Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Good morning, everyone. This is the Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is Tuesday, 04/14/2026 at 09:05 in the morning. So we're beginning our week and our day to look at S313, again, which is an act relating to transforming Vermont's career technical education system. And we have members from the Joint Fiscal Office joining us and how that there's a study that's ongoing. Julia, thank you for joining us. I appreciate your time, and if you can give an update to the committee of where we are and how things are going.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Absolutely. Good morning. Joy Victory. I'm Joy of Physical Office. I think this is my first time in this committee, at least this session. So it's great to see you all. You don't see me very much because I work in education finance. So I spend a lot more time in the education committee and houseways and means. And we're here today to talk about CTE, which I know you've been doing a ton of work on. So to the chair's point, I thought it would be helpful to just sort of take a step back, think about Act 73 and CTE, and then talk about an ongoing contract that JFO has that relates to CTE work as it would fit into the new finance formula. So as you all likely recall, with the passage of Act 73 last year, it set the ball rolling in terms of a lot of work. And as you all know, there's a lot of outstanding work that still needs to be sorted out for a new education financing scheme to take effect. And one of those pieces, among others, is CTE. And so before going into our specific contract and scope of work, what we're working on, I think it's really important to note that how CTE fits into the new education financing system, whether it's a weight, whether it's included in the base, whether it's categorical aid, those are all policy decisions that open to be made in terms of how CTE both fits into the structure, like what is the actual funding mechanism, and also what are the funding amounts? Is it the same amount? Is it varied amounts? And that was not determined, of course, last year, and that's a referral problem within health. So to that end, as part of Act 23 last year, and I can pull up, we heard that you're a sharing committee. So I'll go ahead and share my screen. Write Act 73 last year included this section, Section 45A, which required the Joint Fiscal Office to contract with one or more contractors to review and recommend a whole host of issues related to the education financing structure that hadn't yet been sorted out or that there were different opinions on. So the legislature said, here are few issues that we really want a contractor, an expert to come back and make recommendations to us all on. And that was included in Section 45A. And this is actually one of the contingencies in Act 73 for all of these pieces to take effect that the general assembly must have received this report. And that still is included in H-nine 55, which I know you're talking about this week. But for this committee in particular, I wanna highlight this sub three, which this is the scope of work of the contractors, which is how to account for the provision of career and tech ed in Vermont's financing formula. To that end, we went out Shall I just keep going? To that end, we went out to bid, put out an RFP this summer and fall, ended up finding the full scope of work to a contractor, American Institutes for Research, AIR, and they are now undertaking this work.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (temporary diarization)]: And this report is due back to the general assembly in December 2026, So this coming December.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: And with respect to that, I'm happy to walk through the whole scope of if that's of interest, but I'll start on task five because it's the most relevant to S313 in your committee's discussion in terms of the scope of work. So to my earlier comments about how CTE fits into the financing formula, whether it is a ways part of the base categorical aid, and also those funding amounts, that is a policy choice that you all will need to make. And so as part of the scope of work, the contractor is required to recommend how to account for CTE and the funding formula. We included this more specific provision that the consultant will clearly describe how they would recommend CTE to be included with the funding formula, including recommended financing streams, tuition categorical aid that could also be within the base that could be a weight, as well as recommended funding amount or amounts. Perhaps a consultant will come back and say, we recommend a single amount regardless of program, or perhaps we'll say, we recommend multiple amounts.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Yeah, this might be premature, tell me to be quiet if it is. I mean, it's interesting, we got probably contracts, and they're gonna go out and collect all data, and they're gonna make some recommendations. It sounds like some of those recommendations, of course, are policy kind of issues. So I'm curious about how they're going to, I mean, they gonna be making recommendations about choices? Tuition category, delayed is a big difference, right? So are they gonna be recommending one or the other, or are they gonna give us some understanding of how each policy choice would work?

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Yeah, I don't wanna speak for the contractor. I will say that they are charged with making recommendations.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: So

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: of course that is different than JFO's scope of work where we are nonpartisan and we don't make recommendations. So I would say it's fair to assume that the contractor will come back and say, here are some serious advantages of choosing this funding stream over that funding stream. And from our expert opinion, we would recommend doing A, we would recommend doing A, B, nor C, depending on what your policy goals are. And I think that we don't really know where they'll land until they do a lot of the work that they haven't done yet. So that's really the last part of this is we're still very much in the early days of this contract.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Sure.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Where they're going to end up, we have no idea yet.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Yeah, just think of it from our perspective, looking at some of these issues and some of the policy choices, And we may have a thought about what sort of direction might be going, but it sounds like they're kind of off on their own in terms of expert taking those things, making recommendations.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Yeah, I would say that. And I would also say that's really what Act 83 asked for, is that Act 83 required GFO to contract with a consultant or consultants to make recommendations about a number of these topics, CTN being one of them. And I would say to that end, that was the legislative charge. That's the scope of work we agreed on per the language. And it's a report, bless you. So if the contractor comes back and says, Here's what we recommend. And the general assembly says, No way, then it's a report. And it lives in a report. It's in no way, I'm not a lawyer, in no way binding.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: No, of course.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Just not sure where we are there at that point. Yes, sorry, thank you.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: So that's the scope of work. That's the update on the contractor. And I guess I That's really all I'm prepared to say about the scope of work unless there's additional insight that would be helpful.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: How confident is JFO that the consultant can work within the timeframe and come up with recommendations that are requested?

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: I would say so far, we're looking really good. The Agency of Education has really worked well to provide a lot of the data. So a lot of the initial data requests, actually, I think all of them at this point have been filled. So to the extent that there's no unforeseen hang ups, which there very well could be, but to the extent that things continue to progress as we're expecting them to progress, I think next December is definitely feasible. That said, if there was legislative action that was charging JFO with doing additional work or trying to amend this contract, then I think it would be a different kind of question if they could still get a report back to the general assembly by December.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: So it's safe to say that currently, we have no idea what any cause would be. If we're at Vanessa. We have no clue of what that would cost us. For more implementation, number two, down the road. We don't know that yet.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Yeah, and I would say, as I will admit, I haven't followed all of the committee discussions on S313, because I've been busy elsewhere. And to that end, there have been a number of CTE studies, as the committee is probably aware, over the years looking at Vermont's CTE landscape, there was the studies done by APA. The work being done by AIR is really trying to build on the work that has been done thus far and further getting to the questions of like, okay, this information has been collected. There's still a lot of outstanding questions to your point. How can we actually cost out how CTE should fit within the financing structure.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Have two questions. One of them is we have four governance structures for CTE today. I'm assuming that the contractor is aware of them. Yes. And then one of the things that we keep talking about is getting technical education to the younger people and also to adults, which is not funded in this way, the adult pieces. The younger, the middle school is, are they looking at any of that?

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: I'm glad that you asked that. The adult component, I don't know. We have a standing weekly meeting with them. I'll actually be meeting with them tomorrow to talk about the CTE component. This is a very well timed committee meeting, so I will bring that up and ask about that. I will say that we've already been talking about the pre tech programs and how that could fit into their work. So they're aware of it, they're talking about it, and they're working now to figure out how that could fit into their learning modeling.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And I guess there are a couple of pretexts. There's the middle school pretext that some districts have and many do not. And there's also the pretext for ninth and tenth. Brewer?

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That has been given a little bit of a It's a little less clear for the tech centers today, whether they can offer them for Whether students can take them more than once instead of once and done. So there's new information. So I guess the landscape keeps changing today. And so that's really hard for somebody to take what we're doing now when what we're doing now was one thing when they started doing the work. Okay.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Absolutely. And I think that that's one of the challenges of the whole study because it's like we're looking at this new education finance system that's currently being reworked and rebuilt in so many different areas. And so one of the reasons actually that JFO decided to award the entire scope of work to one contractor rather than splitting the scope of work among a number of contractors was so that to the extent the contractor could say, Okay, here's the foundation formula that we're recommending, and here's the CTE amount that we're recommending, and here's how they should fit together. And if you're doing this district configuration, here's how that will fit with the CTE piece and the foundation formula piece. They're already working and thinking about how they can fit all of those pieces together. So it's certainly a challenge. And I think it's a challenge that if they can't fully address it in the report, they'll be able to address why. It's a challenge and sort of next steps that would be needed in order to better understand how to process it out and include it.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: So in 03/13, we're changing the definition of comprehensive high school into a fully integrated so that budget wise, there's no CTE budget, there's no education with one budget. And so, will this report take that into consideration as well?

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: I think assuming that that is what passes the general assembly, I would say yes. And one of the reasons that we are meeting with the contractor regularly is to tell them, here's how the conversations are developing, Here's the directions that the general assembly may be moving. And so I think that the significant pieces of legislation that passed this year that would impact the direction of the future financing formula will be taken into account.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Because they're very well I mean, they very well could be two different funding systems that have to be going on at the same time. One, if we have these regional comprehensive integrated schools, and at the same time, we still may have some of the same structure that we have now, depending on Time. Well, depending on how we decide what the bridge will be, what kind of system, you know, governance system, and then it very well could be going on for a long time, having to have two systems, and it may be forever because we may not be able to do regional integrated comprehensive schools all around the state. We may still need to have some of the system that we have now. We don't, but I mean, you know, the goal is to get there, but we may not be able to get there depending on the size of the districts or whatever we're gonna call us.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Kirk? I was gonna say something like that, and it sounds to me that our work on three thirteen might be very helpful for you and the contractor in terms of talking about what policy choices, we need more information and help from them, so they can try to integrate it in their work. So we don't get caught in December or January with something that seemed to be pretty important, but we don't have the data goods to really deal with it.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Yeah, I think, I guess the one piece I would say is we can only pivot within the scope of work so much before amending it. And so to the extent that, and I don't think this is the case with S-three 13, it's currently drafted. And to the extent that something comes up and it's really different than what's been contemplated thus far, then we would need to revisit with the contractors. Do we need to open up a scope of work, push back the timeline, so on and so forth? But we're not in any way at that point.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: One other issue, which isn't as big. And we think we have a spot in the appropriations bill to deal with issues around transportation. There are some CTEs that have waiting lists and some CTEs that have vacancies. Think we suggested- It's nine fifty five. Oh, it's in nine fifty five itself. Okay, so I would just mention that as an issue maybe to flag with you folks. I think we're trying to have a piece in September that deals with this issue, that might

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: be relevant to their work.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Yeah, I would say we're we've been working very hard on September. Little plug, we just published our fiscal note. So check it out if you want more information. And yes, part of H95 does include report and the agency a deep look into transportation. So I would say everything that's included in these education bills that are being worked on, because we are also working on them, we're very aware of what's in them. Thank you.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Other questions for Julia? Julia, thank you for coming.

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess, I don't know if you're gonna pull up Ezra, if Ezra's gonna come out.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Just, do have more? Do you want to share with the committee, Ezra?

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Sure, I guess I can share it either from here or from over here.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Over here. All right, thank you.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: For the record, Mr. Holden, joint fiscal office. I guess the only thing that I came to give to y'all is my own little plug. I didn't want to send it ahead of time so we could keep the conversation focused on the scope of work that Julia brought, but I did work on a CTE issue brief over the summer, and it talks a little bit about the governance and funding and some considerations with Act 73. So if that's helpful, I can send that to Matt and he can share that link with the committee. I see right now as you have drafted, S-three 13 does have a governance legislative study group, so that might be something to give you all a few considerations to think about while considering that work. That's all I really have to share.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Great. Maybe we'll take a look at that, maybe.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Might be good to have a little bit more of an overview while you're still presenting.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Could you be able to pull it up

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: on the screen and go over some of that with us? Sure. Yeah. That's helpful. Otherwise, we'll have to invite you back in again to walk us through your thoughts and

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Sure. Would you like me to share the link right now or just do that at the end of

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: I think I can share the link with Matt now, and then he can pull it up and put it on our web page, but also share your screen as well. Sure.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Matt, can you send me a Zoom link? I'm not sure I have one.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Alright. There we go.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: The comfortable viewing size for everyone.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Oh, don't make it smile.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Alright, so would you like me to just kind of run through the whole thing with you or something?

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Yeah, I think that'd be great.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Thank you. Kind of walk through. Sure, alright. So essentially Act 73, which I'm sure you all are familiar with, point 25, the big education transformation bill. So that made significant changes to Vermont's education system. But as I'm sure you all are aware, it left a few areas such as CTE a little bit of major legislative work. And so this brief is in one sense, it's a little bit of an overview of the whole CTE system in Vermont, a little very high level background. But on the other hand, we have some considerations on a few specific Act 73 areas that align with CTE or don't align with CTE and maybe could use some legislative work, which is why I guess I think you have a working group in S3 Good Team. As I'm sure you all are aware, CT offers students a way to gain some experience in fields while they're still in high school, or if they choose to go to post secondary, it allows them to kind of get a sense of what interests them. So the total in state enrollment for fiscal year twenty twenty four was about 2,500 full time equivalent students. And this might be receipt information to you all, but when we're talking about CTE, full time equivalent students, is the count that is used to drop the funding. And so that is your six semester average of students to get a full time equivalent.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: When you were looking at that, did you How many students we sent to other states for CTE? Or did you know how many students were on the wait list for CTE?

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: So I was not able to access a unified set of waitlist information, but we did I'm glad you asked. I did look into that. It's let's see. It's all it's in the enrollment section here. So looks like we had about So I found about 41 FTEs that were Vermont students attending CT outside of Vermont. So that was what

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: I was able to find. Thank you.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: But yeah, I did try and find some information on the waitlist and just wasn't able to find a single unified list from the agency at the time. I thought

[Unidentified Committee Member]: we had some time. Perkins, all the Perkins should have it, I think.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: The Perkins I've never seen a chart. These ones had wait list and these ones had But

[Unidentified Committee Member]: if the agency didn't provide it to us, then could

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: No, I totally understand. I think it's there somewhere. Yeah, well,

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: we can take a look

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: at that.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: It may even be on our website. That's a campaign. Yeah,

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: I did catch some of that testimony, so I can follow-up if that would be helpful.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Think it would be interesting for us to know, we know that there's 2,500 students that go through the system, but we don't know what the backlog is. How many more students could we actually be putting through the system?

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: And I would just like to note that that is full time equivalent. So in actual unique students, it's actually a little over 5,000 who participate in the CTE. Because of the halftime. Yeah, because of halftime, because it's an average over the six semesters, so it's a rolling average versus a yearly count of, okay, in this year we had this many students participating. So just a little bit, two different ways of measuring students. That's why you do have, some folks will say, well, have 5,000 students, which is true, but full time equivalent is what is used for driving tuition to the centers. So to kind of give folks a sense of the current state of CTE, put together this table of kind of the four different governance models that currently exist. I understand that some people might think of comprehensive high school as not really a four distinct model. However, since it is different from what the others are doing, I thought it would be helpful to include it here. So you have what we're calling the host model, which is the most used form of CT. So that is where you would have a high school like the Burlington High School, and you would have the tech center as part of Burlington High School. And then you would have kids from Burlington, but also other high schools in the region sending their students to that tech center. So we have about 11 of those, and you can see that they educate the majority of CTE students in the fall. You also have the Regional Technical Center School District high schools. So those are more of a standalone school district, which is focused on CTE. They have about four of those in the state. Then the independent models would be the two academy. So I think that would be Linden and St. Johnsbury, who have CTE high as part part of of their school on campus. And then the two comprehensive high schools would be Canaan and Mrs. Sequoille. They again, you will hear different things about them because, again, they're not full blown CTE centers necessarily, but they do offer some career and tech classes, so I think it's helpful to just think about those. And I believe S313 includes some language that would allow these to remain comprehensive. So just to go through high level, the CTE center programming. We go through this to just kind of highlight that programming decisions are made at a local level at the CTE center, and there are different stakeholder groups at the center that do help them make those decisions. So you have, of course, the Agents of Education has some guidelines, but then you also have the program advisory committees at the centers, are helping to make those decisions on what programs should be offered and how they should be offered within those guidelines. But we also have the Perkins funding, so that has some guidelines attached to it as well, which helps drive what programs are offered and how the center is running. We did touch on pre tech here, and essentially it's not offered in a user form fashion. So we found that about 17 of the 19 CT centers, and again, that's including comprehensive high schools, which again, I know that some people say that's a center, some people say it's not a center, but we decided to include them with looking at the pre tech. So 17 of the 19 centers from the data we were provided by the agency offered some sort of either pre tech program, but they don't all offer the same programs, and the amount of programs that they offer will be divided in each setting. So it's a little bit of a brat bag of what's offered and where it's offered. We did find that the majority of students who participate in those pre tech programs come from the high school. So for example, to use Burlington, most of the kids in those pre tech programs are from Burlington. So it's a little bit of a, I guess, if you're interested in the educational opportunities, students at the center have more opportunities than students who are in the same region, they are not at that high school, is something that we were finding in the data. So with CT center funding, since we have a study, as you heard about, we did not look into trying to make any sort of recommendations or anything like that. That's not really JFO's position, but we just did a high level overview of the funding. So about 60%, a little more than 60% of CTE revenues from tuition. So that would be your in state students and also your out of state students. We found about 180 or so out of state FTEs who come into Vermont, and so they would pay tuition into the Vermont CT centers. And so that brings us to the two different tuition rates. So you have out of state tuition and in state tuition. So the big difference between the two, other than obviously two different types of students are paying, but the in state tuition that can be reduced by the state's tuition reduction program. And that's something that is available for in state tuition students and not the out of state tuition students. And so I think, a footnote here that for fiscal year 2024, this in state tuition reduction grant was about $4,400 per FTE students, so that would reduce the tuition that they're sending to, would have to send the center.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Yeah, so that is a great answer. Maybe for your benefit, least some of the folks, we have discussions around these kinds of things and finding them. A lot of the testimony we've had focuses on the funding system and the extent to which the tuition payments tend to promote dysfunction between the sending schools and the CTE centers. They're sort of competing for money, right? So I just kind of want to let you know, aware of that we're having, I'm not speaking to the committee, but we've had that sort of testimony so that that might be relevant as you're thinking about where we're going in this kind

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: of thing.

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: Some folks are not happy with the tuitions. How that would be done in terms of foundation formula, where it would come from, know, in the other issue, but I think it's, at least for personally, I think it's an important issue.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Yeah, that's good context. And I think to Julia's point, the benefit of having subject matter expert doing this study for us, they are able to look at the current system with all that data and then make their recommendations to how a CT should be funded in the future. Should it be tuition? Should it be categorical aid? Should it be a weight? I think that's

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: A weight in fact, yeah. Yeah, those are, I guess, the

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: general categories. I think the study will be helpful for that. So overall, 87% of CT revenues come from Vermont's statewide education funds. So there are monies outside of tuition, but the tuition payments really are the majority of how centers receive their funding. And of course, there are federal funds as well, the programs are grant. And then just to touch on some recent trends in CTE enrollment, we only looked back a few years because there's COVID and everything, and so I didn't want to get caught up in that. Like I mentioned, fiscal year twenty twenty four, the CTE full time equivalent for in state students was about 2,500 there, which is approximately 4% decline compared to fiscal year twenty seventeen. And so we do have COVID in the middle there, so that's why I wanted to look at fiscal year twenty seventeen and try and draw that line there. But you do have COVID in the middle, so that's just something to be aware of. But like we discussed at the beginning, you also have the actual enrollments, unique students, not just full time equivalent. So for school year 2025, that was a little over 5,000 unique students participating in CTE. And so that's a little over 20% of your nine through twelfth grade students in the state. So it's a sizable chunk of that cohort. In state students, we saw that it's been increasing by a little bit there. So approximately 7% of students in fiscal year twenty twenty four were out of state students coming here to participate in CTV. I will note that that's a two semester average. Out of state students, FTE is a little different from the in state FTE, that's a two semester average. And that's just for fiscal year twenty four. The number fluctuates a little bit every year. So that's just something to be aware of.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Are those students primarily at our private schools, students who come to Vermont for high school, or

[Julia Richter — Joint Fiscal Office (Education Finance)]: are they

[Unidentified Committee Member]: primarily border region coming in from New Hampshire or New York? I didn't think we've had very many students coming in from other states.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't recall the name of the center off the top of my head, I do know that we have a public center that has well over 40% of its students are out of state students. And I believe that Canaan also has a fair number of New Hampshire students, some of which I believe do actually attend high school at Canaan and are also CT students. But I believe you have some who don't go to high school at Canaan, but may have the Dullesack order for the CTE. So I know that is some of it. If you wanted, I can come back with a breakdown. I have that on a different table, not in this

[Unidentified Committee Member]: If you have it and you can send it, that would be great. Yeah, I can follow-up. Thank you. To understand those numbers better, are we drawing kids for any reason other than proximity, right? Or are we what does that look like?

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Yeah, absolutely. I can follow-up. Yeah, no, I'm not even gonna try and guess So which one it I'll just follow-up for you. But yeah, so the percentage of out of state students, it's a really wide variance. You can either have 0% of your students coming from out of state or like I said, a little over 40% of your students are out of state. And so that's a consideration that we flag later on here in this consideration for legislators is that depending on what is done with tuition, how that could impact centers that rely on out of state tuition or does out of state get put in its own bucket separate from the in state? That's something to think about. If you do have a center where again, 40% or so of their kids bringing in tuition dollars, that's a different situation than Burlington or Central Vermont or Essex, just to name any other center with a different profile. So just to kind of go through big picture considerations. So for governance structures, Act 73 does have intent language around CTE governance and wanting that to be more reflective of the state's new larger school districts. That's just from Act 70 three's intent language. That's not JFO's comment on if that should or shouldn't happen. Just pulled that from Act 73. So just wanted to highlight that the different centers all have different governance and leadership structures. They also have different staffing structures. The four standalone CT centers they have, have to do a little bit more in house versus a center that's just attached to Burlington High School and it is effectively part of Burlington High School with their director just managing the building and how having two different governance structures could lead to different costs and leadership decisions, which depending on what's done from the JFO study, Act 70 three's funding change, that's something to think about, how that would be really important. Considerations are the programming. Just wanted to highlight here that many centers offer some programs, but not every center offers the same programs. So for example, we found that around 16 of the centers had some sort of construction program, but we could only find six dedicated electrician programs. Similarly, you could have a majority of centers with some sort of health care or health service program, but then you only have four with EMT programs, so just highlighting. And now some centers might have an EMT overview wrapped into their health service, but it's not necessarily a full dedicated program. But this is just a highlight that the centers all have different programs. And so in a more consolidated system where funding is maybe more streamlined and not just charged a different tuition rate, that could be something to consider that what are the settings with different offerings? Should they be more similar? Should they not be more similar? That's just something to flag. And then finally, around funding. We've touched on this Act 73 foundation formula. Big picture gives you a base amount of funding. And if your students meet the student characteristic weights, you can get additional funding. If a school within your district meets the criteria for a support grant, you get additional funding to that. That's different from the current system where a district has a budget, its voters approve the budget, they have the budget. With CTE, as it is currently funded, they have a tuition rate. And so they able to they, being the school district, can look at where their students are going, the tuition that they need to pay, and they can raise and make sure their budget fills that need. If you're in a system where you're only able to raise a very limited amount of funding, that means that that district needs to make decisions if you still have the same funding structure you need now. How will you pay for that tuition for those students and do everything else if you can't just go and automatically raise all the money? Act 73 does have some ability to raise a limited amount of funds, but it's not the same as current law. So that's something to flag. You've heard JFO has a contractor who will be coming back with recommendations. So I think this is an area to kind of be pinning that report when you're thinking about the considerations for funding. Then a few other things that may or may not be within the recommendation is there are a few different differences in student counting. So we have six semester FTEs for the CTE students, but the foundation formula is based on long term membership, which is two year average. So you have two different counts to try and put together the funding. Different governance structures, different centers have different staffing levels. And again, thinking about, well, if you have a more uniform amount of funding statewide, how does that work with centers that charge pretty different amounts of tuition because the centers charge the tuition to cover their costs. So that's something where it could be a little more difficult than current law if you have funding that's become uniform on one hand, but the expenditures are not uniform on the other hand. And then finally, just thinking about the programming choices, how that may or may not be impacting costs. Talk a little bit about how centers don't offer the same programs and whether that could or could not be driving some of the cost differences across those centers, which shows up as the differences in their tuition rates. So that's my big picture walkthrough. I think there's a lot that I skipped over. Yeah, I've sent it out to Matt, so you all should have access to it. I did link a few previous reports that were really helpful, but I was getting up to speed on CT coming into this, and so link them there for you also.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Any other questions for that, Kirk? Windsor, did you look into how much money Viola actually contributes to CTE? I don't think it's a lot, but I'm sorry, how much? Viola, Viola Funds. I don't. Of course, Innovation Opportunity, I think.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: Off the top of my head, I don't.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: I think it's available for some students, but I can follow-up at that section. With Jade, Rams, you can Thank you both. Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Ezra. Appreciate you coming in to fill us in on where we're at at this point. We have four and ten. At the floor, we had caucus of the whole on September, the education bill, regular caucus through lunch. Hopefully we're back in here by one, we're going to start looking and talking more about S-three 27 in the context of this afternoon's discussion, it's context of S 139, which is C PACE, which was on the The one thirty eight. 38. What's that? C PACE. We'll hear all about We'll hear all about it. Came out of energy technology Friday 08/2001. Be patient. Straw poll vote that we had agreed to put that into our economic development bill. Yeah. But it's a it's a funding mechanism for commercial commercial properties. Okay. We'll we'll hear all about that.

[Ezra Holden — Joint Fiscal Office]: There are some documents about it

[Kirk White — Ranking Member]: in yesterday's document. Yeah, I'm gonna ask them, I'll schedule

[Unidentified Committee Member]: it to today.

[Michael Marcotte — Chair]: Okay. So I think we're good to go. Was live. I'll be back in here.