Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Welcome back to House Education, Friday, February 13. We are very fortunate for the next half hour because we have a room full of students from around the state here to talk to us. They're from Up With Learning. And I would just like to turn the floor over to whoever the emcee of the next half hour is going to be. Will that be you or? Is not. Who's joining us?

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for having us. It's lovely to be here with all of you. These amazing youth and adult team members have created this presentation to share a little bit of our journey as a team this year and things that they want to bring forward to you.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Will part of what we're about to hear explain exactly what Up For Learning is, or should we take thirty seconds to sort of give us an update?

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: Yeah, go for it.

[Lindsay Hallman (Executive Director, Up for Learning)]: Introduce yourself and then Hi we'll everyone, my name is Lindsay Hallman, I'm the Executive Director at Up For Learning. Up For Learning is a nonprofit. We work with schools throughout the state of Vermont and throughout the country on reimagining and transforming education through youth adult partnership. So our work is around using participatory action research with our youth and adults together to employ data, to bring in the voices from their community to ensure that they are centering students and equity in all that they do. And so we have to work with youth and adults from all three of these school districts, and you'll hear a presentation with them today about a future facing education in Vermont. We're happy to take questions afterwards, but I'm just here as

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great, all right, well, whoever is ready to begin, we are ready to listen.

[Julian Pass (Student)]: My name is Julian Pass, and I'm a junior at Long Fair High School, And I'm here because a good education always includes student input. My name is Tyler Parker.

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: I'm from Caledonia High School. And I'm

[Unidentified student speaker]: here because I really value your student voice, especially when making decisions about education.

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: I'm Zoe Tremblay. A junior at Randolph High School. I'm here because I see the potential of the younger generation, and I want to see them have the opportunities they need to thrive.

[Eric Whale (Student, Randolph High School)]: My name is Eric Whale. I'm a sophomore at Randolph High School. I'm here because I believe every student has different needs and unlimited potential.

[Aliger (Allegra) Muller (Student)]: My name is Alliger Muller. I'm a senior at High School. I'm here because I value the education that I have gotten and I believe youth voice should be involved in processes that are affecting us directly.

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: My name is Joseph Armstrong. I am a eleventh grade student at Randolph Union High School. I'm here because I believe that student voice in the education system is an incredibly important to the world of successful student. I'm Charlotte Badd.

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: I'm Beth Quimby High and I'm I'm Charlotte here for Beth Quimby. I believe that multiple perspectives are important to going through a process of change. I'm Olivia Scharnberg, I'm a senior at Buffalo a High School and I'm also a youth program specialist at Up For Learning and this project felt like an important space to collaborate with other students from different districts and I'm proud to live with them accomplished.

[Scott (Up for Learning staff)]: Scott, I work at Up Throw Learning and I think this has been one of the best projects that shows us that she reimagined in transforming education. I also just want to make sure we recognize that part of our team, the White River Valley Supervisory Union class could not here testify, but they have been involved in all aspects of our data collection. Hi everybody, Katie Ingram, up for learning. I'm here because I think it's important to have youth voice at the forefront. Hi, I'm Kara Merrill.

[Katie Ingram (Up for Learning)]: I'm one of the school counselors at Randolph Unions, and I'm here because I believe that as we contemplate how to make educational changes in Vermont, they should be listening to our youth voice.

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: Good morning, everybody. I'm Superintendent Michael Clark from the Orange Southwest School District, and Orange Southwest is really proud to have hosted Up For Learning for this project so that we're bringing student voice to you all at the legislature, but also collecting it throughout the state, sharing with you the importance of that. So thank you for having us.

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: So we are here to talk with you today to share the work from our youth adult team that represents the diversity of Stoms of Vermont. The purpose of our Future of Education team is to attempt to bring student voice to the school redistricting process that you are all working on. We all believe that the redistricting process should include those who are directly affected by changes being made and should prioritize student voice. As students from three different school districts, we hope to share our process of gathering perspectives of our community members and to share the differences that we realize between our schools. From discussing with the other student representatives at our retreats from our three different schools, we realized the differences between our school communities. So there are differences in flexible pathways or educational opportunities that are available to us. There are differences in the strength of our school communities and the relationships within them. I know that I personally would not have been able to succeed in my education journey without those flexible pathway opportunities and without those school relationships. So we went back to our individual schools and we asked questions to students, staff, and our communities in the form of circles. And we asked them, What makes a great school? And what does education that prepares you for your future look like? We have also shared this presentation with school boards, select boards, city councils, other community groups. We found that in every discussion that we had, we reached pretty much the same conclusion across all of the different schools, across all the different communities, and that is what we are going to share with you today. So this is the youth participatory actual research map that is used by Up For Learning, and we followed this when working on our project. So we built relationships with each other as students, we collected data through circles that I previously mentioned, and we analyzed as a group the data that we collected. And our hope is to implement action for change through presentations like this one.

[Unidentified student speaker]: These are some ideas of how we create future facing education that came up in multiple data collecting sessions. With more time, we can more fully understand the different learning opportunities between districts like flexible pathways, amount of support, sense of belonging, and data around disparities. And one thing we heard a lot despite our differences between districts is that we actually had a lot in common. With the time and data we had, we created this blueprint for creating future facing schools. And these are five aspects that we found especially important to create a future facing school, and they were academic freedom, variety of opportunities, real world community awareness and involvement, supporting belonging to a strong school community, and consistent expectations, and these will be more elaborated on in the next slides.

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: Throughout our data collection process, we found important themes of want for classes that can be prepared for our different pathways beyond high school. This would bring more passion and interest towards student learning. Generalized credits that would be met through diverse class selection. A part of the diverse class selection, we have opportunities for harder or easier classes, and prioritize a hands on version. Okay. For a variety of opportunities, we found that field trips and real life learning opportunities have been extremely helpful. I can see if I can and direct learning. Looking at personal finance along with management have also helped and have been prioritized through across all of the communities, students, and faculty. A variety of soft skills like social skills, public speaking, and leadership have also been communicated as very important. Communication of post high school opportunities starting sooner and younger grades rather than just the older high school grades like junior and senior year have been prioritized so that we can start thinking about our future. For the railroad community awareness and involvement, our students throughout the three schools have mentioned the importance of field trips and service learning trips like our trip to Morocco and our Bahamas trip for cultural immersion and marine restoration. Hands on learning and decipher of information like AI or misleading articles have also been mentioned as very important.

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: Another important education quality is a sense of belonging to a strong school community for students. This includes a close knit community where students can share opinions, where students can develop foundational relationships with fellow peers and teachers and faculty after school, which will allow them well, can also create safe and inclusive spaces, which will allow students to safely explore their identity and social location. And a student at our conference shared that adults empower students, student voice, and students empower each other. Another important quality is consistent and reasonable expectations for students, like ensuring more time and resources are given to student accommodations and individual student needs. This will allow students to fail safely and learn from their mistakes. Also, ensuring communication between students and teachers to enable effective education and preparing students for the real world with skills that we talked about earlier. Consistent expectations for students that will stay persistent through different teachers of different schools.

[Eric Whale (Student, Randolph High School)]: We see that the redistricting process is moving ahead quickly, and we wonder how you will ensure that the priorities of youth throughout the state are being considered as you make these decisions. We believe that the next step should be connecting with more youth across Vermont before decisions are made and identifying the similarities and differences between the districts. We also think that we should think about how we can do more with what we have learned. How can we help you to consider our voices as you make decisions rather than after? We welcome your answer to this question and we open it up to any more questions you might have.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you very much. As I was reading through the slides, it seems like everybody would agree that that's what makes a great school and a great education. One of the things we talk about a lot here is, especially at the middle school and high school level, that many of our schools have seen fewer and fewer students over the years. Went to Montpelier High School, like many of you. When I graduated, I had 145 kids in my class. I suspect you have far fewer than that. Do you have any thoughts about, as we think about fewer students in the state, that trend's going to continue, and the need to have fewer buildings because it's very expensive. But are advantages to gain in some of the things that you have listed there by having sort of larger school communities, especially in the upper grades?

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: Having a larger school would mean we would get more funding for our schools. However, it could mean a drawback on some of the opportunities that we do have by being a small school. I don't go to Montgomery, I go to Randolph instead. And I know if we had a larger school and more kids, we would probably not have as big of a sense of community that we do throughout our older grades. I know we don't have any quicks anymore because people move out of our school and there's a lot more younger kids than there are juniors like I am. We're all very tight knit and friendly and I could go up to any one of the juniors there or seniors, matter of fact, and start up a conversation. It's very not clicky. I also feel that we wouldn't be able to have trips outside of our state if we weren't as small as we are because we fundraise it all and we only have to fundraise for the students going on that trip, which could be like 10 max. Any

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: other input from

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: Just really quickly, I know that going to Mont Bel Air High School, we walk in the door every morning and Mr. Bennington is there, who knows the name of every single student at our school. And I think that is kind of like the basis for why we have such a good community. So I think that if there are larger schools, making sure that we keep that community importance and intertwinement of the whole community and all the students, like you were saying about how everyone knows each other, think that's really important to keep in mind.

[Unidentified student speaker]: I agree with that. I think, peculiar, we've gone to school with the same kids from elementary school all way through high school. I think with the bigger school, it'll make it harder to keep that same sense of belonging and community.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Committee, other questions?

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: Talk for some of the data we've already

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: merged many times and have

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: schools around, and I and I would welcome the students to reiterate this that they have found a hard time creating a sense of belonging and community connection as they've changed that pattern. Again, I don't hate to speak for them that they're not here, so if any of you wanna. I know they talked about a lot of bullying that goes on at that school and feeling like there's not, even that there are punishments, but a lot of us, they still have a hard time with bullying and harassment through many of the students. A lot of their prioritization was around building that sense of community and that sense of friendliness and relationships between each other as it grades, school, and through the teachers as well.

[Eric Whale (Student, Randolph High School)]: Just a quick follow-up, is

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: that bullying? Is it over, like up in your face, or is

[Eric Whale (Student, Randolph High School)]: that on phones and stuff?

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: I know they talked about in person bullying and slur use, but I think there's also stuff online as well. I think it's part of it. And I think it's also important, it wasn't just student to student bullying. They also had a lot of think there were a lot of teachers who were not feeling respected by the community or by other teachers. There was, yeah, it's not just students student bullying.

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: They spoke to a lot of interstaff conflict as well. Yeah. With parents feel like unheard of with their school system. So kind of in all areas. Yeah.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We live in challenging times, there's no doubt about it. Open it again to the committee. Any other questions or follow ups? Anything else that you all would like to add? We've got a few moments here.

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: I think we all have to say the one great thing about school. Okay, we were hoping that each one of us could share a good thing that's happened over the couple of months in our school that we really just wanted to share.

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: We would love that.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Take your time.

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: Well, as a freshman, I didn't realize the large amount of opportunities that was available to popular high school, and this year I just started learning Mandarin, and so far it has been really fun. And I don't think I could have done that at any other school with Western possibilities.

[Unidentified student speaker]: I think having all these opportunities at our school to explore new pathways and learn Mandarin or have community based learnings and be able to follow any path you want and just be able to learn anybody you want is really special at our school.

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: I have a good connection with a lot of the teachers there, especially our nurse. She has helped me so much in just so many aspects of my life. So I just want to shout her out because

[Eric Whale (Student, Randolph High School)]: People often say with a small school, there's a small amount of opportunity, but I've noticed and I've been part of a lot of fundraising efforts to make sure that every single student has the opportunity to go outside of the country or outside the state at least once in their high school career?

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: We have a club at my school that I founded last year called Morgan's Message, and it's for student athlete mental health. And recently, we've been communicating with some members of the Patriots organization about doing an event with them, and I'm super excited about that possibility. And that's been possible because of our support from our tight knit community and tight knit teacher community.

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: I think the best part of our school community is the opportunity for traveling. So recently there was Bahamas trip and there soon would be a Morocco trip. Bahamas trip was where we went to The Bahamas and made it for a restoration on a little board boat for us. And that was an awesome experience. Actually got to write an article about

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: just talk about travel, I'm

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: when I

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: first came to this high school, I was unaware of the travel opportunities that they provided. Until this year, I I be able to take those opportunities throughout year.

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: Opportunity that I found was this workout club that happens three days a week and that students from like all four grades just like break

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: up together and it's really fun and a good way

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: to connect with other people. Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind for me is at Montpelier you can create your own course called the Personalized Learning City or PLS and I've turned my work with Up for Learning into a PLS, so I'm getting a credit for it while getting paid for working with Up. It's really cool because the school is so small, so you have a staff overseer, kind of, like a mentor for any course you create. And I've developed a really strong relationship with my teacher, Ms. Bellow, who's my PLS overseer that I hadn't interacted with much before this year, so I'm grateful for that. Let me just ask you all, what recommendations would you leave the representatives with as we're making decisions session? I'd say to consult youth first if you're unsure, instead of consulting afterwards or in the middle of the process. I think you can gain a lot of insight that you wouldn't have thought of yourself when you asked students from a wide variety of different

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: It can also be very polite when you ask them to find us. So, you know, just not sugarcoat things and you just get straight to the point, just going off. We learned so much in that really short, we had like, I think four, four meetings between the three schools. And I learned a lot about the education process and what we all want. And so I think if we're able to kind of come up with this in a really short amount of time, think I that a lot can come from working with youth

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: for a longer period

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: of time.

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: I agree with Allegra. I think we did do a lot of things in our meeting, but even so, this is just a small portion of students in Vermont. And if we could include more students so we'd have more diverse things experiences, I think it would better help message thoughts that you guys were creating.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Are any of you connected with or know about the Vermont Youth Council?

[Unidentified Up for Learning presenters/students]: I've heard about that.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Think operates similarly. I'm not totally sure about how frequently they meet, but there was actually something that was created by the legislature for exactly the purpose you're encouraging us to to follow through with, which is to hear student voice. And what's great is that there's not just that, but there are other organizations like yours that are that are also sort of uplifting student voice, which is really great for us. We really appreciate you all being very well organized and very ready to testify in our committee and to take the time to come here and do it. It's really wonderful.

[Unidentified student speaker(s)]: Committee House Committee, I'd just like to thank for having us today. This group, I think this came out of a stronger connections grant that initially we were looking at our Portrait of a Graduate work. It would have been specific to the Orange Southwest School District, but with the talk of mergers, it sort of seemed like it was not necessarily the best use of those funds. So what we did was we actually reached out to six different communities in the Central Vermont region, and three came together for this project. And I just would like to pull out for you some of the some of what I heard from students today just here, and that's the piece there.

[Michael Clark (Superintendent, Orange Southwest School District)]: There's a lot of similarity happening between the communities. Definitely differences too, and I think that given time in Vermont, we probably do have a pretty similar vision for what education in Vermont should look like. I think what we don't have in Vermont is a shared vision across the whole state for what that is, and so sometimes it feels like we're not moving towards a common goal, or the common goal, like right now, I know you all are focused in on the governance structures and what does that look like. I think the opportunity that we're looking for, and I wanted this group to be able to bring you at least a little sliver of, was to what end? Why are we moving towards those government structures? What do we want for our students within the state of Vermont? And as a labor said, in just four short meetings, they've brought you the pillars of what a Central Vermont group would say, these are the five most important pillars, six most important pillars. I'm sure that with more time and more work with this, more people, that would expand out, and it would help with some of the clarity that we're looking for. So I appreciate you letting this voice come through, and I appreciate you taking some time to look at that bigger picture of why are we doing this, what are we actually trying to accomplish. I can imagine that kind of getting into just that governance piece, this is the fresh air of why and how exciting it is when you stop and hear about the exciting things from the designing your own credit class to fundraising and figuring out how to travel, and the kind of learning, taking that travel afterwards and putting an article in the paper. It's really exciting what's happening in Vermont education, and I think sometimes this fall or spring, winter, whatever, we've sort of been hearing about Vermont education and how we're struggling and whatnot. I think what you saw today is Vermont education, what it does well, and I think you heard the lips of really exciting things that are going on in Vermont education.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We are frequently reminded in this committee by some members that every day wonderful things are going on in our school buildings. We probably aren't reminded enough. Thanks for bringing a little bit of that wonderfulness to us today. Really appreciate it. Take care, friend. And I can't promise you that our cafeteria food is any better than the

[Unidentified presenter(s)/student(s)]: cafeteria food we have on the ground.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Enjoy your