Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Meeting. What? You you're good.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You're live.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: All right, we hope we are live. Senator Education Committee back in business for 2026. Today, I thought it would make sense for us just to do a kind of a comprehensive overview, walkthrough, or generally you want to call it, Act 73 has passed, to get our heads back in it. Within that, there's a particular focus on what parts are wrong no matter what and what parts are contingent on what happening. Then think what I enjoyed hearing with the House walking through the board of the, executive deputy task force on Thursday, and other people will be filling in. And we have, I think the V is coming in on Friday, and, we'll be filling in in the out weeks, but we'll talk some time today, by the way, at the end of the day about priorities of taking the long surf sign in. But we're gonna have to fill our way along and figure out the approach that we ought to take on September. But today, we've got some surface with getting our heads back in it. And we have, I think, that's so James and Ezra over there today for the two two parts. Oh, and John's joining. I think he's in there at 02:15. Heard right? Yeah okay so you got forty five minutes.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Oh great!

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I'm going ask why don't we take a break? So we all have fresh copies. We have a lot of reports that came in beyond x three, some of which were from x 70 '3, think, otherwise. But we're gonna, over the course of the next couple weeks also, just make sure that we're gonna have reports, one of these cut face and which will not be able to do. So yes, we should spend that on as well. So, but let's start with this and then we can, after we're through this, like I said, we can have a committee discussion about and approaches. With that, you are on.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Great. Betsy James, Office of Legislative Council. Hello again. Apologies for the voice. Brought some 2025 with me into 2026. Yeah. So School, elementary school germs. Daphne, can you let me in to the Zoom so I can share my screen? Oh, yes. Okay. So, couple things. One, I think I sent Daphne, if I didn't, I will send it. I made a list of all of the reports that are due to your committee and with hyperlinks to all of them. So we don't have that. Do you have that? Okay.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So if I was able to find the report myself, I linked

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: to it. And if I could not find the report, there is no link to it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that I was unable to access it. And then for today, what I've done is I've prepared and you all have the slides in front of you. I

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: I'm share. Share.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You can be sharing. Yep.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Alright.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Okay. Great. Thank you.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So some just some PowerPoint slides with very high level summaries of all of the sections that I was responsible for, which are essentially sections one through 33, which I have been calling the education policy section since I'm your education policy attorney. Excuse me, was just gonna go real long. I'm here for whatever you guys need. So, if you don't want to go into detail on a specific section, let's just move on. And if you want to go into more detail than I am inclined to, please let me know and we'll dive into that detail. Not every word about 73 is in PowerPoint slides. Some of it is verbatim, some of it is my own summary to try and fit words into a slide. For every question that you have specific to language, I'm always gonna refer you to the act itself and what it says. So, we're gonna talk about sections one through 33, and I've put page numbers on here, so you can jump right in your bill to the applicable pages. So I did not put any anything in detail related to the findings on the slides, because I think they kind of speak for themselves. And let me pull out Act 73. Is there anything in the finding that you wanna go over in detail? I'm skipping. I'm kind of helping you what I think you should go over. I'm skipping through all of the nice things about Bridgum, and I'm coming to page two subsection b on the intent plan language. Do you think you have that, or do you wanna walk correctly? I have what? Like, are you

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Going for one second.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You want do you I'm on I'm in section one. Yeah.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: No. I don't think we disagree. No. I don't think we do.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Okay. So this is where all of your plans for this year live, just FYI. Okay. We're moving on. See, I told you. So section two of the bill was the commission on the future of public education changes. It refocused the charge of the commission and they were required to come back to you all and I have linked right here. Anything that you see underlined is a hot link to the report. So, they're supposed to come back to you all with recommendations for what roles, functions, or decisions should be a function of local control, and what roles, functions, or decisions should be a function of control at the state level. Necessary updates to the roles and responsibilities of the school board versus the electorate. Process for a community certified school to have a voice and decisions regarding school closures. And then process for monitoring and implementation of Act one. They're recommended, you can find section two and pages six through eight of the Act, and then again, this is a link directly to the final findings of recommendations of Doctor. Shepherd.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Do you have the permission coming out as well? We don't have

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: the Act, Jay, I just talked about Hatcher. Coming we will have them in. We Of the process of solutions within the Texas. Go ahead.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: 16 DSA, now that Act 73 is law, have all the changes been made to that?

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Any change that was to be effective any day prior to 01/06/2026 are in effect. But there's lots of things that have effective dates after today. Right. And we'll we'll hit those every time we come to one of them. The intense section and section two are current law. They've already taken. Okay. So section three. Again, I didn't put a lot of detail on this slide because I think the language, the charge of the school district or district that you task force, section three, speaks for itself. And so if you'd like to go to the act itself and look at any of the language related to the redistricting task force, we can do that. Otherwise, just know that section three was the creation of school district redistricting task force. And again, I'm linked to the final report here. Does that have enough detail on that section?

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yes, I think you probably all remember this section. Document.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Okay. So

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: is that a hyperlink? Yes. Okay. So

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That's a hyperlink to the report itself. Yep. And then the report itself has appendices released.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: And you have to report that file. Section

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: four, which you can find on pages 24 through 27 of Act 73, is the creation of the school district voting board working group. This is a live body. My understanding is that they stand ready. So the the voting board working group is supposed to create create voting district boards or recommendations to you all within new school districts to ensure board membership is apportioned in a constitutional manner. They're also supposed to recommend to you guys school board size. That work can't be done unless you have school district boundaries. So my understanding is that this group, they've met a couple times already, and that they stand ready to pick up work if and when the legislature calls upon them to do that, or if and when there is anything you are working on that they see, you know, something that they can work on. I will just note, section four required the working group to recommend to you all school board size, recommendations for school board size, like how many members on a school board for new consolidated school districts. I know that you don't have new consolidated school districts today, but there is no date, there's no deliverable date tied to this recommendation. So if and when you find yourselves in a position where you think a recommendation regarding school board size would be helpful to your work, someone's gonna have to reach out to this working group to to get that recommendation.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yes. So I apologize. I may have been distracted when you started the the review of section four. Did they meet at all? Did they Yep. Any any outcome worthy of sharing with no report?

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: There's no they have not been their their work to you was conditioned on there being new school district boundaries so they could do that work within. But I do believe they met at least twice, including meetings with the Agency of Digital Services, Vermont Center of Geographic Information, looking at the mapping tools so that they are ready if and when you call upon them.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Okay. If I call them.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Section six. The lowest section of section five in the slide, section five was a small piece in the Kent language. I have left of out of the PowerPoint presentation, which is not really a presentation form summary on PowerPoint slides. Section six is classified minimums. So you can find that on pages 27 through 31. This change does not take effect until July '6. So they are not legally in effect for this school year. The CLAP five minimums were added to section 165 of title 16, the Education Quality Standards Statute. I've listed what all of those minimums are here. There's a multi image classroom limit here. If I get rid of this. Oh, no. I don't want that. I don't want that. And then there are a whole host of types of courses or grades that class had so many of them still apply to that I've already list I've also listed. The state board may grant a waiver to school, meaning they don't have to follow class S minimums or maybe they follow them in their own special way. If the school is geographically isolated or is working on a compliance plan. And if the school is not meeting class size minimums over three consecutive years, the secretary may take actions that the secretary is allowed to take when the school is not following the EQS in general, which requires two years of technical assistance first. So class size minimums don't take effect until July '56. The secretary doesn't take any action until there has not been compliance over three consecutive years. So we're already in 2029. And then let's say that the secretary finds that the school is not meeting the class size minimum requirement. The secretary is first required to offer two years of technical assistance first. That puts us until 2031. Before, under the law as written today, there could be any action taken by the state board for failure to meet class. Can I ask a question? So particularly as we look at grades nine through 12, I think an interesting wrinkle came up in our travels around the state where it appeared that if they couldn't meet a certain minimum, they would start sending the students into dual enrollment, sending them to a local college to take that class, cancel the AP class, and instead move them to a college. I feel like that's a perverse potential outcome of high school class size minimums is taking the money out of the k through 12 system and moving it to Dartmouth or UVM. I just wanna raise that, and I don't think we've done enough to acknowledge that that's something that seems to be happening already when they can meet their class size minimums. I will just note that advanced placement courses and terminal courses are exempt from class size minimum requirements. So maybe what we do is say, try to keep them in house, like try not to be sending students to dual into dual enrollment if you're canceling an AP class.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I would want it. I I get this money, but was too much whatever. We could have a discussion about that.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. Because it's inequitable to say, oh, drive to Dartmouth instead of offer an AP class on campus. That doesn't meet everyone's needs. Alright. So section seven was a piece of section law that similarly would take effect July '26 along with the past six months. Failure to comply with education quality standards. So this first bullet point here is basically a summary of what happens if a school is not meeting education quality standards, which is where the class size minimums live. So the secretary is required to provide note written notice and offer technical assistance for two years if a school is not if there may be insufficient progress towards student performance or they're not meeting The US. And then after those two years of technical assistance and the school has still not committed compliance, the secretary is required to make recommendations to the State Board of Education on next steps. Under current law, included in those next steps is the option of consolidation, school consolidation, rearranging of supervisor unions, etcetera. What section seven of Act 73 does is it says, if the state board is required to take action because a school is not compliant with class size measures, the option of consolidation is taken off the table if that consolidation would trigger school construction costs in excess of a capital reserve account, right, money that the school has already put aside or the district has already put aside for such a project, until you all establish new school district boundaries and take further action regarding the consequences from a failure of the EQS. My understanding is that section seven here is really meant to say, if a school is not meeting class size minimums, and you're like, well, let's just put a bunch of schools together. But you can't do that because there's not space for those kids. So you would then force the building of a new school or adding a wing. But then those schools would districts would be required to take on debt to do that. That's off the table until you figure some things out.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Yes, sir. So what if the school district decided to put schools in?

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: The school district can do whatever they want on their own. This would be a forced action by the state board.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: And is that EQS,

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: appropriate to

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: be EQS, when does that go into effect? So when did when did the clock start?

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: This is current law as far as this first bullet point here is describing current law. And the class size minimums, because they live in the EQS statute, this current law will apply to them when they go into effect on 07/01/2026, which is why this piece of session model was added to say, okay, any other EQS if you're looking at class size minimums, consolidation is off the table, it's to generate construction costs because we don't have a construction program that could help with that. So, extrapolating everything out, class size minimums don't go into effect of 07/01/2026. There's a three year window in which the school would have to demonstrate compliance, and if they don't, then the secretary may take action, and that action requires two years of technical assistance. So we're looking at the very earliest, 2031, before the secretary could even make any recommendations to the state board, your consequences for not complying with the class S. And this document contemplating the waiver process that the skateboard is required to undergo and any determination of geographical necessity, etcetera.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Secondary is required to take any action. Correct. So, and, okay. Correct. Secondary. So all kinds of things. Okay.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Okay, so section eight, there's a piece of session on pages thirty two and thirty three of the act. It required the State Board of Education to update their education quality standards rules to reflect the new class size minimums, and they have to initiate that rule making on and before 08/01/2026. And then also to update the education quality standards with statewide graduation requirements that would begin in the twenty seventwenty eight school year for the graduating class of 2031. And they do not need to initiate that rulemaking until on or before July '27. Section eight also requires the State Board of Education to initiate rulemaking on or before 08/01/2026 to update the independent school program approval rules, again, to make sure that the class size minimum compliance piece is in there. And then it also requires a report back to you all on or before 12/01/2025 with proposed standards for what it means to be a school age small by necessity or scarce by necessity. I

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: got a question, but I wanna step back to section seven real quick. Just for some clarification. The secretary is required to provide technical assistance, and after two years, what if, and of course, what if it's debt, but once this happens, say, I'll take Ripton School as a closer child. They realized at that point they didn't have enough students to keep that school going. So, are they required to they have to stay open for two years or can the school and the secretary decide or the school decide to do that soon?

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yes. There's nothing in section one sixty five that that prohibits the school district from taking any of the actions they're legally allowed to take. Okay. So if Rutland's articles of agreement allow them to take certain action, section 165, related to the maintenance of schools, section 165, the education quality standards, and any action the secretary is going to take doesn't necessarily prevent them from doing that.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: And somebody could come along and go, Hey, it says here you should be able to go two years. But as long as the supervisor or the district decides, this really doesn't matter.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: This Section seven is about recommendations from the Secretary of Education and the forced action by the State Board of Education. It's not about the independent decision making authority of school boards. Now, I don't work in the field. All of these things are related. Right? So it's easy for me to sit here and say that, and then someone in the field is saying, but that's not actually how it works in real life. Right? I just wanna acknowledge that. Yeah. But in the black and white reading of the law, this is about the secretary's recommendations in state board action.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Just went over section eight, section nine. This is where you're going to get a bunch of reports back from the Agency of Education. Okay, so section nine requires AOE to recommend to the State Board of Education on or before 01/01/2026, statewide graduation standards. It requires AOE two on before 01/15/2027, develop and publish a statewide school calendar that would be in effect for the 2829 school year. And then the section, which has been referred to as the section nine report, is the rest of the slide. So it requires AOE to report to you all on report 12/01/2025, on several different categories of information. So the first one was on proposed implementation plan for statewide financial data and student information systems, recommendations for a school construction division within AOE, progress report or guided guidance that would be provided to the field regarding the business processes and transactions that would

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: need to

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: occur to facilitate school district mergers. And then recommendations for the need for cooperative education services and the oversight of therapeutic schools. I believe you have all of these. You, the legislature has received all of these reports. Section 10 requires the State Board of Education to review each rule series that it is responsible for. So they're responsible for over a dozen rules. And I think you've heard testimony over the years that some of them are quite outdated, and the rule making is a very intensive process. So this section is asking the state board, do a review of all of your rule series, and then come back to us in December 2026 with a recommendation for rules that the state board thinks are no longer necessary, so what can we submit that? And then, updating all of the rules that need to be updated, the order in which they plan to do that, and then any associated costs or staffing needs.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: So, do we know if the OA made the recommendation to school board, the SBE,

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: January. About graduation requirements? Yes. And you have that. They also sent their recommendations to you all. And the reports sheet that I gave to Daphne links has a link to

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: that report. So

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I suppose I cannot testify that they gave it to the state board. I'm making an assumption. In 12 through 20, I think in the interest of time, we can just say that sections 12 through 20 are create the state age school construction program. So section 20 repeals all of the then current law for school construction. Section 12 to June? Nope. Section 20 repeals the current law. Oh, okay. Current law meaning the law that was in effect prior to act 73. And then sections 12 through 18 are the new updated pieces of that law. The state aged school construction program, so sections twelve, thirteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen do not go into effect until 07/01/2026.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: Just to quickly clarify, the section 20, that repeals the moratorium that we have. The

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: moratorium was about money flowing from the legislature to the school construction program. The laws were never were always on the books. Okay. So the moratorium was on the appropriations, essentially. Okay. So, that's a great, that's a great question. So what section 20 does, it gets rid of it repeals the school construction program statutes with the process for application and all of the criteria that we would be looking at, etcetera. If the state were to be putting that money forward, and if there were to be a program to actually run. And sections 12 through 18 put new laws on books, including a special a special fund for school construction. Whether there is money in there to actually stand up this program and run it, I think, is an open policy question for you all.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Thank you.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I think it would be good to look at what we've repealed language wise, not we we stopped giving the aid, but I'd like I I don't know we gave enough time to school construction last year and the idea of what we do propose to fund in the future.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Well, that's if that's what's here for proposing to thug in the future.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Think it's fuzzy. I I I just I don't feel like we owe

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: you So you'd like to do it

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: We didn't. It wasn't hard.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: And I

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: would have liked to Yeah. Dig in here and make it work.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: And we can

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: we can do that? Yeah.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That would be good.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Didn't the AOE have a part of that too? Like, some of the money you you know, when they talked about the foundation for, you know, if a school opted or didn't use some of the money that they got for a student that money went back into the selection fund. We don't have any funding because I was receiving any funding stream. Well

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: let's see what makes up your special fund.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: We have the report, right? We have that, right? We're even scheduling a time schedule for Wednesday? Sorry. For the report, the school report? For tomorrow. Okay. So I'm ahead. Partially gonna go report.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And I will just say, I have not read this report. The State Aid School Construction Advisory Group, which is section 14, took effect 07/01/2025. They are who you have a report from, And it was a specific recommendation regarding legacy debt and how that should be handled during consolidation. So not necessarily back school construction in I have not read the report. Perhaps it has other features to it. So you are

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So maybe another day we should we can go through these these sections more in more detail. But I don't have a school construction. That is probably a good idea. Yep.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So the school construction aids fund component section 16 is composed of any amount transferred to it by the general assembly and then the interest that money earns. But you are correct. Correct. The senator Williams. At some point, during the work you all did on 08/04/1954, there was a waterfall in there. I believe from supplemental district spending. Yeah. That's right. But that didn't survive in senate finance? I don't remember where or when. I believe that money is now being used to buy down tax rate. It is available to buy down tax rates. But that when John is in the hot seat, ask him. Okay. So I'm putting a mind asterisk here next to sections 12 through 20. We're gonna have a school construction. So okay.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yep.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And it would be good to revisit the history of Mhmm. What we did do when it was hungering. Yes. John and I staffed the summer working group that did this, so we've got lots of materials to work with. Okay. Section 21 is an amendment to section 16 BSA 8.8, which is the statute that dictates what types of educational programs a school district is allowed to make tuition payments to. And this went into effect on 07/01/2025. So this is current. This has been current law for the last six months. So it amends the law that restricts tuition. So public tuition payments can be made to public schools located in Vermont, independent schools that meet education quality standards, tutorial programs, approved education programs, a public school located in another state, and a therapeutic school located in another state or country. And approved independent schools that meet certain criteria, and I've listed them all out here. This is what's in the step two. The school has to be located in Vermont, has to have been approved under one sixty six, which is the section that tells the state board the criteria for approval for independent schools. And it has to be geographically located, either within a supervisory district that does not operate a public school for summer all grades as of 07/01/2024, or a supervisory in one or more member school districts that does not operate a public school for summer all grades as of 07/01/2024. Yes.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Being that this topic is completely independent schools, would it be appropriate to ask the independent school lobby to come in and and essentially review the impact of this legislation for unintended consequences? We understand what the intended consequences were, but not quite sure I fully understand the impact and how it may have impacted special ed programs, god knows what, without without really recognizing that we we defunded that. We will certainly be hearing from independent schools if we can. But

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: this this was not about therapeutics. Therapeutic approved independent schools are an allowable tuition receiver, if you will, as long as they are approved in their home law and their other state or country, and then that would include Vermont.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I guess to kind of articulate a little

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: further- Yeah.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So, I say it's not therapeutic, but we're all talking about, mental health, etcetera, etcetera. Some kids go to schools which are a little not logical, but we may have defunded. And I'm not saying we did. I don't have the constituent that we have. I'm just looking for, you know, just send a flare up to the independent school lobby. Is there anything we did which we didn't really intend to do? It's having a negative consequence for our students. That's all. It's all. I mean, I just don't heard

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: that and there is litigation around this.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yeah. That's I think we need to take a this is, you know, not a product hospital, but at some point in the next couple of weeks, just Okay.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Just a, you know, thirty minute summary of what what did happen. Good, bad, indivisible. And and I I wanna make sure I understand that the the foundation formula is tied to a lot of other conditions right now. But if a foundation formula was advanced this year, was was the strings were cut from other things that may inhibit it from happening, the independent schools would live under that same foundation formula.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: We haven't

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: got money. Okay. This is just who is allowed to get money, not how much they get. Right. Okay. So, continuing with the requirements in order to, for an independent school to be eligible to receive tuition, they have to have had at least 25% of their student enrollment during the twenty three-twenty four school year composed of tuition students, and they also have to comply with class size. Section 21 also adds definition of therapeutic schools, so I've added that here directly from the law. And then section 22 is a tuition transition. So if a student that was enrolled for the twenty twenty four-twenty five school year, so last school year, or accepted for this school year, so they would be currently enrolled now. Having approved independent school that does not meet these new requirements, but it was allowed to receive tuition under the old law, those students can continue to receive tuition for graduation. Sections twenty four three point six on pages 53 through 56 of your bill recommend the appointing authority for the State Board of Education. So the State Board of Education is composed of 10 members. Prior to act 73, they were all gubernatorial appointees. What Act 73 did is it took two of those members and made one of them a house appointee and one a senate appointee. The governor would retain appointment authority over the remaining eight members, and that includes two student members. And then whenever there's a vacancy, the appointing authority that made the initial appointment to that seat would continue to appoint best. Is this effective? Yes. Have they been appointed? I don't know. So Okay. So so section 25 lays out a transition period appointment. So for the first vacancy after 07/01/2025, the speaker would make the appointment. The second vacancy, the senate would make the appointment. The third vacancy, the governor would make the appointment and then so on. I don't know if there have been any vacancies. Section 26, the governor under the law prior to Act 73 and under current law, the governor retains the authority to remove every board member regardless of who applies with them. However, if the governor exercises that right and removes a member, whoever made the original appointment would get to fill that vacancy. So if the governor removes someone that the Senate appointed, the Senate would then get to fill that. Here we get to the first piece of law in sections one through 33 that is tied to the foundation formula and the contingent effective dates. So section 27 is the tuition section. You'll find that on pages 56 through 58 of the act. Section 27 is contingently effective if and when the foundation formula take effect. So, it's the same contingent effective And you'll see at the very bottom of this slide that asterisk is the contingency. So, 07/01/1928 is the contingent effective date. If new school districts are operational and the cost factor formula report is received by the general assembly and you all have an opportunity to enact legislation and consideration of that report. So section 27 is not current law and it will not go into effect till 07/01/2028 and only if the contingencies are met. You all can do whatever you want this year. So that's just section 27. Yes. Novel's about who can receive tuition. Was Yep. This is this is how much do they how much do they get. Yes. So, the general, and it's a little unfair, I think we did it in the order that we did it because I am the tuitioning expert in my office, but a little unfair because we haven't reminded you all of the basic weight concept. But under the foundation formula, legislature decide a base amount to fund each student's education, and there would be weights on top of that base amount depending on the characteristics of the student. So, some students will be unweighted, meaning they would just receive the base amount, and some students will receive one weight, some students will receive all weights. So, it's going be a different amount of money for each student. So for tuitioning, under the foundation for the law, the base and weights follow the student. So under current law, tuitioning is if it's a public school, the district, the sending school district pays whatever the public school is charging. If it is an approved independent school, there's a number of ways we can figure out how much a school may receive. Average announced tuition is the most common factor. The electorate is allowed to agree to approve more than the average enough tuition and pay what the independent school is asking, and if an independent school is an area of CTE center, semi district has to pay what the independent school is asking. But Under the foundation formula, there is no more asking for or setting tuition. The money follows the student. So, it's going to be a different amount of money for each student. In Guy Lamont. It's to be a different amount of money, but it's going to be standardized by the weight that they're eligible for.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: The average student gets, average rate number, dollars 15,500. And then if they have added weights, then it grows. That money follows that child's plan.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And prior to this? The school could

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: have said, I charge $17.50. You need to pay a $17.50.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. But the school district could also keep some of the money for the weighted student. So the way it works now is that school district has a budget. And they develop that. I am not a school business expert. I cannot begin to explain to you how they do all of that work to develop their school budget. That's not me. But they do that work. And they put in all of the costs. Right? Included in that, it's anticipated tuition payment. Mhmm. I imagine that there are other costs there. Mhmm. Right? And that's the budget that this the electorate votes on. So, a school district is getting whatever their electorate approves. Mhmm. Which I am making an educated guess, but that is tuition payments and other costs necessary to operate the school district. Mhmm. And there's really no wiggle room on paying those fees, those tuition payments. Right? That's a contract. And now it can be different for because right now it says that receiving schools prohibited from charging different fees to different schools in Oh, this okay. So that's subsection b. Oh. So subsection A c. A c? Okay. Oh, there's all kinds of numbers and letters. So No. No. Where. So so every student for tuition under the foundation formula, base and weight of all the students. For grades nine through 12, a receiving school may charge an additional fee, which can be up to 5% of the base amount. So 5 percent and 15,000 free. Only if the receiving school has received approval from the state board to charge that fee and the electorate of the school district each school district with at least one student attending the receiving school has approved supplemental district spending for the purpose of the fee and an amount to cover the fee. So, the elector says, we're not going to raise extra money to cover the fee, then the school doesn't get to the receiving school doesn't get to the Can

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: that school then say they haven't met tuition, we don't wanna take that shit up or that student?

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: They could then opt to not receive tuition, and the student would have to go somewhere else. Or the parent or

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: guardian had to

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yep. But they have to charge the same fee to every student in every district. So it can't be district a get this fee, district b get this fee, district c gets this fee. It has to be a flat fee across the board. And this construct applies to both public schools that take a receiving student or they receive a student and independent schools. Yes. Yes. Receiving a school could be excuse me. In section 27, our receiving school could be a public school for an approved gen ed school. Mhmm. Ended up having a concern after our last school visit that my sense was that some non operating districts take a bond vote for school infrastructure and some non operating districts do not. They might roll up whatever was requested for construction or maintenance or infrastructure into the individual student tuition payment. Are they allowed to does that dichotomy exist that you can have a non operating district that's still taking a bond vote for regional public high high school or public school infrastructure and some non operating districts that just send tuition. I'm not sure I follow. If a school district doesn't have a school building to Supervisory union. Supervisory union is not it's not does not take a vote on anything. Supervisory union does not take a vote on anything. No. Supervisory union is an administrative unit of control. It is, there is no electorate of a supervisory union. School districts are the only units of government within our education system where the voters are voting on something. But the only unit of government. I I wanna look into that more because I I just feel like what I heard was that within the some supervisory union constructs, they are sharing bonding decisions. And within other supervisory unions, the towns that own the high school infrastructure on their own for bonding. That may be. I mean, that could be If you are in a situation where it is a supervisor union that is made up of multiple school districts, and some of them operate schools and some of them don't, and historically, the students in the non operating districts all go to the public school in the next door operating district. Public school is setting tuition at whatever it wants. Right. The electorate of that school district is the only one voting on the bond. But how that payment is distributed through the supervised reunion is distributed through the school district budget and the costs associated with that, I can't speak to. So, now they are setting that tuition, there's rules around how to shut But up and how that plays out, I think it's gonna be a very a specific situation. But a supervisory union, there's no voters in the supervisory union. It is not a unit of government, an administrative unit. So, there's not a scenario in which a whole supervisory union is taking a gone vote. No. There's no electorate vote. We, you all, as a state, create

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Mhmm.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: The pockets of the municipality that can vote, and you decide what they can vote on. As supervisory unions, there's no voting authority or power.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: We don't have supervising unions. No. Unless we have a district map that says we can get power.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Well, but right now, we have supervisory unions that don't vote on shared infrastructure.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: And if you remember correctly, he, the superintendent, said we figured that into the tuition cost. Which So that the student that's coming in is actually helping on the impugged tuition does help.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. But that's very different than an entire town taking a bond vote and sharing that infrastructure cost than saying these seven students are gonna pay 5,000 more dollars for tuition.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: But the town will pay 5. That'll be in their tax of that, you know, rather than the whole town.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I want I asked the chair to look into the numbers about how equal that ends up being because it's very different from the communities that end up taking a bond vote. And and to me, that's one of the things Vermonters asked us to look at is bond votes can often fail if one town feels like, would we be shouldering the entire burden for this high school? And the towns around us might send us some tuition dollars for it? That's, that's a very different conversation than an entire reach of taking a bond vote and supporting that school infrastructure, I believe.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay. Solder. Goes to things that

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Section 28 repeals all of the tuition statutes, spelled statutes wrong there, that would be unnecessary under the foundation formula. Again, that's indigenently effective. Section 28A asks the State Board of Education to come up with an approval process for that extra fee, right? The State Board of Education has to give a receiving school approval to charge the fee, and so section 28 is saying, okay, come up with a process for that approval process. And then we've already talked about how section twenty eight and twenty seven is contingent on effective on July '8, along with the foundation for development. Mindful of time, I'm just gonna go fast now. Section 29 requires the agency of education to give you all a report on the state of special education. There's a hot link to that report right there. Section 30 requires the agency of education to come up with a three year strategic plan for the delivery of special education services. There's a hot link to that report. And then section 31 establishes a one new permanent classified position within AOE, which is the fourth development of the three year strategic player. Open section 32, somehow got moved up the line, is an appropriation of $2,865,000 from the general fund to AOE in fiscal year twenty twenty six for the enumerated in the amounts and for the reasons I've listed here. And then section 33 created or authorized five limited service classified positions in the position pool for AOE in fiscal year twenty twenty six to support education transformation work, and I've listed out what those positions are.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yes.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: So for some mental housekeeping purposes, at sixty, sixty eight, at point six, at point point seven, all go away with this at 73. Correct? No. Okay.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I there's too much in all of those Mhmm. Acts for me to say that they go away. Okay. There's bits and pieces of all of those acts that haven't changed. Okay. But I'm here. This otherwise is explicit about any repeals that did happen. Correct. Did that so you're just seeing the section that was repealed from the task Great. Backwards. What about this position, Rameen? Is this position happening?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: It's sad. Yes. It's.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Nothing. You know. Nothing.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I don't know the answer to that.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I Somebody I'd really like to drill down into the appropriations the agents of education. I I'm very concerned about how it's being spent, and they've never given up clear information on that.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: We can certainly talk about new structure and see the positions.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Anything else for me before I give out the hot seat?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Have you been Alright. I

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: think so.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. Okay.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I should think so. Thank you.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Of course. You. I'm so excited. Yeah. Okay.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Do you want us to take a quick break or do it?

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I do. We can I'm taking a break. Okay. I'll be right back.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay. Alright. Let's get going.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Hello? Afternoon. That's it. Welcome back. Thank you. Have you been here? It does. Was.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Sure. Thank you. Hi. I'm looking for senator Weeks. And

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: or shall I No.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Got it. Introduce yourself. So we're picking we'll be picking up with sections in 3rd and 4th.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So Afternoon. John Gray, also by the City Council. I'm gonna pick up with Act 73, the education finance sections. Just because I'm not gonna be looking directly at the text, I have a lot of organizational slides here to keep us focused on what sections I'm talking about, but if becomes distracting or unuseful, I was happy to jump to the text as an alternative. So, I'm jumping in. As the chair stated, advocacy plans begins in section 34. If you're following in the act, I kinda hope that you get harmed, but if you are, on page 67, and we're talking about, generally, Chapter 133 of Title 16, which is your State Funding and Public Engagement Chapter. So just as an overview of the first set of sections that I'm gonna go over, that's 34 through 45C. I'm gonna keep returning to this table as we go through just so you can see where we are. But high level, setting up a foundation formula as you recall, establishing a face amount, educational opportunity payments, people waiting, creating some changes related to the supplemental district spending, sets up reports that are related to the foundation formula, and then there's some transitionary measures as well. I'll talk about conforming changes and the like, but there's some minor things I'll try to hop through quickly. As Beth noted, a lot of these pieces are continually effective 07/01/2028. You can see I've got the tables lined up so you can see the corresponding effective dates. What you can tell here is all the foundation formula that's continually effective July. The pieces that you see effective on passage, those

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: are your reports. So, of course, we

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: sign holes in passage so people can commence beginning their reports. And then there's a technical piece for 45 c that was effective on passage. But largely, your foundation formula rollout continually effective July. And just so you can see, this is the specific contingency. I'm sure that Seth has talked about this already, but two factors. New school districts have have assumed responsibility for the education of resident students, and the expert has responded to that foundation form in the report under section 45 a, which I'll get into a little bit later. So let's start with core education finance overhaul in Act 73, talking about sections thirty four and thirty five. This is setting your base and weights. So I'm trying to do high level. I don't intend to go too much into the actual numbers themselves. I know that Efra has some background on these pieces, but I thought we might get bogged down if we start talking into all the different weights and various pieces. So, section 34 is establishing your base amounts, it's kind of your core foundation formula, the per pupil amount of 15,033, that is going be inflation adjusted, and then as you know, the kind of payment that a school district will receive under this new formula as opposed to our current system, which funds Ed spending writ large, each school district receives what we call an educational opportunity payment, and that's determined for each school district based on the weighted student count. So you just take your weighted long term membership or your school district, you multiply it by that 15,033, and you get the educational opportunity payment for the school district. Also worth noting that section 34 repeals the inconsistent pieces of existing Chapter 133 that deal with our current education funding system, we don't need concepts for education spending anymore because we aren't setting up a system that fully funds whatever locally voted budgets occur. So Section 35, that's the creation of your base amount and your educational opportunity payment. Core, foundation, bonus concepts. Section 35 is touching your waiting section, so pupil waiting is this Section forty ten, and just high level what's happening here is you're left with a grade level weight for pre K. There's no other grade level weights included in section 35. There's a slight update to the economic disadvantage weight. In existing law, we have English language letter weight, but it's not refined across different pieces like proficiency level and formal education. You may recall we talked about that acronym SLIPE, students with limited or interrupted formal education. That's one of the refinements that English language learner waived, So we have a more built out distinguished Yale weighting system. We've moved away from the census block grants and added special education weights, and that's distinguished by disability costs. You may recall that there's different, three different special education weights provided, depending on the kind of disability that a child has. And then additionally, repealing the small school and sparsity weights, which as you'll see shortly, were replaced with those support grants,

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: for small school students. So question on the weights, and I was thinking about this today, is that when we pick a weight for any one of those, how do they come up with a calculation, and does that calculation to educate just one child? So let's say we have English learning students and you have one. So that weight has, we'll say $1,000 added on to the. Let's say your school has 10. So now you have $10,000, but now you still only have that one teacher to teach that's 10. So as you gain more students, should that have to be taken down, or was it based on what it cost to educate that one child at that amount?

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I don't think I'm in best position to speak to the empirics behind the the weights were determined.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Alright, thanks for that. That's something I'd like to find out, is as you gain in any special needs child, that there's certain individuals one on one, but when it can grow, was that number always designed just for one one student rather than a multi multi seats? Yes. Because

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: so so it it is I think it's the most generous weight that's currently contemplated Mhmm. In in the bill we passed. And that is so that if you have one student, you still have the ability to to meet their needs. But then there's seven different weights each student could receive. So the idea being if someone is at a one, if they really need a lot of one on one support, they are getting a a quite a generous weight. If they need a little bit of, after school support or something like that, the weight is less. So it that in my mind speaks to they the the whole goal is to have a generous enough amount when you only have one student who needs significant support. And if you happen to have a lot of students who are threes or fours or somewhere close to proficiency, you're getting less money that would speak more to meeting their needs as a group. Okay. There's seven different weights. Some some other things worth remembering,

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: and I think this is implicit in in the comment, the weights are additive, A special education child could pick up additional weights as well. So just something to keep in mind is that, yeah, you could have English language, you could have economic disadvantage, so you could pick up additional weights along with other things. Section thirty four and thirty five, core foundation formula establishing based EOP, peer weighting system. Next, we're gonna jump to the support grants. If you're following the act, which again, I hope you're not, but pages 79 through 81, we just talked about repealing the sparsity and small school weights. Those are being supplanted by the specific grants that are extended to school districts for particular schools. So section 37 creates a small school support grant. Got that thirty one fifty seven figure. It's important to note who actually qualifies for this, grant. A small school must have less than 100 pupils in their two year average enrollment. Additionally, you may recall that the State Board of Education is required annually to determine that that school is small by necessity. So the idea is to limit this weight to schools that are in a position where it's by necessity that they're receiving this additional money per student. Also created a or we also created a Spar School Support Grant. It's around $2,000 per enrolled student. Similar conditions for that kick into the sparse school. You have to be in a city, town, or incorporated village with less than 55 persons per square mile. You also have to receive an annual determination from the State Board of Education, sparse by necessity, and those standards for the State Board to determine this were to be built out under section eight b. I don't know the status of the standards themselves, but those are required components of receiving these grants. Not only do you have to meet objective criterion, you also have to be determined to be, by necessity, that kind of school by the State Board of Education. So those are replacing your existing, sparsely exposed weights with support grants. As you can imagine, implementing the foundation formula necessitates a number of appeals to an existing education funding concept, so that's what you see in section 42. Not gonna bore you too much with the details of these, but they removed some technical provisions. They statutes that only reference defined terms that have now been appealed, pieces of suspension of the way education finance was working under the existing system. As you can see, the census block grants, that's for your special education, that's appealed because you're now doing a special education weight. Similarly, the categorical aid for English learners. You now have a more distinguished, defined EO weight. This one will be quick, but just noting some technical conforming and other changes in sections thirty six and forty. We made some performing changes just to pick up the new defined terms. Those are your education payments that go out to school districts instead of referencing education spending. We need to reference the educational opportunity payments, and the concept we'll come to later, and I'll talk about in more detail. Soddlements district spending, which I'll spend a little bit more time on just the details of how that works. Section 39 cleans up some outdated language in the stabilization reserve. There's some archaic language that references the original act in which that was enacted. And then section 45 c is just a technical update. You can think of this as sort of here because this is a vehicle. It delays the first meeting of the Ed Bongartz advisory committee, which was intended to start this past summer, and extends it to July 15, the thinking came to have been so much change, right, in with the Act 73, that they weren't in in a position to respond to this to these changes, so it's just delaying that first meeting. Next, just because we're going relatively in order within the Act, and because we're talking about Title 16 education, rather than taxation and finance at this point, we're gonna talk about the impacts of the supplemental District spending on Title 16 before I actually talk about Supplemental District spending, so just know that I am gonna talk about how the math works for those pieces, assuming you're interested in knowing how the math works for those pieces. Section 38 creates just makes the pathway for your new supplemental district spending. So as you know, supplemental district spending is a tax that's imposed entirely locally, unlike the new statewide education tax that will be imposed to raise funds for the educational opportunity payments. So we just need a pathway from where that local revenue, that SDS revenue will go, and it goes into the ed fund. That's all that section 38 is doing, creating the home for those revenues. Section 41, this one is key, so I will slow down a bit for this. One of the complexities of the budgeting process has been that folks can't see the impacts economically of their decision making when they vote on the school budget. With this move to a foundation formula, the actual December 1 letter is gonna contain a recommendation for the statewide education tax rate that's gonna produce what you need to fund those educational opportunity payments across the state. Additionally, the commissioner will recommend a supplemental district spending yield. And unlike the existing yield, which is dependent on the budgets that school districts vote up until whatever date at which they finalize those budgets, This field is really a mathematical exercise. And when we get to the supplemental district's getting technicalities, I'll explain how the bill is determined. But basically, the outcome of this change is the budget that school districts are gonna vote on is not the broad budget they vote on now. They just vote on any extra spending they want to pursue locally beyond the educational opportunities payment that they would be receiving. Accompanying that budget vote would be a line that states what the impact for their taxes would be. It would say the Supplemental District spending tax rate shall be, and it's really a mathematical equation. You divide your per pupil supplemental district spending by that yield, and it tells you what the rate will be for your child. Budgets would look quite different under this. We'd be voting on something different, and you would know the economic impact of what you're doing.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: And many districts would presumably not vote at all.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. You might have no you might have no reason

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: to vote. Yeah. And perfect. Section

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: 43, this is kind of accompanying that section 38, created the pathway for supplemental interest spending revenues to flow to the Ed Fund. This just creates a reserve within the Ed Fund in which those revenues would be situated. But it's important sorry. It it it creates a reserve for the recapture that's produced. I'll talk about this more once we get to the concept. But as you know, the imposition of the supplemental district spending tax will raise extra funds due to the equalization measures that are included in the act of the day. So because of that, you're gonna have some extra money that isn't blowing, assuming people vote on supplemental spending, they'll have some extra funds available that aren't being paid out to the school districts for their, voted supplemental district spending. So that would be reserved here and used for two purposes. It would be used to offset any miscalculation, so sometimes there is variation in abundance or the like, so there's a miscalculation, you could take these extra raised funds and you could apply them to offset any miscalculation. And then secondarily, assuming you had funds remaining after any corrections, essentially, you would apply those funds to the following year's statewide education property tax rate to reduce the following year taxes. That's what your recapture, which is produced through the Supplemental District Smithing Tax, can offer the state in leases situated here. I'm gonna pause for a second just

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Go ahead. So for a district seeking to spend the 5% for many districts, it would actually cost more than 5%.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That that's exactly right. Raised on there. That's exactly right. When when we get to the actual and I'll just preview it here. But the way that the supplemental district spending yield is set and the rate is determined, it benchmarks everyone's rate to the school district with the lowest tax and capacity. So you can think of it as you're having to pay the rate. Your district is having to pay the rate that the lowest taxing capacity district would have to pay to raise the funds that you're voting. The result for a community that has greater property wealth in applying the same tax rate that the lowest capacity district would apply, is going to raise extra funds just because by applying the same rate to a higher property value, you produce more funds. That's how you get recapture. It means that every district other than the lowest capacity district will pay more than the actual wet rate required if they entirely funded it locally, but where you stand relative to that will depend on the amount of property wealth you have available for long term membership. So if you're close to the lowest capacity, you're gonna have a quite close rate to what you would happen to pay anyway. But if you're a quite wealthy district for long term membership, then you could be paying substantially more the long district spending tax rate. So it's part of why there was a lot of discussion last session about why the school district boundaries configuration matters for determining the equalization measures and for determining the supplemental district spending tax. It really affects the amount of revenues that's raised, the kind of imposition of taxes through the act. So configuration matters for these purposes. Next, we can jump to reports. So we've got a set of reports here. Section 44 asks the age of education with reporting, what's that, the guidelines for minimal transportation to be provided and covered by transportation reimbursement grant. You've also got a report from JFO on inflationary measures and funding for pre k. And then lastly, we have this more wholesale under section 45 a, this kind of larger, longer term report due this upcoming December, and this is updates to the foundation point of us. So, moving away from special education weights to our alliance with special education services, updates to any other weights as empirically necessary, so you can think of this as pretty broad exploration of what the contractor could touch within the foundation formula. In addition to updates to the foundation formula, examine suitable sparsity measures. You may recall that the sparse schools requires the geographic measure that's used is town, village, some other geographic measure that I've forgotten, but it's along those lines. We debated zip code at one point last session. This is tasking that contractor with thinking about what is the best geographic measure for getting S. Farsey, additionally examining the cost of secondary students and whether a wait would be warranted for those. As I noted before, on Section 35, the pupil waiting section only currently has a wait for Pre K, and accounting for CTE within the foundation form. The other big piece to note about this report is you'll recall the contingent effective language that I talked about before. So all the foundation formula is contingent on contingent effective 07/01/2028, and one of the contingencies is you've got the new school district boundaries that assume responsibility. The other is that you perceive this report that the legislature has had the chance to enact any updates based on the information that applies in this report. Lastly, for this set of sections, we're gonna talk about the EOP transition. Just thinking about the early year rollout of the foundation formula. We're gonna be moving from locally varying Olmstead rates, locally voted budgets, to a fixed EOP determined by weight times weighted long term membership sorry, base amount times weighted long term memberships. So it may take some time for school districts to acclimate to this, with some transitionary measures included. So for fiscal years '29 through 2032, there's a measure included to move folks from their ad spending onto the new EOP. And the way that's done, I don't know if the math is especially interesting, but you identify the gap between a district's FY '29 EOP, so that's in FY '29, that base amount times they're within long term membership, and you determine the difference between their FY '25 education spending. That gives you a gap, and basically, you prorate that gap to move people incrementally toward their actual EOP that they'll be on, and by FY 2033, a school district would then be fully onto its EOP and would then sort of more smoothly transition onto that payment than if you'd gone directly from FY '28, Ed spent, to FY '29 EOP.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: But it's just picture of this on this page here that a district that is a lower spending district would have five years to transition to where they would require to be.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Exactly. Exactly. Just in summary, for the total of the sections that we've walked through, high level, you've got a foundation formula with a base amount of 15,003 per pupil plus updated weights, pre K, special education, economic disadvantage, EL. You've got the new concept of educational opportunity payments to school districts based on their weighted long term membership. You've now got a place of the preexisting weights. You've now got supplementary support grants for small schools and spar schools. And then, significantly as we talked about, budget votes are exclusive to that supplemental district spending. They're just about what they call the EOP, and they would include the required supplemental district spending tax rate for voters to see. Changing gears a little bit, we're now at section 46, and this is where we started talking about the education property tax changes,

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: which are

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: relevantly, I've talked a bit about this on the district spending, but there's some pieces in here that I think are beyond the pieces we've touched before in committee. But section 46, and that's on page 93 if you're following in the act. In terms of in the statutes, we're now in Title 32, that section of finance and works primarily in Chapter 135, the education property tax. We are gonna jump around a bit, just like we'll talk about some of the concepts that are in the Act, just so you're aware of them, but it's less crucial to the education overhaul. So here's the set of sections for 46 through 59. You've got your supplemental district spending. You've got your December 1 letter at the imposition of your property taxes. We've got a new homestead exemption, which I'll just hit very high level, replacing the property tax credit with homestead exemption, and a couple of supporting changes. Mainly for these sections, I'll try to spend time on the supplemental interest spending, which is I think most kind of relative to the discussions here, but I'm happy to touch other pieces if it's helpful to you guys to hear about them. Again, I've got a table of effective dates, as you can see, all of these pieces are generally effective 07/01/2028. The one outlier you're seeing on the left side is 07/01/2027. That's your December 1 letter. December 1 letter then anticipates the foundation for your rollout needs to be in place before you actually kick in the rates. You need to get those recommendations from the commissioner that goes effective, proceeding the f y twenty nine year. And then I think you have a report that's effective on passage for July. Again, just reminding you of the contingency language, those two pieces, school districts contemplated by the act have assumed responsibility for the education of students and that you've received that Foundation Formula Report pursuant to section 45 a, giving the General Assembly an opportunity to enact any legislation in consideration. Let's jump to everyone's favorite piece, the definitions for supplemental district spending. Left side column is gonna be this simple, plain English way to think about what's being proposed here, and then the right describes some of the math that accompanies it. So we're replacing current funding formula language with new definitions for supplemental district spending. So your supplemental district spending is the spending, as we've talked about, that voters of a district may approve above their educational opportunity payment. As the chair has noted, there's actually a cap in place on both that SDSK fee. It's up to a cap of 5% of the district's unweighted foundation amount. What I mean by unweighted foundation is, other pieces, we talk about weighted long term membership. And here we're talking about an unweighted foundation amount. So it would be verifying the weighted student count, just straight student count, multiplied by that base amount. You get 5% of that. That would be your allowable supplemental tuition expenditure. We'll also come into a bit to see that there are transitionary measures for this piece as well. Just as there's rollout to get people activated to the EOP, there's rollout to not so quickly impose the 5% categories. Important to note is that the supplemental district spending tax is imposed uniformly across districts. It's not imposed across all districts. It's only imposed for folks who vote supplemental district spending, and their rate is determined locally. But the SDS tax is opposed in a uniform way across districts, meaning that each person is paying the same rate to receive the same amount of funds in return. So to raise subalong district spending, a district must impose the rate that would be required to raise those funds to lowest tax rate capacity district. This rate is entirely locally. The way that this works is we benchmark the rate to the school district with the lowest tax capacity. That's your district that's anticipated to have the lowest grant list for long term membership.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: I know we went over this last year, but taxing capacity, can you refresh my memory

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: and grant list? Taxing capacity, we're just thinking about how much property wealth do you have available per pupil, essentially, is the way to think about it. When we're trying to describe or thinking about the funds that a school district is trying to raise, we're talking about what they're raising per pupil. A district could be incredibly wealthy, but have a ton of students, it doesn't matter so much that they have infinite property wealth. The figure that you really care about is that property wealth per pupil, and so that's what your grant was per long term membership here. It's meant to get at your taxing capacity. It's how much property wealth can you put forward per student, basically, and it's telling you the kind of rate that you're gonna have to impose because the more property wealth you have available per pupil, the lower the rate that you can impose, right?

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: With the more wealth you have, the

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: lower the rate to income tax. I'm just saying mathematically, to raise the second amount. It's not the way the supplemental petition spending tax would work, but if you're just thinking in terms of the way that you would raise revenues, the more wealth you have available for people, the lower the rate you could charge to raise funds. But the supplemental spending tax is applied uniformly, so everyone is going to pay the same rate to raise the same funds, and if you happen to be wealthier, that is you have a higher taxing capacity, you're gonna end up raising additional funds above what you voted, and that additional funding is gonna be your recapture that's sent back to that reserve that can be used to decrease following year statewide property taxes.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: Send back the Ed Fund, JLo?

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yep. So it goes, it flows, all of the supplemental district spending tax revenues go to the Ed Fund. And then it's broadly made available in the way that other funds are made available to the Ed Fund to pay out any payments that are due under the Ed Fund other than your supplemental district spending tax, which is gonna go out sorry, your supplemental district spending. Those payments will go out to districts, and then you're gonna have an element remaining, that's your recapture, and that's gonna be situated within that reserve. But you're correct that all of the funds flow directly to the end fund, and then it's the recapture, not the whole of the supplemental district spending tax revenue. It sits

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: within reserves. The recapture goes to

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: the reserve, and the reserve is to It's just

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Oh, no. Go. I'm sorry.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: It's and so the reserve can only be exclusively used by that district or

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: is No. No. No. Okay. That's that's the reserve is is broadly available for two purposes. The first is if if numbers have come in wonky during the year and there's some mismatch, right, you could use funds within that reserve to offset the miscalculation that produced that. So maybe some cap some calculation, there's a mishap with your SDS calculation. So you could use the reserve funds to offset that, and then I think the broader purpose stated, the hope was the extra funds that you raise, which depending on district boundary configuration could be quite substantial. You have someone who has three times tax income that's even in a district, they're paying the same rate they're raising three times the funds. The second purpose, which I think was stated in this panel, primary purpose is that it could be used to lower property tax, the statewide property tax of the following year. It's not used for future SDS, it's used to reduce everyone's taxes in the following year. Thank you. To explain a little bit about how this is calculated, we use a new yield here, a supplemental district spending yield, which translates this concept into action. Basically, we say how much revenue per long term membership could be raised in your lowest taxing capacity district at a rate of $1 per $800 of equalized education property value, knowing that if you take your districts per pupil supplemental district spend, so take your fully voted supplemental district spending divided by your long term membership, you took whatever that is and divided it by this figure, it would reduce the rate that would be required for the lowest taxing capacity district to raise those funds. So the yield is a way of converting your payments into what would be required in the lowest taxing capacity district. And that's the method of equalization that's proposed in act 73, ensuring that everyone has to pay same rate, put the same kinds of funds regardless of amount of property wealth they have available per pupil. And as we've talked about, this is what leads to recapture, and you can just think of that as excess revenue, and again, it's made available for those purposes, potentially buying down, following your statewide education program taxes. That's great. I'm happy to not keep talking about this. So

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: it's just interesting to know that for many districts, the 5% mobility, more like 2% of the budget, because the 5% mobility equates to 15,000 for the base amount, right? It doesn't, it

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: doesn't include weight.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So that's correct. In many districts, the budget's gonna be substantially more or their their income would otherwise be substantially more than 15,000 because of weights. Mhmm. And in some districts, it would be more acute than with some districts, less acute. So in some districts, the 5% won't really be applied. Yep. 5% add on to the budget will be a 2% or 3% add on to the budget. For sure. Depending on the weights.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: If you wanted to describe the cap in terms of educational opportunity payments instead of an unweighted foundation formula, it would be a lower percentage. I love this. This one's pretty easy to understand. This transitionary measure, it does occur across a longer time period than the earlier transition we talked about, which were five year transitions. It's more like a ten year transition. So this is to allow school districts greater supplemental district spending in the early years foundation formula rollout. We talked about the statutory sector is a 5% cap, but we have some notwithstanding language here, succession law that says for fiscal years 2029 through 2033, so those first years in which you're also going through your tax rate transitions, your EOP transitions, all of that, for those first years, you can spend up to 10% of that money weighted foundation amount in supplemental interest spending, and they were declining each year by 1% until in FY 2038, you've gotten to this factor of 5%. So first years of your foundation for a roll out, a school district can spend more in supplemental district spending for the first five years, that's your 10% cap, and then decline it to the next level. Now we're gonna jump into actual taxes. Just gonna be super high level. Section 47, this amends your 32 BSA, sections six forty two is your primary education property tax liability section. This is the section that imposes the statewide education property taxes. Just to remind everyone where we currently are, the current system we have funds local budgets, wherever they're voted, fully funds those budgets using locally varying homestead property tax rates. This new foundation for no system would just have a statewide education tax rate. It wouldn't have that locally varying homestead rate. So this replaces Vermont's existing property tax mechanism to fully fund locally funded school budgets to account for that variation through varying homestead rates. With a statewide education tax, think about the reason that's possible because you've moved to this EOP instead of funding whatever the districts may vote. You're now just funding space times weighted long term membership for each district. You tally up those figures, and you can spread that cost across the whole state with a single, statewide education tax rate. However, that education tax rate would be adjusted by statutory factors. We don't have those yet. What you'll see in Act 73 is just that the statutory factors are in one, meaning that all of the rates would be the same, regardless of tax classification. Those are yet to be determined. But the education tax would be adjusted by statutory factors to assign liabilities, different property tax specifications. As you may recall, we still have our homestead. We still have non homestead. Our non homestead now looks different. Act 73, you have non homestead non residential and non homestead residential. The way to think about having these different classifications just from a raising education revenues perspective is that you have different levers you can pull down. Right? If you wanna assign more liability to one class, you can change the statutory package. That's what the statutory factors allow you to do, although the expectation is that you can proceed recommendation as to what the appropriate statutory factors would be. And then this section imposes that local supplemental district spending tax. You've got now your statewide education tax rate, and you've got your local supplemental district spending tax rate. Not everyone's gonna face that, just districts that vote supplemental district spending. And I can talk about the calculation again, but it's done in that way I described using the supplemental district spending yield, comparing Europe for pupil supplemental district spending against that yield. Section 48 is touching the December 1 letter. As you know, we currently receive the December 1 letter with a set of recommendation related to yields, and those remain in plus as districts are passing budgets for spending their meetings. We don't need to have those same pieces anymore with the new system. So section 48 fuels recommendations for the fuels in the December 1 letter, and it would task the commissioner of taxes with recommending a statewide education property tax rate. And again, this would be something that could be done because the revenues you're trying to figure out, how much you need to raise, are determined by that base times weighted long term membership. It's a different game than it is on the existing systems, so CAF would recommend that stable interest rates have been spent on the funding. There still are questions as to what non property tax revenues are gonna come in, so it's not all certainty, but you're in a greater place of certainty than you would be member of the existing securities. It also tasked the Commissioner of Taxes with recommending that supplemental strict spending yield. Again, this would be really a mathematical exercise. You would just identify the school district that's expected to have the lowest grant list per long term membership, and you would ask, what could they raise at a 1% tax rate, at $1 per $100 of equalized education property tax value? That's the yield. You can just divide your district's SDS by that to determine the rate that you need. Sections forty nine and fifty are just conforming changes to chapter one thirty five to pick up those rate changes for no longer referencing. We don't have to distinguish non home seven and home seven the same way now that we're using a statewide act process adjusted by statutory factors, although it's not being called out in the We also have proposed, or Act 73 contains, a homestead rate transition. So for those first years, FY 2029 through 2032, to ease the transition of locally good homestead rates, you would again identify transition gaps by taking what would be your FY '29 statewide homestead rate. It's the rate that everyone would be paying under the new education plan system, and You would determine the difference between that and the district's prior fiscal year locally varying homestead rate. The year prior, it's not the foundation point. You're still under the current system, so you're just determining the gap between FY '28 homestead rate and your FY '29 homestead rate. The difference between those is one is locally variant based on the budgets you voted, and one is funding the DOP under the new foundation. And again, you program it down across five years, as the chair describes, and you're incrementally moving folks off of their twenty eighty point seven rate and college of their. Some other measures I don't recall if I talked about it here last year, but I'll just hit high level. High to these changes, new income sensitivity measures. So we're feeling the property tax credit, but replacing it with a new homestead exemption that reduces the amount of house site value subject to any education tax. So instead of a credit that applies to prior year taxes, we'd actually reduce the amount of the house site value that's subject to taxation so you're in the first place paying less in taxes rather than receiving the credit against it. And your new your new income sensitivity measures, would be for households with not more than a 115,000 in household income. You have a range of exemption values available, that'd be, as low as 10% if you're at the upper end of that income threshold, and if you're between 0 and 25,000 in household income, you could have a home set exemption of 95% of the first $425,000 in house side values, so substantial exemption against the health state government. Section 51 is just we state the statutory purposes of exemptions, and as you can see, the point is to reduce property tax liability for Vermont households with low and moderate household income. And then section 53, there were discussions last year as to whether or not folks felt comfortable with the income sensitivity measures that were covered here. So section 53 passed tax with reporting by the end of this year, December 15, on an alternative homestead exemption structure for consideration, and that would include things like an analysis of the implications of move in to income sensitivity measures that recognize higher household income. Benefits could accrue to households of up to a 175,000. Would be just for consideration, report from the tax department. Is there another way to set up on-site exemption structure that may be benefits more of these functions?

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So just to make sure I understand, 115 is a cutout.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yes, that's correct.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: And if you're 116.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That's correct. I think maybe part of what you're getting at is that the way the current income sensitivity measures work, there's math that happens behind the scene to determine the point at which the income yields and the property tax yields meet. So the statutory threshold that you see isn't necessarily the point of cutoff of the benefit. This is a straight cutoff. Above 115,000, you're not getting the home substitution.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yes, so this is income only, no asset test whatsoever. That's right.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And then I'm ending with a one for, I guess, conforming another changes. So section 54 through 56, these are just updating references from the property tax credits to the homestead exemption. And then section 57, it updates the directives of the Education Fund Advisory Committee to address updates for the foundation for Ram HOLLAR and the June homestead exemption. And just to summarize this set of education primary tax sections, act 73 replaces locally varying homestead rates with a statewide excuse me, with a statewide education tax that would be adjusted for tax specifications. It imposes a supplemental district spending tax for districts to raise funds locally for any voted SDS. It repeals the property tax credit system, and it creates it doesn't repeal the municipal, just statewide, And it creates a homestead exemption with new income sensitive measures. And I just wanted to have this beautiful slide. We do have an act summary that's like two pages or three pages. So if you want to read a dense document that describes all this again, you're free to do so.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Welcome. Can sort of ask us before the wall, I think. Yeah.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: There'll be more. Yeah. Oh, I thought

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I I could just go home.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Did you think that all by yourself?

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Do what?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Did you think this all by yourself?

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You guys thought this up.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: I I never rolled a claim. This was our ability. And finance. Yes.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Thank you, We

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: will see you again.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Sounds good. And let me know if you guys want, you know, more details.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Just making sure it's connected up there.

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Alright. Apologies for the slowness with technology. This is my first testimony of the session, so I'm still getting used to joining this event. The record, Edward Olden, joint fiscal office. And today, we're just going to be talking a little bit more about the foundation formula that, you know, Mr. John Gray spoke about. He kinda did high level of foundation formula, and I thought I would give you all a little bit more of an in-depth look at the different weights contained in XMP-three. So, just as a reminder, you'll see this slide a million times from my office, but I'm not partisan, but just like the office. Just wanted to remind everyone of that. So just quickly to remind you all about a few things with foundation formulas and all the abbreviations that we will be using today. So long term weighted average daily membership, that is the long term weighted count that John referenced when he spoke about how you determine the total education opportunity payment that the district will be receiving. In my presentation, you'll see that abbreviated as your LTW ADM. And so that is the weighted student count that drives the funding to your district in a foundation for this. That would be your base. Every student receives that one-zero base, and then you add in weights, whether it's second op disadvantage, English learner, pre K, whatever it is, and once those weights have been added in, you have your weighted daily membership, and that's what you are then multiplying whatever your base cap is. And so, again, of these weights are abbreviated, so kind of PL, federal, so that's gonna be your economic disadvantaged students. You also have your EL, which stands for English Learner students, and SPED, special education students. And as a reminder, the weights under Act seven thirty are added, So you just take one plus whatever the weights are. This just kind of visually illustrates what I just relayed to you all. Your base amount, not your long term weighted ADM, is your education options and or District two. Act 70 three's foundation formula. Again, as John spoke about earlier, there's a base amount of $15,033 per year long term, so that's the ADM, that's your one-zero student. So that's the face that every student would be receiving. And then the student may also receive weights based on any demographic conditions, such as the ones listed here on this table. So these are the weights that Act 73 has. Some of them you'll see are categories that you have the weights are all derived from the memo released by Drs. Colby and Baker in 04/03/2025, and I've linked that memo there at the bottom of this slide if you care to visit that or review that testimony. And those were calculated by the two using their education dot cost function formula, which is intended to determine the sufficient level of funding needed for a student to have enough funding for their education based on what class they fall into. So that's where these weights came from, that calculation that they ran. And special education's census block grant has been replaced with tiered weights. So you'll see that here you now have child with a disability, and you have categories A, B, and C. Under Act 73, if a child's disability falls under category A, they would receive an additional 0.79 worth of funding. Category B, 1.89, etcetera, that's all in addition to the one. So a student with category A would actually, and nothing else, be a total of 1.79 times that 15,833, what the districts determine how much funding they're receiving. And so that's different from previously where you had a special education census block grant, so this is different. Who decides these All of these weights were determined by the Colby Baker memo, as they're presented here. Going forward, part of Act 73 required JFID to contract with contractors to re determine, see if these weights needed to be adjusted or not. So that's where they came from and how they'll be adjusted.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: I understand that, but who decides what level of English learner, and you may not be able to answer that, I'm just asking for a child with disability, who puts them in that category, who decides that?

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Sure, okay, so the English language proficiency, I believe that's a standardized level of testing. So a student, I guess it would be the school, would have to test their students every year or two and see what proficiency level they are at. With the disability categories, I believe each category has a set of disabilities under it. So category A would say disability X, Y, and Z falls into that category. So it would be, instead of making a determination, you're really just looking, okay, what does the student have? What did they score on the proficiency test for English, or do they have this disability? Does it fall under category A, B, or C? Rather than you just arbitrarily are making that determination as an official in school.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Does that answer your question? It does.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: It leaves a lot of a door wide open to what,

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: something I wanna find out about is how it's determined, because that's like level one, that's simply. So that's like the question was asked earlier, if you had 10 students with level one, does each one of them get level one even though they're going into the same class and getting taught with the same teacher?

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I think the other one, yes.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yes, currently, yes. I did.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: I said it has to do.

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah, so yes, to answer your question further, yes, each of those students, whether they're in the same classroom, one student in a classroom, if they fall under this category, they would receive this level of funding. Yes, ten, twenty, one, if they are all English level, one, they lose that.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: And is there any way we can put guardrails, as we always say, to say as they gain students that that level comes down? I believe alternative orders for that, but I mean, that would You can do That's all we have do.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You can do whatever you want.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Act 73 does not speak to that itself. It's later, but that's definitely something like there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars that

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Well, you have to able have to explore whether there is a growing scale of maintenance. Maybe I think premises that there's not.

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. So I had bust the butt.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I was gonna say I had I would have answered the question the way that Ezra did, and perhaps I misunderstood it. But I understood you to be asking the questions, does the dollar figure that's been chosen or the weight that's been chosen helped for this package in in its determination rather than does each duke receive a fixed amount? They do receive a fixed amount. Separate question whether the empirics behind the number are correctly scaled up the way that you're identified.

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. So yes. Anyone who falls, So a student who falls into the English level, the disability category, or under this federal poverty level of 185% or less, a student meeting any of those conditions would receive the weighting amount you see here. A little bit of an outlier is the only grade weight that is still within Act 73 is that pre K student weight, and you'll see it's actually a negative point five or similar to what you have now that actually reduces the weight. So that one point zero that every student gets is then essentially matched with that minus point five four, so their net weight would be point four six. But unlike as you have currently with the taxing capacity, it's now point four six up, that 15,033 is the dollar amount that pre K student would receive. Unless, of course, they fall under FPL, then they'd still get the full 1.02 there. That is not reduced. Because remember, we're adding our weights under Act 73, so yeah, every student would be eligible. Pre K students could receive.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: One other question on very first slide, it's base times LTW ADM. And here it just says base per LDM. So, is there no multiplication to it?

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So, the base amount of 15,033 is per your long term ADM, so that is just signifying that one student without any weights on their own would receive the 15,033, and also that figure is helpful when you recall the supplemental district spending that John spoke about is that is the amount that you can spend your additional percentage over is this 15,033 per long term ADM, which does not have any weights on it. So if you have just 100 students, it's 15,033 for that long term ADM of 100 without regard for their weights. So that's why your 15,033 per long term ADM is helpful versus long term weighted ADM, because your weighted ADM does not go into consideration with your supplemental district spending. So you start out with your long term ADM, which is 104 every pupil. And then once you've added in these weights, that's when you reach a long term weighted ADM, which is multiplied by the 15,033. And just noting down here that under Act 73, small school and sparsity, rather than being weights,

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: they are

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: now grants. And so just moving on to this table here to kind of illustrate that. So Act 73 implements them as support grants, there are a few criteria here. So for your small school support grant, so that is for a school with fewer than 100 enrolled pupils based on the two year average at that school. So that's different from the current year's ADM. You're gonna look at your past two years actual enrollment and that would not be affected by the weights. So if you have 100 kids in year one, and one hundred kids in year two, regardless of their weights, that's still an enrollment of 100 pupils. So we're looking at enrollment for school size, not ADMs. And then also you see that there is a small by necessity. Now that is currently undefined. Act 73 charged the State Board of Education with defining that, and early to mid December, they released a report in which they effectively shifted that determination to the agency of education. If you look here in the notes, have the small and sparse by necessity now need to be defined by the agent's trained information, and for further details, I've linked it there on that hyperlink for here. So if you go there, you can see the report that the state board laid out where they reached their conclusion, that they recommend that the agency should make this recommendation. So the grant amount for small school support would be that 3,157 per pupil at the school that John laid out. And a similar structure for your sparse school support grant. So you have a school in a sparse location, is defined as a city, a school located in a city, town, or village, with a population of fewer than 55 people per square mile of land, and so it has to be located in the village rather than in a district that is considered sparse. That's something that changed with Act 73 being enacted. The location was changed to a city, town, or village, so even if your district as a whole would not be considered sparse, if the town that the school is located in is in an isolated sparse area, that school itself would still be considered a sparse school regardless of the rest of the district, and vice versa. If you have a very wide sparse district, but you have a town with a school right in the middle of the town, and that itself is not a sparse area, then that school would not be eligible under Act 73. And then again, you have this by necessity, and here it is sparse by necessity, is currently undefined, as I laid out, because the State Board of Education staff would then over to Agency of Education, and that would be nineteen fifty four per pupil based on the two year average enrollment, which is the same figure being used above for that small school enrollment size. That is different than your long term weighted AVM. That's just the two year average of students actually enrolled at your school without regard to their rates.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Just curious, going back to your topic, State Board of Education was tasked to figure out the definition of small by necessity, smallest by necessity, etcetera. And they were going to produce a report, think it was January 1 or thereabouts, found what these definitions should be, but they hunted, they said the AOE should be responsible for this definition. Yes, so The summary is correct?

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yes, so that's correct. On, I believe it was December 17, they released a report, and they do go through a few different ideas for measures, such as miles, land miles, minutes driving. They lay some of those out in their report, however, the end of the report, they recommend that the final determination should be made by the agency of education. They offer some, I guess, thoughts and considerations about a few different measures, but they don't offer a final IR CLAR ruling, which I believe is what you just said. So yes.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: And then AOE has a reaction to that, saying when they could determine this definition of I have not

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: modeled the response. No, have

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: not seen that yet. So I would also note that with small by necessity, the 100 students, it's just interesting as a committee that visited England for us to think about the fact that, if I remember correctly, they had 127 kids pre k through high school and they wouldn't qualify for small

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: business. Well, it the district or school? Because they have an elementary school and they have

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: a high school. And it's Oh, small. I think, I guess that's a fair question, because the girls are separate.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: And they say once

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: you prepare, go to the other one. But I think they should've I think they were treated as a single school. But their lunch rooms, they're separate, aren't they? Not so. No. They weren't. I don't know what that means but I think it's interesting to note that even though they had very few kids per grade, if it were just a high school they would clearly qualify, when I say they would qualify for at least 100 students, 100 but because they have in one, effectively one building, pre K through twelve, one hundred and twenty seven kids, they don't. And I just want to note that that may or may not make sense, and we should think about that. I care. I thought they had a total of three sixty jokes. I could be wrong, but I think

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: That's what concerned me, the problem Okay, in the

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: so if you're right, it's not an issue. If I'm right, it's not an issue. Your number is better than mine, which may be.

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So like I said, it's pretty brief, so just wanna end with some considerations. So I think these tables may be helpful for you when you're thinking about just kind of fast facts, wanna find a number, but these tables do not include supplemental district spending or Category four A. You heard a little bit about what was being repealed and what was being enacted, John, around supplemental district spending is being enacted, but some of your grants, such as your EL grant, therefore, be repealed and replaced with this tiered wave. There's also outstanding questions that were not laid out. CTE, there's a weight for CTE. Pre K, it has a weight, but if you recall, that's the same weight as it's currently operating and is from the previous system. That weight itself was not derived from the Colby and Baker memo, so that is effectively a holdover way. And then also potential school district redistricting that will have an impact on your small schools, if students

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: are being moved between schools, also anything about sparse schools, and just what effects that may have on cost around the city. And also the high school tuition, because right now the allowance of tuition costs about 12% more educate a high school kid, but there's no way at this point until we go through that.

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yes, correct. There is no grade weight for high school or middle school students. Currently, sixth through eighth middle school students have a weight for taxing capacity, same for nine through 12 students, correct? You don't see that here, so. But there's a report coming at the end of this year, yes? That's a great consideration, that's outstanding. Any further questions?

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yes. I get it that this is an education committee, not a finance committee, but we had a lot of pop ups last spring that came out of the finance committee. So I'm curious, from JFO's perspective, the homestead property tax exemption with this change on values and percentages and etcetera. Is there an anticipated revenue loss to the state based on that part of the legislation?

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Switching from a property tax credit to a homestead exemption? I believe that the testimony given last year is that it was estimated to cost approximately 35,000,000

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: It's $35,000,000

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: However, from last session, I'm sure my colleague Julia Richter would be able to adjust things now that we're a year later, so those numbers are a little older,

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay, but I you didn't just ask her to at some point validate that that 35,000,000 is still accurate, because my sense is the first lever we're gonna pull, we've created this second home property tax unique rate and that's automatically going to impact I imagine it's automatically going to impact the second homeowner tax rate like 35,000,000 right off the bat let alone any other changes so I'm curious if the 35,000,000 is still inaccurate or semi accurate. I'll

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: move into that.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Any further questions?

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. One 150. Okay. So I'm paying wait, wait, miss. So, by the way, you're gonna get a lot of paper, and a lot of it you're gonna want to use several times. If you want to, if I'm right about that, you can put your name on it and keep it up here with Daphne, and then we're get you again, like your copy of XOB3, John's slides if you don't want it because we're gonna want them now and then. So put your name on them and see if you see them. Tomorrow we're doing remind me that. We're doing the scoop of books?

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yep. We have invite out for our sleep aid person. And we have the report. Yep.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: And we

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: have the report. So people can take it tonight if they want to or they can just make it go through it tomorrow. And what's that? It is the what's it called?

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Aid for school. We don't know. It's it's here.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And it's Oh, okay.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Got them. Right. Or or you can just wait. You gotta pick it up Tomorrow, I'll probably do.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Do you need me? I'll turn out would need it. Okay.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Oh, no. No. No. Not today. Thank you.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Thank you, Julia. We're just talking about it. So

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: we have a few minutes if you want to take a few minutes we can go around and I think with this you know we didn't get enough recommendations so we're gonna have to figure out with one committee how we wanna proceed. My thinking for the short one had been just to take some testimony, like, you know, in the task force from board, hear from the news, hear from superintendents later about both reactants in court of what they see that would be helpful and let our thinking emerge a little bit on how we want to approach that. And I've got you know, we'll have we'll have we'll have some other testimony from, like, the nonprofits and things like that last year, some of look at the wickedness in this arena work that relates to the budget letter and we can fulfill with you and that kind of thing, but this is our major task, I think, for the year. So unless people have a well, anyway, so people that's sort of my was my approach to and by the way, I'm meeting with, I think Peter Kwan just stuck his head in here, we're talking about the way that we can do some joint hearings just for the efficiency of taking in the same information. We're starting now Thursday at one. We'll speak to the past worship work and we're gonna talk a little bit more about other related topics related to this. But I think we both noted that the committee discussion tends to be better committee by committee, but taking the testimony and taking it in makes sense, puts you put some of that together. That all makes sense. But anybody want to go? So I agree with everything you said. You also asking for header priorities for the session in addition to reaction to act 73. Yeah. So if you've got non act 73, the things you'd like us to take up, that's something we should talk about. Okay. So heard my warning committee that committee bills have to be framed prior to the January, which is the it's near this year. And I think that we they that gives us only three weeks. So they may take some time to to kind of fashion at least an outline for whatever a potential committee bill might entail in addition to whatever comes up on the line. Yeah. I know the agency has a thoughtful of things outside of Act 73 that they honestly consider my chair. I've actually forgotten what they are, they'll be able to talk about those. I think a relevant topic, but not specifically related to I-seventy 3 is CTE expansion. Yeah. Okay. Second is VTSU strategic vision. These campuses, so I can't where are they going? What are they what are we gonna do with them? Or is it status quo? I'm really curious. We've asked now three years, fourth year now, what is the strategic plan? And we have now Yeah. Serve the the Vermont campuses. Yeah. The four Vermont BTSU campus. Yes.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: I I think to include probably.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yeah. I'm more interested in what are you gonna do with facilities versus the students that you've got versus with you for the future. I I just think we're at the point now where, you

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: know, think think we're doing that too What that perception is. Sure. I can't do anything. I can't do anything. So we agree to do it. And they always advise.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: Sure. So in terms of

[Edward Olden (Joint Fiscal Office)]: the facts, I'd be free as well. But

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: generally speaking, you know, I wanna make sure that whatever we're doing, whatever direction we take is guided by evidence and information from experts who have an in-depth understanding of

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: what they're talking about.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: I know it can be easy every day. I'm sure we've all done it to some extent where we have a position at the very beginning, whether it's a year ago when we first started this process or two or three years ago, but with more information that comes to life, or evidence that we don't get, you know, it's something to change your mind, or to develop a new position, a new policy, and yeah, so I just want to make sure that we're evidence focused. At least that's going to be my favorite. Also keeping in mind that with each discussion that we have, I mean, we all know for sure that teachers, staff, and parents really watch us like a hawk, as they should, and every conversation that we have, you know, that, you know, whether we're talking about hypotheticals or policy proposals, that has a pretty big impact on, you know Reaction. Yeah, it has a big reaction. These people wondering if they're going have a job in a year or if their kids are going have to go to a different school. And on the flip side of that, I get that it's challenging because then how do we have policy conversations about potential policy changes. But it's just something to keep

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: in mind that I'm gonna keep in mind as well.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I think to shift these hands, and argue with your banking is is well taken, something we have to and I had a superintendent safely just like shifting sands for money. Yeah, it can cause

[Senator Nader Hashim (Member)]: a lot of anxiety. Outside of Act 73, back to what Senator Weeks said, CTEs is the other thing that's big on my mind and trying to expand how students can job shadow or apprentice at different places that meet a certain standard that can provide on the job training that may not necessarily be in a CTD facility. And think that could help alleviate some of the challenges of transportation to a CTD facility. If you have a good mechanic shop in town that you know, meets a certain set of standards to, you know, allow students there for part of the day. I think that'd be a great way.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. Great way to get kids to produce certain grades. That's what they want

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: to do. As it turns out, agency had a lot about that. We could let you send cities to that. Alright. At start in spectrum.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: It's around this way. Go ahead. District boundaries. I mean, what are we gonna do about it? Well, that would pick one. You know, and and to his point, you know, this is such a complex client, really is. So many moving parts of this. A lot of misinformation out there. People that thought they knew would know. All of a sudden, they don't include myself. It's not. So, yeah, we need to make sure it was safe. Talk. You know what we're talking.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So are are you asking the question Yes. About maps in general? Yes. Yeah. Do We're maps. Yeah. Because we don't have

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: We do.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Can I ask

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Senator Heffernan? Oh, go ahead.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Oh, can I just ask for clarification, like maps that save money?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: District boundary.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. What do you want the maps to achieve?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: To so we can do that. Plan is we need

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: a map to start to put the plan together. Because what we Adam, when we're at schools is that just what the center of the students sayings that people want data, and we cannot give any data. If we had three maps, say one with two districts, one with five, one with 20, there's something we can go and get data on each. So we know how we can compare. As of right now, nobody wants to make a decision to say, know, out of these three maps, here's what works best in certain different scenarios. We have none of that. So that's what I'd like to achieve too. I'm after these five, I'm gonna be bold and say two districts right down through the center of it, and then most control is how we figure out to give it to advisory boards for the schools so they still have some vote for their soul. But that's that's a bold plan on my side, but that's, that's, that state is not big enough to have the districts we have. And I think all Vermonters realize that. It's just the changes that are coming that we're all having the hard time of, if my small school has to focus, what am I gonna do? Because it is gonna be, know, Hancock and Rochester have spoken to me that they should change their dynamics in their community. That's a concern. Is it a big concern how much money we spend? That's the decision we have to make. And it's a hard one, but I hope our two education committees can come to a decision and start putting some rubber to

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: the road to get people

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: evidence that this will or won't save us money. This is a good idea or isn't a good idea. Right now we're still screaming at you. Of the co op that the task force put out. So that's a decent idea. I didn't think of that years ago, kind of wondered.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You mean BOCES? Well,

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: co op sharing of resources, some type of co op. But if you cut it down to one district and there's advisory boards in that, then you don't have that board. But that's just my thought. But that's what I'm thinking.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So the question I was asking around the room is just, things you would like to, you know, each individually like to see the committee pick up or priorities of what do they have to do with Act 73 and or whether it's outside of the scope of Act 73. Okay. So, and we heard, we heard stakeholders, strategic plan, CTEs, and etcetera. Took me to think it was for full action of whatever doing this had no space. And I just talked about the way that we're gonna have to by the way, so working trying to trying to work more closely with the house committee in some instances taking shared testimony, and sort of organically letting the committee gel a little bit around the direction that it's where they're taking because I'm not sure what that direction is. So anyway, so it's your turn if you want to.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: No, just one more thing about the district boundaries. Know, I think, you know, we're still in the conceptual phase of this. As we go in this and come up with a decision on boundaries, we start working through it. We're gonna find out. It's gonna be pretty obvious what's gonna work in others. And so I think that it's gonna have to be flexible enough so that we can make changes as we go through this process for years. But we need to start at some point. And

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: so so I think I want to spend this session reminding ourselves of the problems we're trying to solve. And I use Lehigh as an example, right? I have been here through changing the commissioner to a secretary and deciding that a statewide health care contract for teachers would save us all kinds of money and headache and time. And if we don't evaluate if those things actually saved us any money or made our system better, it's irresponsible of us. Right? So I think looking at healthcare as a major cost driver and that did not the rate of growth probably accelerated, I mean, it did across the board, but we did not get any value in oversight or efficiency out of one healthcare negotiation. We're gonna be asked to take a look at that. But I think we have to look at everything through the lens of, are we saving money? Are we increasing educational quality or or workforce retention and recruitment? And I think there's a lot of things we could do that just feel like we're doing something that could cause harm. And I think we need to look back at some of the things we've done where we were wrong or we caused more harm than we have taken on board. So I do think the task force did a good job identifying the real cost drivers here and that there is there are elements of consolidation that could exacerbate those cost drivers. If we combine districts where salaries are very high, you're going to get higher salaries. If we have a regional transportation but not a statewide transportation system, you might actually increase the miles traveled and the cost of transportation. So I just wanna make sure we're continuing to return to what problems our Vermont constituents asked us to solve. And I think the votes we've seen go down more consistently have to do with should we be building a new world class high school or should we, like, belong with what we have? Not every not every current district should be reimagining its high school, but they also can't do the important work of building world class regional high schools without us. So I'd like to look much more deeply at school construction, And particularly what I think providers are asking us to do regionally, which is create excellent high schools that in my mind are either comprehensive CTEs or let those kids go and let those kids go to a different CTE community. So that I have in my potable hands, my CTE bill, which I've been working on with a lot of CTE stakeholders over the last six months. So that's a bit of a tangent, but really the the only way we're going to increase quality and create districts, I think, that are bigger but functional is by starting with where should we be building high schools and what do those high schools need to include to be world class. The in my mind, the American dream is being able to take your child to elementary school. To walk them there, to bike them there, That's a huge, take them

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: in the

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: because I had, well, students, yeah, that we lived out in the country, we were three miles away. When we were old enough, we pedaled in. But, right, but you knew that you were safe getting to school. Yeah, we thought we were. We had, you know, the troubles were then as they are now, just more relevant now. But I have another constituent that she lived in Ferrisburg, and it was an hour and half bus ride to get to the elementary school, going by two other elementary schools.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Well, I think if I could condense this, I think what you're saying is more community at the elementary school level and then progressively larger from middle and high school.

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Yes.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: We're checking it high.

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Yes. So I'll stop waxing poetic. In addition, I think special education is an area where we have not understood where we've helped or hurt. And there is a lot of good work that came before us that has not been implemented in some of these areas like special education. We were we're staring a lot of families and kids and parents and teachers. We we can only do that if we're really making sure that we understand what's come before us and what we need to implement to get some of these things right.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So how do you suggest we get at that? I

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: asked a group of special education experts and leaders and parents to do something similar to what I did with CT. Because frankly, AOE, I'm going to say it out loud because I already put it in an op ed or something, but mean AOE was barely at the table with CTE. When they did their educational quality standards work, CTE was not included. Then they came to our group and said their big idea is to have one CTE district that's managed separately by the state and a new state board, which doesn't solve any problem as far as I'm concerned. I don't see a single problem that solves that we've been asked to solve. That means those CTE centers have to relate to their existing district, which that has been where a lot of the breakdown happens, but also answer to a new, probably expensive or time consuming entity at the state level without addressing the duplication and confusion that that would create. So similarly, I don't think AOE has been the authority they need to be to come in and tell us what we need to do on special education. I've asked a separate group of people to do that work. AOE has gone through many, many special education directors and the most recent one resigned. And I think we need to take a good hard look at where we need to help create systems change with the tools we've already tried to provide schools. And I don't see any value, frankly, in just saying giving AOE more to do. I don't think that's helping our schools right now.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay. Got a special on the list.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: I'm gonna ask him to do this all summer, know, just to get our heads together and brainstorm where we go from here. I'm not qualified to work on healthcare. It's a driver, I don't dispute that, but we're not gonna fix it. The other thing is we gotta get out in front of the declining population. You know, right now we're dealing with 80,000 students at the end of four years of this transition, we may have 70,000. And once we know we either can stop the hemorrhaging and know what we got out at the end of the cycle, we don't how how can we come up with a plan to fix it? I

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: mean, what what makes me really what I really keeps me up at night thinking about kids is that they're wait list for CTE. That students who are probably languishing and not succeeding and maybe not graduating I'm losing. In their schools

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yeah. Think we all.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: We agree.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Are So we have we're losing kids. Like, of the precious few kids we have, there are some that are on wait list or being told, you're not good enough for the program that would make you come alive. It is an economic development question too. I do want to say, like, we do have to talk about this in economic development, maybe we need to have a joint parent.

[John Gray (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I'm really afraid we're all of my colleagues here, but, you know, we've heard clearly that healthcare is one of the prime drivers of process escalation in education. I would like to have I would like to recommend a joint testimony with the healthcare health and welfare people on how this is being addressed so that we share this burden, not just point fingers at where the cost escalations are coming from and how it impacts something as straightforward as education benefits costs you know I. E. Healthcare for teachers. I think we need to have an open conversation about what has caused healthcare cost escalation and what can we do about it what can we realistically do I think that's it. Yeah all right thank you if you want to you could just perhaps have the share the healthcare community to talk about some of the minus some things last year. I think there is a proposal for the superintendent's association that we'll hear about. We actually heard about it last year as well, but we'll hear about it again about a way to push the process of pick that testimony as well. Some of what you're talking about is cool, and some of it is what basically makes connections and how we interface with that. Good yeah agree yeah yeah. So somebody at

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: the leadership level needs to decide who's going to do that? You know, because we're not qualified, don't think, to be honest. And, you know, we should be boarding ahead to the transformation plan. Yeah. We also have to

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: keep our eye on the on the. But all these pieces are relevant. Well, hypothalically, we're not just that. There are bills on the table now which cap education spending, but at the same time we know that healthcare costs continue to escalate. So we have to have an open conversation about what's driving that at least for our own awareness. Will we ever talk about some bill that caps costs which caps healthcare insurance costs for the future? You can't pull a lever not knowing well, okay, we've artificially capped healthcare costs, and then the net effect is it affects programs, academic programs. We just can't be making those decisions without understanding. The consequences. The consequences. And why why we're in this situation?

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: The reason that I left senate finance to come to senate education is because cost containment and tax policy is different than addressing cost drivers and education policy. And I think the pressure of what senate finance has been asked to do is too great a way to bear with a very blunt instrument. It happens as a very blunt instrument. It is made much more surgical when the policy committees are doing their work to figure out how we are not setting our districts up to fail by asking them to simply have their thoughts. The

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: last recognition I would have is, I'd like, we heard last year some testimony about, the potential, cost benefits of going towards, smaller districts. I'd like to I'd like to have JFO in standby to validate AOE's spreadsheets that were offered last spring with that specific topic because we heard in the school groups and also from our constituents that there was no validation of that there's any cost savings to reducing district numbers. And I heard just the opposite. So just so it's not coming out of AOEs now, but being validated by JFL, I think that's an important step. Somewhere over the next two months or so, go check chest, the assumption. Yeah, the test that we presented.

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: A scenario. Yeah, pick

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: a scenario on number of districts, gen up the labor and facilities spreadsheet costs, out JFO validated so that we're all like okay hey they're right or they're wrong or they're off by you know x percent just so we can all walk away with at least we knew you know, line item by line item, like, person by person, walk out of that posture with that Dalton, with that Jefferson said posture.

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I mean, I was looking for Jay, who must have just walked out and Because walked off paying any of the informal conversations I've had about the difference in I think, god, I'm gonna evidence based formula or or cost regression. I don't know. But the AOE presentation left a lot of critical education staff out. I I I remember hearing that. I don't wanna put words in JFO's mouth, but they did not have the time or capacity to validate what AOE has put forward because AOE had assumed had not given a comprehensive look at what staff you need to run a statistical history. There was a lot missing that even when they did.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay so we're gonna we're gonna need something, some type of analysis to, go over the next two months. There's a you know on day one of the session JFO, AOE let's have this conversation to validate whether it is or isn't. Let's just put them on notice and we're going to need that support during this session or my colleagues point you know it's not evidence based it's it's you know it's it's an opinion a single opinion as opposed to a validated data set. Think we need to say we understand the cost impact or cost benefit we're not not having a cost benefit during this process.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: And we used to have somebody in here today. We we have them now. They might hear the main reason. Every every one of our meetings for the last three years, somebody was here. We had a question. We somebody to them and said get us get us the information you know who do we get to come in and testify for that fact we haven't we don't have them.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay that's been helpful. Okay. Good thinking. And, Mara, we're here, ten minutes after the weather's arrest and for a relatively brief, on some construction.

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I have some leadership duties, doctor.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: We're just gonna talk to the group. What year? So then Thursday. So by the way, again, I remind you, you can keep these reports with Natalie and we'll go back out. What's your name on them? Let

[Betsy James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: me know when I can schedule a CTE pairing.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yeah, We have we're gonna we need to put some time with CTs because it is it's so it's

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I had a pretty comprehensive work

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: with all Yeah.

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: The last six months.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So you would like, the afternoon?

[Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I would like the afternoon. Okay. Oh my god. I I don't know if this is my fault. I honestly don't understand this latest round of drafting with Lich Council. I have a paper copy of my CTE proposal, and I can submit it with very few co sponsors, but I'm happy to give people the opportunity to look at it. I don't know. Who do I I need to ask Beth if she can send me the latest digital feedback because it had I had don't have one that went through editing, so here's a paper copy.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay. We are