Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Welcome to House Education on Thursday, March 12.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: We

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: are moving into some testimony on the state's early college program, sort of statewide participation, kind of what the profile of all of that looks like. Got some statistics and numbers from the Agency of Education, and they're all here with us. Thank you for coming. And then we'll turn it right over to you to introduce yourselves and present your testimony.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Good morning. For the record, I'm Zoe Saunders, Secretary of Education.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: I'm Doctor. Erin Davison, the Chief Academic Officer.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: And I'm Ryan Parkman, the Flexible Pathways Team Program Manager.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: We're pleased to join you today to provide an overview of our Flexible Pathways program with a spotlight on Early College, Field and Fall Management, and Fast Forward program. We have provided to you a slide deck and also a full report, which is part of our annual review of these programs and went into depth around the participation rates, along with evaluating the different trends that we're seeing across programs and then overall, along with noting some areas of future inquiry, which we think are really important to our longer term strategic planning and our goals of expanding college and career readiness. Toren Ballard, Jana, you want to introduce yourself, Toren?

[Toren Ballard (Director of Policy, Agency of Education)]: Sure. Think you all know

[Toren Ballard (Director of Policy, Agency of Education)]: me, but Toren Ballard, Director of Policy for Education. I'm just here to put the slides there.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: He's running the show behind us. So really want to understand from you what level of detail you want. We do have a full presentation. So really, decision point, do you want us to provide you with a high level overview of the findings and then open it up for conversation? Do you want us to walk through in detail all of the data all the data analysis that we've provided? I

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: mean, if we go through the high level stuff relatively fast.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Do that because I think it's really productive to have the conversation. So our objectives for the meeting today are to review the flexible pathways vision. We think we need to center all conversations as we analyze the results around what we're trying to achieve as a state and helping our students be prepared after graduation. We have responded to specific data requests that you had related to early college, and we expanded that analysis to include the participation rates and performance in the two other programs that are related and are tracked within our dual enrollment system. Within our analysis today, we've identified some broad trends in terms of participation overall in the state, terms of being able to increase participation in college and career readiness programs, and also where we're seeing some differences by program and also analyzing by subgroup of students. And then we've concluded with future areas of inquiry, which we expect will be a really good launching point to have conversation with you today. So the vision for flexible pathways is part of Act 77. Ideally, this is the state's way of ensuring that our students are prepared and are ready to enter a successful career or college experience after high school. And ultimately, it's designed to increase the rates of secondary school completion, post secondary continuation and retention in Vermont. So, are some key measures of our system that are important to evaluating the overall wellness of our education system and the impacts that it has on Vermont. The flexible pathways program does encourage creativity with school districts as they develop and expand high quality educational experiences and to promote opportunities for Vermont students to achieve that post secondary readiness. And so what we're highlighting today are three specific programs that are designed to do that. You have access to the full report. Within the report itself, as we're walking through, is where you will see in the appendices the details around the school by school participation. In our presentation here, we're highlighting some of the broad general themes. I also want to orient you to the broader accountability focus on college and career readiness. It is a part of our SSJ plan to ensure that we have successful completion of college courses that is measured currently by achieving at least a C in an acceptable measure for college and career readiness, which is outlined within our SSA plan and available also as a reference within your report. We have identified a college and career readiness assessment indicator So that gauges the percentage of students who have demonstrated proficiency on at least one measure of college and career readiness by the end of twelfth grade. And this is an important metric as we're thinking about evaluating the overall success of our system. I would note that as we're moving forward with this process, really looking at tracking that much earlier. And so when we look at college and career readiness, we must contextualize that within the context of our pre K-twelve system. And that's a real area of inquiry as we talk about readiness to take advantage of these opportunities by the time students are in twelfth grade. What we are seeing in our college and career readiness indicators, we have a goal in Vermont that eighty percent of twelfth grade students will demonstrate proficiency on one or more college and career readiness assessment. And at least eighty percent of graduates will enroll in post secondary institutions within sixteen months of graduation. We are operating below our goal in the state of Vermont. So I think this continues to be an area where we want to improve in terms of ensuring that students are able to not only access college level coursework, but they're able to complete that at a demonstrated level of proficiency that we know will help to really accelerate their learning, making it more meaningful and aligned to their future. So, as we move into the overview of the findings, we have in here the participation rates. So, participation in flexible pathways has continued to grow with dual enrollment and early college exceeding pre pandemic participation rates. So we did see a dip. What's that?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Yeah, I'm just.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: I

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: was just echoing. We saw a slight dip.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: He was frustrated by that.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: It's not

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: necessarily the year of COVID. It was that following.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: It was

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: the following.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: We're seeing basically what we're experiencing in this trend analysis is a rebound of participation in Flexible Pathway after a dip that resulted pandemic. So that equates to 3,713 publicly funded juniors and seniors participating in at least one college level experience. So that's about a third of classmen. Of those, 2,405 students participated in dual enrollment. Four thirty three seniors participated in early college. That represents about 8% of our seniors. And eight seventy five students participated in Fast Forward coursework. And Fast Forward coursework is embedded within career and technical education centers. So I'll allow you to just make sure we're fully defining those different flexible pathways.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: So dual enrollment is where every junior and senior in Vermont has the opportunity to take two tuition free courses at I think we're up to eight colleges. All but one college in Vermont participates in our program. And early college, where a student decides to take their entire senior year on the college campus, they could also be doing it entirely virtual if they chose to do that as well. And like I said, had the four thirty three publicly funded students. And when we make our comparisons, you'll see in the report, to compare a percentage of state seniors, we have to look at just the public funded students. But we also do have home study students who participate. But home study is not a we don't know how many home study students are technically a junior. And then we also include Fast Forward. Now, Fast Forward is not a state program. We don't pay for that out of any state funds. It's through Perkins Reserve funds. But we like to track it as well because it's another way in which Vermont students are engaged in college level courses.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Could you just give an

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: example of like a fast forward? The kids doing electricity or something? Oh, was going to the health careers program. Dang it, do that. Medical transcriptioning. It's embedded within their program and at the end of their program they get credits from CCD or BTSU for medical transcriptioning as a quote. Thanks.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: That's great. So overall, when we analyze participation patterns and it's really illuminating, I think, some areas where we really want to investigate further. So we see overall participation that our female students participate at a considerably high level and that our economically disadvantaged students are most strongly represented in Fast Forward. So our students are economically disadvantaged, who are enrolled in CTE programs are benefiting from that Fast Forward program. I think it's also critical that we recognize that there's different levels of rigor and expectation with the different flexible pathway programs. So there's quite a difference between taking one dual enrollment class versus being enrolled in a full set of college level courses for a year. And so as we look at these results and we analyze participation, we also are evaluating readiness to participate in the programs along with the support that's in place for students to be successful in taking advantage of an array of college and career opportunities, college and career opportunities. So program participation by setting, Public school students participated from 96 of our high schools. So that's 54 of the 56 schools participated. They account for the most participation of all three programs. Students that are an approved independent school, and just for a definition of terms, approved independent school means that those students are publicly funded to attend the independent school. 2,838 publicly funded students participated in dual enrollment in early college. And also, that is a representative of eight approved independent schools.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: If I may, just that one, it's kind of wordy or confusing there. The 2,838 are all publicly funded across the board. And that includes those students who are publicly funded attending the approved independent schools from your tuition or choice districts.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: And then home study, you mentioned that earlier. So home study students also have access to these pathways. But by the nature of how we track their grade level status, They're not included when we do the deeper disaggregation of evaluating overall participation by seniors and juniors. The home study students are included in the aggregate data. And so there are smaller participation. We're talking about 35 students that are home study students participating in dual enrollment and 18 home study students that are participating in early college. So are

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: the home study students counted in the publicly funded? How is their access at dual enrollment and friendly college paid for? Where is that coming out of the Ed Fund?

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: What mechanism? Yeah, I think it's the district, but we can. Yeah, I'll stop the time. Yeah. So there is a line item in the preparation for dual enrollment. I think your question is the mechanics of how those slow down to the student. Absolutely. I can review that just to on

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: the goal of the district. Sports, like, some So

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: they go through the high school.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: I know.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: Are homeschool. Right. But I would like to get this

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: get this paid out of a

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: I So they go to

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: their local public school to register or

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: no, they

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: do not? They have a dual enrollment system and a student, a home study student would request an account. And we have a post secondary programs coordinator at the AOE. And they actually do the approving of the accounts and the voucher requests for courses of the home study students since they are not affiliated with a public school. Got it.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: And so just to clarify, the actual process for that being funded is through the dual enrollment system. The district does not have a role in the review process. And

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: just if you're keeping score at home, the dual enrollment is funded 50% gen fund, 50% ed fund.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: Oh.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Just a setting question. We talked about home study approved in Penn schools, public schools. Where does adult education fit in? Because they also have access to this as well.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: As long as a student has not already received a diploma and they have completed their sophomore year, they are technically eligible. It doesn't matter if they're five years post their sophomore year, as long as they have not received that high school diploma and they're working with one of our AEL providers, request an account. We verify with AEL that they are in a diploma seeking program, not just getting like continuing ed credits or something, but they have to be pursuing a diploma. And then they get access to two courses if they haven't already taken one prior.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Where does it fall within the statistics? I'm just trying to get a sense of Yes.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: For today's presentation, we're focused on the three programs. So the participation in AEL, adult education literacy, is not part of our presentation today. And

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: there are other possible programs.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Right, yeah. Work based learning, virtual learning, there's many other flexible pathways that a student could be pursuing. Like I said, we're emphasizing the ones that earns public credit.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Any other level setting questions? So we have this organized in three parts. So to look at those three programs separately, so first we'll look at participation in dual enrollment. The numbers we're referencing here are for fiscal year 'twenty five. There were 2,440 students taking at least one course through dual enrollment. This represents over 21% of the state's juniors and seniors statewide. On the next slide, this is, I think, the trend.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: Do you have any sense about the participation as far as who's taking dual enrollment classes within the building itself, within the setting Or that are taking they're going to off-site to CCB or whatever to take those courses. Does our system track?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Yeah, we tracked out. I didn't know to get the totals. It's right in our master report. We can pull that information out. We have three different settings where students take it. It's on the college campus virtually from the college. And then what we call concurrent courses where the teacher of the high school is an adjunct faculty of the college. Perfect example, my son's actually taking advanced chemistry right now at his high school, and the teacher is an adjunct member of CCB. And at the end of his when he completes the course, he'll get credit for CCB's intro to chemistry. As far as the numbers, I don't have those right here, but as a follow-up,

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I can definitely get those

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: for you. That'd great. Okay. Thanks very much.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: We're looking at Marin over there, Fred. So the next slide is looking at that trend line. As we'd indicated, we're really seeing a rebound and an increase in participation as we look at our most recent results. The next slide is really evaluating the participation for our subgroups. So you want to explain a little bit how we evaluate this metric

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: to comparability to the suit?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Sure. We always like to look at what is the percentage of economically disadvantaged across the state, and what is the percentage of those students participating in the dual enrollment program. And you can see we're lagging a little bit behind the state percentage, but it is an improvement over the prior year, which is included at the bottom just as a reference for you to see. We're trying to get the word out that dual enrollment is for every student. We want to eliminate barriers. That's one of the things I was talking about. What can we do to remove barriers to access.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So we'd like to see, as you think about benchmarking, is to have parity. So you're seeing that participation among the economically disadvantaged students is representative of our overall population of economically disadvantaged. So, when those lines are mapping up, the closer they are, the more parity that we're achieving. So, what you're seeing in this slide is that we are observing more participation from our students that are economically disadvantaged over the last two years, but it's still lagging. So, this is dual enrollment. We have a note to follow-up to provide data around the setting in which the dual enrollment courses are taken. So we'll do that as a follow-up. Are there any other follow-up data requests that you have for dual enrollment before you move to early college?

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: Sorry, my head is in numbers here. So do we know how many students, I just lost my train of thought again. I'll get back to you. You have too many numbers rolling around my head. I was trying to find the report in the report. Yes. Very meta.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So one of the other areas, right now we've shown you participation rates and we're seeing some demographic trends in the report. We've also talked about completion rates, passage rates. So that's helpful for context. We are also evaluating which type of courses they're taking. So as we look about the participation rates by discipline, what are students most taking advantage of in terms of opportunities? Are they taking a lot of college level math courses, college English courses, science, so forth? And then we want to review further what we are reviewing in terms of participation rates by those disciplines and content areas and any trends that we might see that will help us understand both interest, help us give you the proxy maybe for readiness in the context of some broader analysis of academic trends. And then we want to ensure obviously that there's that consistent level of rigor across the programs that they're participating in. So that's an area of further review that we think will be really interesting and informative also for schools as they're thinking about their plan. So if their students are really interested and excited to take on college level science coursework, are we offering enough science prerequisites for them to be prepared and ready to take advantage of those classes? So we're really eager to dig deeper into participation advisory courses and content area. We think it'll be really informative and helpful for a longer plan.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm just a little curious. Specific to your child who took a CCB class in chemistry on premise at her high school, and that was called advanced chemistry, wasn't the high school offering advanced chemistry?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: It's being taught at

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: the high school. So why is it the high school itself, not CCV in the high school?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: That's the draw and the benefit is that, so that if your students are taking essentially the same as Intro to Chemistry or CCU, then why don't they get credit for it? So you go through a process of having your teacher become an adjunct member of CCU.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So it's not an adjunct professor.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: It's a teacher of the high school who becomes an adjunct. They're still paid by the high school. They're not paid by CCD. And there's actually a reduced rate if it's a concurrent top course because who pays the teacher matters. There's a whole bunch of other people.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, I guess if this is a high school teacher who's being paid by the high school.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Only gets 20% of their per credit amount And for that

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: that's to cover the support for training.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Transcripting, curriculum approval, all that stuff.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, just, on broader scale, you know, it's like, anyway, I think if got a high school, it's a high quality high school, it should be offering high quality courses. There must be a much less complicated way to say, we're gonna also give you college credit for it. It's just I don't know. It's all It's all

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: has to be transcripted by Just

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: to note that the teachers that teach those courses are asked to do some unpaid labor in preparation for those courses. And especially if you do a hybrid model, there's an eight week unpaid labor course that teachers are asking. I just want to put that out there.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Yes. The incentive for teachers to do it is purely intrinsic. It's because they want to do what's best for the student, and they also want to take on that challenge of teaching a college level course.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Yes, we have a long history of exploiting teachers who want to do the right things. It sounds like that's more of a collective bargaining issue. And I think at the state level, it's really what are the goals? We want students to have these opportunities to take college level coursework. How are we designing our system to support that? So this is a question around, obviously, I appreciate that we're going down this line of inquiry, understanding the setting, understanding who provides the education is important discussion and making sure that we can continue to expand access. It's important for students' readiness.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Pretty much next than Long.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: If yours is more, mine was going a different direction.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Just following up on

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: my because I had to go back to

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: the

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: report to We have a lot. I was trying to ask, and I did go back to the report to remember that. Do we have any idea how many students have, access to more than the dual enrollment? So some schools are offering more credits. And do we know the numbers?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: No, not formally. We don't track every college course offering. I could give an example. The schools that are within a 50 mile radius of Dartmouth College, their students can take courses at Dartmouth if they have topped out that content area at their local high school. For example, if a student at Hartford has already taken their calculus course and they want to take calculus two, they can take that at Dartmouth College for free. So that's something that's a benefit of any high school that's within a 50 mile radius of Dartmouth College. Middlebury College has a similar program for area high schools. I'm not sure what their radius is.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: That's not actually I mean, that's interesting. It's not tracking. But I'm also wondering, because my understanding is that more high schools are offering additional dual enrollment credits to keep their students in the building and not in an early college program. So enrollment's declining, seats empty. It's really tough. So I'm asking, do we have any idea of how many are offering additional dual enrollment credits to make sure their students stay? It would be paid for locally generated Exactly.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: My understanding is that our dual enrollment system is tracking those courses that the state is paying for. So we don't know that the agency of education is responsible for managing. Now, students in the opening of our presentation, we talked about the flexible pathways statute. And then we also brought in our broader accountability measures. So students that are taking a college level course, those courses are being paid through the state's appropriation are still counting towards that school's measure of college and career readiness. And that's why it's important as we have these broader conversations and we're talking about accountability versus what we're tracking for financial purposes, there's a need for us to have a global and a broader understanding of college courses that are

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: being taken. Just as a follow-up to that. So let's say as high schools continue to offer more dual enrollment courses at their sites, that a student may take two, and then they may go on and take three more. Let's say they end up with five, and two of those are paid for, who pays the other three?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: It could be local budget, it could be parents. Sometimes it's I've seen instances where there's a fee charged by the school, but it can't be paid. They have scholarships available almost. And I spoke with a principal at one of the schools and they said, it's not really a scholarship. We pay for everyone. So they provide it right out of So their

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: just balance. Kids don't have to worry about it as they're signing up for classes, whether or not they're gonna actually get the college Who's and then attach to giving

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: them college credit if it's not a state sanctioned?

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: If it's dual enrollment, it is

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Right, say,

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: not everybody in there is.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So I teach dual enrollment

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: at U32 for statistics, and that's through Norwich. That's just one of the classes that we offer that's dual enrollment. So my question is, once a student has taken two of those and they go to take the third one, do they get charged or does the school just absorb that?

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: I started with

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: this. It varies with school.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So my understanding is that this is definitely getting to more of a financial question. So I would want to go back to our team and be able to confirm what we're describing. But. If a student is taking more than two dual enrollment credits, what Ryan's describing is there's a combination of factors that allow that to happen. Some colleges might have a scholarship that would support that. Some might have a parent's private pay, and then some might generate local dollars to support with the participation of doing that for that student. So I think this is worthy of a deeper dive because it gets into the financials. Some of that data is not tracked at the agency also. So that's an important caveat that we would need to bring up. So it would likely involve some additional conversations as you're highlighting around where and how this happens in a way to bring qualitatively some of these trends to then further review in that quantitative way.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: And I'll just add, because you bring up a great point. Our students are not just taking two courses and that's it. We have a great number of students that are taking, like you say, three, four, five courses. I recall one student who graduated high school with 47 college credits under his belt. So it varies. But the way it's tracked is through the National Student Clearinghouse. And that's how we can get that data into our accountability measure. Like when Zoe was speaking about the number of students for the college career readiness indicator. If you look at our AOE web page for the annual snapshot and you go into the academic achievement and you can look at college and career readiness indicators, of which there are a number of assessments that can be used to measure that. And when you look at the successful completion of a college course, that percentage is actually pretty high. And you'd say, oh, that's higher than the early college and dual enrollment numbers. Where are they getting that from? Because we're adding in those students who took above and beyond the two courses And that's tracked

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: through the National Student Clearinghouse. So just for clarity, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go down a rabbit hole. But I want to clarify what I'm interested in finding out. And I appreciate all these other avenues. And thank you for sharing all those other avenues for payment. What I'm trying to unpack is how many students are getting additional credit that our taxpayers are paying for out of their local budgets. Actually, now that you've shared all those other ways, like through scholarships and parent pay, I'd like to know those too. But my original question was, I can't give you the name of one school who does it, but I've heard for years that public schools are offering additional credits. And it is actually more financially feasible for them to offer it in their home's budgets than it is to actually lose a student to early college. I'm just being very clear that as enrollment declines in all of our schools around the state, or most of our schools around the state, school districts are finding whatever way they can to offer college credit that students are asking for, but keeping the student count and a student in the building and in the classrooms so they can keep other courses. You understand?

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: I mean, I think this gets into the broader conversation around scale. If our goal is to offer students many opportunities to participate in college level coursework and in career and technical education training, we need to have bigger high schools that can support with funding these various programs. So I want to make sure that we're really focusing on the student opportunities that we want to support first as our North Star, as we have these conversations. There are some financial challenges we know that our high schools are facing and our smaller high schools in particular. But I want to make sure that we are continuing to focus on offering students a broad array of opportunities to take on accelerated coursework and explore their interest. Some of that has to do with adjusting our issues of scale and operating at a larger scale.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: Thank you. I appreciate that. And that's why I'm a huge supporter of our process to get to regional high schools that offer not only college level courses, but career tech.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you. Think

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: this might be a clarifying question for Brett McCann or any of you. Some of this, even on my high school teachers, new information to me. Because we don't have as much of this sort of dual enrollment on campus where I teach. So if a kid at U32 has used their two and is taking another course, that's a dual enrollment course taught at U32, is there a potential that some kids in that class are just taking it as a U32 class and some are taking it as a dual enrollment class? Does that happen in some schools? Or is it every kid who's in that class is dual enrollment and is getting the college credit?

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: I mean,

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: I think this is, maybe it's just anecdotal at this point, which is

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: I mean, I've only taught one so far, but my understanding was that by enrolling into the class, I had everyone sign up Automatic. They got the credit. And unlike all

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: my kids enrolled, so I don't know if there

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: is a There's no test and there was not even any, like, you have to get a certain grade. You get

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: the grade in the high school and you get

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: the grade in college.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So a lot of these questions have to do with the course coding and making sure that we have that consistency across the state. Again, what our major theme is, there's a lot of variability right now. Right. But these are surfacing those important questions that look at in the future. Think the SCAD codes are.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: That SCAD code. So it's S C E D. I could tell you off the top of my head what it stands for. I mean, I could, but I'd make something up. The SCAD codes are a national list. And so you'll see, for example, ALGESA one has a Sched Code two, and ALGESA one Honors has a different Sched Code. It's a way in the student information systems to track what's being offered. And so I would anticipate, based on the way that that tends to work behind the scenes that you would not end up with a course where it was a mix of students taking it for dual enrollment and not because of the sced coding process that most schools use. And I also want to make

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: sure that we're touching on that question around the mastery question. And so I think you can talk to that. I mean, being in a dual enrollment course, it is approved by the institution. And so there are specific requirements for students to be able to master.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Right. And one of the things for any college to offer a dual enrollment course in Vermont, they have to agree to our annual participation agreements, which all the attestations that they must agree to were when we created this thing, it was with the College High School Alliance years ago. These are nationally normed expectations of colleges in a dual enrollment program. And some of those things are any dual enrollment course that a high school student takes must be a college course in their course catalog. College cannot just create a class only for high school students. It is a class that any other student could enroll in. It's the same grading expectations. The college professors have no knowledge of what student is still currently in high school and which ones are not. So those are some things that when she talks about the rigor, they are taking college level courses. It's not any less than a Sorry,

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: are you talking about early college or dual enrollment? In dual enrollment, there wouldn't be non high school kids in the classroom.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Can be different sections

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: of a course.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Depends on where it's taking place. Okay. Right. So if it's an adjunct professor at the school, it's taking place at the school. Right. Or they could be on campus or it could be virtual. So the setting is going to vary in terms of whose students are taking that course, what they might be taking that course with other students from outside their school.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: If your high school is in geographic proximity to a CCV or Castleton University or one of those, it's very, very often students will like the classes first thing in the morning. They go to the college first. After the college course is gone, they drive to their high school.

[Rep. Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: This is more for our committee's sake, but I think we may have some interest in we don't have the bandwidth probably this year to do the sufficient work on it. But this discussion to me is really illuminating a point I think we as a state need to work on, maybe through some stakeholders engaging the off session, but particularly in the dual enrollment lane. Just the world has changed a lot since Flexible Pathways passed. I wasn't here when that passed, but I'm not sure if they envisioned classes being taught at the high schools, as much online learning. I mean, it's just the reality of how much things have changed in that, what, ten years of flexibility. Yeah. As we move into the next, regardless of kind of a future state, I dream of regional, regional high school sign me up. But I think it's going to take us a while to get there, and dual enrollment's going to exist for quite a while in the meantime. And so this feels somewhat messy of where kids are taking it, who's paid, the teachers, it's a full time CCB instructor or it's a union teacher at a district, and that we maybe get a little bit better, figure some of this stuff out. Think it's to be hard conversations. Maybe it involves some of the union issues, and a little more consistency, too, to figure out this kind of if we're pushing more higher ed into schools. And that might be my understanding is a lot of states are doing that. I think there's some model programs out there. And we're doing it a little bit on the fly. Schools are responding, like you're saying, to the conditions in their communities. But my hope would be that we could maybe bring some of the stakeholders together here, teachers that intrinsically want to do the best for their kids, higher ed institutions that are innovating in really great ways, and the spirit of our flexible pathways and get a little bit more clear, consistent to make this stuff work for kids and teachers and communities and the reality of the world we live in, which is that it's just not going to be as clear cut and dry of like you're at that school or you're at that school as it was even thirteen years ago. Things are just becoming more fluid. That's more of a sort of if we're headed towards some kind of study committee point that I think meets illuminating. This is illuminating, a serious experience. It's worthwhile.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We're not doing well, but we got

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: to go to early college. Just

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: in terms of what you just said about teachers and their intrinsic motivation, I do want to put out there that as great as teachers are, like all other laborers, they should be paid, not taken advantage of just because they're good people. I think that we need to get that in there. And the part about the collective bargaining worries me that some superintendents think they should

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: be paid and some won't. It needs to be So balanced.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: As part of the education transformation, we've been really consistent in the goal of increasing teacher pay and making sure that there's parity across the state. And that involves understanding all of the responsibilities for hiring a CTE teacher if you're going to do dual enrollment. I mean, it's really making sure that we are funding our system to pay our teachers to do the work that's required to really elevate academic opportunities and outcomes for our state. So we are really on board with that. And I think this conversation is about how are we reimagining college and career readiness? How are we reimagining the high school and middle school experience? We want to give students a lot of opportunities to accelerate their learning. That might mean that high school experience looks a little bit different and that you have more students that are upperclassmen that are off campus, or you have more faculty members from higher ed coming into our schools. So this is a really exciting opportunity to think about how are we preparing our students after graduation. And it should involve an evaluation and review of the current state and the degree to which that's helping our students be prepared. So I welcome that. I kind of joked around the study committee. It is there's just so many study committees. But I actually think within the agency's strategic plan, we've identified a pillar for college and career readiness. And part of that work is looking at how are we measuring the quality of college and career readiness. Right now, within our framework, we've shared with you the ways in which we're measuring it. But we think that there are other opportunities to evaluate that level of readiness. And that can also extend for me talk about middle school acceleration. How are we measuring that early in middle school years? We're giving students the opportunity to take on these challenges and earn industry certifications. That was superintendents this morning as we're talking about how we're going to transform our accountability framework. And one superintendent lifted up and said, well, what else are we tracking in ninth and tenth grade? And you're right, right? We actually need to have a whole conversation around how we're measuring quality related to this indicator of college and career readiness and then set really clear goals for how we're going to get there that might change how we operate. And that's an important consideration moving forward.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Transitioning into early college? Yes, early college. That's cute.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So moving into early college, it's another pathway that's available that was created in April '7. And in this flexible pathway program, students are enrolled as full time students and earn a year towards their associate's degree. Or bachelor's As we're talking about reimagining, in other states, these type of programs, a student can participate and graduate high school with an associate's degree that then basically pays for two years towards your bachelor's program. Right. In many states, we'll have these where they call two by two by two programs to ensure that whole pipeline. So that also is part of the broader conversation that we're going to want to have. But with some additional funding support, those students that participate in early college achieve one year, and then they would be through philanthropy at the opportunity to complete the second year for their associates after graduation. But that's The most part of the foundation.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: But that's only if they attend CCV or the Vermont State Colleges?

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It's actually only paid 10 to 60 advances.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Oh, for the second year to be paid for through

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: the, yeah,

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: you're referencing the core prominence. So that's just CC. Yeah. That's CC.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So it goes to Norwex, they don't have that

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: same opportunity to get that?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: No, they just got the benefit of having one year of courses Yeah, to

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: absolutely. So in terms of participation, we've kind of read through the high level numbers, but four fifty one students participated in early college. This does represent an increase of 10% compared to 2024. See anything else I wanted to talk about there? Persistence rate. So this is a really important measure. So we've talked about the fact they're taking a full course load of college level work. And so we want to make sure that students are able to complete that. So persistence rate is telling those students that actually sign on to do early college and are able to successfully complete early college and earn that one year towards their associates or towards a four year bachelor's. And so the rate in fiscal year twenty five was ninety two percent. So that was a slight decrease from the prior year, as you're going see in subsequent slides. That persistent rate or not.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Like if they didn't continue for the second semester.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: Yeah. And that could

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: be whether they found it too academically challenging, too much commitment on their time or whatever. Multitude of reasons could contribute to that.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: But to confirm those students would still get credit if they pass

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: course completed the course semester,

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: they'd still get credit for college level coursework.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: I think you have to all recognize and applaud that student who says, you know, that was a first semester. I don't think I

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: have And to I'm interested in that.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Sure.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: Yeah. So

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: the next slide is showing you the trend line since the program was incepted. And so you can see we're seeing an increased rate of participation. More students are wanting to take advantage of that opportunity to be full time at a college level coursework. It's still representing proportionally a very small percentage of our overall student population. The next slide, Brian has oriented you to how we evaluate the subgroup performance. And so here we are seeing that fewer students that are economically disadvantaged participate when compared to other programs.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: And also, it's a smaller subset of students, so therefore the fluctuation from year to year as far as

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: the percent participation by those subgroups can vary much more than the overall general population. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would I would note as we put the report together in this slide deck, it's we're not comparing apples to apples as we're looking at the different programs. Right. So there's different levels of expectation when your early college is a different, more robust set of coursework that students are completing. And it's also a much smaller, it's a really small subset of students right now that are participating in early college. So it is important to have that as context as we're looking at these different data, these data points. Is there any way of knowing whether or not the discrepancy in not economically disadvantaged versus economically disadvantaged has more to do with interest or does it have more to

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: do with

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: transportation or like other financial factors? So I would say that there's a conversation around interest, probably conversation around access and readiness, right? That that's the right fit for the students. So those are all broader areas of inquiry that we've noted as we look at participation rates across these various programs is making sure that once students have awareness that these opportunities are available to them, that's one part of access. Another part of access is, as you noted, if transportation is a requirement, we need to understand that. But also, definitely interest and readiness is important to consider as well. Okay. I guess my question was, do we have any conclusions for that? About those considerations, like which of those are sort of playing the biggest factor? No, we don't have conclusions. I would say we have areas of inquiry as we explore these programs being beneficial to students and how we can really help to promote broader participation that's meaningful for them. This is a list of the college and university partners. You want to say on that? I think you touched on that earlier.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Yeah, three participating colleges and there's even more campuses because we have Norwich University, CCB has 15 different locations, and also they have a large number of students that even do fully online early college. And then BTSU has their five different campuses as well. So it's not just three locations, it's three institutions, just some peace of mind.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: Are these three institutions the ones who have always been the college and university partners in early college or has that had more.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Yeah, had more colleges. Oh, had Goddard College.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: Norwich has been in it from the beginning. I'm not sure if Norwich came on

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: the first few years, but they joined soon thereafter. And any college is welcome to. We are actually in talks with two other colleges in Vermont about becoming early college partners. I don't think Zoe even knew that information. Can

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: I ask who or is that not? Usually

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: when it's explored, don't put it on the record.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: I don't to put any pressure on them.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: And so in this slide, you're also seeing the persistence rates, which we've touched on earlier.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think it would be interesting to look at, colleges tend to measure advantage and disadvantage through are you Pell eligible? And it would be, as you sort of build statistics to know, to sort of say, here's what we mean by economically disadvantaged and here's what it means to be Pell eligible, I think there's a big difference in that.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: The

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: next slide is looking at the breakdown in terms of the participation rate here. I think we're talking about comparing all of the demographics here. We're working with a really small in size. This is 5% of all seniors that are taking advantage of this opportunity. But we are seeing as we've showed that there's an increased interest in participating. Do you want add to that?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: No. Yeah. The numbers are right there.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Yeah. And in your report, again

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: There is the asterisk. If you're wondering what the asterisk is, in FY 'twenty two, when we went to Ed five from Ed Fusion, it allowed us the ability to track publicly funded students who are attending approved independent schools. So approved independent students who were publicly funded are now reflected in our statewide totals for subgroup comparisons, whereas prior to FY 'twenty two, they were not. That might be kind of the weeds for Caledonia.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: It could change your percentages. Yeah.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Because it increases your overall number. Okay.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: So you're saying that independent schools

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: I'm sorry No, have to go. Are included starting in FY 2020?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Those publicly funded students who attend approved independent schools, yes.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: And were not included in the numbers prior to that. And

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: that column state senior student count, that's our entire senior class?

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: Yes.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Statewide.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: So in FY '25, we had 5,376 publicly funded students.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: That doesn't include the approved independent schools.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: It is almost 1,200 less.

[Rep. Kate McCann (Member)]: I'm sorry, does in '25, but

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: it's right. They're actually going to be more if you want to include all the privately funded seniors. So

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: these are the publicly funded seniors and they do include those students that are at an approved independent school that receives public in the last Since '22. Yes. So the advantage of having one statewide system that the AOE is able to manage, we can collect additional data.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: So my earlier question, I don't know if this is I had asked for data, and I so appreciate the really responsiveness about like number of students attending early college with the sending institution, what school was and trying to get a sense because of things I've heard anecdotally. There are so I know you've shared it with me. I'm not sure if that's a public document.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Yep, it's in the appendix of

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: the It's in the of report. Table 12 is Early College Participation by High school. Yes, dating back

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: to 2016. So there's some real Some things stand out. A few schools stand out. Like, wow, that's a lot. Especially sometimes given the school that they are coming from. And so I'm trying to understand that. What is the sort of consistency, as far as you know, across schools of flexible pathways, information access, like how counselors are talking to students about it, what information they have. Is it somewhat disparate based on different counseling departments? Or just sort of something gets going at one school and word-of-mouth. And so then it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. This is what kids do here. But I just see some real some things that I, to me, stand out in those numbers. Is it just proximity to a certain early college institution?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: I do know the AOE, we present at multiple VSAC conferences and also at the WITSCA fall conference, where we promote all post secondary options for students that are available. And of course the hope is that through the VITSCA one all the counselors have that information and then share that information with their schools. And the VSAT transition careers conference in the spring, which is actually, I think, this Saturday, a lot of parents attend that, and they get exposure to that as well. So we can't guarantee that every single guidance counselor, every single school shares with every single student all programs that are available. It's our hope that awareness, and as I mentioned that earlier, one of the keys to access is awareness. And I know, Erin, looking at the number of students that come from different schools, I've tried to make sense of it. And sometimes it doesn't make sense. You might say, oh, that school is right next to a college campus. They got a large number. Then you look at one that is right next door, and they hardly have any. And then the next year, the numbers could be flipped.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Also, in interpreting the participation, the context is the size of that school. Know you all

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: It has a bigger impact. It has a bigger impact. I guess that's to the earlier discussion we were having. Even if we all share the North Star of regional middle and high schools, the road there is going to be long and expensive. And so I think what we do in the interim will matter a lot, and particularly in places where there's large numbers. Because my understanding is it's impacting the programming that remains on campus, which

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: I would just caution us against making decisions on program offerings because of financial constraints of high schools. We really need to think about how to fund our system to operate, to offer these opportunities to students. We don't want to reduce the number of opportunities to students. We don't want to reduce the exposure to rigorous coursework. So I just think we really need to be really thoughtful in these conversations. I understand that from the questions you're asking, you're grappling with kind of the issues of scale and the issues of being able to fund these programs in our current context. And I think it just reinforces the need for us to move forward with education transformation and ensuring that we're getting to scale and that we're appropriately resourcing our system to deliver on the array of opportunities that we believe are important for students to thrive academically and be exposed to accelerated and rigorous coursework.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: Sounds to me like you're both saying

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: the same thing. But

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: I guess there's one other aspect, and that is how we thought. And so I guess I'll just put that out there. I'm not even asking for a response back. I believe that when we're having these conversations, we need to learn. We need to understand where

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: the money is coming from. I So totally agree.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: And I just want to say that because I think we all share that, but just want to be explicit around like we want to offer kids more programs, more opportunities. Right. But there is a real and present funding constraint. So what I'm hearing is the committee wanting to understand better the current state of our funding. And then we did allude to in the report that as we look at participation rates increasing and as we look at reimagining what that college experience is, yes, we should evaluate that funding. I expect that that will be incorporated in the JFO analysis of the final foundation formula because it is designed and intended to take into account the full set of cost of the system. So this is, I think, an important precursor and grounding in the current state. But a lot of these decisions will be finalized through that study of really how we're going to

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: fund these experiences that we want our students to have. I totally agree. But I'm just looking at a trend line,

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: and the total doesn't feel very much. You've mentioned five point two percent of our students, but the trend line is much higher. And this past year was 8.1% of our students. So I I just think it's responsible for us to make sure

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: we dig into this. That's all. And I would just point out the trend line in your state senior student count. If you look at it from 2022 to '25, that's one of the things you're up against.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: There's a part of the statute nine forty six that many folks overlook. The business offices look at it. It's transparent but it's just not like shout it out. It's called a 5% threshold. If more than 5% of your anticipated senior class participates in early college, you are held harmless for the amount over the 5%. I'll give you an example. There's a high school that had 24 students in their senior class. They have seven students doing early college. They were nervous that they're going to lose ADM for seven students. And statewide, the average ADM is like $16.00. So you multiply that by seven, you got $112 think if I or $1,120,000 Somebody do seven times 16 for me. I can't do that.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: 70 plus 22 is 112.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Yeah, I

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: had it right

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: in the first time. Anyway, however, 20% of 24, excuse me, 5% of 24 is 1.2. They still got ADM for 5.8 students. They were only held out that 1.2 off their long term weighted average daily membership number. And I was just looking at this current year's number. In FY '26, we actually have four fifty six early college students. We went up by five. I don't know what that percentage is of the senior class. But there were actually approximately 200 students that were added back into the long term weighted average daily membership across 54 different town districts. Now I say town districts because the ADM is paid by district of residence, not the SUSD, the larger supervisory union. So the percentage is by that town. So if you're in an SU that has

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: two towns,

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: it's based on the number of seniors that live in those two towns. There's a lot more money that's given to those towns. So it's not a full depletion.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Double collection, you're not giving them money, you're giving them tax and capacity.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Yes, right. There's no And check given to

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I would just point

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: out To that their long term weighted academic membership.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: But I just point out that Phantom students don't attend

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: classes. Phantom students.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Phantom students, Many schools have policies that say there aren't this many kids in a class, we don't run the class. Right. And they don't count Vantom students.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: That might be there, but

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Well, yeah, that's part of the problem. And the other part of the problem is that we're engaged in really complicated discussions about what it means to be at scale right now. And meanwhile, offering all these pathways that are completely clearing our schools up here seniors and then telling the schools they're not at scale. I think it does go to a different conversation around what do we mean by the senior year experience or junior year experience. And it goes to that discussion around college and career readiness. And for some students, these are really exciting ways in which they can start to take college level coursework, and they want to be fully enrolled in a college and that they're ready to do that. And so what does that mean for the experience? How do we still connect them to their school? I think we're missing the added benefit of they're having an opportunity to build networks with other students across the state. They're having an opportunity to really engage in the college level year, which they're ready for. So we want to Totally agree with that.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: But I also am mindful of the economically disadvantaged mismatch in this process. Because if we're going to say that and we're supporting all the students in our state, we want to make sure every student has that same access that you

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: talked about. That's absolutely right. And I believe that's why it's important that we look at the participation numbers and persistence rate in the context of our overall system. So when we look at our performance statewide, we see that there is a larger achievement gap for those students that are economically disadvantaged. And if we want to ensure that students are ready and have access to these college level experiences, we need to intervene much earlier in elementary, middle and high school. And so that's really part of why we're very eager to move forward with a lot of the efforts underway. One of them is the statewide graduation requirements, really setting that clear expectation. It has a trickle down effect around how we're organizing and setting expectations much earlier on and intervening earlier on. So it's a good point. And as a frame of reference, as we talked about exploring this further, there is work underway right now. So I mentioned to you that within our strategic plan, we're focused on college and career readiness as a pillar. Also, the US Department of Education had a finding related to this area where we have uneven rigor in terms of graduation and flexible pathway expectations. So, have been really clear in our action plan to USED that we value flexible pathways and we are looking at opportunities to strengthen those experiences for students within the context of these statewide graduation requirements that we're putting forward that Erin was able to share with you a couple of weeks ago now. Want to add to that?

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm going to just suggest that given the time we maybe jump to slide three or two of the future areas of inquiry learn more about Fast Forward. Fast Forward

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: and president of CTE and team we want to say.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: Know right off top my head we had eight seventy five different students who earned college credit through a fast forward program. That is not the total number of students in CTE, obviously. I'll leave that to Ruth Durkin to report on CTE for you. Okay, all right, perfect. Yeah. You do see the economically disadvantaged participate at an above state level. So they have achieved and exceeded parity.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: Yeah. And so those are questions around access, I think, important as we think about that in the context of the participation in CPE centers. So we already jumped ahead to starting to discuss these future areas of inquiry. We recognize that to ensure expanded opportunities and participation in college and career experiences that we need to ensure we're preparing those students much earlier, well before they enter high school. So we are looking to examine the relationship between participation in flexible pathways and our college and career readiness outcomes. So what we had shared with you is there's a different tracking as we look at college and career readiness from our accountability reporting versus those students that are participating in these programs. And so we really need to think about that more holistically and look at how we can translate that into improved proficiency and post secondary enrollment, because we do see that there is a readiness gap in certain areas that we want to address. Well, I alluded to this early on in today's presentation. We've really talked about raw numbers in terms of participation, but we haven't dealt deeper into understanding the types of courses that students are participating in and their success rates within those disciplines. So we are going to analyze those patterns further. And we want to understand if certain fields or certain types of courses they're taking by discipline are associated with stronger readiness outcomes. And then lastly, we want to examine how the K-twelve academic readiness overall influences eligibility for advanced coursework. So, there's different eligibility criteria for students to engage in the three programs we've highlighted today. And we really want to understand, are there a number of students that are very interested, but they don't meet the eligibility criteria? We don't have a way right now of tracking that. It's an area that we'd like to understand further because it's an interest between interest and readiness.

[Dr. Erin Davison (Chief Academic Officer, Agency of Education)]: The 5%, all of that reminded me, can you explain for early college, procedurally what happens at the school? Is there an unenroll and then reenroll right before graduation? They lock? Is that consistent across schools? How does that process work?

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: That was an area of concern a few years ago, and we worked really hard at correcting that. And there's a meeting coming up, I think it's very soon, with the data managers or the business managers. And one of the things that is discussed there is how to properly code early college students. And we actually send a message to every school that has an early college student that reminds them that they need to re enroll those students prior to their graduation.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: But they do need to re enroll those students. It is a requirement. And we're building in additional reminders, quality checks and safeguards to ensure that that's happening. If they do not reenroll, those students would then not be counted towards their graduation rate. That's really important as we also think about federal reporting. So that's why we're impressing upon the field the importance of these data quality checks and recognizing that we can step up our additional oversight and reminders to that effect. Is the access for a student who's in early college to say, I'm going to continue playing soccer or participating in the Gay Straight Alliance, whatever it is on campus, is that school by school? Or is that generally the kid still has access to the kind of outside of academic programming? It is school

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: by school. But the general recommendation across the board is that if that student is intending to receive a diploma from your high school, they're still part of your community and participate in those extracurricular activities. And I can see Jay nodding his head because from the VPA Yes. That's the exact stance that the VPA takes as far as participation on sports team. It just comes down, is that student going to graduate from your school? Then they can play on your sports.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Even if they are technically not enrolled in your school. Right. Again,

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: we have there's no state requirement that you must or thou shalt do something. It's just recommendations. Then it is up to the individual school district to make that determination.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: And what's the opportunity to participate in extracurriculars offered by the university? Right.

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: There's some variation there. Sports are off limits for high school students because you must in order to say that any college level score, you must have a high school diploma or GED. So they're not matriculated students at the university. Yeah, they're just taking a full slate of courses for early college and just to cook. Yeah, so as far as participating on a college campus for any of their clubs, I would assume they could do that as well. Yeah.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I don't think they'd be shunned.

[Rep. Emily Long (Member)]: They'd let

[Ryan Parkman (Flexible Pathways Program Manager, Agency of Education)]: it fall. For example, if the college professor doesn't know who's early college and who's just a regular traditional student, I doubt the the Patriot Alliance club or whatever club might be there. I'm gonna see those kids coming through my door, right? Right.

[Rep. Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great, I think we'll wrap here. Thank you very much for putting and this making the time for us today.

[Zoë Saunders (Secretary of Education)]: You for the power seat.