Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: That's

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: we are laughing. She started accepted there and she's waiting.

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: She's with Senate Education Committee. We're at the Rutland High School on 12/05/2025. And we spent a good part of the morning first touring the Stafford Technical Center and visiting, I think, four distinct programs within the center with some students, and then we visited the high school and saw a number of programs within high school. Everything from AP bio to, I guess we didn't do physics, but we, and then a

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: couple of other conferences. Biochem.

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: Yep, so we have just a short interlude here before we're back out on the road, then back again at 02:30 for the community section of this. But we wanted to we're gonna spend a few minutes now in in an actual meeting learning more about the learning opportunities and spaces and at the school. And we'll just a little bit more about the what do you want to tell us about the Rowland High School?

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: Yeah. So I'm going introduce Carrie Coors. Carrie is our director of support services. And so when we think about the continuum of services And actually, you

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: can sort of introduce yourself.

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: Oh I'm sorry. I'm Pam Reed, the Superintendent of School of Development. And so we've been today trying to highlight the wide variety of programs and services supports that we have for students. We visited advanced placement classes, technical center programs such as our internship programs, we've been learning about the year end studies program, and along that continuum of services we provide supports and programs for children who for whatever reason have a tough time being in our classrooms or even being in our traditional school buildings. So in a little bit we're going to head out and so that you can see some of those programs. You'll have lunch with our students at one of our campuses, our Allen Street campus. And as we go along, we're going use a school van that we had to help eliminate some barriers to school to work and our for our place program for students that wanted to participate but didn't have access to their own transportation, we have a school van that then can help them to get where they need to be. So we're gonna use that van today and so you can get a tour. I invited Carrie to come as our director so that she can make sure that we're kind of on when we say continuum of services, what are we talking about? And so she's gonna give a a brief overview before we get on the road. In that way, when we're out and about we're making sure that we're talking the same language about what is

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: a continuum of services especially as it relates to our own. Thank you for having me. As Kim said I very brief two parts. I'm going to do a little bit right now and then a little more so we can back after lunch. We work in what is called tiers of support. And if you think of it as triangle across the top, the largest percent of our students really work in our general education setting. That is where they're getting their core instruction. We do a lot of universal instruction on assessments kind of baselining in general education. From there, we have a population of students that get some specific accommodations, whether it is through a health plan, It could be on things that need some accommodations in the classroom where they have what is called an educational support team around them. So just things that will help maintain their ability to stay in the classroom. And we have students that are on the Section five zero four plan as well. So those all wraparound accommodations for students to help them have access and get what they need in the classroom. And then we have some students that also require some specialized instruction. And those are students that are on individual education plans.

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: When you talk about Before we move on, how do you, within that general, the core program, the general education, how do you pick up or identify the students who are kind of picking it, who are kind of just going along, not really getting a lot out of it, doing well enough to make you think that they how do you pick up those students and get them energized and get them to be unspeaking as one of them?

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: So one of the things that we do, and we're working really hard at being consistent, is our universal screening. So every student will get an assessment. And so we'll look at that as classroom, we'll look at that as individual growth, and we'll look at that across the grade level and see who's kind of falling behind in those assessments. Teachers will work on that. Again, we have a peer. They have a tier one system where they'll work on progress monitoring in the classroom to see if something gets a little off here and we're going try to communicate with it. And then from there, the progress monitoring could lead to more introductions. That universal screening is really important. Not to discredit teacher intervention as well. Sometimes we know that somebody needs a little something more. By the

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: way, that literacy bill that you all passed a couple of years ago requiring that everyone do universal screenings to ensure that students are making that progress is a great tool. So

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: just to give you like a broad overview of what continuum of service could look like and does look like in relevant cities, we have students that are successful in the general ed classroom doing general ed instruction with their teachers, with them, which you would think of as a traditional classroom. We have some students that are in that setting that have some accommodations that the teacher will make for them within that classroom. From there, we have some students that will be in the general ed classroom for most of their instruction or for some of their instruction, a lot of their core instruction. And then they might have to be provided with a service that happens outside of that hospital. We then, if that isn't working, if we're not seeing the progress that we need in that setting, we can move to a separate classroom. So the separate classroom would be, we have a few different ones. We have the TABE program here in the high school. That's where we just We have other younger grades. We have classrooms that are focused on sensory needs. We have classrooms that are focused on behavioral needs. And they might be partly in those programs and partly in a general ed setting. Then we have some students that are solely in those specialized programs.

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: So those are programs in Rockland City that we have in our buildings.

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: And then we have some specialized schools, some alternative schools that we're going to go visit. You're going Elm Street. You'll have one to act today. And then we have PeerPoint Primary Learning Center, personalized center. And those are alternative placements where the goal is always get back into their traditional school building, but whatever brought them there was ever needed to get them to that alternative setting. They're working on those goals to get back. And then we have students that are happily placed outside. So all that I mentioned so far has occurred in our buildings. We have some students that we need a higher level of care for, which we would look at residential. Sometimes residential is based on our school saying that they need higher levels of care. Sometimes it is taking place. So you have students that are in both cases. Prior to this coming here just now, I was meeting with our regional special education directors, and we went a month. We had shared with them that I was coming here, and they wanted me to add to today's conversation. One thing that I think is important to know is that residential facilities here in Vermont actually, the very community. Some of our children sometimes get on meeting lists because we just don't have the resources. Or the resources are in Pennsylvania. We have them in joy groups, have them across the country, which then increases the cost because we don't have the resources here.

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: Makes reintegrating them into our communities even harder when they're so far away. So what you're saying is that's kind of the most blocked part of the continuum. You don't that part of

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: the continuum is the problem for everyone. Yeah, we have kids. And so then if they don't fit in any our any place on the continuum. They end up, one was just telling me today she would have had somebody two and a half years on a two hour tutorial because they don't have a laser for them. So it's it's a real need.

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: So you do that all internally? It act 173 in VOCES? Collaborative education services.

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: We do all of this internally. These are all programs excluding their residential placement. These are all programs that are facilitated by Rutland City. We do have, depending on our students' needs, there are times when we have availability in our alternative programs where our surrounding partners or surrounding schools can tuition their students to us.

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: Okay. You had mentioned earlier that you've got a very high public rate.

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: Yes. So a little bit about Rutland City. I'm going to start this afternoon but I can do that now. So we have about seven and a half square miles of space in Rutland City we serve about seventeen fifty students currently we have two pre

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: trained. Which was We

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: have two primary buildings that serve students grades K through two. We have an intermediate school which is grades three through six. A middle school grades seven and eight those two buildings are attached by Patlock and then we have the high school which you saw today we currently have about 700 students some of those students are our Wetland City residents others are booked the tuition from school choice towns or who are here from through the school choice statewide school choice program. And then there's Stafford Technical Center we have our Allen Street campus Pierpoint Personalized Learning Center, and our Grove Street. We have a poverty rate depending on the school building between 6084%. This building gaining 60%. As I was mentioning earlier, there's a wide variety of reasons for that. One of which is that because we have school choice available and folks from other communities, it decreases the poverty rate because they don't have the same New York Brooklyn city exclusively. Have seven percent of our students are experiencing homelessness currently. We have about twenty percent eligible for special education. Again, that varies by building, but the average is about twenty percent. So yeah I would say if we want to we could get on the road and go visit the different schools the different buildings program. Then what we'll do after lunch we'll come back here. Carrie did create more slides but in thinking about time they also give a good segue for the afternoon where you'll hear from other administrators and staff about some of the programs that Carrie mentioned and that we

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: don't have time for them today.

[Unidentified Senate Education Committee member]: So if anybody is watching we should tell them to come back at

[Pam Reed, Superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools]: come back for 01:15. Okay.

[Carrie Coors, Director of Support Services (Rutland City Public Schools)]: Right. That's right. Thank you. Are you going to have fluids? Alright. Hope you might.