Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: The door with the lights. You actually broke up. Hello, everybody. This is House Education, 01/20/2026. And this afternoon, we are diving a little bit deeper and a little more specifically into the redistricting task force report, most specifically toward appendix E and some of the proposals on what we have traditionally called BOCES but are also called Cooperative Education Service Areas. We are fortunate to have Representative Holcomb with us who helped put it all together and was on the district task force. And without further ado, turn it over to you. Thanks for I will say she came in late notice. Very happy that she was able to make time for us.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: My name is Jay Adams. I did talk to Jay, and Jay was camping all weekend, bed phone, skiing, having an amazing time. And he said, sorry, buddy. So I'm sorry. I am the sloppy replacement, and I will try to do my best here. Thank you to the rep from Newfane who added the mood lighting. Hopefully, that will help everything out. Thank you. So first of I want to really thank you for all the work you're doing. I know this is an incredibly challenging moment. Someone asked me the other day how many schools I've been to, and I thought all the way back to my first experience. It was actually in Head Start in The Bronx, and I can still remember Mrs. Dobinsky. And I still remember her as my introduction to school. What hit me about her is how deeply my memory is of my relationships with her and how much she meant to me. And I wanted to just start with that because it's a way to remind us that we are doing incredibly important work. You are doing incredibly important work for the schools and the communities of the state. But first and foremost, we are making decisions that affect other people's children. And that's the ultimate public trust. So I am just deeply grateful to the care. I know how hard this is, and I'm really appreciative to you for the fact that you're approaching this with a caution that other people's children deserve. They are public trust. So thank you for that. Some of these slides, fortunately, I can pull right out of the task force presentation. So I could come in and give you some things to work with. This was part of a broader proposal that looked at cooperative education services. That's what I'm going to speak about today. It was also paired with voluntary strategic mergers, which were incentivized and a move towards comprehensive high schools. I am not talking about those latter to today, and we're

[Unidentified Committee Member]: trying to figure out Here we go.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: So today's focus is what are shared services? Why shared services? And what are some design considerations? I'm going to take this very high level because my understanding is that you're getting some granular testimony coming in later in the week, including from people who worked in shared service models. So I will try to keep it high level and tell you how the task force got to this and let you evaluate what they can do, what they can't do, because they're not going to solve all of our issues and problems. And we need to be very clear about that upfront and let you think about where they might make sense or not make sense. I put that's a live link. You should be able to do it. I also encourage you to look at just pages one through 54. That's what we'll be talking about today. But also Appendices A and F, which talk about what shared service models can do, but also how they connect not just to some of the affordability concerns, which we know are profound, but also to this challenge of improving student learning and student quality. So there is some work in there as well. And please interrupt at any time. I put this together pretty quickly, so if it's not clear, that's on me, not you, just feel free to shout out.

[Speaker 0]: I'm sitting here taking notes, so just drop in if you want Absolutely.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: I want to just say, oops, shall I let Kate in?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I do.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Okay. I want to say we share the governor's goals. He's right. These are real issues for us in Vermont. We have to figure out how to keep supporting strong economic development. And to do that, we need high quality schools. We need a strong, healthy functioning system with CTE that helps meet students where they are and connect them to high wage, high growth job sectors. Is part of why people move. And when we were taking testimony from the public, people talked about what made their communities a compelling place to live and work was their schools. We heard that over and over again. But we can't adopt this challenge round of making Vermont more affordable. We're all hearing it. People are really struggling to we're now the state we're actually the place in the world with the highest health care cost per person in the entire world. And that's affecting every budget. We know that people are struggling to pay for their rent or afford a house. We have to be looking in every sector to make sure that we're getting the most we can for $1 so that the kinds of people we know we need to build that bright future for a state can actually afford to call them up home. And I believe very strongly that we are better together and the whole state prospers when we bring up the floor, when we make sure every single child, no matter who they are, has a fair chance to succeed. And that means has access to a good school, has access to all the opportunities that this body and your committee have defined as really important. And I need to also say that what we saw over and over at the task force is that in Vermont, schools play a very unique role in terms of serving as a safety net for many of our kids, particularly in our rural and in our higher poverty communities. On average, when we looked at was a data collection that's called the F-thirty three. It's the reported data on what we spend by function. What we saw, which has jumped out at us, was Vermont spends about 2,000 more dollars per kid on what's called student support. So those are kind of social services in the Ed Fund. So there is a role that we seem to be playing that is a little bit different that goes beyond the academic role of schools. And that is around protecting some of the most vulnerable vernacular. So these were goals that I think we were all grappling with as we started to try to make sense of this work. Why this proposal exists, the shared services and I should thank you, Chair Conlon, for pointing out that we call these BOCES, and you did pass a BOCES bill. Actually, that enabling bill created our first real BOCES in the state of Vermont. And that BOCES is something that helped inform our work in thinking about what they can do and they can't do. The reason we changed it to collaborative shared service areas is that we heard feedback that many people in Vermont associate BOCES just with special ed. And I thought by talking about collaborative education services, we could help to elevate the other opportunities to get more value per dollar for every kid and for every community. So there was very strong feedback about wanting to blow our brains a little bit, make us think a little bit bigger and thinking that we've been just thinking too narrowly about where the opportunities are to strengthen our kids and strengthen our communities. But this proposal exists because we went in saying we got to figure out a way to do better for our kids because we all know that they need more than we're currently giving them. But also do it within our wallet, which is really feeling the pressure right now and do it in a way that is accessible to everybody. There's huge implementation challenges around the state where some districts just are not able to pull in the kind of talent or they're even pulling an inconsistent talent. One of the examples that came up is if, for example, BDA, if you pull from multiple different districts and there's very inconsistent access to specialized services, particularly around assessment of students and developing IEPs, you could have four or five students sitting in your English classroom with the same disability but five different service plans, which makes the classroom teacher's job much, much harder. And so people were saying, there's real opportunity here to make it better for everybody. But we're going to have to think differently about how we make sure every single kid in every community has access to that kind of specialist expertise. We also believe very strongly that governance changes alone are not going to fix some of our instructional and our cost issues. The first thing we did was say, Okay, what's driving costs? What are the fastest growing items in school budgets and the Ed Fund across the state? And frankly, mergers don't address many of those things, which doesn't that's a conversation you're going to have. You're going be weighing those merits and figuring out what makes sense there. But the sense was we have to do something now that helps people start to get access to some better services, but also does it in a way that we can share in ways that bring down cost and get more targeted. And CESAs or proposes infrastructure. It's not a governance change in that you're not giving up your local board to join a collaborative education service. What you are doing is giving up some services. Here's another example. If you look at the special education report that was just issued by the education agency, Vermont has an extraordinarily large number of students who are placed in what are called substantially separate settings. It's interesting that that hasn't been audited because if you're taking kids out of their communities and sitting them into a separate place, they don't have access to the same peer environments and opportunities that other people do. And no one can tell me that Vermont has seven times as many kids and need a substantially separate placement as this other state. That's a practice problem. And so seesaws are a way to say, hey, there's something going on here in the way we deliver that if we just stay fragmented like this, we're not doing well for kids because that is not actually good for kids. But it's also not good for taxpayers because frankly, that way addressing education is three times more expensive than having one of these in house programs that a CISA could put together. And so it's a way to say there are things that we can and we should be doing better. But this is a way to stand them up immediately as soon as we form the CISA and keep moving. So the question that you have isn't this or this. Nothing you were looking at, as you know, I don't need to tell you this, is that we say a silver band aid because we don't like the other metaphor. But nothing here is a silver band aid that's going to solve all your problems. But what you have to weigh is, of all the things that are on the table before you, how do we improve quality, equity, and cost control? But also, how do we do it without totally destabilizing our schools? Because remember, these are other people's kids, and they got one shot at school. And if we aren't figuring out how to make the change while carrying them through, because this is their one chance, we're not doing them what they need either. So that's your challenge. My hat is off to you. You guys got a hard job. Thank you for doing that hard work for the rest of us.

[Speaker 0]: Any questions so far? Keep going. And this is not the topic on hand, but you made the comment that Vermont sort of excludes kids at a rate of seven times-

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: I think I checked the numbers, it's in the education, it's a small percentage of kids, but it's a much higher proportion of kids.

[Speaker 0]: I always find that in conflict with, we're also of touted for our inclusionary policies, but I think what you're talking about is a pretty specialized I

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: would love to have a whole other conversation about that because certainly back prior to Act 173, which I think was a fantastic piece of legislation, the feedback we got is we are inclusive in that our kids are in the same room, but that our performance and patterns mirror those of highly exclusionary states. Because what we tend to do is hire a lot of staff who have less skill, and they're the ones teaching the kids with significant disabilities, whereas the teachers are spending their time on the other kids. That's exclusion within the same room. And it's also not good practice. And one of the intents of that incredible bill that you did was to maybe adjust the criteria for identifying kids with disabilities. But one of the primary goals was to improve primary first instruction. It was to help every single teacher have exposure to the kinds of stuff you're still trying to push in through the Science of Reading bill. I mean, frankly, that was supposed to be done in 2018. And if you think about the district management group and the focus on struggling learners and what were the interventions, that whole practice, that instructional shift side of that bill, 173, was never implemented. And so now we're actually dealing with the consequences of that. And I'll talk about that in a bit. But

[Representative Emily Long]: I do want to say one thing related to that, since you're right. Acts 173, we were in the together when we wrote that bill. Another goal of Act 173 was to reduce the number of outside places. Yes, it was. Because we talk many times about how our students, all our students are better served in their home community. And that's something that hasn't really shown up either.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Right. And I actually think there's I mean, this is another issue, and I'm not even sure what committee jurisdiction it falls in. But if you look at the way we reimburse districts currently for students who are placed out of district in that extraordinary expenditure. Districts actually benefit financially by placing kids out as opposed to creating a program in house. So we have designed a an approach or a policy that actually rewards behavior that's bad for kids and more costly at the district and at state level. The seesaws, if we did move forward with them, would actually address the flaw in how that's written right now because they would be a third party provider of those specialized settings. So it would remove that incentive for districts just to bounce kids out to get more reimbursement. Does that make sense? And it'd be otherwise we'd have to change the funding structure because the way we do it now is actually driving higher costs. This is actually a really important issue because as you know better than any committee, because of the maintenance of the effort requirements, we loosened the criteria for identifying kids. We was just testifying and raising means. And I guess they said we're now identifying something like 20% of our kids as eligible for an IEP. The national average is about 15. So we are identifying more kids as needing an IEP than the states on average. Some of our districts, I couldn't believe it, and I've asked for the follow-up data to verify. The person presenting said districts identifying as many as 50% of kids. I never heard that. I've heard 35. You cannot tell me that there is a district in the state of Vermont where fifty percent of the kids have a learning disability. It just seems improbable that needs to be identified that way. This is failure of practice. There were instructional shifts, primary first instruction that we have to address. Thank you for your work on the science of reading, Bill. That's a very positive first step. Now we need to get it implemented because we have to make sure our teaching force, which is working really, really hard, has access to the best expertise possible on how to reach those struggling learners and help them do better. And at the most, I've got here, build once, use it many times. That's what a C size. You can develop that professional development once and then make sure everybody in your region gets the same professional development. But I would also use another business metaphor. Build it right at the beginning, and then you're not servicing the warranty all the way through. If we don't address early literacy, we're trying to figure out how to support students who just don't have the fundamentals all the way through. So let's invest in that early intervention. That was supposed to be the purpose of 2018. Again, that was a great film. So let's keep going on. I think I addressed that last. I wanted to clarify a couple of things that collaborative education service agencies are not, because it is a tool. There is no tool that does everything. So I don't want anyone to come away thinking that. But there are also some things they're not. It is not a new layer of governance because it's not a governance structure. It's infrastructure that you have somebody you pass off a duty that you can't do. Another issue that came up in the transportation report that you're going to read, some of the superintendents were saying, hey, we've got four bus providers. They're all private equity companies. We're really trying to figure out how to get busing for our kids. And every single district now is negotiating with the same company, but no one has leverage because they're all too small to have leverage against a big national company. This is an area where, again, regional negotiation or regional provision starts to make sense, where you could think of having a little bit more power at that bargaining table. But if you're doing it regionally, you are not doing it locally. So you don't get to do science based reading locally and do science based reading at the CISA. You're saying there's a finite number of people with a highly specialized expertise to do this in the state. So let's make that skilled resource work for the region and not just for this tiny little community that could afford to hire that one person. So you're sharing that skill and expertise. But you're saying, know, Beth Brown, you're the expert on literacy. You're going to develop this for a region, maybe somebody's going to do something else. But we're sharing these resources, but we're not duplicating. So the districts retain some things. They retain some responsibility. This is a little bit different. This could work in tandem with other policy. It could work not in tandem if you decide not to do other policy. This is independent of that. And I would argue that shared services make sense for some things anyway, regardless of what else you decide to do, just because there are some things where scale makes sense and not having scale just becomes a cost. And people need to understand this is also not new. In fact, there were more robust ESAs at previous I'm afraid I've got some gray hair and I've been around a little while so I can remember some of these. There have been very powerful experiments around shared services and special ed in some parts of the state, But there's nothing comprehensive. And Vermont is one of the few states that doesn't do this in a robust way. And so far, BOCES are voluntary and there hasn't been any support for real initial implementation. And among rural states, we're an outsider. We're an outlier in that. These are the states. This is federal data that shows the population that is rural in the 2023 data. And Vermont was the most rural state. We don't think of that because we've got all these little villages. But the reality is our density makes us the most 66% of Vermonters live in areas that the federal government considers rural. And of all the states that are in that most rural category, we're the only one that doesn't use shared services. And that's something to think about because what you have when you don't have population density is you don't necessarily and I remember working in a small district and looking south at bigger districts and saying, darn, I wish we could afford that support. But we never could because we weren't big enough. I mean, even if we hired it, we could only hire 0.1 of it. And then the other district would just lock it up because then they had access to it when they wanted. So this is a way to make sure that we aren't tying up that scarce resource in one area. And other rural states do this all over the place. Why? I think I've talked about a bunch of these. I won't belabor every single one of them. It's highly specialized staff. I remember being a school principal and having a child who was an English language learner who had a very, very unusual and rare traumatic brain injury. I had to go to Massachusetts to get a special engineer who spoke the language and was qualified to help us develop that IEP plan because I couldn't find anyone on the Eastern side of the state to do that work. If you had shared services, you could have that capacity in state, but you'd also have the capacity even to share across seesaws if you needed to. What you're thinking about is a way to say there are unusual needs that really need specialized expertise. There's not a lot of it in the state. There's not enough to have it in every district. But if we can figure out these collaborative structures, there is a way to share it, either within a seesaw or even across a seesaw. And this was something that when we spoke to seesaws in other states, this is the kind of thing that they talking about as an unusual benefit. We've mentioned PD, IDA compliance capacity. We've had real troubles around this. You probably read in Digger that some extraordinary number of districts have been experiencing findings related to compliance and IDE. That suggests that there's weakened capacity with the AELE also to do technical assistance and monitoring. Usually, if it's that pervasive, it's systemic. You need to think about how you're providing support. We talked about purchasing leverage. I wanted to just talk about breadth of opportunity because we heard over and over again the importance of CTE as really a very high level applied math. One of the things I've always been proud of in Vermont, we weren't college or career. We were college and career. Going to CT isn't where you go if you can't do things. Going to CT is when you have a vision, a professional mission, and you want to go into the workforce and you've got a sense of where you want to go. Those kids are the lucky ones, but they have to have the same skills. And some of the best math in the state, it's taught in CT. Some of best math I saw was in an automotive class. Because you think about a car turning, the outside wheel has to turn faster to go farther than the inside wheel. Wow, what a great geometry problem. And to watch that teacher take it apart with a kid who wanted to have his hands dirty and coated in oil was amazing. And you cannot tell me that was not how that A seesaw could make sure that the CTs have access to the same high level math and language literacy instruction that all kids need everywhere no matter where they're learning. But it also makes it possible to leverage the engagement and the excitement of the CTE setting and push it into places that, frankly, are just too far away. And one of the districts we singled out was actually your district, because it's pretty far. And if a kid has to ride a bus forty five minutes to an hour to get to school, sometimes they don't want to jump on a bus again for another half hour and then on that half hour back because then they're on the bus for two and a three hours a day. They don't want to do that. But what we've seen in other states is some of that there are pathways now. Because when I first went into education, I remember walking into a CTE program, and they had the machine tools. And they bigger than this room. And that's why you had to have those standalone tech centers because tech was intense. But when you think about advanced manufacturing or robotics and mechatronics, when you think about some of the stuff, redesign some of that stuff, health pathways, There's some flexibility here where there are certain pathways you probably could push to sites and you could keep the modular units at the seesaw and then make it available for instruction at the local site. If you think about that, think about how at a very low price point through sharing of staff, sharing of materials, you could really expand pretty dramatically the access that kids have. And if you're living in the middle of the mountain somewhere and forty five minutes from everywhere, you still still need need EMTs in that community. And so there's a way to try to be responsive to local needs by making these opportunities available. So I did want to call that out. And then to jump down to the full business stack and the data and the information stack management, if you've ever tried to buy your own tech recently, it's kind of bewildering and almost overwhelming. If you think about trying to figure out how to get the best system that talks to each other, one of the biggest challenges we had when we were first enrolling in internet and you know, computers is that they aren't all the same kind. Sometimes they don't talk to each other and, know, you're just spending endless amounts of dollars on fixing technology. What if what if you had somebody who's doing that? Of the power you could have in negotiating deals. Think of the expertise that they could have in terms of figuring out what systems are needed. And think about rolling out an e finance system or student information system statewide. The agency would have to work deeply with five seesaws, not lightly or shallowly. And I'm gonna get this again later because it can't be set enough with 52 districts because you're just sort of making it easier to do that work. And as somebody said to me, actually, was in your district, I don't say who, they said, people really don't care where their paycheck comes from. They just care that it comes on time. And that's, again, central business office functions. You could just roll them up at higher level at the seesaw level. And just as long as it comes on time, you've saved money and you've lifted that chaos and burden off somebody at the local level. So I did want to point this out because this is a slide I jumped ahead before explaining this because one of the challenges is implementation. And we heard a lot of testimonies I did from people in systems that talked about one of the challenges is when they're trying to just run their systems and there's a lot of change at the same time, they have to really do two jobs. They have to figure out how to implement and how to also do the regular work. And when there isn't good support for implementation, sometimes things don't work out. And when they don't work out, it can actually be quite costly. And so I wanted to highlight the implementation of Act 173 because it's a place where if there was a steady hand to support continuous focus on improvement of teaching and on the educational goals of that bill, we might have seen a very different scenario. And this is just looking at some of the data. And if you look at this, we took data provided by the agency. I want to give a big shout out to the data team at the agency who did provide us a lot of data in a very short period of time. So kudos to them. They worked hard. But this is the staffing data between fiscal year 'twenty and 'twenty five. And if you look at it in this period, student enrollment dropped about 7%, and the teachers dropped as well. And classroom teachers, in particular, dropped eight percent. What that tells me is as students decline, as the number of students declines, schools do seem to be rightsizing I hate that word but they're rightsizing their teacher force. So then you have to ask, Okay, if that's happening, why are we solving these ratios? And what we saw was a 22%, almost 23% increase in pre K teachers because what we're seeing is increased enrollments of pre kindergarten, and they need pull that back in. And also, special educators increased by 5.3%. So special educators, that's formula driven. You have more you're going to have more special educators. So we have identified more students. Our number of students identified, the proportion has grown. We're going be hiring proportionally more special educators. But here's where you really see it. You see administrators are going up 12%. And you're seeing actually, CTE is up. It's a small number, but we've increased investment in CTE administration. But look at support staff. We actually added, in this period, eight fourteen support staff. And it's broken out down below, particularly around behavior specialists, but a total increase in 22% of staff. That is exactly what Act 173 was trying to target. It was trying to reduce reliance on just adding support staff and increase focus on primary first instruction, improve quality, improve the quality of specialized consultants so that you could do better service in house. So when you think about this, this does increase cost. Maintenance of effort, that's our cost structure for the next ten, twelve years until these kids move through the system or until we change it. And I say that because when we design policy, this is a great cautionary tale of how you have to be equally attentive to implementation. Because if you don't, you actually could make your problems worse and then be stuck with them for many years. Just providing a very quick explanation what you mean by maintenance of effort. Oh, sorry. There is a protection in and of course, who knows where this will all go. But there is a protection, the idea in the federal rules around students with disabilities that prevents states that receive funding and districts that receive special education funding from cutting back on services, if they're continuing to be part of that. The assumption is that if a student has a disability and needs a service, they need the service. So when they see big reductions, those are treated with extreme hostility. So basically, if you want to get past an overspending, districts tend to grow out of it over time. You change your systems. You have to keep your spending level pretty much the same. That's an overly simplistic explanation. Somebody's hair is curling.

[Speaker 0]: It's a basic idea. Answer to the challenge here is what do you do in a place where you're finding enrollment and theoretically should be spending less on special education. Federal government says they can't reduce. I mean, you can get labors and all that, but it's interesting. And

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: because we are identifying more kids, we actually aren't reducing them. We're actually increasing the number of students with disabilities, even as our numbers decline. That should be a warning sign to us that something isn't working. And that's systems level issue. So, the core proposition, again, are super simplistic, but the core proposition is that CISAs let you as a region buy wholesale instead of buying retail off the shelf, whatever's available, and some people can buy better than others because of scale or because of resources. The advantage is that you get immediate benefits. The day that CISA is set up, you can begin sharing services. And that's something if you have the Southeast BOCES coming and speak to you, you should ask them about that. And one example, one of the task force members as a business manager who thought he was retiring, He got picked up by that Southeast BOCES because one of the districts in the region lost their business manager in the middle. And so he was hired to fill in as a business manager in budget season until they were able to hire a permanent business manager. So and the superintendent said, I don't know what I would have done. And it an unexpected departure. And that happens. And these systems have to keep going. They have to keep providing services. They have to keep paying their bills. And so to be able to just draw on that research, pop it in for a month, but no district can carry an extra business manager. So she didn't have to think it was there the next day. That's the kind of responsiveness that you can get out of a regional shared service. So it's fast impact. And in some sense, it lowers the transition risk. Because you haven't made this governance commitment, it's an easier transition. And you can manage it better. And it also does allow for this more consistent access to services across region. Another big buying wholesale thing, keep thinking of your region, Representative Harple, your high school happens to sit on four different counties, which means you have four different service plans from four different designated agencies. They're all great. They all have different plans. You could have four kids sitting in your classroom who become because they come from different regions, have four different service plans. Same thing I talked to you about. That's very challenging for a district to manage. That's just cost and chaos. And BOCES, because it's the region, it could actually standardize contracts with DAs across the region as well so that you've got more consistent expectations of management. So that's the way you can sort of smooth some of that chaos in the transition. And therefore, when you focus on those high cost, low frequency functions, they're not good for everything. And they're not good for classroom teaching, but they are good for some things. And so the value and implementation is being really strategic about where those opportunities are. And you may consider as a committee, if this is something you decide you want to explore, identifying some of those high cost, low frequency services that you want to be in the initial areas of movement in that stack. So that's something that you might consider having someone from Pennsylvania come in and talk. I believe that there's someone I spoke to who is working to set up some ESAs in Nevada right now. They might talk to you about what you want to do is start with the big wins. You want to get a win early. So you want to do something you know everybody needs and you want to do it well, because that builds the trust and momentum to keep doing the implementation. And there's lots of experience around that. This is in the report. I'm not gonna We've already talked about a lot of these. I did want to call out the grants management piece. I would not underestimate the challenge, particularly if you begin to consider mergers. And there's something like a five page list, a single spaced 11 print of things that have to happen in a district transition. They're all just administrative bureaucratic tasks. It includes you have to redo all your federal grants under your new district ID, and you have to transition. Also, federal landscape is changing quite potentially significantly. Again, having this regional capacity helps you be more responsive and think more flexibly as some of those changes come down the pipe. So there's some real opportunities to build in resilience, not just to transitions here, but also to transitions at the federal level as well. You can't just roll it out and not have oversight. I think that's true. I mean, if you do something you do badly, it won't be very good for people. But most BOCES or CSAS do have some kind of accountability mechanism in place to try to protect the interests of taxpayers as well as students. And I would encourage you to go to the task force report. We identify some of them. You should also ask this question to the people who come in and testify. Some of the ways that CISA has tried to protect tax payers is that the services are priced at cost. But if it comes in under cost, there is a clause that allows for recapture. It has to get paid back to the district. So the CSEC can't bank funds by overcharging. And this is verified through independent audits. You also can have minimum multi district participation rules. You can't have one district just try to offload its cost to the CISA when everybody else is they're doing something that nobody else wants to do. So there are rules that prevent some players from over dominating others. They do replace the fragmented services. They do not stack. So it's not again, you can't and this is where the AOE would have a very powerful role. If you're doing professional development at the CSA level, you are not doing it at your local district level. You might be supervising quality of implementation and teaching. But in terms of the professional development support, that is going be coming from someplace else. It also allows for flexibility because our districts are different. And if you think, for example, of our English language learners, they tend to be concentrated in certain towns. Supporting English language learners in those communities is very different from supporting them in sometimes more rural area where they might be the only English language learner at the school. You need a different skill set and you need a different strategy for supporting those learners in that context. So C section has flexibility. Can you talk a

[Representative Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: little bit more about that last point related to professional development and sort of what could or should happen at the district level versus the CISA level? Because then I saw you say earlier, like instructional leadership should be at the district level. Yeah. Is there going, I wonder if there will be a challenge, admittedly I'm sitting in, a big district that might have more robust professional development. For some places, maybe the services are not fragmented. Maybe they are. How do we find the connection between where the professional development happens and where the instructional leadership happens and do it well, but without duplicating? So it's

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: actually pretty amazing, the timing, when you think about it, that you put that OC bill forward. And I would encourage you, and it's linked in the task force report, we have a sample set of articles of agreement, which spells out both the governance, like who is in charge of the CISA and how the representation from member districts works, but also how decisions about what services are provided are done. So there are model articles of agreement. If you had not passed that bill, we would not have been able to look and see that experience and get a sense of that. So some of these services are decided. These are agreements or collaborative agreements between members about what's provided. And if you think there's a finite number of people in Vermont who could do a really, really good workshop on early literacy. And what this is saying is that should be a shared resource and it's going to be housed at the CT level. In terms of follow-up. Is it actually being implemented? You still have to have the role of the building administrator to make sure it's actually happening. When I started one hundred years ago in education, Vermont, we had a really robust agency. We had graduate level courses in total literacy and math instruction in our small school. And that was supported by the state. We just don't have that anymore. So this is a way for districts to say, Okay, this is something we have to do. It's in statute and it's incredibly important to kids. So we're going to pool our resources and do it together. We're going to pool our resources so we can get top shelf. And then we're going to make sure everyone has the same experience. A lot of you've worked in schools, you know the power of consistency, right? I mean, you do it consistently. It's amazing. It really does make a difference. So you do really want people to have exposure to the same consistency. You don't want your early literacy instruction to be dependent on someone going to this workshop and someone going to this workshop. It's not coherent. Does that answer your question? Yeah. So I want to highlight the speed and risk comparison, and not just because severe we needs now. We are feeling severe financial pressure as a state right now, and we're really worried about our kids. But also, we're dealing with a pretty volatile state federal context as well. There's a lot of talk of block granting. And that could significantly change how funds are distributed, and it could change significantly the capacity of the agency. So having something like this in place provides an extra layer protection in a transition as well, because it means that as soon as we don't have to wait three to five years. If you think about it, some of you were in districts that went through mergers. It's really three to five years before you can make it sing. And most of those mergers have local input, and many of them are voluntary. That's not what we're talking about right now. So there is going to be some transition period here before people can focus on improving learning and bring down costs. They're going to be focused on they're not going be focused on learning because they won't be able to. This sidesteps that and it puts some capacity to support educators and support our academic and learning goals, even as this other stuff is happening. Another advantage of seesaw is that there's no contract equalization. And I appreciate a bill that never went anywhere, but the chair Conlon, have a bill around teacher health care negotiations. But when we leveled health care up to the state level, we had to level up contracts. We actually significantly increased spending because some districts historically, teachers wanted health care more than they wanted salaries. So they had high health care. Other districts, people really wanted salary. So they had worse health care. But we leveled everybody up. So now we have some school districts that have high salaries and high health care and others that still have their salaries, but they all have that same high health care. You tend to level up. And one of the things that was pretty shocking to realize, and even in some of the proposed new districts, there's sometimes a $20,000 gap by the time they're five or seven years in in terms of what compensation is. So there will be a leveling up of contracts. It's going to be an economic shock. That doesn't happen with the shared services, and it also gives you a chance to try to push in against some of that. There's also no construction dependency. And I do encourage you to look at Section three. We tried to identify areas that have really lost a lot of kids, and they probably do need to merge. And they're not always the places people think. It's often not the small rural schools. We have bigger schools in this capital region that have lost the equivalent of five small schools in population. But they actually, without construction aid, they may not be able to do the consolidation. If they have construction aid, they can lower costs every year moving forward. So there's this hurdle that's going to keep us from getting any benefits out of mergers for a bit until we can figure out how support some construction. That is not an issue with the seesaws until you get there. And I think I've spoken all this, but I would just again encourage you to go to the report. And I just wanted to bring this up because I think this is part of what we're trying to deal with. And again, I mentioned one hundred years ago when I was working in schools, the agency had much, much higher levels of staffing. They did incredible development for teachers statewide. And then post the Great Recession, there were significant reductions in teaching force. And by time the I'm more familiar with the agency, the agency was meeting its state accountability, the stuff that's in state statute around accountability and improving learning by berating it with federal funds. In other words, if we lose federal funds, districts and the agency will not be able to meet state responsibilities and requirements related to accountability because it's paid for much of it by the federal government at this point. And some of the funding streams, because we were on small state minimums, whatever we were getting twenty years ago, it hadn't grown. So it used to support eight staff. By the time you're getting into the 2012, 'fourteen, might support three staff. So your dollar sums haven't grown and you still have all the same responsibilities. You just have fewer bodies to do it. And I say this to say our agency has finite capacity. I mean, it really does. And I know at various points, it has worked very hard to throw overboard the want tos so we could focus on the have tos. But it doesn't have the capacity. And that's been evident. I mean, it was very, very difficult to get data out of the agency. That is not a comment on the people at the agency who are all amazing people working hard on behalf of the state of Vermont. Just they're running on fumes, it looks like sometimes. And so that's a concern going in. But if you think about, again, some of the changes that are being discussed at the federal level, let's say they block grant. Let's say they block grant all the title monies, the consolidated federal money. That means they're going send it perhaps straight to districts. And it would be no strings attached. That's what they're talking about. That means no need to monitor the use of those federal monies. That means they're not going to pay for agency positions to do that. So one of the things that we were trying to get at the task force, we still have not been able to get it, is a breakdown of which funding streams IDA, the Consolidated Federal Programs, which of those funding streams supported which positions so that we, as part of any responsible transition, could at least be mindful of the risk. Because if we lost significant positions at the Agency of Education, this agency would not be positioned to support and lead a lot of transition work. And when you think about the regional shared services, again, you're building capacity in the field to be a little bit more resilient to unexpected disruptive changes at the federal level as well. Because all of that responsibility is going to devolve back to districts to make sure that things are happening. And the agency literally might not potentially have capacity to do any of that work. So I think it's really unfortunately, you guys have to walk, chew gum, dance backwards, and maybe make dinner at the same time because you're going have to figure out how to deal with all of these things at the same time. I've never seen a moment like this, and all here at a very unusual moment. So here we are. Is this okay? This is great. Yeah, okay. So again, one of the things that would be different about this, if you chose to go forward and you may decide this makes no sense at all, but if you did go forward with this, the change we were recommending at the task force is that you don't make it voluntary. You make it mandatory. Pennsylvania does this. You can have someone come in and talk about it. And if you think about it, it's like health care. If only people who have chronic disease or people who are elderly or in their health care pool, they may not have the capacity to do all the things. When we're all in, you've got the resources and the benefit and the engagement of all the districts. There's more to work with. So really, the commitment is we're going to do this, and we're going to pull this out and do it regionally at the state level so that we can ensure I always laugh when Representative Brady calls her district a big district because in the scheme of the universe, you're actually not a big district. But you feel good about your professional development offerings. Well, we want every community and school to feel good about their professional development offerings. So this makes sure that we can share that. And this body, this committee could make some recommendations on what's local, what are you going to share locally, how fast to go with standing up as CSOP if you're going to do this. And you could review those Articles Agreement and feel if you're comfortable with structures the finances and structures the representation. The rationale for mandatory is it also prevents the free rider problem. It prevents some district from doing nothing and letting you pay for services that then it gets the benefit of. We're all in. We all have to have skin in this game. But it also ensures statewide coverage. No one gets to say, I'm not doing science or reading because we're all going to if that is what we're going to do, we're going to do it. But it still allows for that customization. Again, I mentioned the English language learners. There's also regions of the state that have really gone all in on community schools and have seen huge benefits in terms of improved attendance. That might be a regional service that a CISA might want to support better because it is paying off. And one of the biggest drivers some people think of our declining scores is lower student engagement, which is frankly tied to some of the skyrocketing absences post pandemic. So again, these are ways to use this vehicle potentially to do that work. And then with respect not to the larger conversation, but with respect to this particular proposal in Section E, we really felt that the seesaws were a precondition for some of the larger recommendations for mergers in Sections two and Sections three, because the strategic mergers really depended on shared capacity and planning. And the regional high schools, particularly if they're going to be comprehensive high schools, you really need to have a strong ESA that can equalize access to opportunities, particularly in some of our more rural regions. So we really saw these working hand in hand and CSAS being the operating spine for whichever path that you went forward. I feel like the rep from Manchester has a question. It's

[Speaker 0]: for me. Well,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I was just thinking, you know, fortunately I dropped my crystal ball this morning, just kinda cut out of fritz, and I Probably look good. Just kinda looking forward, thinking about all of this making sense, thinking about the governor telling us quite plainly, day one, I'm not signing anything unless it looks like what we passed. Because this is a great concept, I mean, if larger districts happen again, I can't look into the future, I don't know, But could that also I mean, it it could work even if we redistrict and just say, hey. All your districts, this is mandatory. This has to happen. Right? I mean, there's no precondition. Right?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: You could you could do both. I and I I think

[Unidentified Committee Member]: because I almost feel like sometimes you're kind of nibbling it down anyway. Right? That's something that you said about

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: We see it as a precondition for the strategic mergers. I mean, not all mergers. It was very clear to us when we start to look regionally. Some mergers would increase costs, some would not increase costs. And so if affordability and improving service is your goal, then that should be the rubric for deciding where you push mergers and where you push mergers. The research mergers is different, the recent research, than the research done even ten years ago. And there have been some recent experiments in other states with mandatory mergers that really, frankly, haven't yielded savings and they haven't yielded improvements. There are a couple of places where they have. And there are also ways in which Vermont is substantively different. For example, the majority of districts that are under 500 students are towns that pay tuition. They're already buying education retail. If you merge them, you're not going to save money. You're just going to get a bigger district that's buying retail. There's actually zero research. I've asked everybody. There's no research on merging tuition and whether merging tuition saves money, unless you're expanding tuition or reducing tuition. So that's the kind of stuff that you need to be strategic because if you aren't thoughtful about what you're doing, you could actually increase costs quite quickly. And we tried to highlight some of those risks in report. And likewise, don't one of the regions that we profiled was this region, which has lost hundreds of students. The enrollment has dropped quite significantly in this region. They also have some buildings that have some significant problems, and they want to build a new CTE center. And the new CTE center was proposing to add 300 more seats to a region that already has I can't remember what the number is. I'm afraid to say a number, but it's multiple hundreds excess capacity already. At some point, we have to talk about taking some buildings offline. And so that's where this coordinated planning around regional high schools makes sense. It's a chance to sit down and say, Okay, some high schools haven't lost enrollment. Some high schools have lost enrollment. Where are the places where we really do have excess capacity and where pushing people together can actually do a lot to make a better difference? And what are the things that need to happen to make that even possible? Sometimes it's construction aid. Sometimes it's some other change. But those are the kinds of things where I think we tried to put some case studies in so that you could see the kind of because we spent hours. We really wanted to have a plan for regional high schools. Couldn't even use that mapping tool that has been shared by the agency. So we actually ended up working with somebody who has RGIS at work. And so every weekend, Jay Baggins and I would sit down with him in his enormous computer. We pulled all this data, fed it in. We were just generating these maps where it looked like snowballs around the state trying to figure out where you could put these schools to try to really meet that. It's interesting. They actually kind of sat on some of our current schools, like one was right on top of your region, because it makes sense. Like, people built their schools where it made sense in a community. But it just wasn't ready. I mean, it just means you didn't have enough time. And I'm sure Jay would come in and talk to you about that process, too. But I think the thought was that to make that happen, you might need some construction aid in some places. I mean, in this area, if you're going to take two high schools offline and merge four communities or five communities, they need to be involved in that conversation. If you want to work, There needs to be some construction aid to make it possible. Those are the kinds of things that just they take a little more time unless you want to do some damage. So that's where we we were just worried. But but that work is that work did inform our thinking. And we spent a lot of time thinking about regional high schools, but particularly comprehensive high schools. I mean, we were using a there are things that have to be done at CTEs. There just are. And there are things that could be career education that could happen in a regular high school. And in fact, some of our CTE courses were actually developed for high school. Like the Project Lead the Way Engineering was built for high school. It wasn't built as a CTE course initially. So there's a lot more fluidity there than we think. And I think part of it is thinking about what is it our kids need and then how do we organize ourselves to make sure we're getting that. So it ends driven thinking. And that's where we were trying to go with the regional high schools. And there's a finite number of schools. And there's a point where if you're below a certain level, you really can't meet the needs of all your kids. And no one wants to hear that, but it's kind of true. I And think we tried to put some of that research in there. And then the other thing we're going have to decide is if you don't support I mean, other states are starting to create what they're calling public school preserves. There are places in rural areas where you just have to accept there are not enough kids to ever have a school the size you think. And so they're talking about ways in statute to just create designated zones where you protect the school access. And these are it doesn't make sense everywhere. I mean, there are places where we have small schools that are ten minutes away from another small school. It's really regionally specific, if it makes sense. And people are really trying to do the best they can. That we got loud and clear. But there are some things that we may have to do at the state level to make it possible for them to do what's right as well. I hope that makes sense. Wrists and guardrails. I just want to be really clear. If we aren't as intentional about implementation as we are about policy design, it ain't going to work. I mean, that's just the reality. Implementation, I would argue, is actually more important than the policy design Because if you implement with fidelity and you do it robustly, and if you've got a recursive improvement process that lets you refine it, if you need to in policy, then you'll get good outcomes for kids and communities. But if we don't pay attention to capacity to implement, we run the risk of just doing something like 01/1973, where you throw out a good idea and it falls on its face and you don't get the benefit. There does have to be attention to duplication because if we don't have some accountability for retiring local functions when they move to a C site, you will get duplication. So we recommended that the agency play an important oversight role. And many states do keep scorecards that help districts see the value they're getting. A real issue in some districts is having access to evaluators who can do the evaluations for special education to support an IEP. There's a federal timeline that you have to stay on. You can look at the time from referral to completion of the evaluation and just see that you're that's just one example of the metrics because that's been a real issue for some of our districts. It's responsible for some of the findings. And you could build in those protections and statute. You could phase the rollout, start with the low hanging fruit and tier what requirements you put in. Transparency is always great. It creates an opportunity for us to evaluate how's this going because it's not just about compliance. It's about our kids actually learning better. Right. And that's so much when we're so thin right now. Back in 2017, the agency, all they're doing is compliance right now. That's all they have staff for. That doesn't actually make good education. What you need is how is this working for kids? How is this working for taxpayers? So that we can get that feedback linked to you here to do that. This is not new. I mean, I just got to make really clear. This is not a weird concept that people pulled out of our back pocket. It's also used in other sectors. And you may remember at the December all members meeting, the health care team from the governor's office presented. And one of their strategies is regionalization and shared services. And if you read what they wrote, it's very similar to what we're talking about in education, that there are things that can they're talking about sharing administrative services, coordinating who does what. Maybe some high schools focus on certain CT pathways and others on others. And you allow access based on student

[Speaker 0]: organization is going to be the buzzword for the next ten years

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: for sure. Is. It is. It is. And it's going to be the buzzword here as well. And this is you're going to get this next week, but this is a preview if you want to get ahead in your reading. This is the link to the presentation in the Senate around using a they are using a seesaw. They proposed a seesaw. I mean, this is a standalone seesaw that only does CTE. The task force recommended a seesaw that does more of those functions in part because of the desire for better integration. But you can see that this is not an alien concept that nobody's heard of because they recommended a seesaw. What you're being asked to decide is whether or not to require shared services, whether to prioritize them before or after or not governance consolidation, and whether to invest your limited state capacity. How do you want to do it? You've got finite capacity at the agency to support transformation. Where do you think you're going to get the biggest lift right now? And I would just ask you whatever proposal you do, I would just encourage you to ask the question, does this create real capacity where Vermont currently lacks it? And any problem probably has 10 solutions. You're tasked on our behalf with trying to figure out which of those 10 solutions you think is the right one to create capacity right now. This was the map. I'm just sharing this because somebody asked about this. We had no expectation that this is what might exactly happen. In fact, I left my own area. My own area is unhappy with me because you can see that little blue spot in the middle of nowhere, is STEPFER, which is now cut off because Rivendell merged across it and was in part of the other region. And so what you're seeing, that chopped up look, is the function of This is the superintendents' regions, which were organized around central restaurants, modified by governance reform in Act 46, just to have a sense of humor because that is the reality of how policy change happens. So people have moved by local decisions from where they were originally organized. We know some of these people have already said, but I want to be reassigned. So we did recommend that you allow for some reorganization. They should request it, though, because what you don't want is a division of seesaws into the haves and the have nots. We're encouraging contiguous and we're encouraging the state to be thoughtful about that. But obviously, if you're now separated, that blue badge actually in the SUV with some of the above, but they actually are sharing services with that red spot in the middle. They'd already said that, but I didn't want to move my district because then every district would have to be moved to. Was like, no, you figure this out later.

[Representative Emily Long]: So I guess that's because the map up here,

[Speaker 0]: that

[Representative Emily Long]: Southeast District doesn't reflect the postage system.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: This is bigger. I think this is a little bit bigger. Because remember, the current one is voluntary, so people had to say, I want to do that. And what you've already got is in our region, are in this, this is Hartford. The Hartford has long done shared services around special education. And so there is already a lot of sharing in that area. And then the Southeast Policies is more like here. And this is saying everybody needs to be part of a BOCES. And what we did is we just grabbed SUs, but some of these SUs may ask to be reassigned, if that makes sense. And I just wanted to share as a closing thought, this is something that Doctor. Sousa, Mountain View superintendent, said to me in an email recently. She said, this BOCES has been my lifeline in the last few years. And if you think of how bumpy and chaotic it's been, they've brought COVID, they're dealing with some funding transitions. I think they're trying to figure out their way through this chaos. Not only are there cost savings, adaptive resources that I have not had at my fingertips in Vermont for a very long time. And I have to say, as somebody who was, again, gray eyed and long toothed and worked in education a long time ago, we have a lot more support. We did once have a lot more support than we do currently. And I think part of our decline is that support doesn't exist. And what she's saying is if we can put this support together by sharing services, you've made me stronger. That's the logic. So I think the question you have to ask is, is this an outlier? Is this an opportunity? What do we need to do to make the kinds of support and richness of resource and opportunity at a lower price point that she's talking about? Is there a way to make that a reality for all Vermont communities? I don't care where they're from. I don't care where they go to school. Every kid needs to have the best we can give them because they are a public trust. Parents send the thing they care about the most in the entire world. And we need to look at every kid's eyes and say that could be the cure for cancer. We need to know that we're doing what we can for these kids. And that means we have to figure out how to make sure every district leader and every teacher feels that way, if we can, within our budget. So I have a bunch more that are just appendices. I threw them in there so you can see them, but I think I've yapped

[Speaker 0]: a lot. Let's do questions. Thank you very much for putting together a very comprehensive presentation for us. Appreciate it.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Maybe a spin on the

[Representative Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: same question, but so, okay, mandatory participation and then seesaw determines their services. So then within that, is there any way they function in other states or envisioned in law variability of whether then every district in that CSOP has to use every shared service? Or can there be some flexibility or nuance to like, well, transportation's maybe not good. Maybe it's PD again or something else. Or take maybe like a Chittenden region where certain districts might have different English language, like you're saying, or new Americans need for support programs that maybe not the entire region does. Is there any room for variability there of who takes what services? Or is it you're sort

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: of all in, you're all in? You decide that. Right? Like you can decide that right now. And so we recommended certain areas that we have heard by talking to lots of people are high leverage, easy wins and recommended that you start with those. Some states require people to do certain things. They say this is your vote. This is participation. And you could ask the person I would encourage you to get someone like John Bass from the Association of Education Service agencies, it's a national group, to come in and say, what are the kinds of things that people do first? They often do special ed for all the obvious reasons. They often do IT and purchase and grant management for all the same reasons. This committee could say, you're going to do CSAS, you're going to stand up this function in year one and this function year two, this function year three, and then you can have flexibility about the rest. And you're going to decide that and figure that out. What I would say is I don't think it's bad to mandate one. We have some clear implementation challenges, and there's some very obvious areas. Again, this is not about the children. And the children are not driving the cost right now. This is about a need to improve practice. I want to be very clear about that. But you could mandate places like that where you want to see the benefits. But it's funny when the district management group did their study of struggling learners a couple of years ago, I think your district was part of it. They made the funniest comment. They said the most amazing thing about Vermont is every district thinks it's exceptional. You are exceptional in the degree to which you think you're exceptional because you are all doing the same thing. And so I think we think there's more variety. I think you magnify our differences in our head. But the reality is if you walk into a classroom here and a classroom here, not actually that different in terms of practice. And so this is trying to use a statewide embrace to raise the level of teaching and learning and operations everywhere. Because frankly, we're all having the same problems right now.

[Speaker 0]: I'm going to take Representative Brady's question and put out an example and tell me if I'm right or wrong conceptually. So, yeah, you could, let's say we mandate these and they all have to do at least, or they all have to do transportation and special education. BOCES in the Northwest part of the state, but then also say there's clearly demand among our members to provide English language learners services, but only half of them want it. That would be sort of set up independently and then paid for on a fee for service basis, which would not require the other members to.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Right.

[Representative Emily Long]: Even under a mandatory.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Yes. Yes.

[Speaker 0]: I mean, something would be mandatory. On

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: the other hand, when that one child moves to town mid year, which has happened to me, you know, boom, all of a sudden you got you can buy in and be part of the team.

[Speaker 0]: So the I'm having trouble getting the sort of up and running. Understand. Getting to that point of and just from sort of a say we were to create statute to do this, we are going to have to, to remember, probably put up some significant initial funding because each CISA needs to be staffed and housed. Is that fair to say?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Right. Yes. What I would do is I would encourage the committee to consider having my understanding is John Bass is currently setting up standing up seesaws in Nevada right now. And I also think you should ask the Southeast BOCES what costs were incurred. I remember talking to somebody and they said, we have no space for this. And I had seen their data and I knew they had 70% fewer kids in their building than they did thirty years ago. So we might have space. I'm just saying that it might not be as much as you think because it's not. There's already all sorts of offices all over the state. And so I think what where you can get a better read on it. And remember, it's supposed to be self funding because you're not duplicating the services. You're buying the services and it's being paid for through those.

[Speaker 0]: I said, just think, can you recoup the startup costs? Anyway, I'm going way too far down here.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: I think I would ask, would ask Sherry, because my

[Speaker 0]: They sort of grew organic as opposed to sort of, you know, legislature saying we're gonna set up seven seasons of the state.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: But that's how they grew organically because that's what the statute required. But I think if you ask her, I mean, if you ask her what services she's using today versus what she used when she first started up, my sense is they started like this. And part of it is like they realize, oh, wow, I could I really need this

[Speaker 0]: from here up here. This is this growth is actually self funded. Right.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: That was my sense. But I would ask her that because you should get it from the right. Provided to the task force was very specific examples of how being able to bring certain services in house to hold people on contract for just in time evaluations. They were able to document and actually evaluate what it did to PD costs for a unit of PD, what it did to evaluations, and both in terms of timeliness, but also in terms of cost of receiving it. Unexpected, she could not talk enough. I keep looking at the high school teachers. You're at the end of the line. You're all high school. So you know what happens if there's inconsistency in preparation and in coherence at the elementary level. It shows up in your room and people are all over the map. And so part of what she said is the unexpected savings was that having greater coherence in those operations in the early years is making it easier to provide coherence at high school levels as well.

[Speaker 0]: So an example that makes me a little cautious is DAs. In a sense, they are a CISA for mental health services to schools, but they are unable to provide the level of services schools found they needed. So, essentially have two duplicative services as a result. So I sort of worry that districts are going to say, well, the CISA isn't providing our needs. We're going to just sort of add on to it. Then I'm arguing in my head well, but then it's really sort of within that ecosystem to solve the problem. It doesn't become a bigger statewide problem.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: I would also just respectfully consider the fact that that's happening already. Mean, there are districts that no longer use the DAs and particularly

[Speaker 0]: I don't want to see that happen.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: That's where we come. It's happening now. And my fear has been for years we will and particularly as education dollars become cheaper as we increase the weight in some high need districts. And if you need more services because you're identifying more kids and you're buying from a DA that is not able to staff, there is a real risk that school districts, because they're on the line, they're legally obligated to provide services. If the DA can't meet it, the school district is to do it because it's a legal obligation. My fear is that if we do nothing anyway, we're going to collapse the DA system. And we can't afford to do that. So my hope is that this might actually do the opposite. It might give you a way, again, by points of contact that are deep as opposed to 52 that are shallow. It might give us more capacity at the state level to think through the logistics of these very complicated systems in ways that are mutually reinforcing. It's a real problem.

[Representative Emily Long]: Angela Long. So I've got another question, that is exactly what I'm concerned about. And I have, my following what you've done here in your testimony today, actually, and I'm speaking locally, my district, it almost feels like it's needed. The DAs need something like this. Because it feels too fractured otherwise. And this feels like maybe it would help bring things together.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Think about it, they also work across, they also could help coordinate across DAs. I mean, could actually be a lifeline to DAs.

[Speaker 0]: As you say, we've got school districts that straddle four counties and four different DAs.

[Representative Emily Long]: So my other question is just very specific. Does HR fit into

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: something Yes, like

[Representative Emily Long]: yes. So you've seen examples of BOCES or whatever the models are in other states where they're actually doing HR.

[Speaker 0]: We've been talking about it for years, about how it would be

[Representative Emily Long]: great to have that at a higher level.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: And could certainly if you think about all the onboarding of employees

[Representative Emily Long]: That's what I mean.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: So it's a huge burden on districts. And another issue, it's a huge burden on districts. And I remember sitting in a district and saying, Medicaid bill back? Just pay for it. Medicaid bill back and hire a staff person? Don't hire a staff person. The things that we often don't like that school districts do, they're not doing for good rational reasons locally. And so again, if you think about Medicaid payment, that's something that could be taken on at the regional level too, because you have to do all the documenting and the billing to pull down the Medicaid match from the federal government through the DAs. So there's all kinds of ways you could do things more efficiently at a regional level as well. And for a period, we were like, why we document the Medicaid? Because it costs us more to do that paperwork than we're going to get back for it. And people make rational decisions. Unfortunately, the rational decision sometimes at the local level is the wrong decision for the state. So if you think about it's the same thing with the substantially separate settings. So if you can think about how know it's going to take work, which is why you want to think this through. But you don't have to do it all today. But what you could do is have some work between now and date certain in the future, be thinking about how to use the seesaw structure to do better partnerships with the DAs to support people, but also to make sure we're pulling down what we can from the federal level. Because what you don't want is the Ed fund to be so cheap and the work so onerous that people say, we're just putting it into the Ed fund and leaving the federal money on access, which is what's starting to happen in some places. The questions? Is that making any sense at all?

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. It's pretty far in the weeds. It's really stuck. Yeah.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Yeah. We're we're spending money we don't need to spend is my point.

[Speaker 0]: So we passed the BOCES bill, and I know we're sort of using the terms of interchangeably. How might that need to be modified to sort of match the recommendation of the task force? I realize mandatory is a big part of it.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Yeah, think mandatory. And to be clear, we had really seven meetings. You guys got months.

[Representative Emily Long]: I feel you've given it a little more thought.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: But this is an area where, again, sometimes you don't need to read about the wheel. I would really lean on the people who've done this and made it work in other places. Again, we're an outlier in not using it. Most people, most states do use it. And I would figure that out. But I think you would need to make it mandatory. You might want to evaluate which functions you think are best pushed in as a first order of work. And you might actually mandate certain things. And you've done similar things before. I mean, prior to Act 46, this body moved all special education up to the SU level for the same reason. Frankly, the SUs aren't big enough. And frankly, for some of our concerns around substantially separate settings, even districts of 4,000 to 8,000 aren't big enough for that kind of work. That should be done at the regional level. So it is done at the regional level of other states. So I think I would figure out where those low hanging fruit. And I would move those things first. And I think if you talk to superintendents, you'll hear skepticism. You also know people want to hold on to their things. And you also hear people say, yeah, boy, I would be so glad not to have to deal with such and such. I remember in the context of Act 46 that we were talking about the caps for a while there. And in the course of that conversation, what came out was that everybody had negotiated a food service contract that had low rates of increase in the first two years and then ballooned in the third year to get up beyond the cap. But in the context of that conversation, we realized everybody was negotiating with the same food service vendor. So it's like, why would you have 52 food service contracts with the same food service vendor? That's another thing you could just pitch up pretty fast as well. And it's not just dollars, it's time. And every minute your superintendent is spending on the duplex.

[Representative Emily Long]: Just how much our accounts, all that work we tried to do, it feels to me like it would be necessary to have all of that IT stuff in place to make this function, and we need it in place, I guess is what I'm saying. We need both. I mean,

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: when That's we what I'm saying, and. Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, I don't sorry, I forgot. I think we're done anyway. When we first talked about the Ed Finance system, a third of the districts were literally on sale. A third had bought a system with every bell and whistle. And a third were on a company. It was like the Dodge Caravan of finance systems. Matter what Floppy Distill. No matter what, a third of people were going to be thrilled because finally they had an e finance system. A third are like, this is the same thing I've always done. And a third were going to be ripped because we were giving them a lower end version because the state didn't fund all the bells and whistles. Nothing we do is going to make everyone happy. It's sort of like when I cook dinner in my house, one of my kids is always mad because they didn't get what they wanted. Unfortunately, that's life sometimes in my house. Maybe this is a case where the states need to have good data is actually really important. And I think you can manage. I live in an interstate. And the funny thing about being in an interstate is New Hampshire actually moved to a new statewide finance system. And they approached it pretty differently. They actually ran their old system in parallel with the new system. So there was a backup in the transition. And it was actually pretty seamless, I got to say. So this can be done. It's just that you need a lot of handholding. On the other hand, if you had five BOCES with coherent and consistent technology choices, it would be much easier to hook those systems into the state. Like before we did that or before we did a Smarter Balanced assessment, we tried to make sure that districts used E Rate, the federal funding, to drive high speed internet to every school. And I think we've got it to all but five schools before most states were anywhere close to that. But part of what we did is we worked for three years around what the technical specifications were to administer the assessment online. And so for years, we had been giving districts information that they had to use when they were making their tech purchases so that they could purchase with an eye to the operation of the system. And that's where CISA, again, it could just say, Okay, if this is the goal, we all need to be on the single student information system, single finance system. When we're putting tech into your local schools, it has to meet these basic criteria. And we're going to buy in bulk for you to get a better price. But you can plan for implementation so that it's a more seamless transition as well. And there are people who know far more than I do about that. And you could ask someone like Peter Drescher, who I think is up in the area to teach you to run some of that stuff. There are all kinds of people who could speak to that much more intelligently than I ever could.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe]: Thank you. Everything do is hard. I really appreciate your hard work. Yes. Thank you.