Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Good morning to the House Education Committee, and it's April 30. The committee this morning is taking advantage of some available time to do a little bit more sort of education governance while appearing from superintendents, both current and retired, to really dive into the differences between SUs and SDs and how they have evolved and what they mean on the ground when you're a superintendent from their point of view. Anyway, with that, I'm going to turn it over to our first guest, Elaine Pinkney. If you would reintroduce yourself, and we'd love to hear from you.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: Okay, I'm Beth Quimby, I'm retired superintendent, superintendent of the Chittenden Valley School District, formerly Chittenden South Supervisor for fifteen years, I've been a principal in three different schools. I've been a teacher at two different schools, was in technical development for forty years. I did forty seven years in public education and I feel like in Vermont, starting in Canaan, that's where I started my hometown, And I feel like I have a pretty good sense of how it all works. During my tenure at Chittenden Valley, in the South, we merged. So I have the before, which was seven years, I think, and the after, which was eight years. And I assume you all got, right, just kind of like a broad overview. If there's one thing I want to start with and have you imagine, is that on the left hand side, supervisory union, it is multiple, scattered, and on the right side, the district, it's one. I think that is the biggest thing. Like for us in the Champlain Valley, and that is Williston, Shelby, Charlotte, Hinesburg, St. George, all feeding into CBU High School, pre district, as a supervisor to healing. And I had been principal in Longston for six years. So I knew that, that sense of like, these are my people, this is my board, this is our school, we do something so incredibly well, better than all those other schools. And they all felt the same way. Everybody is merged out. Like here we are all in this one little geographic area and we're all looking at ourselves as like us instead of we. So as I speak, I want you to just have that in your head. To me, that is the biggest thing, the culture that says, we are about all of these kids, we are about all of these teachers, we are about all of these principals. So that starts with focus. In multiple districts, every school has its own mission, vision statement, school boards, led by the school board. And from that leads to their goals, right? And so as superintendent, are managing, in my case, six different mission visions, even though like honestly, when we did that work, it turns out they all seem the same thing pretty much, but it doesn't matter because people carve out those words they care about. You're managing that, you're managing the goal setting that comes from that. So just like with that focus, in a district, you have one mission vision. You are collectively saying, this is what we want for all of our kids and for all of our systems. So that's a big difference in terms of like what the work of the superintendent is. Single focused on what's best for all the kids. In terms of board work plans in a supervisory union, I had seven work plans. So some districts don't even have work plans, but we did, at least we had that. And we would spend, the whole central office would spend, I'm not making this up, two full days in a conference room, a little bit having this, with charts all over the room, with Pierce's Williston's goals and work plan. Pierce's Sheldon, Chittenden, Hinesburg, CVU, St. George, and the SU, looking for the through loans. So that was like, the superintendent, didn't have an assistant superintendent, but if you did, curriculum director, special ed coordinator director, HR director, finance, all of that human capital for two days, just figuring out how to make sense of it. And you don't have to though. I am sure that there are supervisor units where they just go along their happy way and don't even try, because it's such a job to do that. In a district, have one work plan when the retreat is over, because that's where all the work plans are coming from. When the retreat is over, you still spend time, right? It's not like all of a sudden you leave and by magic, you've got the work plan, but all the ingredients are there. All the board members collectively from all of those times have said, this is where we want to go this year. And so we have one work plan that everybody, every board member, every principal, every other administrator and your community knows, here's what's gonna be happening this year. These are the focus areas for the board meetings in each of the months. Board meetings themselves. And I feel very fortunate that when I was in an SU, my predecessor had already brought the boards together to have the board meetings, except for one board in one location on one night. Yes, it was a long night because we started at 05:00 and we ended at maybe ten, maybe eleven, but it was at least all in one place and you could, they all went to the SU board meeting. So that was the beginning to bring that. But I know because I worked with superintendents

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: that in probably most SUs, that's not the case. I mean, I taught without

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: naming names, I'm mentoring a new superintendent who just before the break had had three board meetings a week for three weeks in a row and that didn't count if he goes to the you know, lacrosse game or field hockey game or whatever it is, it didn't even count that and he was exhausted and he is good superpower, he is doing a great job But he's gonna get like chewed up and spit out, but you cannot maintain that. You can't maintain that at that pace. And so some people, I mean like for me, before Ronald Reagan brought the horse together, that was seven horns. Imagine the number of these. So what I wanna underscore there is that you've hired somebody in the top position for the biggest money in the system, And what they're doing is basically, and I mean no insult by saying this, the care and feeding of warts. Because that is what your world is about, just keeping it all balanced and keeping it going and making sure the agendas are set and all enough. Finance and budgets, what I just said about carrot feeding awards, the first year that I was a superintendent, started because I had been at the Agency of Education, I started in November and budget season had already started and so I went to all the budget meetings but I went with my notebook and took a lot of notes and I observed that our CFO, COO, he had a different budget meeting every single day, some were at 07:30 in the morning, some were at five at night, six at night, they weren't even about the same topic. So if it was Tuesday morning, you might be discussing facilities in Shelburne and Tuesday night you're in Heinzburg discussing curriculum. And on Wednesday night, you're at CVU discussing course selections. I mean, I don't even know how he did it. And so the superintendent, yes, has to go to those meetings, but if you have a business manager, you've got to maintain all of that. So then again, like using up the resources in a really, in my, you can see where I lean on this, nonproductive way. Facilities, buildings and grounds, I think that like the issue that we're in a little bit in the whole state in terms of facilities, not being maintained, not taking care of. I used to do this thing like when we had new board members, we did like a school bus tour to all the schools, visiting each school, the CEO and myself. And one year before we were merged, we were in Hinesburg and we got a call, the roof in Charlotte had flown off. I mean, you can't even make it up, by the time we got there, the board was meeting and they'd already hired somebody, it's just so, it's so easy to not be streamlined and focused. In a district, what happens is you map that all out, right? Because there's one board and you say, here are all of our needs. How much money do we need to fix this? How much can we spend every year? And what will be our plan to move forward so it all makes sense? Curriculum instruction and professional development employee. Thank you, Megan, for putting your work together. I think she underscores exactly. Yes, you could pass a law that says you have to have the same curriculum, but you're not there to enforce that. Nobody's there. Like I say to boards when I work with boards, I just hope that you want to follow the law because there's no police that's gonna come and arrest you. And it's the truth, and we might as well lay that right up on the table. People do the right thing because they are held and inspired to do the right thing. And I think that it is so much easier to do that in an SD than an SU, because again, you can't manage it all. You leave, as a teacher, people used to say curriculum is what goes on in the classroom when the door is shut. Not when people write up all these beautiful things and put the thing on the, in the bookcase and say, okay, now we're all set. It really is at the ground level. And so when you think about it that way, of course, if you can make your group larger and have it be cohesive, coherent, you're much more likely to move forward. Megan, I read her testimony, I agree 100% of everything she said. Culture, I think I've already talked about that. I mean, I am a big believer that we are a small state. We are a small state. We all want the same thing for our kids. In our own district in the Chimpanzee Valley, we had done only lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of the groundwork for mergers. So our merger was not that difficult. People embraced it, they could see it was clear to them what the advantages would be for all of our kids. And I think that pre merger pot, and I spoke about this earlier, like if you went to Williston or Sheldon, they would just be like talking about their own school. Even my colleagues when I was a principal, they were all like, oh yeah, but what we do with this? Post merger is like, we meaning CVSD. And the community started behaving like that. Like, when they formed a new little football league, they called it CVSD, right? And embraced it. Equity and autonomy, I don't know how you get to equity and autonomy unless you have like that bigger capture area, a district instead of an SU. Again, and I'm not talking about maps here, I know you might be thinking I am, I'm not talking about maps. I'm just talking about the difference between an SU and an SD. I know that when we had our merger meetings, one of the hardest nuts to crack in terms of figuring out how to do it was the whole notion that everybody around the table said we want equity. If we're gonna emerge and our tax dollars are all going with about one budget, we wanna make sure that the kids at every one of our schools have not exactly the same opportunities, but equal opportunities. And that's what led to the other side of that coin, which is autonomy. But we're doing some really neat creative things in our schools. How can we measure that out so that we can say, yes, we feel confident that there's equity and there's autonomy. You can still do that major super after school thing that involves the teacher contract and all of that in this school. Other schools can choose to do it if they want to, but everybody doesn't have to do it. It's a huge shift and it's a positive shift, think. And again, it's like human capital. If you ask somebody to run six different companies, which is pretty much what some people will run, maybe more even, compared to running one company, the person who's running one company is gonna do a more focused more visionary, more creative, more all of it, because they have time and attention to give to it. Great, thank you, if you wouldn't mind hanging. I just wanna make

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: sure Megan has time before her hard

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: stop No, at I'm I

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: have a few questions. Okay, that's fine. Great, thank you. Megan, I think you're the one with the hard stop at ten, so we're happy to get some time with you. Go right ahead and introduce yourself and look forward to your testimony.

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: Excellent, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. My name is Megan Gruby. I am the Assistant Superintendent at Maple Run Unified School District. Prior to this role, I was a curriculum director at Grand Isle Supervisory Union for nine years. Prior to that, I actually worked at the Agency of Education as well. And so I have a pretty diverse view implementation of curriculum and in general, the running of schools. I also have been teaching a class for probably about six or seven years now for aspiring and new curriculum leaders. And so I get to see a lot of perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of implementing curriculum in different settings. I'm here today just to talk about my experience implementing curriculum in school districts and supervisory unions since I've now done it in two places. And I think it's also helpful to start in the place of making sure that we have a common definition or understanding of what we mean by curriculum, because I think that people have their own experiences and images that pop into their head when they think about what we're talking about when we say the word curriculum. So first, I just want to start with the purpose of a coordinated curriculum. It allows us to get incredibly clear about the learning outcomes for all of our students. And I think Elaine hit on this a lot where when there's clarity, consistency, vision, and alignment of goals, we can really focus on what matters the most, and it's the students in our systems and making sure that they have the best opportunities possible. And it's really a promise to our communities that a student's educational experience and results are not determined by their address or personal circumstances. And I don't know if that always comes to mind for people when we talk about curriculum, because I think that often we say, well, that's what we teach curriculum in schools. And yet it's so much more than that. It's our promise to our students, it's our promise to our communities, and it's our commitment the future as well. It's also one of the key pillars of implementing Act 173. And so I wanted to provide a couple of different, definitions, one starting from the Agency of Education's guidance document from 10/14/2020. So curriculum, therefore, on page three it states curriculum, therefore, is not just the scope and sequencing of skills and content, but how those skills and content lead to the desired outcome of proficiency, as well as how specific activities in the classroom or course align with the development of those skills and content. Accordingly, we define curriculum as the umbrella for the integration of the content, concepts, skills and process by which students achieve proficiencies. So it's a lot, it's not just something that's written, it's not just looking at the standards, there is a lot of interpretation and there's a lot of art and science that goes into bringing curriculum alive and ensuring those results for our students. At Maple Run, we referenced Robert Marzano's work on something called guaranteed and viable curriculum. And again, just to continue to define curriculum a little bit for us, the guaranteed aspect of a guaranteed and viable curriculum requires all students enrolled in the same class, course, or grade level be exposed to the same rigorous curriculum regardless of the teacher to whom they are assigned. And the viable aspect of a guaranteed and viable curriculum recognizes that teaching the curriculum and covering the curriculum are two different things. We do hear a lot of people say, let's make sure that we cover the curriculum. While teachers can cover a lot of content, to teach the curriculum requires students learn what the teachers teach. If the amount of content for which the teachers are responsible exceeds what they can reasonably teach within the time allotted, the curriculum is not viable. And so there are a lot of factors that go into this and there's a lot of the human component. I appreciated Elaine talking about human capital because at the center of coordinated curriculum are educators who must constantly make decisions and agree and align with one another. And that takes true work. It's not as simple as having a program or a unit plan because those leave room for interpretation and takes consistent concerted focus, effort, and time to create the conditions that enable educators to do this together. So I articulated a few of those conditions that are not necessarily readily apparent or always a part of the conversation about coordinated curriculum. And again, I'm going to hit on a lot of things that Elaine already articulated, but that collective commitment and vision, common direction, goals and agreements, clear decision making and input processes, human resources funding, consistent policies and procedures about curriculum instruction assessment, deep teacher expertise, cross school collaboration, strong and consistent, I would add, leadership, equal access to high quality instructional materials, and ongoing needs based professional learning. Those are just some. I'm sure if you ask anybody else who's involved in the curriculum world, they would have either a different phrase or some additional things to consider, but I thought that A through K was enough for us today. And so now I want to get a little bit into my experience. So now I'm at Maple Run, and I am in this position of the Assistant Superintendent,

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: and

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: I oversee curriculum and instruction here. I've been here for about ten months. But one of the reasons why I wanted to work here was because they are a consolidated pre K through 12 district that is really working on and has established many of these conditions for schools and for educators to deliver on the purpose and promise of a coordinated curriculum. And there's actually data to back it up for the past two years, by the end of the school year, there were no statistically significant gaps in performance among different schools and demographic categories where previously there were. And just again for scope, Maple Run serves about 2,600 students in Pre K through 12 with three Pre K eight campuses, a high school, and Northwest Career and Technical Center. I'm not going to read all of the bullets in my charts, but I hope everybody has the document and can look at it later. But the big trend as I was thinking about the conditions and those enabling conditions that I see in Maple Run and kind of contrasting that to my experience in GISU comes down to a couple of things. And two of those things are boards and budgets, which Elaine has already talked about, that consistency and alignment and having that goal, the goals and visions set by one body and then allowing the teachers, sorry, allowing the leaders to then go do the work of implementing where in Grand Isle, we would have to respond to the different priorities and goals of the boards where we might have alignment and focus in one direction, but a local board might be requesting something different and we might have to shift our focus, or they might have a different focus. And so that would then make us split our attention and split our leadership so that we might not be able to have that singular clear focus on creating these conditions for our educators. There's a bit about with regards to the budgets where if we don't have budgets that are passing and it's at an individual school board level or an individual school level, then we might have schools that aren't able to raise the funds for high quality instructional materials, or they might not be able to keep teachers in their positions, which means that we're losing that strong teacher expertise or we're not able to capitalize on that promise. Another aspect of budgeting and boards and that manageability is that we saw a turnover lot in our leadership positions that really direct the vision and mission of the SU in Grand Isle. In my nine years there, we had four different superintendents. I had three different ones in my first three years. We had three different directors of student support services, at least three different business managers. We had a complete turnover of our principal staff three times in each school. And so every time that you have one of those shifts, we impact our ability to carry forward implementations of curriculum. And there's this period of pause, adjust, reteach, and then move forward. And so that is something that kind of halts progress when you don't have that consistent leadership. There's a lot of research that says curriculum implementation, it takes three to five years to really get something solidly into practice. And when you have leadership changes every three to five years or more frequently, can pause progress and lead to confusion as somebody with a new vision is coming in and providing some direction that might be similar or different, leaving our educators confused. And I think that when we're talking about curriculum implementation and really thinking about that promise for students, our educators really need that clarity, and to know that at the end of the day, they're doing the right thing for their students. And when we have these changes, because either budgets are not passing or we're having an untenable situation for leaders, that can really create conditions where we're not going to be able to really deliver on those promises for our students. I would say in Maple Run, one of the things that's really admirable and that I've been enjoying is that the leadership team has real common alignment and collective ownership. Elaine said it very well where prior to consolidating, is these are my students, this is my board. And at MRUSD, we really talk about these are all of our students and what's good for students in this school is also good for students in this school. And because of the one budget and because of the one strategic plan, we're able to spur local innovation knowing that we can spread it across the district by presenting it to our board and saying, this is something that we see as promising for all of our students, so let's bring this forward. In Grand Isle, it would mean that we would have had to go to every single board and say, hey, here's this promising innovation. Here's how much we think it would cost to implement it here. Do you think that your taxpayers would support including this in a budget? And so we might not be able to spread innovation in the same way that we can in Maple Run, where there's more flexibility to support across the schools rather than looking at what's available in this budget versus what's available in this budget versus what's available in this budget. I think that we also got into a place where for our educators in Grand Isle that there was some lack of consistency or lack of promise that their position would still be there when we had budgets in individual member districts not passing. And so folks would look for districts or for supervisor unions where it was more stable. And when you really think about it, and as I've been kind of saying, the human condition is to want stability and consistency. And when you're not sure if your position is going to be riffed or if your position is going to exist or anything like that, it makes it really hard for people to want to stay in a district an or SU where their future isn't stable because at the end of the day, you have to take care of yourself first. And so we saw some really high teacher turnover, impacted teacher expertise. At Maple Run-in the beginning of the school year, Bill and I went around and we shared with our staff that we had 98% retention rate of our educators and our staff. And that is a staggering number with regards to people wanting to continue to return to Maple Run, to do the work at Maple Run. And we have so many teachers who are career educators in Maple Run because of the stability and the support that they've gotten across their careers. Were there people who are career educators in GISU as well? Yes. Were there fewer? Yes. Did we see a lot of turnover? Yes. And that then meant that there was different allocations of resources for ongoing professional learning to develop teacher expertise. There was more of us needing to hire people on provisional licenses and build their expertise in a way that when we have a more competitive salary schedule or something like that, we can attract high quality experienced educators to our system and start just a little bit more ahead of the game because of their either experienced teaching or their teacher prep program or something like that. So really getting into that strong teacher expertise. Were we able to implement curriculum in GISU? Absolutely. We were able to take advantage of some grant funds in order to bring on some major programs. But as soon as those grant funds, the ESSER funds went away, we had to start kind of proving why we needed to continue to invest money instructional materials or instructional programs because we had to make sure that it could pass at every single board level. And so it was either that local budgets needed to take on these expenses or the SU took on the expense, but then local boards had to support the increased SU assessment, which is tricky. It's very tricky in an SU. And so I think that in both of my experiences, being in a district, you're able to move more quickly towards that promise versus in an SU, there are a lot of steps along the way and diversions and potentially distractions depending on what's happening with your boards on a local level. The other thing is that boards in a supervisory union, the member districts, they can pass different policies than the policies at the SU, which can impact curriculum implementation. So if we're talking about programs, it's possible. It didn't happen. We're grateful it didn't happen, but it is possible for a local board to pass a policy that says, we're not implementing the program that the SU has selected for us. Or to do something that overrides the authority at the SU level. And so it just creates conditions of confusion and people not knowing which area to focus or trust or it can. And so when I think about my experience in both places, I really can see how being a part of a consolidated school district creates some efficiencies and opportunities and flexibility to make sure that we're delivering on our promise for all students. And so I would just kind of conclude saying that as we're thinking about curriculum implementation, that it's so much more than just a program. These conditions that I was talking about and kind of the tug and pull that we see on when we have these kind of technical elements of boards and budgets and human resources and all of those things that are necessary for deep implementation of curriculum. When those systems conditions create confusion, then we see that it takes longer to be able to deliver on the promise of coordinated curriculum. And when there's more clarity and consistency, we're more able to that place where we're able to ensure that students have access to a high quality education and have reliable outcomes regardless of their address or life circumstances. Thank you so much.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Do you have to go? I just would look around the committee to see if there are I've any

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: got a little bit of time. Are

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: there any questions from committee members? The sort of law that says curriculum is coordinated at the central supervisory union level was passed at this point a long time ago.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: Yep.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yet, what you're saying is that having a law is great, and Elaine touched on this as well, not like there's any police out there, but the SU model still can be a barrier to implementation. I guess, as you said, for money reasons sometimes, because one budget may spend more on something than another, but also it sounds like regardless of the fact that the law says curriculum is coordinated at the SU level, a local school board might say, we don't really wanna go in that direction, regardless of the law.

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: Correct, yeah. And I would also say that some of the legislation around coordinated curriculum or even some of the guidance documents, the supervisory district versus supervisory union or school district, and it was something that in my role I continue to advocate for clarity around that because that also creates some confusion around, well, it says supervisory district, so that means that us as a member district board, that we can decide on what that means, when in reality the intent was that it's at a supervisory union level. And so there was some confusion around some of the language, and even in some of my research for my testimony today, but then also in my experience that there are lots of guidance documents out there trying to define the differences and similarities for people because it is confusing. And so with a principal not knowing, do I look to the superintendent or do I look to my board who I'm much more accountable to because I'm seeing them at the board meetings, I'm creating a principal report and they are defining my priorities, whether that's instruction or facilities, depending on the board. And so that can also lend some confusion and inconsistency because there's just a lot of people setting direction and setting expectations and focus areas.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I also appreciate you pointing out in your chart and in your testimony the leadership issue. For me, that's always and will always be a concern is that hiring good educational leaders is challenging if they look at it, because first of all, there are fewer and fewer of them out there wanting to be superintendents of any kind. But then if you're looking at having to govern six boards versus one board, the field gets narrower and narrower. So I'm glad you pointed that out. My take on things is that there are superintendents that we have in Vermont who are strong advocates of an SU model. And my take on it is they're fairly exceptional human beings because that's really taking on a lot. And I just worry that the population of these exceptional human beings is pretty small and it may have already been sort of exhausted.

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: I appreciate you saying that because I think that when we talk sustainable results for students, it's that it cannot be dependent on a charismatic, dedicated leader. That it has to be something that regardless of who is at the helm, these things are happening and can happen for kids. And that we like to take the positive spin of if somebody wins the lottery and moves to Europe, that everything can stay as is and that we have that continuation and that we're able to deliver on those sustainable results. And we know that if the conditions in the system are only able to exist because we have a leader who is capable of making them exist, then it's a person dependent system is not a system that is sustainable. And I would even share that in Grand Isle when there was the final transition to the next superintendent, folks asked me if I wanted to consider that role. And I said no, because there was no way that I was going to be away from my family for the number of meetings and that I was going to have to not get home, not be with my kids, not be with my spouse, because of all of the meetings that I had to attend, both scheduled and then those special meetings and special circumstances that come up. I was not willing to make that sacrifice. And so I stayed in the position that I was in and was grateful that I made that choice.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: The other thing I appreciate you pointing out as well was educator turnover. Before our district merged, you could be hired at a small elementary school under that small elementary school's contract and be the last person hired for years. Always maybe seeing that enrollment was going down and always knowing that you were always going to be the person rift if necessary. And so, as you say, that sort of last hired person revolve constantly because they always went to a more stable place.

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: Correct. And I was a teacher at Morristown Elementary School and my first year teaching, I was that person who was last hired and was on the chopping block. And I was very lucky that there were some key retirements and I was able to maintain my position. But yeah, that's very destabilizing. And again, people want consistency, security, and to know that they can provide for themselves and their families. That really will drive, so we want to believe that morals and ethics drive us and keep us where we are. At the end of the day, the survival instinct kicks in first. So if we see that there's a place that's going to give us more of a work life balance, that gives us more of that ability to deliver on the promise of education in a way that feels more sustainable, then people are going to pursue that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think what we've seen is that under a master contract for an entire district, you may be the last one hired at a small elementary school, but you are now part of a bigger system where there's always going to be attrition.

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: Correct.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: And you can move within that system, but there's a lot of job security involved with that.

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: Absolutely, and I would even say one of the things that we're able to do in Maple Run is, we had at one school, we weren't able to hire a custodian, which isn't teaching staff, but this is still a good example. And we have the ability to first ask poor people to say, Do you voluntarily go over and have a change of assignment? We also have the opportunity to say, Based off of needs, are identifying a few people who are now going to be reassigned school to do the custodial work. And because they're all on one contract, there's no complicating factors that we can shift people. We had a position where interventionists in one school needed to go into the classroom because we had a long term sub that we weren't able to hire. And there was an opportunity for a support staff member for one school to go over and fill in the math intervention space in the other school because the need was there and the availability was there. And that's not something that you can do in an SU with, for example, in Albert, they had a vacant world language teacher for a very long time. Whereas Champlain Island's Unified Union School District had a world language teacher. And the ability for us to be a little bit more flexible in allocating resources across school settings is a real boon because we're able to absorb some of the changes and not have it be potentially a lack of programming because there's more district availability of resources versus depending big district across multiple schools, availability of resources versus depending on being able to hire someone because it's under one contract at a local member district versus at the SU.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great. Thanks very much.

[Megan Grube (Assistant Superintendent, Maple Run Unified School District)]: Yeah, thank you.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: All right. Annie, you are up.

[Annie Houston (Director of Finance, Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union)]: Okay. Good morning, everybody. My name is Annie Houston, and I am the director of finance at Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union. I want to thank the members of the House Education Committee for inviting us to share our perspectives on school governance, and a lot of what I have to say will underpin what Elaine and Megan have already talked about this morning. I sit before you as a product of Vermont's public education system. I graduated the top of my class from Craftsbury Academy and attended UBM on the Green and Gold Scholarship. I have a Master of Science from Boston University and have spent time teaching English as a second language, both abroad and in Boston before returning to these green mountains we call home. I come from a family that's been in Vermont for more than two hundred years, and within that family, public education is a cornerstone. I'll spare you the litany of who has done what over the generations, except to share that my mother taught in Lemoyle County for thirty six years and was a contractor with the then Department of Education during the New Standards Project of the '90s, which was an assessment initiative. And my niece is now a first year teacher in Williamstown, so public education is well within our blood. I'm here as someone who recognizes the remarkable experiences our public schools in Vermont have to offer, as well as areas where changes really must be made to improve the system as a whole and the quality of education we provide to our kids throughout the entire state. And a lot of what Megan said about the resource sharing and flexibility and really having the cohesiveness across an SD versus an SU really resonated with me in that context. So, OSSU serves six towns. It's Crasberry, Greensboro, Hardwick, Standard, Wilka, and Woodbury, and these are located within four counties: Caledonia, Lemoyle, Orleans, and Washington. The SU's role is to coordinate and provide shared services among each of its five districts. These districts are charged an assessment for these services based on each district's long term weighted average daily membership, or in simpler phrasing, weighted pupil counts. The shared services budget for FY27 is $12,600,000 and covers items specified in Title 16, such as transportation, student support services, fiscal management and oversight, human resources, curriculum and assessment, student data systems, and staff negotiations. We have also centralized some of our services in the SU budget that improve resource allocation. An example of this is our facility staff who can then work between buildings regardless of the district, and this avoids an administrative and contractual nightmare. OSSU is also the fiscal entity for any services or staffing that are shared between some districts, but not all. Excuse me. This budget for FY twenty seven is just over $970,000 and an example would be a teacher working in two separate districts, which we then bill for the prorated amount of salary and benefits based on the full time equivalent established to each district. Furthermore, the SU is the coordinator and overseer of all state and federal grant funding, which in FY twenty six is over $1,600,000 and provides services such as staffing, professional development, after school and summer enrichment programs, software, instructional content platforms, facilities upgrades, and so on. So we have five member districts. They are outlined in the table in the documents that were included, so I won't go through the nitty gritty details on that. But these five distinct district types sit under the umbrella of OSSU. Each has their own unique tax identity, which is also the case for OSSU. So all told, we manage approximately $30,000,000 in revenues and expenditures across six separate fiscal entities governed by their own boards. And I know this sort of thing has been mentioned this morning, but I will repeat that. Six separate fiscal entities, each with their own governing board. So six budgets, six boards, six budgets, six audits, six databases, six accounts payable runs every two weeks, five payroll runs every two weeks, Standard Town School District is accepted, and six distinct data sets that must be pulled, combined, and submitted for all reporting requests, all for approximately 1,000 students and two fifty staff. And this list goes on and on and on. From an internal day to day business operations perspective, this is not just a duplication of efforts, it is task dependent, a quint or sex duplication of efforts. Any organizational analyst can tell you that this is not the best way to use employee time or talent, but the system as it currently exists dictates our reality. By repeating the same tasks over and over for each entity, we are prevented from deepening our work and reducing redundancies, and this is a real challenge for the staff within our SU. Speaking about the budgeting process and local control, so the Supervisory Union Board comprised of members from each member district crafts and sets its budget annually in tandem with local boards working on their district budgets. What ends up being approved and decided upon at the supervisory union level is then represented as a single line item assessment cost in local district budgets. This cost is often approximately one third of a district's total budget and is a line item that local boards cannot adjust and modify at the district level. While the SU board builds its budget conservatively and carefully balances the impact to local districts in terms of services and costs, this establishes a dual level of budgeting that ties a local board's hands when it comes to tough conversations in challenging fiscal times. In addition, an unintended consequence is erosion of public trust, given the lack of transparency despite best efforts to explain and clarify the role of the SU and the services it provides, like the fact that OSSU employs about 103 FTEs. 85% of these are based in buildings and providing services. The remaining 15% are supporting central office staff and administration. While our district and supervisor unions are all working diligently to provide our students with a high quality education, this model quickly devolves into an Us versus them conversation as town meeting day approaches. Two layers of governance and two layers of budgeting are not conducive to a transparent process that fosters understanding and instills faith in our system. When thinking about taxpayer interest, the constraints placed upon supervisor unions force us to, in some ways, act against it. For example, SUs are not allowed to own buildings. OSSU central office is located in Hardwick. It's difficult to find a building with the appropriate square footage in our area to house staff. As a result, we pay an annual rent that is over $100,000 and draws the ire of taxpayers every single year. We have done our due diligence to find alternative space. It simply does not exist in a cost effective manner. We have, in essence, paid for our building three times over the course of our lease, but without the option to own, it is a necessary evil and therefore a waste of taxpayers' money. From another angle, many of our constituents and board members have often asked for better in-depth fiscal analysis and forecasting, and frankly, they're owed it, but therein lies the rub. At the start of each budget cycle, I'm building budgets and presentations six times to present to six boards. It's a repetitive loop that consumes all capacity along with managing and overseeing the rest of the day today that does not allow the headspace or the time to develop and provide communities with insightful information. Lastly, the supervisor union governance model stretches staff too thin, contributing to burnout and excessive turnover, just as both Elaine and Megan have talked about. Take as an example, the FY27 budget cycle. From November 1 to January 20, there were 22 board meetings. Each of them required a new set of numbers, memos, and presentations, and each lasted well into the night. The only week without a board meeting in this entire stretch was Thanksgiving. This is not a sustainable model. Our turnover proves it, which we've already talked about this morning. I'm the sixth individual to hold my position in twelve years, and I will be resigning at the end of this fiscal year. A change in the most senior fiscal official every two years on average is A, emblematic of a severe systemic problem, and B, prevents the supervisory union from establishing the stability and consistency needed to achieve its long term goals and outcomes. So a simple solution would be to hire more staff. However, the will of the public and our boards will not support it. The vicious cycle continues. OSSU is faced with yet another change in senior level leadership to manage and navigate, and this includes a new superintendent for FY27 as well. The need for broader, more systemic change is evident. And so I ask you, members of House Education Committee, to please examine governance models and in particular the use of supervisory unions carefully and with extreme caution. There is so much potential to be gained from moving away from this model. Elaine and Megan have both spoken about this this morning. It does not mean that local voice has to be lost or that schools will close. It means that we can focus on doing everything we can to provide the best education and opportunity for all of our students, which is what they deserve.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you, thanks a lot, really appreciate that. And people in your position, just from my own sort of observations, are hard to come by, even for large, high functioning single board SDs. In my district, we hired a guy who mostly managed restaurants, who turned out to be fabulous because it turns out managing restaurants and all their books is much harder than managing SD. But before that, we had frankly constant turnover. And that's at a high functioning single board SD. And so I guess I would ask, how challenged is your district going to be to replace you since you are departing soon?

[Annie Houston (Director of Finance, Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union)]: Yes, so we posted, I believe in late February, early March, we received our first applicant two weeks ago. So I think that the search committee is working on having conversation and interviews to see if it might be the right fit. In the meantime, we have a bandaid solution in that my brother who is also the director of operations for OSSU is sort of taking on, excuse me, is taking on an interim director of finance responsibilities as well to sort of get through the fiscal year turnover and make sure that the lights stay on and everything keeps running. But that's not a long term viable solution without other systemic change that would be required if they were to decide to shift to a director of operations and finance, not a model that anybody recommends. We've tried that before. It burned that person out almost immediately. So we will see, but it's a little bit of a day by day, just put one foot in front of the other process at this moment.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: It doesn't help in, as you say, offering the kinds of services that your school districts deserve, such as predicting for the future and those statistics that you already can't provide being stretched. Right. So, the OSSU is a hodgepodge of different educational delivery systems. One of the things we wrestle with a lot in here, Elaine, why don't you come up and sit up on this call since we have some time for Q and A. Is the challenge of how do you bring all of those different educational delivery models between choice at K-twelve and hybrid sort of under one governance model. I realize you're a director of finance, a here's how you operate a school district, but didn't know if had any thoughts on that. And Elaine would be happy to hear from you as well.

[Annie Houston (Director of Finance, Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union)]: Sure, yeah, I'll offer something and then Elaine can jump in as well. I mean, I think as far as our current district setups, we could maintain what each of our communities are doing and the education models that they are using, even if we were to just shift to a supervisory district model, and it would allow greater flexibility in what we're doing. So an example would be Crashberry Academy in Hazen. They are Crashberry's K-twelve, Hazen's seven through 12. Crashberry has a lower student population in those grades. We have a cooperative athletic agreement and there are certain things that we're trying to share like driver's ed instruction and access to AP classes, those sorts of things. Because those are two different fiscal entities, the level of contortion work that has to occur just to have those kids take advantage of what's happening at the school that's seven miles down the road is such a drain on the resources and the people that we have trying to make all this work. And the principal saying, okay, so we need to make sure that we're billing for this or do it, there's just a lot of rigidity around the financial structure as it stands. And sometimes because of those hoops that you have to jump through, that prevents some of that creative work that Elaine was speaking to from happening. And I, you know, even, yeah, I, we would be able to maintain a lot of what we're doing right now with greater creativity and flexibility just by shifting to an SD model, serving the same number of students, having the same number of buildings, but being able to do more with the same amount.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think the fear among folks would be that maybe you would say, well, actually we don't need to maintain the same number of buildings.

[Annie Houston (Director of Finance, Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union)]: I think that's fair. I mean, I think we are in a hard Vermont is between a rock and a hard place, as we all know, as you guys have been wrestling with for a number of years now at this point. So it's not just districts that are spending more, it's not just districts that have lost student population, it's not just the rising cost of healthcare, it's all of these factors have coalesced into this giant issue that we now find ourselves trying to work towards a solution on. In some cases, I think it may not be closing a building, it may be repurposing how our facilities and spaces are used. Does that look like grade banding? Does that look like dedicated magnet or specific subject content workspace for a particular building? We've already done that with one of our districts, Mountain View Union Elementary School District. The Lakeview student population for the town of Greensboro was declining sharply quickly, and we were down to running a K-three building with 23 kids. That's not necessarily in the best interest of those students or those staff. There was constant fear of people losing their jobs because what if the school does close? So being able to pivot and say, let's turn that into an early education center. Let's put all of our pre K students there for the entire district and really embrace the fact that that entire building and all of its curriculum and the way that it functions can live and breathe three and four year olds. And it is the most magical place to go into now because it's filled with kids that are all doing that work, didn't have to close the building, but we were able to repurpose it in a way that better served the needs of that specific district. And being able to think, okay, so what if we zoom out to do that for all six of our towns that we serve? That to me just seems like we have a lot to gain as opposed to what we have to lose.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Very well said. Thank you. I

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: agree with all of that. And I think the first step would just be to take every SU and turn it into an ST. And I understand that some of the issue is school choice. And maybe there's a carve out for that, to make it work. But a first step would be to go from SUs to SDs. I mean, you've heard Megan did a great job, and Annie. Nice to meet you online Annie. Oh my gosh, the redundancy. You know, when Megan said I didn't, I did that search, I'm the one who cited her, would you consider? And she said to me, No. But you know, it's not just about the meetings, it's about doing purposeful, meaningful work. And I don't know how a superintendent, with all of that going on, can do purposeful, meaningful work and be an inspiring leader and get the group together to say, we are all around. We all care about the same thing. We all enter this profession for the same reason. I don't know how you do that when you've got such disparity and you can have low, you can have low board chairs who just say, hell no, I'm not gonna do that. And then, I don't know, like it doesn't matter what the law says, there is no police that's gonna come and make that board chair do whatever. And I mean, that can be as little as this happened to me in one of my superintendent searches. We, in December laid out, here's the timeline, here's when all of this is gonna happen. I have a rule that if you're on the committee, you have to attend all of the sessions, the committee sessions. You can't just pop in and out. And so, like five days before we were gonna be selecting candidates, a board chair changed the budget meeting for that district to the night we put the committee meeting. In effect, ensuring that three people who were on the committee would not be able to attend the committee meeting. It's just, it's games, it's like little games that people play to get their way, not play with it. Think even when you're dealing with tricky problems, Annie was just talking about, the board that represents, Woolca-

[Annie Houston (Director of Finance, Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union)]: Pressbury, Hazen, Standard, Greensboro, part of it.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: All of those, a board that comprises all of the people around the table, they're gonna make the best decisions for all the kids. And you're gonna get to hear the compelling reason why we might want to refocus the school, but we might want to go to school. I worked with the superintendent several years ago when we had a school with 11 kids in it. I'm not telling stories out of school, because this was in the media. Parents sued to allow their kids to go to another school because they felt like their kids were not getting a good education. If you're one of two kids in a grade level and things don't work out for you in whatever way, there is no way, there's no way to turn, right? So, in the end, they did close that school. But it would have been a lot easier to do that work if it had been an SD than having all the school districts within the SU.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I think that Annie has touched on, OSSU, it's kind of a great example. The Act 46 mergers that took place, the ones that sort of went very smoothly, by and large, were just like CBSD. It was elementary schools that all fed into a unified high school or unified middle school and high school. And so it was kind of easier, everybody was educating their kids toward a shared place or goal. But as we contemplate expanding that to newer, larger districts where there might be multiple high schools and whatnot, I'd just like your opinion on sort of the added challenge of that versus the preferred model that we did with Act 46 that's worked pretty well. But what if

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: they have a district that had school choice, they gave up school choice to merge with us. And so I understand that and that was because of all the work that we had done previous two, so they didn't want to not be with us, It's that collective culture of like, I don't want the disenity, I don't wanna be put someplace else because that was one of the things that would have happened in 1946. They had chosen not to merge with us, they would have been placed in another SU. I don't know why you can't build school choice within the district. We did that actually, we had a school choice for KA. I mean, was very, it is very well articulated. So people can't just move wherever they want, whenever they want. There's a time frame, you can only choose to do that once. There has to be room, all of this kind of thing, but might that work at the high school? Might that be better for some kids? Might some kids be better off at Crack's rate than at Hazen? I don't know and vice versa, right? Depending on what the kid is looking for. Could you have high schools that focus more on one thing or another within an SU? If I were a young person thinking about being a superintendent, that would be really exciting to me to think about like, how do you do that? How do you, you know, it's almost like choice within choice for kids. All our kids aren't the same. You know, so like one of the advantages of our big schools is that they can offer lots of choices. But I can tell you, I am very still very familiar with Cayman High School and they offer lots of choices there. So it's doable, you know what I mean? You can do it.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Yeah, think my concern wasn't so much how do you operate through different delivery systems of choice, but more just moving to sort of taking the next step of, well, if you take Addison County, three unified high schools around which Ag 46 mergers were built, Is there advantages to then taking the next step and saying, you know something, you should all become one.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: I think size matters. I was not a big, and I'm just thinking personally now, if that's okay. I was not a big fan of turning Chittenden County into a district of 20,000. I already feel that the rest of the state feels like Chittenden County is the tail wagging of dog, and to make them even bigger was like, what? You know, they're big enough. I like, I think, the map that came out of this committee, which was two or four thousand, because that's doable, right? You can still, as a superintendent, do the meaningful work of gathering your principals together once a month to say, hey, where are we? What's this work we're doing? What are the next steps? How are we doing it? How can you help this person over here with this? What idea did you have? You can't do that if you've got 20,000. You certainly can't do it if you haven't one, which I did a couple of weeks ago. And I don't think you can even do it in the county. The geography of Vermont is different, right? So, it's possible that in Addison County, Mount Abe and Middlebury and I don't know who the

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: other- Bridgette.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: Bridgette's could be together and you'd still be in that number and the distance between still makes sense so that you can gather people. I think we are a people in history. Wasn't always like that. I will tell you what my first superintendent, when I was a principal, my first superintendent when I was a principal, hit my trajectory, I'm a teacher, I'm a bilingual director for a couple of years and then I get a principalship and then I get married and then I get pregnant and then I say to my superintendent, I am not going to come back next year. I wanted to go back to teaching. It's not that I wanted to stop working, I just don't see how I can do this work. So it was a school of five sixty kids in three buildings, no assistant principal and no guidance counselor in an area of the state that there was a lot of need. And I just couldn't see doing it. And he tried to convince me to stay saying that I could take the month of July off and I said, I'm already working fourteen months a year, I don't know how I am able gain those people. But this is what he said to me that I had a lot had and still have this past, a lot of respect for the superintendent, but this is what he said to me, well the next time around, meaning next time you decide to be an administrator, get a central office job, you've already done hard work. And I remember thinking, I don't want that job. Don't want the job that is managing just like schedules, glorified office manager, right? And I think that in Vermont, we have superintendents who want to be doing the real work, who wanna be working with principals. Teachers at a different level, yes, teachers too. We want to do that work. That's what inspired us to become educators. And so I think that size, all to come back around to size matters. It can't be so big that that can happen. Again, nobody's going to be listening. That person's not going to have police to send out to the schools to whatever. The door's going to close, people are going to do what they're going to do. Has to be small enough. And I don't mean small, Chittenden Valley is 4,000. Small enough that you can touch the human beings, know their names, you can bring them together, you know who their kids are, you know, all of that, I think is fundamentally a brand value. And I think it makes a difference for kids. It makes a difference for kids in school if the person walking through the hall knows who they are.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: As we continue this trend of declining enrollment, I think one of the fears of the big large SD, and mean under a full thousand, but for many people, 3,000 is a big, huge SD and a big change. But it is that sort of loss of local voice and fear that my school and my community could be targeted for closure.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: I think that that would be a conversation around the table. Right? But I think that that's what people can be creative. I do like the idea of repurposing space. I don't know how you'll work that conversation. Conversation and still make sure that there's equity for kids and that you're getting a robust education.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Declining role is what drives the conversation, not governance models.

[Annie Houston (Director of Finance, Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union)]: I just say something to that really quickly, Peter? One of the things that I really had a hard time with is the fact that people just fundamentally don't understand the SU model and I speak a little bit about this in my testimony but you know, when I came in, I was kind of like and this was back in 2024. I was like, okay. So, I know because I've been working at OSSU since 2020, I know that we could be doing better communicating what it is that the SU does and the services it provides and the role that it plays in supporting each of these towns and communities and the schools that are in them. People just don't see that. And so one of the comments I heard this year at a meeting, which was from a former board member at one of our schools, and he's very well known in the community, he's a great guy, and he was like, in public comment, he goes, I just wanna say this is the clearest and best budget information we have ever been provided. It is absolutely fantastic. It is blah, blah, blah. And it was like, oh, that's really good to hear. That felt really great. So I kinda got a little wind in my sails. And the very next sentence was, And we should leave the SU because they don't do anything for us. So when you hear those two things at the same time, there's a fundamental misunderstanding about how this system works and how it translates to what's happening in the classroom. Now that may be that regardless of the governance system, there's always going to be a bit of a struggle there because people are often hearkening back to the days of a central office with three people or your local school board sets all the priorities and nobody else can tell us what to do, those sorts of things. But I do think that the SU model is inherently complex in a way that just prevents people from seeing how the impact to quality of education and the way things function occurs in their towns.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: All right, thank you both. Well, let me just make sure the community doesn't have any other questions because I have a little flexibility scheduled here.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: I don't really have questions. I'm definitely not. Just answered it right.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I I know we've had these conversations so many times in this committee for so long, but the testimony today makes me really sad. Really sad because these structural things, I'm almost gonna cry about SU, that's really It's just so obvious if you care about schools and kids and teaching, This is not sustainable. This is not what is best for kids. If adults and our leaders are in positions where they're in near crisis or have to choose between having a family or being willing to go to board meetings three nights a week, and there's constant turnover, that translates down to kids and education. And so have lots of questions rattling in my head. I wonder about the number of emergency and provisional licenses and SDs versus SUs. And I don't know the data on any of these things on some of our outcomes and test score data. It's so obvious that there's instability in the structure that is not good for humans. And it's abundantly clear from the adults here who care a lot and appreciate it. But it just breaks my heart for kids because that's the systems That's who they're meant to serve. Don't know. This is a hard one today and I know we've had this conversation many times. But hearing really dedicated educators, I think, bring it into clear focus from lots of different, over a long period of time, from a lot

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: of different corners of the state,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: as sad, I think, of where we are.

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: Where we're probably going to land. And I just have to follow that by saying I agree with everything that Rev. Raeke just said, and I'm going to make sure that in my SU, where I'm a board member, that they're aware of this testimony and that it should be required in viewing and reading because we live and breathe it every single day and I am grateful for the feedback that we've heard today.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I'm gonna add one more, and that is having been board chair of the Addison Central School District at the transition to sort of watch the ability of our educational leaders to pivot from board management to really making significant change because we immediately started implementing an international baccalaureate program and being able to do that quickly because we didn't have to go through every board of every, that we have of the seven boards. That experience to me has always been like, Oh, I get it.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I think when you, when people say, Well, how much did it save? The benefit, the savings of mergers or some of those Act 46 things, some of them are less. I mean, we could count if we

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: could count how many kids went through

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the IB program. Not everything is tangible in the same dollars and cents way, although it is all dollars and cents. How successful our kids are is dramatically impacting our economics down the line. But there's so many of those things that are not gonna show up on a like, oh, you saved $500,000 by merging, but oh, you totally improved quality and opportunity for high school students,

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: which happens and value. Am I included in my chart that I gave you on the back side is the testimony I provided to Senate then two weeks ago and at the top it was what was our process. So from CSSU to CVSD and I think that I checked in with Bob and Jana, and they both said about $500,000 And they said that's not a lot of money, right? Like that really isn't, and that's not why we did it, right? Did it and the community did it because they knew that it would be better for kids. And it has been, I still live in the community. I see it all the time. It's a community that sees itself larger than their own.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you both very much, Annie. Good luck with your future pursuits. Thank

[Elaine Pinckney (Retired Superintendent, Champlain Valley School District)]: you. Great.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Do folks need a five minute break?