Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Good afternoon. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It's Tuesday, 02/24/2026, just after 02:00. And we are now going to hear some more testimony from the Agency of Education, mostly to do with education transformation. And we'd given $4,000,000 last year. And there were a bunch of other questions as well, which you have been kind enough to answer and talk to us about today. And as I mentioned offline, we'll probably have other questions because that's what happens here. So thank you.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: All right. Thank you for having us. For the record, Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: John Kascenska, Deputy CFO.

[Unidentified committee member]: All right. So

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: how we thought we might tackle this is to just sort of go through the questions that we received. And again, please feel free to ask other questions. So we received these questions. They're mainly around the Act 73 appropriations, and there were some other kind of questions in there that we're happy to address. So we figured we'd just tackle them one by one. So the first question is, and we just put the text of the question in. Would you share a breakout of how the appropriations from Act 73 have been spent or obligated thus far? And so just a reminder, going back, we do have a handy table that sort of shows you each section of Act 73 where there's an appropriation. The Agency of Education had actually made the request for 4,000,000 As you can see, that $4,000,000 did not all go to the Agency of Education. So it ended up being split across a bunch of different state entities. Sean had actually done some outreach to some of these Secretary of State, Legis Council. As of the time that we sent this over, we didn't have responses from everybody, but he does have some verbal updates to provide because we got some updates. So looking through this, you can see that Section 4H, Ledge Council, had an appropriation of $200,000 The specific use there was to support the establishment of voting wards that would be aligned to any transformation and education governance. They responded back saying that they won't plan to spend this until new districts are established, so sort of an order of operations. And with that also was a per diem for the voting boards working group.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So why did why was 2,000 going to our legislative council? Were they gonna hire somebody to to work on this? You have no idea.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: I we don't. Yeah. I mean, think that was the idea is that they would be maybe contracting for services to help draw those lines. Okay. Under four gs to the Secretary of State was 15,000 Oh, I already mentioned that. Okay. Under Section three I-one, this was really to support the Redistricting Task Force. So you'll see there's a whole set of appropriations there. So administrative support for the task force went to Agency of Administration and $50,000 $100,000 to ADS for technical support. And what ADS did was building that district builder map, if you all had a chance to kind of play in there. So really having this pretty powerful technical resource available.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Did that get spent?

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: About $100,000 they've spent almost $19,000 with a little more obligated. So there's still a decent balance there.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: And there's a particular staff member over at ADS, John Adams, who's done a really fantastic job.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So you hadn't heard back and that's why these are blank?

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Yeah. Okay. And

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: then also to agency of administration was $10,000 for per diem for the non legislative task force members, and then another $10,000 that went to the general assembly for per diem for legislative task force members.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Yeah, I've heard back from JFO that the general assembly money has been spent. Okay. So

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: that's sort of the, what I would call, other uses. There is then a whole section on the agency of education. And then just signaling, there was also $400,000 if you go down to the last line of the table that went to the joint fiscal office. That was for contracted services to make recommendations for the final foundation formula base and weights. They have executed that contract with AIR. That work is underway. We're sending them lots of data even as we speak. So for the agency of education appropriations under 10b, and again, this actually doesn't go to us. This goes to the state board, but it runs through the AOE. Dollars 200,000 for consulting services to review state board rules and to support them in making updates to those rules. That was a request that came from the state board in the FY twenty six budget. So they have executed that contract, and you see they're just starting to expend those funds. Okay, now we're down to the part that really went to the agency of education. So Section 31B, this is the only one of these appropriations that's actually base funding because it was the creation of a new position.

[Unidentified committee member]: Which one are you at?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: 31B? Sorry, I skipped the other page.

[Unidentified committee member]: Got it.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: No worries. Okay.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: So this is the creation of a new position. So it's $150,000 in base funding. And this is for a special ed strategic planning position. We're actually in the I'll have updates on each of our positions in just a moment, but we've made a verbal offer in the process of onboarding that.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is part of the That doesn't seem like it's part of education transformation.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: No, there's a whole section of ACT 73 that's around special education strategic planning and implementation. Okay. So it's actually related

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So it is part of ACT 73?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It is, yeah. And then the next line, so if we go to your next page, Section 32 is really where the bulk of the money that we had requested in that original 4,000,000 appropriation, that's where that is. So this is Section 32. It's a one time appropriation of approximately $2,800,000 This includes a whole host of things in it. So the first is that it includes the five limited service positions with funding for eight months. And I'll talk more about that. So just hold any questions you have there. I'll be giving an update on that. It also includes all of the consulting services that we had identified in our FY 'twenty six budget. And I'll break down for you in this upcoming section all of the ways that we're using these funds and planning to use these funds. So I would say this is actually the area. It's about $2,800,000 is what was appropriated to the Agency of Education to support education transformation is sort of the key takeaway there. So if we go on to the next section, this is where I have all the additional detail on that 2,800,000.0. We did link in what we sent over our original FY twenty six budget memo, where we really describe at a high level all the ways that we are intending to use these funds to support education transformation, funding, governance, and education quality. And so you can get sort of a I brought some of that language over as kind of a reminder. One key takeaway here is the intention has always been that these are multi year efforts, right? Multi year strategies because we're looking at a multi year transformation. So never an intention to obligate and expend all of these funds in fiscal year 'twenty six. That would have been fairly irresponsible of us. We are in a really deliberate kind of phased approach to the work. And it's really important that we aligned this work to make sure that we were maximizing resources with the completion of a major agency reorganization, which began last summer and we completed we're kind of in the final stages of tweaking, we really completed September, October and the development of our strategic plan. And why that's important is we want to make sure that we're really getting value out of every single penny. And you're going to hear me talk about maximizing our limited resources a lot during testimony today. We're looking at braiding funds wherever we can bring in federal dollars to support these activities, general fund, carry forward from the previous year. Sean and I work pretty diligently right now to find every penny we can in our budget to support this major work that we're doing. So if we look at the contracts that we've executed to date, so you can see Act 73 item one. The first is a special education funding report. In Act 73, as we go on to page four, the Agency of Education was directed to identify the conditions and considerations for the delivery of special education in preparation for a proposed change to a weight for special education. So let me back up. Act

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You were expecting to change the weights for special ed? You did.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Act seventy seventy three actually has a weighted formula. And just as a reminder, when the administration put forward our proposal for education transformation, we very deliberately did not choose to do that because we recognize that there's actually a significant amount of improvement and change in the delivery of special education that needs to happen before we actually start to change the funding. So the weights are in there. And so there is direction for us to basically lay out what are the considerations and conditions that need to prepare the system for that change. So that contract has been executed. Work is underway. We'll actually be finalizing that analysis, and we will send it to JFO and AIR as part of their larger work around the foundation formula. So it's sort of supplementing that. With that is item two here. And item two is another contract that we've executed and work is underway. And this is really capacity building, training, and consulting around the implementation of Act 173. So 173 is really the blueprint that you all passed in 2018, right, that was really intended to improve the delivery of special education, generally high quality instruction in the classroom, and differentiated support. We've done a lot of reporting on this. So I direct folks to our current state of special education report and our special education strategic plan. In effect, the state, meaning collectively the education system, did not effectively implement 01/1973. Work really wasn't done for a variety of reasons that we've really diagnosed. So what we're doing is we're really putting some resources into doing this work. We brought on new solutions K-twelve. And the reason that we really selected them in the bidding process is that they were able to actually take our Act 173. They went to Louisiana, and they actually helped Louisiana implement what is in essence our 173. And Louisiana has seen generational gains in special education outcomes. So they've got a real track record. They've worked in Vermont for over a decade, and we're really excited to get this work done. So these two pieces really go together. So what are the conditions for new delivery of special education in Vermont is sort of contract number one in preparing for that transition and funding. I want to remind folks, we haven't even fully completed the funding transition that was in 01/1973, and now we're contemplating a new funding system. So it's really important that we get very clear about what those steps are. So that's contracts one and two. Contract three is we have contracted with Up For Learning, which is a really wonderful Vermont based organization that we utilize and a lot of other organizations do. They do fantastic work with elevating student voice. So in particular, we're doing some student input sessions on the new graduation requirements that the Agency of Education developed and have recommended to the State Board of Education for rulemaking. We had student voice involved. Don't want to give you a question that we didn't, but now is a really great moment for us to do some additional targeted sessions with that.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You have proposed graduation requirements. Yes, they've been sent

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: to state board in December. State board is now beginning to engage in rulemaking. And we've actually committed to continuing to support them with ongoing stakeholder engagement and refinement because we just have the capacity to

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: do so. When are statewide graduation requirements supposed to be agreed upon? And then when do they go into effect?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: 2020. They would So next July. Yeah, they would be in effect I wanna make sure I get this right, but it would be for the graduating class of 2031. They would be the first class to graduate with those requirements. Don't hold me to that 2031. It might be February. So that work is underway doing listening sessions across the state. So those are our executed contracts. We also have a whole series of RFPs in process, some of which are going out within the next week and some will be in the next couple of months. So one of the critical areas that we've identified as really needing improvement and really kind of a revamp in capacity building is around our data reporting to drive data driven decision making for all of you, for districts, for families and students, and really improving both the timeliness and the usability of our data. So we have an RFP that's about to go live. Is really data dashboarding is sort of a shorthand. But think of everything from really generating timely reports for an analysis for all the work that you're doing, for the work that we're doing, strategic planning, reporting for districts, particularly if we are having new governance structures set up, really having timely and useful data available will be really important. This will also help the agency in targeting our support. So where do we need to differentiate support for systems that may already be quite fragile? And we do have a few that are going to be particularly challenged during the transition period.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So I know that the task force had a really hard time getting data for several meetings I'd about

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: say that's an inaccurate statement. So we responded to 156 data requests. Those were posted and available. The initial data requests that were sent over, we actually responded to almost immediately, and the information was not shared with the task force. So the data was not shared with the task force. So then what we ended up doing is in responding to those 156 data requests, there's actually a Anyone can access it. It's publicly available. A site on the It's on the ADS website. So I would say that's an inaccurate narrative that's been put out.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay. I mean, was reading articles about the task force, they kept saying they couldn't just because they didn't have enough data about schools and

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: things

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm like aware

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: of the narrative. I'm just trying to remember what I would say that if you go on the agency website, I would say that our data visualization, we don't have a lot of user friendly data. So we know that this is a real gap for us. So we can send all the spreadsheets in the world. But the first layer of data is just here's information, right? But actually making meaning out of that information and making it usable is another step. And we recognize that that's a step that we really need to support. So that's really where we're aiming here.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay. And Wayne, you have a question for me. Yes.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: So there are problems with that long experience with data. If everybody isn't on the same page, if the data you're asking for, everybody doesn't report it the same way or isn't standardized and isn't recorded with error trapping, then you're gonna have a mess. So are you getting somebody? Are you hiring somebody good that knows data in order to put this together? And is that part of the problem out there that people aren't sending you? Standardized set of data.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, so the good news on you're pointing to something really important. The good news is that we've actually been working on that problem pretty intensively for the past year. So what you're pointing to is that we so the Agency of Education collects something like 300 different data collections over the course of the year. Most of them are federal requirements. And as we know, the quality of data that you get is entirely based on the quality of data that's coming in. So we have a lot of work that we're doing on what we call data governance and quality. We've already implemented some really critical process improvements. So for example, all of our major data collections now have a requirement. We've identified who are the key folks within every district who touch that data. So the first thing we do is some pretty intensive training, and we're actually continuing to ramp that up. So everyone who touches poverty data in all of its various forms needs to understand what needs to be input, how it's used, who on their team it needs to go to. So I love to give the example of we recently had a district who had a person on their staff who had a stack of household income forms, paper forms, and didn't know that they needed to go to the data manager to be input. And so they were short all that poverty data. So those are some of the processes that we're working on. And then once they submit data, we've established now it's a validation, a review, and a certification and sign off by business managers, data managers, and ultimately superintendents. The intention there is to improve the quality of what's coming in. It also improves our timeliness. Because then we're not going through three months of back and forth of, oops, we're missing 10 kids there. So definitely agree with you. We're underway with that and have been for quite some time. And we're actually beginning to see improvements there. For example, the long term weighted ADM this year had far, far fewer data quality issues that tend to pop up when their long term weighted ADM comes up, because then it's like, uh-oh, those are dollars, right? We actually were able to catch a lot of those on the front end when the data was actually submitted. So you're absolutely right. That's really critical, and we're doing some internal work there and then work to support the field.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So if we could go back for a second to the first one,

[Unidentified committee member]: the special ed funding report,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I haven't memorized all of the 147 page bill of Act 73. But in section three, does it actually say in there that there needs to be a special education funding

[Unidentified committee member]: report?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It does. Yes. It actually directs us in The strategic plan has many pages of things that we were required to put into it. And one of those is, in essence, the considerations for delivery of special education and preparation for proposed weighted funding formula. So there is language in Section three that directs us to do that. And we identified in our strategic plan how we were going to meet that requirement.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I guess I have to go back and look at section three now, but I'm not getting to that easily. We'll continue.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: No, I was actually going to bring my I always have a printed out copy of that 73 that's marked up, and I almost brought it. And I forgot it and my phones today. I know my phone is sitting back in my office. Was like, oh, no.

[Unidentified committee member]: Okay. Okay. Continue that. Thank

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: you. So item two of our RFPs. This one is, you can see it's kind of the bulk of our appropriation here is really towards this. So this is a really wide ranging scope of work. But the way I would describe it if we were staying in an elevator is I would say we need to hook up the plumbing all across our education system around all of our various and sometimes disconnected accountability measures, and then ensure that we are providing support to our partners in the field so that they can meet these education quality measures. So right now, actually, Secretary Songers and her team are just down the hall in Senate Finance talking about our accountability framework. This framework was built in 2018. And in addition to what you all may have read about last week that came out, which is our annual snapshot, which is like our performance report, right? So in addition to that, there's a whole other set of federal requirements and state requirements around education quality standards. Those are inputs. We have other requirements, district quality standards, which are state standards. We've built up this kind of mountain of different measures, but they're not hooked up. The plumbing isn't hooked up, right? And so the experience for school districts can often be these sort of disparate measures that are coming in, and we haven't then aligned them to very clear priorities. This is what we're measuring. These are the gaps that we're seeing in our student outcomes. We are all going to row in the same direction on these major things. So it's really setting up a shared accountability framework, really agreed upon measures that we hold with our partners in the field. These are the things that we know matter the most to student outcomes. And this is what we're going to measure. This is what we're going to support you on. And this is what we're all going to work on. This is not really redoing an entire accountability and support framework is where you really want to bring in some national experts. Because it has federal implications, state regulatory implications, district operation implications. You have to think about education prep programs and the workforce pipeline. And it's a very complex set of work. So we're going to bring in some consulting partners around this, some additional resources. And critically, we really want to be focused on getting this right during the transition period because what we don't want is education transformation to actually result in student outcomes suffering because of disruption. So we really want to get clear on what the priorities are so that as people are making these changes in governance and funding, we can get very focused on those major initiatives and major areas to support student outcomes.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Good question.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yeah, I'm going to go back. I think you're on number two right now.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yes, on RFP two. Yeah. Yeah, I'm

[Unidentified committee member]: go back to data dashboard. There's money involved in those poverty piles of lunch reports. Yes. Because that is the basis of all of the poverty programs that come down from the federal government. Those numbers aren't in there. You're missing out on a lot of federal money for every program on demand

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: that they could touch. Yes, and it has serious implications if we move to a foundation formula. So it's because- It influences Medicaid, it influences food stamps, it influences everything. Yeah, so to be clear, on that example, it's not that those kids don't exist in the system, right? They're not reported. We ensure that they do get reported, right? And one of the ways that we do that is actually in the process of doing It's our fall data collection is where they submit all of that data, right? And we then give them back their numbers. And that's usually when they identify, wait a minute, we dropped 70 kids. Where did they all go? And that one of the examples that I share about what's happening in the districts is that sometimes these kinds of things happen. So they're in the system now. They found those kids. But what you're pointing to is that you're right. That data drives our federal formula grants, which are mainly based on poverty. For things like Medicaid, there's actually other ways that that gets collected, but that's really important. But what I really think about right now is right now, long term weighted ADM matters for budgets because the way our funding formula works now is it's about taxing capacity. Under the foundation formula that you're moving to, that's dollars per kid. So we have about two years, two more cycles to ensure that the quality of the data is extremely high. So we started doing this work a year ago. We're seeing improvements. But this is a major investment for us of agency resources, ensuring that our data reporting is accurate and timely. We need to get very weak collectively, meaning our districts and the agency and everybody else involved, needs to get very good with our data. Because when you move to the foundation formula, it really, really matters, right? The base plus that weight for poverty, EL students, that generates the amount, full stop, the amount of money that a district will receive. That's what they get. So it's very high stakes work that we need to all collectively get very good at. Okay, thank you. Yeah, and it's why you're seeing this investment here. And it's a significant investment.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But you're not doing the foundation's law as joint fiscal office has a contract with AIR to do that.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, they're making the final recommendations around the basin weights that's based on a cost factor analysis, which is what the legislature selected as its foundation formula. Our work around the conditions for special education, we'll share with them because it will help to inform.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: There's not overlap?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: No, there's no overlap whatsoever. Yeah, our role is to really working with them is to give them all of the data that they need. And then we did, this was all behind the scenes work. But last year in the legislative session, Joint Fiscal Office and Agency of Education worked very, very closely together, a lot of times until 11:00 at night, tying out every dollar in the system. Because as you're moving from our current funding system to the new one, it's not an apples to apples walk. And we were literally tying out every single dollar across the system so we had an assurance that we were accounting for the whole cost of the system. Yes.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So Wayne, you have a question.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: So do you have a computerized system? Is this going from paper? Does the data get collected from the little schools? How does it get entered into the database? And is this air dropping in there? This a good system?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It's a good question. So we have it will not surprise you to hear that within our districts, they use a variety of what we call SIS, or Student Information Systems. And they use a variety of education finance systems as well. The agency actually released a report. You all directed us to make some recommendations around statewide student information and finance systems. We worked with the field to generate some recommendations and considerations. We are a small enough state. This is my I'm opining here from my operation seat. We're a small enough state that it would probably make sense for us to just to have one statewide student information system. Point of variability that you're pointing to is that a lot of this data is actually it happens at the school level. When you walk into the school and you talk to the executive admin, they are oftentimes the registrar as well. In some of our really small districts, the superintendent is the data manager. And the executive admin is the registrar. People wear a lot of hats. So how the data gets taken in, yes, I think sometimes we have paper processes. Sometimes we have folks inputting into their system that then goes to a central office data manager. It never surprises anybody when I say we have wide variability here.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: John.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: Thanks for coming in.

[Unidentified committee member]: Of course.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: Nice to see you again. So knowing that variability exists just because districts are different sizes here, you've got a person traveling to multiple schools here in this and lots of examples of that. So do you see that model of recording the data, sending it off to you, will variability still be there in terms of who does that? Or do we really want to kind of get down to the point where there's

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: something a little bit

[John Kascenska (Member)]: different that'll improve any potential errors here? Gets entered, there's keystroke kinds of things that happens, kind of go back to kind of see how things work down here before things get I'm a researcher by training as well. Yeah,

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: that's mine. Yeah. So I think there is, to some extent, there's some technological solutions. But ultimately, it does come back to bodies entering information. So this is where we need to get to ensuring that everyone touches the data, understands the importance of the data. So if you are the executive admin who I always like to give the example. They're answering phones from parents because kids are out sick. They're inputting new student information as they're registering for school and a sick kid through up down the hall. Not an ideal data accuracy environment, right? So in any system, you build in redundancies, you build in checks, right? We are already building in a lot of these data validation checks. At the agency, we've significantly improved our data validation over the past year. And then again, we need to ensure that we're getting these trainings out. One of the things that we've been talking about doing is like a data quality roadshow where we've got kind of an interdisciplinary team that includes our child nutrition folks, our data folks, our finance folks, really going across the state and really sitting down with everybody who touches this and like, let's talk about this from soup to nuts. It also gives our, in particular, our data team an understanding. They work with data managers, right? They don't necessarily work with the executive admins, right? So it gives them a sense of how does the information flow through the system. So there's a really important human element to this that we're going to be investing in. And then are there ways that we actually simplify the technology so that we're not right now, we have about four different main data systems, student information systems. We suck them all in through a system called EdFy. So we vacuum it up, and then it gets standardized. But it would be a lot simpler if it was just one system and we actually had visibility on it in real time.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: There's timelines you have to work with to ensure the data is entered, verified, moving forward the way it needs

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: to Got it. Yeah. And so we are actually talking about one of our critical things when we talk about the accountability system is we actually have to change some of our data collection timelines so that we can get our report cards out a lot earlier.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: That's why I'm asking that question.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, the whole system gets complicated. Yeah. That's, I mean, honestly, this is why we need to bring in some national experts in this. This is not the kind of work that any state agency should just pick up and try to do themselves. You're gonna start pulling threads and the whole sweater might come unravel. So and there's real federal implications for we have to change our SS State Plan. It's it's a whole thing. Multi year work.

[Unidentified committee member]: Okay.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: I'm gonna keep plugging away. All right, so item three in our RFP is something, and again, we were deliberate in our staging here, right? It wouldn't make sense to sign a contract for school board governance when we didn't yet know sort of the landscape of potential new districts. But we do have an RFP under development. This is really important work, which is to support both our, in the transition period, both our existing school boards as they're closing out and sort of putting down the work of their former districts, and then the new school boards. And really helping with our school boards to become the most effective partners that they can. And we'll actually have another report coming out in the next couple of weeks that I'll preview for you. It's our beta test of our district quality standards. That includes school board governance standards. And there is really wide variability. And it's a self evaluation. So how boards are rating their own effectiveness in terms of their ability to look at student outcomes, align it to strategic budgeting, and then measure, that cycle of continuous improvement. So they're identifying for themselves already that they struggle with this. And I don't think that would surprise us. These are all part time volunteer boards, some of whom only operate one school, some of whom are part of a supervisory district of almost 3,000 students. Variability is the name of the game, right? We have some really incredible models on this actually. North Dakota really invested in their school board governance. And I actually had an opportunity to hear from their Secretary of Education a couple of years ago. So really, how to institute best practices. And they had a really fantastic consultant that came in. One of my favorite things that they did is they actually did a review of school board minutes. And they identified that only about 10% of school board time was actually spent talking about student outcomes. And we would do something similar in our own school board agendas. So it's called student driven strategic planning, right, is what they're talking about. So we have identified that as we're going through this major transition, if we are also not supporting boards in becoming really effective, then we're not actually setting the system up for success. And we want to make sure that the folks that are investing their time and there's volunteer time to sit on a school board, they're really armed with all the best tools and strategies and practices. So that's an RFP that I'm actually looking really forward to getting out, a project of mine. So we will be getting that up kind of late spring. As you all are making some major policy decisions, we'll be aligning our work with that. Okay. So that's the status update on those. Can if we go into item two, this is really looking for an update on the special education project manager position. Very short update there. We've made a verbal offer. So that's a permanent position on our staff and really one that's sorely needed. Special education is a huge area of strategic focus for us. So having the project manager is really helpful. The five limited service positions are a different story. So we had originally requested that they be made permanent positions, and you'll see that in our FY 'twenty seven budget request. So you see a plea at the end where I say, we really, really encourage you all to approve We're these really trying to rebuild the agency's capacity to be very field facing. And we really lost that capacity in the Great Recession. We lost our field facing team, and we're trying to rebuild that. So those positions were about eight months' worth of funding is what was appropriated. And I think you can imagine that creates some challenges. We're really trying to hire folks from the field. And we did have some good candidates. But as you might imagine, it's challenging to kind of recruit folks and pull them away from their good jobs in districts when you've only got eight months worth of funding secured. So the current status of those is there's five. One of them is a failed search. We're going to revamp the position a little bit. One position so that was our data integration specialist. The business operations specialist, I'm actively in conversations with one of our candidates there. Same thing with the Facilities Integration Specialist. And then the other two roles, which is curriculum integration and then learning and teaching. I always joke that I put these placeholder names in, then you all put them into law. So they're like these very chunky names, facilities and data integration specialists. Those were inactive interviews on those. So if those are able to become permanent positions, I will say I was very pleased with the interest from the field. I actually got a lot of phone calls of folks who were like, I really want to do this work at the state level, and they see the value of it. But it didn't necessarily translate into candidates willing to leave the district.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is that appropriation in the budget, or are you asking for more money?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It is in our FY 'twenty seven budget request.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Okay.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It's our only one time it's our only not it's not a one time question. It's our only request in our budget, is those five. Okay.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So I have a question for you related to positions. Yes. It's not on these questions here. But Medicaid school based funding is moving. Yes. Diva, DOH, whoever. Yeah, Tiffany, you're right.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Diva,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: okay. And my understanding is you have six people in AOE who are doing that. So what's happening with those six?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yes, so at least for the first, almost through the end of the calendar year, we're actually going to be running duplicate system.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: They were already doing it now in Diva. Aren't they already doing this now? Are doing any Medicaid stuff, your school stuff right now?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: No, they have one program through VDH, which is the MAC program that's for school nurses. And then we run the school based Medicaid program. And we're going to be combining those two, moving them to Diva and changing. There's a whole change in payment methodology that's like a whole other round of testimony. We will need to actually be closing out the old system as we're standing up the new system. We've also identified that AOE still has a really important role around the district reinvestment plans, which right now we really don't do a lot of we collect them as an end of year report, but we're not actually working with them on their investment plans. Is that different from Medicaid? It is what they do with their Medicaid reimbursement. So they're required when they get their Medicaid reimbursement, they can kind of do anything under prevention and intervention. And they're supposed to develop a reinvestment plan. Spoiler alert, there's wide variability. So some folks are using it for those purposes. They're funding after school programs and all sorts of things, community schools. Some of them are kind of rainy day funding. Some of them are using it for other things. So and the agency has not had the capacity to really have quality oversight. So we're going to retain that. We are actively evaluating the role, like what those petitions are going to be. So I don't have an answer for you on that because we don't know exactly what we're

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I I have three hands that went up. John Wayne Lanes. So

[John Kascenska (Member)]: those examples that you gave here and how those funds are being used, those are all allowable utilizations of that money or is it money or is it kind of

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It's a little squidgier than I would like it

[Unidentified committee member]: to

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: be. We're pretty clear that it's

[John Kascenska (Member)]: Every school identifies particular needs that may deviate from

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah. So prevention and intervention can be broad. I think that what we're interested in doing is actually doing some of that quality oversight and support, and really thinking about how they might more strategically use their funds. We really don't have, I'm naming this as a gap. We don't have a good understanding of this right now, but we want to. And I really, one of our real goals here is to be better able to support districts in their strategic use of all of these different funding sources to support what they identify as their major needs. We hear all the time about the need for investment in mental health and how do you run a community school. You don't want community schools to rely on grants, right? That's not the way to operate a community school. You need a dedicated way to operate. So I think we have a real opportunity to use these funds. It's not a huge amount, but it's an impactful amount. And we are not doing that effectively now.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: And what is that amount? It doesn't have to be exact.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: I

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: feel like it's

[John Kascenska (Member)]: If don't know, it's okay.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: That we sent to the schools for the Medicaid reimbursement.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Oh, that's transferring over to over 17,000,000.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. Over 17,000,000.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Plus right now there's about 12,000,000 that goes back into the Ed Fund as well.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So they get 50% of it and 20% goes to the Ed Fund and you keep 30. Yep. And

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: we also at the state level are evaluating how we're using these funds to support prevention and intervention as well.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: Some questions about the variability of programs, because it's gonna be different here depending on the group of students

[David Yacovone (Member)]: and

[John Kascenska (Member)]: all those kinds of good things. So what's available here is just, we start taking a look at, we look at performance indicators and lots of things that we're trying to get down to the bottom of so we can justify funding all kinds of things here for sure. And on your end here, what the goals and objectives of programs generally so here. But there's going be some pretty specific parts of that too. And it adds up to the quality piece.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It does. And you're pointing to exactly why we are making this move to move the administration of the program over to DBA, where they actually already have capacity and expertise. And then what does the Agency of Education retain? We retain the quality, the intervention, prevention, and supporting students. So it's actually realigning expertise and capacity in a way that makes sense when you sort of step back from it. Like, oh, how did we get here? And so we're realigning that. So we are in the active process of evaluating it. I don't have a final answer for you today. At least What

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: did you put in the budget for the six positions? For the whole year or part of the year? I think we put it

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: in for the whole year.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Yep. Yeah. Okay.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, to ensure that we were, should anything need to be delayed, we actually had all the positions in place.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And then Lynn?

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: My question is same, John. You answered it. My concern, of course, is appropriate use of funds and the risk that we might entail if something's not quite right.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Clawbacks. Lynn?

[Unidentified committee member]: Well, gonna start us up by saying, are we on number two on a similar note? Would you please provide us that with Yes. Okay. All right. As far as the Medicaid money that goes to the schools, my most recent experience on

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the school

[Unidentified committee member]: board was that the superintendent when questioned about this, pointed out that they never knew how much they were going to get. It came in at the end. And they kind of just took it and put it someplace that they thought they needed it. And I suspect every superintendent does the same thing. And that's why there's variability. I don't know how much accountability there is with that. Prevention and intervention may be very broad. Is now Very broad. But if that's how it's being done, and these are people who don't have any experience really with Medicaid or healthcare or anything like that, This needs to be changed. Yes, that's right. So, I mean, it's like we take the money to just throw it out there.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, and so it's a reimbursement for services, which is why they receive it on the back end. But you're right. Now they're supposed to have a plan for how they intend to reinvest. And that's exactly what I'm saying is the agency historically, because we've been administering the program, have not had the capacity to actually review, evaluate, and provide support and oversight around plans. But to your point, when you don't know and how much money you're going to get is contingent on what services the students receive, which is contingent on what services they need, right? So we do need to support our districts in, do you want to fund positions year after year with these funds? I don't know if there's wide variability. But you have trend lines as well, right? So I think that we actually have, you're right, it needs to change. That's exactly what we're doing with this shift. And I think that we have some real clear understanding of the ways that it needs to change, and they're exactly in alignment with what you're talking about. So I think it would actually be great if we'd have an opportunity maybe to come back around and provide an update on where we're at, either at the end of this session or like first thing. What will Diva do with it? That will be fair. So Diva is going to be so we're again, you should get a full presentation from AHS on this. But they're making some really significant changes in actually how we do sort of the payment methodology. Right now, it's very manual, like paper manual, right? Very intensive, and it's like that sort of line item reimbursement, right? They're moving to a random moment time study, which is actually what's used in the MAC program, which is the school nurse program. So we're actually going to align those two things, significantly reduces the administrative burden. And it's how they run their other programs as well. So that really takes that real heavy touch administration that's happening both with our agency staff and with staff in the field and turns it into a much more streamlined system. But I really do encourage you to have AHS come in there. They're gonna be the experts on that. I'm like getting out over my skis a little bit on it. I know just enough to be dangerous, I think. Dave?

[David Yacovone (Member)]: I was with the agency of human services when then commissioner, Ronnie Chillani, designed this. In a way, this is very exciting, to be able to invest 17,000,000 into power redefined. Prevention and intervention is a big deal.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: It is.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: And good things can come from this and will, I'm Yeah,

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: I think it's absolutely the right move at the right time. And we need to think about, we oftentimes when we're talking about education funding, we're talking about what else are we funding with the Ed Fund, right? So those wraparound supports, this is actually a way that we can think about being more strategic about those supports.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: All

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: right, I'm gonna keep going. So item three, actually addressed. This is that RFP. This is just a little bit more explanatory language. So to your point, this is not duplicative of the JFO contract around the foundation base and weights. This is something that was sort of directed in the strategic plan section of App 73, the Special Ed Strategic Plan. And I just kind of offer a description there. So that work is underway. All right. Oh, I get to shift. Sean, you get to answer a You question. For get number four, Sean.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: So the 1,083,000 that you're seeing in contracts, increase in contracts on the special ed formula grant on the ups and downs. So that's coming from two programs within that appropriation, the BEST program and the Act two thirty. They're kind of related anyways. Those have a 1,000,000 each, and they continue to have a $1,000,000 each in next year's budget. We're just showing that we're spending some of that money on contracts versus grants. And the reduction in grants, you didn't see on the ups and downs due to the other programs in that appropriation going up.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Who's getting the contracts

[Unidentified committee member]: and

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: for what?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: So in the past, it's largely, we have kind of two main contracts. One is the pyramid contract. The company is called Pyramid, which always makes it sound like a pyramid scheme or something like that. But it's not. And they actually do a really critical data collection for us in the pre K, early childhood space around behaviors and a bunch of other small items that you need there. The other, the main part of the contract traditionally has been with University of Vermont, and they do positive behavior intervention service training our system training and the BEST Act two thirty conference, we are going to be realigning our use of these funds, really to support what I would call strong foundations in school climate under our Safe and Healthy Schools division. So what we have heard loud and clear from the field is an increasing frequency, extremity, and a younger age of students with concerning classroom behaviors has created a lot of challenges for our classroom teachers. And what we've identified is that typically one of the ways that schools try to solve this problem is to add more bodies, more adults into the building. Like we've seen a really strong increase in behavior interventionists. What we are hearing is that our classroom teachers need support and training. So everything from hazing, harassment, and bullying prevention, classroom management strategies, creating a strong school climate, the whole kind of range of kind of foundations. And so we're going to be shifting how we've been investing these funds and trying to be a little bit more strategic about them. So we've been running this Best Act two thirty conference through UVM for a very long time. I think they'll continue to run it, but we're going to be using the funds in a more targeted way that's in alignment with our strategic plan and meeting the need of the field. So rather than a grant, it's on track, it washes out.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Okay.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Okay. Item five. There was thank you for the question. Asked I love that you're asking if we need resources for chronic absenteeism.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We have a presentation that we didn't really go over when you all were here, but was in our testimony, and it's on our webpage under Secretary Saunders' meeting.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah. So the chronic absenteeism work, the good answer is that at this moment in time, no. I have no specific requests around this work. So what you do have in front of you, and it's with Caledonia right now, is we need to make some statutory changes around definitions and processes, roles and responsibilities, around truancy and chronic absenteeism. So that work is moving forward with Caledonia. Right now, at this point in time, I'm never going to promise I wouldn't have a resource request in the future. But we're actually managing this work in house in our Safe and Healthy Schools division, which is a new part of the agency where we're bringing together all these resources. We also have some really excellent partners with the V CHIP program and Doctor. Heidi Schumacher and other kind of regional organizations. And we are leveraging some federal and state grants. So at this moment in time, no additional resource requests. I'll let you know in FY 'twenty eight if I need additional resources. But we're well underway with the work, which is great.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: I think we saw some data showing how many days per month of whatever kids were absent. Looked like an average.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: 25%

[David Yacovone (Member)]: or something.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Think it would be a lot more informative if you could actually have the numbers in the distribution or something that's not a mean.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yes, we have that. I'll get that for you. So I'll make sure that we send that over in some follow ups.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Because the average doesn't tell you There might be just a few kids that are out for months at a time. Or there could be a gazillion of them around one or two days.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, and schools may differ in their opinion, right?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, we have some as definitional a larger statement that we can say that one out of every four kids in Vermont is chronically absent. Chronically absent meaning they're missing at least two days of school a month. So total that up, that's a good chunk of days. That's almost twenty days over the school year. Within subgroups, though, is actually where you see the real split happening. So very, very clearly, it is our most vulnerable populations that are missing the most amount of school, economically disadvantaged, students on IEPs, and then critically, critically, our homeless and foster kiddos and our migrant kids. What was the last? Our migrant kids.

[Unidentified committee member]: Thank you.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: So that's really important as we're looking forward. We have a really, well, I'll make sure that we send this to you. So we have a policy brief that's ready to go out and it's got lots and lots of data for you that's on this.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: It's not

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: really so much that, it's really for whoever's writing the language if you're going to have changed statute related to this. Those are the ones that need to be well informed on those different things.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: And they've got all that. We've provided that to House Ed. And I'll just for your own awareness, make sure that you get that information as well. This is really important though, is understanding where we have this differentiation is then where you direct your resources. The really good news about chronic absenteeism is that there are proven strategies that can help us to fix this. This is not an impossible problem to fix. And so first is getting these basic kind of foundations and statute updated. That's sort of the light lift. Then our next phase of work is developing model policies and procedures. We've been working on this for two years now with the field. So getting out this model policy, what do you do? What are the steps that you take? And then the next phase, and we can walk and chew gum, we can do all this at the same time, is really identifying, we have some bright spots already in Vermont. We have some really bright spots nationally where we can tackle this. There's proven strategies. We don't have to kind of reinvent the wheel with this. So this is actually, I have a great deal of optimism on this. I think that we can crack this problem.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Thank you.

[Unidentified committee member]: We had a meeting a week ago with our superintendents and principals and a couple of people. They have a meeting with us every year, like a legislative breakfast. And this came up because I was told by someone who's a constituent of mine last year, they went to a school board meeting and they heard that there was like a 49% absenteeism. This is in just one last date. The issue is that they defined that absenteeism is different than chronic absenteeism, and then they defined the differences, and there are very clear distinctions. Yeah, and

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: then truancy has a different definition.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yes, and they also talked about the fact that they have brought it down to 25%. 22%, they're 22%. They consider that a success. Now, they also, and I think that's pretty bad, but they said that nobody really has a thing about missing school anymore. It's true. You just do it. And COVID really didn't help. Certainly, I heard it. But the other thing is they're working with families.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Don't what

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: the strategies are for you guys. Getting those families. You've got it.

[Unidentified committee member]: Working with the families. Because a lot of times, the families don't care. And we had an alternative school that we created at that high school. Didn't have people who cared about education, whose families didn't care if the kid got out of bed or not. And the kids were at school, this is like thirty years ago. So it was a storefront school. And it worked.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Chronic So absenteeism, so in COVID, we saw a huge spike. Everybody did across the country. I mean, forty five percent, 50% chronic absenteeism rates. So we have come down. 25 is in some ways progress. But other states have gotten it down to like eight percent to ten percent because they paid attention to it and they invested in what works. And what you're pointing to with chronic absenteeism is that there are external factors that are happening in families. A lot of them have to do with just sort of some of the conditions of poverty, right? Older kids needing to work, transportation issues, parents with mental health, those things, right? There is a piece of this, though, which is about for students really keeping them engaged in the value of education. So there's also that value proposition that I don't think, we all went to school because you went to school, right? Like that wasn't a question. And there has been a cultural shift around like, what is the value proposition of school? What is it worth to me? That's something that we've got to show. And then we also, I'm a former teacher, right? I'm a very strong proponent of like, you set clear standards and expectations, you support kids to reach those standards, and then you measure them. And we've gotten away from that a little bit. So part of our strategy is this is not something that schools can solve themselves. We have to reach families. We have to reach communities. We all need to be part of this. So we do have a larger strategy as well. And things like our health care community as well also plays a really big role. So you're pointing to all the complexities, definitely.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: There was a great article in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago about Mississippi, Louisiana, also

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: about schools

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: and how they're dealing with absenteeism. Literacy. Literacy.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Not learning if they're not in school.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But they really are focused on the child. It's like one of the sentences that struck out stuck out to me was that they're they, are really thinking of the kid. You know? So they're not focused on do teach we them the test? Do we do all that? They're really trying to get that child to be there. And in one of the states, you know, your kid's gone for three days, and then, the parents get a note, and at five times they've been absent, they have a meeting with the parents, and then at seven times they're threatened with jail or something, which doesn't happen. It's, you know, we're serious about this.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: We're interested in steps one and two. I think step three is Right.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I mean, now it's a bit worse. On the other hand, now they're down to like 8%.

[Unidentified committee member]: They are. But they also have literacy and they actually started teaching them what they call the science phase three thing. How to spell. You can't in Mississippi or wherever, if you can't pass from Texas and third Thursday, you

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: get back and we start over. So it's called the Mississippi Miracle for a reason. Louisiana and Alabama are doing it with numeracy, it's really important. I mean, they worked very we think about the resources that go to the system, these are systems that pay significantly less per student, right? These are systems with way higher poverty, right? And intergenerational poverty. They were very clear eyed about what the challenges were, and they kind of went all in. And it is called the Mississippi

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It wasn't just Mississippi, that's the thing. Alabama, Louisiana, Alabama. Also do too. Tom, go ahead. It

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: all sounds great, Mississippi miracle. Mean and I'm not going to say that the information I've read is credible either, but those same folks were tested for math and stayed down at the 48 level. There's just a lot of different things going on.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Alabama is not in that situation though. Alabama has actually gone all in on numeracy.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yeah.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah. So you're right. I mean, Louisiana is where we have generational outcomes in special education. I think the point is they're going all in, right? And they're doing it really comprehensively. And one of the things that they do is they measure, right? And in a wide variety of ways, right? It's never just one test, but they measure and they talk about it. And you're actually going to if you're ever interested, our communication and policies director, Torren Ballard, was in Mississippi for the past ten years. And he can really speak to his experience there. He was in education policy, and he can share what he observed and how they did it because we can learn things. Vermont is going to have its own special flavor, but we can learn from what other states have done here. Chronic absence is one of those places where we can really learn what other states have done. So I do get a little hyped about chronic absenteeism. I think that we can do this.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Let me just do a few other things like the literacy. We've seen this test come out and they're not

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yes, have a long ways to go there.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm going to switch questions entirely. Okay, that

[Unidentified committee member]: was all

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I have there. You. We can keep you here for a week and still try to understand all of this, but we're at least we

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: have I I'm throwing things at you and like you're just dipping toes

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: for a

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: little bit and then talking

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: about We are not the education committee or ways and means, so we don't have the same level of expertise. I do want to go back to something that you all talked about and proposed in the budget request. And that was, for some reason, you wanted to merge 05/2001.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Sean gets to answer that. I couldn't

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: let Sean off without another question. So tell me why that has to have, or you think that needs to happen.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Yeah, I mean, went through the we're going through the reorder. We went through it earlier this year. And we took that opportunity to look at our internal budget and to see if when we want to set up a new organization, do we need to separate those two?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Which new organization am I missing?

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Our reorganized AOE.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Oh, yeah.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Typically they were half under the B500 and half under B501. Looking back, we couldn't really see a reason why we had it set up that way. I checked with, I think, finance and management to see if they had a reason we were split. And really no one could remember or really knew why. Internally for accounting, for our purposes, it'll be easier to just have one. We can shift funding as needed depending on outside sources at the federal level or whatever. Any changes we can adapt it, I guess, so to speak, with one main operations appropriation. And I

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: think the other thing is so under our new organizational structure, previously, we had what we often called program and finance. That was how we were split. Our new organizational structure doesn't align that way at all by design. So we have our academics unit under our chief of academics, right? We have curriculum and instruction, education programs, special education. We have operations, which is my house, finance. I have Safe and Healthy Schools, which has a lot of programmatic work. Data management, child nutrition, our grants unit, our education approvals unit, a lot of programmatic work. And then we have our third unit, which is strategy and accountability, which includes school improvement, a lot of programmatic work, but also has assessment, right? So just that split didn't make sense anymore. And we do, as Sean was alluding to, we need the agency to be nimble given some of the potential uncertainties at the federal level, which we kind of lived through in the past year, a few kind of abrupt decisions that came down. And we weren't as nimble as we'd like to be, to be able to shift money around to cover positions if all of a sudden federal funding went away.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So it's about shifting positions and moving money. Is that why you want to do it, to combine the two? Hold

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: on. That's it.

[Unidentified committee member]: I think it didn't

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: make sense anymore. There isn't that split anymore. And it also gives us the ability to be nimble.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And so what happens if this doesn't happen? Because we have to approve it. And I'm just these are the questions that we ask people. What if this program went away? What if this doesn't happen?

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: Yeah. I

[Unidentified committee member]: was not

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: expecting you. We'd have to internally redo our budget some to align it back to the old way. And then we'd have more levels of accounting to deal with, or used to doing it. But we would appreciate it if you would combine. Okay, well,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: these are the questions, you're not the only one who's getting asked to statute. That's fair.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Are there any pros to the old way?

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: No, we can still separate things as we need it, even under one appropriation. There's no big advantages to the old way. No, because we budget for you guys under the major debt ID we call them, but we have minor debt IDs already, and we'll continue to do that just under the new No change in debt IDs within the agency. Well, are with the reorg, but we still have a number of them. We go down another level to programs. So we can still track what we want or need to internally.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Us, and this is part of my work, is traditionally the way that we budgeted tended to be pretty siloed. Each kind of department or division had sort of its set of projects and priorities, and they would go to Sean,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: they would work with him,

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: and he would sort of be able to produce that budget. We are moving towards being much more strategic about how we're and having a strategic plan really helps, right, which we haven't had since 2015. So now we have a strategic plan. It points us in the direction of our major priorities. And this gives us the ability for Sean and I to work really closely together to actually budget strategically so we're ensuring that we're resourcing. And I really want to assure folks that we are literally scraping every penny out of the budget right now. So every conference has to be approved by me. Everybody has to come back and say what they learned and share out at the conference. We're really trying to be as tight as we can because we have an extraordinary amount of work, big, important work. You all were just pointing to it, right? Literacy, accountability, chronic absenteeism, numeracy. We have to do this work. And we run a very small agency. And so we're trying to be as resourceful as we can, scrappy.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That leads me to another question. Sorry, I thought you were off the hook. I think you've been an under resourced agency for a while. You've had a lot of open positions. You also are doing a lot of things with grants or contracts, rather, not too much grants. I'm just wondering if you were staffed appropriately, whether we'd actually need to be paying all this money for contracts.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah. I think it's a fair question. So I hear this narrative a lot. I actually don't know that we do more contracts than other agencies. I'd actually like to ask that question.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I do believe it matters. But I'm just asking about

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: So your here's how I approach contracts and consulting contracts, right? There's we have two flavors of contract. One is the contracts that run major systems for us. Right? Like, I think about our annual contract to run our statewide assessment. Assessment. We're always going to have that contract. It's a core kind of major function of the agency. It's not something you run with staff. So that's one. And those are kind of underlying systems you see these appropriations every year. The other place that you use contracts is when you're doing one time work. I mean, every person in our agency has a full time job, right? So when we are adding new initiatives or doing major change and we're doing both of those things right now you're doing one time work. You need expertise that you would not have in house. So I gave the example of totally redoing your entire accountability system. We have accountability folks within our agency, and they are going to be supported by national consultants. So you bring in one time expertise, but it's really important that as you're bringing in those consultants, they're not doing the work and flitting away and nobody understands what they did. So you're also utilizing consultants to build capacity. So for example, last year, there was a, I don't know if y'all noticed, but the agency churned out more reports, I think, than we ever have before. We were pouring data and information out. We didn't have the capacity to do the visualizations. We just didn't have folks in agency who had been asked to do that before. And so we brought in a one time consultant to help with those data visualizations, set the templates for us, and now we have the ability to do that. So I think that we have real value for those one time new initiatives of when we're making major changes. But I agree with you that you don't want to build them in as a permanent crutch. Right? We're not doing So I I can assure you every one of these things that we're doing right now is meant to bring up expertise that we don't have, help to build that expertise in the agency, and then help us with major time bound change. I don't know a single I want to say this because I'm going to take the opportunity because you brought it up. I cannot think of a single state in the country that would be trying to change funding, fundamentally changing how we do funding, potentially changing all of our governance, and dramatically working to improve the quality of our education system without help.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Oh, yeah. That's suggesting that you don't need help. Yeah. No, I think You don't all need help.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: I'm taking the moment to, because there's this narrative. I'm like, no, there's no state would undertake this. When I go to national conferences and I say what we're doing, people gasp. And then they all come and ask me questions and say, oh my gosh, we wanna see what you're gonna do. And I say, yeah, I mean,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: thank you the space. Right? We all wanna see that.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Well, is the clock running down? Are we winding down?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We're okay.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Well, okay, but I was gonna say in three minutes or less, tell me, in order to get the Vermont victory as opposed

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: to Mississippi miracle. I like it.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Can you educate me as to why we need different governance, mapping, districting, etcetera? Help me.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah. So it's a complicated answer, unfortunately. It's not an elevator, riding an elevator answer. And I would encourage you, and I'm happy to send it over. We did a presentation to House Ed last week or the week before. We spent about ninety minutes with them. And we really laid out for them and reminded you all of why you put certain things in Act 73 that you did. So while there may be quibbles around some of the numbers, and I want to be very clear, There is no magic district size number. It doesn't exist. There is no research that says, ah, it's 7,700 kids. But what we do know is that when you move to a foundation formula, that's now the block, right? You get as a district $100,000,000 And now that's all you're going to get, and you have to decide how you're going to resource your system. So if you are operating a small district, and we've done some really extensive modeling on this that we'd be happy to share with you. So if you're operating a district under about 1,000 students, which 50% of our districts are under 1,000 students, you get to a point where you have to make choices. I mean, any district has to make choices, but the choices become the opportunity. So maintaining kind of your existing staffing and existing responsibilities that you have at a district level. Every district that is understood as a local education agency under the federal government has requirements. Right? Thou shalt have a superintendent. Thou shalt have a business manager. Thou shalt have a data manager. Thou shalt have a special ed director. Thou shalt Those shalt Thou shalt you're going to have to start to make some really challenging choices in order to maintain education programming and opportunity. It is helpful if you start to achieve some scale. And what you all settled on, and it's research and evidence based practices. So this is not making up, these numbers aren't drawn from nowhere, is around 4,000. As you start to approach 4,000, you start to hit some really good efficiencies. We've done some modeling. And we've shown and we shared this with House Ed. You can do this at 2,000, but you have to actually change the way you staff and operate. So for example, I'll give you a real world example. You can do this at 2,000. You can still meet all of our education quality standards. You can still offer languages and music and all of those things that we want to see in education programming and multi tiered systems of support and counselors. But if you have a elementary school with 500 students, a lot of our elementary schools are, you need to have a principal that's a 0.25 FTE. So they're going to need to teach classes as well. Most of our systems don't operate that way. So we're trying to offer some choices for folks. So that's one thing. So basically, when you're in a resource constrained environment of a foundation formula, you're going to have to operate your system. There are some basic standards that you're going to have to meet around education quality and then federal requirements, right, and operational requirements. And that's going to force you into some choices. So that's item one. Item two is when we are looking at making these really big changes to our system, we need to improve literacy. We need to improve math. We have got to improve graduation requirements in college and career readiness. We're not going to do what our kids want. When we have a very small, complex system, one is it creates a lot of variability, right? How do you counter variability? Actually do a lot more state oversight. The agency of education is too small to do that. We don't have enough bodies to provide the level of technical support, training, oversight, monitoring that is required if you have a small, complex, highly variable system. Something has to give somewhere, right? And so that's why you're seeing us kind of settle around this 4,000 number. There's also a bunch of other considerations. It actually starts to increase demographic equity. You can So map right now, in our current system, the disparity is about 12 to one in terms of economic disadvantage across our districts. When you move towards 4,000 to 8,000, you can almost get parity across the system. That matters, right? Then you have, instead of maybe more affluent communities making certain decisions for their students and the kids in the next district over do not get the same opportunities, you're actually starting to have districts make decisions for all students. And I think that's a Vermont value, but we don't operationalize that. Right? We don't actually implement it. I could go on and on. But I'm giving you some of those considerations. I mean, we're trying to point to, like, there is no perfect number. But there are choices. And there are different choices that you're going to make in a different system. But I do really want to point out that education quality, if you really want to move the system in the way that we want to for students, we just have to acknowledge that's a very small, very complex, very variable system, which is a description of our system with, like, no value. That like, that's our system. It's very hard to move that kind of system, particularly with a small state agency out there.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Sure. That's like a whole new round of hassle. Well,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: have increased over time.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: They have.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And I'm just surprised we haven't been sued again. Actually, that's what I'm surprised.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, I mean, I think what we came forward with last year is really interesting. When we started the conversation around foundation formula, people genuinely believed that we had an equitable funding system. And we kept saying the theory is equitable, but let's show you the evidence. And it is not. It is objectively. We are not funding or giving our students the same opportunities. And I don't think anybody can say that we are anymore. So we've at least made that transparent. And now what do we do? Right?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Exactly.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: I do always like to sort of give folks a pep talk here at the end after I talk about all the bummer, is that I taught in a system in California that really did not value public education. And one of the things that I cherish the most about Vermont is this, like, deep, deep, deep commitment to public education. We have all of the ingredients. We have a highly resourced system, the best resourced education system in the country. People believe in public education. Even in light of these challenges and a system that isn't producing the results that we want, you know what most states do? They privatize. They what? Privatize. They do vouchers. They start sending money out of the public education system. What we're talking about in this really challenging work is doubling down on public education, going all in on public education. Think that's really admirable. But we've got to actually go all the way. Right? So that's my pep talk. Was like That's a point. It's challenging. It's no fun to

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: do this.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: And I would like to do it once and not have to do it again in five years, if at all possible. I think we get through

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: all this, nobody's ever gonna wanna do it together. No, probably.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: The one time, you know? I And have a kid who's an eighth grader and a kid who's a fifth grader. And I keep saying to my daughter, I'm like, I don't know that I can fix all this by the time you graduate, but I'm really committing to making sure that my son really gets out of the system high quality. Yeah.

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: If you

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: haven't put anybody in jail, they're going to have to go to Mississippi.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: All

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: right.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Thank you for all the questions. I appreciate it.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: All right. Well, thank you for your time. We appreciate you coming on semi short notice. I know you had the

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: question all the time, but

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: we appreciate you coming today. Sure. And you're taking the time with us. And like I said, we could have you here for a week and ask a lot more questions. And if I had memorized Act 73, I probably would be asking more questions. So we'd still may come back to you at least privately and ask you some questions. We are here.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, genuinely appreciate the conversation. Really good questions. And anytime you need

[Sean (AOE finance official, CFO/budget lead; last name not stated)]: us. Great.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: We're here to support. Thank you all.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you very much. So, Kunfi, this is it for today. Tomorrow is Wednesday. At 09:30, we're hearing a bill, age five sixty seven. I think this is a treasurer's office again in GovOps bills. So, we won't vote if there's money, but we'll hear it. Then from eleven to twelve is when the legislators are coming in. We have legislative requests to add to the public hearing that we do every year. And, Autumn, are we signed up? 16

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: people. 16 people are signed up.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: No, not

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: that. We're giving him two minutes and we have an hour. So that is what's happening then. And then we have a couple more bills in the afternoon and we have some more time. So tomorrow there will be breaks in action for you to really try to dive into your budgets and the issues and see where we can find more money now that we've been through the spreadsheets and see how much we don't have. Continue to update spreadsheets and we'll see what that looks like. We just had another committee letter come in, so, you know, take a look at those as well. So we've got plenty to do even if we're not live on camera, I think. So anything else from anybody this point?

[David Yacovone (Member)]: I'm sorry, will that letter show up on Tuesday, or will it be in other documents under something else? Which letter? The committee letter, I'm sorry.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: The committee letters, Autumn, the judiciary just sent one. She's posted it now if she hasn't.

[Jill Briggs Campbell, Deputy Secretary of Education and Chief of Operations (AOE)]: The thing I can see has been posted.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, it's all been posted on our, it's under that other section, other documents, and then go to FY27 budget, and then it has committee letters. Thank you. For information for standing committees. Thank you. Yep. So it's all there. And we should be getting the rest between today and tomorrow. Right, I think.

[Unidentified committee member]: I mean, some of them have talked to me.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We know that human services has a lot. But the rest, we're going to come off by the end of the day today. It's about understanding. And we just got judiciary, so we're

[Unidentified committee member]: in agriculture, supposed to come

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: in today. I can't remember

[Unidentified committee member]: the name, I have notes somewhere in this file. Okay, let's go up live.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We'll be live again at 09:30 tomorrow.