Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Okay, welcome back to House Education on May 8, I think it's May 8. This afternoon, we are fortunate to have some time with the folks from the New England Board of Higher Education. I have two motivations behind having them come and join the committee. One is to basically give the committee an overall refresher on what the board is all about, or that the organization is all about, what they do for Vermont. In part because, really, I think between the end of this session and the start of the next session, we need to reinvigorate Vermont's participation in it. There is, for example, a legislative advisory committee that I have been on for years and find it very helpful in meeting with legislators from other New England states about sort of issues in higher education. It's a little hard for Vermont because we don't have an agency that deals with higher education. We don't do much regulating of higher education, but it is interesting to hear what else is going on. And in addition to that, one of the initiatives that is going on is higher education in prisons. And just so the two of you know, we had the Community College of Vermont come in and talk to us about it earlier in the week, really interesting. And so I thought it would be great to get an update from you as to Debbie's work in all that as well. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Michael and Sarah. Introduce yourselves. And I guess you could begin with kind of the the big Debbie overview and talking about some of the work and and its benefits to Vermont.

[Michael K. Thomas, President, New England Board of Higher Education]: Well, glad to do that. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to see you all. Chair Conlon and Vice Chair Quimby and members of the committee, it's a delight to be here. Just to say a few words, I think Matt is asking if we would like to share screens and if that's feasible, we'd take advantage of that at various points during our conversation here. I was unable to respond by the chat, but if that's possible, that's great.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Yep. So thank you. The cohost.

[Michael K. Thomas, President, New England Board of Higher Education]: Oh, well, thank you. I've been upgraded. That's great. First of all, thank you for your service. We know you're at, you know, I guess hopefully towards the tail end of what's been a very busy and consuming session, certainly in our conversations with New England legislators, the topic of education reform in Vermont has come up regularly. And so we know that you've been very, And very thank you in particular for your service. We know how much education leaders, institutions and students both in K through 12 and higher education depend on your support of leadership and thank you for all that you do. So I will say a few intro words and I think quickly summarize some of the materials that have already been shared with you. And then ideally share a large portion of this time with my colleague, Kaczynski, who is here. Sarah is one of our directors and ably leads a number of our initiatives but particularly the New England Prison Education Consortium which she'll describe in detail. And certainly we acknowledge the leadership of the state of Vermont, your colleagues that you've been in contact with earlier in the week as well. They've been really important supporters and collaborators on this work. And I'm sure that Sarah will detail that in a number of ways. I will start with the assumption that everyone perhaps doesn't fully know the nature of a education compact, but we are one of four regional higher education compacts that exist in The United States. There's one in the West out of Boulder, Colorado, that is called the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. There's one in the Upper Midwest in Minneapolis and one in the South as well. Our footprint is of course is the six New England states. There are only three states in the country that do not participate in a compact New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I think just by dint of sort of historical engagement in sort of geographic identities, New York and New Jersey do ally with NEBY on one of the programs that I will describe later. But our footprint has since 1955 has been the 6,000,000 states. As summarized for you, we were created enabled by the federal government and created by legislation in each of the 6,000,000 states really driven by governors, legislators and post secondary leaders. And the essence of that sort of founding really relates back to the history of American higher education and particularly the post enrollment boom driven by the GI Bill. So as you can imagine, states were trying to grow rapidly to accommodate the expanding interest in post secondary education opportunities. And they realized that they needed to find ways to collaborate, to coordinate and where possible share resources. And so NEBI was created fundamentally as a shared resource of the six New England states and as a platform for collaboration. We've summarized there for you, of course, the basics of our work, our mission in particular and our sort of focus in terms of our strategic priorities as well, which include affordability, equity and alignment with high demand talent needs. As a quick reference, as also noted, we've got from each of the 6,000,000 states, eight specific representatives. We've shared with you that list and in addition to representative Conlon and your colleague in the Senate, Tom Chittenden includes a broad range of education leaders and individuals and they're very valued contributors. I will quickly mention that also as representative Conlon indicated, we do have a legislative advisory committee and in a nutshell, and I will also just drop quickly here in the chat for what it's worth a quick link to the legislative advisory committee summary, but created back in 2013. In essence, it's an opportunity to create a platform for legislators to come together in the region to share experiences, legislation, sort of state perspectives. We do that typically on a semi annual basis, but sometimes on interspersed schedule depending on issues and needs. Really it creates both community and interaction and exchange. We also typically will bring in at the suggestion and the advice of members of the committee, people from around The United States that work on critical issues. Sometimes they are policy experts from other states. Oftentimes they're from national organizations with a perspective on a particular policy issue or dimension to essentially support sort of knowledge and learning. I realized in that regard, it probably mirrors some of the interactions that you might have through the National Conference of State Legislators or Council of State Government. But it's a very vibrant community and we would certainly invite the additional participation. There's really no upward cap on number of people that can participate from any given state. I know we've got four individuals including Senator Chittenden and Representative Conlon who participate. And if any members of this committee or if you have suggestions of other colleagues that you would like to involve, please reach out to us and we would love to engage in that conversation and find opportunities for your participation. You've got a summary of our overall sort of slate of activities. I would say that our work really concentrates in three primary areas. The first is what we would call convening and leadership engagement And so that reflects not only our legislative advisory committee, but a variety of in person and other virtual events that we convene on a regular basis around the region. Off time in response to leaders requests for information, I'll give you one recent example. We recently convened all of the state higher education leaders, institutional leaders and state finance agencies together to sort of share perspectives on how states are working to respond to changes in federal regulation related to the availability of grad loans, graduate loans for graduate students. That purpose of that conversation was to share information and perspectives. We also had worked to share some information with the New England Council on behalf of the six New England states in terms of advocating for greater flexibility in terms of state loan entity, state finance entities ability to serve that population. That's one example. Sarah recently held a summit on higher education in prison. So a variety of events, and we are always open to collaborating with colleagues on sort of requests for meetings and roundtables and other gatherings where we can help be a convener. Secondly, our work in program specific areas, the summary that we've shared with you, I think is a good summary of that. It ranges from our tuition break program, which really dates back to the founding of NEBY in that it creates an interstate tuition exchange program that allows students to travel within the region, but out of their home state while accessing programs that are advantageous to their individual goals and educational trajectories without having to pay full out of state tuition. Is not only is a great benefit to students and we've shared with you a sheet that summarizes those savings, which you know better part of almost $3,000,000 I believe from of savings to Vermont based residents as they move to other New England states for programs that they choose to access often based on specialization or program uniqueness. And it's also a critical tuition sort of marketing and strategy enrollment marketing strategy for institutions around the region, including the three public institutions in Vermont. A program for public institutions. It also outlines in that document our work in policy and research and particularly we're involved in a lot of work these days that is focused on the connection between higher education and what we would call employability or workforce needs. We've been executing a program with support from the Strata Education Foundation that's called the Learn and Earn Challenge. And we're in the process of ramping up a series of initiatives that will further engage states and employers and institutions and expand in the number of paid internships available around the region. And then the document also describes our work with open education resources and also mentions our work and Sarah can say more about this in developing guaranteed transfer pathways for students from two year public to not only four year public, but four year independent institutions. We also manage a somewhat obscure regulatory driven entity called the state authorization reciprocity agreement. And that was built essentially to simplify the ability of institutions to deliver high quality online programs across state borders by virtue of federal regulation institutions have to be authorized in every state where they have a student. The challenge of that became extremely evident when students returned home during COVID but had been known also before that time as being a real impediment to institutions being able to deliver programs very widely. But by virtue of the reciprocity agreement, which we helped to build across the nation, we founded a separate nonprofit entity that supports institutions, 13 institutions in Vermont participate. It helps them to reach about 3,200 students outside of Vermont and also enables the ability for students who are out, who from out of state, but can access an in state learning placement opportunity to be able to do that within the confines of regulation as well. So a little bit obscure, but a real critical dimension to institutions being able to deliver online programs in particular small institutions and both public and independent institutions participate in that obviously. That's really sort of our program aspect. And then we have our policy and research team. And I'll just be very brief about that with the hope to pass the baton here to Sarah and answer any questions that you might have. But we have a policy research team that can assist with information and data requests. We're doing a fair amount of work these days, particularly around labor market projections and again, sort of understanding the demand for skilled talent around the region. I would note that back in 2021, then chair Kate Webb enlisted our organization and our policy and research team. We essentially created the proposal that resulted in the state select committee on the future of public higher education in Vermont, and then helped to stop that activity. The report was written by another entity, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, but NEVI was instrumental in both sort of proposing mounting up and then executing the select committee. And that's an example of how we try and work for member states to assist them sort of in the course of their work for higher education in the region and to provide policy and research capacity where needed. So with that, let me just pause. We'd be delighted to answer any questions you have. And then of course, wanna leave a fair amount of time for my colleague, Sarah here.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Great. Thanks a lot, Michael. And I'm glad you brought up at the end there, the work that Nebby did in coming up with the Select Committee on the Future of Higher Education in Vermont. As a sort of younger legislator, it was kind of amazing to watch something go from report to implementation, to frankly, providing a roadmap to the future for our state college system. And I think it really showed the high value of being part of a compact where we have access to great policy work. So appreciate that. I do have a question like in the future, how is NEBY starting to work on or focus on higher education facing the demographic cliff? Especially given today's front page of the New York Times talking about declining enrollment?

[Michael K. Thomas, President, New England Board of Higher Education]: Yes, the answer is yes. So I'll try and be brief on this too. So obviously the tuition break continues to evolve to be a tool for institutions to be able to then just have another tool in the quiver for expanding their reach for attracting enrollment. We have also held a number of conversations with, institutions, both public and independent. For example, we were, early involved in sort of events and strategy sessions resulted in Marlborough's transition as they were dealing with the challenge of reduced enrollment. That has all been sort of focused on really helping institutions think about opportunities for strategic partnerships or alliances that might help address their sustainability needs and expand their ability to deliver innovative programs and just to deal with some of the challenging realities. I mean, I think we know that, you know, sadly not every institution is going to survive where possible. If we can help support those transitions in meaningful ways, we're desirous to do that. We continue to be, very interested in the question of the extent to which institutions are evolving to meet the range of available students. And your point I think is right on particularly relative to the reality of enrollment declines that certainly have a national impact, but are particularly concentrated in the Northeast and in the Upper Midwest. It does raise the critical question of how are institutions evolving to meet the needs of other learners. Nebby, this is probably about seven years ago had done a comprehensive survey of adult learners in the region. We'd be happy to share that back with you just to understand their needs and motivations and certainly found that there were clear populations in the region with interest in further education. Those are individuals both with undergraduate degrees, but also, you know, just some undergraduate credits and no degree. You know, it is an interesting reality that a vast portion of delivery to nontraditional learners around the region is done by a single institution and it's an independent institution and it lives in the state of New Hampshire. I think you're probably familiar with it, but I think it does demonstrate the question and I think a critical imperative for institutions to think about their twenty first century learning model. If we're not going to be able to serve traditional undergraduates in the fashion that we have, I think, you know, we certainly do understand that there are still vast learning needs of particularly adult learners and even those who are readily employed through skilling and upskilling. And so, you know, we would certainly, you know, challenge and welcome engagement with institutions and with states around this question of where can we look for models where states have been able to develop robust delivery alternatives for lifelong learning. And, you know, where it's some interesting, I think transition points given the advent of workforce Pell, which again, you know, is fairly narrow in its current iteration, but is likely to expand and grow in the future. So I hope that's a helpful set of thoughts, but happy to answer any questions as well.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Yeah, well, thank you. That was helpful. Other questions from the committee? Are we learning more about the policy work? Great. Thank you, Michael. Yes, thank you.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Great. Thank you so much. And I might just pick up where Michael left off. So my name is Sarah Kaczynski and I currently serve as the director of transfer initiatives here at the New England Board of Higher Education, as well as director of the New England Prison Education Collaborative. And I think I want to talk briefly about the transfer work just because I think it builds nicely on the idea of serving learners where they are. So one of the things that Nebby has done is create state specific transfer guarantees in each of the six New England states funded by four, you know, private funders who were interested in supporting that kind of work to, I think, wrap their arms around a larger swath of four year destinations and given our regions, higher proportion of independent colleges and universities, the desire was to be able to bring those institutions into the fold of some of the state specific transfer policy. So we currently have five institutions in Vermont that participate in the Vermont transfer guarantee. I can also put if it's useful in the chat, the student portal which we supported CCV and setting up in which I worked closely with their team there to continue to update and maintain. I think there's some data related to our first year of enrollment in the Vermont transfer guarantee in the materials that were submitted for today. But we have just over two ninety students that enrolled during the first year, so that as students that transferred to one of those five receiving institutions. And we are currently working with CCV, we just made a sub grant to them with some of our remaining grant funds to support some efforts to capture student voices around community college transfer. One of the most compelling things that I heard when there was a, you know, nationwide transfer summit during the last administration held by US Department of Education was that students want to hear from other students about their transfer options. I think we spent a lot of time building up infrastructure and policy, and the students on the panel really, I think, read us all to shame by saying we really want to just have someone explain to us what it actually means to transfer, what are the benefits, how do we decide where to go, and so we're helping to support CCV in actually capturing some of those voices that can then be used by the whole consortium of both the two year institution participating and then also all of our four year participating institutions. So I am excited about that. I think it'll be exciting to see students perspectives from Vermont in that context. And then I think we're also working to figure out the Community College of Vermont is very interested in adding an addendum, which would basically be a data sharing agreement to help them understand the success of their students post transfer. We publish state level data, I can share a link to our enrollment highlights report, but I think they're very interested in how can they ensure that students are doing well at their destination. So we're really proud to be able to support them in that work despite the grant funding for that initiative implementation being concluded. So excited to see the sustainability of that transfer work. Any questions on the community college transfer work before I jump into the main focus?

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Well, at a basic level, transfer guarantee basically says that if you graduate from, in our case, CCV, you guaranteed to be able to transfer those credits into a list of higher education institutions.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Exactly. And that was considered sort of the first phase of work. And then CCV worked very hard with our four year partners to develop actual two plus two pathways that are signified as such on the student portal that I shared the link to prior, which I think is great because then there are students who both might not have a sense of what they want to do in their baccalaureate program who can have an array of options for guaranteed admission, but then there are students who really know what they wanna do, who can use one of those two plus two pathways to actually get their bachelor's degree in that way. So, yes.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Is the transfer guarantee constrained by state border or does it cross state border?

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: At present it is. We've always said to institutions that they're welcome to do the policy work with the institutions across state borders if interested, but there was not an appetite when this initiative rolled out, which was we did it in two chunks. The first chunk was a Southern New England states, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and that rolled out at the height of the pandemic. So in spring twenty twenty one, and then this work concluded in this, this work went live in 2024 2024. So we'll get to see the second year's enrollment. When we do our annual data collection. I think I noted this in the document for today, but we have committed to continue to collect that de identified student level data and publish it because we think it's a useful service to the region to have that annual checkpoint on how students are doing and how many have graduated and in what majors.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Thank you.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Yes, of course. And so I guess I will jump into talking a little bit about how the New England Board of Higher Education got into the prison education space. And I do want to thank before I, as my team knows, I'm always like just jumping right into things so we can get as much done as possible, but thank you so much, Chair Conlon, Vice Chair Quincy for having us here, so thank you. So basically, Nebby got into the present education space through a commission that we co ran with the Educational Justice Institute at MIT. I think as Michael touched on, one of Nebby's like primary roles in the region is convening and because of our board and the structure of our board and the folks that are on it, we have a really good constituent group to tap into how we can, I guess, prepare the region for large shifts, often shifts in federal policy or as was talked about earlier, shifts in kind of demographic enrollment patterns like with the adult learner work that we've previously done, and so we had folks that were stakeholders of ours on our board who were interested in figuring out, you know, New England is the higher education capital the world, at least in our eyes, and so how can we prepare the region to be ready for this reinvestment of federal funds that occurred in July 2023 when Pell Grants were returned, or you know incarcerated learners were now eligible for Pell Grants if after they had not been since 1994? And so we brought this group of stakeholders together. There were many Vermonters on that group. Our Educational Justice Institute partners at MIT brought correctional folks to the table as well as many leaders with lived experience of incarceration and program directors of higher ed in prison programs. And so we had both Joyce Judy on that group and also at the time Associate Director Billy Dunham from CCD's program. And that work really catalyzed a report and I see Michael has put all of the other folks in there, many of them have since moved on to other posts and or retirement, but we had a report that came out of that commission that basically said there are certain areas that we really need to focus on to maximize this federal reinvestment of Pell Grant dollars into higher education in prison. And so one of those was that there's a real need to bring together the agencies that were part of the commission, the stakeholders that were part of the commission, that is correctional folks, higher education leadership and systems in individual New England states, as well as the program directors and the actual students or former students themselves. And so we were really lucky to be able to have a proposal approved for five years of funding from the Ascendium Education Group, they had funded to a much smaller amount of planning grant for the commission, and building off of the commission, we secured funding $6,700,000 over five years in February 2024. And so my work in that first year of the grant was really to build up the team of just recently four including myself that carries out that New England present education collaborative work. And so I think a big bucket of our work and probably most of interest to our legislative stakeholders is that cross agency strategic planning work. So essentially we work over the course of a year with a sub grant of up to $100,000 with each of the six states in the region to build out a plan that actually creates a centralized focus on higher education in prison and post release for the state, and so I can, I worked with our Vermont group there, they had a legislatively created planning group that was established, which definitely helped us out a lot, but that was the first state that we supported through this cross agency process, and we've been incredibly excited to see the way that this report now published has helped to kind of galvanize, I think energy around the goals in the report from other state agencies that might not have been super involved in the actual planning process? So I've linked out to the report there, and we're currently in a sort of implementation phase where the group that carried out that plan now does meetings every other month to kind of check-in on their progress towards goals. And we're hoping to have actually some pretty substantive investments in some of the goals from private entities as well which I think we're very excited to see catalyzed through this group, through this work of bringing the agencies and stakeholders together. So that's a big bucket of the next work is the support of state agencies and kind of statewide collaboration around higher education in prison. And then we also have a significant portion of our annual funds that are for sub grants to individual higher education institutions. So we have each year what we call an accelerator grant making cycle where we award individual grants of $100,000 over a year long period to institutions with a topical focus each year. So last year we awarded five grants, it was our inaugural year, and the goal was really to work to fill what we call ecosystem gaps. So in many states there is not adequate programming in women's facilities, and so we had two of our accelerator grants in that first cycle that worked to fill that gap by actually bringing in a pilot program and I'm happy to say that those programs intend to continue which is amazing, but bringing in a pilot program to a women's facility. So we've just launched our RFP for our year two of that fund, and so we will have four accelerator grants of $100,000 and the focus this year is on credit mobility. It's an issue obviously writ large, but it's particularly challenging in facility where often, know, post release or even during intake folks may have credits from various different places, and it's challenging to be able to really get those to apply in the way that they should. And so we are really excited, I think, to see how, you know, our accelerator grantees support their own work obviously with the funding, but they also support the advancing of innovation in the region by showcasing new ways to do things like credit mobility. And so we're super excited to have RFP out in the world now. And in tandem with that RFP, we each year produce a large research document. And so in our first year, we interviewed 17 programs, CCD was a big part of the interview cycle, 17 programs across the region to talk about academic reentry. So what does it mean? Reentry involves a ton of things. It involves housing, it involves reestablishing community and family ties, it involves returning to employment, but it also involves for many students returning to school, and so how that continuity, is, maintained post release is something we really wanted to dig in to see how are our established programs, our established higher education and prison programs in the region really thinking about this, thinking about how to support their alum post release, and what kind of actual practices are they employing to create those support networks. So we were super excited to have that published. I also have links galore so I can share a link for that as well. And that work, probably a good segue, is very much driven the white paper and the RFP for our accelerator grants is very much driven by our higher education working group. So as we like to say, when we speak among people who've been working in higher ed in prison for sometimes twenty years. You know, we are not higher education in prison experts, and we have not run prison education programs, but we're context experts, and so we rely on two main coalitions that are regional in nature to drive forward our work, and one of those is our higher education working group, which last year was co chaired by Brian O'Connor, who's now a dear, dear friend, and so this group helped to identify what do we want to explore in the white paper in this first, this inaugural year, and also what do we want to incentivize in the grant making cycle. So they've done the same this year and Brian will continue to serve on that group in year two. And then the other sort of coalition that drives our work is primarily focused on correctional executive leaders, as well as legislators and leaders with lived experience from across the region. So that's our regional advisory council. And we currently have Tom Anderson who is in the Vermont DOC who serves on that group, and we have a variety of legislators. I would definitely open it up if there's an interest to have a legislator from Vermont on that group. We've thus far had legislative folks from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island that are represented and Maine that are represented there so waiting for a Vermonter who is interested, and I'm happy to. Matt has my email, so happy to receive an email if there's an interest in that, but that group really focuses on leveraging, whether it's policy models or funding opportunities that are not through NEIPEC, they bring together you know, the ideas that are necessary for folks in the other regions to sort of grow and advance their higher ed and present ecosystems. So that's pretty exciting work. We make them work less than the working group, hence the difference in name there. I think really that is kind of knee peck nuts and bolts, but I'd love to answer questions or kind of give additional details on specific aspects of the work that's underway. It's very exciting to me, so always happy to dig in deeper.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: We had a really great presentation from CCV the other day of their work, they humble bragged a little bit that they were probably ahead of a lot of other states in terms of bringing in higher ed to prisons. I think that their concerns for the future were one, of course, being able to continually fund it. Yep. And two, their capacity to track post release success or failure, or how to provide those supports to keep people on track post release, and sort of what's their role in it. I can't remember, can you talk, so federal Pell Grants are currently, if you're in prison, you are still eligible. Has that changed? And will the move to a work based Pellet, I can't remember what the term for it is.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Workforce Pellet.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Workforce Pellet, thank you. Will you see that as a new added benefit that may get more funding or more involvement in prison based higher education?

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: I'll be careful here because we have a whole community of practice who is focused on this for the last month, so I don't want to get over my skis in that respect, but my understanding is because of the stipulation that workforce Pell programs must have been in existence for a year, that there aren't a great deal of programs that will be eligible in facility for benefit initially. And so I don't know, Michael, if you have heard otherwise, but my understanding is that there'll be a minimal impact in the immediate term in this particular sector of higher education.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: I think it's a lot of it. Sorry. Go ahead, Michael. Go ahead.

[Michael K. Thomas, President, New England Board of Higher Education]: Yeah. I would just quickly note too that because of the, sort of wage premium demonstration requirements as well that can get a little bit tricky depending on a person's, you know, sentencing status.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Yeah, yeah, forgot about all those. There's so many rules and strings attached to all of these changes, including the graduate borrowing and all of that.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Yeah, absolutely. And so I think one of the benefits, honestly, of having funding from a large funder, I think, you know, really the large funder in this space is that we're part of multiple different consortia of national and regional intermediaries and technical assistance providers. So me and my team have been in a recurring meeting with the American Institutes for Research that has thought really intentionally about both the theoretical and practical implications of workforce Pell for prison education.

[Michael K. Thomas, President, New England Board of Higher Education]: Yeah. I would quickly note though that it's important thinking because even if workforce Pell isn't the path, we certainly advocate and you'll see this in the commission report as well for workforce alignment to prison based delivery programs. And I would just say, one of the great benefits of having CCV at the core of this is that it actually in some ways is slightly unique. I mean, we're grateful that there have been so many institutions that sustain delivery of high quality prison programs, particularly throughout the thirty year absence of Pell. But, you know, there is something to be said. I think nationally, lot of people would agree that community colleges are a really critical core base for the delivery of these programs. Just because of who sustained it during that gap, the involvement of community colleges across New England states is a little variable. And I think you know all the arguments as to why they are such critical elements of this delivery model.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: One of the things that was fascinating that they said was kind of critical to acceptance, just sort of navigating the tension that exists within a correctional facility is being able to say, and this benefit extends to correctional officers as well. Yep. You keep finding that in other states as well, I imagine.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: I was gonna say that when you said they're ahead of the curve, they're ahead of the curve in many ways. Would say Vermont at CCV in the higher education and prison space, but one of them is absolutely the work that has been done to engage both correctional staff and their family members. I think that's fairly novel to be able to think about. Other states have encountered, know, for example, in Massachusetts, there was an effort to figure out should we have folks have benefits of this kind on the correctional staff, and then there were some folks that were like, we don't want to go back to school, like this is our job that we're doing, but we have kids that are trying to fill out a FAFSA, and so they've done kind of intermediary steps like helping support correctional staff fill out FAFSAs, but CCVs work to actually provide educational vouchers and access to correctional staff and their family members, I think is incredibly original and it was great. We were recently at the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison and got to see Brian present alongside folks in Louisiana, my home state originally. Been here for five plus years now in the region, but that is where I hail from. And they also have a very robust correctional officer engagement program there in their Rayburn correctional facility, but it was great to hear Brian. He does things that frankly I didn't even know prior to that panel, but going into the academy where they're actually training COs and presenting on CCV so that when a CO comes into the facility, that they are like, oh yes, that's Brian from CCV or that's Billy from CCV. And so I think those things like that are really intentional and really speak to understanding the ecosystem within a facility and how crucial to delivery of higher education it is to have an ecosystem that is well and supportive of that work.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Any other questions from the committee? Sorry, you've dominated the whole thing. Anything else for us from you?

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: It's a good question. I think, I mean, we are very excited. So I guess maybe I'll just really briefly say that we have worked now with New Hampshire. We did some work with Maine that was shorter course on the cross agency strategic planning because they are part of the National Intermediary JFF's Fair Chance to Advance Initiative, so we wanted to kind of tee them up for that with our funder's permission. And we're currently working in the Commonwealth in Massachusetts to do this cross agency planning work, we are working to get it kicked off in Connecticut as well. But we, you know, Vermont and Rhode Island are on our list, and so just I think thinking about ways, we obviously talk a lot to Brian about this, but thinking about ways that we can help to support through that cross agency work, I think, you know, what we've learned in the year of doing this work in New Hampshire is that the build up to actually successfully doing this is much longer, the runway is longer and more extensive, so I think just starting to think about how that work might be of a benefit to Vermont would be useful. So just my plug for that.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Can you talk about what you mean by cross agency work? And of course, we don't have an agency specifically devoted to higher education. And I think New Hampshire has maybe a half time person.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Yes, yes. So essentially what that would look like in this context would basically be someone from CCV representing the higher education provider in the state, and then there would be correctional leadership, so we typically have the director of rehabilitative or educational services, the title varies per state, and then we like to have the involvement, at least initially of the executive commissioner. We, we often, and actually require having the perspective of folks who actually have experienced incarceration in higher ed while incarcerated in a state, as well as usually some reentry or workforce partners. I know Kendall Smith has been supportive, also a board member of this work and sent someone to our summit from her office. So I think thinking about the workforce piece as well, I can send sort of our overview. Actually, it's also in the first page of the strategic plan, but you can see sort of the agencies that are typically involved. And so I think it would just look however, you know, it would just be tailored to Vermont's particulars.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Got a question here, Representative Brown.

[Rep. Jana Brown, Clerk, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Actually, not so much a question, a statement. Sarah, so I recently had an opportunity to talk with some incarcerated parents up in Berlin, New Hampshire, who've been And part of that they had really incredible feedback to share about what a huge difference that partnership has meant to them, especially in a really super remote place of New Hampshire that doesn't have a lot of programming. It was really life altering. Yes. Great to hear.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Honestly, it's been very great. New Hampshire is unique in many ways, and so we try not to overly derive lessons from that state, but it's been very cool to see how just providing some basic scaffolding and in the case of New Hampshire, we supported a contract for a vendor agnostic nonprofit that does technological infrastructure assessments for correctional facilities. It's quite rare to have people that don't come in and say like buy this upcharge by 700% because it's a secure device. They actually look and say here are the ways that we could wire this women's facility so that women could participate in coursework over here, or here's this person might actually be able to have a remote tech job someday. So we supported, you know, to a very like what seemed like a very humble amount of contracts to support that planning group, And it's really been exciting to see how the momentum has just continued to build and generate even now that the work is in its implementation phase. I'm actually going to be up in Berlin because I went to their first graduation of White Mountain Community College cohort last year and this year it's just been a recurring, it's just an event that I'll probably go to for the rest of the time that I'm invited because it's an incredibly exciting thing and I think the work that Chancellor Rubenstein has done to really make this a priority of the community college system. I see a lot of similarities with obviously Joyce Judy and the way that CCD has made this not kind of a siloed over there. We sometimes do this work, but a central part of the mission of the institution. And so I think last year, one of the academic awardees actually of the whole White Mountains Community College was an incarcerated individual in that inaugural cohort. And just being able to see the excitement among the community college folks in the room, and I think it was a tie actually between this individual in the facility and a woman, a grandmother who had returned to school in the mountains of New Hampshire and just to see, you know, someone can't tell you they're like this is what community colleges are supposed to do and I was like yes. So it's really exciting and the work that they're doing up there is great and they're now going to be able to do work in the Concord facilities which is awesome because there's larger populations there and also they're closer to the communities where folks are typically releasing. So yeah, cannot say enough about New Hampshire. Yes.

[Rep. Jana Brown, Clerk, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Great.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Thank you for sharing that.

[Rep. Jana Brown, Clerk, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Oh, sure. Well, no. Happy to share it.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Alright. Well, thank you both very much for taking the time on Friday afternoon and squeezing us into your busy schedules.

[Michael K. Thomas, President, New England Board of Higher Education]: Entirely our pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. And I just dropped into the chat as well, a quick mention and Chair Conlon, you're familiar with this routine. Our semi annual fall board meeting retreat tend to rotate around the five New England states with the exception of Massachusetts where we typically have our spring board meeting. We will be in Woodstock, Vermont in the fall November. So put that on your calendars, we'll share an invite with you and your committee members. Again, encourage many of you to participate in the legislative advisory committee as you can. We're also doing sort of a partner convening that will overlap with that meeting, really focused on a variety of the issues that you've hit on today. Everything from federal policy changes impacting the states to sort of accessibility needs for students across our states and how states are dealing with some of the enrollment challenges, including direct admissions programs, guaranteed admission programs, things like that. And so we'd certainly love to have your participation. You'll get us to save the date shortly, but as you can put that on your calendars. And I would just lastly offer again, we're here to help wherever possible. We would certainly welcome the opportunity to come up and meet with you during session and again in person if that's helpful. If there is a topic or issue that we could partner with you on doing a briefing for your State House colleagues someday while people are there and in session would be delighted to consider such opportunities as well. Here at your service and please don't hesitate to reach back out.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: Great, great. Thank you. Thank you for all of that and for all the information today. Was very helpful.

[Sarah Kaczynski, Director of Transfer Initiatives and Director, New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEBHE)]: Thank you so much for And having

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: have a great weekend. To you as Bye bye. Alright. So for us, that is it for today. We are back on Tuesday, and let's take a quick look at the schedule next week.

[Rep. Jana Brown, Clerk, Vermont House Committee on Education]: I might have something that I need to do Thursday morning.

[Rep. Peter Conlon, Chair, Vermont House Committee on Education]: K. Yeah.