Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: This is House Education, Wednesday, March 25. Committee is going over some of the language it's discussing, and now we're gonna just get a sense of, obviously we've got lots of decisions still to make and now we've got to hopefully have these decisions a little better organized. Thanks to work with our legislative council who I'm gonna turn it over to right now.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Hello, Beth St. James Office of Legislative Council. I don't know that I would say this is any better organized than what we've been doing, but it's at least all in one place. What I'm pulling up now, which is on your website listed as the drafting request number, which is 20Six-eight03, policy decision points, is a Word document that I put together between the last time I was in this chair and 01:45 this afternoon. And it is really just a stream of consciousness, looking at the language you already have, thinking of the conversations we've had, and just putting in questions that I could see coming from the draft language that you may want to consider. So just because there is something represented on this document does not mean it is a necessary decision for you to make to advance something or to achieve a goal. It is literally just a two page document where I tried to get everything in one place. And it is up to you to tell me, we've cited this, take it off the list. We're not considering this, take it off the list. Or gee, we really need to pontificate on this one. So that's me just saying I'm not trying to drive your policy decisions or trying to point you in any specific direction. And because I have flagged things that say, do you want to deviate from current law, is not a suggestion that you should deviate from current law. It is just trying to get everything in one place.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Let me turn on Sharon.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Thank you.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Why do don't a whole bunch of notes? Yeah. Can't look.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Oh, yeah.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You wanna wait till you have a need for copies? Is that what's happening?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. You can go ahead. Okay. Appreciate your I'm gonna go right above right above you, so we got it.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Oh. Okay.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Seesaws, what's your membership? What are you gonna call Beth? You mean besides Seesaws? No, Seesaw one? Two?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: What CSO?

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I mean, that's a small decision point, but you got to refer to them somehow. I can be the first practice. Start up funding for seesaws. You already have a grant program going. Is that enough? I think it's $10.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Is that enough?

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I'm just going keep going until you tell me to stop.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: And everybody

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: just jump in if you have a follow-up question.

[Emily Long (Member)]: I guess my question about the startup funding is what needs to be included as purchases or fees in the startup company?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: These are all things we have to figure out.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Okay. Is that so we're not trying to figure those out?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: No. We're just going through this list right now.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: Start up funding the $10,000 our current statute, both seat statute has a minimum or maximum of seven, and we're having conversations about having more than seven, so

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: set up funding limited to that $70,000. Now do

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: we need to change that? The law was passed in '24

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: to create the The program that exists now, the funding was really just designed to people who are ready to go to do their articles of agreement.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I'm just sorry. I'm just pulling up my own

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: board document so I can make notes on it.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Moving on to facilitators. Study committee formation. What's the funding for facilitators? Your current SESA law, your current BOCES law, which under this bill would be SESA law. Seesaws would be funded through fee for services and maybe membership fees, depending on if the seesaw decides they want membership fees. But you've got to fund your facilitators somehow. So are you just going to let each seesaw figure that out for themselves? Are you going to have a specific funding stream for facilitators? This has not come up yet. It's just a question that I've had, is you're requiring these facilitators to do a lot and you don't provide any parameters for qualifications for the facilitators, I don't think you have to. And from a legal perspective, it's more of a practical, are you looking for certain qualifications from these folks? Direction from the general assembly to the facilitators. What is the date by which the study committees need to be formed? And what is the date by which study committees need to hold their first meeting if it's different from the date that the study committees need to be formed by? What about the suggested school district groupings? Basically, that's your map, your evolving map. Are you going to require strict adherence to that? Is it just going to be a suggestion? Are you providing any guidance on when or how a facilitator may deviate from the map, or is it all of the facilitator's discretion? ADM of study committee participants. Right now, have 2,000 to 4,000 students as practical, but I have notes in the margins of the various drafts we've been working on about allowing ADM on the study committees to be larger than that, to impede that. So what is the specific direction that we're gonna give folks? Right now, the language that you have requires participants to be contiguous. Is that a decision that you wanna keep? Right now, the language that you have allows participants to be members of different SUs. I think some of that will depend on how strictly you require the facilitator to adhere to the map that you are giving them. Are you going to allow study committee membership to be adjusted by the facilitator after work is underway and that a similar concept is going to come along later? What happens when you've got six school districts grouped together and pretty quickly they realize it should be three and three or two and four? I don't think you necessarily need to put explicit language in there. But if you want to make sure there is no ambiguity about anything you want to be able to happen, you should call it out. And so how do you want to address that? And what does the report back contents from the facilitator look like? We've already got some starting points in the draft, but just That is the decision point. Anything I'll pause at facilitators. Anything you don't think I have captured here that we should add to our list?

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: Maybe it goes along with qualifications, but almost like a job description of what their expectations are for the facilitator to do. What is it they're supposed to do?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Other than just how specific do we want to get that? Did we have anything I

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: just pulled it up, but

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I haven't been reading the language again for this. Did we have anything in there that requires districts to be members of only one? Yes. We did write that in there. And

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: current law also well I thought it did, but I Current law

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: requires that, a formal participant, yep.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: So we mean formal participant, meaning that informal, different?

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yes, that's a concept in chapter 11. Okay. I'm just trying

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: to remember all this. This is slowly coming back.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Formal. A school district shall not be a formal participant in and appoint members to more than one study committee. A School district shall not formally withdraw its participating in an existing study committee after the school district has appointed members to that committee until the study committee dissolves. So that may be a piece of law that we would not want to not withstand if you want to make sure that study committees can be broken up midstream, if you want to allow that. And then informal participation. Is something that I have on my to do list to think through, and I have not gotten there yet. But informal participation means just what it says. Board of a school district that is not a formal participant in an existing study committee may authorize one or more of the board's members to contact the study committee to discuss whether it may be advisable to include the school district within proposal as an advisable district. Your This law is written for voluntary one offs. This is not the entire state undergoing this at one time. So this may be this informal versus formal. And how do you deal with the facilitators made a grouping? But now they have done some work and they realize there needs to be different membership. This is a piece, a decision point that I think needs some further thought on what your goals are. I think you need to identify just without thinking about current law at all, just plain English. Here's what I would like to be able to happen. And then I can figure out with you, do we need to not withstand law? Do we need to add language here to achieve that plain language goal? Does that make sense?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, I'm just going to say, I think it's something that we should have on our list because it does of

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: We haven't gotten to the study committee membership yet. No, no,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: no. No,

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I may not have I may not have captured it accurately, so let's add that. Thank you. Yep. Any else on facilitators I should be adding?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Okay.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Study committee process procedures, budget. Right now you have language in there that talks about a separate appropriation and then a normal process kicks in if a study committee needs or wants to spend more than the separate appropriation. But I think the fact that there may or may not be a separate appropriation is in and of itself a decision point. If you don't give them a separate appropriation, then all of the funding for this is coming out of school district budgets. Proposed articles of agreement. I have not added a ton here because they are so spelled out in current law. I've just listed a couple of the topics that have come up. So school closure requirements, do you want to give direction on what should be in there or leave it to the study committees to decide? Be silent on it. What about board size guidance? See, I can't.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: We So are we looking at the Act 64 language? Because a lot of it's coming from them.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You mean Act 46?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, that's what I meant.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Acts, I get the shot here.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: No, this is all current law and chapter 11.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: But this is all chapter 11?

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Mhmm. Well, not all of it. Some of it is from the language that we've already drafted, but the skeleton is is current

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: law. Which

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: act 46 used the broad concepts of, but the chapter 11 that exists now did not exist at the time of Act 46. There has been a rewrite since then, but the major concepts were the same then. What about representation models? Current law allows school districts to pick from three. Do you wanna limit those options or be prescriptive that there's only one option? Or do you wanna just leave it to them to decide? And then the catch all of any other deviation from current law as far as what should or should not be in proposed articles of agreement. What about the type of school district? This morning, we talked about requiring consideration of a unified union school district. What happens if a study committee determines that a UUSD is inadvisable, but maybe some other format would be advisable? So they need to form a separate study committee. Can I just document that decision point and actually move towards forming something other than a new USD? And I'm just throwing out there that between Act one hundred fifty one hundred fifty six, 153. I'm trying to think of which one came first.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: 153.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Okay, 153 in 2010, 156 in 2012, Act 46 in 2015, and Act 49 in twenty seventeen, eighteen. Those were all related. Act 153 and Act 156 were the precursors to Act 46. Act 46 built upon that work. And Act 49 was picking up where Act 46 left off and providing additional guidance based on some of the questions and the work that was happening in the field. Act 49 has these concepts that are called side by sides, and there's numbers that go along with them depending on the configuration. And so I am not suggesting that you use this. I am just suggesting that there are many different concepts out there. And if you don't have specific language in here about you can only consider a unified union school district, and leave it open to folks. What are the possible options that folks are gonna be coming up with? And what would you be happy with? So Is that a conversation for a later date? You take a look at the landscape after all of these study committees have done their work and you see what the end product is, and then you move on to the next step in this journey if there needs to be further legislation and direction to the field? Or do you provide some of that guidance right off the bat? If you decide that a unified union school district is not advisable, then you may consider this configuration or that configuration. Do you want to be that prescriptive? Do you not want to be that prescriptive? Okay. Does the UUSD need to include all participants in the study committee? What if the study committee decides only six of the eight member districts are necessary? Is it okay if those two other districts remain on their own? Are you gonna require them to form their own study committee? I don't know. Also, you could just be silent and just let the process organically happen. Before we move on to the next subsection, any? I guess we're still in the same one.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Nope. You

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: know what? In my outline, the indentations are not correct. I'll redo it for Matt. We're gonna pause here, study committee process procedures, before we go on to the final report of the study committee. Anything should be added here or taken off?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'd like you to get through everything because your time is limited. We will discuss lots of these questions.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Final report of the study committee. Is there a due date for all study committees? Are there milestones along the way? We haven't talked about that yet. If a new school district is advisable, if the study committee finds a new school district is advisable, any requirements on top of current law for that final study report, the current law requires that the report goes to each school board of each school district member of the study committee, but there's no additional direction. There's no requirement for the school board to hold the public meeting or anything like that. Do you wanna be prescriptive here or do you just wanna let communities figure out what works best for them? If the study committee decides that a new district is inadvisable, the language that you are considering requires a report current law does not. Do you wanna stick with that policy decision? What should be in the report? The report of a study committee when a new school district is deemed advisable is just the analysis of the strengths and challenges of the current structures of all necessary and advisable school districts. The draft you have now requires that of the inadvisable report. It's a policy decision. Again, reasons why formation of the new USD would be inadvisable with an identification of the law or rule that was an impediment. If not unanimous, do you wanna require a dissenting report? Who should the report go to? The current draft you have looking at is school district members, State Board of Education, AOE, General Assembly, and that's all policy decisions because none of this is required in parallel. Secretary review. Current law requires advisable report and proposed articles of agreement to go to the secretary who then shall submit them with recommendations to the state board. That's as specific as current law gets. Do you wanna provide any specific findings or process that AOE is required to make, or do you wanna leave it as is? State board review. Current law requires providing a study committee an opportunity to be heard, allows for the state board to ask for further investigation and allows the state board to request that the study committee amend to report our articles of agreement. Do want to deviate from this process in any way? The state board is required to make certain findings. Do you want to have them make any additional findings that differ from current law? And should the State Board of Education be allowed to say no? Currently, they are. If they don't make those findings, then they should not be saying yes. Vote to form Union School District. Current law requires voters of each school district identified as necessary or advisable to vote. You wanna deviate from this in any way. For example, instead of each school district, would it be the towns within the school? There's a lot of policies that can Decisions that can happen in there. Does this vote need to happen by a certain date for everyone, for certain number of study, anything. Are you getting a report back on the results and who should be reporting back on the results from all of these votes?

[Emily Long (Member)]: Can I ask a quick question?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Emily Long (Member)]: I don't believe that current law has any kind of timeframe for a study committee to sort of complete its work. Is that Correct. So it could just kind of roll on for years potentially?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Because it's strictly voluntary. Right, yeah.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I have switched from using the term Conlon map

[Emily Long (Member)]: to guidance map. Nice.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: What do those groups look like? Those school district groupings? What are you gonna call them? The reason I am fixated on names is because there's no maps that are going with this legislation. I have to type all of this out into legislative language. So even if it is identifying it by a number, that is a policy choice. And then I've just flagged at the end Act 73. Based on the decisions you make prior to this, are there any changes to the contingency language or dates necessary, depending on your goals? And that's it. For now. For now.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Right. Well, think what we'll have to do is sort of chip away at these one by one. Start with some of the easier areas, if possible. So just I I was the member of the committee to get all the floor report and everything on chapter 11 of title 16. So I I kind of have a baseline knowledge. So just I I just wanna I mean, I understand that you don't necessarily have that, and I don't wanna talk ahead of you or over Deborah. So stop me if I sort of get carried away. Okay. There's a spot where people would like to start.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I think,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: you know, CISA membership, we just need to finalize lines. We're not we haven't really worked on that yet. We're probably gonna need a little guidance on startup funding, and we'll look to some outside resources for that. I'm gonna probably suggest the easier place for us to begin on some of these discussions since we don't really have I would suggest for a moment, let us jump to number three on the front page here, first page, before we talk about, so budget separate appropriations are self funded by members out of school These are for the study committee. Were I think since we are mandating that they form and happen, we need to put the state in to provide the startup funding for that. Did everybody Separate appropriation then? Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Can we go, can I hijack for a second? Back

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: in section two, C5, can we just remove contiguous?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: At this point, I'm going to hold off on that. I know you're very

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: One of my things.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. I'm not quite sure why. I would also just point out that, first of this ability to form has always existed. So, we could say our goal is to continue that. And if the area doesn't form anything, they still have the ability to fill it out, contiguous. The state law is not so contiguous, does it?

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: It's not.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So let's change that for a moment. All right, oops, kinda while I skipped ahead here. Proposed articles of agreement. So this is, you know, the school closure question, I think is one that we just need to address. I go back and forth, but I almost sort of believe, let's leave that up to the districts to propose articles of agreement as they see fit. I can go back and forth on that a 100 times.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: So do you say there's three opt Am I confusing that for configuration? There's three options to choose from for articles of agreement, or is everyone starting from scratch?

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: The three options refer to representation models. Chapter 11 specifies what needs to be in proposed articles of agreement. And we've got various draft documents out there from Match 46. Chapter 11 is silent, though. School closure is not listed in. Right.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So Yeah. I would just say that our options are we could be silent and let the Articles of Agreement be developed as they are. We could outright ban the sort of veto power of it, or we could put in some language that says, As I floated, three years no closing, and then after that, which was recommended by the task force commission, closure votes require a vote of the entire district.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Can you repeat that last part?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So many places like your district right now has the town in which the school is located can go to not close it. We could put a prohibition on that ability in our bill that says you can't prohibit a school vote to close in school with a town vote. I don't think that would be very popular. Or we could sort of come up with a compromise that would say, you know, once a new district is formed, you may not close the school for three years. After that, this part was recommended by the Commission on the Future of Public Education. It isn't a town vote, it is a district wide vote.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Is the three year part a commission thing? That's it.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: The language could say no closure for the first three years without a town vote. Exactly. I mean, a district vote, too. Because I guess I would say if you form a district and then you're not allowed to close the school for three years, that could be a problem for a community who's

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: emerging. I did need to say that a vote or a vote of the town that we feed that.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: This district. If you have them.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: No. I see what you're saying. First, the vote that you can't see that. It's the only in the town where the school is, even if that town is now in a larger district. Correct. Only that town is voting on the closure after three years.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I think when I

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: say the town, if it's a school that serves two towns or three So, towns, they would be yeah.

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: You have similar language in there. That's right, yeah,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: to put the proposed language in there.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I'm concerned about that and the foundation formula in terms of way.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And I'm also, again, as I'm gonna continue thinking out loud, think you're right that if you are trying to, was your point that you're trying to get ready for the foundation formula and you blocked, you made a prohibition on picking it up? What I was just thinking about is what if you're trying to adjust to a foundation formula and you have merged three districts that have union high schools in them and you wanna close one that requires that phone of everybody who feeds that thing, which would also make it very hard to adjust.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I think there's a contradictory path here of, if no one convinces you about the inevitability of the speed of a foundation formula, but that removes any voting locally on budgets. And so now, there's a contradiction of we're setting the money, so we're taking away local. Because we're creating this more equitable and predictable system by here's the money managed to it, but also much less local control. But then you're leaving in this really big piece. Like, think that would work possibly creating like a kind of Vermont Frankenstein year that could have really hard consequent A district could be in a no win spot here. Like we're saying, you're not going to have a say one anymore, but you're still going have a say over the other. Nobody's saying today is as clear as they might feel like it is, but that feels like a pretty potential contradiction.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think that's a very solid argument to not put in a prohibition of those schools. So then we are down to the more broad choice of being silent on it and folks can decide that as they want, as they get ready for this, or prohibiting it completely. Representative Taylor. No, I think having a prohibition on it, I was trying to figure out how that would work with a study group deciding what's advisable and what's necessary if there's a prohibition of being an homeowner. So I think that too, yeah. All right, so if it's okay with everybody, I think that we should throw away the idea of an outright prohibition, And so that brings us to silent, which I'm sort of leaning toward. In other words, those forming the new merged district can figure it out how they wanna do it. And if they wanna handspring themselves to be able to maneuver, they have that option. Or we can say it's prohibited from, you are prohibited from blocking and closing at the school, which I think would be a disrespect for many people to be the merchant at all. So we get all these countervailing forces. So I'm kind of leaning on like, let them figure it out at the local level.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: For figuring out the local level, there are existing articles of agreement that these new study groups could refer to. I mean, they're not starting from zero because work was done previously that they could look at other existing articles of agreement across the state and say, this would work for us, this wouldn't work for us, we could adjust right here.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah. Yeah. One would hope that if they are serious, if people actually are willing to come together and they're serious about it, I would assume they would be taking into account a future need to adjust for a foundation formula as they develop their articles of agreement?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: So I keep her back, and my nonsense perspective is an agreement. But it is, as we all know, very personal person almost in a community about whether to close to school and sometimes the dollar amounts aren't even the drive. So I'm just wondering whether there's an ability to have articles of agreement that say you can't close a school and then have some parameters of when you can, even when the town says no. I I know that there have been some real challenging situations around the state about closing schools. And I'm not trying to force closures on schools or communities, but I worry about schools that are run with no kids. Schools are above what? With literally no kids in them and no ability to close them because there's not enough students that you can keep class. We have examples of schools that have had to close because it couldn't even hire staff for a school as small as a school has been. And I just worry about taxpayers are one thing, but even students and children under their education. So I'm just trying to find a balance here.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I I would hope that we've now had enough experience that merger study activities would now see the pitfalls of all of that, acting differently. I don't know. But I also don't have the answer of whatever we say would apply to everybody.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: This conversation, what you said, just makes me think when we think about jumping around, connected here, the facilitators, qualifications, job description, I don't know if I'm going go down that path.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: But

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: it feels more and more to me like they're going to need someone somewhere on these study committees is going to need some financial modeling and understanding tools and ability of the foundation. But because these two are so intertwined, if this is on the path towards that. So I know it's starting to make my brain explode, that gonna matter. We've been strict figurations, I think.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I thought my question was gonna be almost a sidebar, but it might be tangentially related to that. Was wondering when you were, right, when you were in the map making tool and you were making the seesaw lines, did that give you any indication of how many kids were in each because I'm thinking I'm just thinking ahead, like, okay. In each one of these seesaws, can we expect, oh, maybe over here there might be four potentially new larger districts between two and four thousand, up here it might just be two, or did that come up? I mean, you can kind of look at it and count the colored sections within it to get a sense of that. Because the colored sections are sort of suggestions as to what might make group groupings and they're all within the two to 4,000 range. Well, guess what I'm saying is, okay, right, so you could just count how many seats are here. Can I try to restate your concern and you tell me if I'm right? Sure.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I just stumbled into

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: something. Sorry

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: you did. What you're saying is, gee, we're forming a, or the legislature is at the point of saying, okay, we're doing a foundation formula, now we need modeling district A or district A, B and C are in the middle of a merger discussion. So it sort of needs to be modeled for each of them individually and altogether, I would hope that it is unequivocally true that there's benefit to scale under the foundation formula.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I didn't think that was a big part. Based on the modeling that we already have,

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I think there's a bit of a- A bit

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: of question about the reverse of that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, I guess I would say that I would hope it would be unequivocally true that separate entities coming together, and I'm sure I would be told right now by Jana Brown, yeah, but I'm saying that. Go ahead, Chris. Mean, clearly, it's out there, but not me, and I haven't answered to this at all. But this just seems way overly complicated. To me, seems like there's got to be, and I understand wanting to kind of follow statutes, statutes that's kind of in place and a little bit of a roadmap, but this just seems way overly complicated for what we're trying to do. Again, I have no suggestions on how to simplify it. Sorry, just ahead.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: Politically, I know unpopular suggests, I think it eliminates the challenge of trying to do all of this policy and governance and funding change at the same time. And yes, they are all interrelated. But I think, in my ideal world, this process will we know from great testimony yesterday. We know many of us who lived through it were on study committees in Act 46. I was like, that is going to take a while. And that has to start to shake out a bit more before you can really start to bake in the path to the foundation. I know that is not what a lot of people want to hear, but I am seeing the challenges of saying, okay, we're going to be slow and we're going to be incremental and more community based here, but the money, which is so much of what drives things current schools, is on a very different path, those might run into a different path.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: To me, that's I don't know,

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: but maybe I may be overconfident.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It just seems like taking the foundation format out of the whole equation right now, what we're doing is creating a CSA, but it's almost like we're overcomplicating saying, Do whatever you want, because we're not really setting any parameters other than, You'll figure out the Articles of Agreement, you'll figure out this, you'll figure So, to me, it's

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: So maybe it's I mean, I probably would say with you, I'm setting some hard for him.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think that's what we're doing.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Getting consensus here. Totally hearing what everyone's saying. This does feel very complicated. But the part that's complicated is us setting up the criteria and the boundaries around it, which is what once recognize where the strengths and weaknesses are in the decision points and we make those, the idea is to make it less complicated in the field that we're trying to implement. I would also say that because of the things that you just said and you said, and I'm staying with you, I totally agree with the foundation formula, and I just want to set that aside for right now. The timeline, I think, has to be part of the decision. It can't be an open ended process. So once we can decide what can be done within a period of time,

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: we set that, then it would

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: be easier maybe to set some of the boundaries around what these are. This is complicated because we've got all these points, but once we make decisions in those areas,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think it might become less. I would say, couldn't agree more, just as you were saying that, I'm like, oh. But there's no alternative that isn't really complicated. Could mandate newer, larger districts, but A, there's all sorts of political, as we heard yesterday, people sued, people protested. We've got operational issues within them, to say nothing of all of the bringing together of all these decisions that have to be made anyway, representation, that finance system, there isn't anybody gonna be used, all those sorts of things. So it's all yeah, I got no easy solution here. I know that Something's better than nothing, hopefully. That's not always so true. Alright, where do we leave off just now? Everybody, we would return off the closed articles of agreement.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, I think it's the answer for.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Alright. Well, so on the issue of closures, at this point, shall it just be silent and the articles of agreement, the local community comes up with the articles of agreement or the local voters study board? Would that create a patchwork system across the state of different closures?

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: That's a pledge we have now.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Yeah, think

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: we're here. I'm not sure I'm here early. I'm trying to temper myself with understanding that I've listened. Would say I share your frustration in the inability to have a simple solution that makes sense and is politically palatable enough to the people of Vermont that it can actually survive out there. Yes, but I think we're creating an entity that's just going to take all the heat.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: No matter what path you take that you go.

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: I mean, not trying to be what I normally am. But I mean, make Chris's proposal a couple of weeks ago, I think that is something the state could get around. And it would be a lot more streamlined and straightforward than this.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And you should actually leave this committee with enough votes. That's one or two problems here.

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: Well, I mean, I think we could have maybe explored it further see if we could find a way to get to more votes.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm not sure it would have led to, in a way, would have just led to a lot other huge decisions that have to be made that would all get twisted up and not so much. Was somewhat, the testimony yesterday about everybody talking about community, the importance of community value, available on the sets to be somebody else taking on the heat. Yes. Every time I turn around, they're asking for that, but they don't We hear time and time again, it needs to be more community based, blah, blah, But you're right, that also is saying they gotta take the heat. And the responsibility. Yeah. And I think that's what we're saying. Right. Yeah, but that doesn't make it anybody's job easy. I've I've

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: seen you.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Go ahead.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I'll just try to keep

[Emily Long (Member)]: you busy. This isn't gonna be helpful, but I just I

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: don't wanna admit that I was here

[Emily Long (Member)]: for the rewrite of chapter 11 because that implies I should know a lot more of what we're looking at. I do recall as we sort of swabbed through that, it was very in the weeds and sort of perplexing. So I think that this is a sort of a familiar feeling. But it's a structure we worked on before. To the extent it

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: has any reassurance. Well, should make this easier if it doesn't have stuff done. Well, Yeah. If there's an inherent challenge, tension here in us trying to move away from local control in some ways, maybe,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Pause for a moment and get an update. Matt, you know where we are? We're on age 72, I don't know why it's happening now.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: It's going to be

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I go with that.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Is it a minimum? You

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: want me to say a minimum of two to four as practical? Sure. I already have copy of it. Can

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: you repeat that so I can hear

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: it without any other

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: comments? Minimum.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: It must have been a two to four as practical. We don't want to cap it.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: I'm not putting a

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: No, no, So this is me just talking. Does it, so what would the benefit of saying a minimum of two to four versus a minimum of two? Is it just like, I think I like the two to four because then it lets people be like, Oh, I can go four. Right? Because sometimes you see two and in your head you're steadfast in

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: the two.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: That's a

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: question I don't really know. I like the two to four.

[Emily Long (Member)]: It's just

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: us trying it again.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: It's Once we get over a certain size, it's not as efficient. That's for kids either. But that

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: would be for the study.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I understand it. I'm just saying I

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: don't want Let's try to say what we know that say, oh, let's break up. I don't

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: want it to be

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: an individual. And I do like to make a home of care for at least or at some extent possible.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: If

[Emily Long (Member)]: that was here, she would

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: say as practical as the language.

[Emily Long (Member)]: You can kind of bust through.

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: Yeah, know, that's why you

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: can throw it in

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: a bus sized hole.

[Emily Long (Member)]: Yeah, it's a bus sized hole, no matter what we do do it.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Which seems Yeah. Do have 10,000.

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: But I mean, if we're going to say that the house on the ground knows it's better for the area,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: that would be good place where we could.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: That's why it has practical works for

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: me too.

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: Because they may, as practical, say, it's 1,000. It's eight It's

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: you might be like, we need eight because we're big.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: May It's easy because the districts are

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: right next to each other. I'm

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: not saying this is going to happen for all the people listening, but Burlington and Winooski in South Burlington all of sudden became betting bets, a year over 8,000, but that could work in that kind of metropolitan area.

[Emily Long (Member)]: And yet, if you combine your two largest high schools from Northeast Kingdom, you can't

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: get past 700.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Right, but this is what

[Leland Morgan (Member)]: I'm saying, right? That's where the two to the extent possible thing becomes the way to make it work is possible.

[Erin Brady (Ranking Member)]: About introducing Because

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: it would not be practical to try to have 2,000 in certain regions.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: This would be a good opportunity for us to

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: take a ten minute break.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Let's do

[Jana Brown (Clerk)]: that. I think we're gonna have to go. I can't

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: believe we're not going full for this one.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Gotta be your goal. This is ten minute break.

[Emily Long (Member)]: It will be, yeah.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: It's

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: a