Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: All right, welcome back to House Education February 10. We're gonna spend some time right now in the committee asking questions, getting a little bit of a tutorial on the district builder mapping tool that is housed in the Transportation. At the state level, it is what we have been looking at in terms of the draft map that was presented last week, and I have encouraged all the committee members to use it, to play with it, to perfect the draft that's on the table, but we probably need to learn a little bit about how to use it, but more importantly, how to overlay information that people want to see on it, such as channel names and whatnot. So anyway, John, welcome, you probably should introduce yourself, and then if you wouldn't mind kind of walking through basic functionality again with us, and then we can get into some more detailed refinement, period.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah, that sounds great. I'm John Adams, director at the Center for Geographic Information, part of the Agency of Digital Services. I did put together a slide deck for you all so that you have have some of that information to refer to, and I will share my screen here. I think you should see the slide deck, can you?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yes, perfectly.

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

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Here.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Alright. So just very quickly, for anyone who's not familiar with the Center for Geographic Information, this is a high level summary of our charge and statute. We're part of the agency of digital services. We group what we do into sort of three buckets. One is build those foundational data sets from which we derive most other mapping data, so things like aerial imagery, elevation data, tax parcel data, municipal boundaries. We lead the development and coordination of the state's GIS system, know, so, herding herding cats and working with people across different agencies and state government and trying to make sure what we're doing all works together, and then empowering folks with data access, visualization, and use. Doing things like we're we're doing here, building tools for you all to use to visualize some of this information. We were created back in 1992. This is our first director, Bruce Westcott. Our annual report had showed that we had about a 107 users. People would fill things out by mail and get our state database on these 12 floppy disks. Things are are very different now. We have well over a 100,000 a 100,000 users a month with over a billion map requests this year. People know people access information differently. It's similar to how you use Netflix for movies now instead of going to the video store, getting actual VHS cassettes. And then we work with our partners to federate data and make it all available in single place. And then if anyone's interested in learning more about what we do outside the world of education, there's a year in review here, a link with over 40 examples of of how GIS is used in state government. So on to some of the mapping tools we built for x '73 and for the redistricting task force. If you go to map.vermont.gov/education, you'll see a link to these three tools. One is the the district builder, which allows you to piece together districts and then see what those configurations mean in terms of various metrics that were laid out in the the law. The school explorer, you can think of this as a mapping tool with a lot of different layers that you can you can see on top of each other. And then the the drive time mapper was a specific one that helped visualize drive times. I will walk through some of those. This this was all built. This is all custom built, open source technology. So if anyone's interested, then they go here. They can see all of the the code behind this, and it's all publicly available and transparent. So this is when you open up the school district builder. This should be the screen that you see. I think it's important to understand the way this works is it uses Vermont's tabs as the building blocks to create these these school districts. So it uses the ADM, student resident ADM, so the the numbers at the town level, and then it as you select towns, it aggregates those in real time as you assign towns to districts. You can toggle on that shows schools if you wanna see schools on the map. If you click on the legend, you can actually hide, you know, different types if you're interested in seeing different school types on the map. There are a few different ways you can go about assembling or building districts. The first is on the map, if you were to just select, you know, a district on the right and then start clicking on towns, you would be assigning them to a district, and their color will change to match the active district that you have and give you numbers on information on the number of students, grand list per student, and then some information about the schools in those towns that you've selected. You can also start from a few base existing configurations. So you could start by county, school board, association regions, CTE regions, regional planning commissions, for example. And then you could then, you know, select a add a district or select a district and start modifying them if you didn't wanna start from a blank a blank map. And then if you were to click over on the supervisory union tab, you'll see you should see little dots with colors once things are assigned to towns. This shows you the the color of the dots corresponds to the the districts that you've created, and it shows you the where they are in terms of the existing supervisory union. And this could be helpful at a glance to see if you've put, you know, towns in, if you've split up supervisory union or you've put different towns in a supervisory union. The if you wanted to share or save anything, there are a couple of different ways to do it. So if you were to click on more and click export CSV, this creates a file on your computer, and when you wanna resume work later, you select import assignments, and then you can drag and drop that file. So the CSV assignments is a table, and it has a list of all of the towns and then the districts that you've assigned it to, and then you can resume work on that file. This would be the most robust way to save any configuration. So if you've spent a lot of time working on something, I highly recommend exporting the CSV assignments. The the image is just an image of the map, and then the the shareable link is the the easiest way if you wanted to share the work you've done with someone, click copy shareable link, and it would it will generate a long URL. And what those are are you can think of them as instructions telling the application about your your configuration. So it's like a a blueprint. It is a snapshot. So if you make some changes, you need to click that. Again, it won't keep track of the changes you're you're making. So that's what those

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: John, I had a I I think I ran into a little bit of trouble with the shareable link. I sort of worked on it, then wanted to save it, so I emailed myself the shareable link. Then I went back to it and worked on it some more. Clicked on copy shareable link, but it didn't seem to, as I say this out loud, I actually think I know what I did wrong. And instead of clicking shareable link, I went up and just copied the URL that was in my browser. Okay, I'll just talk my way through that. Yeah. Josh?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. And that's a natural that's, you know, that's it's it's challenging. We're we're trying to make something that you don't need to create a login. Try to keep it as simple as possible. And and, yeah, figuring figuring that out was a challenge. It's not maybe necessarily the most intuitive, but I think understanding, like, you have to click that cop copy shareable link if you make changes again. Don't just copy the URL you're in.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yep.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: And, I I highly recommend saving that CSV as that that hard copy backup of the table if you spend a lot of time working on on something. Yes.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I may just talk publicly about the issue I had with that that I discussed with you, is that when I created the CSV, it appeared as an Excel spreadsheet when I clicked on the download, and it didn't seem to work when I tried to import it again.

[Joshua Dobrovich (Member)]: That's the same problem I had.

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

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Even though it said that it was a CSV.

[Joshua Dobrovich (Member)]: Yeah. And then you drag and drop it. Yeah. And whether I moved it into a different folder or I tried to put in different places. I even tried to, like, copy all of the cells and dump that, and none of it would go over.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Interesting. Yeah. I'm happy to explore that more afterwards. It's possible you it was opened in Excel and maybe saved as an Excel XLSX file instead of a CSV.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Do you know if

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: you can do I was able to take the CSV that you had sent me and load it up. So

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. Okay. Alright. And that was, you know, whenever you were able to do it, I wasn't. And and so I figured it must be something with my rather old laptop and old Excel software. I don't know. But anyway, just let me It does work so that if we You say that's the most robust way to save our work. And so if it doesn't sort of drag and drop in, you're there to help us.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yes. Yeah. It's very possible there's a bug in this. You know, this is custom software we built pretty quickly. So but it is a, you know, written record of the towns and what you've assigned them to. So at the very least, we can work from that. But if if anyone has any trouble, please reach out. I'm happy to to trouble troubleshoot or help make that work.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So one thing that came up a lot is, hey. Can you print out a map? Can you print out this map with the towns overlaid upon it? And I didn't know the answer to that because I hadn't really taken it any further than where we just stopped slide deck.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. So the

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. I'm sorry. I interrupted your slide decks. Why don't you finish up your presentation?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Okay. I can I can fly through some of these and then get to to talk about that and see if there's any any changes we should make to that? If you if you select generate report in the application, you'll see some charts, and it creates some tables and summary statistics of the the districts you've drafted. Here's an example of some of those right here. And if you you hover over some of those items, it'll give you a little bit more information or detail. You keep scrolling down, you can see the district profiles, you can click on the different districts. These are just I had selected regional planning commissions as the default, so that's what you're seeing here. And you you can see more more information about those. That's the the district builder. And Okay. Mhmm.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Maybe before we move past that, if you'd go back to the report generated, so much for my call to get through the slide deck first. But one statistic that I think a lot of people are really interested in is the FCI categories, which is the facilities condition index. It shows sort of like how many buildings in the district that was created are good, Beth. Could you just talk about how to read that?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Sure. Let me see. Let me pull up the actual If you if you're looking at it from the data table here Yep. And you hover over it, it tells you the number of different schools you have and their facility condition index by category. And then I believe if you scroll down to the bottom, it breaks it out for each school as well. The different districts, you can scroll down, you can see the FCI there.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Oh, yeah. Great.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: And then you you can export export that as a table, and it should also have some FCI information that you can then open up in Excel if you're interested.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Alright. Thank you.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: So that's what this looks like. If you export that table, you'll see, you know, number by FCI here.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Which table are you

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: If you were to ex hit click on this export export this table to CSV

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Oh, okay.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: You then get those summary statistics in a table that you can open in Excel. Great. So that that's the district builder. Should I move on to the school explorer? Do we wanna talk a little bit more about builder?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Let me just ask the committee any further questions there. Every time I go into it, continue to be really impressed with the usable information and how accessible it is. Really great. So how do we so is is explore just a whole different thing to click on? In other words, we can't get to it from the district builder.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: You can't if you go to the if you go to that route homepage, themap.vermont.goveducation, you can click on the builder or the explorer. We could put a a link to it in the builder if it's helpful. But

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: That might be actually yeah. It might be kinda nice to be able to kinda click back and forth. Mhmm.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: This one so if you click on by default, the schools are are turned on, and if you were to click on them, you'll see information about those schools pop up in the in the bar on the left, and if you select map layer, this gives you a tab with the option to toggle on a bunch of different layers on and off, you could do, you know, school districts or lots of different information. It's relatively, if we have the information or the map, it's relatively easy for us to add to this. And this actually was an evolution, I think, of a mapping tool that we had helped create for house education last year, so this is an an iteration of that. And just to point out, because I know there was some interest in in, you know, the existing school districts. Some of them can be challenging to see because they can be overlapping. So if you and and there is an overlay that shows, you know, where you have overlapping districts. But when you click on them, you'll see, like, the different districts. You'll see information about the town, the different districts, and the SU pop up on the on the left for the town that you've clicked.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So would you go back to the previous map you had up? So what layers do you have selected in order to have the coloring?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. So here, we selected school districts. And then if you just click on

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Oh, there it is. Yep. Thank you.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: A school district, then you get some information about that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I've seen a version of this mapping tool that could provide even some additional detail around sort of school student profiles, free and reduced lunch rates. Has that ever been part of this tool, or am I just imagining? I thought I had seen that before.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: I don't think that there's anything in here about the free and reduced lunch unless it's in the at the district level. But I don't think it is.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: They can poke around and see what I can

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: I guess I guess they're if you look at, like, the

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Supervisory union, supervisory district, there is some information there. But if there's anything that you wanna see that's not here and that and it is available, I guess that it isn't very hard for us to add different layers or other additional information to the map. We did just add the latest layer we added, and this was a request from Senate Education, and we were able to obtain this data from the Agency of Education. So this shows the the school flows from, like, the town the students resident residents, their town to what school they attend. And for the towns, we use the town clerk's office as the as the starting point for these lines to the schools. And as long as there are more than there are three or more students from a town going to a particular school, then that line will be reflected reflected on the map. And I thought, I think this this is some helpful helpful information or helpful data to to overlay. If you were to click on them, you'll see

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Excellent CTE. So,

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: if you click on those, you should see, you know, there are 374 residents in Williston who attend Champlain Valley School. So there we also and I'll show you this. We just published a new app to make it easier to explore this a little bit. Very briefly, this is the School Explorer. So this is the third application you can access from that main home page. This uses you can look at this from the school's perspective or the town's perspective, and it lets you select. Let's say you are just selecting a school and on the screen, you know, Twinfield is the example. It shows you a breakdown by town of how far what the the drive time is for for students. It's not using actual student residences. We used a model where we use e nine one one addresses, and then we assigned a fraction of a student to each address and then calculated the drive time to all the different residences to help understand distance from schools to populations in different towns, or you can look at it from the town's perspective. For example, you select the town, and then you see how far schools are for for their their populations. And then this is the final app that we just published. And then this lets you these are those those town flows, and you can select e again, from the town or the school perspective, but you select, you know, here, South Hero, for example, and it shows you the lines of where students are going to school, and then the numbers on the left here. And then similarly, selecting from the school's perspective, can select the school, and then you can see the different towns and the numbers of students coming

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: from those towns. John, thank you for your patience with us and especially me. Could you just walk through again how you got to that from the sort of opening page to to to get to this right here?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. Because we just published it, so I haven't actually put it on the opening page yet, but we will. Right now, the best way to do it is in the slide deck you have is to click right here.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. Okay.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: But we'll get it up on that that homepage.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Okay. Great. Great. And I have another question under in the list of various map layers. There's one that's called school board association survey of school board chairs. What does that refer to?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. That let me pull that up. This was a survey that the association had done of its members, and the redistricting task force wanted to see this on a map to see if there were there were patterns. So if you select if you click on those and select them, you'll see the different comments that were received from different school districts there. And

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Okay. Perfect.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: I had we had made made an attempt to try to categorize them in terms of, like, some form of partnership discussed or partners identified. The comments were all fairly nuanced, so it wasn't very it wasn't as simple as we had we had hoped. But that's what that's what that layer is.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: That's it's kind of amazing. A

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: few other things very quickly that I thought, you know, might be helpful just to leave you with. Senate education, they wanted printable 11 by seventeens of the existing districts and supervisory unions. That's all those are. If you click on those links, you can download a higher higher resolution version that you can print that has the town names on them as well as some higher resolution, or these would be, like, 24 by 36 PDFs and versions with and without traffic and elevation on them. And, again, there's the school districts and the SUs, SDs. And then I also made a version of the the draft from from last week. I don't know what the official title of it is, but I called it called it house It's the draft.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It's the draft from last week. It's the draft from last week.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: I called it House Committee on Education draft two five twenty six. Perfect. So if you click on these links, you'll access a high resolution version of these that have the town names and the schools on them.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Okay. And those links that we could click on to get to those are in the slide deck you're providing, not readily accessible on the Vermont School Explorer map, for example.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Correct. Okay. Could we could add these layers if the if we could add this layer to the School Explorer if you thought that would be helpful or

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Not at this point. The I mean, the the map and links to it are why being widely distributed anyway, so I think it's fine.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: That, I think, covers everything in the the slide deck there.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great. Representative Dobrovich has a question.

[Joshua Dobrovich (Member)]: It's actually a question for you that could lead to a question, Ben. Yeah. Does it make sense to take all of these tools and put them in Builder so you can be in Builder, don't have to keep going to that document or their website. You can just go in there and it has to link to all the different tools so you can open them from there instead of having to search?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: That's not a question for me.

[Joshua Dobrovich (Member)]: So John, can you take, those are all fantastic tools. Is there a way to take whatever I would, air quotes, make the parent tool and then have links to all of those other tools within that parent tools. Like, let's say it's the builder, and then you would have the one that has the feeding patterns, the overlays, and all that within it, so I don't have to keep going to the website or to the document just all in one tool?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: That is a little bit of what this landing page is. Yeah. But we can we can make them it wouldn't it wouldn't be hard to link to the other apps from the other apps so that they feel a little bit more seamless or you can go from one to another without And

[Joshua Dobrovich (Member)]: now for the bigger question. Each of those build or each of those tools has incredible information that would be beautiful if you could overlay, let's say, a map from the builder to the feeding patterns for the schools, so you can overlay one over the other to see where all that happens instead of having to go into each individual tool to create your map. Is there a way to do that?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: We could look into finding a way to for, like, the the the flow map, for example, there's we could probably have a way to open up your or export and upload your proposal there. The reason we've created the district builder and the school explorer in separate ones is having the read only maps that you can layer on top versus the, like, the builder would create challenges from a u user experience, but also the technical back end that they are different. So it isn't you know, we couldn't having all of the layers in the School Explorer available in the district builder may not work, but we could look into a way so that you could take your districts and like, I don't know. You you tell me what are, like, the most helpful things that to overlay with those.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, well, well, like, might the answer to the question be if one of us has, like, could you please create the draft map that we have and overlay the patterns of the schools, and then ask you to sort of create it? Is probably a better solution for us as we go through this work?

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. I think for certain that that may may make sense. There's there's also if you wanna start on, like, the school explorer, have a little section of draft maps, it's not very hard for us to put those in there. And then, you know, as long as you're naming them and you could recognize what they are, you open that up and you can see a list of the draft maps and toggle those on.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, if that That fantastic. Sounds

[Joshua Dobrovich (Member)]: because the question for me is what would be best used. I don't know. I'd like to see it play with it all as part of it because I've enjoyed going in there and playing with all the data, so it's hard for me to say what would be better, what would be worse, but I like that idea of if you have a draft map, you can then put it in there to play with.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So maybe once we get some consensus on the draft map, and by consensus, I would call not a consensus that people would like to further explore the details of. We could ask John to to do exactly that and and make it available on the Explorer app to overlay those things.

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. I'll leave I'll leave it up to you to decide, you know, what you'd wanna put put up there. It's not hard for us to do. So if you had, you know, ten ten drafts, even if there isn't consensus on those, we we can put those up there. But, again, leave it up to you to decide what what you'd like to see there.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And to be clear, putting those up there, it it's up there for everybody. Right? Once you sort of do that, if that if the site is public, it's for everybody to look at. Would this be a thing that we could project on this big screen right here? If we wanted to do a side by side rather than all of us staring at these tiny little screens, something it's could be projected from- Yeah, we can, it was just as simple as sharing a screen. Oh, by side may be a little more challenging, but- I was thinking all 10. I'm not sure we can do everything, we can at least put it up there and play with it if that's what we wanna do. All right, John, I know you're not feeling great today. We appreciate you taking the time with us and your patience with us, and really great appreciation for these tools, they're fabulous. Yeah,

[John Adams, Director, Vermont Center for Geographic Information (Agency of Digital Services)]: thank you.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Thank you. Committee, why don't we take five minutes and reconvene here