Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Good morning. This is House Education on 02/05/2026. This morning, we're gonna hear from the Chief Operating Officer of the Agency of Administration. So this is following up on a request made to sort of help sort out funding for the adult education programs across the state. This has a, this has really been an ongoing discussion. It's largely been handled by the Appropriations Committee. And this is all sort of part of our, what we need to do in our budget letter to the Appropriations Committee. I may be corrected if I'm wrong, but this isn't a question about the level of funding that's generally been agreed to, but this is a question of how that funding is allocated to the various organizations that provide adult education. Nick, are you prepared to give us a little background and all that? I'm just gonna turn it right over to you to walk us through.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Thanks, Mr. Chair. So for the record, my name is Nick Kramer. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at the Agency of Administration. Appreciate the committee's time today. I think this is the first time this session I've been in this committee, so nice to see you all. Yeah, as the chair suggested this well, actually, I jump in, I see that I'm the only one on the agenda today, Mr. Chair. I do note there's other stakeholders in the room just to help me calibrate the level of detail you wanna hear from me. How much time more or less should I anticipate?

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I mean, we've got until 10:15. And, yeah, level of detail is a good question. Since we're a little bit unfamiliar with a lot of this incident outside this committee room.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: And I will be thorough. And if committee members feel like I'm boring you to death, then let me know.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: But I was worried about area outside of perhaps being not too thorough, but if we keep right here to have a higher level of understanding.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Okay. Right. Well, I'll I'll try to start here and dive in as I hope we can police members ask questions with the caveat that I too am fairly new to this space right prior to this legislative request. Certainly, agency of administration are not subject matter experts in adult education or we weren't, but had an opportunity to work with a really great, I think, group of stakeholders and have learned a lot. By way of context, then, as this committee probably is aware, last year's big bill, the last year's appropriations bill had language in it requesting, and I'm going to sort of talk through the report. There's two reports, one submitted, that's kind of the culmination of work done by all the stakeholders that we were charged with bringing together, then that's specifically from the agency of administration. So I'm starting with the full one, and a lot of what I'm saying is mirrored in the structure of the report. So if committee members are interested or haven't read it and want to follow along. So the legislative charge that brings us here was language in last year's big bill section E504.3, charged us, the agency of administration, with kind of being neutral conveners and facilitators of a discussion around specifically the funding formula for adult education. My understanding of the context here, which certain committee members may be more familiar with, is that the funding formula, the way adult education funds historically have been distributed has changed a bit without going super into the weeds, but has largely been based on a State Board of Education rule, which is somewhat complex and has a number of different pieces to it. But the upshot is that there were very different per student allocations based on that formula, depending on which county you lived in. Certain counties had really high per student allocations and some not so much. And so to zoom out even further, Vermont's adult education and literacy programs are funded primarily through state funding, but there's also a not insignificant piece of the overall pie, which comes from federal sources. Adult education and literacy falls under the umbrella of the Federal Workforce Opportunity and Innovation Act, or the OA. And so under that act, funds are required to be distributed on a competitive grant basis. Right. So these are competitive grants. There's a grant cycle that the agency of education administers that is a three year grant cycle. So every three years they go out and issue solicit applications for these grants. For the last couple of decades, more than a couple of decades, there have been sort of four incumbent AEL providers in the state. The tutorial center, which is located in Bennington and serves sort of that region of the state, Central Vermont Adult Education, which Catherine heads, which is sort of in Central Vermont, as you would imagine, Northeast Kingdom Learning Services headed by Michelle Faust, and then VAL or the Vermont Adult Learning, which Tara runs, kind of serves everything else, every other area of the state. So, those four incumbent providers are kind of the universe of folks that have been providing these services. They've been the ones applying for and receiving these grant funds. As I mentioned, the old formula, well, two things. The old formula did two things. It both set the total amount of state funding for AEL and describes how those funds are to be allocated on a county basis. That's the existing language that's in 16 VSA for four eleven. And that on the basis of that, that language was actually so I'm struggling because I don't want get too far into the weeds, but there there is some conflict between recently changed statutory language, which is what I was just talking about, and then the longstanding State Board of Education rules. And there was some different interpretations between the agency of education, expectations from incumbent providers. There are very different outcomes depending on whether you follow statute or the State Board of Education rules in terms of how the funds are allocated. The Agency of Education's interpretation last year or the year before was, well, statute supersedes State Board of Education rules or the incumbent providers, they've been following the State Board of Education rules for many years. So that was sort of the expectation. So there was a misalignment in a certain session about a surprise of, oh, we didn't think that the funds were going to be distributed this way. And it resulted in a dramatic decrease. I'd mentioned that sort of inequity on a per student basis. The new statutory allocations would be pretty much a level and exactly level per student allocation. And so that resulted in some incumbent providers seeing precipitous declines in the amount of funding that they were going to receive, which was obviously challenging for them operationally. So this is all context to why we're here. Last year's big bill, in addition to requesting this report, kind of hard coded an allocation based on a compromise proposal. They said, all right, well, we've been following the State Board of Education rules, and then there's this new statute, which probably supersedes, can we, for this fiscal year, so FY '26, the fiscal year we're in now, let's do a compromise and allocate on an average of those two methodologies. And so that's the current funding for this fiscal year. Then on top of that, the charge was, okay, and let's have the agency of administration convene as sort of a neutral stakeholder process to talk about what makes sense moving forward into acknowledging kind of that historical inequity where some providers were getting way more per capita per student than others. But we also didn't want to, I think the intent of the legislature was, well, let's not move so dramatically that, for instance, an incumbent provider couldn't continue functioning and serve students. So I'll pause there because I know that was a lot of background, just in case there are any questions from the committee so far.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: No, it's been very good. Thanks. So

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: in accordance with the legislative charge, we, the agency of administration, being myself and I have one trustee sidekick, we convened a series of five meetings, which the charge says no less than five meetings in late summer and early fall of last year in 2025 between the incumbent adult education and literacy providers, representatives from the agency of education. We also had representation from the Department of Labor, because they're obviously connected in subject expertise here. And then we also put out the invitation for participation to a number of other organizations who had attended. I mentioned these are competitive grants. As part of that, there's sort of a grant informational workshop where people can come and learn more about WIOA and the opportunity, and there were a couple organizations that had attended those grant workshops but had not wound up applying. And so just in the interest of having a broad swath of perspectives, put out an invitation to attendees of those workshops. I think really there was just one person who consistently attended who wasn't an incumbent provider and was really just there to observe, but a representation from the Vermont Migrant Education Program at UBM. And then we occasionally had folks from World Learning and State Refugee Office, but they weren't consistent attendees. So we met five times in person over the summer and fall. Really appreciate everybody making the trek, in some cases, the way from Bennington. I think from our perspective, from my perspective as the neutral facilitator, the conversations were really productive. And like I said, I learned a lot. I think we, at a high level, identified a lot of points of consensus and were able to kind of put to bed a number of issues. Spoiler alert, there was no final consensus on one adult education and literacy funding formula, so I'll talk in detail about kind of what the points of consensus were and what weren't. And then the secondary charge, which was for the agency of administration to issue an additional report on top of that report if we had any different recommendations. We do have a single recommended funding formula. Being sensitive to that was the request from the legislature was for a suggestion, and it's basically an average of where the different parties landed in the overall report. So if folks are following along, I'm on page two of the report, which is really the first substantive page, but there's an executive summary that gives a high level overview of what those points of consensus were. I'll hit on the biggest ones. As the chair mentioned at the outset,

[Chair Peter Conlon]: we are looking at the adult education literacy report, not the AOA adult education literacy report. Correct? That's correct, mister chair. Yeah.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: They are you would be it's like one of those things in the newspaper spot. The differences that are similar. This is the one that just says submitted in accordance with 2025 Act 27, not by the Secretary of State. So as the chair mentioned at the outset, there was consensus that the current funding, the statutory funding formula described in 16 VSA four eleven F is adequate and appropriate for determining the total amount of funding that should be going to the system. With the asterisk providers, of course, wanted to retain the right that if something dramatically changed, like the base education amount, which is a key input to that formula, and there was a precipitous drop in funding, well, then they reserve the right to say, Oh, wait, no, we don't think this works anymore. But based as it is currently and on current assumptions, the feeling was this works for determining the overall size of the pot. As the chair mentioned, the question is, of course, how that pot is distributed. And I'll get to that in a second. But other points of consensus were that, in fact, statutory language does supersede State Board of Education rules that had been a matter of debate, as I mentioned in prior years. But then everybody agreed that, okay, well, if that works to determine the size of the pot, we should actually have a different formula that determines the allocation versus the status quo where they're both sort of the same based on wording. So, and within that, we talked a lot about what that funding formula should consist of. And there was, I would say, like 80% consensus on the elements. One thing everybody agreed was that counties continue to be the most logical unit for distributing the funds. Obviously, in the education space, this committee knows there's a lot of different ways you can draw maps. There's a lot of different ways you can slice up Vermont. These funds have been distributed on a county basis. Historically, folks felt like that makes sense moving forward. The incumbent providers in their applications serve county units. So that was agreed to. We'll keep going with that methodology. We talked a lot about the importance of ensuring this was part of the rub in the precipitous drop of funding formula, particularly for the Northeast Kingdom Learning Services. It costs a certain amount of money just to keep the lights on, just to open a center, have sort of base administrative overhead. And a formula should acknowledge that. It shouldn't just be solely on the basis of serve. We see this in all kinds of areas. So one way to address that was to make a base payment for each county. So just say based on geographic region, there's a certain base level of cost. Each county gets that amount. We talked at some length about what that should be. There were some proposals. I think at the end, everybody settled on $80,000 per county. So for each of Vermont's 14 counties, each will get 80,000. And then the question really, so that's you multiply 80,000 times 14. So it's dangerous to do math in public, but that's a significant chunk of change out of, I should mention, the state's total pot of funding we're talking about is around 6 point something million. And then there's federal funding. That's a small portion on top of that, but this is all focused on how to distribute the state funding. And so the question is, once you make those base payments, how do you allocate the rest? And that's kind of the end of where we got to total consensus. The points of divergence between providers were on that remaining amount. There was a group of three of the providers, the Vermont Adult Learning, Central Vermont Adult Education, and the Tutorial Center, who all felt like while the remaining funds should be allocated solely on the basis of a count of students served, and that's defined very specifically in statute as the rolling two year average of students served based on the number of students that have completed diagnostic testing. So that's kind of a mouthful, but basically the intention is you want to count the people that are formally onboarded into the program and receiving services. And the two year average, I understand, is just because there can be ups and downs year to year. So that helps to smooth. And that's based on current statute. That's sort of what is in 16 DSA four eleven F currently. So their feeling was, okay, you make the $80,000 base payment per county, distribute the rest based on those counts. And those are numbers that the agency of education tracks. And so it's easy to say, okay, Essex County, you get this much based on that number, Franklin County, etcetera. Northeast Kingdom Learning Services agreed that that metric continues to make sense as a basis to distribute a good chunk of the remaining funding. But the concern that they surfaced was that if you're only counting students served, there are costs implicit in sort of the seat time or the exposure per student. In other words, their contention was that it doesn't cost the same to educate a student who's in the program for three months versus a student who's in for three years. And so they were advocating for a portion of that remaining funding to be allocated on the basis of student hours, which is a slightly different metric. You could serve 300 students and if they're all in for a week, that's 300 student weeks. Or you could serve one student for three hundred weeks, under a per student only basis, you would get very different funding for those. And we had a lot of discussion about this. I mentioned five meetings. We sort of started at the beginning with guiding principles. Everybody agreed the funding formula should be equitable, but it should also be simple and transparent. And we continually tried to come back to those principles as weighing those two things. In the final couple of sessions, I think we had a lot of really productive discussion from my perspective as a neutral facilitator. Mean, of course, I'm going say this, but I really don't think this is an issue where there's a right answer. It just depends on your perspective. And I think there were really valid points made on both sides. So the final proposals that the providers were pushing for were a solely student count basis. And then Northeast Kingdom Learning Services was advocating for the remaining funding after the county based payments to be made, I think 75% on the basis of student count, just like the other three wanted and 25% on the basis of student hours, which are numbers that the agency of education also tracks and has available. So I'll pause again because I'm saying a lot just in case there's any questions on that.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: Questions? I have someone. I'll wait until I hear everything.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Great. Great. This has been frankly very clear. Yeah, great.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Good, we strive for clarity. So that was the differing perspectives. I think I should mention that the agency of education, who took kind of a primarily listening role through much of the conversation towards the end, as we were getting towards finalizing the report, they had a yet slightly different perspective, which was just to say that there's a lot going on in the education space right now, as this committee knows more than I do. And including, I mean, it was touched on in our meetings, changes in federal funding. At one point, while we were having these discussions, it was unclear whether federal funding for AEL would continue. That would throw a wrench in things in the sense that, as I mentioned at the outset, our program design has largely been based on federal workforce opportunity and innovation act. There are a lot of requirements that come attached to that. If federal funding went away, it would be a question for government, for this body to decide if we were solely state funding this program, there might be flexibility to make some amendments and changes to the program design that we didn't have if based on trying to align with federal guidance. So that felt like a big unknown that the agency of education flagged. Also, that there's a lot of education transformation happening specifically in the state and that is very much live. And their feeling was that this obviously adult education is part of the comprehensive system of education delivery, they thought it might make sense to kind of tap the brakes a little bit and do a more comprehensive study of how this fits into that larger picture. And so they kind of brought that forward as a recommendation towards the end, and that's described in text in this report. I want make sure I'm not missing anything critical, I guess, just to orient committee members, if folks want to take a look or do a deeper dive into anything I said, The report, like I mentioned, has an executive summary section and then basically more detail on everything that's mentioned in the executive summary. It's structured as around the same way I just described things. There's sort of a points of consensus section, and then there's the points of non consensus. There are a couple of charts, I think, starting on page seven and eight of the report that I would draw the committee's attention to. I'm a numbers geek, so for me, are always super helpful. But I think these really illustrate these are a helpful graphical representation of some of what we're talking about. The intent here is to compare sort of five different scenarios. First, the old, the historical SBE rule, the State Board of Education rule. And then I'm skipping to the middle one, which is the student count only rule. That's a light gray bar. That's what's currently in statute in '16 BSA four eleven F. And then the sort of medium gray bar is the average of those two methodologies, which as I mentioned, is what was programmed into the FY twenty six budget. There were specific allocations to each provider based on that. So those are kind of history and status quo. And then the two green bars in each chart represent the dark green bar is scenario one. That was the recommendation of the three adult education and literacy providers. And scenario two was the Northeast Kingdom Learning Services model. So you can just kind of compare the first chart, which is on page seven, gives the total dollar allocation by county on a nominal basis. And then the second chart, which is on page eight, gives the same information, but on a per student allocation basis. And so if folks are looking at it, I just draw attention to like Essex and Grand Isle. That's those huge spikes are why we're here having this conversation, because those are really illustrating that historically those counties got quite a bit more funding per student than others. So pause again, just in case there are any questions. Okay, and then the report concludes with recommended draft language for statutory changes to 16 BSA four eleven F. The first section is just changing the statute to align with what I described as that point of consensus around there not being a single formula that governs both the size and the distribution of the funds. So this would sort of disaggregate that and say, okay, here's how you calculate the total allocation or the total appropriation, and then how you allocate it depends on the foregoing language, which is given at the end of the report. There's sort of two scenarios, As I described the scenario where it's just 80,000 base, then the rest based on a two year average. And scenario two would be 80,000 base based on seven well, that's now That's

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: gonna be my question.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: See, it's $70.30 instead of $75.25.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: If bracketed italics is an error, so I appreciate that representative. If you look at the language, it says seventy five percent twenty five, and that's that reflects a change in the recommendation if for a while they were looking for 7030 and then it changed to seventy five twenty five. Great. Thank you. Great. And so that concludes the report that summarizes group's recommendations. I'll dive into the secretary's office next after any discussion.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Representative Hunter.

[Representative Robert Hunter]: Do you have a recommendation for us, like scenario one or scenario two?

[Chair Peter Conlon]: We're about to get that.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: That's the second part. Segue. Yes. Thank you. He told me to say that. So

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: the AELN, one of their concerns with the student hours is that it can incentivize, mean, an incentive structure to try and count more hours. So can you explain to me your interpretation of their concerns around that, or why you see that they feel that that's a concern?

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Why the

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: field is that so concerned? The system can be gained by using ours.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Yeah, so appreciate the question, representative, and of course, with the caveat that I'm sure they would be able to speak better to why they see it as a concern than I am. But what I took as a facilitator from that conversation, which was robust, but we sort of discussed as we were debating those points of non consensus. There was a lot of discussion about incentives and what a structure would or would not incentivize. Not in any way suggesting that folks would intentionally try to game the system, just knowing that how you architect a funding formula does have implications inevitably on program delivery. So my understanding of the concern raised by the three providers was that, well, I think there are two pieces. One being, does that incentivize just like getting a student in the door and then just keeping them there? And I think they would speak eloquently to this. They point out that the metrics for success in this space, and I think education generally are all performance based or deliverable based on sort of I'm getting the phrase wrong. Proficiency Proficiency based. Thank you. So from their perspective, actually, it's not a bad thing if a student comes through the system and they have X, Y, Z goals and they meet them in two weeks instead of two months. Great. Their perspective is, well, they've met their goals. So incentivizing just butts in seats is the phrase that's been tossed around. That's not necessarily benefiting anyone. So I think that's part of the concern that there may be other components to that. I think just in the interest of, again, trying to remain a neutral party here, the counter concerns advanced by the Northeast Kingdom Learning Services are, well, an argument could be made that just a solely per student count formula could have an incentive to just get as many students through the system as possible, and that if there's no guarantee of additional funding to really work in an ongoing way with a student who's like a higher touch student for whatever reason, then there could be potentially an incentive to kind of get them to those milestones quickly, and there's no real incentive to provide that kind of more ongoing construction. Of course, there's a counterpoint to that counterpoint, which is that, well, there's no such thing as just rushing them through the system because they have to hit their proficiency goals. And I think it's, again, it's one of these areas where reasonable minds will differ. And depending on your experience as a provider, I'm sure there are a theme I took from the conversation is we're talking about adult education and literacy students like some monolithic block of people, but really this is a diverse population from English language learners to somebody gave an example that really stuck with me, which is like, sometimes we just have like a grandfather that just really wants to be able to read a bedtime story to their grandkid. And that doesn't always necessarily align with our workforce development goals. They're not doing this for a job. They're not doing this for So the point being that there are so many different types of learners that come through the system that inevitably a one size fits all methodology is probably going to really hit some of the population really well and others not so much. I don't know, it's a long answer to your

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: question.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: Well, mine's the counterpoint of that. Because I was just reading through it, because it says that in that scenario that it's the average of students who completed the diagnostic testing. It doesn't even mean they were served beyond taking the test. So that, I guess, is maybe the counterpoint, but I think you explained it anyway. Robert. And it's somewhere in the middle.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: I think there's a lot of nuance to the conversation. So, Rich,

[Chair Peter Conlon]: as a follow-up. So

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: three of the four providers feel that counting hours is not the right way one provider does. So being the impartial person listening to all perspectives, why do you think that food providers are seeing it the same way and what the virus is seeing it completely differently?

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: I think there's a couple ways I could answer that question, representative. Again, I'm always a little squeamish about trying to speculate on behalf of other people. But based on my I guess I'd make a couple observations. I think that there are no secret to anybody in this building, right? The Northeast Kingdom is a very specific region of the state with specific challenges. Put in a plug, I'm actually from Northern Orange County, and I'm always like, where's Orange County Day? Right. They're not unique in the North Sea, but it is a really specific region of the state. Right. And there's some challenges in that part of our state that are, again, not unique there, but particularly acute. So I think that the perspective of a provider operating in that geographical region might just naturally differ from, let's say, a provider operating in the booming metropolis that we're sitting in right now or the really booming metropolis up in Chittenden County, right, and that sort of stretch there. And they're very different populations served. So I think if you were to have each provider go through some of their rationale, and we did hear this in the conversations, if you have mostly ELL students, the type of program you're delivering is really different than if you have the grandfather that's just trying to read to his kids or his grandkids, right? Or the percentage of people living without a percentage of people in poverty, percentage of population without a GED or a high school diploma. I mean, are all topics we touched on. We had a lot of conversation about like, should there be other metrics besides just the two that we're talking about to try to get at this? And I think ultimately everybody decided not to go down that road because it started to look a lot like the old state board of education rule, which has like five or six different weightings and categories and gets really complicated. And folks, I think, by and large, felt like either solely the metric of students of student count or student count in hours, that those were kind of good enough proxies to capture the average of all of that diverse population and students served. So I want to make sure I'm not deviating too much from your question. But I guess the other observation I would make, and this is not to imply nefarious intent, right? But these are passionate providers trying to continue to offer these services in sustainable ways, and part of that is financial stability. I think there's a difference of perspective on the basis of how the funding allocations would shake out, right? And wanting to ensure that each provider has the financial resources that they feel that they need to continue this.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Would it help if person the would be out. I'd be happy to back to you unless you Maybe we should hear the recommendation, and then we can sort of talk about it. But go ahead if you want

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: I to

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: just didn't know. Did the difference in availability of internet and technology and transportation come up among the providers and how they provide services to adults? Because I know that's always been a question in Essex County and some others are like, We can't do online learning, we have no internet.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Yeah, that's a good question, representative.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I don't

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: know if that came up as part of

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: the I think tangentially, was implied in a number of facets of the conversation that talked about morality and distance to education centers, and we didn't have an in-depth conversation specifically about broadband access or anything like that, but it's part of the picture. Thanks. So then if it please, mister chair, I'll I'll move to the the Secretary of Administration's report, which I do think maybe answers some of the representatives questions. So as I mentioned, the charge was first to convene this group, compile a report that reflects what the group thought. Then if the Secretary of Administration had differing recommendations or anything else to add, there was a second report that was due in January, the first report due in November. So this is the report that says submitted by the Secretary of Registration. Only folks have access to that. There was one additional charge to us, which I'll touch on, which is sort of this last sentence of the legislative charge paragraph of the report shall also include any additional recommendations from the secretary. Nope. Sorry. That's what I already talked about. There's a piece in here I'm looking for, which is just any recommendations, here it is, starts on the fourth line, for any administrative changes to adult education, including which agency or department outside the agency of education is best suited to manage adult education grants. So that was very specific language. As I mentioned, we are always very sensitive to wanting to meet legislative requests to the letter. I will say I'll talk about that piece first because I think it's quick and easy to respond to. We're not recommending any changes to the administration of the program. We feel like the agency of education is very much the appropriate agency of jurisdiction. I mean, their education, this is adult education and literacy. There are long standing relationships between the incumbent providers and the staff that administer this program. A woman named Robin Castle, who is head of this program at the Agency of Education, has been doing this for a long time.

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: I think there

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: are positive working relationships there. So we certainly are not recommending a change. However, the request says specifically outside of the agency of education, what would be the best alternative to run this program? And we know probably the Department of Labor would be sort of next up in terms of relevancy. They do, as I mentioned, there was a representative Jay Ramsey from the Department of Labor who participated in all the conversations. There's clearly a nexus there. And in some other states, their departments of labor do play a more active role in the administration of adult education and learning. So that's the next logical circumstance. But again, we feel like in the Vermont context, it really makes most sense to continue to live in the agency of education. We'll pause there in case folks have any questions on that. Okay. So then really the remainder of the report is just if we, so that was section one, section two I'm jumping to, which starts on page three. Any recommendations regarding the funding formula that differ from the original report? Well, the original report had not a single recommendation, but several. So as I mentioned at the outset, we just tried to find what felt like a reasonable compromise on the basis of, as I mentioned, all the really valid arguments brought up, including those by the agency of education, which we really chewed on and felt like weren't in fact irreconcilable with what the providers were suggesting. Each provider advocating for a new funding formula. I should have mentioned earlier, the Agency of Education, basically they were saying, well, we need some more time to study this. And in the meantime, let's just keep allocating the funds on the same basis they were in FY '26, which again was that hard coded compromise between the State Board of Education rules and the statute. Our feeling was like, well, it is true that federal funding is increasingly uncertain in this space. That is definitely something we're going to have to keep an eye on. It is also true that we are undergoing massive education transformation in the state and that there could be tentacles of that work that very much implicate this space. Another thing that this committee and this legislative body are going to want to keep an eye on, In the meantime, we don't see any reason not to go with a slightly modernized funding formula in alignment with the proposals of the providers. We felt like all the perspectives were reconcilable in that sense. In terms of an actual recommendation to get to the punchline, we are recommending an allocation that has an $80,000 base payment, like everybody agreed, and that that that remaining funding be distributed 85% on the basis of the student count and then 15% based on student hours. And so again, if one perspective was all student count, no student hours, 100%, 0%, the other being 75%, 25%, we felt like 85, 15 would probably be a reasonable midpoint, feeling like there was a lot of, and maybe this gets to some of representatives questions, but that there were a lot of strong arguments to be made for why student count was really the primary allocation distribution. It's, for one thing, been the feature of statute for a long time. It's part of how the grant evaluation is like that's a metric that's included in the grant proposal. So it's not a surprise to providers. This is sort of historically how it's been. Really that and so 85%, the vast majority of the funding should continue to follow that methodology. The 15% really being an encouragement, we felt like there is some truth to the fact that it does cost. There are differing costs based on kind of contact with students and wanting to ensure that there is a little bit of flexibility to accommodate the fact that there may just be some students that don't move as quickly through the system as others and that that was important not to completely cast aside. So that's where we landed. Again, not as subject matter experts, but just trying to synthesize all of the good information and passion that we heard from providers. The report has this report also has some charts which just have now for the bars, the same three bars that the first report has, and then the single green bar represents our recommendation. So again, a graphical illustration comparing the different scenarios. And the report concludes with the statutory language that it would take to implement that recommendation.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: Thank you.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Any other questions? One, thank you very much for your work on this. This has been something that has continually churned up, and it seems like you've really put a lot of time and energy and thought into this. So thank you for that. Second, you may not be able to answer this, but I can look around the room. Is there advocacy or is there agreement that this compromise is the best path forward? I'm gonna guess perhaps not.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: What I can share, Mr. Chair, is that all of us downstairs in front of your colleagues in House Commerce the other day. And I believe the adult education literacy network, that's the name of AELN of the three providers, are continuing to feel strongly like 0% student hours, 100% student count is the right way. They have, I'm sure, far more eloquent arguments to that effect than I do. Michelle Faust from the Northeast Kingdom Learning Services testified in that committee a week or so ago that she was supportive of the compromise that were.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Any other questions, team? This was very logically and clearly presented, which has been very helpful to me over the years. So thanks again. Of course,

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: yeah, Appreciate your time. Do have a

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: question for you. Oh, okay. Any chance we may be able hear a testimony from the two sides of the conversation?

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I think we'll probably have to. What I need to get clear with is that Congress is hearing this, we're hearing this, appropriations must hear this. Trying to kind of who's the who's the the main character of this story. So I'll

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: get some clarity on that. I'll just my presentation. Yeah.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: So you basically gave the same presentation to Congress as well?

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: Somewhat more abbreviated downstairs. Yeah. Okay.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Senate Commerce or House? House.

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: House economic development. Okay. Alright.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: They're not really downstairs. For Mark Hots.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: Is that

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: right? Yes. Actually, there. Sorry.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Okay. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, maybe we'll take advantage of the fact that we have a little bit of time here, and if anybody from A A E E L L M, or whatever the acronym was, would like to speak? Sure. I don't wanna put you on the spot.

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: No, we're here. So I'm Tara Brooks and I am the

[Nick Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Administration]: executive director.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Why don't you come sit up, That'd great.

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: So I'm Tara Brooks and I'm the executive director at Vermont Adult Learning. So we represent Windham, Windsor, Rutland, Addison, Chittenden, Grand Isle, and Franklin Counts. And so we serve all of those for Val.

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: And at Central Vermont Adult Education, we serve Washington, Orange, and the Royal Counties. And I'm Katherine Klausner. Thank you.

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: So I think our biggest point, and I think Nick touched on this a little bit, is really that adult education in Vermont is about goals and efficiency and being as efficient and effective as possible to meet the goals of the adult learner. And one of the things that we really want to talk about is Vermont has worked really hard to push us to be a proficiency based program. And proficiency based is not seed time. And that's where we disagree with the agency of administration's recommendation is that seed time piece, because seed time does not correlate with proficiency based education. And Vermont, again, has worked really hard to move away from those credits and that seed time and move towards what proficiency based education really means and looks like. And so putting hours into the metric incentivizes that seed time, which is not a good metric for adult education. Bless you. Did you want to add anything there?

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: No. I mean, guess I would just concur that Vermont has spent a long time moving students in all aspects of education to proficiency based, which does not That lies in the face of a seat time based model. So we really feel like that's not educational best practice at this point in time in the state. And so it feels like some of it, I'm going put it in quotes, guess, really problematic road to head down with adult education to have that metric in the mix. And as Nick alluded to, we have students at various different levels. They could come and be with us for one month. They could come and be with us for four years. It really just depends on their goals and where they are when they start and where they're hoping to get to at the end and what other challenges they have. I recognize that he also alluded to the counties have different challenges in front of them. I will say I feel like the population that we see in adult education is very similar, of what county you're in. Many, many, many of the folks that we see are living on the edge. They're one flat tire away from economic disaster. So it's challenging. And so, sure, they could come and they could complete the diagnostic portion of the program. And then for reasons completely out of our control and their control, we don't see them again for a while. Usually, then come back. We have a lot of students who are returners. They drop out to deal with whatever crisis they have on the home front that is preventing them from coming in to complete their learning. Then a year later or two years later, they'll pop up again and show back up and say, here I am again. Here's a new set of goals that I'm working towards. So I feel like, by and large across the state, that's sort of the population that we deal with in our programs. So I think that's how we came to the 80 ks per county base. Need to have a presence. We need to be sure that we're equitable in terms of all students in the state who are seeking our services can get them, but without funneling a lot of funding into an area that has a low number of students and then shortchanging areas that have a large number of students that are participating.

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: We did submit this graph for the testimony today to be added. And this graph really shows the first line here is the old funding formula. And this orange here is the amount per student that the Northeast Kingdom was getting compared to the other. And that's just amount per student more. So this was under the previous form. And this is what really was the catalyst for the conversation was the fact that the Northeast Kingdom was getting so much more money.

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: And they agreed to that. They recognized this has been inequitable for a long time.

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: The second one over is the compromise that the agency of education came up with last year and the model that they were recommending that we continue to move forward with. The third one is scenario one, which is the one that we're advocating for. Then you have the next one over was the one that the Northeast Kingdom was originally advocating for before they decided to side with the agency of administration, which is the last one. If you look at the difference, just focusing on these two here, the one that we're looking at and the one that the agency of administration has submitted, there's still about $1,000 per student difference between what Val will be receiving per student and what the Northeast Keynote will be receiving per student with those two scenarios. So we really just want to make sure that we're using a formula that's equitable across the state so that we don't have this discrepancy of certain counties receiving significantly more funding per student than other counties.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: We had no argument over the 80,000 base funding. No,

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: we all agreed We on all agreed on that. It's that metrics of what else should be included. And the straight student numbers to us seemed like the fairest, easiest, most equitable method after you do that base. The original recommendation from this agency of education when the RFP came out, which kind of threw us off for loop, and Nick kind of alluded to that earlier, was a straight funding, which would have decimated the Northeast Kingdom. And it would have been really good for VAL, but we also recognize that that's not really fair for adult learners across the state. And we wanted to make sure that all adult learners were being able to be served. And we didn't want to see the Northeast Kingdom go under because of that. And so we were originally advocating for a more equal formula that did support the Northeast Kingdom and allowed them to have additional support. So we have come to the table uncompromised a lot. And VAL and CVAE is continuing to see less funding even under our scenario than the others. But we do feel like scenario one is an equitable solution.

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: Because the second column in

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: the AOE recommend, that was a temporary recommend, not a we think it should go this way forever, right?

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: No, but in the report that Nick submitted, the Agency of Education did ask that they continue with this scenario. Second one. Yes, that was their recommendation, was that continued for the next two years. Because the way it's working right now is that every two to three years, and current one is a three year cycle, we have to reapply for the funds. So we're currently in year we're just finishing up year one of a three year grant cycle. The agency of education's recommendation was we keep the funding formula the same until the grant cycle is over, then we look at

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: Great, doing it thank you. You're welcome. What were your thoughts on that proposal?

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: Again, that one is There's not a lot of difference between that proposal, which is this one, and Nick's proposal. The agency There's really funding. There's not a whole lot of difference. It's a complicated formula, and that's where it gets messy, is that it's really inconsistent because it brings in a whole bunch of other metrics beyond just the student number and focuses on a lot of census data, which as we all know, can be really outdated really fast because sometimes the census data is eight or nine years old. And so it's based on data that's not really accurate.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Is student hours something you track anyway?

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: We enter them into a statewide database because there are metrics that we need to hit. So it's not a metric that's been important to the agency of education in all the years that we've been a recipient of the funds. The only point where it becomes important is for the federal government. They have this thing called the federal report that lords over a lot of the work that we do. But it's really about getting students to two magical moments, and one is twelve hours of service with us and the other is forty hours. And if you hit both of those places, at forty hours, you'll be reassessed, and it'll measure whether you've made skill gains in the time that you've been working with your teacher. And those two things will hit what they call the federal report. And that's what the agency of Ed obviously needs to submit to the feds to show what kind of work we're doing here

[Tara Brooks, Executive Director, Vermont Adult Learning]: in the state around adult education. Yeah, and that's under Title II, Wheel IS. But it's a small portion of the overall state funding, it really is.

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: And there's no sort of monitoring system for that. So just as a point of education, each of our teachers goes into the system and enters in, Oh, I met with Sarah yesterday for an hour, and we worked on math, or whatever it is. The system is pretty wide open. There's no monitoring or auditing of that system to say, how closely does this match the reality of what's going on. Not to say, again, that anyone will be taking advantage of the system, but there are mistakes that get made. Teachers forget to put hours in. They're very, very busy. Or you fat finger something. Thank you.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Great. So, for the committees, I will convene a meeting with the chairs of Commerce and Appropriations to sort of see what we do and we'll then probably revisit it at a minimum. I suspect somebody wants a recommendation from us if we aren't taking the lead on it. And we need to get statutory language rolling along too. Okay. Great. Thank you very much for your time.

[Katherine Klausner, Executive Director, Central Vermont Adult Education]: Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education)]: Very clear. Very helpful.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: We call ourselves adjourned and we will return at 10:30 to Room 11 for a joint hearing with House Ways and Means.