Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Don? Alright. You're welcome. Okay. This is House Education on March 19. The committee is about now to talk about testimony, more information on educational service agencies as we continue down the path of exploring CISAs as a way to curb costs and save money and move us toward a more efficient state. We have our frequent visitors from the one BOCES or CISA that exists in Vermont. Welcome, thanks for your presentation. I'm gonna just turn it right over to you to introduce yourselves and proceed.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: Good morning and thank you for inviting us back. I am Sherry Souza, Superintendent of Mountain View Supervisory Union, and introducing Jill Graham, who's the executive director of Vermont Learning Collaborative. This is a familiar slide deck, but we've incorporated some information that hopefully will address your questions that we were shared with previously. Great. So role of educational service agencies, I know you're very familiar with this core function is to offer services and support. Other states do this are much larger urban format so that it can operate in many different ways. The new information that we added here that I think is really critical is that SS do not replace the organization of an SU or SDS. SS cannot supplement. SS do supplement, they don't supplant. So they do not usurp the authority of an existing organizational structure of a supervisory union or school district. Their role is to address the identified needs of that SUSD and build collaborative relationships between SUs and SDs. And I think that is a point that we didn't really may not have focused in on, on our previous presentation, but as we see the work of our remote learning collaborative, it really is to bring partners within SUs and SDs and amongst them to operate at a much more efficient level, as well as meeting the true needs of our individual students. Jill?

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Absolutely. And I wanted to add this voice, excuse me, this slide as well to really underscore that the agency serves its constituent members. They provide opportunity for voice from its member groups through regular needs assessment and focused conversation that determine what are the needs and priorities of the region and what services or supports should be considered in the future. Then on the right hand side, ESAs provide choice. So from that developed portfolio of ESA services, a district or supervisory union then determines which services are most valuable and useful for them to access. And this may look different from SU to SU or district to district, just depending on what their priorities are. Additionally, though, it's also important to determine that the region may decide that they would benefit from the same service or opportunity. And this is what Sherry just referenced. This is where we bring our members together to collaborate and cost sharing can occur through examples of shared PD or cooperative purchasing.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: I think in addition, and what we've come to learn is opportunities that we could not pursue as individual SDs or SUs because of our size or even demographic representation. Because now we are an organization of eight SUSDs, we have the capacity to pursue other opportunities. For example, Jill and I just wrote a grant for $100,000 to increase professional development for special educators that may lead to special ed endorsement. As a small district, I couldn't have accessed that grant representing eight SDS shoes. I now have that opportunity. So it's bringing some new opportunities to the table because we're representing a larger group and a larger set of needs. So Jill's going to talk about our member needs assessment.

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Yeah, so you have a link to this document, and this is the draft document that was then turned into a survey. But one of the questions was, what can you determine from a needs assessment? Well, that is the voice behind the development of regional services. So we use a combination of a survey format, mixed focus groups, and then our regional meetings, which really brings together the quantitative data that we gather from the qualitative data that will help to drive our strategic planning. You can see this needs assessment. The focus is for us to understand, first of all, what's the feedback from our member groups around what services they're interested in and what are their current barriers that are impacting student success. These are our stakeholders who received the survey. It was our member superintendents, special ed directors, curriculum directors, business managers, human resource directors, IT directors, as well as all of the principals within our membership group. I did encourage if folks felt that there was someone else that should be part of that feedback loop that they also forward the survey to them. In a follow-up to this survey, we are also going to be doing some focus groups probably next month, We are in the process of gathering feedback from our members. To give you an example of some of the information that can be gathered, first of all, we asked what service categories are a priority for your district or your supervisory union, and that included operational services, cooperative purchasing, curriculum, instruction, assessment, grant writing, personnel recruitment and hiring, professional development, special education evaluation services, special education services, special education programming, transportation resources, food services, technology, and anything else that folks wanted to bring to bear. Then we dove into each of those areas to ask some very specific questions about where could you benefit, for example, from cooperative purchasing? What are your curriculum instruction priorities for the next one to three years? What are your top five professional development needs in the upcoming two years? Underneath each of those categories, we cover topics that range from operational services to general education services to special education services as well. You do have access to the Word document through that link that is on the slides to take a peek at that.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: So, go ahead, I'm sorry.

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Oh, I think the one thing that I say to our group is that we are only limited by the creativity or the needs of the region.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: And I was just going to add, sometimes you don't know what you need. And so what we've used Jill to do is come in and do program reviews. And whether it's a program review at the special ed level, program review at the MTSS level, you know, many of us have been operating within systems that have been in place and we are not aware of what is the latest research, what are the label, or what are they doing over here in this district? And because Jill is involved in eight different districts can begin to form those partnerships, see where holes are, identify and revise programs. So that's been a great part. And as you can see by just this needs assessment and audits, we drive Jill's work and the work of the VTLC. VTLC does not drive the work of supervisory unions or school districts. So for our region, what we've really focused in on the last two years are around where are the broader responsive service abilities? So that really speaks to in many ways, we know that special ed costs are really driving up this cost of individual districts and we'll show a model of that. But where are there holes in our service within our district? So we don't need to use our access out of district placements, residential placements. Where are there some more range of serviceability that we can provide? I spoke to the grant opportunities and grant administration. Jill and I are hopeful that we'll be able to launch a pilot program around special education endorsement. Again, a real challenge for all over the state of Vermont. Cooperative purchasing is another area where we're looking at how do we share a position, special educator or more like a speech language pathologist or a pediatric resources. So we've really looked at across districts, what do we need? And the other part are greater capacity to higher quality staff. So whether it's a special ed position that's really hard to fill or directors of facilities, Jill has been a real individual who can bring in a lot of different resources and avenues for filling those positions. So the mission of a BTLC that we wrote together is to jointly conduct educational services and programs for member supervisory unions. And you can see in our mission in a cost effective manner in order to increase educational opportunities, exactly in line with ACCE 73. This is the work of our DTLC. This is the work directed by our superintendents and special directors. And these are the ways we've fulfilled that so far. So high quality programs and professional development, Special education evaluations, huge challenge, huge cost driver in special education services. And that's both for member and non member supervisory unions. High quality professional development, bringing in important guest speakers that again, as a small district, I don't have the resources to do combining eight member SDSUs, we can now afford that. Staffing services for supervisory unions. So including areas of specific expertise, coordination of resources amongst members, supervisory units. How do we share people when I only need a part time multi language learner teacher? And any other lawful purpose authorized by the Title 16 Vermont statutes annotated Chapter 10, or as determined by the Board of Directors. So that's been the work we've been doing in the last few years. One of the questions that was asked of us is what would be the startup costs? We had a very unique opportunity when we began this process in that we had some money that was given to us from another nonprofit. And we had some resources at that time during COVID. We put that in place to do a larger study and bring in other individuals to help us develop our collaborative. Because we've been working on this for seven years, we at VTLC and with Jill's direction, have a lot of opportunities that we can share and we want to share. That's how we came and talking with Jill and the other members of the VTLC. We really believe that the initial phase of program development, that's the structure, the planning and the needs assessment, would be addressed through the current dose grant of 10,000 And we at the Vermont Learning Collaborative are positioned to offer that training and support. We've already met with superintendents through VSA. We began to collect a cohort of superintendents, special ed directors who would be interested. We could begin this summer, absolutely that $10,000 already in place and promised would cover that cost. The staffing phase, and this has been our experience to create the job description, recruit for a director and the hiring, we believe salary and benefits absolutely could be addressed with $200,000 And that would be the initial startup phase. Once that is in place and a director has been found, and I will tell you, there are retired superintendents and special ed directors who are willing and excited to take on this kind of position. And so we believe in Vermont, there are others, it's not a Jill Graham specific though we love her. We know that there are other individuals who have that strength and knowledge to run a BOCES in Vermont. And then once in place, we're positioned in VTLC to offer consultation to help and move that work forward, as well as membership fees to ASA, who is the national organization. Believe that, and again, we could Vermont Learning Collaborative, if members are interested, could provide that consultation. And then the way we are VTLC is currently structured is that we do pay membership fees that are based on our student enrollment with the goal of those would be eliminated once the service covers all costs. So every other service, so right now our membership covers the cost of our executive director. We share that between our eight different SUSDs and then every other service is a pay for service model. So that is our budget. It's basically primarily the director's costs. We are sharing that as members. We have seen in our budget and our annual review that we are moving in a direction without the fee for service will cover all of the VOC's costs or AISA costs. Any questions around that slide? I know that was specific ask.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Very helpful. Is the $5,000 amount you have here for consultation and membership fees, how does that break out between what is the annual membership fee and how much of that is hiring them to consult?

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: We use, and again, this is, you're asking us what numbers out there that just starting. Would be the consultation of 5,000 really would be working with like Jill Graham coming in. Would be a very high end membership fees to ACE is about $200 annually.

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

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: All right. 5,000 at a very high end. It really is, again, dependent upon how much a superintendent organization would need that. So that's a high number.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you. All right.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: I'll move on then. Jill, if you want to share the slide.

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Yeah, this data I think is really helpful to show you how a member supervisory union has saved money from a real life example. This data is from twenty four-twenty five. This is from one of our members and it represents a cost analysis for their services that we did because they were determining if BOCES membership was the right fit for them. As you can see on the left hand side of the table, these are all the services that they accessed during that year, professional development, speech language services and assessments, a contracted SLP who is within the district, other SLP specialized evaluations, psychoeducational evaluations, program consultation. Those were the main services that they received. The actual cost is under that next column that they paid for each of those services. We can then compare that in the next column. If they were not members, they would have a 20% increase of costs for those services. Now, if these services were rendered from a private provider, the cost would most likely be even higher.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So this is the cost if they are using your services but are not a member?

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Correct.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Okay.

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: That is that middle column.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, and what you're saying is that if you didn't exist and they had to go out and find these services on their own, you believe the cost would be even higher than the 151?

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Correct, correct. And you'll see that in some of the future slides based on the cost analysis that we do with private providers in the region to make sure that we are being competitive with our costs. You can see the final column on the right hand side shows their savings under each of those categories by being a member of the collaborative. The savings is significant. Their net savings is over 25,000 that year for all of those services that they purchased.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: Jill, if you would share, here are some case studies of within what we're currently paying if you're not a member of a BOCES and what are the cost savings by having VTLC?

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Yeah, so this may be a familiar slide. This is about professional development. So this shows conference fees on the left hand side and costs for a conference that occurs outside of BOCES, perhaps in Burlington, perhaps in Boston. Quite frankly, that conference fee is probably conservative. They often can be much higher. The mileage rates that need to be paid for travel, potentially hotel costs, and of course, a substitute for that staff member within the SU or the SD. When we offer professional development, it is local or it may be virtual. There is no mileage, there's no hotel need. There may still be a need for a substitute, but there is significant cost savings realized to our members. I want to just also bring this to more recently, offered what was called a legal toolkit series to the region, and we invited non members to attend as well. It covered both general and special education law, as well as employment law. We ended up welcoming a really wide range of professionals to these sessions, including educators, principals, superintendents, special education directors, related service providers, and HR directors and personnel, as well as some members of the AOE who attended looking for some updated case law information for one of the sessions that we prepared. The feedback really has been very strong from across the state, which has really underscored the need for this type of organized training in the region and quite frankly around the state. These are evaluation services and I will tell you that this area has become really popular within our agency because these high quality personnel are very difficult to find. We actually just received some requests outside of our member area for some evaluation services, and I was very pleased we were able to turn those around in a very quick period of time to help those folks as well with their compliance needs. But on the left hand side, you'll see these are evaluation services by a private clinic, and these outline the different types of evaluations that we offer, academic evaluations, autism evaluations, psychoeducational, speech language evaluations. These are comparative costs for each of those services, And overall, you'll see about a 42% average savings for our members by using our services compared to that of a private clinic. And I think it's also important to know, again, we don't have a waiting list. We have an immediate response which allows our supervisory unions and school districts to maintain compliance with their special education regulations. And the quality of our reports are just as high as those private clinics.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: Before we go on to some other models, I really wanted to talk about how in Mountain View Supervisory Union, you know, we've worked with collaboratives since I've been here. We've been able to develop high quality in house programming district of 1,000 students. We currently have three students residential who are medically fragile state face, it's no cost to the district. We have one day placement student. If you know anything in terms of special education costs, the highest driver of special education costs at this time is out of district placements. With the collaborative's help and ongoing consultation, we've been able to develop programming within our district, which has the highest likelihood of success for students. So we're serving students as close to their home communities as possible. And we're significantly saving our taxpayers money because we are serving students without transportation, without having them to leave their communities at a much higher level cost. So I will emphatically, and it's why I'm the vice president of VTLC at this time is because I know that it's the best for students and it's the best for our communities in terms of cost savings. So we're able with the next direction we were going to take in terms of our presentation is really look at the depth and broad opportunities provided by, ESSES, if you would like, or are there questions that we can provide responses to specifically? Want

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, you to all that'd be great. Think some questions might be in order first. Okay. I think for many of us who have kind of watched this and listened to the testimony, we've a proven concept here. And as we move forward, trying to figure out a way to both help save taxpayer dollars in Vermont and try to regionalize whatever that concept might be, what we're doing, this seems to be the way to go. You talk about your creation as very organic and whatnot. We're in a little bit more of a hurry. And so what we are thinking is that these things need to be mandated and that some of the services they should at least attempt to offer should also be mandated. I think you've clearly made the case for special education services. The other area that we are focused on is to facilitate discussions about newer, larger school districts. Not requiring them, but having an entity take charge of bringing people together. Some of it is sort of forcing people together. They're not forcing them to do anything but talk and issue a report, perhaps. And I guess question one is, is mandating CESAs and then mandating some of the roles of CESAs objectionable, and I hope not, and is sort of saying, we also want you to either be executive director or obviously hiring somebody with similar expertise facilitate these discussions.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: So what I can speak to is that our experience over the last seven years has really demonstrated the willingness of superintendents and special educators to work together for a common purpose. And I think that we have really demonstrated and unified around, the opportunities available through the SS. So part of what I hear you saying is by mandating it, will it create those relationships? We didn't have that luxury. There was no mandating, but we knew that we had to provide a better opportunities for our students, our schools, our administration, our communities. Those experiences have led to very strong collaborative relationships. And I think having that facilitated conversation, having a Jill Graham, someone who has such a depth of experience has helped those conversations to happen, facilitated that. Advocating for mandating, working together, that's a challenge. And I know that's a challenge for you all as someone who's been a superintendent and is leaving in the next year. I think there needs to be some structures. I think when people are left to their own, there's Angela and I've heard it, change is hard. People are worried about losing autonomy and we need to do an offer programming that makes the most sense students. And for us, this ESSA model has really helped us. I don't know, Jill, do you have experience with other district states where it is mandated? I'm not sure.

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: There are states where an educational service agency model membership is mandated. Again, I think the mandate of service I would approach cautiously. And here's my why. Each region looks very different in every state, and I'm going to use New York for just one moment. So in New York, I believe BOCES are mandated and you will see them around the state except for in the five boroughs. That's because you have a significant higher level of capacity in the five boroughs than you do within the rest of the state. If you think about Massachusetts, Massachusetts Collaboratives, which are educational service agencies, many of them offer similar services, highly concentrated around special education programming, but not all of them. So I think the service piece we need to approach cautiously with some really informed information with some informed decision making around what does that region need. Burlington Minusky may need something very different than the Northeast Kingdom. Again, more of your urban areas will need different services versus your rural areas. It doesn't mean that they're not accessing those services, they just access them differently.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: And I think if you've had some larger themes like exploring opportunities for unified professional development, exploring opportunities for special ed resources, exploring opportunities for collaborative purchasing. I think on broader themes with some parentheses around it, I think that absolutely because those are problems no matter if you're in Burlington or here in Woodstock, we're all addressing. We need high quality professional development and consultation. We need to think about how we can have greater purchasing capacity and professional development because of where we live is always an issue. I mean, representation and our law toolbox training has tripled in terms of enrollment because it is a theme and need across. It changes every year. We have new administrators, we have new special educators. Is an it used to be offered by years ago. And so we are replacing that need. So I think if you had some broader themes that had expectations, I think no matter where you are in Vermont, those are all issues we're struggling with as leaders.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Could you talk a little bit about your relationship with districts that are outside the boundaries of your CISA and how that works?

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: Sure. So I think as we you know, with our approval occurring this year, our name recognition spread a little bit further, which was helpful. And so we have received some calls. For example, I gave the the evaluation sample where we received a call from a nonmember who was in need of some evaluation services. We were able to accommodate that within our schedule. Our priority is for our members first. When a non member calls, we have to look at our schedule to make sure that we are able to accommodate that. But our role is to support kids and do what's best for kids. If we can support a non member because they have a specific service need, we want to be able to do that. Some of the things we provided, I mentioned evaluation services, we've done some programmatic consultation for non members as well, and we have a lot of non members who have attended our professional development. Kate? Do you take on new members? We would consider that. There is a process within our articles of agreement to be able to take on new members as well.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: For other questions. This was very similar to the previous presentation, and I appreciate sort of, I'm a big believer in repetition. It took me years to really understand our finance system by having it repeated at me for ten years. Wanna say I appreciate that. To the extent the two of you can be available to perhaps members personally, if you may get a call or an email as we sort of continue to investigate, it'd be really helpful to, whatever input you can provide and make yourselves available.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: Absolutely, we are very invested in sharing our knowledge and our experience and being available to other educational leaders, the successes we have can be replicated elsewhere.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great. Great. Yes. Want to

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: echo Sherry's statement. I'm happy to answer questions that the committee may have, or if there's other legislative members who have questions. We had a really nice presentation with the Vermont Superintendent's Association in January and got some initial interest about who else may be interested in doing this work so that we can start to begin that support for them.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. I mean, we find ourselves at this point in time where we are looking at regionalization, however you want to define that, and the fact that you just happen to exist as we go into this has been really beneficial. So thanks very much.

[Jill Graham (Executive Director, Vermont Learning Collaborative)]: You the opportunity.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Have a great afternoon.

[Sherry Souza (Superintendent, Mountain View Supervisory Union)]: You too, take care.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Bye bye. Right, Continue looking over the outline. Have a nice lunch back here at one. Okay.