Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Welcome to House Education on February 5. This is some time to really continue our discussion on the chronic absenteeism proposal that was brought to us. You'll see posted on today's website under Ledge Counsel's name sort of legislative language that she was provided in sort of out the form that we're normally used to. I had also posed a couple of questions via pledge counsel to the AOE as well that we can discuss. But I don't know, will ask our witnesses, did you come here with anything that you would like to present or not?

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: No, we thought we'd offer just a brief introduction and refresher of what we're proposing, then we were going to turn it over to you all to direct

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: That'd be great, thank you. Why don't you go right ahead?

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Very good. I'll start. So for the record, my name is Courtney O'Brien, sheher. I am the Agency of Education's Director for Safe and Healthy Schools. I'm Ann Bordenero, for the record, and I am the Senior Federal Policy Advisor for the agency of Ed.

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: Good afternoon. Jamie Crabo. I'm an Assistant Attorney General for the Agency of Education. I'm here testifying today on behalf of the Agency of Education, not the Attorney General's Office. And I use chief workmans. Thank you. And I do as well.

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: So thank you for inviting us back. We're very excited to see a little bit of progress in this space since we last talked. To set just kind of the tone for our conversation, as a reminder, the agency of education has been undergoing work in exploring improvements to chronic absenteeism as a statewide strategy for several years now. And that's actually quite well represented by the number of people you see here today. Folks may be a bit familiar with the internal restructuring that the agency underwent this past summer. And as a result, this work of chronic absenteeism was able to move through and be supported by a couple of teams. So it now is being supported and led by our Safe and Healthy Schools division. Prior to that division being stood up, my colleagues here, Anne and Jana, had done a significant amount of work, both internally and across our stakeholders and invested parties, to develop potential statutory language that could be presented in this session to help us move towards this chronic absenteeism shift. And so we've come here today to talk to you about any questions you might have around the proposed language. Jamie and Anne definitely have the best detail and background around how this language was developed and the parties that informed that discussion. But feel free to ask questions as needed, and we'll do our best to respond.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Maybe we could begin with a little bit about the genesis of all this and who the parties were that were involved in the creation of it.

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Probably the oldest member here in terms of involvement in this work. So the Interagency Prevention Committee out of the governor's office is a committee that meets regularly with representatives across, as the name suggests, all of the different state agencies that have anything to do with prevention. It might in fact be all of the state agencies, maybe not transportation. So prevention meaning like making sure that children and families are thriving and healthy and all those things. So back when Heather Boucher was deputy and then became interim secretary and I briefly became interim deputy secretary, we were asked well, she was on the committee, and then she was overwhelmed with so many other things to do that she asked me to sometimes go in her place. So I became the representative on a regular basis to the committee. And early on, we were sort of trying to settle on what the work for that year of the committee would be. And we strongly felt that we would like it to be focused on Title 16 and reforming and updating our truancy and compulsory attendance statute. We'd already had discussions prior to me joining between Secretary Boucher and I don't know who the secretary then of AHS was, but anyway, about the need to get some improvement in this space. And it involves Title 33 to a certain extent, as I think you're familiar in the AHS statutes and Title 16. And we felt like we needed to move forward with Title 16. It was really difficult to move forward in any way as an agency with new policies and practices in this space and leadership of of school districts with a statute that was so ancient and outdated. I think I said last time when I was on the screen that we were dealing with a statute that read like the outsiders, so from 1960s. So anyway, we began that work and a small group of us, I was working with a partner at AHS, and we did some research, a bunch of research into the national research in this space and discovered connections between chronic absenteeism and a bunch of other both positive and negative outcomes for students later in life, there's a pretty robust literature on that, brought that back to the committee, talked about the issues of concern to the different members of the committee. So that included people from mental health, health, family services, the state's racial equity office, all kinds of different folks. And a couple of things came up consistently in that group. One of them was inequity in the current system, primarily around how you define absences and how idiosyncratic and locally controlled it is. And so there was great inequity in that. And that had a knock on effect, which meant that the data we were relying on was really poor, because the data is only as good as the definitions underlying the data and the people who make determinations at the time of submission of the data. We also decided that folks were saying from every corner that they were hearing that there were all these inequities from the perspective of parents, like, people would raid, my kid got this letter, blah, blah, I mean, it was at that level of DCF and AOE and school districts, and everybody was kind of like the scarecrow pointing fingers, but wanting to work through it and work it out. So we moved from that space to focusing on Title 16. And at that point, I think you got involved and we did about a year's worth of work within the agency focusing on school districts that were already doing really great work in this space. So learning from them and relying on them as key informants and beginning to develop some of the statutory language. We spent a good amount of time on that. We also spent a good amount of time with our DCF family services division partners to see where our respective lines were in this space and our different timelines for working on these pieces. And and I think we ended up in a good place as far as, you know, who had what responsibilities and when in our timelines. And then in the fall of that year, we convened some stakeholder groups primarily concerned with restorative justice people leading in this space, local school SU and SD and school level administrators who were leading in this space and our colleagues in the various professional So Vermont principals, Vermont superintendents, Vermont school boards, special ed directors, you get it. So anyway, that took us through the '4, I think. And at that point, we were contemplating bringing it to you all last session, but really heard both externally and internally that we weren't quite ready yet. And so we ended up consult or contracting with a consulting group to help us expand more broadly in terms of stakeholder engagement and work on some of these pieces in more depth. And once we got that in place, we engaged in a second, much more robust round of stakeholder engagement throughout last summer and fall I

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: don't have the report in front

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: of me, but you will get a report that outlines all the different groups and individuals where I think we held multiple all over the state, multiple in person as well as virtual stakeholder engagement groups. So some of the same participants, but a whole lot of new participants, parents and kids and community representative, folks from the community, school folks, everybody. And we went out and gathered everyone's input. And not only did that affirm some of what that first year of work had led us, the directions the first year of work had led us in, but it also added to and sometimes modified where we came out based on that first year. And I guess the other group that I completely forgot to include is Jamie and I, primarily Jamie, were also engaging in 2024 in the fall and then in 2025 with the legal community. So representatives from the state's attorneys and some school district attorneys. I think we had one judge

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: in a focus group. Can't remember all of the particulars, but

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: we did work with the state's attorney in Southwestern. So they also contributed particularly to the truancy part of this language. Not so much in they didn't write the language, that's not their role, but we were listening to their input in So what we ended up coming up that brought us to the twenty sixth session.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great, thank you for the background. And I realize we're repeating a little bit from before, but that's not always such a bad thing for us anyway. So I had had a couple

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: of

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: questions that Legis Council sent your way, and it was really just sort of about I I think conceptually, I didn't have any questions about, like, why are you doing this or anything else like that. And I really appreciate the level of engagement that you all had with everybody involved in this. Mine was a little more technical, and that is that in some areas it applies to public schools, in some areas it applies to approved independent schools. It almost never refers to recognized schools. And that it doesn't discern between students that have independent school, maybe from out of state and absenteeism. And so I guess, for example, if this is about making sure all Vermont's kids are engaged in learning, why aren't recognized schools part of the equation of this?

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: I think that the answer to that is that we have had such different levels of oversight over recognized schools as opposed to upper independent schools, obviously public schools. And so this recognizes an expansion, as it is, to cover the obligations to go over approved independent schools. And I don't think we anticipated exercising that additional level of control over recognized independent schools at this point. What do we do currently in terms of that sort of record keeping?

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: Currently, for recognized, I guess.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. No, no, for all, each and every level.

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: For approved independent schools, the state board rules, at least in machine 01/1966, require them to maintain an attendance policy and keep attendance records. But these statutes do not address approved independent schools or any independent schools, other than to say that a student must be enrolled in and attend a school when they're compulsory school age.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I want make sure I heard this right. Right now, we require individuals to recognize schools.

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: Then then approve Are to attend?

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yes, but in terms of keeping track of any of that.

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: I would actually have to go back and look at the state board rules, but I don't believe that there is significant levels of oversight that we have over their attendance. My understanding,

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: correct me if I'm wrong, Jamie, is that our thought was our primary lever is over students who are funded through public dollars. So that is where our primary oversight responsibility lies. Currently, as of last year, that's only in approved independent schools, right?

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: Yes, and independent schools that are out. Therapeutic? Well, therapeutic are a type of approved independent schools, but also independent schools under EQS, which I think is just one of those.

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: And so that's where our concern is, is with those that are

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Publicly funded. So I'm not sure that the language necessarily discerns between just a private pay student at an approved independent school and a publicly funded student at an independent school? And should we make a change?

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Well, if I may, so I think to kind of wrap that up, we're really thinking about this idea of shared accountability for shared funding. So that's where this idea of expanding this into approved independent schools that are receiving public dollars for education is the direction we're headed. Both philosophically and at a logistics level, it would not be practical to enact this legislation for a specific student attending school within an independent school. When we talk about this shift from truancy to chronic absenteeism, a really important thing that we're talking about here is the idea that chronic absence impacts all in a school community rather than just having that very acute impact at a student to student level. So if we were to go down a path where we were, if at all practical, which I will share is probably not feasible anyway, but if we were to try to manage this at a student to student level, we're not accounting for that expansion of impact. So we're really looking at school systems here as being the lever in which we can make change in chronic absenteeism. And so when we think about schools which receive education funding, public education funding, and our approved independent schools are what we're talking about here. I think what Jana is referring to is there's a subset of schools. And I'm not the expert on independent schools,

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: but it's eligible to receive public funding. There's a new category that has come up. Well, some approved independent schools are not eligible to receive public funding.

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Yes, yes. So in cap

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We're only referring to approved independent schools eligible to receive health tuition.

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Yes, exactly. Yes, so that's what this language is meant to achieve, to capture and kind of bring into the fold any approved individuals receiving public funding for any of their students.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great, thank you. Some clarity on that. But we'd probably still within that category be really Vermont only students, I would imagine.

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Those are referred to in the truancy part.

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: Yeah, so 11/26, we start referring to Vermont resident students for the truancy requirements. But we wouldn't expect schools to have different intervention policies for students based on where their residents are. How they're paying.

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: So that's one of the practicalities. As a school, you're not brave. One set of attendance policies, you're going to gather data on attendance, keep track of attendance in one way to be maintaining the system for Vermont tuition students and everybody else.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: doesn't make sense, but when it comes down to truancy and accountability, then they're not going to be referring kids who are coming from other states to the local sending

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: advisory union.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Do you have a sense of I think we're always concerned, and we'll get testimony from the field, but does this significantly increase any sort of burden on public schools? Or is it really The record keeping is the same, but the approach is, I suppose, softened from the days of the outsiders. Street toughs out there skipping school.

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Sure, course. I'm always hesitant to speak on behalf of each and every school. For the most part, the input that we And I would actually say, I struggling to find an example of where somebody provided feedback in contrary to this. But the vagueness of the current process is what is causing a lot of time spent in school districts. So I think that this process, yes, will have some change management and yes, will require some PD and some training to make sure folks are using the new system appropriately and the new procedures are working well. But in the end, should actually help to simplify and clarify who should be taking responsibility for what part of the process. There are some supervisor unions who are doing this very well and have been providing very robust early interventions all along. There are some SUs who may not be in that space. And so that's where we might see that, yes, there may need to be a different approach and a bit more effort from those SUs to try to understand that early intervention component rather than perhaps managing the same amount of effort, if not more, later in the process when things have escalated. And

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: would you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: say in your estimation that this gives schools, like, there's some teeth behind this, that, right, that that you know, because the chronic absenteeism, it seems to me, is is some of it comes from the families too. Right? That, you know, parents are letting their kids stay home or whatever. So as long I feel like as long as it's had some appropriate steals that schools can lean on, that would be good.

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Yeah. And, we talk a lot about clarity is kindness, I think this is another example that we've heard from families as well, that there's just not a lot of clarity in why these communications are happening. I don't know that it's I think it's a little evolved. Yes, I think that we will have some families that this is new, and it's something that we need to get used to. And having that support from a state level really helps that conversation. But there are a number of families and caregivers that we spoke with that expressed just frustration with the inconsistency and the non clarity that's available in the current process. So why am I getting this letter? What does it mean? Who made the decision, excused versus unexcused? I think, did you all have something to

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: I was just going to add

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: that the definitions, I think, are pretty much a response to that. The definitions are our effort to be really clear with everyone, including parents, including classroom teachers, including principals, administrators, everyone about what constitutes an excused and an unexcused absences and make that consistent across the state. And, you know, it defines in here a whole bunch of categories where superintendents can excuse absences. It also leaves the door open for the unusual circumstance that has to be there. You know, there's always going to be something that doesn't quite fit in the category, but but it narrows the range of potential. I don't even want say narrow, but it clarifies for everyone. And that's been part of it with parents, as you said, is accompanying this is going to be a whole lot of guidance. And a perfect example is some people keep their kids home because since COVID, there's this misunderstanding of when is your kid too sick to go to school. And so one of the things we're going to do is try to clarify that guidance with school nurses and the pediatric community around when should kids go to school? Like every sniffle does not mean they need to stay home. If your kid needs mental health support and is anxious about going to school, the answer isn't necessarily to keep them home from school. The answer is to make sure that they get support in school. And so the definitions here for excused and unexcused and what needs to happen in the particularly early intervention stage, which is the part that's probably most neglected and least consistent, will help, I think, both, if you want to say, increasing accountability with families, but also with schools in terms of what they need to do to support families, what families' obligations are. And hopefully we won't get to a situation where there's a chronic pattern of absence and eventually truancy by doing that. I don't believe there are too many people who just keep their kids home because they don't care. There's likely at least one and that's what this is meant to address. So yes, along with everything else, but more on the prevention side. And it should be picked up in that prevention side through the different kinds of attempts by the school to reach out to and interact with the family in an effective way. That's an obligation on the part of the family or caregiver to also be on the other side of that interaction.

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: So I just wanted to say that the teeth were already there and that the language around truancy and what state's attorneys could do was already in statute. What this does is actually, if it gets to that level and we're hoping it gets to that level less frequently because of school level interventions that are happening earlier. But when it does get to that level, the school is going to turn over to the truancy officer, and

[Ann Bordenero, Senior Federal Policy Advisor (Vermont Agency of Education)]: the truancy officer is going to turn over to the state's attorney a protocol that outlines all of the interventions that have already been put into place or attempted. Which is something we heard from the legal communities was frequently not there. When they got a case, they were sort of starting from scratch trying to figure out had anything been done other than recording absence. So, yeah, so we're building that from the front end. Good.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Representative McCann?

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: They got a question from a couple of days ago, because I think this is the right spot for the right people. And I just heard you use a word that made me think about this question. Somewhere in the language that's already been drafted so far, it says parent or guardian, and I'm wondering if that's still the going phrase, because a lot of schools have moved to parent or caregiver, And I heard you, Andy, use the word caregiver. So I'm just wondering what that language should say, and how we want to communicate that best. And what's legal versus what's the right thing to-

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Jana, I look to you on that for that. I think that legal definition is really important here.

[Jamie Crabo, Assistant Attorney General (assigned to the Agency of Education)]: The term guardian has lots of different legal understandings, depending on how it's defined in statute or elsewhere. Here, we attempt to define it in a way that conveys the reasonably understood meaning of the terms parent or guardian. We could consider caregiver, but I think we were aiming for guardian because caregiver could include a more informal relationship that a guardian wouldn't necessarily include. Here, though, we also include students when they are emancipated, or if they're an unaccompanied minor. That's not usually what you're thinking of when you're thinking of a parent or guardian. But we want to make sure that we have mechanisms in place to ensure that students, especially who are in less stable home conditions, are encouraged to attend school and are receiving the same level of interventions from their school.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: Glad you all are talking about it, and I appreciate the time.

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: I'd like to suggest, Jana, maybe we should check-in with DCF as well to ensure that there's not because we do talk about this interaction between Title 33 and Title 16, I and think we should be very clear that if we change the language, does that disrupt anything when that handoff happens?

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: If you find an inconsistency there and you want to make a change, would you alert our legislative as well? I'm just looking around the committee to see if there are other questions. So we'll just get some feedback from the field next week, which I suspect will be perfectly positive. And other than that, if there's no other questions, we'll break until two. Other questions committee? Great. Thanks for taking the time and sort of getting us back grounded in this.

[Courtney O'Brien, Director of Safe and Healthy Schools (Vermont Agency of Education)]: Please let us know if there's anything else we can help with and we're happy to come back.