Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unknown Committee Member]: Good

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: afternoon, everyone. It is February sorry, January 22. It's Thursday at 01:15. We are going to focus on the small and sparsity necessity rules that we tasked the State Board of Ed with working on in Act 73. And this has been something that's needed attention and some rules and guidance for quite a number of years, and I'm glad that it's getting some attention. And really glad to have our guests, Tammy Colby and Jennifer Samuelson, with us today. And I'll leave it to you two to navigate your testimony. But before you do that, just want to and maybe you were going to do this, Professor Colby, but just bring people's attention to the fact that you're here as a member of the Board of Education.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Chandy Colby. I'm here in my capacity as the vice chair of the State Board of Education, and I was also the chair of the committee that did the work to think about a framework that the legislature might consider for defining small and sparse by necessity. I'm joined here by Chair Jennifer Samuelson. I'll let you do your own field, Jennifer. Behind me, I can't see you.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Good afternoon, everyone. I literally am feeling like I'm taking a backseat here. Chair of the State Board of Ed. And I mean, I think it is appropriate that I had asked Tammy to chair this committee. This was a short lived committee, really tasked with looking into looking at what by necessity means. And so it was Tammy, joined by Brian Campion and Cynthia Stewart or other board members. And I just want to say, I think the committee did a very comprehensive and thoughtful job of putting together a really good framework that I think is useful for legislature. And I think to the fact that they went through and added the rationale and considerations really makes it a helpful roadmap. So I will turn it over to Tammy. I'm here if there are any questions, I'll really let Tammy take the lead. Thank you.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: So, I have a presentation. I think you all have access to it, but I will also put it up so that the public can see. I'm sharing my screen now. Is that through okay, Sorsha? One thing happens when I share my screen, I can't see other things that are going on. So, if somebody raises their hand or something. So what's going here? Okay. So I want to spend a little bit of time just level setting here so we're all on the same page about what our involvement in this discussion is and was at the time. So Section 37 of Act 73 established these support grants for small and sparse schools. And statute defines a school is small if it has less than 100 students. It defines a school as being located in a sparsely populated area if it's in an area with less than 55 persons per square mile of land. Both of those requirements are in statute. Those are not things that the state board had jurisdiction over. Act 73 also stipulates that to be eligible for these additional funding if you are small and or sparse, you must exist by necessity. And Section eight of the Act 73 directed the State Board of Education to propose standards for schools to be considered small or sparse by necessity. So we have small and sparse defined in statute. We have the requirement in statute for funding to be contingent on being a small and or sparse by necessity. And the state board was asked to come back to the legislature with a framework for standards that you might use to define when a school is small or sparse by necessity. Our process for doing that Yeah,

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: I had to Okay. Yeah, we use these schools. Can you clarify what you mean by state?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: That's an interesting question. By virtue of some other work that we're currently doing around class size minimums, school is not currently defined in statute nor is it in rule, and that's something we will be taking up in the context of also needing to come back with you, also needing to come up with the implementation standards for the class setting.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: Are you contemplating that small by necessity could apply to both independent schools and public schools?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Whether or not you are small or located in the sparsely populated area is defined in the statute and its eligibility for funding.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: So wait, for real. Sorry, so I think by that statute, I think what you're saying is that the interpretation is that Black River Expeditionary Learning, eight kids could be small sparse by necessity if its sparsity was 55, less than 55 persons per square mile.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Well, we haven't gotten to the necessity part.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Well, if it met those criteria. I may jump Whether in or a school is small or sparsely populated, These definitions are in Act 73, which means that they are eligible for funding, correct? And currently, 73 and sort of the additional supplementary payments for small and sparse schools, I do not believe cover independent schools, that those are public schools.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Yeah, I was just going to say, if I might, this was not something that the State Board of Ed was asked to look into opine on. I mean, it was literally coming up with a definition or framework for what does small by necessity mean? What does sparse by necessity mean? So that was nothing that we had entertained conversations about. Thank you.

[Legislative Counsel (unidentified, first name likely John)]: Hello. John Zuboff from here. Yes. Congresswoman of legislative council. Hi.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Doctor. Colby helped you identify during the public funding of education chapter, but if you want more specifically, the

[Legislative Counsel (unidentified)]: place for the distinction that you're looking

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: for is the definition of enrollment.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Enrollment is the number of students who are enrolled in a school operated by the school district.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Thanks for clarifying. So our process for considering this, we called ourselves the by necessity committee, the process for thinking about how to apply a by necessity criteria to a smaller sparse school. We went through the state board and engaged in the following process. In July 2025, the State Board of Education constituted a special committee to develop a proposed framework for defining when a school is small by necessity and or sparse by necessity. As Chair Samuelson mentioned, the committee membership consists of Cynthia Stewart, Brian Campion, and myself as chair. Committee met five times during the 2025. We held one public listening session on 11/07/2025. We consulted with and received data from AOE, and those data are available up on our website. It does include spreadsheets that showed the driving times between schools of the same grade level, if that's of interest to you. We also reviewed other states' policies and practices and how they considered both small and sparse and the extent to which they employed a by necessity or some other criteria when applying their funding formula. These definitions and their funding formula. The State Board voted unanimously to accept the committee's recommendations of its December 2025 full board meeting. And so what I'm going walk through now are sort of what those recommendations are. Are you going to talk about driving times in more detail? We're going to talk about driving times. But before I driving get time, I do want to talk about some key definitional considerations. Again, level setting here. So, before we could start to talk about specific criteria, Chair, we actually wanted to talk about what by necessity actually is going to mean in a larger sense. And by necessity, from our perspective, clarify and say by necessity would be a function of unavoidable demographic circumstances, since the criteria for small and sparse is already defined in statute. So this means, by necessity, that a school is either small or sparse because it's that way because of other not because of local preferences, but because of other unavoidable circumstances. And so if we extend that, a by necessity definition therefore needs to distinguish between schools that are small and sparse because of geography or isolation, therefore, would be funding eligible, and schools that are smaller sparse due to local organizational decisions, preferences, or policy choices, they would be funding ineligible. Why is that important as a starting point? Because we have to remember that this definition and sort of this qualifier we're putting in place by necessity is all about determining whether or not a school that meets those statutory minimums, right, is qualified for additional supplemental funding from the state. So we have funding eligible and funding ineligible, the way that we constructed and thought about that is if in fact we were going to find funding eligible as by necessity, that means that a smaller sparse school had to exist because of geography or isolation, then that would be the fund that would qualify for them as funding eligible. We then zoomed out, and I'll talk about the specifics of these things in just a moment. We zoomed out and then, to extrapolate that to say that then our starting point was to find a school as small or sparse by necessity where a school cannot reasonably increase enrollment or consolidate without creating undue hardship for students, specifically in terms of travel time, safety, or the lack of feasible alternatives. So that's sort of the big picture. We started broad. Then what we did is we said, Okay, what does that look like in terms of an operational framework? And I think this is where you were going. And so I'd like to talk through that framework and the criteria that comprise our recommendations. So five broad criteria that we say that we're offering for your consideration.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Sorry, I don't want to sorry to interrupt. Can you go back to that sentence? Yes. And so are you essentially does the framework define each of those Yes. Phrases? Okay, great. Thank you.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: We thought it was important that we hit on it. Before we started getting down to specifics, we thought that it was really important to have a hat rack on which to hang all of these things. And so if you think about that, the hat rack makes an initial distinction between those schools who are funding eligible and funding ineligible. And if you pull the string on what small and sparse is, that means that funding eligible are those that are smaller sparse because of geography or isolation. Schools that would be funding ineligible would be those who are smaller sparse, of the other side of the coin, due to organizational decisions, preferences, or policy choices that are local. So that was the first. And then we said, Okay, then who would be funding eligible? What broadly does this geography isolation, how do we operationalize that? Our starting point then was to say, this would occur when a school could not reasonably increase enrollment or consolidate without creating undue hardship for students. And we operationalize that further in specifics in terms of travel time, safety or lack of feasible alternatives. Thank you. So the big picture, and now I want to talk through those specifics. We operationalized this in terms of five proposed criteria: travel time and distance thresholds. And you'll see in our memorandum that this is the most common way that other states have operationalized this. Two, safe transportation limitations. Three, lack of feasible consolidation options. Four, a community's population trajectory. And five, closure consolidation would impose substantial increases in cost to the state. And I'm going to go through each one of these in more detail. So I'm getting more granular as I go.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Exciting anticipation.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: So for the travel time or distance threshold, and again, I just want to remind us all that part of what we did when we created these criteria is we looked at what other states did, we looked at data around, and we did data in Vermont, we have to took testimony on this. So the travel time or distance threshold that we were recommending is the average one way student travel times would need to exceed forty five minutes for an elementary grade student or sixty minutes for a student in grades seven or 12, or road miles to the nearest school of the same grade span extend the 10 to 15 miles depending on the terrain. Why do we have travel time and road miles? Travel time is thought of in terms of busing time, Road miles are thought in terms of parent driving time, because we have situations in the state where not all school districts offer bus transportation. And so we're trying to think in terms of what is a reasonable amount of time for a child to be traveling to school either by bus or by parent or sort of private transportation. And we can talk about those thresholds if you like now, or we can talk about them at another point in time. But for each of these criteria, we have rationale, and our rationale for these criteria is Vermont geography makes travel time the most sensitive and equity relevant measure. And that's again consistent with what other states have used. Most all states rely on travel time for their by necessity determinations, and the suggested thresholds are consistent with what we found for existing research on the effects of travel time on student outcomes and the criteria that have been used by other states. And if you look in our memorandum, we have a footnote where we cite the relevant research if you want to consult that. The committee also received testimony that existing bus time for children exceed sixty minutes in some places in Vermont are ready. And we used that testimony to help us think through whether or not these thresholds were also already thresholds that reflect reality in Vermont already. What we did hear from superintendents is that they really wanted to make sure that these were averages and not minimums or maximums, because that would It could be that you have one child who's on a bus for fifty minutes, right? And that these kinds of sort of hard criteria, these threshold criteria could really make bus scheduling really difficult for some rural districts and bus scheduling is already really difficult for rural districts. And so they wanted to make sure that these were averages from the floor. The criteria are safe transportation limitations. This sort of goes right along with our recommendation around travel times. Depending

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: on terrain Oh, you're about to go to that. Sorry.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Yep. Safe travel, right. So in addition to just having thresholds for the amount of time with distance that a child might have to travel, we also said that a school would qualify as by necessity if terrain, winter road conditions, unpaved routes, mountain gaps creates unsafe or unreliable transportation between schools. So if you think about, I always think about Lincoln And Warren and Lincoln Gap, which even closes in the winter, there are no buses going over. Even those schools are actually relatively close to one another, those two elementary schools. So examples would be bus routes requiring travel over roads closed in winter, mountain passes that could cause 60 detours, or if there's only one road in and out of town, a single ingress that's prone to closure. And again, these are criteria that other states have used, these are examples that we're offering. The rationale here is that in addition to just thinking about travel times or distance, that we need to have additional consideration for specific geography in Vermont that can impact travel times and, frankly, student safety. That's just travel times. We just look at travel times without safety. We could end up in having situations where we would be really uncomfortable about the situations in which children are being transported to school. The third criteria: lack of feasible consolidation options. Under this criteria, a school would qualify again by necessity if nearby schools, both within and outside an existing district boundary and that, by the way, was a recommendation that we took from the agency lap capacity to absorb students and still meet the state's educational quality standards, including class size minimums, Or the cost of renovation or addition at receiving school to exceed the projected savings from closing a school. Or three, tuitioning out raises per pupil costs or creates inequities in program access. This would be especially for students with disabilities who require special education services or other students who have learning needs who cannot be met by nearby non public school. So what the rationale for these criteria are is what we're really trying to talk about here are the feasibility of consolidating students in nearby schools. Just because they might be proximate, it may be infeasible to consolidate. And our worry is that if we just relied on travel times, we could end up with situations where, for example, in the Mad River Valley, have three elementary schools, but if we close facing school, it's unclear that there's capacity at the other schools to accept those students.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: This is so helpful, and I appreciate the evidence based nature of these recommendations. I have a question about this third one. We have regions where to enroll your child in school, you might have to pay additional tuition above

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: the payment of the tuition amount. Is that what you're contemplating, or is the State Board planning to address topping off in its rules? I think there are two questions there. What we were saying here is this would be the tuition that the district pays for a student to attend another school. And the cost benefit analysis here, it's not in the state's interest to have a situation where the average tuition amount that a district might pay for students to attend a non public school would exceed the cost of keeping the school open. Remember, the question we're trying to answer here around the by necessity is a funding one. And so part of what we're trying to balance here is if we were to provide an additional subsidy to public school, that's an additional cost to the state. But if in fact we didn't provide that and the only other option is for those students who go to a non public school where the average tuition amount paid for by the district is higher, then the cost benefit analysis to the state doesn't make sense. Asking a second question. Go ahead.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: I just want to add the context that this is sort of designed to apply to Act 73. Yes. I'm to say future state, which I was hoping not to say this here, but I don't

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: have a better word right now. Sorry.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: The situation of folks being of communities' tuitioning just essentially partly for a student is mostly resolved in Act 73. There are limits on that.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Now that we agree,

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: we can have testimony on that.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Yeah, that sounds good.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: I actually

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: don't think that's resolved yet. We didn't contemplate that specific. What we did is we looked at other states, and we were talking about the conditions. And we were thinking about this from the state's perspective and the cost efficiency of operating a system. And if we were to make a decision about a public school staying open, and it turned out that if that public school met the educational quality standards and the class size minimums, and that school, even with the subsidy, was cheaper to operate than the average tuition amount for sending all those students to a non public school, it would be in the state's financial interest to keep that school Let me be very clear, we were not wading into the debate over public versus non public placements or tuition. This was a cost benefit analysis with respect to the funding. The trade offs between providing the additional subsidy for a smaller sparse school, right, versus a tuition option. And I

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: think Tammy, if I may, because the board did have a small conversation about this, I think the bigger issue isn't even so much a public versus non public. It's really more that tuitioning costs would increase if you closed a school, you know, whether that's so it's not it's really just looking at if you close a school, where would those kids go and would that new school increase the tuition costs, however that school is characterized? Well, it wouldn't cost the not the tuition cost. It would be,

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: would the average expenditure for a student coming from my town go up? Right? Relative to what the average expenditure for that student would be with the state subsidy to keep the school open if it was small or sparse. Let me be very clear about that. Just one more clarifying point. There's a second piece to this that's very important, and that is with regard to students with disabilities and other students with learning needs that can be met. You can run into a situation where the tuitioning, especially for students with disabilities, can be enormous if you have to send them to a non public person. And so, it's both the average, but in particular considering what the cost will be for students with special needs that require very specialized instruction in a non public person.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: I want to be real quick. That was not the question I was asking.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Well, there's a second part of your question. I wanted to start. I broke it into two pieces. So the first part of the question is sort of the cost benefit trade off here, and that's what we were considering here. You were asking a second question, which I believe came out of the task force report with respect to topping off. I'm going to defer that question to the chair.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: So I'm going to defer the question back to the General Assembly because State Board of Ed does what we're told to do. And so if this is, I mean, I know that at the current practice is, and for as long as I've been aware of it, has always been that families may pay an amount in addition to the average announced tuition. If that is something that is going to change, I think the change needs to occur in the general assembly first with a directive to the State Board of Ed to update rules accordingly. Because otherwise, I think the the state board of ed is really engaging in something that it doesn't have the authority to do. I mean, we really need the legislature to to give us that direction so that we make sure that we're staying within the confines of legislative intent.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: I was just curious to know from the state board, it's received a legal opinion on whether or not because it's not parents choosing to pay more, it's parents have to pay They have to pay to play. They have to pay in order to access what's supposed to be a public benefit. And my question is whether the state board has sought legal advice on whether that is consistent with the protection intent of public education.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: We have not, but I don't feel like that question arises in the first instance with the State Board of Ed. I think if this is a change in policy, that's something that the legislature needs to address first.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: I'm gonna Thank you. Okay. I have a The one and two, I'm surprised that's not an and between them, and it's an or. And can you help me understand that? Should I explain my question a little bit more?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Yeah, you can. So if a school outside of

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: a district boundary lacks capacity, but they could spend $50 and I'm really using $50 as ridiculously -No, I understand. Like, insulate something that wasn't insulated, then why would it matter if they lacked capacity or not? So it seems to me that the fact that they lack capacity and they can't gain capacity easily is actually the question.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I can see where that could be an end. I think it could be. I think we, as a committee, put forward what we We tried to be distinct in the criteria here, and I think if you wanted to make that an and, I think you can certainly come up with rationale. I think the other thing I would point out in number one, it's not just lack capacity. There's an and in that. You have to lack capacity and still be able to deal with the EQS. So another way you could partition this out is you deal with the capacity in one bullet and you deal with the EQS in another bullet. You could combine those two. Again, our goal here was to provide a starting point for discussion and a framework. And it wasn't

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: a criticism. Was really trying to understand your thinking.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I think we as a committee had discussions about ors and ands. And I think as a group, we could make arguments both ways. And so we went with this as a starting point in the framework. But I think you raise a good point. Okay, our next criteria is the community population trajectory. And this criteria would apply a school to qualify if the census block or town catchment area is projected to remain below an enrollment that would support a viable larger school even with consolidation. What do we mean by this? It is not in the state's interest. So let's say a school has 98 students right now. And maybe they've had 98 students for a while. But we know that they also have a pre kindergarten class that suggests they're going to have way over 98 students three years from now, or there's a business coming into town. And so it is not in the state's interest. What we're recognizing is if the state pulls back a subsidy to that small school, that small school located in a sparsely populated area, and that school closes as a result of losing that subsidy, and five years from now, there's some able to be projected demographic shift. And now that school is no longer there, that's shortsighted on the part

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: of state. And

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: so we wanted to acknowledge that those kinds of, especially when we have hard and fast cut points for what consents is smaller, sparse, that providing some flexibility and the ability to talk about potential demographic shifts is an important criteria for to consider when we're defining by necessity. So you might be small by necessity for two or three years, but the long term projection is not for you to be small by necessity over a longer period of time. And so what that does is our rationale is it provides flexibility in places where schools may temporarily fall below 100 students, And it recognizes, again, the state's interest in maintaining small schools in geographic areas where there might be a future demographic or economic change that would result in an increase in the number of students. What decides? I'm trying get to that, if I can put a pin into that. We have recommendations on that. The last criteria? All the others

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: seem easier to decide than that one, so thank you.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: We'll put that one in the parking lot, if that's okay, sure. The last criteria, closure consolidation would impose substantial increases in cost. And again, this is a funding formula criteria. So in our conversations, we recognize that there is this sort of cost benefit trade off with this. And recognizing that if, in fact, a school didn't receive a subsidy as smaller Spires, the likely outcome in many cases would be that school could not exist. And so that we need to think through this cost benefit trade off. And so we offered the following policy criteria. A school qualifies if closure or consolidation will create substantial measurable increases in the district's average per student expenditure, including but not limited to tuition costs, transportation costs, capital costs, or new facility requirements. So if it's the case that by virtue of that school no longer receiving the smaller sparse subsidy, that school would close, the average per student expenditure of the district would increase substantially. That doesn't make sense from an economic perspective either. And we recognize a number of scenarios where it may not be limiting these scenarios, but these were four possible scenarios that we considered. And again, what we're trying to do is take in these conditions, recognize the interest in the taxpayers, and controlling education spending.

[Unknown Committee Member]: It kind of crosses over with some of the previous

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: It does, it does. And that's why this is a framework rather than a definition. We did talk about a definition, and we have one that we didn't vote it out of the committee because we didn't see that it was our job to provide you with definition. We didn't want to hamstring the legislature that way in your deliberations, but we certainly can talk about the kinds of things that we thought might work for a definition. But what we really want to do is give a framework here of what we thought the important considerations would be definition and, to the chair's point, in future rule, which gets us to other implementation considerations. So one of the things we also need to decide is who's responsible for the healthiest, right? So who's going to be responsible for determining which school meet the criteria? Our recommendation is that the agency of education be charged with responsibility for determining whether a school qualifies as smaller spars by necessity, both because they are largely responsible for administrative formula. They also have EQS and the DQS that they monitor, and that this could all be part of that. Second, though, we do recommend that the specific criteria documentation requirements, timeline for review, data elements that the agency would use to make this determination should be established in rural and incorporated in the education quality standards, where lots of these other kinds of things are currently placed. And that way, the expectations will be transparent and consistently applied. So to your question, Chair Kornheiser, our recommendation is that the AOE be charged with determining, but that criteria that the agency used to determine would be established in rule and would go

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: in the EQS. And so, for example, the AOE would be responsible for this. They would propose rules that would say, we will refer to the Vermont Futures Project for determination of future population numbers.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Yes. So the EQS is a state board of education rule, not an agency of rule. So it would be the state board of education ultimately that would develop the criteria that were consistent with statutes, documentation requirements, timeline and things along those lines, like we do lots of other things. And so we would take your statute to make that implementable in

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: the context of The U. S. And then the agency would be responsible for implementing that. When you develop rules that the agency is responsible for implementing, how do you manage the agency's capacity for implementing that? I don't mean that in a very abstract way, like enough staff. I I don't know if there's anyone at the Agency of Education that thinks about future demographics.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I'm just giving you an example, because it's the one for this outside of so this. Our process for updating the rules is always an inclusive process, where we take lots of testimony, including testimony from the agency. For example, we're doing that right now on size minimums and trying to think about how to make these things operational. So we don't go and develop those rules without talking to the agency about what's doable and what the resource requirements. I would think that some of these, this particular rule, might require data and information from other agencies in order to implement around driving times and things along those lines. We already collaborated with folks outside the agency when we were developing this to give us those kinds of data. And there's a working relationship between the agency and these other entities already.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: So let me just tack onto your answer, Tammy, because we did kind of run into this when we were updating EQS and 2200 the last go round. So as the legislature is aware, the State Board of Ed can't really tell the agency what to do. That's not within, you know, our rights. So the only way we are allowed to tell the agency what to do is if the legislature has given us that specific authority in that particular circumstance. So I'm not coming up with an exact example off the top of my head. But with EQS, if this is something where we need information from the agency, the way to accomplish that is one, have something in statute that allows us to direct the agency to do that. Express our intent or our hope in the rule that the agency would provide that information to us. And of course, it always helps to get that buy in from the agency as we're engaged in rulemaking. And if the agency were to say, yes, we can do that for you, that makes it a lot easier for us. But we can't just go out on our own and say, agency, you need to do X, Y, and Z. Like, just, we don't have that authority.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: So in statute, when you come up with how you define this in statute, ultimately, the by necessity definition is going to have to be a statutory definition. You could prescribe that the agency be charged with the responsibility of determining whether a school qualifies according to the criteria established in the EQS. To Jennifer's point, we can't direct the agency to do anything, but statute can. And the statute can say, it's the agency's responsibility to administer this. However, the criteria that the agency uses to administer this would be established in rural and would be part of the EQS. And the EQS already established and the GISMA quality standards as well already established criteria for lots of things that the agency does. The last thing we just want to bring to your attention is timing for designation. This is a real consideration because whether or not a school is designated as smaller sparse by necessity has financial implications, right, and budgeting implications. And so we have to think about the timeline for when this determination is made so that when school districts and schools are forming budgets and decisions about operational decisions, they know whether or not a school is going to be designated as by necessity or not. So it needs to be done at least annually. It needs to be done annually because this is an annual thing and circumstances change year to year. But that needs to be done on a timeline that aligns with district budgeting. And our perspective from the state board is that districts should have a clear determination of eligibility in advance of developing and completing their budgets, just because this is high stakes. Let me stop there.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Oh, that's all your testimony.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: That's it. Highly efficient. Thank you. Questions. And again, we wrote a memo all about this, and I want to draw your attention to a couple of things in the memo. In addition to just talking through our recommendations, our criteria, all of that, there are a couple of exhibits in the back. One is not a comprehensive scan of all states, but it's example states where this has been done, a summary of how they've done it. That would be Attachment A. Attachment B in that memo is a synthesis of the criteria used in other state funding formulas. You can see, right, we thought this would be helpful to you. So when you're thinking this through, if you want to go look at Utah Utah does this, so you can go look at Utah more carefully. So there are two attachments to that memo in addition to our memo, which provides additional description of what we do, both the process and our recommendations.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: I have a slightly weedy question about the miles for parents to drive, depending on terrain. Is that sort of what that meant, what you would imagine would happen in rulemaking as well?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: No, I would imagine those kind of criteria would be established in statute. In statute? And our recommendations for Do like rulemaking that would something? Be I think that would need to be defined in statute. I think what we were suggesting in rule making would be how the agency would go about making those determinations. But I think the what is a statutory, how that is implemented by the agency, would pop all within the permutations.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: So, do you have recommendations on what terrain makes sense?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I think we had some recommendations in our presentation, in our Back up. Sorry. Bus routes requiring travel over roads in winter, mountain passes that cause more than a 60 detour if they're closed, and only one road in and out of town of single ingress prone to closure. And we drew on those examples based on what other states have used. I will say

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: I'll just be totally explicit about what I'm asking about. I think you had a 10 to 20 mile range for the parent driving section. 10 to 15?

[Unknown Committee Member]: I can

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: pull my slides back. Think about on a main road near me, there's 10 to 15 miles between, and it's a 55 mile an hour road. So that's a very short drive between two schools.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I think those are all reasonable things to consider. I think the challenge is that To be frank, I think the challenge is this. There are going to be more exceptions here than the statute can And so what we were trying to do is think about what we talked about this in the committee is that what we're trying to do is create a framework not about the tails, but about the middle. And there's going be stuff going on out here where I don't know that any well formed statute is going to contemplate all those things. So yes, 10 to 15 miles is arbitrary, right? But I think what, I mean, certainly you could operationalize that a different way, which is in terms of average parent driving time, But the goal here was, I think the message that we wanted to get across is that the travel time or distance threshold needs to take into account both busing time and parent or caregiver time or some other private transportation time. Because not all students have access to busing.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: And I think too, you guys could structure it so it's kind of a totality of the circumstances. So if it were just 10 to 15 miles of parent time, that to me, like if none of the other criteria were satisfied, I don't think that that alone would be enough. I think, you know, what I'm envisioning is if the agency were, you know, considering whether a school is small or sparse by necessity, that would be one element to be considered, but they would, you know, really have an entire bucket of elements, and that they would really be looking at the totality of circumstances with regard to any particular school. One of

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: the things the committee discussed was a weighting system, where each one of these things is worse, a certain number of points, and once you cross a threshold, you're in. Because another thing to take into account here is should all these criteria be weighted, have the same weight? And so we did talk a little bit about that, but again, we were trying to be careful in what we came back with you about not being so prescriptive around how US legislatures might construct statute as opposed to what we thought were the most important things that should be considered in a definition.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Yeah, I mean, there's interesting questions around whether cost or opportunity or all those things are the essential questions we're grappling with.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: Do you have any opportunity to look at where there are qualitative differences between districts that operate? Busing transportation systems and districts that don't

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: There are no data available on the we asked those kinds of questions. There are no good data in the state on busing. So we called in a number of superintendents that we and we had folks come in to testify that we knew operated large districts with complicated busing and talked to them that way. We also asked the agency and they put a request to the group that handles our GIS mapping, and that's the spreadsheet that is up on our website that I think might be very useful to this committee, which shows actual driving miles between schools that have the same grade level and also taking schools that would currently meet the small or sparse threshold and then talking about driving times, not miles, as a profile, driving times to another school in the capacity of the other school. So we did do that. We did make that data request, and that was considered in thinking about the reasonable person test with regard to these driving times and word miles.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: And it's up on your website?

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: It's an Excel spreadsheet.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Representative, thank you. Could you consider maybe what we would want to put in the record as legislative intent is when the agency goes out to do rulemaking on this, any law has been passed?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: We were hopeful that our definitional considerations might provide a starting point for the legislature to think about how to talk about this and construct that argument. And so talking about necessities being a function of unavoidable circumstances and then being clear that this necessity definition is really sort of one for the purposes of funding, what's fundable and what's not fundable, and under what circumstances the state has an interest in providing supplemental funding versus those circumstances in which the state does not have an interest in providing supplemental funding. So those instances in which the state has an interest in providing supplemental funding would be those where a school is smaller first because of geography or isolation, Or schools that are not fundable would be those that are smaller sparse due to local organizational decisions, preferences, local policy decisions. And so we hope that providing that, like this slide and that definition, that might help you in crafting that narrative. And also being transparent of how we organize our conversation.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: Did the agency provide you with a list of all the districts that applied for and received transportation grants? And is that something you can No, we did not receive that information. Did you request it? I don't recall. We

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: had a fairly comprehensive data request to the agency. We did not receive everything we requested. Some of that was because they couldn't provide it, and some of that was because of timing. Everything we requested from the agency is documented, and also everything we received from the agency is up on our website. I think, perhaps for this committee, the thing that's most useful is that Excel spreadsheet with the driving times. And although that didn't Analytically, we didn't go school by school. It gave us a sense of what the lay of the land was, and that helped us think through these larger ideas that might be useful to you as well.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: And you said you got it from

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: the GIS office. Did you ask them to do any visual overlays?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: It's really complicated to do a visual overlay, because what we asked for was not a one to one correspondence. It's not like the tool that's up on the web now. What we asked was a different question. What we were interested in is what is the driving distance to the nearest school with the same grade level? Here's a school that meets the definition, what is the driving distance to the nearest school that has the same grades. And the existing tool on the web does not do that. And so you might have multiple schools that meet that criteria for one school. So it's not a one to one match. And because of that, the mapping doesn't work very well. So what you have is a spreadsheet that says, here's school A and here's one or more schools to which drive, one or more schools that meet the grade level criteria. What we could not determine is we couldn't determine whether or not those schools had capacity. There was no way for us to do that. But it was helpful to see just the driving times. And again, we intentionally did not qualify that these schools that would be considered as a potential match be within the same district. Because there are circumstances in the state where we actually have two small schools within five miles of each other, but they're in separate districts, and we can't carry them.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Did anything surprise you in the analysis of the data that you pursued? Yeah.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Me, personally? No.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Yeah. Or the rest of the board then?

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I didn't hear anything from the rest of the board that where no one suggested it was surprised or surprised or not. It wasn't really and no one really talked about whether that they were surprised.

[Unknown Committee Member]: I was about coming up with the definitions, and I think these are great, but it's just a deeper into it than a lot of us.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: It's a challenging question. And again, that's why we really started out with this definitional consideration, just sort of from a 10,000 foot level. I think it's really important, since this is part of a funding formula, is that we ground it in that conversation, like who is fundable and who's not. In taking the legislative intent of Act 73 into account and being clear that the by necessity definition is being bogged to small and or sparse. So that says that by necessity has to take into account geography or isolation right off the bat. And that interpretive, if you sort of pull the string on it, those are the fundable schools. That means anything that's discretionary is not fundable. And that was a really helpful conversation, orienting conversation for us to get clear on that before we started thinking about criteria. Because what started to happen before we got clearance, you start talking about all kinds of things, then you're like, is that fundable? Just by way of process, it was helpful for us to start with that kind of distinction, and that's why we offer that as a starting point for your conversation as well.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: Anyone else want add? Yes, for presenterism.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Couple of things. K. Different directions. One is I'm impressed about the work that you did in Scott.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Very great committee.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Well, rational and pretty easy to follow. Going in the other direction, though, I was intrigued by Representative Ode's direction. I'm putting words in here, what I think you were thinking. So there comes a point where we're trying to be extremely rational or sufficiently rational to meet the requirements of a sentence to get on the edge of what's practically possible, if you understand whatever. Yep, I do. And those are the quandaries that we deal with here.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: And

[Unknown Committee Member]: from my own say, we do the best we can with what was that, which is what you were saying too. I appreciate that.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I think this is going to be the law of averages, in that it's going to be really hard to develop a definition that covers all the exceptions to the rule, and there are going to be exceptions. It's just going to be really hard, and what we try to do in the framework that we're providing to you is provide what we thought was a good middle ground that covered most of the circumstances. That's why we have multiple criteria. Some states only take into account travel time, and we said, that's probably insufficient and that we could create a really good use case. For example, the demographic trajectories, especially we could get ourselves into a real pickle on that and end up in a situation that's not in the best interest of the state in Milwaukee. So hopefully, it's a workable start.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: I just want to say that I was wrong about the topping off. There's been much texting and emailing with staff, and that it's not addressed in 'seventy three, which is a huge oversight, because I thought it was.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: It is not addressed in

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: Thank

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: you so much for this very detailed outlook. And I

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: was hoping that when I'm grateful that we were taking time to look

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: at transportation. The failure to provide transportation hugely conditions opportunity, and even who can live in a community, I'm hoping we can have a robust conversation about that, and also that we can request information on who is receiving those transportation grants.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: Yeah, and my understanding is that the education committee is taking more testimony on attendance sort of problems. It's very strongly Yes, that the rest of my sentence. And so I hope that they're Yeah. Hope that they're also diving into transportation access, because that's a huge part of whether or not kids can actually attend school.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I can take off my stapler hat a minute and put it over here, and I'm going to put my researcher hat on. Excited. Saw that. Okay, that was a shame. There is research on transportation and impacts on students. We do cite some of

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: that in the memo.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: But I will say that it might be helpful to look I think the Education Commission of the States has a summary of different transportation policies in rural areas. And that is an area that's been studied. And I'm happy to

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: come back and talk to you about that, not with the state board hat. Thank

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: you. My state board hat back up.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: Thanks. And we do have

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: the Education Commission on the States coming in next week to talk about reserve guidance. And Jennifer, if you are interested in any way participating in reserve guidance, that might be an interesting thing for the board to get involved in. Because I would likely become part of EQS probably or something like that.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: How about this DQS? DQS, district

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: quality standards. Thank you. Yes.

[Dr. Tammy Kolbe, Vice Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: And just to be clear, the DQS is actually under the purview of the agency of education by statute. And so we've got the DQS that's operated, that's oversaw by the agency, we've the EQS that's oversaw by the board. Hopefully this is helpful to you.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, Chair]: It is helpful, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. So next up, we are joining a joint hearing with Senate Finance. My understanding is that the witnesses and the topic have changed since we discussed doing a joint hearing with Senate Finance. And so it'll take a few minutes to catch up with ourselves on that. And then that'll be at 02:30. I think they are scheduled for more time than we have available because we have the floor at three And then we Zoom in from here. We're gonna zoom in from here, but just one second. And then if the floor ends before 04:15, we are back here for security briefing, off the record, at 04:15. If the floor goes past 04:15, we are not back here, we'll reschedule it for another day. 415 is the magic number. Thank you.

[Jennifer Samuelson, Chair, Vermont State Board of Education]: I'm just gonna sign off. Thank you all.

[Rep. Carol Ode, Member]: Thank you. Bye.