Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Welcome everyone to a joint hearing of the senate and house education committees. I'm Peter Conlon, chair of the house education committee. To my left is Seth Baumgard, chair of the senate education committee. Today, we are getting a report from the school district and task force. Really, it's an opportunity for us to sort of hear their thought process, what's in the report, and ask some questions. We have until the house floor time, which is at three. So probably a few minutes before that, we'll have to break. But I think probably the best thing that we should do is dive right in. And I think the two chairs of the redistricting task force are gonna open things, and welcome to you both. If you'd all just introduce yourselves and and we'll get started. And thank you for your work and producing a comprehensive product for the legislature, as well as for being here today.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: Thank you for having us, Chair Conlon and Chair Baumgard. It's great to be here. I am Senator Martin Murakulic. I serve as Vice Chair of Health and Welfare and Aman's Senate Finance that I'm missing right now, but I have permission to be here, so thank you. Representative Edie Granting from Jericho, representing Jericho and Thunder Hill, Vice Chair of House Commerce and Economic Development, and Martine and I co chaired the task force. And with us here today

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Jade Adams, I'm a retired superintendent. I'm a resident of Stratford Vermont and I was a member of the task force as well.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I will get us started. I will sort of set the table with a little bit of history and how we did the work. And then I'll pass it over to Representative Grand, who will go through the 41 pages of the general portion of the report. And then Doctor. Batas will talk about the Appendix E, which is the actual proposal that the task force has put forth. Does that sound okay?

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: That sounds great, thank you. And

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I would also just like to say that if anyone would like to interrupt with a question, I'm happy to entertain questions as I go, and I'm sure my colleagues are as well.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: I think what we'll do is if people have clarifying questions during the presentation, please jump in, but for broader questions, let's save those to the end.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: Okay, so as you all know, we were formed as part of Act 73. If you look at the bill, we are specifically conjured up in page 18, starts on page 18, and it goes through to page 24. And if you haven't read those pages, would certainly welcome you to do that. It's very helpful. We were created specifically given the charge, there is created the school district and district task force to recommend new school district boundaries and configurations to the general assembly. So create new district boundaries and configurations. I think you all know that we had some members appointed, legislative members appointed, three from the House and three from the Senate. We had some retired superintendents, a business manager, a former school board member, as well as an appointee by the governor who was a former superintendent. Right, and and Secretary of Education as well. So we ended up having a group that was actually quite well versed in education, had an interesting background in the state of Vermont and outside the state of Vermont and different areas of expertise. We also came from all different parts of the state. So we felt like we were quite well represented and had a good, a well informed group to do the work. I would love it if I could read a little bit about what we had to do in terms of Act 73, creating these boundaries, but I like to read the list of qualifiers, and if you would allow me to do that, I would like to do that. So we were told to draw these maps, and we were also told to get public input for monitors, which we did. We worked with the Commission on the Future of Public Education with a survey that was sent out to many folks, and we had a great response to that. We had public input at all of our meetings, which was both in person, but also submitted in writing. And then we were also told that we had to have two public hearings. We ended up having four, and we tried to sort of spread those out across the state as well. And I think it's also important to note that Representative Bennington and I also spent time traveling around the state, meeting with folks, talking to folks, superintendents, Senator Harrison asked me to come now to Brattleboro, which I did, and she asked me to drive the streets and the roads around that rural part of the state so that I could really get a feel for what our students experience on a regular basis. I live in Burlington, so for me, it was great to drive some, what I would call, must be dangerous roads in the winter. They were dangerous in the summer, but I can imagine the winter get worse. So we were told to try to put together districts that were between 4,008 students. We were to look at both school districts, sorry, proposed new school districts or supervisory unions that had to have a grand list and pupil count balanced number. They had to be demographically equitable, logistically feasible, and create the least amount of disruption to students as possible. We had to, when creating the districts, the task force shall consider the following with the goal of increasing equitable access to education opportunity for all students. So equity obviously was one of the first and foremost pieces of the work that we were doing. Current school district and town boundaries and other historic and current community connections, including access to regional services for students, such as designated areas had to be considered. We had to look at geographic barriers, including mountains and rivers. We had to look at population distribution. We had to look at the location and capacity and the facility condition index score of current school buildings. We had to consider transportation and employment patterns and practices, brand list values, accounting for the homestead exemption and current education spending. We had to look at student demographics. We had to look at debt liabilities, assets for current school districts. We had to look at staffing levels, salary scales, and we had to look at opportunities to support small, I'm going use the word small, it says local elementary schools, central middle schools, and regional high schools with the least disruption to students. We had to consider access to career and technical education. We had to maximize cost efficiencies. We were asked to consider the location of schools and CTE centers and any other factors that we deemed relevant. So to say that it was a challenging task, I think, would be an understatement. I think we certainly agree with the governor that reform is desperately needed, and we did end up providing that. That will be brought forward a little bit later. But those were the that was the context in which we were doing the work over the course of four months and eighteen. So we started by taking all of this information that I just shared with you and listening to Vermonters. And we had the help of a great facilitator named Sue McCormick and her group, which is called the Creative Discourse Group. And they really helped us take all of what I just read to you and come up with some very deliberate intentions for the work that we were doing, as well as some goals. Because as much as there was a lot dictated here, there was some stuff that was not dictated. Like what do we do with the public input that's not explicit in the law? So we set an intention, we set goals. We decided right off the bat we didn't want to do harm to our communities in Vermont, especially our rural communities. We wanted to focus on equity, we wanted to focus on quality, and we wanted to focus on cost. So those were sort of our guiding principles and everything that we did came from those. So we started by looking at what would it be like to have one school district in the state of Vermont. We wanted to draw maps. We had every intention of drawing maps. So we did that as an exercise and we quickly discovered that having one district in the state of Vermont certainly did not adhere to that list of qualifiers that I just read to you. And also, you know, we have some really interesting aspects to our landscape, which is the state school districts, and that immediately sort of made one district impossible in more than one way. Then, actually Doctor. Madams, I think, drew up a really interesting map that would have divided us by brandless value. Right. It's fair. And it ended up with a third of the state versus two thirds of the state, right, basically. So that was, again, didn't adhere to what we were charged with. We then looked at, know, Franny and I were really interested in a regional high school map. We thought it would be great to really start with regional high schools and then build districts around those high schools. That became challenging for a number of reasons. One, we needed way more information when it came to transportation. We felt that without money available for school construction, That was kind of a non starter. And then, and this is something that we, I would say we bumped up again and again, we weren't charged with dealing with governance. So when we looked at creating these larger regional high school areas, what seemed to happen was that we were going to start increasing choice, especially in our comprehensive CTEs in high school. Yes, comprehensive high school. So they would include CTE. But we started bumping up into governance structures and it was unclear as to whether or not we were just going to be expanding choice across the state because of the supervisor union versus district conflict. And that was not part of our mandate. It's not something that we heard providers wanted us to do and it wasn't something that we felt comfortable with. So that ended up being part of our report, but it wasn't something that we mandated as a map. So then we ended up with a CTE map. The CTE map held a lot of problems for us. We were pretty excited about it because obviously everybody wants CTE to be expanded in the state of Vermont. That had its issues, one being that CTE is not equitably distributed across the state. All know that. It seems like it was done rather haphazardly. Also programming in our CEPs is not equitable. And ultimately, we also decided that the map, if you all have taken a look at it, and if you haven't, you should, was not equitable in that one of the districts, Chittenden County, had over 21,000 students in it. And then there was another map that had a little over 2,000. So those sides have just created a real equity issue. And we heard from a lot of folks who had issues with that piece of that map just being inequitable in terms of size. Simultaneously, I think we were discovering that there was a lot of savings to be had by regionalizing services. I was just at a press conference talking about healthcare and how when you buy in bulk, you save money. So Doctor. Brown will be talking about that a little bit later. We also wanted to continue with the idea of merging some districts, but doing it strategically and not doing it as this large scale mandate, which Doctor. Batten will talk about, would be very problematic in many ways. Yeah, ended the last month, I would say, of our four month foray was putting together the report, which we did with the help of the creative discourse group. And ultimately, we voted against the CTE map. I believe it was seven-three because of the issues that I mentioned before. And I think I can probably turn it over to the person.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Thank you.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: You're welcome. Hi, thanks everybody. I just want to highlight a couple of things that Senator Hewlett said, and then I'm going to not repeat it. So just bear with me for a moment. I just want to highlight the people that were on the task force. We had two former secretaries of education. We had one former state board of education member. We have two retired superintendents from different parts of each state. We have a pseudo retired business manager, school board members, teachers. These are people steeped in education at lots of different levels and asked interesting and important questions every time we went through all of these, people who are dedicated their lives to education. So thank you for putting that group to be able to come together. Thank you to the governor and to the committee on committees and to the speaker for choosing the people that were chosen, because it was an amazing group of people, and we got more done than I even believed. I'm the one who keeps saying we only had four months, we only had four months. And I will probably say that a couple of more times because it was not enough time. I was not trying to figure out Oh, and data. We requested a lot of data from the agency. We got most of it. When did you get all of it? We got most of it two months in. So we had roughly two months. And if you take the last three weeks that we were working on the report, had about five weeks to really work with that data, and we had to figure out how to make it all work together. So we had created for you a treasure trove of really important data that I hope you can use because it's there now and it's available, almost everything that we asked for. So hoping, maybe we'll get some more. But that should help you because you now have the really hard task of what's next. What else do I want to say? Yeah, I would just say, I've been So folks who are saying fact that we didn't produce math is setting us back to months. I would just say we have now co located a bunch of data for folks if they want to continue with the math process. If we were to do it in three months, you all can do so if you would like, but there's a lot of great information in our report that could assist anyone who is interested in that. We are here till May or June,

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: so just

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: throwing that out there. I know that is a critique that I have heard a few times. I'll say a couple of things. I'll say one of the things that we learned that's really important is that there has to be a partnership. And it has to be a partnership with the legislature and the agency and the superintendent's association and the school board's association. And we started having a lot of those conversations, but this can't be done adversarially if we want it to be successful. And our kids and their education is worth So, full stop, that has to be a focus. These community, it's not the right word, collaborative, gosh, I'm now in, thank you, cooperative education services can do a lot to save money and to make availability of opportunity for students more equitable across the state. And I hope that you're open to learning more about them and to understanding how they can work in Vermont. They work really well in regional states across the country. We're slow to this party. We passed it just a couple of years ago, a system for this. We would have to change that law to make it work in the system that we've put forward. But it's going to be an amazing tool for our I'm going let you talk about all of the things. All of the things. Thank

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: you. Thanks.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: I was

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: actually going pause for you, so I wanted to see if there's any questions about the opening comments before we dive into the proposal.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I first appreciate the invitation and also being involved with the task force. And it was less than a year ago that I was invited to come and talk about my own experiences as a superintendent in Pennsylvania, consolidating schools. And at that meeting, I shared the exhaustive process that we went through in dealing with a $26,000,000 budgetary shortfall and $180,000,000 budget, and seeing that consolidation was probably going to be part of that, but knowing how difficult it would be, we held that up for three years. We downsize, we studied our organization, we did just so much work in the prior two years leading up to the consolidation, that we had all the data and we had extensive studies and we had extensive public engagement before we shot the system by closing a significant number of fields. I say all that in really in response to the notion that our recommendation is being seen sort of an act of defiance. I'd say it's very much to the contrary that it was a result of a lot of very condensed research. It was the result of a very probably too quick data analysis and the 160 plus pages that you see in the report are just that. It's a thorough report based on research that you can look at, you can question, and you can make your conclusions. That's in reaction to a proposal that I still would say we have not heard all that we need to hear about why five districts, the original proposal. And given all that we've learned about how consolidation saves money or does not save money, I think there are some very serious questions that came up in that research that makes me very worried that if we jump to a massive consolidation, which means school closures, which means increased class sizes, which means loss of local control, Means all three of those things for sure, I don't care, I'll argue that with anyone. Sell that to your voters. It doesn't matter if they're Republican or Democrat. We heard loud and clear in the public meetings we had that nobody liked the idea of forced consolidation, period. That means we haven't done a good job selling them, and we aren't in a position to sell them because we don't know. There's nobody here that knows whether consolidating will actually save money. In listening to the governor in the last couple of days, it's obvious to me that saving money is the number one goal here. And so if put our state and our communities and our towns through this level of disruption, and we don't save them money, and we buy money and reduce their taxes, I'm just glad I'm not running for olives. So that said, that was our motivation for coming up with the alternative proposal that we did. Realizing that there definitely are places where we have redundancy. We identified through our attempts to do maps that we have areas where there's no service for career and tech savvy. We found that it's really difficult. We the standards of a thirty minute drive in most of the mapping that we did as a team. And we found places where it just wasn't feasible to have access to a clear text at it or to a comprehensive place in thirty minutes. And so there is no doubt, as Senator Hewlett mentioned in

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: our comments,

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: there's no doubt that we have the need for construction. And going back to my testimony a year ago, where do you put if we need more current tech centers where should they go? That requires study. We can look at our maps now and see where those deserts are. We can see the areas where none of the colored pathways to the thirty minute drive or the forty five minute drive are there, just blank space. So you can't just throw a dart at the map

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: and decide where to put

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: a CTE sign or take study. And so it became pretty clear to me after, really after our first public meeting when we met at Leland and Gray High School,

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: that there was a lot more work to do.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: We tried to do that, we did a lot of the research, The best we came up with were promising practices that we learned in different regions, one of which was in the Southeast Area of Vermont, where they are using a cooperative educational services model that they have grown themselves. As a former superintendent in that region, I know what they went through consulting with some folks in Massachusetts who were running those sorts of organizations. And then also coming from Pennsylvania where we had an extensive, it's called the intermediate unit system there, that certainly is a one stop shop to consolidate education costs for things like low incidence special education needs. They do back office stuff like billing for Medicare sorry, Medicaid. Really on top of everything else, professional development. So rollout when the state Department of Education in Pennsylvania would roll out a literacy initiative, every single SU wasn't responsible for figuring out how to adopt that themselves. The intermediate unit served as a regional hub where they could train the trainers to send people back to be on the same page in terms of literacy instruction.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I just want to jump in here. One of the areas that we noted where we are spending more than we should, right, where there is a way to save money is in this how we roll programs out at stake, how we train teachers. And I just want to highlight this because this is really important. We are so inconsistent in what's happening across the state and this has been made clear to us, I'm sure it's made clear to you over and over again. But if the agency of education is actually staffed well with highly qualified people and can roll out programs across the state in a way that is with fidelity and consistency, we won't have every single school district trying to do it on their own and coming up with some different program. There's going to be something more, something different, some way that they do it, but they all spent all the same amount of time. So how many 119 school districts are going to do that over and over again versus one? Giving everybody the information? Like there are things like that that we were made very clear to us that we can do and we can do it regionally or we can do it sexually.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Without blaming the individuals who work at the agency education, that's an organization that I think is woefully understaffed, especially given the breadth of responsibility they have. And we had a presentation from someone who was new to the agency who I don't think really had experienced what we as superintendents in the field experienced the previous year. There was a statement made that the data is great, the data that the agency has and our ability to gather and use data is perfect, or some words close to that. And looking around the room, there were other superintendents in the audience and so forth. What we went through to try to just report our student enrollment numbers a way to back 127, so they're critical to make sure we get our tax rates right, It took us months in my district, and I know it was the same for many of my peers, just to get that data to go into the system and come out correctly, To the point where I had to get on

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: the phone with one of

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: the people working in data in the AOE and just tell them from a handwritten list the numbers of students we have in each grade. And that's after they've been submitted through these electronic systems. Ultimately, it came down to some third party vendor that we had hired to to help with this this process, but just the statement that the date our data collection's fine was just patently not accurate. And subsequent to that, we had a presentation from the secretary telling us that we as a committee or task force need not worry about implementation. Yet you heard senator Gulick run through the the list of things we're we were told we had to consider in developing our proposal. I don't know what else to say about that, that we didn't have to consider implementation if we just needed to draw a map. We could have just gone with counties, we could have had a competition among kindergartners to draw pretty lines on a map, whatever. Implementation is critical in this state. We ran into the issue that we had 20,000 some students in the Chittenden County area in a number

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: of schools who are all working, who are

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: all about being educated in districts that are already at scale. We had a lovely meeting in Winooski, where we hosted a public meeting, where they've got a campus that's got their kindergarten through twelfth graders on a campus. It's running fine, and here we are, there we're worrying them thinking they're gonna have to consolidate and join somebody else, and they're Burlington is already at scale. Several of the districts out there are already functioning efficiently and at scale. But if you go to other areas like right here in the capital region where we have, if you look at the declining enrollment, you look at the number of schools you're still operating, you've got plenty of room to consolidate high schools. So if we're just going to do a blanket proposal that applies to the entire state, we're not going to fix our problems. We're going exacerbate our problems. And we're going put communities through a lot of turmoil. People in my hometown in Stratford right now have signs, they're printing lawn signs, and when they start printing lawn signs, you know what's on their mind. And it's essentially saying fix our taxes, don't mess with our schools, essentially the science does. So cooperative educational services, we thought, was one initial step we could do to save money. And it's not going to be dramatic, certainly not when you're starting anything out, But in comparison to the costs that you're going to face when we try to implement a drastic five, eight district consolidation plan, how are you going to handle the teacher salaries? How are going to handle all the teacher agreements that are going to be leveled? They're not going level down. Just that cost alone, what's that going to look like? Health insurance costs aren't going to change, same number of bodies are going to be insured just in different number of vaccines. And then politically, right out of the gate, maybe after our first meeting, it might not even have our first meeting yet, there is an argument to be made that more effective governments and less expensive governments might occur if we had supervisory districts instead of supervisory unions. That way everyone would have to participate in whatever reform you're going to do. Immediately there was pushback from people who love their SAUs for the very fact they have more independence in governance. And we started hearing from different members of our own committee that they were being pressed to make sure they don't mess with the SUs. So that's your backdrop. So it seemed to us that cooperative educational services was something that was like twenty third rails, offered actual savings, had research backing showing that in all the other states that you and most of the rural states do except us, They're working effectively, they're audited, it's not guesswork, and it's not hypothetical. And it's already kind of homegrown starting up in our own state. So that was one piece of the pie. The other thing we learned in visiting all the different regions was that there were already efforts underway to consolidate where it made sense for the British. And we were hearing that too from our folks locally saying, hey, put us with this district if you're going to consolidate us or do this or do that, and then there were actually places where they got even further down the road and they were actually meeting with each other. And at one point I was asked to attend a meeting of the White River Valley SU. And at that meeting, Orange, I believe the Orange Southeast or Orange, one of the Orange SUs had asked to participate in that meeting, and they joined because they wanted to find out if White River Valley SU would be interested in consolidating with them potentially. Later we heard that Woodstock and Hartford and Windsor were talking about shared services and an opportunity to make sure to see, realize some consolidation. You know, some of that was because they felt that if they didn't do it themselves it was going be done to them because of this work in

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: 1973,

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: But a lot of they had some really good ideas and there's a danger if you just let everybody team up on their own, there's a danger that it's going to be like picking teams in gym class when you're in elementary school, where I'm going to go seek a district like mine that's functioning as well as I think my own is, or mine's going to be more socially homogeneous or whatever. There to be More just

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: because person doesn't spend as much money as my district does on So student they have so much farther to come along to where my district is, that why do I want to tame everybody with that? Has has to be done in sorry, I'm totally wrong. But this has to be done in a way that is studied, that there is leadership, that we build that consensus in advance that this is gonna be better for everyone. And we understand why it can be dropped. Right? This is the thing that we kept getting our heads against, is that there is no trust right now. And if we don't build that trust across the state in a way that is, well, slow, right? I didn't say this before. I'm in a district that merged. I've been involved in merging districts for fifteen years. We started fifteen years ago. We finished in 2018, I think it was. So I don't know how long ago that was. It was a long time. It was six ish years from the beginning of our first conversations to our final lawsuit being settled. And right. And we had a district that had a shared high school for almost fifty years before that. It was a supervisory. It took that long to merge. There was some trust, but not enough. So that's why this is so important. This needs to be done methodically. This needs to be done carefully. This needs to be done with a really clear understanding of who is being asked to merge with who and what those difficulties will be when they come together and how do we support them through it and without those supports it can't be successful and what happens if it's not successful? We're teaching kids or we're not kids and that's why I have to do this really carefully and really well. I

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: just wanted to before we start the question are you wrapped up with your presentation? Didn't want to

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: stop. I can stop. I had the third point that I would have made.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Then we'll take questions. Okay.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Alright. So so we came we came to cooperative educational services as one lead in and then voluntary mergers. So essentially voluntary mergers that would be subject to scrutiny of whether it's the AOE or the state board, whatever it would be, but they would need to meet certain criteria. We have to show that they're going make more efficient use of resources, saving money at some point, lead to better educational outcomes. And we can build criteria. Then we also thought about incentives. We're talking now about trying to restore some kind of building construction aid. It's going to be necessary. We can keep on turning our head as we this will pass the graveyard on this one, but it's we have buildings that are collapsed, buildings that are in need of where it's it'd be way cheaper to bulldoze the building than to renovate, and that's not gonna go away. So we thought an incentive that if you had if you're gonna create a comprehensive high school in an area, that if we could get a merger out of that and then also get a better facility with better access to career and tech, that would be an incentive to do this kind of work. And so that was the second part of the proposal. And then finally, we couldn't help but bump into a couple of other familiar third rails in discussing anything when it comes to school reform, but visited some regions where school choice is absolutely essential because there's not a public school within drive or within a reasonable drive, and others where there are public schools with capacity that still have choice. We were told by a number of people who came to these meetings that if you touch choice, we moved here for choice, so we will leave if we don't have school choice. And we just need to decide. I had people write to me to tell me that any comments I had made about choice were not accurate, that in fact there's no competition between independent schools and public schools, and that independent schools actually save the public system money. Well in my town, because we analyzed all this data, the high school that is within thirty minute drive of mine, actually I have two high schools within three high school, wait four high schools within a thirty minute drive by home. And a lot

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: of kids go to all

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: of them and there's choice in my town which I'd still love to see a financial analysis, but there are over 100 empty seats at White River Valley at SU High School. And

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: there

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: are about 150 kids that go to another independent school same distance. That means there are two principles. In essence, if you have a school head and then some other administrator, might have the equivalent of two superintendents. You have certainly redundant teachers when you look at class sizes at both of the institutions. And so at least in my town, it's absurd to think that that choice is coming without a cost. And so until we can get honest about the economics of choice, if we want to be the choice state, we have to be more to pay for it. And so this notion that we're going to save money somehow because of choice is ridiculous. I mean, I beg to be corrected on that, but that's my just very simplistic assessment of it. We also have situations where we're designating every single child a career and tech student at an independent school receiving public money, which makes me wonder would it make sense for, well, no longer a superintendent, but had I known that that was possible, I might do that for my high school. And what would the impact cost be for the system then? And those are just some things that we have to be before we just say public education spending is out of control, involving the students, much of that really becomes apparent just because of the imposition of the new student waits. I'd see implementation of exome degree as of right now is really dangerous, and I would stop.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Senator Heffernan.

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: I have to leave him a little bit. That's why I was so eager to ask. Sorry. So I want to thank you for the work you've done. Unfortunately, you didn't do what was charged as far as doing them. Matt, what I did hear is that you did look at one district. Now I'm a fan of one or two districts right down the Green Mountain myself. What this will help do, I believe, is that we don't rush to combine schools, but it take the time. And where it can be done effectively, do it, leave school choice open, and we will get to where we need to be. We're definitely wasting money, as you see, other services, in duplication of superintendents. So I appreciate the work, but it's like you could have done a map of two and said, hey, this is where we're gonna save. It might not work. We can't move as fast as the governor wants to move. But when it comes time to start consolidating, the locals will have a lot more input because you're all under one district. We don't have to worry about who's buying out what or what teachers, and it can be done at the local level as well. If we're worried about, you know, school boards, we should think about having advisory boards at the at each school that have some say on what happens with their their money. Totally changed the way we're doing things to help save Vermonters. Because 87% of Vermonters say they're paying way too high property tax. And we have

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: to do something with their school system. Do you have

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: a question for And that was more of a statement, but I want to thank them for what they did. But the question is why, you know, we could have done two maps and then just picked it apart that way, rather than saying, We did no maps and are doing this suggestion. That was kind of the question. But I do appreciate and see the work you've done. It's hard work, and like you said, not enough time.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I think we might all want to respond briefly to this comment. Yeah, just want to say, I hope you'll take the time to read the appendix E. I think that is where you're going to get the detail that is a little bit missing in your question statement on where there is or isn't money to be saved. So I think saving a little bit of time with that is going to be important. I think one of the issues that we all face, and again, I am a murdered advocate, I think that they're important, I think that there are places for them, I fought for them, I was one of the people who drove with 200 square miles in school district, edge to edge to meet with groups of people to build that trust, to build what we needed to do to make it happen, right? That was really important to me, and we have a better school district, and we some of the best outcomes in the state. So I would be concerned, I was concerned, I still am concerned, with putting a map on the table that doesn't have buy from the people who are going to be in the active fire. People, as some people here heard, I was yelled at, I was spit on, I was derated at public meetings because I'm the face of this task force that is talking about merging schools, not because I said your school announced to merge. So I think that the vehemence against it across the state will be surprising. Can I just add surprise to you, Steve, I appreciate that comment and I appreciate the criticism because you're right? I mean, we were charged with drawing pictures, boundaries and new configurations and so on. We did do that. I mentioned some of the ones that we tried out. Also, I forgot to mention, we looked at a county map, which again, people really want county governance. It's something that I think as legislators, we would love to see. So it felt really good, the idea of school districts based on counties. But again, the minute we started looking at what we were charged with in terms of all those qualifiers, brand list values were right out the window and district margins, lines were right out the window. So we did make maps. We didn't ultimately vote for them because in good conscience, we couldn't do that. And I'm not trying to be flip when I say, but if you think you can do it, do it. We've given you all the information, it's co located, go for it. I really, I would like to see what is possible because we didn't think it was possible, certainly not in the limited time that we had. No,

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: it's alright. I think that's always I'm keenly sensitive to this. When we had to cut $26,000,000 from a single year's budget, I knew the first thing we had to do is cut central office administration. You have what roughly 52 to 54 superintendents in the state of Vermont. Myself, I was one of the highest paid citizen of Brag, it's kind of sad when I retired and I'm feeling the pinch of no income, I was one of the higher paid superintendents in both New Hampshire and Vermont, and I made about a teacher and a half salary. So you're not going to get out of you're not going to reduce people's taxes by getting rid of every senior tenant in say Vermont. But I sat here a year ago and I had my copy, out a copy of the SU map of Vermont, and having led a district with 13,000 kids and knowing my teachers, knowing my schools, it's possible to have a bigger district and to run it well. But if you go to two districts, to answer your question, you're gonna have two superintendents, but then you can't administer all of the special ed programs and all of the think of every other piece of legislation you've written that has required us to do something, whether it's whether it's ensuring student safety with behavioral threat assessment or testing that has to happen, the regulations around transportation and attendance and all the things that have to be done administratively. How many support, how many assistants do I get if I'm the superintendent of the eastern half of the block? And then with special ed, every entity is going have to have an LVA present at special ed meetings where placements are being determined. So how many special education administrators are going to hire at 6 figure

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: salaries? No, no,

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: what I'm trying to make is that the costs to consolidate are not going to translate into tax savings. In fact, you're going to in the law itself, as written, you're to hire a bunch of people at the AOE to facilitate the transition for these fewer districts. I can't remember what the money that's been already appropriated or allocated for that is, but imagine their job, they're going to have to be the ones that are going to consolidate all these schools and districts. And the handful of people that were up, it was four people, maybe three, four people that are being hired to do that work?

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: How Just to and then I have to go. But to answer your question here, like, yes, you have a center attendant. How much staffing can you have? Right now, we have nineteen and fifty two, a total of a 161 superintendents. I think each one could do it with oh, each each district doesn't have a superintendent. That's either way, there is savings there, and you will have more people. But I don't want to get I really didn't want to get into any argument with you. I'm just asking for answers. You're giving me some. I, again, appreciate it.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: President, if that makes you that you all should read, you never read it, please read the part about cost drivers. It's super important.

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: I thank you for your time. Sorry. Just

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: want to say, we're not arguing. Simply saying that those are numbers, and if we have a good handle on the numbers, you can make your own.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Yeah. I got Joshua first. I'm gonna take my own little liberty and ask a question. In your opening statement, you talked about that you really wanted to focus on equity. And I think equity is really at the heart for many of us of what we're trying to accomplish here. Could you talk a little bit about how the proposal strives towards greater equity?

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I can talk about hopefully this will lead to that, but I was going to use the CTE map as an example of not having equity, just to kind of be brief. One, we heard from some folks who were very dismayed by the idea of where are our BIPOC communities focused, where do they reside, right, where are BIPOC communities? Well, they're most heavily found in Chittenden County. They took a bridge. Had an issue with the fact that there was this massive district being created in Chittenden County that would have the highest concentration of people of color. They would have one superintendent for 21,000 students. That access compared to 2,000 students for one superintendent is not equitable. That became a real issue of a lack of equity, just to give you an example. Yeah, and then just in terms of the sheer numbers of families accessing a superintendent, 21,000 students versus 2,000. So, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so just to address that directly, if you look at cooperative education service areas, you have a region that implements our laws consistent, right, and they could work together five regions working with the agency together implementing our laws. So flexible pathways, right, we passed that in 2013. There are school districts in the state today that haven't figured out what software to use to track their students, to make sure that their students have access to flexible pathways. If we had a region who put together information, right, this cooperative service, Northeast Region, and said, this is how we're going to do it. Did all the professional development, figured out what the software is, figured out what the best practice is on how to do that, ensure that was implemented across that region, you would get equity. And so it's finding ways, it is a loss of local control for sure, but it's a loss of local control to implement better outcomes for students. Students. And that's really important because right now we have volunteer school board members, one of them, who think that they know the best way to do it and it's only to work if they do it their way in their region. I'm not an educator. I don't know that. I hire a superintendent to do that. And the more school board members that we have that are able to say that and able to say, if this happens regionally, and as students have to move from district to district, because that happens, like it happens, sometimes you have to move, my kid will be able to continue their learning more seamlessly than they are today. So that's the kind of thing that we're talking about.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: So I may not have read the Appendix C well enough to understand the difference between CESA and a BOCES. So for example, a BOCES model is basically a fee for service where I want this service from the cooperative model and I pay a fee and to get it. What you're describing is something that's a little more sort of governmental. Is that correct? So I mean, if I'm just curious to know.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: We get to choose. We get to choose how we want it to be done. What we found is that in rural areas, it makes more sense to do it this way. It makes more sense to do it based in professional development, based in shared services, ensuring that there are economies of scale and that policies are implemented with fidelity and consistency.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: The cooperative group being in charge of and responsible for implementing.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Representative Dobrovich, you're next.

[Rep. Joshua Dobrovich]: So you're charged under act 73 specifically to come out with three statewide consolidation maps. Jay or mister Robinson, I apologize. When you came and testified in front of our committee last year, it was the most exciting testimony I heard. And it was because you told us how we have all the data with the exception of where specific students live, which we can't get here in the state of Vermont, to go and get GIS software, work with a consulting group, and within a month or two, have actual data to show us where we can build maps that showed us where we can maybe build new schools if possible, all these things. I was super excited to have them there for those reasons. The task force refused to make any maps. Right? So your report repeatedly claims that large scale consolidation lacks evidence for benefits. But wasn't the role to develop maps based on the requirements from Act 73 and the charge of the task force not unilaterally reject the concept based on your own set of recommendations or requirements?

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: Can I just say that we didn't refuse to make maps? Don't know.

[Rep. Joshua Dobrovich]: Did you make any maps?

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: Yeah, we did. Did you did you present all

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: of that? That's probably just

[Rep. Joshua Dobrovich]: I I my question is

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I listed the maps that we made, and then I said that we did not vote for them for the reasons that I

[Rep. Joshua Dobrovich]: Weren't those maps supposed to be presented to us? That was the charge.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Well, I I think it would probably be better to work with what we have. And I think Jay is is itching to respond.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Yeah. I I just wanna respectfully disagree with the characterization of my prior testimony in that, yes, we could if if we hired somebody who did that professionally, and we had some great support from the state in terms of creating GIS maps, We couldn't locate individual students. We had to work with data that was very difficult to work with to figure out number of enrolled students and try to guess where they live. But that's not it. I was also asked in that same conversation, how long would it take to come up with a good consolidation plan? And I said it it took me three years, and then I was pushed a little. And I said, if you had all that data, including that GAS data, you probably could put together a good plan in a year. I said on day one, our first task force meeting, the fact that we had eight meetings and four months to do this work with all the stipulations in the law, and if you were to ask me that same question again, I'd say this should be a ten year plan. We think we pulled a lot of that stuff together and there's a lot to work with here, and the only real map in there is a map of the the cooperative service agency projection. But, yeah, I stand by what I what I said at that meeting, and I still do. I think if you were to hire an education and planning architect and give them this job, you're not gonna get a for at least a year.

[Rep. Joshua Dobrovich]: So my the reason I brought that up is because I wasn't talking about the whole consolidation, whole reworking or everything. I was talking about the specific charge of the maps, which the comment was about just the map that with the information, it wouldn't take very long to make a map. The consolidation I get is not a quick thing. We never said it was in the law. We we put it out for a few years to get done. So, like, you know, I don't mind what you produced. It it would have been fine if it was the fourth thing. Right? Three maps plus this. Right? So, like, you know, if we if you doubted the consolidation's effectiveness, why not advocate it to legislative changes to act 73 during its passage or after the fact try and make changes there rather than using the task force to override the mandate by rejecting the maps and not providing the legislature with.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: I guess I'd like to keep our discussion, if you don't mind. And I I appreciate you making a statement, but let's keep our focus as to what the presentation is and what the information is.

[Rep. Joshua Dobrovich]: I'm trying to get the why, right?

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I did advocate for changing Act 73 before it was passed until I had a force for it. And then I said, I don't want to serve on the task force because I think it's an impossible job. And then I was asked again, and then I was asked again, and I said, I will do my best. I will put, and I worked every day except for maybe three weeks of those four months on this. I thought we would have memes. I didn't know how good they would be, but if anybody questions the fidelity with which this task force worked to achieve great outcomes for the state of Vermont, I will argue with them for days because we work really hard to get this done and we feel really good about what we brought you. And the fact that you have data to work with now on day one is a big win and should help you to do this job going forward. I wish we could have done better.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Senator Hachi?

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: I found the answer to my question.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: There's one piece of information that we didn't touch on if we don't mind, but I will. We didn't talk about the building costs and the cost to maintain the buildings that you have today, And so we keep talking about regional schools, regional comprehensive high schools, built in places where students don't have to travel very far. Our buildings are so old right now. The amount of money that we are spending to keep them up, the debt service on the plate repairs that we've already done, we are spending a giant A giant portion of tax dollars are taxes on Medicare. And so to think about, again, spending money to save money, that's one of the things that it's kind of consolidation.

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: The collaborative education service area is very close to what a BOCES is, some differences. I was an advocate, and I was a figure of the BOCES voted for the passage of the law. So I guess two things. That's kind of already in place. Bringing that forward really isn't much of an I think, because it's there.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: This is not the same.

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: So I guess my question is, you have five recommended five areas. Is that a mandated five areas, is it a recommendation? So it would be mandated that you would be involved in one of these, that school district would be involved in one of these five areas?

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: It's a mandate to implement Cooperative Education Service areas. We recommended by knowing that the Chittenden County area might have to be divided into two. Yeah, so five, seven.

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: And I just have a quick comment. At the beginning of the testimony today, we heard some language about, I'm glad I'm not running. And if this body uses that as a model for their decisions, that's self preservation. That's not looking out for the education of students. And I just wanna make that point.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I totally agree with you. And in merging the district that I did, I had people, we ended up closing a school, and I had friends stop talking to me for a year. But it was more important to do the right thing for our students and the right thing for our district, and I did it. And I think that you're exactly right. We have to figure out first what the right thing to do is, and then we have to do it in a way that makes sense for Vermont and for all the people and the students in Vermont. And that's going to be hard also.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Senator Weeks, excuse me.

[Sen. Dave Weeks]: If I could. So first of I'd to thank you guys for the effort. We know how hard this is because this group was living this problem up until the spring of last year, and then essentially everyone kind of acquiesced to, well, Act 73 is the best solution we could come up with at the time, and here we are. So we fully recognize how challenging your environment was and your task was. So thank you for that. I do have a question, follow-up on the BOCES model. Again, you had a different acronym, but essentially it's a BOCES model with a mandate, five districts. So that, in fact, from my perspective, is one of one map that's actually in the report. You gave us a map, it's BOCES, it's five districts, and I appreciate that. I think the recognition that came from that, of at least, I don't know, including that map and that concept in the report, is that we do, I think, nearly all agree that the business efficiencies of those BOCES districts, or whatever we wanna call them, you've validated that, that there is a business model benefit from those five districts, and that's something we could gain some experience from and modify as necessary over time. What I struggle with is you've recognized the business efficiency, but not the leadership efficiency that comes from larger districts, smaller numbers of districts. And I'm wondering why the difference between business and leadership. And again, we're talking about superintendents and such. What in your mind was the difference between business and leadership that caused you not to accept the BOCES, CISO, whatever the new acronym is, okay, but not the leadership portion. If you could articulate that a little bit.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I'll let the former superintendent answer that question, because I'm sure he can do a better job. But just from my, from where I stand sitting on

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: a school

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: board, superintendents have a varied job and they juggle a lot. One is curriculum and instruction, which is super important. The other is like all of this administrative work, including infrastructure and buildings and grounds, so on and so forth. But one of the things that I really liked about the CSAW, the corporate education service area model, is that when you have another body or entity or person doing that administrative work, which is really not student focused and or student facing, I should say, it frees up the superintendents to really focus on what needs to be done to educate kids, which is curriculum, which is instruction, which is making sure teachers are showing up their best every day in the classroom. Because we know that that's what makes a big difference. So that's one of the reasons that's one of the things I love about this model. It kind of acknowledges that those are two very different roles. And then of course you've got the cost savings of the buying in bulk. But Jay, I'm sure you might want to add

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: to that. Yeah, I think it goes back to this whole notion that we didn't deliver a map. And again, it wasn't work avoidance by any stretch of ice sheet. Did more work to come up with that conclusion. I think we would have drew a map. I think in fact it would have been much easier. The issue though is governance. I remember sitting every time we presented a map, everyone shied away from addressing the governance question. Whether we considered it out of scope or the job of just drawing a map, but we had to think about that. Here we were debating whether they're gonna be SUs or SDs and getting, like, just so much public feedback, whether from the rural folks or from people in Chittenden County. We're getting all this pressure around what we should and shouldn't touch. And to me, I said this on numerous occasions on the record, I felt that the task force being put in this position at the beginning of this process was really putting the cart before the horse. Like with so many of the questions that couldn't be answered to help guide us in making the mass, we had to dig up ourselves. Half of it we couldn't get until halfway through the process. So what mean the flip comment about being glad I'm not running,

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: if I'm going to go out

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: there without that data to back me up to say we're going to make your schools more crowded, you're going to have more crowded classrooms, you're going be fewer schools, going to shut some of your schools down, and you're going lose local control. That's what I meant. I would not want to run for office on that platform in education, just to clarify that. So this can all be done. It just can't be done in four months. Whether it's thinking about leadership versus the business part of the enterprise, there are not good answers for any of it. Show me where the savings is by going to five districts. And you can't wave a magic wand and say there's not going be this big transition. How long will we pay for the transition before we see the savings? Probably the best answer to that question is looking at the analysis of Act 46. So that's all I'm saying. It's not to belittle the work done on x 73, that's huge undertaking. If you think of the size of this transformation, I think it's it's doing everybody in this process a disservice to suggest that you can do something this big in this short period of time. I mean we've got a three year lead way of implementing, but we just did the planning. It's going to take more than four months.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: It's not about the leadership, it's about the governance. So we have districts that operating K-eight, K-six, could not operate at all, pre K-twelve, all of those different levels. Have our academies, we have some privates that are going to continue to get money from the state, have others that are not, but still will for the next few years. There's so many moving parts right now. It's a lot to ask a group of people to tackle in that amount of time.

[Sen. Dave Weeks]: I do. I appreciate that answer. You. That forms it. I have different question. A lot of your effort in the task force centered around the analysis of CTEs and such, and I we all want to see enhancement of our CTE programs. I'm wondering if in your data analysis, if you recognize that there were population centers not served by the thirty minute boundaries where CTEs were missing.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Oh, yeah.

[Sen. Dave Weeks]: Okay. It's not quite spelled out that those kinds of missing CTEs isn't really called out that I saw in my review of the report. Just wondering if at some point we can identify, in those, again, this has to be a population that can utilize a new CTE, but I'm wondering where those CTEs might be for future planning purposes.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: Ideally, it's part of a comprehensive high school where all students belong to the same unit and they don't have to leave that unit to go to CTE. Right. If we're looking at where those should be.

[Sen. Dave Weeks]: Let me reframe the question. So we have existing CTEs and those aren't going to get up and go anywhere. So those we have those, and we're trying our best to enhance those. I'm just wondering, without having to build an entirely new CTE regional comprehensive school, where are the missing CTEs now? That's kind of

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: All I

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: can say is it's really, excuse me, Senator Weeks. It's really complicated by the rural nature of our state and the transportation times. And there it's in the Southwestern part of the state, there is a district that Massachusetts literally drives a bus up to the border every day, picks up students from that area, drives them to their comprehensive tech center where those kids get educated. And that's easier and it's closer for those students to access that. But for us to build a regional high school in that area with a tech center would almost be impossible just because of the sparse nature of that geographic area, unless we're busing kids for like an hour and a half. Mean, I that was just one challenge, just one challenge among many. You. I just want to challenge too, if we're going to say what we have now is firm and we can't touch it, we might not be doing what's best for the kids across the state. So that was Recognize the challenge is

[Sen. Dave Weeks]: we have known CTEs and we have deserts. We

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: have known CTEs that have wait lists that are long enough to fill a second CTE in that area in certain programs. We don't have enough teachers. There's so many we have areas that have CTDs that have very few programs that call but consider that to be comprehensive education for those kids so, CTE in itself is an equitable user which is another problem.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: I want to back to the notion of what a superintendent is doing with the leadership aspect. One of my greatest reliefs in retiring is I don't have to make the snow day call. I still get them. I'm still on an alert notice, but that's something that a superintendent does. So it'd be interesting to see what a superintendent would do to make a snow call when he's waking up and for Jana, he has to make a call for the whole western half of the state. We had

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: to have all those sorts of

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: plans, legal things. I had a teacher that had inappropriate contact with a student. It took I can't tell you how many hours of my life in a day, really. I think part of this whole thing, this notion of saving money on administration by consolidating, is a lack of understanding of what a superintendent does for them. And I'd say the same for a principal at the school level. Not great if this curriculum weren't. There's so much involved in it that is largely applying the law, sometimes consulting with attorneys because you're over your head. And is that possible in a 20,000 student district? Sure it is, but you distribute that. But there's so much that goes into the leadership aspect of it, that it's going be an important calculation to weigh the potential savings versus the lost productivity or the replacement cost of finding someone else to do that kind of work.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Appreciate the comments you're making about this. So I just have a, first of all, a comment and then a couple very different questions. The comment being, it's just about we keep talking about the five districts. And really, that's why the task force was created was because nobody seemed to buy into the five school districts. So I just wanna say that at the beginning, that was really never on the table. And people still continue to wanna talk about it in terms of the five districts, and that's really one of the big motivating factors why the redistricting commission was created was to say, let's try to create a districts within this, you know, boundary of numbers where it's practical to do that. I'll put that out there. Here's where I'm I keep sort of my mind keeps going well. Isn't it just the same thing? So when we talk about CISA with It's mandated to have it, which has the power to implement all of these things across a broader geographic region. I guess help me understand what the difference between that is and a larger school district that has all of the same powers and scale that would come with a CSAT.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Just to share my experience in Pennsylvania, the way the imaging unit works in Pennsylvania is that from a governance perspective, you have a board that is made up of one school board representative from each of the member districts. In my situation, we had 13 districts, so a member from each of the schools that participated, each of the districts participated. There's also an advisory board that would be the superintendents of each of those districts, similar to how we operate our career tech centers here at this point, governance wise.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: No, there's all kinds of different governance.

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Right, so what is retained in going with the cooperative educational services model is that you still have local control, you still have your local school board, your SE board, your SD before making that radical transformation. So we thought that was something that could be implemented without disrupting our current government structures to give us more time to analyze those governance structures and to encourage voluntary murder.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: And it's not something we're inventing. Sure a lot of them, but they're used in close to 40 states. They are extremely effective in rural states like Maine, New Hampshire, Montana, Wyoming. They save anywhere from 10% to 40% in buying, and from what we've heard, they improve outcomes. So we're not reinventing them yet.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Totally, me, which is more that a larger district, and I think your answer is probably the answer is that in one case, you're not changing the governance and creating a new sort of level of staffing to to handle things at scale versus changing governance. Personally, think we have a governance issue in Vermont because of and I think that costs money and kids. My other very different question was, you know, you came and testified a lot to us about your experience within doing what you did in Pennsylvania. And I think one of the messages you were pretty clear about is that you've got to make the case to the people who are gonna have to accept it, and that that takes time and somebody out there with the ability to make that case, making the case over a sustained period. Yeah, I mean, can you talk a little about your experience doing that?

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Yeah, like I said, I knew right out of the gates that I had a community that felt very strongly about all of our communities feel so strongly about their schools. I can't tell you how many retired teachers in Stratford have stopped me to plead the case. So there's this deep emotional attachment to our schools. In Erie, it high schools. All of our business leaders, our mayor, everybody went to either one of the four city high schools before the suburbs even built. And any talk of consolidating high schools was not gonna be listened to. There were 10,000 seats in our high schools and we maybe had 4,000 high school kids at that point. Even given that obvious need for consolidation, we hired an educational planning architect who did the GIS study that I described in detail before, who showed us where our current schools were, where the logical locations for comprehensive high schools would be, and what it would cost to actually make that change. And we didn't say much about the elementary schools. We kind of had an idea there were a few that were really old and dilapidated that were probably going to have to close, but we wanted to make sure we built the case first before we took it down the streets. And we involved the community much the way we did for the task force. We brought them in, we gave a brief presentation, and then we had them work together to just, here's the data, you look at it, what do you think? So that by the time we announced the first round of school closures and consolidations, it was a foregone conclusion. It was like a yawn in the news, whereas you'll have people out with hate signs and I've seen it go badly. And I've seen, I've listened to the reports here about every time it comes up on a found local ballot that we're going to close the elementary school, there's always a lot of disruption. So just by taking the time, we actually would go to these schools that were either going to be consolidated and changed or closed and shockingly got applause at the end of the presentation because we took our time and because our data was bulletproof. I'm sure in appendix e, we didn't include all research, but I will say it's not biased in the sense that we only picked that research that supported our position. I wanted to know for myself because I sat here and said, well, it seems with like 52 entities that we could probably run this state that only has the same number of kids as the city of Nashville with less governance and less administrative overhead.

[Sen. Nader Hashim]: But let's look at

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: the data. So in doing a deep dive through this process, my mind has changed. I think there still is savings to be brought up, but it's not in one blanket application, it's in these specific areas where we have too many schools in one pocket like Montpelier, Rudman. We've got CTG deserts where we just don't have access to a CTG. All these things are very regional. We have people challenge us to take the bus routes up over Mount I can't wish Mount it was, but it was one of the mountains in Southern Vermont. And I've been on enough of those roads in a prior life as a salesman in Canada, and it's a lot that I know I want to turn sideways on some of those roads. So it's nuanced, and it just is going take more time. How it rollout is, I think, vital to make it work.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: As for your thoughts on that, I mean, one of the concerns I have is that the what we have now is the chickens coming home to roost in terms of declining enrollment. And declining enrollment does not seem to be stopping, and it seems to be moving faster than our ability to adapt to it. And so to you know, we keep talking about taking the time. And, well, school districts are actually sort of having to do it on the fly because it's happening, and we can't seem to stop it. And that's for reasons that have to do with everything from birth rates to housing. And so I grow concerned, I'd like to have you address my concerns, the process envisioned with moving slowly and all that isn't gonna make us we aren't gonna be nimble enough to react. And we talk about schools closing and longer bus rides. I'm not sure that anything we do is gonna stop that because we are growth more rural as populations move to cities and people are having fewer kids in rural areas?

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: If you're asking me that, that's we heard that at our first public meeting. I heard a line of people come and tell us that if you consolidate our schools, we're leaving. If you take choice, we're leaving. So yeah, I don't know that rushing a solution is going to stop the flow of people or the decline in population. I think that steady decline, it's a tough one to reckon with, but put together a big plan for a big transformation and maybe it's just changing time. Like you've got some key pieces in place in the legislation, so maybe it just you know we've delivered this report, maybe it just means that we need to think differently about like when's it ready for prime time? We at least I said at the meeting, I think those of us who voted to put this forward agreed that it's not ready for prime time, it needs to be cooked more.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: I'll respond and not necessarily for the task force but for myself. I'm frustrated with that comment and I'll tell you why. We have no strategic plan for education in the state of Vermont. We don't know where we're going, we don't know what we're doing. We had a commission on the future of education that we conjured up and then we basically left to die in the vine. It's frustrating to talk about when we have to find enrollment, what are we doing, when we can't solve the problem of governance, When we are still unsure if it's okay to be giving taxpayer subsidies to ski schools? Is it okay to have non operating districts? Like we need to solve these problems before, in my opinion, we can have the foundation formula and before we can do what you're talking about, which is move quickly. We cannot, full stop.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Any other questions?

[Dr. Jay Badams (Retired Superintendent; Task Force Member)]: Oh, please. I would just refer you and just remind me that on page 131 of Appendix E, the last item in the longer term says, it can be an important to consider consider the public education system for modern conditions beyond ten years, beyond the useful life of its newest school buildings, and beyond the confines of our century old structures and practices. We talked about building a foundation at the first meeting. It's like without building the foundation for the future first, we're just going to keep on renovating and changing things that have been in place here for don't know how many

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: And making carve outs for the people that come to the State House with a very clear plan because something isn't working for them. And the more carve outs that we make, the more fractured system we have, the less good it is for kids. We have to be happy.

[Rep. Erin Brady (Ranking Member, House Education Committee)]: Go ahead. I mean, I think that's some

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: of

[Rep. Erin Brady (Ranking Member, House Education Committee)]: the lesson of Act 46. And I was similarly in your shoes. My school board career began as the last year of the CVU school board before we became a unified district and merged voluntarily under Act 46. But that the carve outs the carve out like, something that started, and I wasn't here in this body to have to vote for it. And I understand the difficulty and the complexity, but, you know, that I think had a good intention and is the same thing we're wrestling with now. And then I think I think almost every one of us in the room agrees we do have structural scale problems. They are uniquely different in different places. But we, you know, we do have too few bodies in buildings, and we have two different systems of where we send our money in our bodies. And those are really complex challenges. I'm not sure. You know, the governance piece, I think we keep, like, running head into it, and then we back off. We run head into it. We back off. And I will say I listened to every single task force meeting, and it just kept yelling in my car. I'm like, we're never going to be able to do any of this until we confront governance, until we have a common governance structure throughout the state. And I will put on my Chittenden County hat with a little frustration here. You talked about your district. You closed a school. I've had a next door neighbor's seat to Essex and watching them. They went through a voluntary merger in Act 46. They now, because of their structure, the school board and the superintendent can make educationally sound decisions for their community that are still difficult and unpopular. And that includes moving kids in grades. That includes closing schools, as Essex just did. My district is talking about potential reconfiguration. And the governance allows for that. And it requires leadership too. They have strong superintendent and board leadership that helps do that. But it felt to me that some of our challenges in what we've passed in Act 73 and the things you ran in and that we're still talking about here are because we haven't fundamentally addressed that governance. And we quickly fall into carve outs, and this is different, and that needs to be different. And things will look different. But until we can agree on a common governance structure, it feels like we just keep running into the same wall.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: Yeah, and that's local. And we value local And nobody wants to give it up without understanding that it will be better for their care. And until we have that information, they won't like it, but it will be better for their for our kids. Let me one quick little remark and then I promise I'll stop talking. Is that okay, chairs? Sure. Thank you. I think as legislators, we all have the opportunity to, and I don't sort of like look in the mirror also, every time we pass a law, it costs money. Every time we require legislation, including accepting free, it costs money, it costs time, it costs men and women and people power. If you, again, I would like to direct you to the cost driver portion of the study, which talks about not only passing PCB legislation costs money and time and effort, but the fact that we then place it on an understaffed or under resourced body to do the work, right, that actually costs money. One of our cost drivers is the Agency of Education's lack of ability to see through the legislation that we pass, whether it be proficiency based rating or special education or PCB, you name it, that is a cost driver. And it's not something that I had thought about until we made it explicit in our report. But it's something that we all need to be thinking about when we pass the bill.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Senators, representatives? Great. I think that the tone of the conversation today is typical of what we're gonna be going through as we've really tried to wrestle with a lot of this. But you guys provided the information or the proposal to us that we needed to debate and really appreciate the effort you put in. I always appreciate your very candid commentary.

[Sen. Martine Gulick (Co-Chair, School District Redistricting Task Force)]: And I must thank you for the hard questions, because if we're not willing to have the hard conversations, I would not be able to make things better. So apologies if I came off strong. I know I was bearing my soul a little bit here, but I think we're talking about something that's important to every single one of us and every single family in Vermont. So really appreciate the difficult conversation and appreciate that you're going have.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair, House Education Committee)]: Thank you. We stand adjourned.