Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Good morning. It is Friday, February 6. It is nine a. M. And we are continuing the testimony from the Joint Fiscal Office about prekindergarten that we were looking at two days ago. And Emilie Kornheiser joining us to finish out that test. And then we will continue the conversation on it next week. I'm sorry for the disruption in our usual Friday morning bill introduction protocols. We will also restart that next week. Emilie?

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Hi. Hi. And then after

[Speaker 0]: the floor, we're gonna do regional assessment districts, and this afternoon is joint fiscal. I encourage folks hang out if you wanna understand how the rural health money is going to work.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Where will that

[Speaker 0]: remodel? Maybe I'll

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: make another publisher.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: If any window move here. Want me to jump in and start sharing?

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. The whole floor is yours.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Awesome. Do what you will. Yes? Do want us to do the same

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: thing and use all these questions?

[Speaker 0]: I think that makes sense. All right, so let's say we'll ask Emily clarifying questions, and we'll collect big questions for future big question names.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So for the record, Emily Burns from the Joint Fiscal Office, here to talk about the language you all spoke about on Wednesday and to talk a little bit about the public system in that language.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Just to clarify, this presentation is based on the draft bell language we saw. Okay.

[Speaker 0]: Yep. As was the last one, I think. Yes.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Ezra helped a lot with a lot of the data analysis and putting together the presentation. So I just wanted to

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: give him a shout out. I could

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: not have done this without his help and Julia and Ted and Logan. 37% of the joint fiscal ops staff. So I'll jump right in.

[Speaker 0]: Do a pie chart on that for the next fifteen minutes.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I can do that.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: I had

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: a computer.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: It's Friday.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: It's having a Friday morning. Okay, so high level, real quick, we're going to go over universal pre kindergarten. Remember how the program currently is structured and how it works. This is what we talked about two weeks ago, I think. Slides should look very familiar. Talk a little bit about the fiscal impacts of the proposed language and go through some very crude, for lack of a better term, analysis that we did to try to figure out costs in the education fund for the public and private system currently, and then talk about some high level scenarios. So with the new language, what it would look like if universal pre K was provided just in house versus provided outside of the district versus a hybrid of the two. Talk a little bit about statewide impacts and some general considerations. So to recap, universal pre kindergarten under current law, all districts are required to provide access to a publicly funded pre K education for ten hours per week for thirty five weeks a year for parents that can secure a slot. So that slot had a pre qualified program. So that can be in their school district, or it can be at a community based provider. But if the parent can't secure a slot, then there is no exchange of funds for universal pre K. It's available to all three, four, and five year olds not yet enrolled in kindergarten. It may be provided in that public or qualified provider space. And if a district doesn't offer a pre K program or if the parent chooses to enroll in a different pre qualified program, either at a completely different public school or at a private provider, wherever, the district within Vermont, I should say the district must pay the statewide universal pre K tuition to the selected program. The tuition payment is part of a local district's education spending. And the public programs themselves, both offsetting revenue. So if you're receiving revenue from a different district for a kid that's not within your district, from an outside district, and the expenses associated with tuition and the cost of operating your program in house are part of a district's education spending. The existing pre K weight. So under current law, the pre K weight is negative 0.54. That's to reflect that it's only ten hours a week. This means that if a child is enrolled in a pre K program, regardless of where they attend, the district receives 0.46 in their long term weighted ADM for each of the participating children. Depending on a pupil's characteristics, so English language learner, lower income, etcetera, they can receive additional weights. I'll note just for when we were working on the pre K report and working on a lot of this over the summer, in talking with school business managers and just anecdotal stuff that we learned, it's not clear that every district collects all the information on additional weights for pre K students. So if you're just paying tuition, there's not necessarily Some districts absolutely are and some aren't, but it appears both in looking at the data and just in the conversations that it's not consistent, that additional weights are being used by districts in their headbands. And the impact this has on districts is different under current law and Act 73. Currently, 0.46 increases the district's tax capacity. Under Act 73, it's going to increase their education opportunity. So who pays for universal pre kindergarten? A child enrolled in a universal pre kindergarten program at a public school that's in their district. The cost to operate that program is part of the district's budget, and it's treated like any other grade. If the child's enrolled at a pre qualified program at either a private provider or at a different public school, the sending district pays that fixed amount for the ten hours for thirty five weeks out of the year to the program in fiscal year twenty twenty five. We're going use 2025 because that's what we have the most recent actual data for. The tuition rate was $3,884 It's part of the sending district's budget. And if the pupil attends the public school program at a different district, it's also part of the program itself will be an expense, but then the money that's coming from the home district is also offsetting revenue for that district. Sorry. Getting

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: confused between Karak Maha and the proposed language. How was the Karak tuition raise calculated?

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I believe it was set in statute and that it's increased annually by NIFA, the National Whatever NIFA is. The inflator. It's inflated every year.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: It was initially set based, if I recall, based on the cost of education in elementary schools.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So, and under Act 73, just as a quick reminder, the pre K weights will correspond with funding amounts. Now, contingently effective in Act 73, the district's long term weighted average will dictate the education opportunity payment. This includes pre K students and their associated weights. Under Act 73, based on the way that the current weights are written, that pre K students will receive $6,915 and FY $25 along with any other weights that a student qualifies for. So current spending on pre K. So we did some analysis to try to figure out, and this has been one of the challenges with pre K data, is what is currently being spent in schools? Say this to everybody that's talked to me about pre K in the last eight months, but I'll keep saying it. If you know about one pre K program, you know about one public pre K program. I would say, if you know about one private program, you know about one private program. They are all different. They all have everything is different about all of them, probably. And so we don't know what is offered in every individual SU and SD. That data hasn't been collected. I know it's part of conversations, but that needs to get figured out. What is everybody doing? What's the baseline? What is everybody doing right now? Know how many slots there are, but we don't know how many hours or what those programs really look like. So what that does is that makes trying to analyze spending really challenging. So you can only kind of do it at a 30,000 foot level. You don't really know what's going on in individual districts. We can only make sort of gross generalizations about what's being spent per kid. So we received the twenty twenty five spending information from the Agency of Education. In that sort of accounting data, it's coded. These are pre K expenses. We're able to do some analysis on what's being spent, but want to caveat it that it's not meant to be the amount that any one individual district is actually spending per kid on their pre K programs. I shouldn't joke, but I will joke a little bit. When I was at the Agency of Education, we spent a lot of time working with districts on how they are coding their expenses and whether or not there's a more consistent way to do it. And then looking at this data, it was like, Oh, it's still not consistent. Didn't spend a lot of time with the data again. Ezra and other folks spent way more time with it. But even in my brief thing, was like, Oh, that district coded that thing, but nobody else did. And that district coded that. And that's not unique to Vermont Public School District. That's any accounting anywhere in any situation. But that just shouldn't put that over the top of, that makes this not a perfect This is not a science. It's an art. I'm just going to throw that out there.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: You said you're not unique to school districts. Did you also imply unintentionally not unique to what other states do? Probably. Okay.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. I mean, was more thinking it's not unique to what every agency and department in state government does. I've been a business manager in different parts of state government. We did things differently in the two Yeah. Departments I worked accounting has a little bit more art to it than people recognize sometimes. So anyway, we're going to make some very generalized statements about the program costs, and they're not all the same. So like a hypothetical situation based on the data that we've got. So saying all that.

[Unknown (Joint Fiscal Office staff, possibly 'Ezra')]: And to add on that,

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: so are we trying to make it consistent from school to school? That's what our result, we hope, will be. I think there has been a lot of progress made in trying to get more consistency. I know there's Back when I was at AOE a long time ago, there was lots of conversations, but that's And that's a great question for

[Speaker 0]: the fiscal analysis folks from AOE who will be here on Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So what we did was we took universal pre K expenditures from the data set from AOE. We have the estimated general education expenditures. So we excluded all of anything associated with special education, right? Because we're only talking about general education of pre K students. So that's about $60,000,000 of general education expenses for pre K. And then we took out any related federal expenses. We're looking at just what is coming out of the education fund for pre K. Expenses.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: Expenses, okay.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. So the expenses are coded to the associated revenue costs, we wanted to pull out the federal pieces. So there's about $11,000,000 of federal funds being used for pre K general education. So the remaining was $48,600,000 on pre K. There's a weird oh, Okay. Yeah, yeah. I had to get creative with PowerPoint so I didn't show the whole table at once so I could see Anyway, the estimated private we then needed to back out the tuition payments so that they're not because if we want to look at just what's in the public setting, you want to take out all that money that's going out to the private providers. So that's about $14,800,000 $14,900,000 leaving about $33,700,000 of spending in the public system for public pre K programs. That's

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I'm Let's finish on the slide.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: And I think this just repeats what I just said. So 33.7, taking out the federal expenditures and the tuition payments, only includes direct expenditures. And this does not include indirect or administrative costs. We're generally not accounted for here. This alludes to the, everybody did it differently. Sometimes you would see some things that looked like in the data that looked like administrative costs, but it's not. School districts don't cost allocate their principal to everything or that sort of thing. So those are sort of general overhead operational things that districts have not accounted for in this. This is sort of the direct expenses associated with pre kindergarten. That 14.86,

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: is that coming from families?

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: No, that's the education payment to private providers for universal pre K.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: So that doesn't come from

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: No, it comes from the local budgets. A local state.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: $78.86 per student. Sorry.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Perfect. Problem. Eric. What are the

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: things I do think you have to try to get a handle on are the indirect administrative costs, both at the local level and at the state level. And this is an unusual program and it means a mandatory voucher program. So even a program that operates also has to pay tuition, which means that you had, like, a little administrative cost. And did you see anything in the data that gives you ideas of what we should collect to be able to evaluate that?

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Not off the top of my head. Can think of it. Again, I didn't spend a lot of time. That's Okay. I'm not the one in the weeds on the data. But we can think of it. Keep going. Okay. So in fiscal year twenty twenty five, AOE reported that there was 7,800 pre K long term EDM. Based on the fiscal year 'twenty five tuition payments and the number of students, we were able to back into an estimated 3,800 pre K students that attended UPK at a private provider, leaving 3,900 students attending UPK in a public school. So this is just the math on how we did that. So we took the $14,860,000 of private tuition divided by the UPK tuition rate to come up with the number of students that would reflect. So it's approximately half are in public schools and half are attending universal pre K at private providers.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: But just to be clear, this is not total UPK expenditures. This is just tuition.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: This is just the tuition, yeah. Because there

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: are administrative costs associated with those $3.94 and 3,826 students.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: This was just a way to sort of Because we don't know from the districts or from AOE how many kids are in private providers versus public providers. So we did this to try to back into that. So this is our best estimate of what that would be solely based on the math of, if tuition is 14 and the rate was this, then it must mean that they're paying for this many kids. Okay. So then, with that, we took back on the first slide, you'll remember there was $33,700,000 worth of spending in the public setting. If we take the tuition out and the federal funds out, based on the math we did on the previous slide, to calculate how many students are attending public programs, it's about 3,900. You divide those two numbers together, you get approximately a per pupil cost for UPK students in the public programs of almost $8,500 This doesn't make any assumptions about offsetting revenue associated with kids moving from one public school to another public school. And just a caveat, this is a simple numerical average, doesn't actually correspond to spending in a district. To representative Holcombe's point, there doesn't tease out any detail around administrative costs for these programs. Some schools are tagging their pre K coordinator as a pre K expense, and that's not direct instruction, that's administrative overhead. Are you done with yourself? Yes.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: So I'm just curious about the denominator there, because every program that is providing public pre K is could, and we have the tuition data from the agency, is also likely supporting 100 universal pre K and private providers.

[Speaker 0]: So I'm just curious about why you use the 3,074

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: student. So it's really just that there were 7,800. If we do this math to come up with the number of

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: tuition kits, I get that, right? What you're doing is attributing total administrative costs to the kids who are publicly Yes, we are doing that, yep. So that's an allocation decision, which inflates the cost in public programs. Yes, and for the

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: purposes of just figuring out how This exercise is to figure out how many kids are in each space partially was part of it, right? Because we have the If you take the tuition amount divided by the rate, you can come up with the number of kids, right? You're totally right that we're attributing all of the administrative and overhead costs to those public kids. That's why I think this $8,500 shouldn't necessarily be used for anything in particular, because it's a loaded number. Because it's got all of the administrative costs with operating UPK for all of the students that are served, not just the public kids, and all of the any other associated overhead with those kids in that number. So that number is But it's what the public schools are spending. There's no real way to Given the data that we have in the information, there's no real way to slice the admin To tag admin costs to all of them, because we don't know the admin versus not admin. It's not a perfect analysis by any

[Speaker 0]: stretch. And we have two choices here, right? We can have analysis that's not perfect and name all the assumptions, or we can have no analysis at all.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I totally agree. This goes back to, I think, the presentation that was made by the other day, that sometimes what the analysis tells us is nothing. And I'm just naming this as an example of that. I appreciate what you said, because it also is we're allocating all the administrative costs for private providers to that number. The other thing we don't have is any sense of dosage. And we know that some public programs provide full day care. But what we shouldn't assume is that what we should not assume based on this data is that it costs $8,498 for ten hours of public pre pay. And I just worry when that goes up there that that's what people think. So I really appreciate you unpacking that.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Don't want to

[Speaker 0]: be Hello.

[Unknown (Joint Fiscal Office staff, possibly 'Ezra')]: I'd also like to remind the committee and going back a couple of slides when Emily was walking through what UPDK expenditures we are and aren't looking at in the analysis, there are the indirect expenditures that have been not included in this analysis because Editor was pulling the expenditures that have been specifically coded to UPK. So some of the other big picture expenditures that are associated with education writ large are not being captured by these figures.

[Speaker 0]: Do you mean like building costs and just having the school there?

[Unknown (Joint Fiscal Office staff, possibly 'Ezra')]: For example, yes, and other indirect expenditures. Like if you go into the really meaty dataset and you're looking at, to Emilie's point, how things have been coded, they're coded very differently across school districts. So there are indirect expenditures beyond building costs, and that's

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: a great example that are not included.

[Speaker 0]: One moment. What are people's relationships to the announcements this morning?

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I have to be

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: there. Sorry.

[Speaker 0]: Okay. Does anyone else have a strong relationship to the announcements this morning?

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: I have a strong relationship till 09:30. Okay. It's coming right up.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I'm just back. I have a pretty sleek day, but you probably don't have a We don't wanna do

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: a free day.

[Speaker 0]: Why don't we do a couple more pages? Representative Holcombe, did you have

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I just think that this is I mean, I wish we had come farther on implementation of a common chart of accounts, but I think what we also know is that districts are incentivized or not incentivized to collect certain data based on how they are supporting universal pre K. And so if we're going to make policy decisions, this is another area where I wonder if what we should be thinking about is what is the data we actually need to specify that needs to be collected in order to have any sense or ability to estimate the impact of policy changes. Depending on who you are, where you sit in the state, what your capacity is in the elementary building, how close you are to other programs, whether you collect different data, can submit.

[Speaker 0]: Representative Ode or Representative Butzazak, why don't you remove yourself and we will continue going? Because it seems like we're in a natural transition.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: We are in a natural transition.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Okay, so looking at the new language that was proposed for public providers, so some of the fiscal impacts, mandates the UPK coordinator at each supervisory union.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Do you want me to go back?

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Changing the availability of UPK to just four and five year olds that enrolled in kindergarten. Three year olds are no longer eligible. The UPK students now receive a weight of zero, so a long term median of one. And they receive the full base amount in Act 73 and any other weights that they qualify for. And only the students counted in the

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: public

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: program would be or students enrolled in the public program would be counted in the long term media. And the student's face and weights would follow them if they went to a different public program. I don't know. This is also a good breaking point to do the scenarios. I can either go fast with scenarios or do scenarios.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I have a question, if that helps.

[Unknown (Joint Fiscal Office staff, possibly 'Ezra')]: What does that mean for

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: three year olds are no longer eligible? I believe that's what the proposed language just says. Represent Yeah. Whole?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Was data ever collected? There was a question about redshirting several years ago. Has that ever, have people ever-

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: No one

[Speaker 0]: knows what redshirting is, sorry.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: People, parents placing children into pre kindergarten who are five and who are eligible for kindergarten, but choosing to maintain them. It's common practice in some places, but I don't know if that is ever done to understand how much duplication there is in that five year old. I'm not

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: sure. I also don't know how you deal with the count on October 1, but kids being born in September who have turned five before October 1, when the enrollment date is September 1. Only I have, for instance, kids were five before the Catholic. And it's just because

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: the language in 01/1966 does not align with how public schools manage enrollment.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Represent Masland.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: Just a brief anecdote for the day being football weekend. Redshirting frequently happens when students get a fifth year of eligibility in college.

[Speaker 0]: To be clear, I did know what redshirting was. It was helpful to I just

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: thought I'd add this out. You can't hear it.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I'm a good child, and people like to kiss you could raise your third grade test quotes by red shirt.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I'll be

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: a treat. Okay.

[Speaker 0]: I think we're going to stop there, and we'll have you back, Emilie. Thank you.

[Representative James Masland (Member)]: Great. Okay. Good.

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: It's mostly because I just wanna come back, and I tried to not talk at a million miles an hour. It's trying to be intentional.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: It's important

[Emily Burns (Joint Fiscal Office)]: to work in the