Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sharon Elliman (NEK Choice School Board Member)]: We're live.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Okay. We're live. We're back after a very quick break. So one of the things going on in the state house today is NEK Day. And so we have three people from the kingdom here with all all involved in the education field. So I think what you're gonna do is give us a sort of a combination of the any k part that you wanna do, and then switch a little bit to being talking about the maps and the question in front of the committee today. Wherever however you wanna handle that is fine. So we've all introduced ourselves before, so I think if the three of you introduce yourselves, you can start in any order you want to, and off we go.

[Martha Vanderwoldt]: I'm Martha Vanderwoldt, I'm on the Canaan School Board and the ENSU School Board. Well, actually all of are ENSU School Board.

[Sharon Elliman (NEK Choice School Board Member)]: My name is Sharon Elliman, with Bennington, and I am

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: a member

[Sharon Elliman (NEK Choice School Board Member)]: of the N. E. K. Choice School Board and a member of the Supervisory Union Board at 06:08.

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: And I'm Miles Eddern, and I'm the chair of the E. S. U. School Board and also the N. E. K. Choice Board. I want to thank you all again for coming up that time for making it up. Thank you for making that Yeah,

[Martha Vanderwoldt]: apparently it was pretty tricky this morning. I was already here because of my disability. So thank you for the opportunity to testify today on NEK Day. It's been a little interesting listening to people talk about the NEK who who live closer to Montpelier than they do to Canaan. My neighbor who was born and raised in Canaan and has taught in Canaan for thirty years told me that he didn't know he lived in The kingdom until he went to UBM, because we're so far away from the kingdom that we don't even know we're there, but anyway, we are. I come today representing the Cayman Schools as well as the Regional Education Collaboration Working Group of Essex North Supervisory Union, North Country Supervisory Union, and Orlean Central Supervisory. And you'll be hearing from Elaine from North Country a little later. I have two main points I want to make today in this testimony, but first I'd like to express our support for S214, which would provide pre K tuition for our NEK choice students who attend school in New Hampshire. If we want an equal and equitable education for all Vermont students, we should not be withholding a strong educational foundation from a handful of our youngest students. But my two main points today are these. Number one, our rural K-twelve schools would be starved out of existence by the definition of small school in Act 73. And two, it is physically impossible to provide equal and equitable educational opportunities to all Vermont students wholly within the state of Vermont. Act 73 defines a small school as one having fewer than 100 students. That is the equivalent of fewer than 20 students per grade, which is how small school is defined on the AOE website under small schools grants. And I included the link in your written testimony. Act 73 does not include that second part of the definition, however. A K-twelve school with fewer than 100 students would have fewer than 10 students per grade. By any metric, that would be considered small. But depriving our rural K-twelve schools of small schools waiting would be a consequence of Act 73. So that raises the question of what is a school? So I went searching to find out what the state considers a school And so I raised this question in every forum I've attended in the last year, the Redistricting Task Force, the Small and Sparse by Necessity Definition Group, the Commission on the Future of Vermont Education, and even the Rural School Community Alliance. All of them dubbed the question, saying that defining a school was not their job. RSCA went so far as to seemingly support us while actually undermining us by recommending some kind of sliding scale of weights for schools over 100 but under 200. Under Vermont Schools on the AOE website, it says, and I quote, public and independent schools are commonly but not exclusively divided into three tiers of primary and secondary education: elementary school, middle school or junior high school, and high school. The directory of Vermont schools lists principles, So the definition of a school seems to be that it has one principle, no matter how many grades it has. In that list, Canaan is listed as Canaan Schools with an S. Those of you who came to Canaan clearly saw that we have two separate buildings. One has a sign in front that says Canaan Memorial High School and the other says Canaan Elementary School. We also have a tech center which is attached to the elementary school but on a different level. We save money by having one principal for all three schools. But that fiscal efficiency seems to make us one school in the eyes of the state and under Act 73 would cost us half $1,000,000. We could hire a couple more principals with that money. That would make us three schools if that's what we need to do, but I don't think that's what you want us to do. While the other rural K-twelve in our region may only have one building and one principal, they are at least two schools, if not three, a K-six elementary school and either a seven to eight or nine middle school and a nine through 12 high school. We have a seven through 12 high school. They may share staff, nurses, guidance counselors, mental health staff, special education and specials teachers and some spaces are art and music rooms, the gym, the cafeteria, but these are cost efficiencies. They do not make them one school. The primary educational experiences of the students remain largely separate. Most of them Cabot, Crasbury, Danville, Twinfield have fewer than 100 in each school, but more than 100 in the combined schools. 75 students in each school times the 3,157 per student in Act 73 is just under half $1,000,000 per district. For our small schools that's a lot of money. Our tech centers also do not receive Perkins grants because our class sizes are too small. Attending the House Committee this morning on CTE centers It occurred to me that Secretary Saunders' idea of a model CTE center of an integrated high school and CTE center and introducing CTE at the middle school level is exactly what we have in Cayman. CTE introduction classes are part of the middle school's regular rotation and the CTE center is right there. I do have to give credit where credit is due. Canaan's Community Schools grant has been a godsend. It allows us to provide after school and summer enrichment activities for the kids and adult education classes. Our adult woodworking class was so over enrolled that we had to add more. A number of community members have stepped up to provide classes in CPR and first aid, bread baking, Tai Chi, and conversational French. Some of our high school students are counselors in the elementary programs. Small K-twelve schools are a feature, not a quirk, of the Vermont educational landscape. They allow all the students in the district to learn together as well as serving as the hub of the community. Everyone who wants to gets to play on the varsity team except maybe in Bethesdaghal because if there didn't there would be no team and everyone in the community turns out to watch them play. Some of our small high schools combine to form teams. Gaiden combines with Pittsburgh, New Hampshire. I think the cabin combines with Twinfield. Kids get individualized educations. Every teacher knows every kid and what they need and how they learn differently. I have taught in very small schools, very small schools, and there is something magical about them. The relationships among students, teachers and staff is as close as family if not closer. The girls in my son's classes, I have no daughters just boys, were their sisters and still are. They worked with teachers during the summers refining their building trade skills and my kids were trapped to go to college, not into the trades, but they got their building trade skills at Cambridge. When my oldest son, who at the time was the director of STEM education for the state of Massachusetts, was remodeling his house, the roofers were amazed after seeing him on one day tearing out plaster and building walls and the next going off to his real job in a suit. They asked, if you have a job that requires a suit, how do you know how to do all this stuff? His response, I'm from Vermont. If our students were forced to travel over an hour each way to attend larger high schools, they would not be able to play sports at all because of time and travel constraints, if they even could make the team. Nor would they be able to participate in other after school activities, The chess club, the robotics club, the math club.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: I'm really sorry to interrupt you, but I want to make sure your other people get to testify because we're really sure They will. They're Yeah, okay.

[Martha Vanderwoldt]: This is not equal and equitable. Those of you who came to Kane and got a first stop can look at how far it is from any other school in Vermont. If you took the all Vermont route, the only school you passed in the last 40 miles was Brighton Elementary School in Isle Of God, which by the way is in North Country Supervisory Union. If you took the safe winter route over Route 2 to Lancaster, New Hampshire and up from 3, which is the way we go in the winter, you would pass in the last 40 miles two elementary schools, a high school, a K-eight school and a K-twelve school. If you didn't take the left into West Stewartstown to cross into Canaan and you can see the Canaan schools from there and kept going on Route 3 for another ten miles, you would pass another K-eight school and reach the K-twelve school in Pittsburgh. On the Vermont side, Canaan is very remote. On the Riverside, it's not. Our NEK Choice students on the East side of the district who do not go to Canaan attend school in New Hampshire, and I think we gave you a map of where our kids go to school. Thus, while it would be a bus ride of well over an hour and a half for our high school students to get to the nearest high school in Vermont, it's a fifteen minute ride to other K-twelve schools across the river. Of the three K-twelve schools within a 10 mile radius, Cadence is the most centrally located and the only one with a tech center. If we were to turn Cadence into a tech hub, we would get a lot more kids from New Hampshire because they don't have tech center and they can send their tech kids to Vermont they can't send other kids to Vermont. I know you don't want any carve outs to Act 73, but you can't defy the laws of physics and geography. It is physically impossible to provide an equal and equitable educational experience to Canaan students only within the state of Vermont. Canaan has to have a carve out. We do however support the task force's recommendation of CSUTs. We are already working with the Regional Education Collaboration Working Group of ENSU, NCSU and Hokusu and talking about services we could share in order to find cost efficiencies. We have great respect for our friends and the other SUs and look forward to working with them as we go forward. But the distances and winter driving conditions make cooperation with New Hampshire districts more sensible. As New Hampshire moves forward in their own redistricting efforts, SAU seven and SAU fifty eight might be more motivated to reenter talks about consolidation with ENSU Cross River, but it should not be put on us to make that happen. We would need help from both states. Allow us at least to engage in more collaboration with the NHPSI schools and or support our small schools financially rather than deprive us on funds by using a definition of small that seems to be intended to apply to K-five or K-six town schools. We were asked to comment on the maps. For Kane and the maps are pretty irrelevant. We are where we are. We're going to be in the corner of no matter what district you draw. What's more important to us is the SUSD question And there are a lot of unanswered questions for us about that. Like how school boards would be formed in an SD, who would get representation, does a town without school get representation? All those questions are unanswered. So, at this point, we agree with North Country and, Orleans Central that we should remain SUs and do everything we can to cooperate to save money on services that we can share. So, I will let Sharon and Miles talk about RAPs and all that others. Terry?

[Sharon Elliman (NEK Choice School Board Member)]: Happy NEK Day to those who celebrate. I'm on the N. E. K. Choice School Board. I'm not with the Keenan School. I'm on the other part of the Supervisory Union. The N. E. K. Choice District, just as a refresher, is a £10 all choice school district. We have no schools. The N. E. K. Choice District is all of Essex County except four towns. Canaan, Yucatan School, Lunenburg, Coffern, and Brighton, but we're all of Essex County. I think we're the biggest landmassive district in our state. I've been listening throughout the session, and you've been hearing from full time professionals and people whose work regularly brings them into rooms like this across many sectors with your maps and lines. You are tasked to do, and it is a huge task. I'm here in a different way, on a different day, any K day, for some plain talk on any K day. I'm a school board member covering a district, as I said, with the most square miles and the lowest population density in the state. We have population densities of two in my town, two per square mile, tiny, micro rural. It's an honor to be here on any K Day. I think it is scheduled in January because if you can make it here, you can really prove something, that you don't give up and that you are well prepared. I drove 35 miles an hour for over an hour on the first leg of my journey here today. But showing up here in our presence is often how we make ourselves visible, and it really is not often enough in Montpelier. It does feel like our distance makes us optional at times. We are honored to be invited here, and we feel appreciation. What makes today different is that this committee did not treat Essex Essex County as optional recently in November. When you came, there was an excitement in the air. And although I'm not Kane and I attended, of course, my SU, but there was pride. Your body language mattered to our town and our region. We had any K parents there too. Your warm smiles, your real eye contact, your humanity and the questions that showed you were listening made a difference. That feeling was in the air, but it soon dissipated and it became a very open conversation with real people. You responded to people with pride and the students felt it, and we appreciate that. Once you visited Essex County, you can't unsee the distance, the geography, or the daily realities of life in this area. That visit built trust and you demonstrated what inclusion looks like on the ground. In 2021, the Vermont Community Index identified almost every town in my district as the lowest and most vulnerable in the state. High to child poverty, food insecurity, and long distances to basic services are very real things, And our kids walk through that reality every day. From that place of things, I wanna talk about school choice as something that's absolutely necessary. In places with no sidewalks, public transit, and fragile economies. School Choice allows families to align their child's school to the patterns that they take often for job and childcare. It is a lifeline. We are not choosing to delete private schools with $75,000 tuitions. These are lifelines, and it goes out of state, and that is a reality. Parents cannot drive an hour when they're school a mile away over the river. I appreciate that you know that. Flexibility is not optional. The town budget in my town at 89 people is $75,000 That's our municipal budget. That's a fragile economy. If a parent has a job and these masks change that they have to send their kids somewhere else, it would just be devastating. We don't have anything in our town to back that up for that budget. Coming quickly to process, a recent commission working on X-seventy three was charged with visiting all 14 counties in person over almost two years. You'd guess which county wasn't visited? Only one, and it was ours. The message that we received is that our distance makes us optional. It's not an isolated oversight of this mission. It reflects a pattern Essex County knows too well for many groups. I wish there were more people in this room right now that filled the rooms earlier this morning, as we talk about education for all of the Northeast Kingdom, not just ourselves. We are underserved within an already underserved region, and I want to mention that the Northeast Kingdom includes three counties, not two. This committee knows with confidence that driving to Canaan does make a difference, and you know that. Building real representation requires reaching every part of the Northeast Kingdom, not just the places easy to reach. I want to talk about Senate two fourteen that has been introduced for our Pre K problem. Our K-twelve kids go to New Hampshire. Pre K can't. There's a technicality in the universal pre K statute that requires a certain type of certification that New Hampshire would never have because it's Vermont certification. Very easy fix. But Act 166 is close to 12 years old. So we have maybe hundreds of kids who never got pre k in that are in school right now. What other area of the state would have accepted lack of equity for no universal pre pay for almost 12? I'm delighted and tickled that it has been introduced, and I so appreciate your support and for the sponsor, Senator Lundinston. My ask is a simple one. As you move forward, continue to do what you did in Canaan, demonstrate equity to the places that are easy to miss and challenge others who appear in front of you to do it as well. Let lived experience inform the maps before they're finalized. As you consider changes to governance and districting, please protect systems rural communities built voluntarily and out of necessity as we did in our district. There is a map in my testimony that splits our district. We put 10 towns together and we're doing great work for advocacy. There's nowhere in Essex County where nine pounds meet and we meet all the time. We're doing great work for our families and the elderly and all kinds of people with the people leading benefits that our region is seeing, it's incredible. So, if the proposal on the map weakens the voice of the most remote towns, it's trouble. Splitting our district will dilute us twice. First, we're gonna break up our district. And then second, we're gonna be in these tiny towns that aren't gonna representation. So we are going to be deluded twice. And that is something that I can't sit with maps. Thank you for coming to Essex County once more. Thank you for carrying on what you've heard as the work continues serving underserved places. It's a privilege to be here on NEK Day in the people's house and be able to speak very openly with you. Thank you. Thank you.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Let's go forward and then have questions at the end.

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: Okay, so I'm happy that you guys had us, happy to be here for any K Day. I apologize our superintendent was gonna sit in this spot where I'm sitting and she was unfortunately unable to make it at the last minute. So I do not have a detailed testimony with you guys. I've sat a lot of things today. I don't know how much time you have, so I will keep you pretty short from a few things moving along. I did appreciate you came up and was was something came, and it was a great thing. So I understand that you guys are tasked with a task that we probably should walk away from because I don't think you're going to ever satisfy enough people, and I trust that you guys will figure out something that will benefit many people. The biggest problem that I can say we have, as this map just came out recently, is that in trying to address the situation in the Northeast Kingdom, especially for us at the Northeast Kingdom of choice, is when maps come out there's nothing to give anybody some kind of a picture that they might be able to start to get information and focus the lens on, and that's been a really difficult thing to have conversations with people because I'm sure it's been for you long pathway to be able to figure out how you're going to arrive at some kind of decision. So my question is that more information can be out there somehow, Things can find their way to people so they can begin to discern. The fact that you're splitting one of the masks fits the NDK choice. I feel like when we are, I'm from Kirby, we have a pretty good situation because we're close to the rest of the world down in the Northeast. I feel that us being with them and it was a decision that came when we were told that we had a choice to maybe form a complete non operational district for the state and I vehemently injected to that and wanted to find a pathway not to do that because the five towns we had in the Edsburg Scout, we could not always manage the issues that go on with it very well. So over the years since SAC forty six and all the work we put into it, the statistics we had to accumulate to go before the State Board of Ed, we've done a pretty good job of making use of our connection with them, the rest of the Essex County, and I know that our area won't be as affected as much but I feel bad that the work relationships we've built with the rest of the county will probably be affected. It's been difficult at times to get kids in the schools in New Hampshire that's been pushed back at times especially in pre k. I know I testified before we even were accepted in fact 46 validity about that particular issue and supposedly they were going take it up and address it nine, ten years ago so hopefully there's some way that that can be addressed because I think it only pays into having those students and those kids develop much better than where they end up if they don't have that and ends up being cost effective along the lines you don't have to spend as much in education. Could go on and on but I think that I would just like to see more information come out as you do it I think that to the point it was said that you know you've got to draw a map and you've got to disenfranchise some people for a period of time I can see that happening but I guess the question is, is there a way for you to present more of a picture so people may be able to get on that boat wonder where they're gonna stop And like I said, the healthcare situation, I like to believe, and I haven't followed it close enough, I like to believe that the intensity of these educational talks is going on three times as much in the healthcare area because that's the biggest driver that's creating the situation we're in in these conversations. And I really wonder if magically you can figure out a solution to that, if this talk will be going as far as it is in terms of dealing with the problems that you have and the steps that you see as necessary to make happen. You all for taking the time to hear us today. Thank you. Questions?

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Yes. A more statement that, thank you, that coming up to your school really helped, I think, the whole committee, but definitely myself, to understand how vital it will be to protect that situation. I don't think there's anyone here on the committee that doesn't feel the same way, but what's up there is very special. It's very lucky, I think.

[Martha Vanderwoldt]: Thank you. And one of the reasons we're so appreciative of your coming up is that people who haven't been there can't imagine. And you've seen it and I know there are a lot of people in the legislature both the House and the Senate who have never been ever and have no idea so thank you for coming.

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: I would like to just add that when we went before the board from the Choice District from Southern California right on up to the Canadian border, the biggest question was how are we going to provide transportation because we

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: formed the

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: art of this for district, it was challenged, we didn't have any way equitably to manage to do that, and every town in that situation approved that they would figure out a way to provide transportation to contact the schools that they're going to, which were good about wanting to bring students in, and it was a big factor in enabling us to go through, so

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: people are willing to do

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: things if they understand what's involved, and I think they'll go farther than well, those farther people, they might know possibly, so, know.

[Sharon Elliman (NEK Choice School Board Member)]: Thanks. My last word is to thank you again for giving us this opportunity and visiting us. Essex County has a vast richness of problem solvers because we've had to be problem solvers. We would love to be tapped into in this process and be accessed and approached as the rest of the Northeast communities.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Thanks, and I think just in a way, add on to what Sarah Robinson said, I think the committee has gained a real sense of the unique, nothing's totally unique because there's parts of all of Vermont that have the same issues, the circumstances do have the unique element of being unique in Essex County or in the Northeast Kingdom and Essex County in particular, the importance of some of the things you said today about, you know, kids being able to go to and have choice, the importance of choice and the importance of, yeah, so, and just what comes from being sober all, and I think we do have an understanding of that, I really appreciate you coming today as well, so thank you.

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: Thank you, thank you

[Martha Vanderwoldt]: for listening.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: So,

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: to

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: the last order of the day, and that's from Doctor. Elaine Collins, superintendent of North Country SU. So and here to talk about response to the map and the who else you wanna share with us in your capacity. So just I'm not gonna introduce yourself, but the floor is yours.

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: Sure. Thanks for the opportunity. And someone mentioned earlier, you're in a position where you can't please folks. Often been in the position where I have to make snowfalls. I can't even believe that the matter of the call is the wrong one. So you're in a very challenging position when you're looking at the state. And I've been hearing all kinds of testimony and opinions about how to make the right decisions for the entire state. So I appreciate how difficult that must be, I appreciate your service to our communities. So for the record, I'm Elaine Collins. I'm in my fourth year as the superintendent of North Country Supervisory Union, my fifteenth as a school administrator, my thirty sixth year working in Vermont schools. The 14 towns in my SU are Brighton, Charleston, CrowdStrike, Derby, Bowling, Jay, Little, Morgan, Newport City, Newport Town, Troy, and Westfield. And I still have to look at that list. We range about 65 miles from one end to another and have about five twenty square miles between. We also have about 2,630 students in North Country Supervisory Union. So not as high as some in Chittenden County, but pretty large for overall context in the Northeast Kingdom. And as you know, context matters, so please bear with me as I share with you what I perceive in my thirty six year career as some cost, some reasons why we are. And I don't do this in a way to school you on things that I know you don't already know about, but just sort of set the context for why the work, particularly in rural schools is really important. In the governor's budget address, he spoke about the increased effects of housing insecurities, drug addiction, mental health crises, criminal offenders, and lack of accountability. I would ask all of you to consider that many Vermonters who have these issues have children and they come to our schools. Do the children of these folks need more? For sure, obviously yes. Do they also deserve the same chance to realize their possibilities and potential? Also, obviously, yes. But it takes more work to provide that for those kids. If we consider that our state's children are one of our most vulnerable populations of students or populations in our state, then we can think of them as a little bit like the canary in the coal mine as a reflection on, as many have remarked already, this is a Vermont problem, not an education problem, right? We for sure need to make changes, but it is a reflection of bigger problems than just education. In my thirty six years in education, things have changed. And when things change in society, there are reflections in our school buildings. This hasn't happened all at once, but over time, it's a little bit like boiling the frog alive. You turn up the heat a little bit at a time and before you know it, you're in a crisis and you haven't even realized how you've gotten there. That's where we are in education. There are several things I would ask you to think about. About two decades ago, our community resources started to dry up. Things like our designated agencies and departments of children's and families started to struggle with capacity issues. That has direct impacts on schools because schools quietly started to pick up mental health supports and other family supports that weren't being provided for in our communities. That's a real need that if we don't do it, no one else will, but it comes at a cost. Housing shortages have been around since long before COVID, but it was certainly exacerbated by COVID. Think about a few of our North Country students who earlier this fall were living in tents or several who right now are living in a shed with no reasonable heating source, electrical supply, or real insulation. Think about that child's needs that need to be met, learning, or live at school compared to the typical kid who comes to school warm and well fed. Our schools provide for those basic needs for all kids, but it's exacerbated by housing resources. When local resources shrink, schools get cut inside.

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: Food Food

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: insecurity, another thing, right? We provide meals for kids, breakfast, snack, lunch, supper, weekend meals. It is the right thing to do. We don't want kids hungry, anybody hungry, but it comes at a cost. Substance abuse and addiction, another issue that is largely unaddressed, I would say, not through lack of trying, but without options to treat addiction and students who are living in homes with families who have unaddressed addiction, those kids come to school with real oftentimes behavioral needs and unmet needs, and they tell us through their behavior. And so we have to create positions like behavior specialists and behavior interventionists. It's the right thing to do, but it comes at a cost. As more and more of our young people have challenging histories, it's not just the adults who struggle with justice, it is juvenile justice that we have more and more of our kids require more restrictive environments, whether it's residential facilities or in the quote unquote lockdown facilities because of their dangerous behaviors. We still are on the hook for providing for the needs of those kids as an educational institution, and that comes at a cost. All of these factors contribute to students, many of them very young students who I think are probably the byproduct of our society, but also of coming out of COVID without high language skills. This year, we've had to send at least seven students to alternative day treatment programs. The causes for these kids going are not insignificant, punching adults in the face, causing employees' concussions, kicking, spitting, hitting over and over. Many more of our young children in our elementary schools come not being potty trained. And so we're having to hire LNAs and more nursing staff to provide for those needs because we wouldn't want classroom teachers to be taking time away from tier one instruction to provide those services. My sense is in that areas of the state like the Northeast Kingdom where community resources are at an all time low, schools have to pick up more of that. And so our cost for some of those, what we would once consider peripheral services are higher than in other places who may have other choices. Again, the right thing to do, because the cost if we don't do it is in human cost and down the road, maybe more societal problems, but it's a cost to our educational system. That's the current reality. And we have really shifted our schools from being educational institutions to being social services agencies. That horse is already out of the barn. We can argue that that's good, bad, or indifferent, but the horse is there. We can't back that out, right? That's where we are. I'll also remind you about some of the unfunded mandates, universal pre K, it's about $4,000 per student going out to other private suppliers. We've had to hire up preschool teachers, at least one in each school, preschool aids, at least one in each school, larger schools have up to three preschool teachers and preschool aids. Again, investment in early childhood, it's never a bad thing. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but it's at a cost to our education system. We get 0.46 of that reimbursed in our ABM. And special education for our preschool students that we provide in their homes and private programs and in our schools, those are costs that we don't get any reimbursement for because they're pre K. Dual enrollment, early college, great programs, right? Gives our kids a real leg up. We need to do that for our students. Not gonna say no, but it comes at a cost. Oh goodness, PCBs, everybody's favorite topic, especially one I over the last couple of years. We've spent $8,700,000 just in North Country High School on PCBs and we haven't gotten rid of one of them. We're at a point where we're going to have to do something really dramatic in North Country High School. So I've heard repeatedly, and you know, schools are spending too much money on too few students. I agree. And I agree that you need to be more efficient and that there are likely cost containment measures that can be realized with some systemic change. I hope you don't feel like I wasted your time with setting the stage for why we've gotten to where we are currently, because we've been boiling the frog alive in our educational systems. We keep adding and adding at more and more cost, and then saying, we're spending too much on education. So at some point we have to make a decision about what are schools responsible for providing for our communities. Now to the questions you asked my perspective about. The consolidation of districts or supervisory unions at the superintendent's level, sure, it's possible. You're the general assembly, you can make it happen. Central office budgets are 5% to 10% of overall spending across the state. So that's not a huge savings in and of itself. The devil is always in the details. And although redistricting maps can be determined, the logistics of implementing those districts are where the roll costs come. The hybrid map that the secretary proposed was a combination of the VSBA regions and a comprehensive regional high school approach. The VSBA region for the Northeast would encompass twelve forty one square miles, more than twice of what I currently oversee, and not it for being that superintendent, just saying, 35 towns and 19 schools. Although the VSPA regions are long established, this superintendent's perspective, it's too large to be practical in our area. The longest stretch from school to school in this region would be from day to king, about an hour and thirty nine minutes with no weather or traffic. On the first day of school at North Country High School, we had an incredible bomb threat. We had to evacuate our students. The superintendent has a duty to be on-site, to be at command center, to make decisions, to help manage communication. If I were over an hour and a half away, I'm not sure how I could have done that. Last year, we had an assistant superintendent to our Supervisory Union, thank God. Just last year, we saw PCBs in the high school and educating students, seven twenty students in tenants. Our principal who left in October in Brighton, which met two days a week each for the assistant superintendent and I to be in that school in Essex County, which is 40 miles round trip from my office, negotiating both support staff and certified staff contracts, I would not have made it. I've got pretty good resilience, I would have quit. So with another 1,300 students and eight more schools, we'd likely need more assistant superintendents. It's not because we love to sit in our office and watch Jerry Springer eat bonbons. We have real problems that happen every day in schools and principals call us. So we need to be available to help meet the needs of each of our individual schools. That's the service that central office provides is supporting our students and our administrators. We would need likely more central office folks to manage things like payroll and personnel and early childhood and special ed. And so if we consolidate, it means that we're creating a bigger bureaucracy potentially. If we consolidate with other SUs, and if you consider the 2,000 range, we're well within the 2,000 range, we're actually over

[Martha Vanderwoldt]: the 2,500

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: range. And potentially that's something for you to consider for North Country. But in this combined district that was presented to you, whose CBA do we follow? Whose collective bargaining agreement do we follow? If 80 to 85% of your budgets are based on personnel costs and we level up to someone else's CBA. There's no cost savings there. Who determines seniority? Whose financial system will be used? We transferred to a financial system because ours was outdated last year. Cost us over $200,000 to transition our daily basis. If we were doing that for 35 towns and 19 schools, what's the cost to that and who's responsible for it and where's the manpower to do it? With PCBs at North Country High School, there is both a challenge and an opportunity. And I hate to say that PCBs present us with an opportunity, but they in fact might. The building is 60 years old and has outlived the life expectancy of all of the systems that are in there. Having spent $8,700,000 in PCB mitigation has done nothing to get rid of them. If we feel that a newly constructed regional high school is the best way to accomplish this for North Country, then perhaps we look at this in a more regional manner. We're going to have to rebuild, maybe we think about this more globally. We would absolutely need state aid for school construction to make that a reality and a process for what that would look like and lots of supports for others. And I don't know that it would be possible, but it's something that we should certainly look at. And perhaps it gives us an opportunity for that kind of collaboration. With the utmost respect for Senator Beck, the CTE district model that he presented seems more convoluted because of the changing structures and governance that he proposed, Having pre K to schools and pre K to eight schools that are in different districts wouldn't seem to make sense to me and would be harder to manage. The bigger and more complex the system, the more bureaucracy you need to manage the complex system. If the point of that is about access to CTE centers, simply redistricting won't change access for us. We have North Country Supervisory Unions, North Country Career Center that we share with Lake Region. It's more than just access. It's also infrastructure investment. For example, our welding program is always wait listed. There are tons of kids who want to get into welding. It would take about a quarter of $1,000,000 to outfit a second classroom to expand access. So although we would want to do that, and the vision would be at some point, hopefully we'll be able to do that. It takes real investment of real dollars to create infrastructure to increase capacity. So it's not as easy as just redistricting and boom, we're there. It would be good for students, absolutely, but it would take a larger investment and certainly wouldn't save money in the short term. As a supervisory union versus supervisory district, as with most things, there are positives and negatives of both models. You've heard from Essex North that we are in our working group and we are aligned with trying to stay supervisory union. We have strong representation from each of our towns, active boards and schools at the heart of our rural communities. And we're cost effective, small and cost effective. Most of our schools fall well below or at the state average for cost per pupil spending. Our central office costs $22,800,000 to run, but we only assess back $8,300,000 because we manage a large amount of grants and sub grant a lot of grants to our schools. On the flip side, there are also 15 boards, 63 board members and 17 board meetings a month. Is it possible to keep North Country as one and make it a supervisory district? Certainly. We're used to working together and we have trusted relationships with each other. There's greater flexibility, as my colleagues mentioned earlier, about being able to move resources in that model. We may be able to mitigate some of the smaller class sizes if we're able to move kids and teachers. However, the absolute necessity for our boards and for me in this model is that we have voice and the ability to advocate for our communities in terms of representation. Direct representation from our communities in the supervisory district model is the only way that our voters will feel that that's palatable for them, so that things are being done with them and not to them. Ultimately, it's up to the general assembly to make that choice, but no system has all positives and no system has all negatives. There are positives and negatives in each system. But in our SU, we have made it work with both coordinated curriculum and trying to achieve cost containment as well as possible. But you have some suggestions for a path forward. You'll have to consider a multifaceted approach. Consider why we're thinking about district consolidation and think about how to maximize efficiencies. If there is no evidence to show that mega districts will actually save money, why are we considering it? Senator Beck said it yesterday, there's no cost savings in Act 73. Jay Nichols provided some testimony on this yesterday and I agree with many of his points, Reducing the number of districts to fewer, but not so few that it creates greater bureaucracy seems more reasonable and manageable. People who are used to working together will continue to work together. This allows real change to happen on a manageable scale. Allow districts a limited amount of time to create incentivized voluntary mergers, either for services or for districts. For my country with our increased need for alternative day treatment programs, there's a real opportunity for us to work with our neighboring district like Aung Siu and create our own shared services model. Reinstate state aid for school construction. That's the move that you keep hearing. I apologize for saying that again, but it is absolutely essential. That means construction costs, which won't save money in the short term. Sometimes closing two schools to reopen the larger ones and practical in terms of transportation in our rural areas. In Morgan and Holland, our communities actually did vote to close their schools. And they sent their elementary schools to Derby Elementary School. This makes for a very long day for some of our very young students who travel about seventy five or eighty minutes one way to school every day. It sounds good from afar to say, let's just close schools and consolidate until the reality of what that means for our young children hits home. The devil is always in the details and the only people who live and serve in their own context can tell you what those details might be. In terms of savings on Holland's tax rate, closing their school, their CLA is at 44%. With a statewide adjustment, it's somewhere in the 60s. Their tax rate is going up 19¢. And all they have is tuition. They don't have a building anymore. They sold it to the town for a dollar on July 1. Think about unfunded mandates and the extra work of our schools. How do we pay for those things? Do we continue to pay for those things? We may have to prioritize as a state. Take steps to address cost drivers. Health insurance, you've heard it said before. Health insurance, a family plan costs $42,000 currently. That's almost as much as a first year teacher's salary. That's real money across our SU. 125% in eight years is really incredible. I would ask model, model, model, please, model what this looks like. We can't accept on face value that this is gonna save us money or gonna provide cost containment. It would be an awful thing if we went through all these machinations and all of this advocacy and ended up with something that actually cost us more money. So if the problem is we have to have cost containment and realize efficiencies, then we have to model it and show that that's what the end result will be. And right now, I don't see a lot of modeling or I don't see a lot of data to support this will actually save us money or even contain costs. Finally, I would ask, and maybe not specifically to this committee, but more to our state's leadership who has somehow education has become enemy of the state number one. Public schools perform necessary and important work that is well beyond the scope of academic achievement. And over time, that commitment and that responsibility has only grown. So to then be blamed for spending too much in large part because of those extra responsibilities is unfair and demoralizing to those of us who are working in schools. We know we're spending a lot of money and the tension between our communities and our schools is unsustainable. It continues to be a heavy weight for administrators and school boards. We want change too, and we have practical experience and information that will be important for you to know as we implement change. Please continue to work with us again for your work. I'm happy to answer questions if you have any.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Thank you. Do we have a copy of that?

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: You do. I apologize for my lateness, I did You have. Four to nine. Yeah. I had to call an early release today because of winter at Westwells, and so I was a little delayed.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Was it you who mentioned snow days?

[Martha Vanderwoldt]: Yes.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Snow days are the hardest thing for every school.

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: They certainly are. And I get complaints on both ends based on the decision. Anyway,

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: questions? Just a comment that the slow cooking frog, and I disagree with that. Twenty years ago, we knew we had a problem and we just kept kicking it down the road. That's what we've been doing. Now it's to a point that we cannot kick it down the road anymore. And every explanation you gave was great of the reasons why and how our legislation didn't start saying, Hey, we need to do something about this. Your point on about that. But as far as it being slow, it just didn't We knew what we were doing, but didn't bother to stop.

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: I think from the school's perspective, it's been a slow burn because just more and more has been piled on over the years. And, oh, yep, sure, we'll do that too. Yep, you're gonna ask us to do that? Yep, we'll do that too, because it's in the best interest of kids and it's in the service of our communities. But it all comes at a cost.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yes. So would you be willing as a superintendent to work with us to alleviate these problems?

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: I am ready, willing, and able to do whatever I can to help you. I don't know that I have anything practical to provide other than my lived experience of being a Northeast Kingdom girl for my entire life.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Well, you've you've identified a lot of things that I didn't even think of. So and and we're that's the scrutiny we're gonna get put on here because we're gonna have to come up with a plan.

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: I think one of the important things to remember, particularly in a rural context, is that those services that we provide won't be provided in other ways to our students. And so for many of our students, those are lifelines for both our students and their families. And so it's more complicated than just saying, we'll stop doing it because we'll lose students and families in that if we do that.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Quick comment. One line that you mentioned that sticks with me the most is when you mentioned this concern about going through all of these hearings, all of these challenges that we have only to end up with a system that could potentially cost people more. That is one thing that keeps me very concerned about everything that we're doing and just wanted to thank you for highlighting.

[Steven Heffernan (Member)]: Yeah, wanna thank you for your testimony. You've highlighted a lot of the issues that others have, you've reinforced, made us more sensitive to some of the things that we're contemplating. I did wanna draw out from your comments, the one sentence you have, I believe this is one of your responsibilities. It's you deal with 15 boards, 63 board members, and 17 board meetings a month. Is that sustainable?

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: Not as I get closer to 60.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Is that

[Steven Heffernan (Member)]: the best use of your time?

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: I would say there are some inefficiencies in going to 17 board meetings. And yet I really value the work with the boards. And I think that's the point I was trying to make with representation from each town. We're used to the supervisory union structure where we have representation from each town on our executive committee. So we're used to that working relationship and there is a voice of each town. John is on our executive committee. He comes to each executive committee meeting, even though he represents a non operating district, he still has a voice on the board. And I think that's a really important consideration. If you think about mega districts and voting wards, that doesn't really fly well with Northeast Kingdom folks and probably in other parts of our state, because it's not, your voice isn't heard. And it's not that we can't make hard decisions, think about Morgan and Holland, they closed their schools. It's that we want to be able to be considered and our context considered in the decisions that have to be made. And that requires representation.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Along those lines, could you have your assistant, new assistant superintendent take care of some of those?

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: We do separate. We do try to separate. And every other month, we have a system where I go to one on one month and she goes to the other on the other month. That every two months we're in a board meeting so we don't lose track. However, with negotiations, lots of student hearings last year and advocacy groups and other things that came up. It was still a lot of three and four nights out every week. And we're on par for that this year as well.

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: Yes, just as a follow-up

[Steven Heffernan (Member)]: to the concept of governance is not within this committee, although some of the things we may support would affect the need for the conversation about governance. Governance is really in the government operations committees. And so agree with you. But I do anticipate that that committee will be looking for input on what is the right scale of what a superintendent or their superintendent staff can handle from a governance perspective. Because that's one of the There's three key elements to this education transformation. Three key stumbling blocks. And one of them is governance. And I I don't hear a conversation about that yet. All I hear is the negative side of we have so many. How do we shift to maintain democracy, etcetera, etcetera? But that that conversation about how how do we reflect governance in a in an education transformation. I I I don't hear that conversation yet. So I'm I'm glad that you highlighted what you're doing. It's not sure where we're going, and I don't hear that conversation in the building yet.

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: We're having it in our buildings.

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: Good, good. I

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: thought the other thing, one thing you said that, I guess I knew, but you said it for the first time was that part of the reason you're having to pick up some of the services you're picking up is because of, I don't know the right term is collapse, one of the designated agencies. Know that has actually been more acute in your area, as far I understand. Yes. That, well, I knew that I hadn't quite put my finger on the way you articulated it. So that was an interesting little book at that out of your testimony.

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: So I think often there are hidden costs in that because if families aren't getting the supports they need, their children are going to have more behaviors or more unmet needs And in the school so there's, I think, an abnormally inflated amount of need for those kinds

[Seth Bongartz (Chair)]: of services and for districts who don't have those community services. Okay, that was compelling, testimony, thank you. Thank you again for your work. And we are actually, where are we tomorrow?

[Dr. Elaine Collins (Superintendent, North Country Supervisory Union)]: We're back

[Miles Eddern (Chair, ENSU School Board; NEK Choice Board)]: in our room at 01:00.