Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Okay, welcome back to House Education on 01/16/2026. I'm gonna spend a brief period here to talk a little bit more about school construction with some folks from the private sector with some thoughts on large scale construction and sort of thoughts on how we can do it perhaps better and perhaps more affordably. The floor is yours, introduce yourself and go ahead with your presentation.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Great. Thank you very much. I'm Eric Lafayette with Energy Efficient Investments, vice president. I work out of Williston, Vermont. We have 18 employees now in the state of Vermont. But what we do is we do energy upgrades for schools through a delivery method called performance contract. So I've been doing it now for about five years for EEI. Prior to that, I worked at New England Air Systems for a few years where I sold a lot of projects specific to EEI. Really like the business model and kind of how they develop their projects, and then was able to talk them into Ironman after a couple years. And since then, it's gone really well. And super excited to be here today and talk to you guys about your guys' schools. I've probably been involved with maybe 30 or 40 different school construction projects in the last three to four years. We do everything from fuel switching, so taking people off of oil, moving them to, like, a biomass or heat pump systems, building envelopes, windows, roofs, doors, building automation systems. So the controls that you guys have right here from Control Tech, like, actually what operates and controls the equipment that's providing heat and ventilation to your guys' buildings. And I'm here to talk to you because there's a couple measures inside the performance contracting statute that we were trying to get clarified. And we'll talk to you guys towards the end of that. And I'm just gonna pull up my slide right now. Sorry. I can share my screen. Right? Can I share my screen, Matt?

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: Yeah. You should be able to rebut the bottom and get through the queue.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Says it's not given the option to share. You have it shut down or

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: Your co host is in a meeting. I can also pull it up.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Alright. Cool. I don't know why it's not sharing. It just it's not giving you the option. So I live in South Burlington, Vermont. I apologize about this. I'll kinda pull up my slide so I know what I'm talking about as I go through. I'm a BHS grad, went to school down in Roger Williams, Rhode Island, came back and started working in the construction industry with a focus on mechanical engineering. I'm here obviously to advocate for performance contracting, if you don't mind going to two more slides over. Slide. So performance contracting is a delivery method that essentially allows companies like mine to go and evaluate a building, look for different energy efficiency opportunities, recommend those energy cost measures to different school boards and school districts, and then work with them towards upgrading the facilities using using the energy savings to help finance the project. So next slide. Why energy performance contracting? So energy performance contracting has helped customers attain grants and rebates. So we chase grants and rebates for people. Specifically, we do a lot of stuff with the ITC. So we've gotten rebates for geothermal and solar projects around the state. We've provide investment grade audits. So we go through the buildings. We look at all the different energy measures that could potentially save the school district money. We quantify those, and then we guarantee an energy savings associated with that measure over a period of time. We do ongoing analytics, so we don't leave our school districts. We a lot of times, these guaranteed savings last for four, five, ten, fifteen years after the project, kinda depending on how much measurement and verification the owner wants to take on at the end of the day. Usually, after we improve the savings for three or four years, it does cost money to actually go out and measure and verify those results each time. So usually, three, four years of hitting their energy savings, they go, hey. Thank you guys very much. Really appreciate the work. Let's start planning our next energy project to save some more at the end of the day. No significant risk to the school district. So we do all of our work upfront at no cost. The school districts don't pay any money until we actually sign a a contract to do the work. We work on a cost plus fee structure, very similar to a construction manager. So in the RFP process, school district would issue an RFP for energy services. Ourselves, other companies would respond to it if we're selected. Usually, there's a predetermined markup structure associated with it. So for site supervision, engineering design, measurement verification, and then we go out to local subcontractors to perform the work. So we design it, we manage it, we oversee it, and then we do the procurement on behalf of the school district board as well. But the procurement, your services is just a cost plus. But for the bulldozer that's digging the hole for the geothermal, that is just based on your cost.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: In other words, there's a little bit of a separation. The performance contracting guarantee is to cover your services, but not necessarily like the hard costs.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Yeah, ours are turnkey costs. So when we go out and we present a project to a school district, we've already gone through and we've budgeted the work, we already have like, we know what our guaranteed maximum price is for the work. And then once we sign the contract, and everybody's agreeance of what the scope is, and what the energy savings are going to be and how those are going to be realized, then we stick to those numbers through the duration of the project. So those are hard and soft costs. So Okay. As an organization for us, as EEI, we're typically doing what I call, like, the soft portion of the project, which is the development, the engineering, the design. And then we go and we provide on-site project supervision. But then we put all the bids out to local subcontractors as we do the work. When you say so two questions. When you say you guarantee the savings, what does that mean? It means that, essentially, that in this performance contract and statute, it requires us to provide a guarantee that they'll hit the savings. And if they don't? And if they don't, then we're supposed to make up the difference of the cost between those two. And then so I've worked with three E Thermal. Are you do you know who they are? Three E Thermal? Yeah. I've heard of them before. Basically, I I I was gonna ask if you're they're in the apartment world. Right? I didn't know if they same kind of thing. I've met them at the last renewable energy conference, but that was that was about the extent. I know they're more on the residential side. Because they do something similar where they find all the grants. They will try and get you as much as you can, plan a project, but then they hire out to do the work. Sounds similar except the guarantee. It's pretty much the same. That sounds very similar. I mean, our guarantee, we're we're we're kind of governed by NAESCO, the National Association of Energy Service Companies. That's the big kind of trade organization that we're part of. They're the ones that go out and try to set a lot of the performance contracting standards, how that measurement and verification process would work. But we really kind of focus on that mush market, municipalities, universities, schools, hospitals. And we do some private practice manufacturing as well. And you said that annual assessment that shows if they're meeting that guarantee, there's a cost to that. Is that a cost that you bear, or is it a cost that That's a cost that we include in our in our project upfront. So we would have but if they wanna do ongoing measurement and verification of their of their utility systems, then we can do it. It's usually about, you know, depending on the size of the school and how complex it is, anywhere between 500 and $2,500 to Okay. To do the verification for door. So I really think that this is the best way to address infrastructure because we are looking at long term energy use. We're there to work with the school districts through the duration of their projects, and we're we're bound to those projects once we establish that GMP. We go out to bid with them. Next slide. So this is really our process. I think I've kinda touched base on this, but we identify options. We start with this, what I call this ala carte energy cost measure matrix, where we might have 50 different measures for a single school. In order to heat or ventilate a school, there's four or five different options that you could look at. You could have your traditional system, which is your unit ventilator, that big piece of a mechanical equipment that sits on the wall in every single classroom. It brings in outside air through the back of it. It mixes it with internal air through a plenum on the bottom of the piece of equipment. It has a big hot water coil in it, and it shoots 95 degree air into the building. So you're taking raw outside air day like today, five degrees, and it has to raise that temperature delta by essentially a 100 degrees to get the 90 degree discharge that needs to heat the space at the end of the day. So that's your traditional system. There's also energy recovery units, so a central ventilation ventilation system that's on the roof of the building, then it docks down into each one of the classrooms. That's becoming more popular. That usually comes with energy recovery. So the great thing about that on a day like today, five degrees out, you're not trying to heat five degree air as it comes back into the building. You're actually taking the heat out of the exhaust air that you're taking out of the space, transferring it to the supply air. So I think on a ERU on a day like Jana, you're you're heating 50 degree air up to 90 rather than heating five degree air up to 90 degrees. So there's geothermal systems. So we can, you know, attach one of this rooftop units piece of equipment to a geo field. So now all of a sudden, you have heat pumps that are supplying the heating and the cooling to potentially this ventilation unit up on the roof. We can stick with the biomass system. You could use wood chips to potentially heat your building. That's been a very popular option. So when we go through and we look at all the different options for these buildings, we're we're looking at each one of those and giving them a magnitude of cost with a potential annual energy savings or increase depending on what the project is at the end of the day. We review it with the owner. We do we sit down, we go over all the different measures. They usually go through and select which ones they actually want to move forward with. We design it. We put the pen to paper. We engineer it. We have in house mechanical and electrical engineers that stamp the drawings at the end of the day. We procure it. So we put it out to bid, we create schedules, we work with school districts to make sure that we're not impacting their daily learning activities, we manage it on-site, everybody goes through different background checks, not easy working inside of schools. So we have a pretty significant, you know, review process for people to do that kind of stuff. And then we commission it. So we go through with the engineers at the completion of the project, make sure that it's installed the way that it was supposed to. And then we're usually involved with the project, like I said, from three to four years post construction as well, Doing annual reviews and helping them update their DPC systems. Next slide. Options we provide, I kinda touch touch base on this, but what's your fuel source? You know, is it is do you want an oil based system, a propane system, natural gas, biomass? Do you want an air source heat pump system or geothermal heating system? Those are all different ways that you can heat your building or potentially cool your building with those systems. So when we do our analysis, we're really looking at all five of those. And at the end of the day, some of them are heavily incentivized by the federal government, some of them have no incentives. And we build in all those different incentives into our analysis to help the school district make the best choice for them at the end of the day. We do a lot of steam conversions, steam to hot water, we have a lot of old schools that have failing steam systems. We do a lot of ventilation systems with dehumidification. So we've done that in Barrie, Springfield, Burlington, Swan and Hannaford Career Center. We've done fuel switching in Rochester, Bethel, Stockbridge, Clairton, Stockbridge, where we take them off of oil, move them over to pellets. And then we've done geothermal systems in Burlington, Keane, Dover, and some of those. So really, there's different options for everybody. There's not one option that's like, hey. You need to do this. It's really dependent on how far, what your existing infrastructure that you're working with. And then really what the desires of that school board or administration group of what they're trying to accomplish with their goals at the end of the day. We certainly have some school districts that are like, hey, we just need the cheapest upfront cost of this project. Need we want it to maximize the payback. And we're like, okay, great. Like, we might keep your steam system, put a new steam boiler in. Might not address all the other comfort issues in the school, but they're gonna lower their utility bills by $50,000 a year, a $100,000 a year. And then we have other school districts that are like, hey. We wanna get off of fossil fuels. It's a goal of ours as a community, and we wanna maximize the inflation tax credit to get as much money as we can get with it. So we're like, great. If that's what you guys wanna design around, we'll show you the options of these other ones. We don't make the selections. We just try to show as much information upfront so they could make informed decisions. Next slide. Notes from work. These are kinda cool. We did this project at Springfield High School, replaced all the ventilation. They had unit ventilators in there, the wall mounted units I was talking about. They had MERV eight filters. It's a very little not much for filtration. On top of it, the filters don't really work because they never fit inside of the equipment. They kinda rattle all around. So we put in centralized ERVs. We ducted the whole space. We added dehumidification as MERV 13 filtration through the ventilation, and they have a 30% reduction in sick days. And we can kind of show the graphs on that through that period of time. We actually did that in a phased approach where they have, like, four or five different buildings at Springfield. I don't know if you guys are familiar with it, but it's kinda built up on a hill. And as we did it, you can actually you know, we would be like, alright. We're gonna do these two buildings this year, we're gonna do these next two buildings next summer. And the sick days go from, like, you know, 30 per you know, originally, it's like a 10% decrease, a 20% decrease. And then when we finally hit the whole school, you get, like, a 100 per you get that whole 30% decrease in student absentee. So it's funny, as almost the percentage of the school that we were upgrading was proportionally decreasing the sick days at the school as well. So that was one cool one. And then there's tons of studies from this company called Undaunted about indoor air quality and sick days and what it means for test scores and kids. It does really make a huge impact on the students at the end of the day. And the cool thing about Springfield is we actually reduce their energy while adding dehumidification to the school too. So their actual energy bills went down 10%, and the way that we were able to do that was by adding energy coverage through the ventilation system with advanced controls as well. So they get the benefit of cooling with less energy bills too.

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: Did that include the tech center as well? It was quite so part of the building.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: No. That was the high school.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So it

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: was just the high school. The tech center up above it wasn't

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: part of

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: the No. The tech center still has allowed their original footprint. Got it. Thanks. So Rob?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Our time is somewhat limited. I got a technical as you go through these other examples may come Super quick. Okay.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: We did a project at Haniffer Career Center. We abated everything in the building except for one room that had floors. The one room that we didn't do the abatement on, that was the only room that failed PCB levels. I thought that was an interesting fact. We this was pre PCB abatement, even knowing about it and stuff. But when they went back and did the testing, it was, you know, the business manager and called me up. He's like, just wanna give you a heads up. You know, the only room that failed was the one room that we didn't have in our contract to abate the floors and everything else passed. And they found it in the glue plastic of the floor. Next slide, Rochester performance contract. This was a cool project. They had an old oil boiler. We put in a new pellet boiler in over there. New LP underground tanks. Total project cost of 1,200,000.0. We were able to secure $250,000 in grants. Those were federal and state grants. We were able to secure a 115,000 or they used a 115,000 in ESSER funds. And then ultimately, you see is Rochester stock Stockbridge responsibility was 572,000 after we removed the the rebates and the the grants. They had a a payback period of 40,000. Their annual savings are guaranteed at $40,000 a year. So they wanted to have a cost neutral project on their capital line budget. So they went with a $450,000 lease that cost them $40,000 a year that matches the the guaranteed savings. And their responsibility upfront on the capital side was 122,000 to get

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm trying to see the whole because our time is somewhat limited. And maybe skip the Bethel campaign.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: I'll skip the Bethel. I'll go down through there. We go out. We find financing for people. We help people secure their rebates as well. We work with efficiency Vermont to maximize the rebates for that work. The challenge, we're working with more and more schools that are considering these energy improvements, but either don't have the space in their current school or their space allocated doesn't work in their current teaching methods. We're working with schools with little to no ventilation in key spaces. The ventilation is the process of bringing in that outside air and what's creates the healthy environments for the students. And the challenge is is that the schools that are the worst, the ones that have no ventilation in them, when I start bringing ventilation in, that's energy that's being used to condition that air to go back into the building. And I'm actually not able to give them a performance contract because they don't have the energy savings associated with it at the end of the day. So it's it's almost unfortunate that your worst schools, the worst ones that don't that have the least ventilation are really the ones that are not able to take advantage of performance contracting compared to like a school that has a working ventilation system, but no no energy recovery. You know, they're actually they wind up perfectly for performance contracting because we can save them a lot of money with advanced ventilation system on a yearly basis. The request. So what I'm looking for is really just to kinda we'll provide language at another time, but we're hoping that performance contracting could work for additions. I'll get into a minute on why that that would why we're looking for that. And then indoor air quality being a metric for consideration and the valuation of the of the building. So that's all I had. Sorry about that, Peter.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I I would say it's probably news to all of us that there is even a statute governing performance. So there'll be a couple quick ones. The performance contracting statute language, is it only applied to schools?

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Yes. That is a specific one to schools.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Does it only apply to school renovations? I see you wanna expand it to additions. Yes. Does that mean it does not also include

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: No, so right now it does not include new construction, but right now the language is a little bit gray in the way. So we're looking to try to clarify that a little bit more just because it is a little bit it talks specifically about energy saving opportunities in it. And what we're finding a lot of times is that a small addition as part of our project is either required by code to do the upgrade to the facility, or, you know, it just financially makes a lot of sense to combine it at that same time. Because we're already in there doing groundwork, we're building foundations, we're developing it, and they're like, wow, you know, we want another, you know, 1,200 square feet of storage or classroom or that OTPT space. And it's it's preventing us from essentially doing these energy projects because the fire marshals like, hey. I can't give you guys a building permit to renovate your facility when you still have this 1,500 square foot temporary outbuilding that that doesn't meet code was supposed to be temporary, and it's been there for twenty years now. So they're like, they're not allowing the building to get the other upgrades, like, you know, fire sprinkler system and these other things because they have this lingering outbuilding that they've been utilizing forever that was supposed to be temporary and is still in use. Yeah.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And how would you measure indoor air quality in a performance contracting

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: system? What does that work? So the thing what I wanna try to be able to do is just come up with a baseline use. It's similar to how, like, efficient Supermont does their evaluations. But if I have a school or classroom that has no ventilation in there right now because what you'll see a lot of times is you have that unit ventilator on the wall, but the amper to the outside air breaks. And then that coil in that unit freezes. And this happens to every single unit that over the course of ten years, the coil freezes. And the first thing that the facility director does is they go and they cut their piece of blueboard insulation, they shove it into the outside air, and they're like, I'm never gonna have a broken coil again. And then I go into the school, and I'm like, guys have no outside air in your building. When I start introducing and create systems that do have outside air, that's gonna increase the energy. So if we could at least update that baseline use that would say, hey, you guys, like, let's take out that piece of foam, pretend like get the energy use that it would impact to create a new baseline. Then we can actually show savings Okay. Towards it and get the project. Yeah.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We'll look forward to getting the language at some point, and I'll I'll need to sort of review if we're the appropriate committee to be dealing with this. But since it is fairly school focused, probably is. Oh,

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: I'm sorry, Josh, one more. Two quick questions. First, with Rochester, the 15 lease, to me where I come from, a lease means at the end, you mean, it takes product back or there's some kind of change as opposed to a loan where they own it at the end. What happens at the end of lease? You own the equipment. Okay. So it's a lease to own. It's a lease appropriation clause. So, essentially, if if that school district says, hey. That wood chip boiler stinks in my building. I don't want anything to do with it. The school can call up the the leasing company that provided the funds for it or call us up, and we have to take that equipment away. But if they wanna keep it, is there an is there a balloon? There's no cost. There's no cost at the end. There's no it's just like a lease up. How many projects do you do a year on average, and how many projects could you do? I would say right now in Vermont this coming summer, we probably have ten ten or 12 different schools. We're doing varying degrees of renovations too. And I would say with this added stuff, I'm not I would I can think of, like, four or five schools right now off the top of my head that if I can show some of those baseline, you know, show them what the savings would be to go with a more efficient system and what that indoor air quality impact would be at at least four or five minutes would come. Go ahead, Will. Some contractors, yeah, hard to find what you need. It all depends on the project. So I mean, like, the scale of the plot project, the complexity of it, and the location, obviously are big driving factors. So like, there's some areas that are very tough, you know, your Chester's, Springfield's, even though it's on that 91 corridor, your North countries are tough. Chittenden County is pretty easy. But in general, there is a stigmatism against school projects because there is it's usually short timelines. Contractors generally don't wanna deal with schools. They tend to be a little bit needier than most people. Everybody has to be going through a background check before

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: they go in.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: When yeah. When the school is being occupied and stuff, it's we have a very strict background check process. It's very similar to anybody working. They So have to go to the Sheriff's Office, get their fingerprints. And the crazy thing is is like, you know, I could be working in Barry. The guy I go and get fingerprinted, and then I gotta go over to walk into a Montpelier school, and they're like, yeah, you gotta go get fingerprinted again. So I've gotten fingerprinted like eight times in one year.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great. Thank you very much for your time and then you gotta loosen yourself into our open mic out here.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Slide two, cute kids. There are a lot of work. Orchard School South Burlington going very well. Nice.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Do we need to reset? No. We've seen everybody's here.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Yep.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Alright. As we sort of play little musical chairs, we're gonna get settled here.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: He's still alive. We

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: are still alive. Oh please, yeah, thank you.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Good afternoon everyone.

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: Hey. Hello. Nice to see you. We

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: are live. Okay. Well, let's go. We can make a quick turnover here. So our next round of testimony is an update on the work that the State Board of Education has been assigned through Act 73 to come up with what do we mean by small by necessity or sparse in sort of identifying schools that under a foundation formula might be eligible for an additional grant or perhaps not, depending on whether they are small by necessity. So, we have got the chair and the vice chair of the State Board of Education here with us. Floor is yours, and thank you both very much for coming in quickly. Appreciate it.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: You

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: have the chair behind over your shoulder, just to say no.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Good afternoon, I'm Tammy Colby. I'm here in my capacity as vice chair, and you can introduce yourself.

[Jennifer Dex Samuelson (Chair, State Board of Education)]: Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Jennifer Dex Samuelson, chair of the State Board of Ed. I'm appearing remotely today with my apologies, although kind of worked out. I'm actually I'm feeling sick, so I'm really glad that what you're going to hear, this afternoon really is the product, of Tammy and, the committee that she led. So I am here, as a resource, but, I I really am gonna defer to Tammy on this because, I think the committee has done a tremendous amount of work in a very short period of time. My own personal sense is that they've put together a pretty good proposal. So Tammy, I will hand it back to you with my thanks for the work that you've done.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Sorry, you're not feeling well.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Hey, Jennifer.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Okay, so I did share a PowerPoint presentation and I don't Do you want to move through it or how I do not have that Zoom link on.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: We'll just keep

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: it up

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: on our screens.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: I didn't know for the viewing audience that they needed to have that for Open Meeting Lab. If you want to send it to my work account, tcolbyair dot org, I can open it up here. But I know the time is precious, why don't we jump in and

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: make The sure public has access to it. Okay,

[Jennifer Dex Samuelson (Chair, State Board of Education)]: and I was also going to offer that I could share my screen if that's helpful.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think we're okay. Thank Thank

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: you, everyone. We play musical computers today. All right, so as Jennifer mentioned, we and the State Board of Education were assigned by the legislature the responsibility under Section 37 of Act 73 to think about how to define by necessity for the purposes of defining a small or sparse school. And that, again, is Section eight. So, what we were assigned to do was to propose standards for schools to be considered as to whether or not they meet that criteria. Slide three. So, we undertook a process in July 2025. The state board constituted a special committee to develop a proposed framework for defining when a school is small by necessity and or sparse by necessity. Committee membership consisted of Cynthia Stewart, Brand Campion, former legislator, and myself as chair. We met five times during the 2025. We held one public listening session on November 7. We consulted with and received data from the Agency of Education, and we also reviewed other states' policies and practices. All of the materials that we considered as a part of our process are up on the State Board website under the committee. I am happy to try to make any of that available to you directly if you're interested. What may be of interest to you is we did ask the state agency to provide us an Excel file that shows every single school in their proximity to another school by just driving times. So just so you know, that is available on our website and that may be of interest to you in your deliberations. The state board, we pulled together a series of recommendations we're going to talk about today. And the full board voted unanimously to accept the committee's recommendations as December 2025 full board meeting. So what I'm going to reflect to you today is our recommendations, not just by the committee, but the recommendations that were approved by the full support at its December meeting. Before I jump in, I think it's really important that we ground the conversation in a definitional consideration, and this is one the committee gave a lot of thought to on slide four. And that is how do we think about this concept of by necessity in the context of defining small and sparse? So, the first thing is that the committee was very careful to note that since both small and sparse are already established thresholds and statute, that was not our jurisdiction to rethink what constitutes small and or sparse. And just by for reminder, a small school is one that's less than 100 students and a school that's located in a sparsely populated area is less than 55 persons per school. Those are in statute. So our charge then was to think about, well, is a school small or sparse by necessity? And so because we have those definitions in statute already, this suggests that the definition of necessity needed to distinguish between two things. First, schools that are small or sparse because of geography or isolation, right? And therefore, would be funding eligible. And schools that are smallsparse due to local organizational decisions, preferences or policy choices and would be funding ineligible. And I just lay that on the table because ultimately we're talking about this definition is going to apply to whether or not a school receives funding. And so by making that distinction, what we're saying is schools that are small, sparse because of geography, or isolation, and therefore are funding eligible are through the formula, schools that the state is deciding warrant additional funding to keep open by the virtue of the fact that they are small and sparse and may be unable to operate at scale without additional funding. So, that, that means that our state board's starting point was to define a school as smaller sparsified necessity where a school cannot reasonably increase enrollment or consolidate without creating undue hardship for students, specifically in terms of travel time, safety, and lack of feasible alternatives. So that's our broad definitional construct that we started with. Then we used that to create a broad framework and some criteria for you all to think about as you craft the next step in this, which I assume would be some sort of statutory definition. I'm on slide five, moving on to slide six. So, the possible criteria that we came up with, committee operationalized our general framework in terms of specific criteria that could be used to determine whether a school is small or sparse by necessity. And therefore, basically five broad buckets here. A school that was by necessity, is demonstrated as meeting one or more of the following. Consolidation would result in average one way travel times exceeding forty five minutes for grades Pre K-six or sixty minutes for grades seven-twelve or travel over terrain that is frequently impassable or unsafe. Second, there is no nearby school with sufficient capacity to absorb the students without significant additional capital improvement or investment. Three, closure or consolidation would include substantial increases in costs to the district or tax figure due to tuition, transportation, or capital needs. And four, the population density and projected enrollment of the schools in catchment area are such that the school cannot feasibly reach sustainable enrollment in the foreseeable future. So a school already meeting the less, for example, less than 100 students or less than 55 persons per square mile threshold could qualify by necessity if any one of these conditions were met. That's the big picture. What I'd like to do now is talk through, we had some rationales and additional more specific criteria as it relates to each one of these. So I'm now on to slide seven, the travel time or distance threshold. So as I suggested before, the possible criteria for travel time or distance threshold was the average one way student travel times exceeding forty five minutes for elementary students or sixty minutes for students in grades seven or 12. And this would be also considering considering road miles to the nearest school, the same grade span exceeded 10 to 15 miles depending on terrain. Again, these thresholds are always tricky, right? Because they create clips. But we felt like we needed to set some guardrails around sort of what these travel times might be. In establishing this framework, we not only looked at what other states did, and you'll see in our memorandum, there's an appendix where we looked at what some of the other states are doing. We also talked to superintendents in the state, and they made two important points. I think one, that if we are going to use travel times or we are going to use road miles, it needs to be an average, not an absolute, because it could be that some students might need forty six minutes versus forty four. And they were very clear about that. The other challenge with this though is that road miles to the nearest school can be dependent on terrain and that sort of feeds into our second criteria. If

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: it's a clarifying question then let's go for it. I actually

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: have one too. So I'm just curious, I understand that you took your recommendations by looking at whether it's HR, but why settle on 45 versus a half an hour? How did that number get selected?

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Yeah, and so in the memo, there's footnote that has some research on this too, right? That talks about sort of time on bus and its impacts on student learning. So, we took that into account. We took into account testimony from superintendents around sort of what they already use as guidelines, right? For example, we heard from one superintendent that they already use a guideline of trying to make sure that students aren't on buses more than sixty minutes. So it was both looking at what other states did, looking at the existing research literature about the impact of time on bus on student achievement and other kinds of factors, as well as taking into some of the practical considerations that existing school superintendents shared with us.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: For the walkway.

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: They simply hike. The travel time, does that include pick up, drop off, switching buses, and all of that as well?

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: My understanding is that travel time includes all of those things, but I think that would be something that you would want to be clear about in whatever you defined.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Mine was when it says average one way student travel time exceeding that time on a bus, as opposed to a parent driving a child directly to the school.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: We considered travel time as more general than that, so it could be a parent driving a child because we don't require bus transportation in Vermont.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: This is obviously something everybody holds very good and has their own experiences. My travel time if my parent drove me was about five minutes, the bus was forty five minutes, so how do you

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: think about that? This conversation highlights the challenges with operationalizing a definition. And one of the things that we've heard from school superintendents and others in our listening session were the fact that the definition itself needed I mean, there needs to be guardrails, right? But that we needed to be careful about not making those guardrails so absolute that superintendents in particular wouldn't be tied into something where they had so little flexibility that they couldn't make something work. Mean, busing schedules are one of the bane of many superintendents' existence. This is really tough stuff to do, especially for some of our large districts in rural areas, trying to figure all of this out and make it work. It's also why we were very careful as a part of it in our committee deliberations not to come back at you with one criteria. So some states make it all about travel time. And what we said is, and we'll go through the other criteria here, is that there needs to be multiple things that come into play here. Because if you just make it about travel time, there are other kinds of considerations.

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Thanks. Other questions?

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: I think maybe this is already answered, but I just want to make sure I understand it. The travel time also includes the stop and start and stop and start picking up kids and how long

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: they might wait for them.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Well, I think my understanding of travel time, and this is how we discussed it, it would be the time from which a child became the responsibility of the school district, right, picking up to the time that they dropped off. Right? So, if a parent drops their child off at 07:30 and the bus doesn't pick them up till eight, that's not part of the travel time. Would be from and that's basically how superintendents in hunt districts operationalized bus time now, right? As they think about on it, they've got a set schedule. So Tammy gets picked up at 07:30. She would be dropped off at elementary school by 08:05. Yeah. Right? Based on all the And to your point, represent Conlon, I might be five miles away, there's loopity loop. Right.

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: I was just making sure it wasn't about actual physical miles versus how long it takes to do those physical miles because you start and stop and start and stop and start.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Well, and I think this is one of the things we need to consider, right? Like we can use both time, but we also can use drivable miles between schools. Right? And so it could be that you contemplate a definition that says the lesser of the two, for example. Right? Because one of the things we heard is, and this is again, because we in the state of Vermont, we don't require busing. We do have a situation where many parents have to transport a child. So we may say, we don't want child on a bus for forty five minutes, but do you also then want to impose on a parent a requirement of having to drive more than 15 miles to take their child to school? And so you'll notice that we wrestled with that a little bit and that's why we have both of those criteria in there. And I might respectfully suggest that a consideration could be to say the lesser of the two. Is that helpful?

[Eric Lafayette (Vice President, Energy Efficient Investments)]: Yes.

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: Okay.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Helpful in the sense of pointing out how hard it is to operationalize these definitions.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Yeah, and let's put it The committee gave a great deal of thought and discussion around these topics, and part of the reason we're providing a framework rather than an absolute definition is we really felt like this required more deliberation on the part of the legislature in defining statute. So what we're trying to do is provide you with sort of what we think are the key things that need to be considered in a definition. I think there are multiple ways that you potentially could go about creating a workable definition. I would encourage, as you always do, to work with our talented superintendents and folks in the field to think that through. Okay, so the second one would be safe transportation limitations. And this is, of course, related to travel time. But we also wanted to be explicit about this. The possible criteria would be a school qualifies if terrain, winter roads, unpaved routes, mountain gaps create unsafe or unreliable transportation that's certified by the supervisory union or AOE. We need to take that into account. Like App Gap, right? We don't want buses going up over the winter, right? And you think about it, or Lincoln Gap closes, right? You think about the Warren School and the Lincoln School, they're pretty close together except for the fact that Lincoln Gap is open in the winter. Just another criteria to take into account, and the rationale we suggested for including this is because this provides additional consideration for specific geography that can impact travel times and student safety. And in the back of our memo, you'll note that there's an attachment where we talk about the context, which states have used some of these criteria and the context with which they've applied them. And you'll see that this particular criteria pops up in states like Vermont that have some challenging geographies. We have rural areas in this country that don't have challenging geography. They have schools that are far apart, but not, for example, don't have challenging geography. Slide number nine, lack of feasible consolidation options. And under this, a school will qualify as small or sparse by necessity if nearby schools, both within and outside the existing district boundary, lack capacity to absorb students and still meet the state's educational quality standards, including class size minimums. Or, the cost of renovation or addition at a receiving school exceed projected savings from closure. Or three, tuitioning out the student raises per pupil costs, on average and creates inequities in program access, especially for students with disabilities who require special education services or other students whose learning needs cannot be met by non public schools. And so what this says is that if in fact we acknowledge that a school, by virtue of the fact that would not receive the additional payment, likely be unsustainable financially, we need to look at, well, what are the impacts of closing that school? Because if in fact it's the case that there's no nearby school for that child to attend, that's in a reasonable distance, right? Or that the cost of renovating or equipping another nearby school to accept those students because of capacity issues is exorbitant or maybe even impossible, right? Or if the other alternative is for the town to become a non operating town or not operating at rates, and this would create a tuitioning situation, the interest on the part of the state is not to, on average, raise per pupil expenditures from what they are right now. So what this does, this criteria addresses the feasibility of consolidating students into nearby schools. And these criteria are most commonly used in other states' necessary small school calculations. There are other kinds of feasible consolidation option considerations that states are used, but these were the most frequent. Slide number 10, community population trajectory. Under this criteria, a school would qualify if the census block or town catchment areas is projected to remain below an enrollment that would support a viable larger school even with consolidation. What do we mean by that? So we know that schools, for example, might bump below and above that 100 threshold year to year, and we want to be attentive to that. And we want to think about the fact that, for example, are we seeing a temporary blip in the school being small? And we have good evidence to suggest for a number of potential reasons that school may be larger or more sustainable in the long run. It would be shortsighted for the state to create a condition where that school closes in the near term. So for example, a community may be anticipating a new employer moving to town. That would bring in a certain number of jobs. It could be that for a number of reasons that there is a decline in enrollment for two or three years, but all of a sudden you've got a kindergarten class three or four years back that says you're going be well over 100 students four years from now, right? And that trajectory is sustainable over time. So what we're sort of inserting into the conversation here is sort of a longer term hot time horizon and thinking about whether or not this school should exist by necessity in this community in the short run, even though they're small, right? Because in the longer term, there's going to be higher demand for that school due to community context. Finally, a closure or consolidation, this is slide number 11. Closure or consolidation would have potential increases in cost. Under this as a possible criteria, a school qualifies if closure or consolidation recruits substantial measurable increases in the district's average per student expenditure, including but not limited to, tuition costs, transportation costs, capital costs at a receiving school, or new facility requirements. And again, the rationale here is that these conditions recognize the interest of taxpayers in patrolling education spending. So if you sort of stand back at the 10,000 foot level, what we tried to do is we tried to think broadly about what are those kinds of conditions and criteria that meet sort of the reasonable person test for what would be a small school by necessity. And thinking about, well, if we have this threshold at 100 students or less than 55 persons per square mile, how do we think about those hard and fast boundaries for whether a school is small or located sparsely part of the new area? How do we think about that in the context of implementing that in a realistic way in the context of our larger education system to both maintain educational quality and safety for kids. Any questions on the criteria? Then I want to talk about a couple of implementation considerations.

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: I'm thinking of tuition costs, I'm trying to picture all of this stuff in my head and apply it to actual real time. What if a school needed to close, but the only way to do There's no other school around that would have made sort of become non operating tuition students. I'm trying to think, because you're using this as a criteria, some independent schools, I believe, charge above the tuition rate for students. Would that be part of the extra cost? Think what

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: the committee I think there are two points to be made there. One, what the committee acknowledged is, right? If we're thinking about the let's go back to the by necessity clause is here because we're trying to make decisions about whether or not to provide an additional subsidy to a small school to stay open for small public school. And the state's interest is in maintaining that school under certain conditions. And those conditions are obviously educational quality. No school stays up unless you make quality standards. But also, is there really a feasible alternative? That's the driving distance and the safety provisions. But we also wanted to acknowledge in this conversation that cost plays a role here, right? Like there's this trade off. And so if in fact it's the case that you close this school and the alternative for where those children go, whether it's public or non public, so let me just I'm going state out care a little bit for her, are much higher, right? Substantially higher than what that additional subsidy would be to keep that school open, then it probably is in the state's financial interest to keep that small school open. Right? Okay. So that's the first point. And that applies whether or not it's a public or a non public school. Right? So that's why we have discussions in here about, well, if we had to invest millions of dollars in another nearby school in order to create the capacity for this, it might make more financial sense for the state to continue with the subsidy payment to this small school because it Right. Now on the tuitioning, one other alternative could be is, right, so if the school no longer received the subsidy and their decision was to close, right? And now we have a situation where we have a town that's non operating at entirely or at some grade levels. Well, those students now have to go to school somewhere. And there is an average allowable tuition in the state for public schools. And I think that's what you're talking about. In some instances, the tuition amount for a non public school is higher than that. And so what we're saying is that we need to take care once again that if the only available tuition option to a town is a non public school where the tuition payments to that non public school are going to be substantially higher than what it would cost to continue operating that school, we're back to the same point with the state, it's in the state's interest to maintain that school. Okay, is not a commentary on non public schools or the tuitioning or anything along those lines. What we're saying here is that this is about the cost benefit analysis in maintaining the state's interest in operating an efficient educational system. Course, all of that is predicated on, and we're very careful to say, predicated on the fact that the school continues to meet education quality standards. Now, this gets tricky because the education quality standards are not going to have minimum class sizes. And so you could run into a situation where a school cannot meet educational quality standards and the only option is to close that school under EQS, right? And those children have to move around to other schools. That could increase costs in other kinds of ways. But that school cannot operate and meet the existing EQS standards, particularly can't meet educational quality standards.

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: Just a quick follow-up. One question follow-up. But minimum class size standards are applying to both independent and

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: They would. They would. They would. That's something else. What I'm saying is that and back to the cost benefit analysis, the state could still end up situation where the cost of closing a school, right, or not, right? If the outcome of not providing the subsidy to keep the small school open is that that school has to close, right, because they can't meet the educational quality standards. I just want to be clear that there could be situations where that creates additional costs to the state. However, that's at the trade off of making sure that students go to schools to meet the educational quality standards, right? So I just want be clear, it's not always a neat and tidy cost benefit trade off. We also have to take account the educational standards.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm just going to repeat something that you said, is solely to determine whether a school gets an additional subsidy weight. We haven't decided if it's a weight or a grant, but basically I think it's a grant or not. The underlying foundation formula is irrelevant, that still would qualify for the district. That's correct.

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: And That's

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: that's part of the reason that in our criteria, we wanted to be very transparent about the cost benefit trade offs there. So by necessity is not Go back to our definition. Our original sort of definitional consideration was our starting point was to find a school as smaller sparse by necessity where the school can't reasonably increase enrollment or consolidate without creating undue hardship for students, right? Specifically in terms of travel time safety and lack of feasible alternatives. However, in doing that, that's not all about money. But money plays a role here.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And I will sort of say as a real world example. So in my district, we have a number of small elementary schools, very small. They're all under 100. So they are small by definition, but they probably would not qualify for by necessity. The district continues to have the option under the foundation formula to keep them open. The money still follows the student to the district and the district can operate how they choose. They just won't get the small school.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: As long as you meet the educational quality standards.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great. Representative Brady.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I think you made my point exactly, Peter. I just wanted to make sure we're clear because I think this discussion gets conflated with what small by necessity schools are allowed to stay open. This isn't about I mean, is obviously on some level about operations and school closures potentially, but it's about the subsidy grants, not can that is that school sort of allowed under our rules to exist.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: That's correct. And that's why we took into it. That's why cost is part of the factor in here, right? And we were very careful when we took testimony in our public listening sessions to make it clear that what we as a state board doing and considering had nothing to do whether small schools stay open or closed. We're trying to think about how we operationalize this by necessity, which is for the purposes of the grant. Right? And because we were operationalizing this for the purpose of the grant, that's where some of these cost benefit considerations come in, because we're talking about the state's interest. So we had two other implementation considerations. I'm on slide 12, but I'll move on to slide 13. Of course, we got to figure out how we actually determine whether schools meet these criteria, whatever the criteria are that you set. Our recommendation is that the Agency of Education be charged with responsibility for determining whether a school qualifies as small or smart by necessity because they have responsibility for making other kinds of determinations under EQS and things along those lines. And that would make sense. We also recommend that whatever the specific criteria are that you adopt, the documentation requirements, the timeline for review and data elements that AOE should use in that determination should be incorporated in the EQS so that all of these things around educational quality standards are in one place and consistent with one another.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So on that point, very good point, if a school is found to be in violation of EQS in any shape or form today, can they appeal that to the State Board of Education? What we're talking about here is something that's highly measurable versus something that isn't all that measurable that exists in EQS. And all I'm wondering about is, if the school says I don't feel like your measurements are correct, is there an appeal mechanism that currently exists today that we could mimic?

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Jennifer, help me out. I don't think there's a formal appeal mechanism for public schools, but I do there is for independent schools, correct?

[Jennifer Dex Samuelson (Chair, State Board of Education)]: Yeah, and I'm just reflecting 16 VSA 165, I think has five criteria where it aid it goes first to the agency and the secretary can recommend closure to the state board if a school doesn't meet any of those five stated criteria. And I'll I'll find it and I can drop it in the chat just so that you guys have it. But, that's that's kind of the complaint process that currently exists in statute. And I will say we did update EQS, you know, the the most recent version that's now in effect. We do require districts to keep track of complaints by, you know, anyone, you know, parents, students, whatever. And, so we do have that requirement, but there's

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: not We don't have an appeal process. Exactly. Right. So if the agency of education, and this is aside from what we're talking about here, but if the agency of education under EQS says this school is not meeting EQS for whatever criteria. Right now, there's not an appeal process in statute or rule for a public school to appeal that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: This is a funding issue, sort of a highly measurable funding determination issue. So it's just something for us to think about, perhaps something for you all to think about as well. Jennifer, I don't think the chat's enabled, but if you'd like to email that to our committee assistant, that'd be great.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Sure. And then, so to your point, yes, this idea of determining which schools meet is an important consideration. Our suggestion is that the agency do that as a part of its routine. Wouldn't make a lot of sense to have another organization making those determinations independent of all the other things that are going on in schools. But we do feel strongly that this needs to be clear and rural, and the rural where it needs to be is it needs to be part of the education quality standards, because that's the canon, right, to which public schools look to figure out what they're supposed to do. Slide 14, timing. This also came up. So we've got this challenge here where the by necessity definition will tripwire whether or not a school receives additional funding. Well, has implications for budgets and staffing and sort of the cascade of things that come from there. And there are a lot of other things, moving pieces right now in our statute. And so this came up as a consideration and we did talk to the agency about this. We're going to need to figure out it should be determined annually because the funding is annual. So, that was one recommendation. So we need to determine whether or not they meet these criteria on an annual basis because that's how the funding works. For sort of coherence, we want to keep these two things lined up. But then we have a question around the timeline, right? And so the timeline is going to need right, when we do this, we're going to have to think carefully about making sure that timeline for making that determine aligns with the district budgeting process, right? Districts should have a clear determination of eligibility in advance of developing and adopting budgets. And we superintendents heard that and others. However this is operationalized, timing really matters, right? But what that means is that we're gonna have to think about what data are available when, and this is part of what would need to get specked out. Gotta think about what data are available when to make this determination. We're talking about funding for the next year based on current or retrospective data, Right? And so this is something like, because if you think about it for the twenty sixth, in theory, if this was operational right now, we would be making determinations whether or not a school was eligible for the twenty sixth, twenty seventh school year. The conditions on the ground for the twenty six-twenty seven school year could be different than they are right now. These are some of the things, and that's part of the reason I think our suggestion was if the legislature creates a robust definition, some of these kind of operational details could be handled in rule and in a way that's consistent with other kinds of reporting and documentation that are already in the EUS, trying to keep the burden on districts and our data systems and making data reporting and how we use data coherent across multiple types of things that districts are being asked to do. Those are my slides. Again, there's a memo that I shared with you. That memo provides the detail, but it also has a couple exhibits that summarize some things that we saw in some other states and some other kinds of summary around it. It also includes footnotes for the research that we consulted around school bus times and student outcomes. It's not a robust research base, but there are some things out there, and we certainly consider that as well.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: As I think about your point concerning needing to have the information available to school districts for their budgeting purposes early, and then think about how we do long term weighted ADM, which is, correct me if I'm wrong, kind of a rolling three year average, so that you might have an abrupt change one year in your numbers of kids in your school, but it actually the impact of that positive or negative kind of rolls in a little bit later. So you are often retroactive anyway. You could perhaps apply the same idea with this.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Well, so sparsity won't change as often, right? But enrollment may. And my understanding is that the enrollment threshold is already pegged to long term weighted membership.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, I was thinking actually just determination.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Yeah. So then the reason I mentioned that is if you think about the criteria we put out here, these are criteria where things don't shift really quickly on the ground. And that was also a consideration. There are only so many moving pieces on the chessboard that we can all If you want to have a fair and efficient funding system, we got to make not everything moving at once, right? And so the membership might be moving, but things like average busing times, drive times, train cost of building another facility, those things should be relatively stable year to year. Those things we shouldn't see big swings, and they also should be relatively predictable. Good policies is predictable and transparent. And so the idea here is that proposing this framework is the membership might be moving. Whether or not you qualify as small, in particular might be moving year to year. However, these kinds of criteria are actually relatively steep, right? And so you wouldn't expect big changes for a school from year to year on these kinds of criteria, unless you had some sort of population influx or what are those sort of community characteristics?

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: And just very quickly, that's one of the reasons why I was focusing on the cost, because for me, those four criteria in there are a little less stable potentially, in my mind. Transportation, we all know how transportation skyrocket.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: That's right. That's the only one that I

[Robert Hunter (Member)]: was told. I actually considered those four things in the way that you put them in here, so I appreciate that.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Great. Thanks. We hope that it's a rational starting. That was our goal, right? We did step back of providing We didn't provide you a definition on purpose because we really felt like that was the purview of the legislature, but we wanted to give you a good framework to start to think about what this might look like. And of course, we're willing to support you in a way we can with the state board. And again, if you do go forward with whatever definition and you want to put something in the EUCUS, we will work with you to craft language that's what you can put.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm not seeing any other burning questions, but we do have some reading material with the memo as well.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: We're happy to come back too. There's quite a bit of material up on our website from our testimony and the evidence that we considered. If it's helpful for us to come back and talk to you about specifics, we're happy to do that too.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And we are very good in the legislature at assigning difficult tasks to support education and we appreciate you.

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: Hopefully we'll take up to expectations.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you both very much. Alright, Diviti, I think that wraps it up for us for the week.

[Matt (Committee Assistant/Staff)]: Gosh, you know

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: how to

[Tammy Colby (Vice Chair, State Board of Education)]: that was your last one.