint Fiscal Committee, on which a couple of us sit, is meeting on Friday to accept, presumably accept, the World Transformation grant. It has to be accepted by them. So there'll be a public discussion about all of that then. So I would think once we've done that, then we've done our part, get going. I

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: think the message that we wanna just really leave behind is that we think these programs have been very successful. They're meeting really clear needs. And we stand ready as an organization to step in when AHS is prepared to try and move that money forward.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You guys have been great partners with all of these programs. And when ARPA came along and we launched a couple of programs, more than a couple, you took it in stride because you have a good infrastructure in place that you can run through your So business all of it's great that you could do all these great things for a lot. Thank you.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Well, of this would be possible without the support that you all have provided us. So thank you. We take seriously the trust that you have given us and are grateful for the support.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you. Any last questions? Dave, do you have anything else? Well, not

[David Yacovone (Member)]: for VSAC.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay. All right, everybody good on this? And John Kascenska is the liaison, but we know we can always reach you if we need to, so. Absolutely. Wonderful. Thank you

[David Yacovone (Member)]: very much for coming in.

[Scott Giles (President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation)]: Thank you. Great to see you.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Okay, wow, committee, well. So Madam Chair? Yes. Just so that I'm tracking this, during fiscal meet Friday, presumably, don't want assume that they approved the grant that's presented to them. That enables AHS to actually start getting some of that money out the door, even though it hasn't gone through and been approved in the FY twenty six or twenty seven budget?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We have no authority as the general assembly to do anything about the money in the Rural Health Transformational Grant. We do not appropriate the money. We don't say, can you tweak it here? We can

[David Yacovone (Member)]: So they can act.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: They can act because they don't need us. All we have to do is accept the grant. That's the only authority that we have. We can choose not to accept the grant. But that we can That's it. That's the only role we play. It's it was a little surprising to find that out but in fact that's the case but we're nimble but we can't we can't change what's in unlike this other things where we have some flexibility like we did with ARPA we had flexibility. There were strings attached, not as many as here. It's like, this is what

[David Yacovone (Member)]: it is, and that's that. Follow-up. I don't know if our committee of jurisdiction would do this, this information, its output. Could they say, okay, we understand what the 195 is going through? And then they might say, here's the toolbox or portfolio that VSAT has. We were good to go. We don't we can accept or not the AHEC reduction. And and they could recommend to us, you know, even with the one ninety five, you're not covered or we're good to the go, good to go. Right.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, we wanna compare what's possibly being eliminated with what is coming in through that grant.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: We can do that too, but I would say

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Committees of jurisdiction can take a look at that as well.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: And they know that or they will?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well they're going to be looking at the budget as a whole anyway and so whether it's health care services they're going to say we agree with the governor's recommendation to eliminate this program or we don't or whatever you know so we're covered. People are looking at it but I think Dave's point is that the budget is one thing right but the grant is something different and Dave has a concern about how that grant might be spent to make sure that what we don't do in the budget might be covered that's right And that's where hopefully the policy committees will be taking a look at that as well. And I would expect that we would want to have some oversight just in terms of reporting back on how are you doing getting that 195,000,000 out the door, what programs are working, what are the results, so that we just understand that information. Because even if we can't change it, we should be paying attention to that.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Any other thoughts?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So, we will we have at 11:50