Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Okay welcome back to Senate Economic Development Housing and General Affairs. Thomas Chittenden, you back.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Thanks for having

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: me. To this committee, it's good to have you and I understand that Vance Vermont has been making all sorts of advances so we are eager to hear that and what your asks are for this year and how we advance workforce in the state. Sounds great.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: So for the record, Tom Chittenden with advanced Vermont. This is my first outing for this legislative session. So glad to have it here. So I know you're all familiar with the work. I'll get through kind of the refresher kind of quickly here. But ultimately, what we as an organization believe is that every Vermonter should be able to pursue and navigate a career and education path that meets their goals essential to our economy, to individual prosperity and to the strength of our communities. So part of that vision is that we think that every high school student should be able to graduate with a clear plan for their next steps. And that mid career workers, really anyone in the workforce should feel empowered to advance in their career and have that ability as well. Kind of four core values to that for us is that career choice really is number right, like we shouldn't let back your background or your circumstances get in the way of you being able to pursue the career that you want to pursue. Education credentials matter, you hear me talk about this every year. It is incredibly important that Vermonters have the skills they need and usually it requires some sort of piece of paper after high school, whether it's a degree, a certificate, or friendship. But equity and access are really essential. We've got to remove those barriers to ensure that everyone has access to that information, but also that ability to to pursue the path that they want. This takes social capital, which we'll talk about a little bit here, in addition to just raw data and information and support. Within the core value to our work is that collective impact is essential. So we're gonna make change if we're working together. So what's our focus in this? Two kind of, or three main areas that we might focus on working. One is just making sure that providers have the information and tools they need to make those informed choices. And this is both for the career education seekers, but also those who support them, which is just as important. We have to elevate the importance of all education training options, and then we have to make sure we're aligning, which work to align our work with public and private partners. So that is in essence how we approach our work. Four main buckets of work. First, we'll talk about it is My Future BT, which is our current education planning hub. The second is this project and this data project that informs My Future Butte, which is this effort we call the Vermont Credential Transparency Project, which collects and publishes the education training program information from programs across the state and makes that available for the public, but also policymakers and others when they need that kind of information. And then we have this new program that I'm gonna spend a little bit of time talking about in a couple of minutes and I spent some time last year talking about it too. We've made some advances to continue with the pun, but really it's around aiming to just increase the number of Vermonters who are graduating with a plan. So this is a youth specific program and doing a lot of work in schools. And then, you know, finally, we like to spend time here and with our partners in the executive branch to, you know, help you all make choices that are going to help advance these goals that we're talking about. A couple of examples are working with Drake and Savannah, the Office of Workforce Development and we're continuing to have conversation. We're just talking about getting together and having another conversation around making sure we're supporting them with their charge. There's some overlapping work we do that aligns with their charge that we want to make sure we're coordinated with and supporting, particularly around creating that inventory, that list of all the education training programs in the state. And then just yesterday I was over at Waterbury meeting with or speaking with a whole bunch of educators from across the state in how to better utilize precise learning plans. This is something that AoE a convenient that AoE put together. So those are some of the work that we do there. Any questions about high level art work or refreshers or anything? Yeah. Who is Advance for? Yeah.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Is it nonprofit? Yeah. Yep. It's been a year.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Yep. Yep. So we are a knock up organization. We spent our first several years or most of our history with use of these cycles, our fiscal agent and our and our backbone. We are now our own five zero one c three and stand fully alone in that regard. There's two full time staff, one part time staff right now. And that I funders, the state of Vermont has been generous. We have some federal funding that will expire at the end of this coming federal fiscal year, so September. And then we've had done project support. Okay, thank you. And their budget, our budget is it's around $400,000 Yeah, give or take. So we

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: have a relationship with the Department of Labor about a week.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Yeah, yep. So we meet regularly with the Department of Labor and the Agency of Education. I'll talk about graduate with a plan as an example a little bit later. Maybe I can just skip to that, but we have an advisory committee for that work and it has people from the Department of Labor as a commissioner of the Department of Labor, has two people from the Agency of Education, and someone from hireability. So generally when we take on work, those are the three agencies we tend to work with and are pretty consistent in that collaboration. Is that three or four? I remember.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah, because I think your idea of having every person whenever they leave high school either at 16 or as a regular graduate have a plan and then who follows up with that plan, I mean that's key to success for young people going into the world and just critically important and how we afford that and how we actually make that happen I mean our counselors are not charged that high school counselors aren't followed charged with following kids for the first two or three years after to make sure that plan is activated and that I think the idea that every young person leaves high school whenever they do with a plan, but then somebody they are accountable for and work with somebody to make sure happens. That is a

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: dream. Yeah. That's exactly right. You know, we we spend so much time with our kids between pre k all the way up to 12, and then they're out of our public education system and on their own. And so how do we make sure that while we still have them there, there as we're preparing them as best we can for whatever those next steps are, not the whole bunch of lot, you know, we can't expect someone to have everything mapped out, but do they know the next couple steps that they're gonna take?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: The five year plan would

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: be helpful. Yeah. Yeah. And then do they know the supports that they can access their efforts to your point? Can we hand them off to those different players who can help?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Because there are a lot of resources going forward. They just need to

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Ton of resources. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. So I wanted to just introduce this term career navigation. I think it's pretty straightforward, but interestingly has not been something that has been a focus from a systems level, either in Vermont or other states. So a lot of times we think about post high school and post high school education in particular, we're thinking about making sure that our public universities and colleges are secure. So we spent a lot of time we actually spent a lot of time doing that since COVID around the state colleges. Spend a lot of time thinking about how can people access that education. Okay, we're gonna make sure that there's strong financial aid. The legislature has done a tremendous amount there. Where not and Vermont is not unique to this, where we haven't focused as much as thinking about a really robust career navigation system. So what does that mean? It means that if you're youth or adults, you're able to acquire the knowledge that you need to understand what your skills and strengths are, to understand what that how that might map to your career options that are available, to then start doing some of that planning to make those informed plans. And then finally you have to actually truly navigate the different steps you have to take to access that career. It's a really complex system that begins in the pre k to 12 system and continues thereafter. And we, you know, always are talking about helping better coordinate that system. But it's also how can we from the Pre K to 12 perspective in particular, really focus about being focus on being intentional, purposeful, consistent, so that every student is getting equitable access to this exploration, to this planning, and that they are able to take advantage of the resources that are out there.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: I'll talk

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: a little bit more about the current state of Vermont, but this is something that I think we before it was you go to work or you go to college, and in the last ten, fifteen, twenty years we know that our post secondary system, whatever comes after high school, it's more complicated now. So we really have to make sure that we're building the systems and the supports for our students to make sure that they can navigate it. And this is something this is a space where there's been a lot of work in, you know, probably a couple handfuls of states, maybe a little more than that in the last few years, but it's not been something that that this state has spent a tremendous amount of time on it. We think it's a real opportunity. So I wanted to just introduce it. So what would successful career navigation look like? What are some of core components? And I pulled these last two graphics from this great report from the Harvard Kennedy School. But so you need information, access information and accurate accuracy, so that's labor market information, it's the things that you see on My Future VT. You need to be able to attain those skills and credentials, you have to have the social capital, as I mentioned before, connected to those wraparounds of course, they're gonna help you access that career. But in order to do those four things, you have to have the structures and the systems and the policies in place to enable those. And that's where I think there's a lot of opportunity for long. Any thoughts on career navigation or questions? Yeah.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: I took a peek ahead of your slide deck. I don't see in here any of your metrics on impact reach. How do you measure how many students are using your services? And so on? Well,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: don't we go So

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: the work that we're doing to support for navigation system right now, the first thing is myPHRBT. So as a reminder, this is our free tool that connects users to careers, in state education options, and more information about education opportunities, and then those support services from the labor to higher ability to many, many other organizations doing that work individually with people. So what I wanted to highlight this year in terms of metrics was these three bullets, specifically some work that we've done to expand the tool and then I can talk about some other outcomes as well. So what we've done in this past year is now Vermonters are able to see nine fifty education and training programs. This is from CTE to postgraduate work at University of Vermont and elsewhere. So what we do is we work with those individual education providers, make sure we have their information appropriate and are correct, and then we publish it to the site and people can compare apples to apples what the different education options are. As I noted before, there is no other place in the state where you can get this information. You're you're on your own going from the University of Vermont to VTSU or or wherever it is learning their websites to navigate what their programs are unless you come to my kitchen.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And here it's just a one stop shop. It gives you what the resources are, what you need to do to accomplish that, the cost, the time, all those those pieces so that you can really make an informed decision about what you may or may not wanna do. Randy, how

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: do your does your target audience know that you exist?

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: We work on that every day. Yeah. So we we do ads. We have a small small marketing budget where we're able to do online ads primarily. And then we really try to reach people through those adults who are supporting them. So for youth, it's specifically talking to school counselors and principals and you know, And typical population then on the adult side, it's talking to the Department of Labor to hire ability, VSAC in both youth and adults.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: So we're talking person is unemployed and and knows that they,

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: you know, are looking for work

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: On one hand, which is what they would probably express first. But the the underlying problem is they're a, they don't have the skill that they need. Yeah. They're it's unclear about what job they're looking for and so on. Does Department of Labor open the door to to that? And how do you how do you know that they do it? One.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Yeah.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: And two, how do you know whether or

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: it's effective? Yeah. So so then you're coming ahead of your in your in your No. This is this is great. And so I'll start with the first question is how do they know and then I'll get to the effective So this is an example I just picked to we looked yesterday at what our referrals were. So in other words, who is pointing to our website? So we're able to see you can't see everything, but you get a sense of it. What you could see is that the Department of Labor was pointing to to our site in this ad that they were using or posting, this event posting I think is what there's a little more to that screenshot than I was able to put on the page. And so the Department of Labor was going to this this where were they going? The South Burlington Public Library. And so they they went to the South Burlington Public Library, had from one to three on whatever day this was, and oh it's monthly, the second Friday, where they talk about they're there for people who are seeking their next step in their career, and they specifically say we use my future PT. So so that is one example of how people are using it. How do we know it's effective? So and I didn't put these slides in this year, but I did last year. I just didn't want to to it done, but but last two years ago, we did a very comprehensive study on the impact of My Future BT. And so we went out to people who are using the site, youth and adults and those who support them, and said, how's it going? And when you ask me, put any question to them, it was nine out of 10 said, good. So does this have the information that I need or that the people I work with need? Nine out of 10. Does it have a good look and feel? Is it easy to navigate? Yes. And then most importantly to us was, is it leading to an outcome? So they're self reporting and saying, yeah, I applied for a job, I applied for an education program, or it helped me move forward in my planning process and had everything in between. And so it truly was nine out of 10 pretty much every question you put to them said this thing is is working. So that's a that's a core metric for us as well. How many people?

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: What's your reach? How many

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: people are using the site? Yeah. So I will I will tell you, we're trying to pinpoint this yesterday from last year. And we have had and we're not unique in Vermont or or not just in Vermont, with site websites. There's a tremendous influx of bots, AI bots using sites. So I will tell you what is trickier to give you like an exact number. But we are what we are seeing is more engagement when people are on the site. So we can see that there's like They spend a lot longer, they're on more there's more page views. And like I said, we're seeing more referrals from other entities, which means these are people who are interested in this tool that are actually getting here. So that exact number is a tricky one to give you like exactly how many. It's in the it's in the tens of thousands, but we but I will tell you, we had a hard time last week trying to get back with new discussions that come up because we've been really struggling with figuring out what was real traffic and what was not real traffic.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And then how do you, just to tag on

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: to that question, I think this is

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: a question we're all interested in, is then how do you measure, with those 10,000, how do you measure success, how do you measure they've landed a job, they've changed their career, they've that really How do measure that,

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Yeah. The success piece of this. So currently that's by surveying them and asking them to tell us how changed their life. Like I said, nine out of 10 said there was something really measurable impact on them.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: So you got these types of things.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Yes, absolutely. It is trickier to make that connection. We can look at how many people are clicking on to an education program. That's a sense that they're diving deeper, right? So we have a program up there like art that they're putting on to GBM's website, right? That's showing depth of of interest. It's difficult to follow someone because what we don't have right now is a pro it's like a profile. You can't go in and build a profile. And there's two reasons for that. One is that can be if you force someone to create a profile, they often won't create a profile. So you don't have to force that always, but there's all it's also a pretty big expense to add that to this. So so right now, we we aren't able to kind of track users over time. We are having conversations with a national organization that does similar work and talking about how can we maybe integrate so that we can capture users progress over time.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And I'm just curious what progress are you making on the clear plan for post Yeah. High school. So I think it's Yeah. An admirable goal to have every student graduate with the five year plan. That would be Yeah. Incredible. The fall is critical, and what are we doing to advance that level? Yep.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: I'm almost there. Does that work? Yeah. Keep going.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And then to your ask for this

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: year. Yeah. Totally. So so yeah, I think this is pretty straightforward. We've made some progress in the past year. And this this map you see is all of the education programs where they're offered across the state. So someone who is coming in and looking for education options will be able to see something in their backyard. And this actually only if there were multiple education providers in a in a town, it doesn't actually have two kind of pings. So that undersells the impact of it. So graduate plan is is this other piece that we're talking about. And I don't think I have to do much of the pitch because I think it's kind of come out already in terms of the thought behind it. But really the work that we're doing right now with graduating with a plan is, and we want it to evolve and deepen this work, but it's focused on those trusted adults in youth's life. It could be a teacher, it could be the lunch staff, it could be the front office staff, it be a coach, anybody who has a trusted relationship with an adult. Most people in a school have that relationship with somebody. It's not always the school counselor that we want to that has a relationship with every single student. So we want to capitalize on those individual relationships that people have, make sure that those adults have the skills, tools they need to become what we call navigators, effective navigators supporting their youth, so that they understand their role and are able to help their youth connect to both their aspirations and to the opportunities that are there. The work that we're doing specifically is in three buckets. The first is we call navigator training, but it's basically professional development. So going to school, and many people within the school community, and not just schools, organizations too that serve youth, Most folks haven't really thought about what their role is in supporting youth after their as they're beginning and thinking about their next steps. Because they're teaching math, they're teaching science or they're doing speech education. And so we wanna help them understand the role and then help them have those tools. And so we're beginning to schedule out, this is a new program, we're beginning to schedule out some trainings right now in schools for campus services or faculty meetings or other opportunities where we can help that high school science teacher have a better conversation about friendships with their student. And we can have that coach on the bus back from a sports game. We'll talk about, oh, yeah, what do you wanna do? And have some be able to say, hey, maybe you should check out my future routine, or did you ask your school counselor about this opportunity? The next piece is a career education planning framework. This is where it gets closer to policy. And this is basically a lot of other states, their agencies are doing this. Their agency of education is developing a framework for career education planning. In other words, from grades six, and in this case we're starting at six or middle school. To grade six, at each step, what do you need as a student to be preparing yourself to graduate with a plan? What are those competencies that you should be showing? And then what are the activities you could do? So we're gonna develop a toolkit where teachers, principals, anyone within a school, different organizations doing this work, have a roadmap for how to support their youth so that they're graduating with a plan. So working This would

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: be a direct support for our public school guidance counselors and trusted advisors. Yeah. So that they can actually be more effective in in supporting and helping navigate

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: a student's entrance into the world. An example, teacher advisories homerooms are a great opportunity where over four years you're developing a relationship with students, and they're you're all in it together over those four years. What we hear is across the state, they're not being used in a way, a very purposeful way around career education and conversations. And there's a tremendous opportunity to use those twenty minutes or whatever the time that you know, each day or each week to be purposeful from grades nine up to cultivate that plan and cultivate those aspirations individually and then as a cohort. So that's an example of something that you would see in this framework is saying here's how you can bring this to your school. It's also really helpful because what we're doing is we're, as I mentioned, we have advisory committee, and we're working really deeply with the agency of education, Department of Labor, hire ability, VSAT, CCV, or face learning coordinators, the McClure foundation does a lot of work in this space and others. And we're saying, we're working on this together, so that we have we're all in alignment. So we have personalized learning plans in state of Vermont. How do we make sure that this framework, you know, harnesses what we have with personalized learning plans and supports the work of the agency of education. This is one example of what

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: we do. I have to say after all those stuff that we've worked on this summer occasion, I have been working in the CTE workforce space. I don't have a lot of confidence that these individualized learning plans are actually all in line and that there's anybody seriously overstating them all. I feel like if we have put these individualized learning plans in place, we'd have a higher graduation rates or we'd have at least people who are leaving for a specific reason.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: And we would need Tom, we need Tom because

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: We need Tom because this isn't happening.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: What we're trying to do is from the bottom up, build support for planning. Planning different, you know, different things. Right? Personalized learning plans are one of the tools that you use in the planning process. I we spent a lot of time with the agency of education, obviously, in this work and they are very eager to let them speak, but to to make personalized learning plans meaningful, I think they've got some good ideas. I think that they're starting to put more attention towards it. It seems like that they're interested in putting more attention to it. So we'll, know, certainly should have them speak to it. But I think there's an opportunity together to move that forward, and we're hoping that this can gain people's attention. And then they start to think about, oh, right, okay, we have this personalized learning thing. How do we make that more effective? That can be a tool.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Right? There's a tool to help build our trust and our our success in the world. Yep.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: And right now, think a lot of people feel like it's just another thing we have to do. And so how do you make it really meaningful for both the student and then for the educators that are doing that? So yes, that's one thing that we're working on. And then the third bucket is just, you know, really embedded in this is just collaboration, continued improvement. We're being able to see where those gaps are and try to fill them through this work. We did a landscape scan just to inform this work and three key things that came out of it was that current youth in career education planning falls short. Three out of four people, whether it was youth themselves, the adults that support them, and their parents, three out of four said, yeah, it's okay or less. So there's a there is a x there's a lack of hitting it right now. There's a lot more we can do in our k 12 system. Yep. It's not yeah. So but but people see it, right? So they're telling this to us as well. Future planning isn't sufficiently integrated, so we just are not doing it in a coordinated fashion. You have one school that might say, it's good enough that my students go to a career fair, and that's their only thing in the tenth grade, know, or whatever, and maybe there's some other stuff, but that's kind of, it has to be really purposeful and integrated and comprehensive. And then the students serving adults say they need support. They say we want this work, whether it's graduate with a plan program that we're doing or other supports. So just to get to the legislative priorities. So not super complicated here. We know I've spent a lot of time was grateful to spend time with Chittenden and Chair Clarkson this summer. I mean, the CTE conversations that Chittenden led. And there's a real opportunity, I think, to improve our CTE system. But also in that work, to be thinking about how the CTE system fits in this career navigation system that we want to build, right? How does it fit within this goal that every student graduates high school with a plan? So I think that we need to be thinking about governance, funding, and some of those other pieces that we're really focused on with CTE. But it ought to be through this context that it is not the only place where we do career exploration in our schools. It is not the only way that kids can gain technical skills in our schools. And that we have to think about it as it sits within the larger pre K to 12 system and specifically, how do we build a career navigation system within our schools? How do we make sure there's career connected learning in our schools in a meaningful, consistent, resourced way? And I think if we do that and we build that foundation in some of the bills coming up this year, we'll be better for it.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Kesha? That was a nice sort of ending, so I raised my hand quickly unless you were gonna keep going. One thing that really stuck with me from our meetings that I, you know, keep turning over in my mind is just like we use third grade as a reading proficiency marker, that if kids don't have some sense of direction and forward momentum by seventh grade, we start to lose that and all of our CTB and a lot of this like what are you going to do if your life starts in tenth grade if we're lucky, and we should all be really focused on that metric. We just can't afford to lose kids.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And that's why we're trying to earlier and earlier and something they created so key. Yeah. You know, and and we begin to lose kids at 16 and when they are able to, which I still wish Alison was scared to advance that bill. Yeah. They They can't show up. So where he we need to provide them those that career I love this term career navigation because every one of us needs to know how to navigate or help to have tools to navigate the future, particularly when it's as unknown as it is at 16 or 15 and career navigation we really both AOE and all of us all workforce development CTE or non CTE, we really need to embrace career navigation big time and invest in it seriously and I am excited your ask for this year other than supporting our workforce bills and the stuff that we're working on already, did you know that your financial ask is what? Yeah. So so this year because it's this is a good idea for the secure continued state support or advance for not to work. Okay. What does that mean? Yeah.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: So in the past four out of five years, we've come and asked for support and received it. There was one year we we were okay. We didn't ask for that that support. We are looking if we really want to truly fund both our Graduate with a Plan program and My Future VT, it's in the neighborhood of $600,000 to really do that right. Senator Brock, when you say how are we reaching people with My Future VT? I tell you, I went to that a week conversation yesterday with first size learning plans. And not, you know, some people move us and if they're school counselor, they're they're likely to know. But not as many as I'd like. Yeah. We just don't have the resources to get out there as to the way we'd like to. I think we've been as successful as we can with the limited funds we have. But, you know, a lot of this is about awareness. We have to make sure that students and those who support them are aware of the tools that are out there and aware of how to support their students and and it just takes on the ground people having those conversations. You know, I sometimes talk about how if we were a for profit platform, if my future PT was a for profit platform, which we certainly are not, you'd have probably five regions, five salespeople, you know, across the state full time going to school and different organizations to build an understanding of the tools and support.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: So your objective is to develop this tool for math counselors and schools or trusted advisors for every you develop toolkit or materials for them to then use with each student in each individualized learning plan?

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Yeah. So that's that's the graduate with a plan. Yeah. It's a framework for current education planning. It is a toolkit for adults So how

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: soon is this AOE actually rolling out and supporting you in that? They've been really supportive

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: so far. I've had a conversation with secretary Saunders in the fall. We have Erin Davis, the new chief academic officer is gonna join our group. And and we have another person from a o

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Are they $600,000 enthusiastic? Well,

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: I'm coming to you asking for the money. But but I I think that they're support they're supportable.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: Is that your official last $600,000 from the state of the law this year?

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: This is where we are right now. You know, we wanted

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: to be honest about what we think it takes.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: What did you get last year?

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: We had a 150 last year. In the past, we've received 350. K. Mhmm. Yeah. But to try to do it right, we have enough experience now of knowing what what we truly need. We just thought we were honest with you about what we think it'll take.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Me really hard questions. I've asked them. They could support it. Yeah.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Like, true I mean, first of all, I I wrote an op ed I hope gets printed that Tom helped me really crystalized because the way you're supposed to talk to your little children now is not to say like don't put your foot there or like watch out that's not safe. It's to say hey what's your plan? And like that even your very younger toddlers thinking like what is my agency and how I take my next steps? And I see it working, I see it working the most important. It's some kids get asked that all the time till they're like sick and tired of it, and some kids, people wipe them off really early. And I don't see this work happening in a standardized way anywhere else. There's a lot and you asking for continuity is important. We, you know, we have a lot of things that come up and then die on the vine. But I know you're trying to make yourself obsolete, and I wish we were closer to getting there, but we're really far away from getting there and this is really important work and that amount of money is a bargain. And frankly, we visited all these schools in center education and the schools that are the most well resourced have mental health counselors and guidance counselors and college counselors and career counselors and everyone has some expertise and the ones that are not well resourced, they can barely get a student through that day's crisis to move on to like, what's your future plan?

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: The schools that have those resources are equally as interested in this work as those who don't, because even they are wanting for more.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Exactly. Well, and in this constrained education finance world, it's

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: So so much of our work is about trying to build helps schools and organizations build capacity. And so to some degree, know, us going in and supporting schools in this work around graduate plan is one less thing they have to do on their own, and maybe one less cost that they have to bear.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: Really honest though, that's a big ask and a huge increase for this year and for me personally, really support it. I'd love more specifics on how many people you're reaching, how many kids are taking advantage of these services. It turns out you go from 150 to $600,000 this year is is a heavy heavy lift. Yeah. That's my need of things. Okay.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: $1.50 wasn't what we were looking for. Right. Right.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: To be clear. Sure. But and not what we needed, and it would it would put strain on us.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: You're right. Was pretty safe. But it was yeah.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: But, yeah, I'm happy I'm happy to have conversations with you. And and I was I didn't prepare, you know, the big budget, you know, detail slide and things like that today because I thought we were kinda getting started and happy to come at it. You need to

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: hook us first. Yeah. Yeah. So

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: I'm happy to sit down Well, go back to the

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: your proposals and your goals and your the work you've done so far is just so impressive. And in your partnerships with all our other workforce efforts, it's just it's just great. I it's very exciting. It's exciting to watch you grow this and to see where

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: we are. So Well, thank you. And thanks for the support of this committee over the years. And I'll note, I think it's worth noting that the state state is stepping up. I really see much more interest and action from the agency of education, the Department of Labor, the Office of Workforce Development. I mean, it's it's feels like it's not just us. I mean, it's a collective. Yeah. Starting to see some fruition, you know, things come to fruition and I think we just have to keep that momentum.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: And I hope Tom doesn't mind me saying that he was really instrumental on helping me work through the language for my CTE proposal, you know, that I we're hearing everybody needs a little bit of something. It's a similar theme, but there's variations and everybody needs a little bit of flexibility, but in a framework that moves toward success for all our kids. And Tom's been very helpful in helping me steer that

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: work. And we're grateful to you for that. We're grateful to your participation this summer and fall. But I think to go to Tom's point and David's, I think we would love to flush it out a little bit further in terms of numbers and your ask and what AOE is going to participate in in terms of helping finance because this is you're basically doing what AOE ought to I mean, Michael will have figured when they rolled out the individual wearing pants. But anyway, I think this is and their pathways program. Now all these programs AOE has started, that if they had really financed them fully and rolled them out fully, we would be in

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: a different place right now. We could.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Anyway, that's

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: why we can't wait for anybody else.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And we'll write. So if you could get that to us as soon as possible, that would be great. Randy, and then we're gonna break.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. And that and that is also looking at if an investment of this type, how do we measure the return on investment and what should that return on investment be?

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: Since it's only 10 kids, that's pretty expensive to ask, but if you can show hundreds and hundreds of thousands of reminders. Basically you've

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: got to show what the result is the anticipated results so that

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: we can come back and measure, did we get that?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah, you know, 10,000 kits on advanced BT or micro BT is very exciting. And I think all of us want to know what does that translate into and that's hard to capture as you said.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: Yeah, mean I'm happy to come back and go through the evaluation that we did and let you see the numbers in terms of what people are responding to and the impact that they felt it's had. I will also try to find some stories to show you as well.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Right. That would be that would be true.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: One the asset test would be take half the state and put it on your program and if they have not, see how they measure up in the difference. That would be Yeah. I realize that's Right. Very theoretical. Yeah. And not probably something to do.

[Tom Cheney (Advance Vermont)]: That might take more than $600,000, but that's okay. But we tell have you Yeah. With a lot

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: more certainty whether or we were or we're not successful. Yeah. Great. Yeah.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Show. We're gonna