Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Committee Staff/Tech Host]: We're live.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay, we're live. Center of Education Committee on January 21. And we have with us today Scott Glales and I think we have from Bongartz from the Broad Student Assistance Corporation for their annual visit. Great. Yeah, and priorities, updates and priorities.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: So thank you very much for having me. I know your calendar is quite busy and I'll say that I did pass around a stress ball that we have been kind of sharing with staff. It does two things: it commemorates that this is VSAT's sixtieth anniversary, which is something that we are extraordinarily proud of. But we're also in an environment where I'm spending as much time in DC as I am in Montpelier. I will say is after having just come back from Washington, it's a pleasure to be back in my home state capital and engage in conversations where people agree or agree to disagree, but we are actually able to work through policy differences to reach meaningful conclusions. And my goal today is really gonna be kind of threefold. Do a brief, you know, just a reminder of the work that VSAC is doing and the programs that we offer. But just as importantly, Wendy Cohen from UDM is here, and she can speak to the fact that with the passage of the reconciliation bill, Congress passed what is the largest change in federal financial aid policy over the last fifteen years, which has pretty substantial implications for higher education here in Vermont and across the country. I'll touch a little bit on what that looks like. And then importantly for the work here, kind of share, least at a high level, what our budget request looks like, what we know from the governor's budget request, and then answer questions that you might have about our various programs and services. So just to kind of start as a baseline, which I think you all know, VSAT serves as the one stop shop for both financial aid for students that are interested in pursuing education or training after high school. We administer the five twenty nine plan, which is the college savings plan, which has become one of the most successful kind of programs within our higher education portfolio. We administer the state grant program, an emergency micro grant program, and importantly, with really strong leadership and support from this committee, We also administer eight zero two Opportunity, which is a supplemental grant program that allows any Vermonter coming from a family earning $8,000 or less to attend Volcanity College of Vermont tuition and fee free. This is particularly important from a workforce development perspective because as you know, CCB offers not just associate's degree programs, but offers apprenticeships and short term certificate programs, which are an important part of our workforce development strategy within the state. And then last year, with your support, we launched the Freedom and Unity Scholarship Program, which is a program at Vermont State University that allows any student coming from a family earning $65,000 or less to attend one of the regular tuition programs at BTSU tuition and fee free. And I'll just kind of make a note in advance of later part of my presentation that this is gonna be particularly important for Vermont given the changes that have taken place over the last year. And then oftentimes we are known predominantly as the College Access Organization because we've got counselors working in nearly every middle school and high school in the state. And counselors working with adult students. I'll touch on that program in a minute. But we also have a very, very large workforce. So, in support of individuals that are interested in pursuing, workforce careers or not interested in pursuing traditional post secondary education. We have the Trades Forgivable Loan Program. This is a program that will pay actively the full tuition for an individual that's interested in pursuing a career in the trades. And they commit to working in Vermont in and out of field for one year for each year of aid that we provide them. And if they fail to do that at Duverns to Alone, the vast majority of those students historically fulfill their obligation through work here in Vermont. And then we have the advancement grant, which is our adult non degree grant. This supports everything from certificate programs at CCB to individuals that are interested in pursuing workforce related training at the V adult CTE programs or the Advanced Welding Institute in Vermont. And then the largest of these programs is our nursing program. And this past year, we awarded $3,200,000 worth of forgivable loans to future nurses. In Vermont, we were able to support nearly two fifty students, but as you'll see in our budget request, we could have awarded an additional three forty of those. It would have been another $5,000,000 We did put in a budget request for additional funds as part of the global commitment request of the administration, yes. And we are working with the Agency of Human Services on the Rural Healthcare Transformation, the workforce components of that. So just kind of briefly touching on some numbers. Provide current education counseling to over 5,800 students around the state, and that's of all ages, because we have counselors working in every region providing current education counseling for adults that are interested in changing careers. The five twenty nine plan, I mentioned, we do financial aid and forms nights in virtually every high school in the state. For the most part, if there's a community organization that's interested in having us come in and help families navigate financial aid, we are there. We do provide student loans and this is a supplement to the federal student loan program. This program will be even more important given the changes that were just made at the federal level. We administer 150 private scholarship programs worth about $16,800,000 a year. And this ranges everything from large foundations that are interested in making substantial investments to your local rotary club that raises 2 to $4,000 a year and is interested in having a need based component to it and wants to take advantage of the expertise and the systems that we have in place and we charge a relatively minimal amount for those services. And then last, I just want to mention one thing that we're doing that is not funded by either the federal government or by state programs because we're always looking for innovative ways that we can expand our reach. And this is something that we refer to as the Workforce Opportunity Loan Program, a formal acronym, but it's a partnership with the Vermont hospitals, again targeted towards meeting their healthcare workforce needs. The hospitals actually put up the money. They identify employees, current employees of theirs who are working in nonclinical roles, who they think, given the right training, would be successful clinicians. They effectively provide the money to us. We make the equivalent of a loan to that individual, in exchange for, in that long case, for the education and training that that employee will receive. And then the hospital pays down that loan for each year that the employee works for them. And it's really a novel and innovative way of leveraging dollars if they were already going to invest in workforce development. We did receive some congressionally directed funds through the Business Roundtable as part of this. But what this has allowed us to do is create a revolving fund that allows the hospital to supplement that with their own personal involvement funds and keep the fund going so that we can continue an innovative way to training nurses. I, you know, for context, I think if you talk, or as you talk to anyone in higher education, everyone within the community feels somewhat under fire right now. And in some cases, it's, you know, for good reasons, and in some reasons, you know, it's not. But we are entering a period where there's probably more turmoil in the higher education space than we have seen in years. And some of that is coming from the federal government. Some of that is changes in federal financial aid policy. Some of it is demographics, because we've got a decline in high school graduate pool within our region, which we've been experiencing for some time. But there are some estimates that this is also a trend that will begin nationwide, starting with next year being kind of the peak year for the number of high school graduates. This simply means- Peak year for? High school graduates nationwide, which means that the national competition for students, which is something that we've, some of our institutions experienced pretty significantly now will be heightened. Changes in access to international students have a pretty profound impact. And even institutions in Vermont that have not been heavily recruiting international students are experiencing this because the institutions that may be in the next pool of competition above them, that have relied fairly heavily on international students lose those students. They now pull from their waiting lists. And what we see is the impact of that recruitment process cascading up and down throughout the higher education system.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Scott, where it says international students have all been plummeting, can you quantify that? You know, it'd be interesting to get you the

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: I'll give you What I'll do is I'll go back and get the exact numbers, but it looks like we're looking at 10 to 15%.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Thank you. That's good

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: enough. You don't need. And those numbers that

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: you can.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: And that is because the federal government is not gonna fund their education? The federal government was never funding their educations per se. It's really about who's being allowed to enter the country at this point and concerns about, There has always been heightened international competition for the best and brightest international students, and the concerns about whether or not people will be able to enter and remain in the countries are creating opportunities for England, Australia, and other countries to aggressively compete in that space. And so we're seeing The UK and Australia in particular seeing large increases in the industry. So it's more visas and maybe clearance. Okay. Yeah. And then of course, because you asked the question about federal funding, there's been a lot of conversation about federal research dollars and changes in the availability of that, and different institutions are exposed to that at different levels. Hand in hand with this is a conversation which I think you all, we've talked about before, which is concerned about whether given the cost of post secondary education, whether it's worth it. And that is having a pretty significant impact on different sectors of the population, but particularly young men. So we're seeing a decline in post secondary aspirations amongst high school graduates, but in particularly what better, at raising questions about that.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: It could be good news, bad news. So if Americans are seeing the need for college, secondary education, secondary education, That's dropping off is the need for the CTE or trades picking up simultaneously. Is it where one is maybe less favorable, the other is becoming more favorable? That a good news, bad news story?

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: I think we would love for that to be the case, and we're, I think, collectively working on gathering data to take a look at this. We know what utilization looks like in our programs, and importantly, starting in the pandemic, you provided us with additional tools like the Trades for Giving to the Windham and increases in the advancement grant, which is that non degree grant, which allows us to have on offer something for these students. But there's a fairly significant, particularly with young men, there's a growing body of evidence that suggests that they're entering into the workforce, but not entering the workforce with the skills that will allow them to pursue those kind of higher wage elapsed patients. So it's one of the areas of research that VSAC is actually interested in exploring further. We do a high school senior survey every two years in which we are able to take, we attempt to survey every high school senior, 80% of them participate. We are able to gather a lot of information from that about their experience in school and what their expectations are, as well as their aspirations. And we're gonna be releasing some data in the next month or two that takes a look at what it is those, particularly the young women, are saying about what they're saying. So we'll be able to share more shortly.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: So just to clarify this question, you just don't have the data to say, hey, they are not attending college, but we are seeing more in the trades that they're plumber where they're

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: going to plum to school at night or- We wanna test that. Wanna test that because- We have no data on that at the moment. At the moment, we should releasing some of joists. What I will say is that based on what we've watched the last four years, we have not seen significant, we've seen declines, particularly in young men's aspirations for post secondary education, but we haven't seen corresponding, when we ask them, this is in the spring of their senior year, what they're gonna be doing. We're not seeing corresponding increases in their plan to pursue those kind of vocational training programs. What we need to do now is to be in a position where we can go out and ask them a year after they've left school into the workforce, what are you actually doing? Are you a carpenter? Are you a butch digger? And, you know, I think from a PSAC perspective, what's important is that every student in front of us, you know, has a different career path that is optimal for them. Our goal in supporting students, whatever age, is to make sure that they've got the tools they need in order to successfully pursue them. So, you know, have a career plan when you're graduating. If you're interested in construction, we know there are lots of, just pick plumbing, you know, or electrical work, tremendous opportunities within those fields of disciplines. Try and hire a plumber right now, depending on where you are. You may be waiting for some time. If the answer to our question were that we've got more people going into those trades, I think we'd consider that to be a success, assuming that it's worth for all the right reasons. But we don't have the evidence to support that that lack of aspiration is translating into a concrete plan that leads to what I think of as a vocational path that will support their life. One big beautiful bill, I mentioned before, the largest changes in federal student aid policy in decades. So now I'm going to move a little bit away from the vocational side to, one kind of exception to what is happening at the federal level. Because you will hear about this probably not this year, but next year from our institutions of higher education, and I just wanted to give you, you know, just some an advanced description of what is happening, you know, within the community. And the biggest changes are, the first change I want to talk about is changes in federal student loan policy. Student loan conversations have been, you know, at the federal level, one of the largest topics of conversation tied to the cost of education. And there are two things that changed as part of the reconciliation bill. And I'll start with the undergraduate loan. Starting back in the, what I'll say, the late 1990s, the federal government created a parent loan program. You know, right now a student who is pursuing traditional post secondary education can borrow without regard to their kind of credit criteria or their income, a limited amount depending on the year of school that they're in from the federal government to help pay for their education. That dollar amount ranges between, for a dependent student, so a studious parent start paying for their education, from $2,500 up to a maximum of $7,500 their senior year. To close the gap between that $7,500 and need based aid that students experience at some institutions, a new parent program was created that allowed parents to borrow their remaining gap up to the total cost of attendance. And this became one of the fastest growing areas of student debt in that kind of period of time. The federal government, and there's been a debate about the relationship between access to federal student loans and the cost of education, whether access to this money was urging some institutions to raise tuition. Economists have argued and debated this as long as I've been in federal and state education policy. But this year, starting for students that will start next fall, so first years, the high school seniors right now that will be finding out in the next couple of months where they've gotten into and what their federal financial aid packages are. Where the previous class parents could borrow the full cost of attendance, This class would be the first class where the amount that parents will be allowed to borrow will be capped at about $20,000 a year, with a lifetime cap of $60,000 per student going in, so a maximum amount of $60,000 a year. So at some other institutions, this will have relatively little impact because the cost of attendance will, and the aid that is provided, will fall well within those limits. For other institutions that are higher cost, this is gonna create some pretty substantial changes because parents will not have kind of access to the resources that those students previously had access to. And you'll see this phased in for students over the course of the next five years. And I can talk about what is in place in Vermont that will help offset some of that and where those gaps are. The second piece of the student loan part that is probably the most dramatic that you'll be hearing about is at the graduate level. The credit crisis in 2009, graduate students were allowed access to that same parent loan program and allowed to borrow the full cost of attendance for their programs. And between 02/2025, we carried the merits of this, graduate and professional borrowing, so think med school, law school, and graduate programs, became the fastest growing part of the federal student loan portfolio. And now graduate and professional borrowing constitutes about 50% of all outstanding federal student debt. The federal government, as part of reconciliation, also capped what could be borrowed under those programs. So graduate students will now be limited to borrowing $20,500 a year. With a lifetime cap for regular graduate programs of $100,000 For professional programs, that cap will be $50,000 a year with a lifetime cap of $200,000 The interesting thing, or I say this only from a clinical drafting perspective, is what is a professional program? And the reason that this professional program exemption was created was because at the time Congress was doing this drafting, there was a lot of concern about med school and how med school would be paid for, recognizing that med school uniformly costs more than the 20 to $25,000 that Congress was contemplating. So they were looking for a definition in the Higher Education Act, which is the governing law, that defined professional programs, which would include med school, and used that definition. That definition is kind of idiosyncratic, includes doctors, it includes lawyers, it includes pharmacists, interestingly doctors of divinity as well, are included within that. But that definition only includes 11 kind of idiosyncratic occupations. There's a lot of negotiation taking place at the federal level right now on the regulatory side to see what else can be captured or the laws captured within there. But what you'll find at a institutionally Vermont Law School, we'll use them as an example, as currently contemplated, their law degree will count under the professional program, but a master's degree in environmental policy will not. So they'll end up with trying to navigate what is a much more complicated financial need policy. And students that are attending those programs, again, none of these changes kick in. They only kick in if there are new students starting in the fall, will be struggling to find alternate ways of taking their education in the wake of those units. The second two things that will be happening. One is something that will not be new and transformative in Vermont. VSAC, have administered the advancement grant, which is a, think of it as a workforce based grant program for non degree certificates. We've done this since the meetings. We've got a lot of experience navigating this. The federal government has always wanted to do something like this, and during reconciliation finally came together creating what's called Workforce of Health. Right now, the State Workforce Development Board is designed Is been passed by law with identifying which programs will be for those kind of workforce programs, but it could be a very positive contributor to our effort to meet those kind of non degree related workforce needs that the state has. And then lastly, this will be the one that hits us kind of later in the cycle, but our new accountability measures that are contained within the reconciliation bill. And these essentially want to tie federal financial aid to the ability of an individual program to demonstrate that their graduates earn more after receiving that degree than they would if they had only pursued whatever degree was available. So how would you think about this? Schools will have to demonstrate, and I'll use a undergraduate program, but you could use any Vermont institution. They will have to be able to demonstrate that each of their majors, in order to be eligible to participate in the student aid program, so think of psychology or or religious studies to define it. You know, my own discipline. That a graduate from that institution who majored in religious studies is earning more than they would if they had a high school diploma. And similarly, in a graduate program, if you have pursued, let's say it was a PhD in religious studies or religious ethics, that that program will have to demonstrate in order to retain eligibility for federal financial aid that its graduates are also earning more than they would have if they had an undergraduate degree. Lots of policy conversations about whether that is the only way or the right way to evaluate a particular degree, but it will create some pain points that we will want to be paying attention to. Because there are some, what I think of as being high credential but low wage or relatively low pay occupations that are critical to Vermont and any other state. And so we might look at early childhood education as an example. Or even a field that is near and dear to my part, licensed clinical mental health counselors, where we require a master's degree, we require three thousand hours of clinicals, supervised clinical training before we're eligible to bill, or before you're eligible to bill. And then we know that oftentimes they end up working, you know, these very talented and critically important individuals end up working in designated agencies and other contexts where the earnings, these are vocations that people are passionate about, but they're not necessarily ones in which the return on that investment is high from an individual perspective, it's incredibly high from a social perspective. So, you know, what we like to say is that the reason that we're flagging these is that we're gonna be monitoring this pretty closely over the next year to take a look at, one, the equity impacts of all of these things. I'll use that med school example of those changes. None of us will be in a position where we want only upper middle and upper income families or students to be able to pursue med school. It's critically important that that would be a viable career pathway. You know, will these policy changes, as I mentioned, depress the expansion of graduate programs that are critically important from a workforce perspective. I named two for third and whatever, you know, that we can talk about. And then, you know, how, you know, if they are having these negative impact, what strategies do we want to employ, you know, at the state level that will allow us to offset some of those implications that they can decide that we need to.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Why do you think they, did they give a reason why they wanted to stop this funding? Was it, we're getting paid back, just something felt, if you want higher education, that should be on you rather than government. Was there a thought process that they gave?

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: Yes, and I think there have been two competing policy conversations that have been taking place for at least twenty years. And I think that on the student loan side, there was question about whether or not all of the programs that the federal government was supporting were yielding the returns on investment that warranted the federal investment. So I think at one level that there's an economic question that was being asked and challenged. And so the accountability measure is a response to that saying that for you to retain eligibility as a program, you need to demonstrate that your graduates are successful in the workforce and that they are successfully earning more than they would have had they not invested the time and federal and other dollars in that particular degree. So I think that that's one conversation. I do think the second one on the federal aid side was whether or not allowing graduate students in particular unlimited access to capital without regard to their ability to repay that had an inflationary impact on what schools were able to charge or able to charge. And economists argued both sides of that, but I think that the conferees doing reconciliation essentially felt that unlimited access to graduate borrowing was encouraging grad schools to raise tuition in ways that they wanted to put a cap on.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: See any indication that they'll get more technical colleges for workforce development, the trades, see any incentives for about to increase their technical college?

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: I think, so I do think that one of the things that, and maybe this is an opportunity to, I'll skip over and just jump into maybe our budget request. If there's time, I can go back and touch on some other things that we're doing. Maybe this is, let me just touch on something that we just announced and it'll be a feed into my answer to your question. So one of the things that has been a particular challenge, we've got a rapidly changing kind of federal financial aid kind of circumstance. And VSAC, one of the core functions that we provide to the students that we're supporting one on one, is not just helping them navigate this process, but financial aid award letters are partially financial documents and they're partially marketing tools. And if you are not very sophisticated in understanding those, sometimes it's hard to know the difference between a loan and a grant. You look at a grant, it's hard to know whether this was an award for one year or is it for four years? And oftentimes we will find families that are unable to tell the total net cost of attending a particular institution. And part of ESAC's mission is to help families be good consumers of education. So understand what your choices are so that you're not borrowing more than you need to learn how to retain your particular deliverables. One of the things that we have done, and it kind of speaks in part to the options piece, is that we just launched an app that we designed in SPR. It uses machine learning and AI. We hope that this will be one of those examples that we're probably proud of down the road. We have been training it with financial aid award letters that we've had access to through our counseling programs for the last year. What it will allow a student to do, or a family to do, is snap a picture of their financial aid award letter. And we are, I would just say, we are not collecting NPI in this. It's question one. And it will actually translate that award letter and then compare if you've got awards from four or five schools. You can snap those pictures and it will do the comparisons for you so that you can actually see how much you're gonna have to borrow if you can reach these institutions and what your true out of pocket costs are, so that we can because one solution to these changes, you know, is of course to try and backfill the dollars, right? There's lots of conversation about do we make up for the loss of federal funds by coming up with other funds? The other answer to this is to help families be good consumers in education and understand what their choices are, including pursuing some of these alternate paths, like the programs that are available through VTSU Technical College, where there are some really, really important critical programs. And one of the things that I just want to mention is that the Freedom and Unity Scholarship, which was something that we launched last year with One Time Money, which allows a student who is coming from a family earning $65,000 or less to attend the regular tuition programs, tuition fee free, is probably one of the best ways that we can both encourage students to pursue those educational opportunities, but also meet the increased need that is arising for some families as a result of the federal and support for. So with this, what I'd love to do is just jump into our budget request really quickly and say that-

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Sorry, good. Yeah, but good. I'm a couple slides back. Under the accountability question. Third, forward. I'm curious if there was in this accountability conversation if there was, it seems that that they're focusing on the the earnings potential versus the community need and I'm wondering if that was ever part of the conversation about accountability where we know what the state needs, we know what the nation needs, but if we're only focusing on earning potential, it doesn't necessarily address if we're using treasury, whether that's whether the community really needs that.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: So the answer to your question is in the abstract, yes, but in the design, no. Okay. So I think these questions were raised, but this was a policy that was, on the one hand, born out of what is, I think, was an important and valuable policy debate about the shortcomings of the current policy. But the design of this was what I described, and I spent twenty years in Washington, D. C. Kind of working in this context, a very intellectual think tank kind of driven policy solution that wasn't grounded, didn't involve people that had been working in the trenches on meeting what our state and regional workforce development needs. Now, I do think that there's gonna be openness to engaging this conversation. The question is, given how hard it is for policy formation and change in Washington right now, how long will it take for the kinds of tweaks that used to happen relatively routinely in federal, you know, federal aid policy, maybe another ten years before any substantive changes are taking place. And what we are seeing from our perspective is states taking up this question themselves. How is it that we adapt to this changing environment and adapt our own policies to try and make sure that these changes don't negatively impact our ability to meet what are the specific acute workforce shortages that we have with their employees. And I think to that end, we are probably better positioned as a state than many other states are by virtue of some of the investments that you all have already made. That doesn't mean it will solve them. You know, it'll address all of these problems, but at least we've got tools that we know what they look like. I'll give a couple of examples. But, know, quickly, I'll jump into a couple of things that you've supported before. We've put in a request for our base programs of a 3% increase. The governor has included that within his budget request. We've included some language. I can talk more about this, but kind of going to this question as to what students are doing, one of the things that we launched several years ago was what we call our aspirations initiative. And you all have allowed us to use a portion of the money that we get within our base appropriation in order to fund what we think of as being, they're not really pilot programs anymore, but we will identify institutions where the leadership is very, very committed to and concerned about whether their students are adequately developing plans for life in high school. And for some students that is, you know, pursuing traditional post secondary education. For others, it's going to be pursuing career and workforce opportunities. So we have asked for permission to use up to $400,000 from our base appropriations to support this. This is one of our most exciting programs, and it allows us to do research looking at how it is that we better support that 50% of students who have traditionally not been interested in post secondary education, but whom we want to get into these opportunities that prepare them for the skilled workforce in trades and, you know, in other fields. One of the things, and this kind of goes to your question in part about whether or not about workforce needs, Vermont has been kind of a pioneer in these forgivable loan programs that are targeted towards very specific worker shortages. Trades is one that we offer where it's really a scholarship with a work requirement. We have one with nursing, we've got one in dental hygiene. We've got a range of these that we administer on behalf of the Agency of Human Services. Typically these have been funded through goals and commitment. And in some targeted places, we think that these are gonna be opportunities for the state to be able to respond to some of the, or at least ameliorate some of the impact that some of the federal changes may have on specific workforce areas that we have particular concerns about. I mentioned the Vermont Nursing Predictable Loan Incentive Program. We intentionally requested, we have been awarding 3,200,000.0. We could award an additional 3,000,000 in that program just based on the Vermonters who are interested in pursuing nursing and working in Vermont once they are done. We requested 2,000,000. I will say that we are also in conversations with AHS about that Rural Health Care Transformation Program. And so, that is in the very early phases. There's gonna be a workforce development piece of that that we are hoping to partner with them on. Once we have more information regarding how these two things will intersect, we will all give the chance to come back and share it with us.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: To that end, can you characterize the additional 2,000,000 then this is the Vermont Nursing for Good Alone Syndrome. The additional 2,000,000 plus I think you said you could accommodate if you had additional funds you could accommodate just the workforce need recognize this full workforce addition that this incentive is looking

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: at? So the answer is we are coming nowhere near, even with this meeting the demand that we foresee. As the hospitals are sharing with us, the combination of the burnout that particularly nursing staff experienced during the pandemic and retirements means that we are entering a period where our demand is far exceeding we are investing.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So I think that's a classic example of good accountability on a program which the state supports. The feds can do what they want, the state runs go into something, this is a perfect example of how it's done properly. So thank you. And

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: my question, I believe you answered it, but out of, if we came up with that money you're looking for, then nurses are staying in Vermont. Yep.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: So the obligation is that you have to work in Vermont, your license capacity. For how long is there? One year, right now it's one year for each year of support that you've provided. Okay. And our experience historically, this program grew during the pandemic pretty substantially, but our historic experience is that 90% of them fulfill their obligation with work. And then if they don't, it becomes a loan that they have to repeat. Or if they move out of state, it a loan that they have They're not working. And they're not working at home. It becomes a loan that they have to leave. And then what I did wanna kind of highlight, kind of two pieces here. The Vermont Mental Health Forgivable Loan Program. This was a program that actually was created by the Senate three years ago with one time dollars. We fully expended all of those dollars. It did not make it into the budget last year at the end of the day. We started to have conversations with appropriations and others about whether or not this was another thing that might be eligible for a global commitment, like nursing was. Understanding that there's a lot of strain and stress in that budget right now. This is another area we want to highlight, where there is a critical shortage of licensed mental health counselors within the state. We see this in our schools. We see this within our communities. And one thing that I just want to kind of highlight for these programs is that while we have the authority to draw a limited amount for the administration of these programs, More than 95% of the money that you send to us for these forgivable loans goes directly into the hands of students. This is not about us. This is about us highlighting kind of critical workforce shortage needs. And there is, to your point, we've got demand within the marketplace for this, and we've got capacity within our schools to produce them. And we've, you know, kind of a critical need within our communities for moving all of kids in. Then last, I just want to touch on the Freedom and Unity Scholarship, which I've already talked about. We received, you know, one time money for that last year. It's proving to be very, very successful this year. It's something that I know the state colleges and the state universities feel very, very strongly about and very supportive of. And what we are anticipating from this is that it will have the same kind of material impact that eighty two Opportunity did at CCB, which was that we saw materially higher enrollment rates and we saw materially higher, this is really important, retention in the graduation rates for these students. These are programs that have a high return on their investment relative to the dollars that we're asking for. And as I mentioned, we're asking for an $800,000 increase in that program this year, which would allow us to take the income from Chittenden to $75,000 Since

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: we heard the governor's budget speech yesterday, are any of these numbers in there? No, these are not. Okay.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: That's great. Are they in or left, there's enough?

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: We are confirming on the nurse forgivable loan program the global commitment the dollars we believe are in, But Freedom and Immunity, we do not believe it's in.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Just to make sure, BSOC Freedom and Immunity scholarship and

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: opportunity.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: They They do opportunity. Do not have an accountability.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: There's not a requirement, there's not a work related requirement, but we actually do evaluate the outcomes of these programs and can provide additional data just as we shample. But there's not a residency requirement? No. Well, are Vermont residents.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Right, but post graduation and there's not a balance of community need, meaning that there's a shortage of workforce shortage prioritizing certain degrees that's not part of the conversation with those two programs.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: These are not targeted in that particular way. What I will say is that, and I'll start with 82 Opportunity and CCV, which is part of our current base program. Two thirds of the participants in that program are adults, working adults in Vermont, who are very, very sticky. So these are individuals that have decided that they need an additional credential in order to be able to get the next job. And I'd be happy to come back and share more information about, you know, who they are. We are the first year with Freedom Immunity, so we're collecting the data, you know, on the participants, you know, in that program. But historically what we know is that, you know, where the Community College of Vermont is probably 90% Vermont residents and individuals that are what I would describe as being anchored here, Historically, the numbers that the Vermont State University shows will age wise be different. They will be more traditional students, but they are also very anchored. They, you know, this program is only going to Vermonters who have chosen to go to those institutions, and historically what we've seen with the Vermont State University is that those students tend to be true.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: So thank you. Thank you for the opportunity and I appreciate the questions and if there's additional information, know that you know how to reach us and we'd be glad to come back and put some.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: This

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: is

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: a well organized, helpful presentation. Thank you. Go back when you have

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: to stay longer. Yes. So if

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: I had a constituent that was interested in the nursing program, and I believe sometime last year I directed them toward you, appreciate your support and you gave me insights that their constituent was looking for the certificate. I appreciate that. That's one

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: of those hard programs, will say, because we open the competition and we know that we're not gonna be able to fund and have students who want to buy in. That's always disappointing when you know you've got that opportunity, but it is also a sign of the success of that program. Because when we first started it, we did not have the demand that we are seeing now. And I think the availability of that program has persuaded people to pursue that career as an option. And it's both a great and rewarding career at the individual level, and it's at the heart of some of the biggest challenges we face at the state.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you. That's it.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. We just have feeling or we're we're not requiring overtime for nurses. Make the feeling mandatory. Yeah. Right. That's that's. Yeah. Probably, they've well, they've been on

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: a part of travel with nurses.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Yeah. Voice. Oh, that's pretty impressive. Yes.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: See Tom Little on the screen. Do you have anything to add, Tom? Stand behind 100% of what Scott said,

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Mr. Chair.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: thank you again very much. I'm really pleased.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So we are on to walking across with you. Thanks again. Thank you.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So soon? I'm up. How are

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: you? I

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: just wanted to see you log in. I'll let her screen share it. And I just added a slide. Be awesome.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yeah. Can. I just wish to watch. So thank you for coming. That's the best we can wait for that. It kinda got cut off. The other day. And act like what it's worth. I misread the agenda. I hadn't realized that was a time working break could have gone into that world. I thought it was the next one this realized that was just a break.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Jackie, can you just please send resend me that?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Yeah. Gonna go ahead and invite you from closing the room. Thank you.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Requested screen sharing.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Alright. Yeah. Told you to come in tomorrow.

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

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yep.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Perfect. So for the record, I'm Doctor. Morgan Crossman, Executive Director of Building Bright Pictures, and I'm happy to be back with your committee. Spoke with Ways and Means earlier tonight about Pre K, so excited to be back, and I'm gonna go back one slide and talk about what we know about Pre K, and then talk about rural access with the group, and try to answer some other questions that came up with the committee at the end of last week. So in terms of what we know about access for universal pre k, we're ranked second nationally for access for three year olds and four year olds in the country, and what that means in a percentage of how many kids we're actually serving is around sixty one percent of our three year olds and seventy eight percent of our four year olds in publicly funded pre kid programs. And I'll talk a little bit about what that breakdown looks like, and actually have a visual from joint fiscal as of today as well. In terms of enrollment, so how many kids are we actually enrolling in those programs? We're serving approximately 8,000 children in pre K right now, and that number is varying each year based on a range of factors. So one of the things that you'll see is when the birth rate dropped in 2020, we are now seeing a decline in universal pre K enrollment, but it's also related to slots, workforce, and family needs. When we're looking at the capacity and where kids are in those programs, whether they're public or community based programs, we're seeing about 44 in school based programs and 56% in family and community based programs, and so those could also meet Head Start programs for the youngest and most vulnerable kids and families.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: You say family child care, home day care?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: It could be. So when I say home, I'm saying if we look at school based versus community based, community based would be either home care settings, some center based care, or head start programs. So there are a range of different settings, that's what we call our mixed delivery model in the state of Vermont. And when we talk about the rural gaps, some of the most important factors in that are the fact that we provide services and care in so many different settings. So when we look at pre K access and equity across the state, not one school district shows it the same way. When So you look at the variability, everybody has different ways of providing or service systems that provide pre K and there are absolutely deserts. So I wanted to call it one example, like in Essex County, where we are seeing one hundred and 11 three and four year olds in that area, and only 93 licensed slots in those three day programs, right? So even though we are saying Skirgum's universal, there's a disconnect in the amount of availability for those slots.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So not every family sends their kids to daycare, some parents take care of their children. Could you figure out, is there any kind of data on the 111 children point nine three slots doesn't necessarily mean that there's a gap of slots if some of the families are taking out some of that care, which is probably indicative of the percentages on the upper part of the screen.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Right, if they're making a different choice about care, are they choosing pre K, they choosing CCFAP, are they choosing another care option? So what we know right now is it's about sixteen percent of those children in Essex County who are likely to not have access to UPK. However, you're completely right, it's not a direct number of kids because there are different choices that families are making, but I do wanna show you on the next slide, specific to the question on rural access and where

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: we're seeing

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Are those 93 slots filled?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Not necessarily.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Not necessarily. Okay. And so, when we look at, when we look at the data and look at the number of children, and we're estimating the number of children we are thinking likely to need care, because we can't document families' decision making at this point, or how they're assessing needs, and then we look at the number of slots that we have for those programs. Sometimes there's wait lists depending on the area, sometimes there's a direct correlation of the slots are filled. In this case, we're seeing about 60% still likely to need care, and not all of those, 93 license slots, at this moment in time, I can't tell you if those are all filled. But in terms of going a little bit bigger picture and zooming out, When I mentioned that there are so many different models for the way that we provide pre k in the state, I wanna name a couple of the different ways. So, for example, St. Johnsbury might offer full day pre k to children who are four years old by September and tuitions three year olds. Rutland City might tuition all pre k students to private and community based programs and don't offer school based pre k. And then others like sorry, Bennington Rutland Supervisory Union might have a combination, where in Manchester, they're only serving four year olds, whereas in other preschools like Dandy and other places, they offer different models of care. So when you're looking at the visual here, and we're thinking about the mixed delivery model, what you're seeing in yellow is where we have community based pre guides. So, in the homes, in center based, and Head Start programs, and then that teal ish blue is where we're operating public schools, and you're seeing such a mix and variability of where it's offered, but the thing that I want to call your attention to as we're thinking about equitable access, is where did we not have any? Or where are we seeing deserts for what this looks like across the state? And so one of the things that I wanted to talk a little bit with this committee about were in the context of policy recs and in education transformation, the things that you could be thinking about as you're thinking about universal pre k in the context of pre k to 12 education. The first is, we know that having two years of pre k is better than one, and Vermont currently offers pre K to three and four year olds. The consensus across the state, through a range of information gathering efforts and in the policy recommendations from both the State Advisory Council, but also the Pre Kindergarten Education Implementation Committee, are saying, if you're going to make a change in pre k, maintain access for three year olds while considering what it would look like to expand for four year olds, because we have heard that ten hours a week is not enough. So the question is, if you're gonna expand, how many hours? How many hours are we moving to? Is it twenty? Is it full day, full school year? And as you're thinking about that, maintain three year olds as you're trying to

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: do an expansion for fours. Who? You're saying that.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Several So we have heard several proposals over the last three years in the session, whether it's from the administration or the legislature, potential opportunities to enhance or change universal pre pay. Some of those proposals have included removing three year olds, some have proposed moving all pre k into public schools, some have maintained three year olds while expanding for four year olds at an amount of twenty or more hours, and then the governor's office and the administration had another proposal as part of education transformation to think about maintaining mixed delivery and to offer, again, expanded full day, full school year pre kid for four year olds while maintaining threes. So, a range of options for how we think about pre K have been discussed, and the question is, in this session, how do you think about that in the context of a broader education transformation, and how do you maintain what's working really well for our younger students. So, in terms of people waiting, this is one of the primary areas of tension and things that folks are really trying to understand. How much does it cost to educate a pre K student, and what does that look like in a public school and in a community based setting? So one of the recommendations was to establish an appropriate pre K rate, and that is really complicated in the context of education transformation and the foundation formula. So that's something that Ways and Means and the of Other Finance Committees are really sitting with right now. What is ADM? What does the foundation formula look like? Last piece is around global access. So again, based on that visual, you can tell there are parts of the state that really don't have access for all of our kids, so even though we're doing a great job holistically and children are doing well when they have access to pre k in those high quality environments, not all families actually have that access, so as you're thinking about transitions, really trying to prioritize those pieces. I mentioned these at my last testimony, but just naming one more time, that the Pre Kindergarten Education Implementation Committee had very similar reps that are coming from the State Advisory Council, so this was a group that came together for eighteen months out of all of the Act 76 work and said, we want you to come together and make recommendations on what to do about pre k. Those recommendations were maintain the benefit for threes, expand access for four year olds, commission a report on people waiting, and truly understand what the cost is for both community and school based settings. There was also a really big call for data. We still are working on the accountability pieces of this, and I mentioned last time that we wrote a $12,700,000 federal grant that was just received to work on the entire early childhood education system as a whole, but one of the key priorities there is to have both of those agencies come into a space and redesign and really refocus their efforts on implementing Pre K and then monitoring from a data perspective so that we can answer more of these questions. Holistically, over the last five years, we've collected a ton of qualitative data from superintendents and school districts, as well as community based providers to say what's working, what's not, what should we prioritize in the coming year? So this is the compilation of that five years of data for you all. The first is that we know the investment we made in Prepaid through ACT 166 is working. There are a range of challenges, however, as a whole, that investment is making an impact in terms of families' access to high quality early learning experiences across settings. It's also, we are also leading the country in access to Universent Re K at that ten hours a week for threes and fours. We also know, oh, sorry. Can you remind

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: us what the cost of that packet was?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: The cost of Act $1.66?

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, 166.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Which probably would be the Absolutely, I will go back and find out what was in the initial dollar amount in terms of investment. I was talking about investment holistically. However, one of the one of the dollar amounts that we've been talking about is how much it would cost to educate per pupil, and that amount I wanna say was around 4,000. I'll double check, but around 4,500 per student

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: That just this kind of level set because we were, Senator Williams and I were both in health and welfare of America, Bill Kingford, and the price tag, if I recall correctly, was somewhere in the $260,000,000 per year.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Act 166 or Act 76, the child care law or the pre pay law? The child care. Okay, yes, different investment that I'm talking about, but yes, there is very significant investment in Act 76, both from the administration, but also from the legislature in saying we're going to prioritize high quality care across settings. Pre K is actually an investment that is linked to that child care law and linked to the way that we regulate pre K and child care, but there's a different investment and the pre K dollars are coming through education fund, so separate from the dollars for access leases. So, when we look at what else we heard from community partners across settings, they said the mixed delivery model is one of the ways that we as a state are providing capital access, and that the partnerships across school districts, not just the agencies partnering, but school districts with community based programs with educators and others within those areas is what's really holding Pre K together, and having access to the plural nature of our state is possible because we have that community based care option. One of the biggest successes that we've seen across the state is having a point person or a pre K coordinator in the district. So there's someone who is responsible for pre K and managing both sometimes communication with families, but across districts with the agencies to help support that coordination. There's also a shared commitment across all of our settings, really focused on quality in these settings and what that means and supporting development of the appropriate practice. There's also a really strong push to understand the data. And right now, as I've mentioned to you, there's so many indicators and things that we can't answer, namely the number of hours that kids are receiving in school based settings for pre K. So one of the initiatives that we are tackling this next six months as a collaboration between state agencies and community partners is to revamp the way that we're capturing data from school districts. Schools and principals and folks on the ground have this information. We don't have standardized mechanisms to feed that to the state or to a centralized place so that we can look across to say, here's what this looks like. In terms

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: of why do you think

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: that it's because we all have the systems or

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So some of it is that there's different systems, but some of it is that every piece of data that the state collected at any point in time was created for a really specific purpose. And it wasn't, so we could count the number of programs and kids and things across sectors. It might have been that we needed an application for X. So they ask a specific set of questions to school districts or to business offices, and then they have a different form for families. And those pieces of information have never been required to be fed centrally in a standardized way. It's not impossible. It's actually something we should be doing and should have been doing, and so that's one of the initiatives that we're tackling. But yes, there are separate data systems as well. So, the Child Development Division collects data on Pre K, the Agency of Education. COVID. Yep, and there are at least five different community based partners that are also capturing that data in addition to programs themselves and schools.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Yes. So how does the funding for pre K schools go to the LEA to go to

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: the district? So we have so much testimony, there just haven't been ways of means on this, but yes, the funding is going to school districts, but then schools are providing that tuition stipend to the programs that are providing pre K, and they are pre qualified pre K programs. But I would ask, the Joint Fiscal Office is doing, or has just completed, a very large report on the funding for pre k, the funding for child care, and the funding for head start to help us understand the interplay between the Act 76 pension plan.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So, all military schools, they compete for that?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: It's not competitive funding. So, again, we have offered this as a universal program as a state. The funding does flow through districts, and then it's a little bit complicated because each school district and school has their own budgeting process, and so they are having to estimate and come up with their best estimate for the number of Pre K kids that would be receiving Pre K in their district and building that into their school budgets, but it is coming out of the Ed Fund and there's a specific tuition or a specific subsidy amount that's going for Pre K.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: The reason I'm asking is that we got dragged in the middle of, they moved pre k from one school in the SU to another and Paris was all in South Wales because it put more of a role for couple of them.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: And it is really different, right? We want to have challenges, and there are some things that continue to arise around what happens when either a Pre K program closes in a district and then is open somewhere else, or if it's open in a school setting, or if a family moves from one district to another, but wants to keep their child in a pre K program over here, right? So there are temporary challenges that we have to keep working from that perspective, but I will say it is a really complex funding model. So when I think about a number of partners that have to be involved in the conversation about how to make a change or shift to pre K or what that formula would look like, there's so many different stakeholders and partners involved in that conversation. Okay. So, terms of problem solving and what you all holistically will need to be talking about related to pre K as you're thinking about any changes or as you're thinking about in the context of a transformation, is first, public school capacity. Right now, we have a mixed delivery model. Some parts of the state might have 70% of their pre pay programs happening within a school, and in others, that 70 to 90% might be in a community based program, so it's not as if we have all of this extra space, and that public school capacity also involves infrastructure, the physical space and location. And when we're educating young kids in a developmentally appropriate way, the actual space itself has to be adapted based on the age of that child, right? So one of the things that our public school partner said is, you know, some of us actually do have physical space and capacity, others of us don't, and so it can't be a one size fits all across the state. The second is around workforce. Anything that we do in any of these sectors is really constrained by the availability of early childhood educators across settings, and what that licensure looks like, and making sure that we have high quality early learning environments. So that's something we're paying attention to, because we do know across every setting, whether it's public or community based programs, are struggling to find and maintain early childhood educators, but there's also so much intentional work happening across the state to really work on that. The third is around special education. So anything that we talk about related to pre K and across all of these districts is how do we think about equitable access to special education? So if we identify that a child has a need or an additional concern, how do we make sure that we are not losing both the funding and the capacity to provide intentional services to those kids as we're thinking about education transformation related to pre K. And then something I've already mentioned quite a bit is this mixed delivery model. Any change to pre K will have an impact on both childcare, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, but also after school and out of school time care programs, right? So, for example, if we had more children being enrolled or were thinking about expanding the number of four year olds who would be in public schools, one of the considerations would be, okay, now they don't have a full day outside of those school hours that they might have had in another childcare setting. So now we need additional wraparound support and time so that our families can work. And so, again, just really thinking about the interplay of all of these different sectors and how one change here has a ripple effect. And that's not to say that we can't make changes, we just need to understand what those unintended impacts might be, and do some shifting. We talked about equity, so I'll stop there, but true cost is really challenging right now. So, colleagues across both the House and the Senate are really trying to understand what would it cost to expand pre K right now? What would it cost to provide equitable access to pre K? And where would that funding come from? And do we really understand what it means to do that in all of these different sectors? So, there's a lot of work happening there right now. And lastly is a challenge around joint agency oversight communication across both the agencies themselves, but then the communication to school districts and the communication with private and community based partners. How are we doing a better job of having very clear messaging around what the vision for pre K is, and how we're actually monitoring that system? So I'm gonna pause. Is

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: there a bill or a vehicle right now to expand pre K, or is it simply happening inside the ways and means, or?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So it's not a specific bill at this point. Folks are taking testimony right now on the Joint Fiscal Office's report, and it's really a fiscal analysis of all the incentives that are coming through childcare, pre k, and head start programs. Through education transformation, the administration has presented proposals on the expansion of pre k, so you're definitely seeing it there. And so one of the things that's coming is a bigger discussion of, is there going to be a separate bill or vehicle, what's that going to look like, is it going to be a part of ed transformation, and again, one of the biggest challenges is the funding piece of it.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Was it in the Governor's budget address yesterday?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: I believe that the way they proposed through Act 73 that pre k was included as part of the broader education transformation package, but I will double check-in the-

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: It's ten hours a week now, but-

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: I believe that originally in Act 73 it was proposed as full day, full school year, maintaining threes but expanding for four year olds, and so they had hired consultants to come in, and I would absolutely defer to Secretary Saunders and others that domain of what landed in the final budget on this, but in terms of what they had proposed, they had really said we want to include pre K as part of that transformation.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Wasn't there the ten hour program, wasn't that federally funded? It's a different fund, no?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: No, pre K is not federally funded, but we did, we have consistently over the last ten years written additional grants to bring funding into the state for early care and education programs. So, the last three years, we brought in $24,000,000 from the feds through something called the preschool development grant, and then we just got the next iteration of that in one year, and it's $12,700,000 So, didn't go away, It has not yet gone away. We're still working with our federal program officers, but no, we did receive funding over the last three years, and we were really, a really targeted application on building the system and really focusing on maintaining what we have in the existing Pre K, but also really strengthening the system.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Where are we in that three year?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: We just finished the last three year cycle and we just, December 30, found out that we have one more year. And so, the way that cycle has run has been one year, three years. But we were just told that we believe in future cycles it'll be a one year grant. It's not money going directly to programs, though. It's really for systems building, thinking about the data quality and prioritizing those efforts. Where

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: does push really come from to say we want to start including, you know, three employers on, what did it come from? The public? Did it come from schools to say we want to pick up?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: When Acts 166 was created, you mean when the universal pre K law was created?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Yes, But now we're trying to incorporate it into the school. Where did that put is that from the act or is that from where did that come from?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So act one sixty six was passed over ten years ago, really focused on the mixed delivery model and saying we wanna offer offered it before, some there are so many different models across the country, and we are really looked to as a state that's on the forefront for providing that high quality early learning opportunity as early as possible in threes and fours. But this was not a new opportunity that came about in the last years.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: So, but it was the secretary that said, okay, I wanna, who's the driving force beside We're gonna look into that, have this funding to, you know, we know how we're struggling now, it's very important what we want to do, but if we can't afford to do it, I don't understand why we're pushing you right now.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: And I will, so my understanding was that there was a collective effort years ago by both the administration and the legislature to say this is a priority for us as a state. Right now, I think that the push, I would say, is to maintain the existing structure, build on the strength of what we have, and make sure that we provide equitable access because we know that we don't have that right now, and if we're thinking about an expansion, that we would prioritize four year olds.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Senator Wicker. Good. So how many years now with the pre K? Ten years. Okay.

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: Ten years. Twelve years of pre K.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So do we have metrics of the benefit to the program somewhere in the you know over this ten year period is there something we can just show our constituents and say no it's the right investment working.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So, one of the slides that we have been using, and don't pay attention to the right side just yet, but, because that is, we're talking about third grade math and reading there, but when we're looking at this, what we're seeing across the board is one, we have more, we have, the majority of our kids who are eligible for pre K are accessing pre K and having up to two years of early learning experiences. So that was a huge win nationally, that's what folks are looking to Vermont for, is that we have actually developed a program that is universal and serving the majority of our kids and getting eyes on as early as possible. From an outcomes perspective, we are seeing really strong outcomes where, again, on the left hand side, this is not a trend line, so don't look at it that way. Each bar is a totally different assessment. So the pink or the red bar is our assessment for pre k literacy. Teaching strategies hold us the way that we look at what is going on for our kids in pre k, and what we're seeing is that ninety one percent of our children who are attending pre K are doing incredibly well in both social emotional development and in literacy. We also use the benchmark of Ready for Kindergarten. So when we're looking at whether kids are showing up ready to learn, what we're seeing is in that zero to five space, kids are really showing up in that way, at 85% for when they are coming into kindergarten. So in Vermont, what we're seeing is really strong benefits for that first five years of life, and the investments that we've made.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Okay, and then?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: And then third grade math and reading is a totally different thing, and this one's really tough, right? So, this is not a direct comparison. These are different point in time assessments. What we know is what's happening in zero to five, really strong. Don't break it as we're trying to fix other things in the education system, and when we get to third grade and we're doing an assessment of how our kids are doing in that point in time, they're really struggling in math and literacy. And those who are historically marginalized are even further behind, right? So we are seeing significant discrepancies when we're looking at children on IPs, folks who are struggling with homelessness and other areas.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So,

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: as a Navy engineer, snapshot in time is not what we focus on. What we focus on are the Trend trend line over the course of this particular legislative effort, support of pre K would be very beneficial to really tell the story. The quality of the effectiveness of the investment. But the one data point that you put up there, the 48%, we've got a ten year period of time that we've been exercising this system. Those third graders have gone all the way through the system. And I'm wondering why we're still only really at 48% as opposed to seeing more significant. Yeah,

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: so I fully agree with you on the trend line, and this is one of the things that we are trying to prioritize in a different way. The challenge is we don't have longitudinal data systems, so we don't have the ability as a state right now to show you that a child received ten hours a week of pre K, forty hours of childcare wrapped around that, plus special education services, and here's what it looked like over time, and here's what their education outcomes are. We can't do that longitudinal trend at this point. All we can do is the point in time counts, and we know that's not good enough, and that we are really trying to build the agencies, both agencies' systems for being able to track and monitor that. What we do see is increases over time, and then some leveling off of enrollment for universal pre k at some of our programs, and that varies each year, but generally speaking, we've seen that increase over time in who is accessing the program, but what we can't do is look at those trend lines across years. And actually, one more caveat to your question is that we as a state have changed some of the assessments over time. So we might have had a baseline and a trend line, and then we changed an assessment, and now we have a new assessment going forward. So some of those examples are things like our third grade math rating. We'll now have trend lines for the last two years.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: We hear that frequently, change of assessments, but if the assessment was standard for three years, there's a three year trend line. Replaced by another assessment may change

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: the

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: calibration but then we've got another three year assessment trend line. That's still valuable even though you're changing assessments you're still seeing either, you know, you're still seeing the net result, positive or negative or neutral.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Yeah, and I do think we're seeing that in Ready4K, so you're not seeing the Ready4K trend over time, but that blue bar, we do have over time, and it's been stable for the last ten years. So Ready for Kindergarten has been at 85, 86% for the last ten years. TS Gold is harder to math, we don't have it as far back. We do have something. Yes.

[Matt Levin (Executive Director, Vermont Early Childhood Advocacy Alliance)]: Mr. Chairman, I'm Matt Leden, Executive Director of the Vermont Early Childhood Advocacy Alliance. We're a partner with There was a report that was generated by the Agency of Education and Department of Children and Families of the University of Pre K in 2024, which we can forward to, which Morgan's organization participated extensively, and it shows exactly the trend line that she's referring to, so we can get that to you. So there is some ready for this data and so on. I would just caution you that as Morgan is explaining, that shows a relatively flat line over time, which should actually be viewed as a positive. It means that we were able to sustain gains and sustain accomplishments for our youngest learners at a time through the early 2020s when there was a huge strain on the system, when families were under enormous stress from the pandemic, etcetera. So Morgan is intimately familiar with this report. She can forward it to you. It provides you with some data. Again, as Morgan's saying, data's a challenge, but there is I just I jumped in because, senator, there is some data that we can offer you that we can have further conversations about later. And Morgan, again, was very familiar with this report, and she can go into it

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: in great detail. Can we all assume you can go with us unless our committee assistant could have JFO analysis?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: It's not public yet, but the second is. I will not out yet, but yes. So Emily and JFO have been testifying on it, they're hoping to have it by the end of this week, the second it's out, it'll absolutely come. Right. And I think one of the things to note is that the Agency of Education and Child Development Commission are also working on additional data analysis right now on pre K to bring into the space, so the hope is that we'll have more. And the question that I'll ask them is how far back we could look at TS so that pink bar on the left hand side on literacy and social emotional learning, how far back could we look at TS hold scores, how do we feel about the validity of that data, and then I can absolutely show you the trend line on Ready for K, but it's flat over the last time.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: That read from the left is the new bar for third grade reading. Does that include all third graders or is that just, does that part just reflect those who have gone through?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: The film? It is all third grade math reading, which is why, again, this is not a visual showing just preaching.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So it's possible that that bar is deceptively low as it relates to the kids who have gone through the program who started off apparently at a pretty high level. It's also possible it's not, but it's possible that it is deceptively low.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: But if you're trying to improve return on investment, in this case the return being academically prepared for their education career,

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: it's relevant. Well it is relevant, my only point is that if that bar, that point 6% was for only for kids who had gone through three ks it would be bad. Right. But that's not so this is so we're being offered this data as a graph and if that's the case then the story should be there associated with it and that's where the trend lines and the

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: caveats and the data inclusion or exclusion become important otherwise.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Exactly and it is three separate assessments at a point in time right? So we're not saying it is the same child that then is really struggling in grade grade math and reading. And the best example I can give you is my own daughter who is now eight and is really struggling with literacy. She did incredibly well early on.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So, again, that's the next level of questions that

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: are happening Exactly, between and what is happening during that time period, but I think when we look at, to your original question of what is the data that tells us whether or not kids are doing well in Pre K, the two assessments that we as a state have said are those estimates, are TS hold and ready for kindergarten, right? So if the goal of early childhood education is kids showing up ready to learn, it's that ready for K assessment, and that has been stable over time. The narrative here is that there is something happening in this time period that is is really important for us to pay attention to, especially for our historically marginalized populations who are really struggling once they are hitting that third grade. So what is it about literacy and math?

[Senator Steven Heffernan (Member)]: Maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but would we be able to get, I think, what your underlying questions are by looking at the NAEP scores and looking at how at those assessments, just seeing generally how kids are doing, or setting up kind of I

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: think that the, my hope is that in the next two years, we will have all of this data within the agency of education and child development divisions that we can be looking at trends over time to see, you know, from at least pre kindergarten through third grade, we'd be able to see the trend lines.

[Senator Steven Heffernan (Member)]: I mean, that's great, but also what about the NAICS scores? I mean, is that something that would be able to provide some sort of a snapshot?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: We could absolutely look at that data in the context of pre K and see what's there. Yeah,

[Senator Steven Heffernan (Member)]: because I am just curious, you know, if we're looking at at least a couple, you know, these different assessments and we're seeing different trend lines over the last three or six years. You know, it may not have the same nuances. You know, the assessments that you're working on and you know, so we can take that with a grain of salt but I think it could be insightful to some extent but there's also so many other factors that are affecting stores and so it's yeah be radical but

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: but that's okay. I think that the more information we have on how our kids are doing gives us a more holistic picture, right? These are three very discreet estimates at points in time, and I agree from my perspective, without the trend lines and being able to look at not just the trend over time in the aggregate, but being able to look at an individual's child's trajectory and what they have access to is the most valuable, right? From my perspective, I want to know, my child was in a community based program for two years. She also received two years of universal pre K with a licensed early childhood educator. She also received speech therapy in that center. So she received early intervention and then special education in a public school in a different district. So what were her scores in Ready for K and in Social Emotional Learning and Literacy, and how does that impact her outcomes in third grade? Right? So, now, I know that she had a speech delay, she was really struggling, and she had access to all of it. She had access to childcare, pre K, and she was a child that went through the COVID nineteen pandemic with a mask and speech delay and working with providers. Right? And still struggling with literacy, but also has ADHD and anxiety. So, again, to your point, there's a range of factors, but without the trend line and being able to look at what kids have access to at each point, it's really hard to know what the exact impact was.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Do we have that green bar for, because the COVID point has made us interesting, do we

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: have that green bar for a number of years? Yes, so we do have trajectory data on third grade math and reading that I can bring in, and forge have ZOE bring in age. There.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Okay, yeah. So, this, we paid for this program, and you give like your daughters that had all of it, but there's some underlying issues there. Right. Is there a way that we can see that the program actually, for all this, the dollars are spent, that yes, most by third grade are, you know, that 48% is mainly the ones that went through had the early learning in that. There's probably no way to gauge.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: You can't do it right now, but that would be the long term goal, is that we could see the exact number of kids who had access pre K, how many hours they had, which also that dosage amount, something that people talk about all the time. And right now as a state, we actually can't count the number of hours that children are receiving from pre K in a public school setting. So that would be the ideal. We wanna be able to look at that dosage and what kids have access to, to know.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Because I can look at my granddaughter, 70, and say, because she went through, and she's an excellent reader, she's just going. So at that point, it's like, yes, this program is valuable. But in average, it isn't. So we kind of reassess what we do.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Right, and I think that again, this slide might be deceiving. There's 3,000 ways I could present this information. I could have presented three different charts to you and said, one, here's the outcomes for TS old, and here's ninety one percent of our kids thriving in terms of their early literacy in that pre K period. The next slide could have been readiness for kindergarten, and what you would have seen is that over time, between eighty five and eighty seven percent of our kids are consistently doing really well in that readiness for kindergarten, and those are the two primary outcomes that we set as a state to know whether or not this program was working. The visual was more for you to see that when you're thinking about it in the context of transforming the education system, our third graders are struggling. How do we make sure that we're maintaining what's working really well in this zero to five space at the same time as we're going to transform this system because they intersect and they're built on each other.

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

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you for coming back. Yeah, absolutely. This was actually a nice, a good addition to the Yeah, I'm sorry to

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: do that. No, please. When we, when you first came in. Sure. And between the homeless and that astronomical number, do you still have that chair? I do because I realize have that you didn't

[Scott Giles (President/CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation - VSAC)]: I didn't do it today.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: But you didn't, did you provide that as testimony when you came in? Yes.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: I'm happy to send that, and I am still working with Miranda's team because one of the things that we talked about is there's so many different factors contributing to the increase of homeless families. So, are looking at different breakdowns with Miranda's team to think about all of those factors.

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: The center to Hinsdale brought in there, there was a flooding, know, and then, like, even still, even with all the flooding, that number is astronomical, and then we need the data to show us why it is because it's, you know, is it harder? The hotel motel? Is it, what is brought our homeless, because that's an alarming number. We do

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: have a significant rate of homeless children and that that also varies across the state, right? It's not centralized to just one location. We really are seeing that. And so what are the factors in each of those locations?

[Senator Terry Williams (Clerk)]: So if there's any way to get any type of data, just add that we can.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: I know your books on pre K. Do you also advise on childcare?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Yes. Okay, very good. Yes. So my job for you all is to say any of the systems of service that support kids and families, whether it's housing, nutrition, basic needs, education, special education, childcare, mental health, any of those different topics, what data do you need? What policies are you trying to think through? How do I help you with that strategy? And how do I connect you with the right people? Whether it's who has data in the administration, who are the community partners that could come in and speak to different components of that. So, even tomorrow, actually, it's NEK day, so you do have colleagues with a ton of expertise on the rural nature of pre pay and what that looks like in NEK who are ready to talk to you about that as well.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay, so one of the questions I have actually is, my understanding is that we are losing rapidly people involved in the home childcare setting especially in rural areas and A, is that true? And B, do you have an understanding of why that's happening?

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So I'm pulling to mind data that the deputy commissioner from child health, Janet McLaughlin, presented last year on the trends. And so the answer is, as whole, over the last fifteen years, we have seen a decline in home based child cares. So, I can absolutely find that data and bring it to the committee or ask Janet to send that in. So, we are seeing a decline in home based settings. And there again are a range of factors for why that is happening, right? We have a different demographic and population in the state for who is providing care. It's also, there are also narratives around women in the workforce and what is being prioritized in terms of wages and compensation in those cases. So, I'll bring that information the next time I respond.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yeah, and I guess the concern is it's hitting rural and and their poor parents have no option, fewer or no options.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Great question. I'll communicate with Janet.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: How does it happen? Does it interface with how does it interface with the push to professionalize

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: system. I've talked to a lot of home healthcare providers that head out because of regulatory requirements for education and they were just like you know I really can't afford to take the time to do it. I also know of a home child care provider that got married and moved in with her husband and because she wasn't living in the home where the where the child center was now she had to reapply for a I think it's a home it's a child care center And there were a lot, a lot of different requirements for that. They had to go through, you know, of the testing they had already done. Fire marshal, they had to have special leg testing for the water. So, a lot of this is regulation, this comes with the period.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: Yeah, I do think that one of the priorities in the Child Development Division who oversees the licensing and regulations has been to reduce duplication and to really focus on, again, health and safety standards and what is really required, but also reducing duplication in things like background checks and fingerprinting. So, I'm naming that as one of the major points of tension in our workforce as a whole. So that is being tackled as a very holistic approach by a range of agencies with Parkinson's and Dibones, but we also wrote, we wrote that right into the preschool development grant and wrote in funding to support our ability to reduce the duplication and to move that funding board forward. My understanding is that, for example, one of the agencies that is charged with processing all of the documentation and paperwork for background checks and fingerprinting doesn't have enough staffing capacity, our data system is not in the place that it needs to be, and so it's such a significant delay and backlog in being able to get people access to their documentation and time to be working. So, I think that the agencies are really working on reducing regulatory requirements while also thinking about improving quality across those sectors, And that's absolutely something that is being discussed in I think in Senate Health and Welfare right now and some of the other committees.

[Senator David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: She also had to cut the number of students that she had. She had a master's in the early childhood education, I might as well go work at school.

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: So one of the things that I'm thinking about is, and you should all have this in your inbox, we did send a report on app 76 monitoring, so yes, we're charged with monitoring the entire system for you all, but very concretely in Act 76, we were charged with preparing data and submitting a report every single year to you all. So, we just submitted that. That is in there, both on the financial impact of Act 76, but also what it looks like for all of the different types of programs, what we're seeing in terms of enrollment rates, what we're seeing in terms of upticks. So, I'm happy to talk about that at another point in time or speak.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Good. All right. Well, thank you. Thanks for All coming

[Dr. Morgan Crossman (Executive Director, Building Bright Futures)]: right. Good to see All right.

[Senator Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: That's it for a short day today.