Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: We're starting now.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. Thank you.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: You can

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: walk me at the sign. Yeah. No. Totally okay. Here we are. Still ways and means. 10/25, January 21. We are talking about pre kindergarten. And we now have our third in the JFO UPK lineup, Ted Barnett.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Hello, Ted Barnett, Joint Fiscal Office. I believe this is the

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: first time I've actually sat in the chair of this session.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Oh. It's wild that I've made up this fire without getting in the chair, but here I am. So yes, I'm going to talk about incentives for private providers.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: You met our new representative?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: We have certainly

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Okay. Before. Great.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So, one to specify, as we've reinforced quite a few times, is that this is not the full set of incentives faced by providers. Really, the whole myriad of different incentives. These are just general examples of the considerations that private providers are thinking through when they're building up classrooms, deciding on their programming, etcetera. And so some of the incentives we're gonna go through are the difference in revenue per classroom. And we're gonna look specifically at licensed centers, largely because licensed centers are the bulk of the UPK system. We're going to look at UPK payments and overall family demographics and how providers are responding to the families they're serving. We're gonna talk a little bit about the relative value of payments versus the cost of PPK, some program hours and CCFAP calculations. This section will feel similar to some of the incentives facing families. So, yeah, to jump into it. This first slide is just something that Emilie shared, that I was in the business office at a parent child center. This is just a slide I feel in my bones. So, like incentives, you have different staffing requirements for different age groups. So for infants, it's one to four, and you have a maximum class size of eight. Toddlers is one to five, so these are teacher student ratios for a maximum classroom size of 10, and then for preschool, it's one to 10 with a maximum classroom size of 20. So even though there's a differential in the state CC FAP rates, so infants, you receive $471 per week per infant, and that drops down to $439 per pre pay, reflecting a little bit of those differences in costume care for those aged children, it's still your total revenue per classroom, if you're fully enrolled, is substantially different between if you're serving preschoolers versus infants. For preschoolers, this heading should really say preschoolers, it's over $450,000 if you're fully enrolled in that classroom and you're receiving both CTFab state rate for each of those children for the year. And then for infants, that's less than $200,000 So you're not seeing the same amount of revenue per classroom. So at the center, you're thinking about how many classrooms you're having at different age groups, how that's going to contribute to your overall business model.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: What what are the assumptions on the number of hours for each child? Sure.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: This is all full time. So you're Forty

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: or 50? Or what

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: is So for for CCFAP calculations, your part time rate is one to twenty five hours. Your full time hours are twenty six to fifty, and then extended care is fifty plus. So this is all in that twenty six to forty hours for full time care.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Which is a great flag because I think there's a question about what full time means in a pre K setting that we will dig into. Absolutely.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: There's a Holcombe. So I noticed that you're putting pre K, but pre K is a very specific meeting that's different from ages three to five. Could you tell me what we're talking about here? Because there are different regulations for childcare at this or early care and learning at this age and for approved pre kindergarten providers, and there are also different regulations for people in private settings and public settings.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Absolutely. So this heading, I flagged it, this should really say preschool. This is flagging for preschool ages in the CCFAB system. This should say preschool, because this is looking at CCFAB.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Does that include people in UPK?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: This is revenue looking just CCFab. Okay. Yep. We will talk a little bit about some of the depending on the demographics of the families that are in your care, UPK payment influences the center bottom line differently, depending on family demographics. And we'll talk about that in the future. But it should be thinking about this slide primarily in the CCFab context without UPK.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: DCF?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Contracted with First Children Finance to do a cost modeling exercise. And so there are two different, broadly speaking, cost models that they use. One is using current wages, reflecting what providers are paying their staff in the current system and reflecting the differences in revenue, you're able to see for different age groups. You can see that for providers, particularly at centers, the difference between what they receive in annual CCPATH subsidy, again, it's cost of care for preschoolers, It's positive, and this is reflective of the report for 2025. It very shortly, I understand there'll be an updated report for 2026. We wanted to flag that as well, that these numbers will be updated pretty shortly. For toddlers at licensed centers, larger centers are For large and medium centers, the cost of care and CCAP subsidies are pretty well linked. But then for infants, reflecting that you can only serve eight maximum in a classroom, you have to staff those classrooms. There is a difference. Your CCPAP subsidy does not cover the full cost of care for course of the year. You'll notice that these dynamics are only present for licensed centers. In family childcare homes, they're able to serve multiple age groups in a single classroom. And so that's why you're seeing these differences. Whereas in licensed centers, you have infant classrooms, toddler classrooms and preschool classrooms. So the report also looks at what they call aspirational wages. And these aspirational wages are using the compensation structure found in BASE's Advancing ECE as a Professional Workgroup Recommended Minimum Compensation Standards. This was released in 2022. So this is increasing one of the main cost drivers in a specific classroom. And so you see, comparing against the current model, that you are, with an aspirational model, still staying positive for preschoolers, but for toddlers and infants, that gap really widens.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: And asking for a friend, b t a e y c? It is the

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: oh, someone's gonna have to help me. It's basically the group of it's fairly Morgan, someone yeah.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Summer Mom Association for Education

[Unidentified Committee Member]: for Cancer.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: There we go. Thank you. So digging into a bit of how UPK works with different family demographics, I will flag before diving into this that DCF just released a memo that gives a bunch of different examples on how providers are to apply UPK payments to different situations. I will provide the distortion so you all can breeze through it. I am going to dive into two examples from that memo. So to start, a provider can either treat their UPK hours as separate or blended when they're doing their billing, essentially. And so for a separated program, they're calling out that these ten hours in our schedule are for UPK, reflecting that UPK payments are for ten hours a week for thirty five weeks, or it's blended within their program and they're not making that distinction of when the hours are. So, essentially, we're going to look at the blended case. I will say for more, if you want to go into the weeds on how separate and blended, how those apply to specific payments for families, I would review the memo.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: Why would you make the distinction? Because you charge different rates for the different programs?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: It allows you to say for our non UPK this is our tuition for the non UPK hours, essentially. And so there might be different I will say to think through the incentives for separating them out, that's something I would allocate to card time, to think about why, for me as a center, when I was in the business office, it was just easier to think of it as a blended, this is the program we offer. But there, yes, there's a whole set of different incentives, but I'd spend some time in the car thinking about them. Yes. And if you have any thoughts on that question, welcome to share. Two So examples here. One of them is we're going to look at if 100% of the care is provided, the cost of care is supported through CCPAB, and in that case, the provider is able to receive the state rate plus the UPK payment. And then we're going to look at a case where the family share is greater than the UPK weekly payment. And in that case, the UPK payment for blended programs, they are reducing they are supposed to, they have to reduce the family share. So this ends up providing a different amount of revenue for centers. So in example number one, where there's an estimated weekly family share before UPK of $0 the center receives the $439 which is the state rate through CCFAB, And on top of that, they receive $114 which is the UPK tuition per week. That's rounded up a little bit to make the calculations easier and we're not looking at dollars and cents, just dollars. But the center in that example, for a family with a zero family share, they're receiving $553 per week. So the second example is the family has a family share of $300 here. UPK tuition reduces that $300 weekly family share to $186 The center is receiving the difference between the estimated family share for how CCFAP calculations work and the state rate of $439 so they're receiving $139 from CCFAP, and so they're receiving the UPK tuition of $114 They're receiving the estimated, if they decide to collect the whole family share, they could receive up to $186 from the family, and they're receiving $139 from the state through CCFAP, and so that ends up on the state rate. So depending on your family demographics, the center will be receiving different amounts of funding. I mentioned I really wanted there to be a universal statement I could make on how this works, and I couldn't get to there. And so we'll note that in these examples, we're holding some things constant. This is one child in the family. We're looking at a full time CC SAP certificate for the family and the program's offering a full time program. So there's a lot of incentives baked into these calculations. If you bury those, if there's multiple children in the family, if the family is receiving a part time certificate and a full time program, those calculations will be different. That's why I really recommend going through the memo to see more examples of calculations if you really want to dig into the weeds.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Can you help me just understand what you're doing here in the math? How many hours? Mean, you know your PK tuition is ten hours. How many hours are you assuming for that CPAP payment, Bridget?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yes, so this is, again, all reflective. Yes, so the family has a CCFAB certificate for full time care. The provider is running a full time program. And so in a blended program

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: So that $439 CPAP payment per week is considered full time CPAP payment?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: That is the full time rate.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: And if you're adding ten hours in addition for UPK, we're double paying for ten hours.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So in And then maybe I should. I will get into the consideration of how CCFab interacts with the number of hours the sender provides. As long as the sender falls into once you subtract the ten hours so let's say the program's offering a forty hour a week program, you subtract the ten hours supported by UPK, they're at thirty hours remaining. That is still considered a full time program under CCFAP rules because they're in the twenty six to forty hour range.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Go back to that, but I have two more questions, What if incentive do you see this creating for a center in terms of who you choose to enroll, because they can choose to enroll?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So I would say looking at And again, centered or not, if I were looking I'm gonna qualify this in saying if I were only looking at the fiscal incentives, we're surely in a money world here, The program, the center, would have an incentive to enroll folks with a $0 or lower family share because they're receiving more money per week compared to the center that's serving families with higher family shares. Again, this is an example where the family has only one child. There's only one child in the program. It's a full time program. Centers are looking at things in a case by case, it's very hard to target families of a specific demographic. You're trying to maximize enrollment and that might be a more important consideration than finding a specific type of family to serve. But yes, and in the second case, right on this one on the right, where the center is receiving the state rate, maybe this is a nice pivot. For them, they're not receiving an extra financial incentive through UPK. Their incentive is reducing the cost for families to participate in UPK. So there are additional requirements with UPK that we'll talk about here. They're not necessarily as incentivized due compared to the center that's receiving the UPK on top of the state rate, relatively speaking.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Go back to the slide above. So on this slide, I think what you just said, there are challenges around hiring a UPK teacher. What would these boxes look like if people were taking that into account? Because there's additional costs, there's dual regulations, there's dual statute and rules, there's additional costs, because you have to have a teacher consulting for your program. How would that affect the cost if they just chose to do just SIPA and not UPK?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Right, so they would have lower costs as a center. And so there may not be And as you said, it's incredibly I can speak firsthand on how difficult it is to find a teacher as a private provider to help you to either be in program or consult to run a UPK program. And so if you're not receiving additional revenue for your center, it may influence your decision on whether to do UPK or not. Because in that case, your main incentive for UPK, financially speaking, of course, is to help out folks who are enrolled in your program and lower their cost of care. So good segue. There are quite a few different requirements that providers need to implement in order to become a pre qualified universal pre kindergarten program, including hiring a teacher with an early childhood education or special education endorsement from AOE. You have to conduct surveys of student progress, whole family engagement events. You have to meet certain quality standards, so you have to be a four or five star program in the Representative Kimbell, the Vermont Step Ahead Recognition System is what STAR stands for. So, yes

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I say anything? Uh-huh. Sorry. Yes,

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: and so you have to meet a whole set of requirements in order to become pre qualified. Both I, in conversations with DCF, both private and public providers are having trouble finding staff to run pre qualified programs. On the back end of the office, You have to have capacity to implement those surveys, crunch the data, put them into computers. The business office is coordinating with multiple different districts and supervisory unions. I think I looked, because I was in Rutland County, I could theoretically have students from five separate SUs. And so you have to coordinate, you have to become a pre qualified program. To You meet all their requirements, send invoices off to those different supervisory unions, understand where the kids are coming from. It's a lot of work. So there are different financial benefits depending on demographics of your families. And so that's going to be a thing you're looking at as a center when you decide whether you want to become a pre qualified program. I do also want to note that the so for the centers that have a lot of their demographics are primarily folks who have a lower CCFAB family share, the relative incentive, the amount you're receiving on top of your weekly CCFab rates, the relative benefit that UPK provides against that base hasn't increased. It's become lower. So CCFAP rates have increased by 50% or over 50% since 2019. But in that same period, the UPK payment's only increased by 18%. So the relative benefit to enrolling in UPK has decreased since the pandemic. And those CCFAB state rates have increased through the investments in Act 76.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I'm curious if you frame

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: it that way. One of

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: things that concerns me is a lot of our early educators are just woefully under compensated, and I hope there was a distinct effort. So how much of that increase in 50% is an effort to sort of level up compensation in that sector to bring it closer? I mean, we have more early educators certified states than physicians. They're just all teaching third grade because they're not going to take a 50% pay cut to work in that setting that doesn't provide that. So I thought the effort was I mean, so I guess I worry about throwing those percentages out without having it in context.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Sure. And I would encourage, I know Janet can talk quite a bit about how they're seeing the increase in CCPAB state rates trickle through the system and how centers are using those increases in rates to increase compensation. We certainly did as state rates increased in the business office. That was one of the first things we did, recognizing that it was absolutely a challenge. But there's also centers are also looking at the condition of their buildings, improving the quality of classrooms. There's a lot of things that they are likely sending that money towards CCFAP rates have increased quite a bit. And then this one is going to feel very familiar. Can I take the

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: last one for a second? Sure.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: And so, I feel like

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I heard you say the opposite of this, but maybe I really totally misheard you. The CCFAP, a center that has mostly families with a high CCFAP reimbursement, the pre K would not be as relevant. Is that what you said, or is

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: it the opposite? So thinking about that group, and this is like, we're getting a bit into the weeds on this point, but here we are, we're getting in the weeds on a

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: lot It's just the day of the It's like field a full of wildflowers, no weeds.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Exactly. So I'm trying to remember, and it would have been helpful to put actual dollar figures on this one. But thinking about, Okay, so I am a center who has a low family share or zero family share. They're receiving the UPK payment on top of their CCFAB state rate. In 2019, that relative value so it was like $220 some odd in 2019 for your CCFAB state rate, and UPK payment on top of that was a larger percentage boost per week than it would be now because it's now $439 and $114 for UPK. And that relative incentive at UPK for the centers who are serving folks who have essentially all of their care is covered by CCFAP. It's just smaller and that some folks may just decide it's not as rewarding of a It just doesn't fully compensate for their costs. Those types of Centers,

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'd say folks. You mean centers? Yes. And then in a situation where a lot of the families looking for care would not receive that much CCFAP reimbursement because of their income levels, UPK would How would UPK play into that kind of center?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Sure. So there's no since centers in that case are receiving the UPK payment applies to their family share, they're receiving the state rate, so there's really no change in incentives based on the relative amount of UPK versus CCFAB.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: In your example, the center receives less money with a higher family share that you gave a couple of slides before.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So that's money with a higher family share, correct? Yes.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Can I say something

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: to this?

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Yes. No. You

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: can save it. Okay. Okay, thank you. I know, I would like you to be helpful, but then we all Like the bunnies will run into the

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: wildflowers. Okay. Holcombe. Can I just go, going back to that slide, can I just play back two things I think you're saying to make sure I'm understanding I what you're think what we're saying is as the CFAP payments come more in line with the UPK payments, there's less incentive to rely on UPK for some families? For some centers. Some centers. Yes. I'm also seeing that because the stacking is more beneficial to centers in some places and families in other places, we may be creating incentives that may be incentivizing, I would argue, socioeconomic segregation in this setting.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I would have to think about whether that's Again, I think, yeah, I can't speak to whether that socioeconomic split is happening. I know in talking with folks about general data characteristics, there are a lot of centers who is the structure of who they're serving, And that is true in the system. And I don't know if it's I can't speak to whether that's incentivized or whether that's just the nature of how communities operate.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: So let's carry that out

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: through the next few weeks, months.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So this one will feel familiar. Families and buyers, have kind of the same incentive structure here. I will flag that, to Emilie's point about us looking at the system and identifying incentives, this one may not be happening in many cases, but it exists, so we're flagging it. As we talked about, there are different CCFAP rates for different amounts of care. So for part time, it's up to twenty five hours, full time, twenty six to fifty. And extended care, fifty one plus hours. And I believe I probably said at twenty six to forty. So, twenty six to fifty. UPK hours are, as I mentioned, subtracted from total program hours for CCFAB calculations. And the state rates for full time care versus part time care dropping from full time to part time is a larger difference than the UPK payment. So if you're a center or a provider Yes. If you're a provider and your program operates for thirty four hours a week and you become a pre qualified UPK program for the thirty five weeks that your program is running UPK, once you subtract the ten hours that are paid for by UPK, your number of hours would drop to twenty four hours and you would receive a part time CCFAB reimbursement. And so financially, that is not something you want to do. I thought of this because immediately after the pandemic, it was challenging for many providers to have enough staff to be able to operate at a full time schedule. I know this impacted a lot of centers. It was challenging for parents and centers alike. And so it was more likely that centers were just limited by staffing capacity to They could have ended up at this 34 a week, thirty three hours a week. So one to flag this incentive. But again, we understand that this likely is not incentivizing centers wide scale, but it's certainly present in the system in the same way families are looking at how many hours they're approved for through CCPAT.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Can we assume that school pre kindergarten programs are going to play out the same way the center based care is.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: If they are enrolled in CCFAB, they would have the same incentives as a private provider on that front. But there are also all of the incentives that Ezra had talked about would apply to them as well. And netting out whether it's CCPAF or the school funding formula considerations are more important. Do we

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: know if all of the in school pre K programs are accessing CCPA?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: From what? The data we received, there are 19 schools, public schools, who received

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I think districts?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: The schools

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: By program, by a licensed site?

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah, licensed site. 19 sites, but we don't know whether those are only providing after school care or whether those are pre K providers.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: We can talk more to that.

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So that's it on incentives. I'm going to channel Emilie in her high level thinking about the entire system for this last slide. So next time, we will continue to talk about how complicated this ecosystem And that because this system was built over time and there so many linkages throughout the system. You have public schools receiving CCAP and private providers doing UPK and children going from different districts. Changing one component And you have, for private providers, preschool students creating extra revenue that the centers can use to serve infants. Changing one component of the system impacts the rest of the system. And so as part of ed transformation, y'all will need to address the wait for UPK, and Emilie provided what looks like a very comprehensive list of options, which are you could change it or not. UPK waves.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Thanks.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yeah, Representative.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I wonder if in the next time we could add one more thing, and I think of it because you put in information earlier around care for school age children who are accessing CPAP, And on top of that, have 21 C. We have school based programs that aren't even registered by the state. Like, I don't even think people know what it says because there's a way to do that. And then also we have the new cannabis after school, which is both public and private. And so I feel like there's a bunch of stuff all targeting the same age. And I would be curious to know, including when we do these capacity grants, are we tracking overlaps from various there programs that are receiving capacity grants from multiple entities? Do we know how much capacity we have non duplicated? And do we understand how these different programs are interacting?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So I'm gonna try to simplify your question, not for Ted, but for the rest of the table, if that's possible, to ask the question of how does after school care and funding overlap with pre K and early care parent funding, given that often the same entities are providing. Is that okay? Did that feel like Okay. Great. Which we're not going to talk about right now.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: No, don't. No? Want to start going forward what to do.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Okay, we're going hear from our other witnesses and then we'll do that.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I didn't have an answer, I'm wondering if, this is very complicated, wondering if, can we have someone to a study by, know, ask one question. I want

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: to rephrase my white whale. We have asked to have this studied so many times, and we're hoping we're going to just find a path through actually knowing it this session. A path through what? Actually knowing it rather than studying it this session. And then the

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: other kind of student that for some of this, the auditor's office could possibly have some stuff.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: That's a good question for

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: the auditor's office. That is a good question. Sure, ask for me. Thank you. Which one of you wants to go first?

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Or you're welcome to come up together.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Don't know if you've pre leveraged.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Gonna do thirty minutes with each of you, and that might mean that we need you to come back. Is that okay? Yes. Okay. I think you would need to come back no matter what. Okay.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Great. In one of your slides, how long we've spent studying this question?

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: No, but I'm happy to address that. So

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: for the record, I'm Doctor. Morgan Crossman.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: I'm the executive director of Building Bright Futures, which is Vermont's Early Childhood State Advisory Council. What that means for you all as a committee is I am your primary advisor on children and families pre middle to age eight. I also advise the governor's office and the administration. Our job is to centralize data, be a nonpartisan advisor, convene partners and elevate family and community voice so you understand what's happening on the ground for kids and families, and then to actually monitor the data. So I really appreciate the committee's questions throughout the morning on what data we have and what we don't. You're not going to be excited about a lot of my answers in that area, but I think that one of the most important things you can do is name what data you need and working with both the agencies, but also community based partners that you've heard about today to capture some of that data in addition with school districts and the Joint Fiscal Office. So in terms of our charge, I wanted to also just share with you who is on my board. So we're listed in both state and federal statute as that advisory body. We have public agency leaders from all agencies, departments, and divisions supporting kids and families, members from the legislature. So we have Representative Garoille as your liaison to the board and then a range of at large members. So again, just because it's the first time committee letting you know who we are bringing together on an annual basis. One of the other pieces to note, even though you are really focused on the financial elements of this, as you're thinking about the next five years, as you're thinking about ed transformation and financial implications, we've just launched the next five year strategic plan for the state for kids and families. We'll be sending out way more information, but I just wanted to name that there are really important components related to pre kindergarten education, but also ed transformation holistically, specifically in Goal three. So a lot of the questions the committee is asked around special education, around how we're supporting early intervention and access. One thing we haven't talked about is exclusionary discipline. How are we thinking about ensuring kids are in schools, in programs that are supporting high quality learning in a mixed delivery model? Mixed delivery, for folks that are not in the leads with us all the time is that we have a system of early childhood education that is provided, as JFO mentioned, through community based child care programs, through Head Start and Early Head Start programs, and through public schools. So you'll see a lot in there about accessibility around accountability for those pieces. And the one most important thing I can say to you today as you're thinking about finances and foundation formulas and how we're thinking about ed transformation holistically is how to make sure that we're holding the integrity of the work that we're doing in that early care and education space right now. So if we are seeing strong outcomes for our young kids, specifically in thinking about childcare and pre K, how do we maintain that in the context of ed transformation? How do we think about not losing the focus on what's working really well as we're thinking about change, which we know we need to be moving forward with? So I want to talk a little bit about what we do know in universal pre kindergarten education. So I'll start with access. And I think our colleagues at JFO mentioned this, but in terms of access, what we know is that nationally Vermont's ranked number two in the country for access for threes and four year olds. And when we look at the breakdowns of what that means for who we're actually serving in the state of Vermont, it's about sixty one percent of our three year olds and 78% of our four year olds. And those are the ones that are involved in publicly funded universal pre K programs. We haven't talked a lot about enrollment. It's something that we're really working closely with our joint fiscal partners, but also with the agency of education and the child development division on. We are serving approximately 8,000 children in universal pre K. That number varies based on so many different factors every single year. It might be something like the dip in births in 2020. Also is impacted by slots and workforce. How do you know if those are duplicated or unduplicated slots? So we have colleagues from First Children's Finance that JFO also mentioned who have been doing a range of analysis on both the capacity and slots that are in community based programs and in public programs. We don't have that same information necessarily by school district. It's by county. So there are data challenges, as you know. But my understanding is that we are able to duplicate the slots in each of the programs. One of the challenges that we have is looking at what actual enrollment and what the needs of families and preferences of families are that are impacting some of those choices. But in terms of capacity, one of the questions that you all asked earlier is what do we know about who is in school based or public school settings versus community based settings? And based on our current data, what we are seeing is that 44% of those slots are in school based programs and about 56% are available in center or community based programs. Those numbers have been stable for quite some time. It's usually between 5560% of our capacity, our license capacity, is in those community based programs. But one of the things that's super important is that it looks different in every district in the state and by community. So sometimes you're going to see 70% to 90% of spots be in community based programs versus public settings. There's also, and that's where we get to some of these equity gaps, there are some places where we don't have kids who are able to access universal pre K. So even though we are talking about UPK as a universal program, if you look at somewhere like Essex, for example, in Essex County, there are 111 children who are three and four years old in that area. There's 93 licensed slots in universal pre K programs. But what that means is that we still have 16% of children in that area who likely don't have access to care. So as you're thinking about the rates, as we're thinking about foundation formula, one of the things that we have to fix regardless of the funding is equitable access. There are places in the state where there are deserts in both still childcare and in universal pre K. So it's just really important to think about that piece. I'm also documenting all of your questions and data questions from earlier around special education dollars. So just also want to bring in here that what we do know is that the specialized child care programs are very well positioned in a range of areas to support children with disabilities and special health care needs. And it doesn't mean that we are able to meet all of those needs equitably across the state. And I'm going to ask folks to hold questions until the Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about outcomes, because that's something that Emilie's team wasn't really able to prioritize in theirs. So when we're looking at outcomes of what's happening in our early care and learning, what I want you to see on the left hand side of

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: screen is three different educational assessments. Do not look at that bar graph as a trend line. That's not what you're seeing. What you're seeing is an outcome for pre K literacy. You're seeing an outcome for kids showing up ready for kindergarten. And then separately, you're seeing outcomes for third grade math and reading. The takeaway on this slide is that when we look at our outcomes of what's happening in the zero to five space in childcare and pre K, children are doing really well. They're showing up ready to learn as they are entering our school system. And so those two assessments around TS hold and ready for kindergarten are showing that kids are showing up ready to learn. We also know that from our national data, two years of pre kindergarten education is beneficial for children, and those kids are also showing up more ready to learn. What you are not seeing on this slide is that breakdown by historically marginalized populations for pre K literacy or ready for K. On the right hand side of the screen, what you're seeing is where we're looking at third grade reading. And when we do the breakdowns of what's going on once our children are having that third grade reading and math assessment is that we're seeing significant variation by our historically marginalized populations. And that is true as we're looking at other data as well. So again, as you're thinking about next steps in transformation of our education system, how do we ensure that the things that are working well right now are maintained, but we're still problem solving for equitable access, for workforce challenges, for different pieces around this while not breaking different pieces of that system. Can I just have a question about the chart? Don't have a very detailed question. The chart on the right hand side, is that proficiency? Is that level, like the number of kids who are Yes. Testing proficient or

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Okay.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: I'm

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: going to really try to hold the question.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So in terms of the transition into policy and thinking about what's next, the State Advisory Council does have a series of policy recommendations. I'm not going to go through all of them, but there are specifics related to pre K, very much so tied to the data that we have and what we've heard from communities. The first is, as you're thinking about a pre K wait, as you're thinking about what to prioritize in the next five years, we currently serve three and four year olds or not and five year olds not yet eligible for kindergarten and that we need to maintain access for threes and fours. That's consistent with recommendations that you're hearing from the Pre Kindergarten Education Implementation Committee. The second is that we really do need to focus on the weight for pre K and the funding associated with universal pre K. And so one of the things that we kept discussing was how could we move forward without a pre K weight in the foundation formula? What would that mean? And how would we make sure that we are supporting kids in the right ways? And I think where we landed is it's so critical not to forget the earliest learners as we're thinking about ed transformation. So really focusing on getting the dollar amount right for both community based and school based care is critical. And then lastly, as we talked about the equitable access, we really need to be thinking about equitable access for districts, but also thinking about access for children with disabilities and special health care needs, and ensuring that we have the right systems in place for those transitions as well.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: This is a quick call out, and

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: I know Janet's going to mention this as well, so I won't harp on it, the four recommendations that came out of the most recent committee, the Pre K Implementation Committee. So again, maintaining benefits for threes. If you're choosing to make an expansion for four year olds, that that's where we would target, is really thinking about maintaining threes while expanding for fours, really focusing on the weighting and what the cost is, and to understand what that rate would be for community based programs. And this, to a lot of your questions, also called for the need for data systems and monitoring in a way that the state has never done for pre K. That is still something that's really important and necessary. And the thing I would draw your attention to is that we just wrote a grant to the feds for $12,700,000 and received the preschool development grant for the next year. One of the key priorities within that grant is a partnership between the Agency of Education, the Child Development Division, and Building Bright Futures with support of a contractor to both focus on governance and how we are implementing this program and communicating statewide about pre K, but also really to focus on our data and monitoring systems. So all of the questions that you're all asking that we've never been able to answer as a state, we recognize are unacceptable, and building new systems in place. So really working also with school districts and community programs to capture that data in a systematic way, and not just to do rapid turnaround surveys. The next two slides are a compilation of all of the qualitative data over the last five years that we've captured, whether it's from school districts, superintendents, community based providers, and multiple entities. And again, as you're thinking about education transformation, really trying to call attention to the fact that, yes, pre K is a discrete program and it was built on child care licensing. It was built on and layered with how we think about Head Start. And one of your most recent questions, after school and out of school time care. And how are we making sure that as we're making changes in one, we understand that it will create a ripple effect And we need to potentially be making different policy choices and financial decisions about things like after school if we're making the change to something like pre K. So what we're seeing on this slide is overall, pre K, in the broadest sense, has been such a significant and meaningful investment for the state. Yes, there are a range of challenges, but what we know is that it has been making an impact. We are leading the country in access to that ten hours a week. We do recognize that ten hours does not mean that and that we need to be thinking about what that looks like and how the cost looks. We also know that mixed delivery, meaning that you are able to serve children in both community and public schools, is so important and that the partnerships across those entities and with school districts, including having UPDA coordinators and a point person, has been one of the most meaningful important pieces of that success. We also know that maintaining three year olds is a priority for a range of reasons, and that we need to maintain a shared commitment to quality. And that is looking like thinking about our infrastructure, our workforce, and how we're supporting developmentally appropriate practice for our young kids. And one of the biggest pieces and things that we're targeting this year is how do we actually collect the data we need to support decision making across sectors. In terms of problems that we all need to solve still in pre K, and again, these are the things that I would call your attention to. Okay, how do we think about these in the context of the transformation? One, where do we have capacity, both in school districts in the state? Is it in community based programs? Is it in public schools? And what would have to change from an infrastructure perspective that might limit expansion or equitable access in different areas. The other that JFO mentioned was workforce constraints. We know that we are really needing to prioritize workforce in every single setting related to early childhood education. And there are a range of opportunities that we're working through, but that is something to consider as we're thinking about quality. Special ed was a huge focus this morning in terms of your questions. That is something that, as we think about pre K, is important because and we talked a lot about EEE. The way that we have generally been talking about special education is through IDEA, that Individuals with Disabilities Act, and that there is early intervention services and children's integrated services for young kids under the age of three. And then IDEA Part B is special education through both pre K and through our public schools. And so those transitions really are going to require intentional discussion in ed transformation about how to maintain our ability to provide special education. One of the questions that I heard earlier was, what data do we have on where those children are and what they are receiving? On the special education front, we do have those breakdowns by setting. The challenge that you will find is that some of that data has to be suppressed because we don't have a number that reaches our threshold for making that data publicly available when we break them down into groups. But we do have some of that data to be able to share with you, and we can also do more of those breakdowns and are working with the agencies on some of those pieces. Another is mixed delivery. So how do we ensure that we're sustaining mixed delivery, especially in the rural nature of our state, where about 60% of our pre K is residing in those community based programs? And how do we monitor the impact on head start and after school and out of school time care? So if we're reducing a number of hours of pre K here, where are we then having to increase the number of after school and out of school time care hours or vice versa? How are those things interacting? It's really critical. We have to focus on equity across the state. And if you're really going to prioritize anything session, it would be how do we maintain and prioritize where kids don't have access at all in the state of Vermont right now. And for this committee in particular, what does sustainable funding and what is the true cost of this system for kids and families? And I think one of the big questions I kept hearing is whether or not the current ADM is truly providing the dollar amount that it takes to educate across settings. And I think that when you hear from a lot of our community based programs and our schools, we still are needing to have support around special education expenses, administrative costs. So from your perspective, as you're thinking about that foundation formula, really needing to ensure that whatever is in there for both public schools and community based programs that we are providing, the best estimate of that cost of care for young kids. Lastly, there have been a ton of conversations over administrative complexity, the fact that we have dual agency oversights of universal pre K, and so really focusing on how we're standardizing both how we're communicating and delivering universal pre K as a state, how we're communicating not just between the two agencies, but also with school districts, with our superintendents, with our community based programs around where we are expected, and then also how we're monitoring and being really clear about why that monitoring is important. We are not just coming and trying to understand the number. We're actually trying to understand how many hours a child is receiving in every single setting. And that's still a number that we don't have. What is the total number of hours that a child is receiving of universal pre K in public schools? Lastly, this is where all the data lives. So again, our role is not only to collect data that we as a state don't have, but to partner with every single entity across the state that is capturing that data. Related to pre K, there are so many entities that are responsible for capturing this information. It's not just the Agency of Education and the Child Development Division. It is also our after school and out of school time care partners. It is also First Children's the Vermont agency, BTAUIC. So our job is to bring all of that information together to provide that for you all. Yeah, representative. If I knew what your long term goal was, really, really, biggest long term goal, then as we're working on this, I would think to myself, let's say your long term goal was eventually this would all be a public system. No divided, whatever it's called, then my decisions would be different from if we're going to keep fragment. And so benefits will be to your public, because then the answer is for sure, think, pay, they're going to have people who have to have education, and I know that's one of the goals right now is to educate child care providers and then they would have, they'd be covered under employee contracts and then pay would not be switched off for fixing a door. So, I need to know, are you thinking we go in ten years or eight years, we go all public? No. And I wouldn't say it's my goal. So I think one of the frames here would be that the state's next five year strategic plan for kids and families says that our goal is to ensure that we're maintaining that mixed delivery model. So especially because we have areas of the state where we have 70 or more percent of kids being educated in community based programs, that that is really critical for the rural nature of our state, especially in places like Essex. And so it's not necessarily the goal that all kids are served in public schools. But I do think that one of the goals is to be really clear about who is responsible for ensuring that all of our kids are educated at that ten hours. And if we're going to expand beyond ten hours, how to ensure that we have a designated entity responsible for that. Is it going to be our school districts? Is it the state agencies coming together to do that work? So no, the long term goal is not that we're moving towards a public system only. It's how do we ensure that all of our kids are well educated with a well prepared workforce across every single setting, whether it's Head Start programs, community based programs, or public schools? And how do we do that in the context of an ever changing broader K-twelve system that is making different decisions based on funding? And I'm happy to have

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: you come back at some greater depth about where we're headed. I'm hoping the committee can get our heads around where we are right now before we start tackling next steps. I under, like I- This is my

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: first thing that I said, which is, I don't understand, we've got small schools across the state. So there are plenty of buildings for people to be in, be educated. And that is absolutely fair as we think about infrastructure. The challenge around our infrastructure needs is not all of those settings are appropriate, developmentally appropriate to educate younger children. So there are rules and regulations in both our school systems and in our community based programs that require specific adaptations to those physical spaces. It's not that it's not possible to adapt those spaces, but it has financial implications. We've had

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: a slide that was sort of the consideration slide.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: Thank you. I'm interested, do you folks collect any data regarding folks at homeschool and what that, when they do enter the school system, what their proficiency ratings are in a sense? Is that available? Because I find that more and more folks on my way are homeschooling, especially in the early years.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: That's a great question. I don't have that data on me today, but I can absolutely reach out to the agency of education who monitors what that homeschooling provision looks like and to see whether or not we have those breakdowns. The question would be, again, whether or not we can publicly communicate about that data if the numbers of children aren't great enough by school districts. I would imagine that we haven't

[Unidentified Committee Member]: yet, though.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Thank you. Represent myself.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, thank you, fascinating. A couple of comments. One, going back to Ted's comment about the fact that this system has been built over time, and by necessity, because the way we do things here, it's getting more complex all the time, and where, as Carol said, representative Ode said, is fragmented. And I'm just wondering out loud, I guess, where the remedies may lie when we try to deal with administrative complexity. And you have pointed out succinctly where we are. What we do about it today, season, I'm not sure.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And we don't need to figure that out today, folks. It is an incredibly complex system. I want us to even just begin to get our heads around what And is happening right

[Unidentified Committee Member]: that's the point. Yes.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I love how everyone's jumping to what we do next, Representative Holcombe. This is

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: actually a clarifying question. We used to talk about extended learning. Then we went through a period of time that after school entered review and the administration used the term out of school. I'm just curious about your choice of language and where you think that's headed. Sure. So the way that we are using that terminology is based on largely the universal after school approach that both the administration and the Vermont After School have been taking and talking about both what is happening in extended care, which is happening on either end of the school day, but then also that as you're making changes to education, whether it's the number of hours, it also means there's summer care and other complexities for families as they're trying to access care. So I don't think that it's necessarily that we're shifting the broader way that we're thinking about after school. It's just the terminology. But when we're talking about it, we're talking about what happens before a child enters the school system, what happens in the after school, actually after they are leaving school space. But out of school time might mean when they are needing to be in care during summer months. And I think one of the things that we sometimes forget is that when we have our youngest learners in a range of different settings, they might need to transition settings in order to have access to that care. And that we have children in multiple settings who also need different hours of that extended care. So we do have children who are in public schools who need that extended care, who might have to transfer during different times of the day to go to other spaces.

[Rep. Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: So I'm wondering, Doctor. Grossman, if you have a sense of how many of the programs for pre K are limiting it to ten hours. I mean, we touched on it before, but what's reality? I mean, I remember around us, pre K programs are extended to twenty hours and just built into the school budget. So wondering what percentage are just ten hours at this point?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: It's the right question and I can't answer it. And that is something that as we are in this next six month period, again, it's not in time for us to be making really big decisions here, but it is the total number of hours. We can capture that information from our community based programs. We don't have the mechanisms right now that go from what's happening in communities and schools, in particular, to the state to centralize. So we do have the information locally and in school districts. Our job right now is to get all of that information into one place so that we have a cohesive narrative. But I cannot tell you the number of hours that are being provided across school districts or within individual schools at this moment in time. Your superintendents and school principals have that information, and it's our job to bring it together. With respect to the assessment data, I'd be curious to know what the study is you'd like to be able to do, because there's only one study I'm aware of that predicts trailing performance based on pre K participation. And it was a study that looked at dosage. And it found that dosage made a difference for readiness for disadvantaged kids, but not actually for kids who are already advantaged. And looking at that, we've now had pre K for multiple years. I have some significant concerns around that site, which we have. Just methodologically. Yes. But I think it's early to know when you think this big investment in early care and learning is going to start to have an impact. When you'll start to see that. So this is And such if it's not, which it doesn't appear to be based on your presentation, why? What's missing? So what representative Holcombe is talking about is our inability right now to look at the trajectory of outcomes for kids based on what children received at different points in time. So we do not have the ability to show you this beautiful trajectory, whether it's increasing or decreasing, a child received childcare, universal pre kindergarten education and special education in these settings and what their trajectory looks like by the time they are in third grade. So again, the slide I was showing is absolutely not a trajectory. It is just showing that at a point in time, our young children in the system have strong outcomes in terms of literacy, in terms of their ability to show up ready to learn. And at that same moment in time, we are seeing our third graders really struggle in math and reading. So she is absolutely correct that that is not what I'd like you to see on that slide. We don't have the ability to look at that information as a state right now. I should just That's not what Because I was you can't look, you cannot compare across scores or cut scores across different assessments. They're measuring totally different things. Exactly. If we had picked an easy score, we could have 80% of kids scoring as proficient, but they know more than that we do now. That's an arbitrary artifact to hold us accountable by standards. The question I'm asking is another one. We have differential expectations for different contexts also, and we have different dosages across different contexts. Is it also possible, and we don't know because we don't have an adequate trailing indicator, but is it also possible that we aren't getting the benefits because we aren't actually requiring the same things across all contexts? Yeah, it's a great question. I think that if we had the ability and we should, for the record, have the ability to measure the same indicator over time for these young kids so that we can look across dosage and across the contextual factors that would impact those outcomes. We don't have the ability to do that in this moment.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you very much, and look forward to coming back very soon. Thank you.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Janet, so much for joining us. Just noticed that Morgan has two laptops, which is double down. Said,

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: back up, watch my adult

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: lose power. Back up. Okay. Do you want to

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: have Teddy? You can bring your outlet thing up.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: No, no. I'm good. I'm good. It was Teddy's because I forgot mine altogether. Okay. Great. Thank you. Of course. A lot going on. Okay.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Me make sure. So right document open. So good morning. So Janet McLaughlin. I'm the deputy commissioner within the Department for Children and Families that oversees the Child Development Division. Child Development Division is the part of DCF that really focuses on most things early childhood. And so that includes children's integrated services, which includes things like early intervention. And it also includes child care licensing, child care financial assistance, various quality and capacity initiatives, and also joint administration of universal pre kindergarten with the Agency of Education. I talked with Secretary Saunders yesterday, as well as Aaron Davis, who's the new Chief Academic Officer at AOE, yesterday about this session, about a testimony. And so the State Board of Education is having a meeting right now. So they are unable to be here weren't able to be here this morning. But we are really aligned on our vision and our commitment to early childhood education in the state and to pre kindergarten education. So I believe that what I will say aligns with their thinking as well. And I provided some written testimony. No fancy slides like Morgan has. But just some written testimony. And I'm not going to read it out loud to you, but I do have some points that I want to make. And I do actually want to respond to a couple of the questions. So first of all, my biggest point is Vermont should be super proud of what we are doing with universal pre kindergarten education. We have incredibly high uptake rates, uptake rates that very that are on par with as much penetration as any state in the nation is getting on pre kindergarten education. The state made that investment, and it's working. This is a voluntary program, and families are taking us up on the offer. Wow. It's pretty amazing. So I just want to say, as we think about changes, we should really be thinking about, let's not break what's already working. Let's think about how to improve it. But really, having the level of uptake that we have for a voluntary program, that really does show that this program is meeting a lot of families' needs. And then that is coupled with high quality standards and some strong assessments, including external assessments and validated assessments at both the program and the child level. So there absolutely is room to strengthen and improve that. But it's not like we never checked. It's not like nobody is checking on the quality of programs that we're offering, that we're not tracking child's developmental growth during their time during pre kindergarten education. We have those tools. And we analyze the data as thoroughly and as robustly as we would have liked. No, not quite. But in terms of the practices that are in the programs, that information guess, let's say, not the information. The foundation is there for us to build from. So I just want to say, we should really feel pretty good about what we've been offering for Vermont kids. Our goal here, really, with pre kindergarten education, is to ensure that all Vermont children are entering kindergarten ready to thrive in schools, and in schools, ideally, that are prepared to build upon the foundation that they got. So this is truly an educational program. We want to make sure that we have eyes on our three and four year olds before they show up in kindergarten classrooms, and that we're connecting those kids who might need extra supports and services early on and finding out what their needs are in kindergarten. So I just want to say that that is really the thrust of our work. And there's this question of, we want to make sure that every child has access to a base level of pre kindergarten education. Right now, that base is ten hours a week. We can debate whether or not that's the right base. But it is, again, being taken up by families. And it has been integrated into the early childhood education ecosystem that we have within the state. And again, there are absolutely improvements that can be made. But fundamentally, we know right now there are thousands of children around Vermont right now in their pre K classrooms getting a high quality education.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: So

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: let's see. I want to go to answer a couple of the questions that were, I think, tied to probably some of the questions around incentives. So I just want to make sure this was as clear as possible for folks, which was that for universal pre kindergarten, those in community based settings, the tuition dollars are subtracted from parent payments. So a family that's not eligible for child care financial assistance at all, they're a private pay family. Their universal pre kindergarten tuition that's paid on their behalf is deducted from the amount that that family pays. And there is no so that means there's no real direct financial incentive for those programs to offer universal prekindergarten, especially because we know it actually increases their costs because they have to meet high standards. So why do they do it? Well, they do it for a couple of reasons. One, they are committed to offering high quality education to young children. Right? You can ask that question about almost any part of early childhood education. Why do you do it? You don't make money. Right? We don't that's one of the core problems. Right? People do it because they're passionate about serving young children, they want to make sure kids get a strong start. And for this model, we also know that families want it, right, and they need it because it reduces their costs for education. And there are children, but for UPK, would get zero exposure to a high quality community based group learning environment if it wasn't for UPK. And so for universal pre kindergarten, the strategy for that, when it was created, was to create a universal program that is not means tested and not based on a service need, because we want all kids to have that foundational pre kindergarten experience. Now, child care financial assistance, that program is means tested. And it's based on a service need. So a family has to be there needs to be a reason why the parent can't be caring for a child while they're in child care hours. So they need to be working. They need to be in school. Maybe the parent has a special health need. They have to have a service need reason why they qualify for child care financial assistance, and they also have to meet the income scale. So I want to say, not everybody we dove right into the examples of UPK and CCFAP and that interaction. But I just want to say, not all families are eligible for child care financial assistance. And there's lots of reasons for that. Again, sometimes it's income, we can decide, hey, that's not necessarily society's problem to solve. But it could be that they're home with maybe they have a baby and a toddler in a preschool, and they'd really like that preschooler to to be able to have a prekindergarten experience. UPK allows that family to have that opportunity. So I just want to say there's different strategies by design. And as a result, they do rub up against each other a little bit, again, at the margins. But overall, it's working. Families are taking us up on our offer of pre kindergarten education within the state. And I will say, for childcare financial assistance, and these questions of, so does it I guess, for childcare financial assistance, one of the driving design questions for childcare financial assistance is, how can we make it incent programs to want to serve those highest need families using income as the proxy for who are those highest need families. And so that's how the system is designed. It's designed so that you might get a little more money to be able to serve families that have higher needs. That's exactly what we do in the public school system. Like, why are we surprised to see that that's in the design when we see the interaction between CCFAP and UPK? So I just want to just they're two different philosophies. And I actually think that they can marry well if they complement each other, because they're trying to weave together a system that's going to catch every kid. And so yes, sure, there's some tension points there or some places where you're like, But it's designed to catch every kid and get them that foundational experience. Okay, I'll go back to some of the order that's in my testimony. So one, there is a I want to make sure people know, the agency, we did submit a pre K report in 2024. It's linked in my notes. But it does have information on enrollment, on access, on quality, on expenditures that I think officially got submitted in June. So perhaps people weren't paying attention at that moment. So that report exists. I have a draft. I want to be clear. I do not mean

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: to denigrate the report that you turned in. Had still open data.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Oh, it sure does.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: It must have stayed open. Correct. I just

[Ted Barnett (Joint Fiscal Office)]: don't know.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Everybody knows. It really and

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: it might be helpful for us to actually send all of the sort of there was the report, there was the working group, there was this report,

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: and bundle them all together. Yes. That's with that one, I'm talking about, so theoretically, the agencies it's a joint and also, I'll just point out, these are joint reports. AOE and CCD work together on these reports. So this is the universal pre kindergarten report, '24. Again, that's more like a monitoring type report. Right now, we're working on the one that covers the 'twenty four, 'twenty five school year, and we expect that that will be out in the next few weeks. So that has information in it. Flagging, we did have the Pre Kindergarten Education Implementation Committee. We worked really hard together over it's not quite eighteen months to explore a lot of the questions that have come up. Ultimately, what that committee universally recommended didn't get as far as everybody would have liked. Well, we didn't get further. I will say, some of the attention of the committee, because this was we were working really hard in so that would have been '4. And that was when it was really clear that, oh, the funding situation related to schools, that's when the Jessica being real, real active in that moment. And so there became a lot of question of, how can we make really strong recommendations when it appears that the basic structure of the system is going to adjust? And I will offer. I feel that we're still in that moment. And then at the same time, you guys may also remember, CDD was tasked with a lot of work around implementing Act 76 at that time, too. And we were implementing massive changes to Chakra financial assistance. So again, the sands were shifting really significantly during this or in the last two years related to this whole context. But ultimately, in that committee, really, there was a lot of discussion. And there was a universal recommendation around maintaining pre K for three year olds. Yes, Morgan went through this. And then around recognizing that we needed additional information to be able to make recommendations around expansion and hours based on understanding the financial implications of those decisions. So that's what we were saying, the analysis related pupil weight and the methodology for establishing pre kindergarten payments. So happy to talk more about that at some point, too. I also want to point your attention to a couple more things, though. One is, AHS and AOE issued a joint report on elevating the status of early childhood education in December. So that's also, I think, a useful resource to try to understand AOE and CBD's position on early childhood education and our partnership together. And you'll see in this case, in my remarks, I did just quote directly from part of that report, which highlights the fact that the reorganization of school districts in Vermont, along with a revised funding system, can address many of the challenges in UPK administration. And it's all tied to this question of the districts, the accountability, and the funding. It's the same question. And the question is, we need to how do we make decisions about pre K? Or our position, really, is that decisions about pre K need to be embedded within those broader questions about the system overall. But we can see some real opportunity there. And then the next thing I wanted to point out is just that, again, in late twenty twenty five, CDD, along with the Agency of Education, Building Bright Futures, other partners from the Agency of Human Services, we secured a preschool development grant, Birth to Five Systems Building Grant. That's what they called it. It's a grant in it twice. And it's really all about strengthening the early childhood education system in a variety of ways. And one of those projects is really focused on a streamlined, coherent framework for UPCAD that will try to help us get past some of, especially the administrative challenges that we run up against. And so you can see what the goals are there. We'll probably have that RFP out for a consultant. I mean, I saw a draft. They're saying next week, maybe by the end of this week even. And there would be four major goals. One is around creating the streamlined coherent framework. The goals are to improve access to UPK so that it works consistently for families in every region or district and across program types, to clarify and align UPK governance, funding, and expectations across agencies and settings so that sort of everybody involved knows how to operate within this coherent framework, that we are reducing administrative burden and duplication by identifying and addressing any unnecessary differences in oversight, monitoring, or reporting, and then, again, to create that foundation for UPK data governance and integration so that we can get to the place where you're tracking participation, quality, and outcomes. And so it's going be led by an interagency team. We are planning to have a steering committee of community partners to help guide and advise and validate throughout the process. So we hope that we will have really excellent information. We will make massive strides now because we have some real money to put against doing that work together. And some of the maybe systems level questions are starting to be answered. We're starting to understand a little bit more about what would be the framework that UPK needs to be hung onto if that's changing. So there's that project. And then I just have a number of considerations here as we do think about pre K. Again, there's more information on a lot of this in the pre K committee report. But relative to it being an ecosystem, the JFO team and Morgan touched on this as well. But I'd highlight a few things. So one is Head Start and Early Head Start. These are really important programs for really high need kids in our state. And Head Start has really specific eligibility standards. And Start is really designed for children that come from families that are at or below the federal poverty level. And maybe you can have 20% of them be at 130% of

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: the federal poverty level.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: And then because we're in the Northeast and the federal poverty level is federal, there's actually not that many three and four year olds, specifically, in families that are in that to serve. So Whatever we're doing, if we start decreasing the number of children enrolled in Head Start, we will likely decrease the amount of federal dollars for Head Start that we were pulling down into our state. And we will also have to figure out how we are replacing some of the wraparound supports for Head Start children as well. Because Head Start is not just early learning. Head Start is also a lot of child development and health and family supports as well. So just that interaction, I think, is really important to keep in mind, because these are some of our highest need children. Relative to children with disabilities, we 100% agree that they should have access to an inclusive high quality early childhood education program. Vermont actually gets great well, sees benchmarks and performs better than other states in providing exclusive experiences. And our belief is that is because we have an accessible and flexible UPK programs. And early childhood special education starts at age three. So prekindergarten and early childhood special education, they're not the same thing. You can get early childhood special education services without being enrolled in prekindergarten. But they are the same age range. And for most of them, there is an overlap. Most of those kids are hopefully participating in both, because we want those children to be participating in both. But so again, as we think about this, threes and fours are a cohort from an early childhood special education perspective. I would just also offer there's many have I written that wrong? Not quite right. Many excellent these communities are excellent. Many communities, I was going say, have developed excellent programs, is what was trying to say. But there really are some excellent programs already functioning for three, four, and five year olds. And five year olds not really an integral. And hopefully, is discussed does not take those away in any way, but instead are supporting it. And I would just point out that many of those programs are leveraging both UPK and CCFAP to ensure an affordable, accessible experience that will match the family's needs. And it's going to reduce the need for transitions that are logistically challenging for small children. And they're not necessarily developmentally appropriate for that age group. I also just want to point out, for school age children, we pay our CCFEP in public education all the time. So this is not a special exception for pre kindergarten children. It happens all the time. There's public school children who attend all day, get their full day public education. And then through child care financial assistance, their after school program is paid for, or their summer care is paid for. So this mixing and matching happens all the time. It's happening on the most maybe for school aged children, it might be happening on the family level rather than as a blended experience in one program, one full day program. But something this that the system is designed to be able to do, is to pair these things. And hopefully, in some of the design choices we make, that allows that to happen in a way that makes sense. And then I want to point out, that, prekindergarten is really highly related to what is happening in zero to five child care or early childhood education as a whole. Moving And all your pre K kids to public schools in other states, it has had incredibly negative impacts on the availability of zero to five care in those communities. And most recently, this just happened in California, where they established a TK, a transitional kindergarten. And what they discovered is that overall child care capacity decreased, not just for preschoolers, but for infants and toddlers, too, because it's all part of one financial model and one educational model for those programs. Then the kids that took them up on traditional kindergarten were typically the children that were wealthier. So just something to keep in mind, again, as we're thinking about what the incentives and the levers are here. And I'll point out that part of the reason for that is because of just historical and practical factors that mean preschool often covers the losses on infants and toddlers. So a child care program might think about a child from the age of zero to five. And they think, Okay, over the ages of zero to five, we'll cover our cost on that child. They know they're going to lose money on that kid in the early years, and they're going to end up the time when they can kind of earn back their money are when the kids are older. And they just build it into their model. They're just doing business planning, and they're building that into that model. Historically, well, practically, programs have often based their rates based on what families can afford. And they can't necessarily afford the true cost of infant toddler care. So they've evened things out. And then historically, child care financial assistance rates and actually still, child care financial assistance rates have been based on what the market rates are. So it's all this self fulfilling prophecy or reinforcing cycle there that has preschool enrollment, preschool tuition deeply intertwined with what's happening for infants and what's available in the community and is available for infants and toddlers. And in this case, I would also point out it also would really impact availability of after school care, of summer hours, like in term for programs. It's really, connected. And again, I think we've already talked about this, that even the models that we do have right now don't cover what we call aspirational wages and benefits, but that really is what we know is a professional wage for people who are doing a professional job as early childhood educators. And we know that the UPK costs right now are not fully covered by the UPK statewide tuition rate for community based and private programs, and that the amount paid is not adjusted for disability, for language, or economic disadvantage. So there's definitely plenty of work to do. But again, we just need to be careful as we think through how to pull the threads.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. Agreed. I don't think that we are interested. At least I am personally I'm speak for everyone. I am not interested in doing anything that would reduce opportunities for care for anyone in this state. And I want to make sure that we do have necessary work to do. We are not just rolling forward incentives in the system that aren't our intent. So we just have a couple minutes. I want to name that we're going to ask everyone to come back, including AoE, to talk about what comes next multiple times. And we don't have to do that right now in these next two minutes, because that's what we'll do next. So if anyone has questions for Janet, do you have a question?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Very briefly. You used the term aspirational and something else, and I didn't write down your other term.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Oh, was just current. Aspirational versus current wages.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Gotcha. Thank you.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Representative Holcombe, Ode.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Just a quick observation, the disability, the subsidy or payment for disability would be reimbursed by the school district if a child with disabilities was placed into a provider. So it is provided for in the current construct because districts are liable for that. But a question I have is, we know that the current administration in DC has been intent for at least talking about cutting Head Start. In Vermont, we made a decision to treat Head Start as a standalone pre K. I'm also worried about those tests because I know many kids do depend on that. Has there been conversation in Vermont at all? I know other states co locate headstarts and pre K providers both to ensure that they're part of the broader community and not socioeconomically segregated, but also provide them some resilience. Are those conversations happening here?

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: Yeah, there's examples of

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: have there's Not universal.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: No, I agree. Not universally, but we do do some of that. And I'd be happy that either we could either have the Vermont Head Start Association or Vermont State the Head Start Collaboration Office, the directors based on my team, come in. But now there's places that have done that. I've been to a beautiful program in Barton that is where the school district owns the building. And the Head Start program and the Pre K program are fully integrated. And they're really strategic together to figure out how they're going to wrap funds around. And that's how they make sure that those special ed services are getting right to those Head Start kids in a very facilitated way. There's definitely great models for us to build from, I guess.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Thanks, Representative Ode. So thank you for talking about California and all so I'm just hoping at some point I can understand what threat should suddenly unravel if we took off any income limit, not now, but

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: For CCFPP? Yeah. Okay.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thanks. Thank you, everyone. Thank you all very much for your somehow rushed testimony, even though we've three hours aside for this. And we will dive back in really soon. Thanks. Thanks, all. And if someone could send Sorsa all of the pre K reports and task forces of years gone by. She can send them out to the committee. And then last thing for the committee, Sorcia's going to resend our legislative liaison list. Janet, thank you. You're welcome. Okay. I'll sit there.

[Janet McLaughlin (Deputy Commissioner, DCF – Child Development Division)]: So we're just

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: gonna resend our legislative liaison list. Remember, we all have a committee that we're tracking and collaborating with? Yeah. So everyone still needs to be tracking and collaborating with those committees. Representative Ode and representative Holcombe, you both know that you have committees that you're a liaison to? Oh, so everyone is has a committee they're a liaison to, and they should be tracking legislation in that committee and collaboration with that committee because we already have bills coming in. It's helpful to know about those bills in advance. Environment. Sorcha's gonna resend the list.