Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Welcome to a joint hearing of the Senate and House Education Committees on Thursday, January 15. Today, we have with us the Secretary of Education and the, I'm not sure what your title is, of the Agency for Digital Services. We'll let you introduce yourself in a minute. Thank you. Today, we're gonna catch up on some work that the agency had done for the redistricting task force, which was mentioned in our previous joint hearing. And so it was worth a question to follow-up on that, speaking specifically about some mapping work that had taken place. I think with that, we'll turn it over to the two of you. Thank you for essentially making a quick turnaround to come and join us soon after the request. Introduce yourselves and proceed.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. I'm Zoe Saunders, Secretary of Education, joined by John Adams from the Agency of Digital Services. The Agency of Education and the Agency of Digital Services coordinated to support the redistricting task force to produce several conceptual maps, some of which were not formally presented to the task force. The chairs of the Senate Ed and House Ed have asked us to share some of those conceptual renderings as a starting point for your work moving forward. For the agenda today, we want to begin by orienting you to the mapping tools that were created for the purpose of suggesting new district boundaries. And then we'll walk through a review of Act 73 goals to establish the criteria for evaluating different district configurations. And then we'll share several conceptual maps that have been presented and walk through some of the organizing principles for that work. Our position is to share this with you and to be a resource. But we are not coming today with an endorsed map from the Agency of Education or the Agency of Digital Services. Our focus has been on the criteria. And we do agree with the criteria that you have passed within Act 73. But there's no endorsement of a specific map today other than to share some of the thinking that you can build upon. So with that, I will turn it over to my colleague at Agency of Digital Services, John, to walk us through the mapping tools.

[John Adams (Agency of Digital Services, Director, Center for Geographic Information)]: Thank you. Hi, folks. I'm John Adams, director of the Center for Geographic Information, part of the Agency of Digital Services. And I will share my screen here. And you should have these slides. There are very few of them. We just one here, as I'm gonna walk through a demonstration of some applications that we built for the redistricting task force. So part of Act 73, were tasked with assisting the task force with some of their mapping needs. And we created three applications that you see here on this screen. One of them would be referred to as the District Builder. So this is a tool that enables any user to go and create their own districts and see some of the related metrics as they build those districts. The other is we refer to the School Explorer. So, this is one where we have lots of different map layers and it came out of it was the evolution of a mapping application that was created for house education last year. So some of you may be familiar with it. But this is a tool where if there are any other map requests or you say, hey, can we layer on top these districts? Or can you show these demographics? It's easy for us to add another layer to this application. So we keep the builder application and then the explorer application separate. And then finally, the last one is drive time mapper, which was came out of a specific request from the task force that we created that. And I will walk walk through these three starting with the district builder here. So if you do go to the link on the slides, it'll take you to this homepage that has a link to these three applications. You launch the district builder here. You should see this screen. On the left side, you'll have an app guide and information, which I will not go through here since I'll be giving you a demonstration. But if anyone is interested in going through those, they can, along with some information about some of the data sources here. But when you open up the application, this is what's in front of you. You have the Vermont's two fifty six municipalities shown here. And on the right, you have these empty or blank districts. And we used municipalities, so towns, has the building blocks. So we have the resident ADM, so the student population assigned to these towns. So when you select them, it will dynamically add those along with other variables such as the grand list. And I can show you that here. We can select District 1. You can rename it if you'd like. Begin selecting towns and you can see this isn't a good example because it's covered up here, at least on our screen. So, let me just select a different district and you can see the number of students start to change there. If you hit this toggle, you'll see the schools in those towns that you've selected. You can actually toggle the schools on here and you filter out by type if you're interested. And if you expand these, you'll get additional information such as the facilities condition index and breakdown by school. I would say there's three ways you can approach building these districts if you are using this tool. The first is by aggregating towns. We've also made it so that you can build them from supervisory unions, if you prefer. So, let's say you select a district and then select the different supervisory unions that will add all of those together, and you can add or remove towns from that if you'd like. And then finally, there's a few pre configured districts that we loaded up here. And you can start from those and then add or remove towns if you're interested. Once you have a configuration that you'd like or if it's a work in progress, you can export and you can if you select this copy shareable link, you'll get a very long URL, which you can share to anyone. And if they open it up, that gives the application instructions to open it up exactly how you had configured it. Or you can download a table with the assignments, so the towns assigned to the districts that you've created, or an image of that map. And then if you select generate report, you'll get the average daily membership of the districts that you've created, as well as the grand list per student, and a few other metrics here, the ten year change, public schools by type, and then district profiles down here. You can you can use that shared URL, or if you had saved that table, you can import assignments here. Think that generally covers most of the basic functionality here of the district builder. And I can go on to the School Explorer, but maybe I'll stop here to see if anyone has any questions about this right now. So here is the School Explorer. When you open this, these are the layers that you open to. You have the different school types and size by enrollment. And you can zoom in or select those. And if you click on a school here, the perils of the live demo, We'll get information on that school related to enrollment, the facilities condition index, staffing details here, as well as information about the district SU. If you go on the left, you can see here where it says map layers. Here's where we've loaded up a number of different layers that were requested. So you have anything from high resolution population distribution. Here You have statewide commuter flows. We think from jobs or grand list details. Rich daily traffic, conserve lands. So these are different data layers that were requested that we added to this. It includes our school districts. I think you get the idea. I won't go through all of these layers, but if there are ever any or if this is a useful resource for you and we have the data with the map layers, it's fairly simple for us to add more to this application. And then the final one we had created was the school drive time explorer. So we modeled the drive time from all of the schools. We used conditions for a typical Tuesday in January using bus telemetry. So some of these may seem like longer than they actually are. And they may not be exact, but they should give you a pretty good idea. And we created different views of this. So you can look at it from the perspective of a school, for example. So let's pick Berkshire here, and it'll zoom to Berkshire, and you can expand, set that drive time, and you'll see the drive time from the school. And then the results will break out by town an estimated number of students and how far that school is for those students by town. And we did this by using E911 addresses, and we had a model that assigned a certain number of students or a fraction of a student per home. So this isn't based on actual resident where students actually live, but we assigned a number of students based on the number of students in that town, and we distributed it across those residential addresses to come up with these estimates around how far students would have to drive by town. The other way to look at this is from a town perspective. So, you can go and select a town and from there, see how far different schools are for the population. So you can go select a school, and then you'll see in your town, for example, here in Barton from the Lake Region Union High School number 24, approximately half the students should be around a five to ten minute drive, a quarter of them at ten to fifteen, and so on and so forth. So and then finally, the compare view is just one that lets you select two different schools and then compare. You can select the drive time and then see how far they are in comparison to each other. So these are the three primary applications we had built for the task force. The first two we had built before they actually began. We noticed they had a relatively short timeframe and we decided to build it to demonstrate to them what's possible and then iterate with them and make additions to it as needed. Happy to answer any questions.

[Speaker 0]: Not seeing any, I just would say thank you. Not only was this a tool or previous work, it's gonna be a tool for future work. But if in an era where we may have new configurations across the state, within those, there's gonna need to be work done, and this is gonna continue on as, I think, a really valuable resource moving forward. So I really appreciate the work on that.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Are there any questions? No.

[Speaker 0]: Go ahead. Thank you.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So as we're transitioning, I'll ask our Policy Director, Cornwall, if you could hand out the packets and I'll orient you to what is inside those packets while we're transitioning to a slide deck to give you more context on what we will present. And it looks like I've closed this one, so Next slide. Sorry, I'm having trouble getting one for folder. Yes, one for each folder. Thank you. And all of these materials have been uploaded for the testimony, for backup documentations. Sometimes it's a little bit hard to see the details of the box, so we did print them on a larger view for you to look at. See. Open. Excellent. So I do want to start by commending Don and the agency of digital service team for creating this tool and also to mention that this is publicly available. So any Vermonter that would be interested in exploring different district configurations has the ability to do so using this tool. I think the design elements that they put in are really important, because as Vermonters are playing with this and you and your role as legislators, you're able to identify if those district boundaries meet the Act 73 criteria. So everything has been developed according to that criteria that has been put into law for the new district boundaries. So for this presentation, we've walked through a demo of the mapping resources. I'm going to start by briefly reviewing the goals of Act 73 and those priorities that have informed how these maps were organized. And then, in addition to the maps that I will share today, you also have access to the CTE map that the redistricting task force reviewed. Additionally, our team provided some consultation around a county model that was explored. The models that I will share with you today are opportunities to build upon and start new conversations around potential maps. So the redistricting requirements, as you all know, the task force shall study and consider different configurations for school district consolidation and propose not more than three options for new school district boundaries. Those new proposed districts or supervisor unions, to the extent practical, should contain between 4,008 students for pre K through twelfth grade. And the proposed new school districts or supervising units as supervisor districts shall be, to the greatest extent possible, equitable in terms of brand list and per pupil count, so to be balanced in those numbers, along with other demographic factors. There was an attempt to ensure that they're logistically feasible and to create the least amount of disruption to students as possible. These are the specific considerations that were outlined in Act 73, that the current school district and town boundaries and other historic and current community connections, including access to regional services for students, such as designated agencies, would be considered. We'll also consider geographic boundaries, including mountains and rivers, population distribution, location, capacity, and the facility condition index scores of current school buildings, transportation and employment patterns and practices, brand list values accounting for the homestead exemption and current education spending, student demographics, debt liabilities and assets of current school districts, opportunity to support local elementary schools, central middle schools, and regional high schools with the least disruption to students, access to career and technical education centers for all eligible students, the maximum cost efficiencies, the locations of schools and CE centers, and then any other factors that should be considered. So I wanted to run through those because the tool identifies all of these as a layer. And so it's easy for you to navigate, to evaluate the degree to which a district boundary meets all of that criteria. The scenarios included in this presentation build off of the VSBA region, so the Vermont School Boards Association regions, regional high school districts. And a third example is offered that is a hybrid of the two. So as I noted at the beginning of the presentation, the AOE and ADS are not going to endorse a specific map, but really want to reaffirm our agreement with the criteria that was established in Act 73 that you all identified. And there are, as you will see through the different modeling, there are only so many ways to draw the lines and comport with the criteria of Act 73. The VSBA regions we are sharing with you, because these regions were used last session as a default for a lot of the modeling that was reviewed as you were evaluating the bill and specific to the funding components of Act 73. The Vermont School Boards Association is an organization that does provide some level of collaboration across existing school boards. This is the map of the VSBA regions. You also, in your packet, have a map that is blown up so you can see more detail. The grid that is included in the map helps you to identify the types of schools that are included within those boundaries. And in addition, in your packet, you will see a version of this map, and you'll also see another version that layers on the regions, the topography, and the travel time, so that you have that as an additional layer. All of this is information you could access within the tool, but we printed it for convenience. As you look at the VSDA regions, you can note that some of these districts exceed the maximum threshold identified in the Act 73 in terms of student enrollment. So you can see Central Vermont, Eastern Chittenden, Franklin Grand Isle, and Western Chittenden are over that 8,000 threshold, along with Windsor slightly. The regional high school districts were developed to ensure that there's a regional high school within each district. We can walk you through the criteria that was identified. This is an organizing principle to ensure that each district has a coordinated elementary, middle, and high school within the area, with the concept of also including, in the future state, regional high schools and CTE centers. The initial regional How are you defining regional high school? Yes. So I'll let Don expand on the criteria for the regional high school map. We're about to do one more.

[John Adams (Agency of Digital Services, Director, Center for Geographic Information)]: Yeah, right now. Good. Yeah, so the regional high school districts was something we just developed as a concept starting with high schools of a minimum ADM of 300 students. And then from there, we had a certain drive time. It may have been eighteen minutes or so where we created, if a high school was in close proximity to another, and they were both within that threshold, it created a high school cluster. We then assigned all the closest towns from a drive time perspective to those, either the high school or the cluster. And then based on a number of other parameters, let's say a town was in close proximity to multiple districts, we made sure that no school districts were broken up or supervisory unions. And then if that district didn't meet a minimum threshold, it may have been set at 3,800 or so, it would then get aggregated to the one with the closest high schools. Conceptual model with different dials that you could

[Senator Weeks]: turn

[John Adams (Agency of Digital Services, Director, Center for Geographic Information)]: to get a map as a starting point.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: And the first version of the Regional High School District map did include a single Chittenden district. There had been a lot of conversation in the task force and also in the legislature of that being a concern of being too large. So the version that we're sharing here actually breaks Chittenden into three different districts to meet the requirements of Acts and Degree in terms of enrollment. You will note here that there continues to be two that are slightly over the maximum threshold. So with that in mind, we did some work in thinking about a hybrid scenario. So it's important to note that the VSBA and the regional high school district scenarios are similar. They are similar in scale, and they overlap in many areas. They provide greater balance between districts in terms of need and property wealth compared to the current district or current SU, SVA configurations. They do differ in how well other priorities and criteria are met. And we can expand upon that in our conversation. Both include districts that are over the 8,000 ADM. That prompted us to think about offering a hybrid model that combines the best of both maps. And this third hybrid scenario does start with the Vermont School Boards Association regional map. It keeps existing SU and SDs together and ensures K-twelve districts with regional high schools, which is part of a shared vision that's been articulated within PASC seventy three. To meet the did not exceed the maximum ADM, this hybrid splits Chittenden into three districts, and that is based on the regional high school map that I just shared with you. And it splits Central Vermont into two districts, and that is based also on some of the adaptations we made to the regional high school map. So this is a version of the hybrid map. You can see, as we have outlined in all of these, some demographics to the left, which outline the enrollment patterns. Central Vermont still slightly exceeds the maximum of Franklin Grand Isle as well, just to note. With that, I will take questions. Also, should orient you to what you have in your packet. So in your packet, you have each of the three maps. They are stapled, so you have the version that you saw on the screen in the slide deck, and then the second page has additional layers of detail, which include you can see the topography, you can see the major roads to give you a sense of drive time, and you'll note that there's other variables you can add to this view in the mapping tool, if you want to dive deeper into any one of these scenarios. Additionally, because it can be hard to read the math at that level, we have included printouts for you. And these help to identify the specific schools and their current affiliation with SU and SDs, and then where those schools would be placed within the various models proposed here, including the VSBA region, the regional high school district, and the hybrid approach. There is, on the version that you have uploaded, you can drill down, somewhat challenging as you look through the maps, but there's additional detail on this version that I'm going share with you, that also includes by each school, you'll see the square footage. So it gives you an estimate, understanding of capacity, and includes school enrollment, and it also includes ADM as well. And facility condition is an index that we have evaluated and is included as an additional layer in the tool. So as you move forward with exploring different district configurations, there is the possibility to create default maps. So in coordinating with John this morning, we could create a default map for all three of these. Currently, the SBA is already there as a default map because so much modeling last session was leveraging that particular configuration. But we could also have it so you could click to see the hybrid model, you could click to see the regional high school model, and play around with the other layers to get a broader view of the overall district profile. Also to note, we're looking Vermont wide, so we're looking at the entire state. But as you're engaging in the tool, you can zoom in so you can get more specific and really understanding the clusters. I'll note that as you're looking at the maps, sometimes our elementary and middle schools are very close together, and so those dots are hovering over each other. When you're zooming into the tool, you're able to see more discreetly where they are. And you can also screenshot that so that you can actually have a zoomed in view of the specific districts, which gives you a better sense of all of the schools within the region. And part of this work too in doing around regional high schools gives you a sense too of attendance patterns, but not that we would be determining that, but starts to have some input to guide those decision making processes. That's what you have today.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. Just a question about the regional high school model. How did you define regional high school? Obviously, some of these have been what I would call numerous regional high schools. Give a little more clarity on that. That'd be great.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So for all of these, I would say that we'll articulate what the criteria were that we used. However, if there are specific questions that you have or additional considerations that you think should be contemplated, we are here to be a partner and explore how that modeling could be done. So we'll start with today's conversation and explaining what criteria were defined to produce these initial maps. I'll let John expand on that. But we do hope in this discussion that we can note additional questions you have, additional considerations or data points, so that we can help in informing your decision making.

[Speaker 0]: I guess my question is really within the regional high school model, is that sort of like, if you were to have an imaginary brand new regional high school, these would be how you break it up, or is it to say these are areas where there are regional high schools existing?

[John Adams (Agency of Digital Services, Director, Center for Geographic Information)]: This is all based on existing Okay. Existing schools. So

[Speaker 0]: Addison County's got three regional high schools in it. How did that factor? Many of the areas have multiple regional high schools in them. Or what is a regional high school?

[John Adams (Agency of Digital Services, Director, Center for Geographic Information)]: Yeah, so I guess I'll start by saying, I should not be talking about education policy or any of

[Unidentified committee co-chair/member]: these.

[John Adams (Agency of Digital Services, Director, Center for Geographic Information)]: What should or shouldn't be, I'm totally agnostic to that, and I'm just trying to empower anyone who has an idea to visualize that and analyze it. I think the number, the 300 was given to me to use as a starting point for a model, and that there was a reason behind why you would have a minimum of 300 students in a high school. And I can't speak to why that is or not.

[Speaker 0]: I just was looking for that. So you sort of defined regional high school as 300 more students in Africa. Great, thank you.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: I think also an important point is it's based on existing infrastructure. And we know that there is an interest in the future state to have comprehensive regional high schools, but we also need to ensure that we're providing that quality education now. So this can be a tool as we also think about future state and prioritization of school construction. When developing the hybrid model, in the start of your presentation, you showed us the, reminded us of the long list of considerations. Again, were considerations that weren't like everything had to neatly fit into

[Speaker 0]: a model. Were there considerations that were sort of weighted a little heavier than other considerations?

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Yeah, so I'm going to pull up a little bit of a you also have in your packet, I think it's printed, if it's not, we'll follow-up, a matrix, which helps you to get an overview of the breakdown across these. So let me just make sure it's in the packet. If it's not, I'll make sure to I'm not sure that we have that in there. But what you'll start to see is where it's really very nuanced at this point. There's a lot of similarities across these maps. We certainly made adjustments to fit within the minimum and maximum enrollment. So I think that was a large driver in making the adjustments. You note that within some of the maps, the first two sets of maps, that there are more districts that exceed that 8,000 maximum and at a greater rate. So as we explored different ways to organize, that was a major consideration. In terms of creating lease disruption, we wanted to ensure that we kept districts and SEUs together to the greatest extent possible. And that's really important as you're thinking about also shifting federal dollars and looking at the property tax base in terms of equity. You'll see that the hybrid gets you to more parity in terms of the grand list. That's important as we think about the revenue generation piece of this. And more consistency when you're thinking about the overall school portfolio, and that's indicative of the enrollment size being more similar across the hybrid model.

[Unidentified committee co-chair/member]: Caleb? So going back to the original high schools, again, I'm still trying to get my head around a little bit on how the maps were set up with them. So if we're talking about existing infrastructure, was capacity in existing infrastructure taken into account when the maps were created?

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So I would say capacity is an area we have not, as a state, tracked very methodically. In your backup documentation, we have included square footage, which gives us an approximation on capacity. I would note that building capacity does not always translate into capacity in terms of educational operation. So there's more work that would need to be explored around that level of viability around actually having to organize classrooms in your lab space. So this work provides that approximation and can be fine tuned. So there's other

[Speaker 0]: questions here. All right, well, there's a fair bit of information here for us to review. Again, just final thoughts on the map and information in front of us before

[Senator Weeks]: yeah. I guess just to get a little clarity. So these are really just samples that you prove, but very different maps. You told us want to show us.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: These, I think, viable maps for consideration. There's intentionality around evaluating these configurations against the criteria for Act 73. And each has an organizing principle that is worthy of exploration. So the VSBA MAP, the organizing principle, is to leverage existing school board collaboration that's been occurring across the state as we think about making these transitions. The regional high school map, that organizing principle is understanding the vision for the state of moving towards regional high schools. Think a lot of the questions you're talking about is how do we define regional high school. That needs to be part of an ongoing conversation as we think much further into our future state when there are opportunities to build or reconfigure. The other piece of the regional high school map is really ensuring that there is that continuum from elementary, middle, and high school, giving access to the full continuum of learning in the child's career. So those organizing principles, I think, are relevant and important as you evaluate the criteria. And then the hybrid really takes the best of both worlds. So you will identify how we could take those organizing principles, further refine them in a way that would meet the criteria of Act 73.

[Speaker 0]: Job. Matrix, were talking about?

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Yes, thank you.

[Unidentified committee co-chair/member]: Just hidden in there? I

[Speaker 0]: just wanted

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: to It was a bit. Mind if I borrow that for a moment? Thank you. So this is the matrix that I was referring to, and includes, along the side here, it has a number of districts that shows you the average minimum, maximum, and also the ratio between the smallest and the largest. So as you look at the hybrid, you can see that that ratio is minimizing. So everything at the hybrid starts to get us to a more balanced equilibrium. You also include the number of schools. It's important for us to understand the overall portfolio and the level of similarity across the districts. Here, again, you have the average minimum and maximum. And the federal poverty level as well is relatively similar with the new models. But I think what's important is comparing that to our existing structure. And that's where you start to see a lot of the variability. And property wealth is also included. So when you start really looking at different configurations according to Act 73, you're starting to feel like a lot of similarity in terms of these metrics, but they do vary greatly from our current state. And that's as we would expect, given that the direction to move towards larger districts is designed to be more equitable. And the criteria that you determined within Act 73 is helping us to achieve that and being methodical in evaluating the future state. So thank you. This is included in your packet. Thank you.

[Speaker 0]: Senator Haffner, thank you. Chair. So originally, I think you brought us five, correct? Because scale, and that would be the optimum savings. Or I don't even want to say savings anymore. I think for our state, it's getting more efficient, so a more efficient running system, which in turn should save us money. So now we've gone from that up to what was it? 15? 13. 13. So I see we're going to lose some efficiency. These are just, again, just thoughts. But my thought now is that, I'm going say it to both sides, that I'd like to see here one or two districts, and then we figure it out from there. Because once we have to start deciding to reduce and consolidate, it will make the path so much easier. And then it's almost a new way of thinking of, instead of school boards, we have advisory boards. There's so many other options we can do here to really make Vermont more efficient. We have districts out there that are larger than our schools put together, and they run on one superintendent. I think we really need to take a long look at that and come up with a new system that makes Vermont very efficient. Because some of the things we were worried about was budgets, leadership, criterium, practices. And right now, they're all over the place from what we learned from our last couple meetings. If there was only one or two districts, I think that would make the whole system. Like even lunches, school lunches, you could go anywhere in Vermont, and on Wednesday, everybody was having the same meal. That creates efficiency because everybody's buying from the same source. So I'm just asking the board to think about that, both the Senate and House of Representatives that we think like that as well to make a more efficient Vermont school system. Yeah, Representative Harple.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: I have a couple of questions regarding that scenario that you're laying out. One is that if we

[Speaker 0]: Who are you speaking to? Is this

[Representative Leanne Harple]: idea that was just laid down on one or two school districts?

[Speaker 0]: Mean, rather than getting into a debate about that.

[Unidentified committee co-chair/member]: It's not a proposal. I

[Representative Leanne Harple]: have some huge concerns with that statement that was just put on the table.

[Speaker 0]: You're welcome to respond. Yeah, go ahead. No, so you're welcome to respond.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: Oh, okay. So one would be, and maybe this is a question for Secretary Saunders if she's considering that idea seriously.

[Speaker 0]: That was coming from me and me alone.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: Okay. I would like to address this, though.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, that's fine.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: That is an extreme of what we're talking about. And one would be, how would we ensure that if we had advisory boards and some stores, if the work that they did is being honored by actually doing what they suggest, and how would that play out over a state that might have very different values in urban areas and rural areas?

[Speaker 0]: I'm gonna just pause for a moment. And we'll call that a rhetorical question for us to think about. Course, you're looking for a response. But also, have x 73 in front of us, which talks about districts between four and eight thousand at the moment.

[Representative Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Okay. I

[Unidentified committee co-chair/member]: have one

[Representative Leanne Harple]: question about that.

[Speaker 0]: Oh, and

[Representative Leanne Harple]: then the lunches were mentioned. Yesterday, we heard the testimony from the schools, like how are we going to continue to honor local agriculture and local food systems, but yet try and feed one or two districts with

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: that all get tacos on Mondays and burgers on Tuesdays.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: I just want to put that out there.

[Representative Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: There's things we need to know. Yeah,

[Speaker 0]: it's a little more complicated than what we're gonna get. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm gonna say. Hey. Go ahead.

[Representative Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Just wait. Did your hand open?

[Speaker 0]: Is senator Weeks the other question?

[Senator Weeks]: No. No. No. I'm gonna pray.

[Speaker 0]: They're in the person.

[Representative Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Did the I I assume this is not possible in the mapping tools right now, but I when we start to look at the lists of all the things that have to happen for consolidation of districts of any size from two going into one to 28 going into one, You know, we're starting to compile some lists. I'm trying to remember which one we looked at in committee just a couple days ago, kind of all the discrete tasks, obviously, with a dollar figure attached that would have to happen. Do these count or do you have any, like, back of the envelope numbers of sort of what the consolidation cost would be per each of these? Like, how many buildings have to be transferred? How many collective bargaining unit agreements have to be merged? How many? I imagine just looking at it, some of them, while they're a larger district, might actually have fewer merger steps, and some might have many, many, many, many districts that are now merging into one. And so there's a whole lot more logistical work, again, all of it with a price tag. And so I just wonder if we have any sense of that sort of price tag per consolidated unit. And then I guess a question for you or even for the chair is a reminder of what money was already allocated for that consolidation work in Act 73 and how it's distributed. Is it statewide? Is it per district? No. So the one I

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: would ask, if there are specific data points that you're interested in evaluating within the map, we welcome those requests so that you can actually visualize that within the tool. So I would encourage all of you to review the different layers that are included. And if you feel that there's another data set that would be helpful to inform your decision making, we would like to be able to upload that if it's available. So that would be quite helpful to us. Some of what you're describing is moving into the implementation planning. We have brought forward suggestions as you're thinking through the mechanism around collective bargaining. Also, in the original proposal that was before last year, we did include language around how to manage debt service. I know also that the money committees, Housewares and Unions, Senate Finance are exploring that as well. So I think all of that has been outlined in terms of the considerations to move forward, and we could have a separate meeting to walk through what that looks like. One piece I would name that we've heard really consistently is there's a need to understand the new districts in order to do that work precisely. So a lot of the work we've had and engagement with our business managers and superintendents and principals, there's work now that they can begin getting ahead of if there's clarity on the direction of where we're going. We did note that in many of our reports that getting clarity quickly on the new district boundaries would be helpful to get to that next level that you're requesting around the implementation planning.

[Speaker 0]: Senator Weeks, I can show a comment. So I have a concept question. In Act 73, we tasked ourselves to take a look at maps, were, the Grand List was an element. Can you comment on how relevant the Grand List becomes in a newly formed district when we use the foundation formula. Just been struggling with that concept for a while.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: I think it would be helpful to have the tax department to weigh in more specifically, but Grand Isle is important as you're thinking about equity in terms of taxpayer capacity and also the ability, should they be interested in doing supplemental spend, those are some of the considerations that need to be accounted for from an equity lens and also adhering to the Brigham decision. Thank you.

[Senator Weeks]: Just wanted to follow-up on it. Fair to say, I don't want to make I'm going say something, then you tell me whether it's correct or not. But we don't At this point, this is almost the only starting point we have for looking at maps. And would it be fair to say that although you are very open to tweaks or changes, the hybrid map is your best shot at a map?

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: I think of the models that we've shared today, the hybrid most closely aligns with the criteria and expectations set forth in Act 73, And we're very open to working with you to explore different tweaks to that that you'd be interested in looking at. But there are, I think as we've said, to meet that criteria of Act 73, there are only so many ways to draw the lines. And I think going through this exercise to get to the hybrid helped us understand the similarities as you start using this mapping tool. And there's some decision points around the best way to create the ultimate alignment and the new configurations. I'd say it's a strong starting point.

[Unidentified committee co-chair/member]: Jana Taylor? So not a question, so I'm breaking protocol, but I just want to Just ended up follow-up with right. Exactly. I just want to say that I am really impressed by these tools that were put in place and the thought that was put behind all the different layers. And I appreciate the ability to even be more flexible as we go along and discover even more things that we might want to take a look at. I think this is huge for us on our path forward, so I appreciate them greatly.

[Zoe Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: And we're here to support you and your process, so welcome. If you've had the time to absorb both the tool and also the sample maps, really interested to hear your thoughts and considerations, so we can support you in modeling refinements to that that you think will best serve the state.

[John Adams (Agency of Digital Services, Director, Center for Geographic Information)]: Okay, Brady.

[Representative Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I apologize. This question is going to be a little bit of a detour. We know our school leaders are obviously facing a lot of uncertainty at the state level here as we all have these conversations and try to work this out. I happen to represent the district that is now in the crosshairs of really difficult federal shifts and policy changes. And the reality is that we are just sort of responding to the fire hose as quickly as it comes out of Washington. And so, in talking with my district and trying to support, making sure that we are supporting and welcoming of all students, I wonder if you can let us know whether when the Senate Help Committee reached out in November to 18 states, I can surmise why I think it was 18, and asked for really specific and detailed information about our practices and policies related to Title IX, whether you responded on behalf of the state of Vermont to those directed questions. We provided a response to the health committee. Is that public? Yes.

[Speaker 0]: Anything else? Then, appreciate you both coming in, making the time for us, and, we stand adjourned. Our committee, let's sort of wander for fifteen minutes.