Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Relax. So, the Senate Education Committee on February 6, we're starting the day, you know, the '15, we've been continuously insulated from the campaign for Vermont since the campaign has not been a lot of work in the military services that I spent an hour or so on to call whatever that was. I have no idea what happened.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Times are good. Yes, it's all relevant, in fact.

[Speaker 0]: But you're talking to me, and after we got done, it really made sense to me that we had to implement the walkthrough saying for us. And so as we're leading to the next chapter of acting on nine seven three, they can prove that we're going. So, this is relevant. So, the floor is yours. Oh, by the way, we'll introduce ourselves.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thanks for Ram

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Hinsdale, Chittenden County.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Not a

[Speaker 0]: machine, Windham County. Jake Weeks, Melbourne County. Longwestern with Bennington Senate District. Terry Williams, Robert County. Steve Effernan, Ashley Kenneth.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I am Ben Kinsdale. I'm the executive director of Campaign for Vermont. We're a statewide network of over 20,000 Vermonters that are focused on growing middle class here in the state, we do that through policy and advocacy work in a number of areas, including tax policy, housing, healthcare, and what we're talking about today, education. We've been doing work in education since 2013. I do have a little bit of a presentation here that I'll keep going. We've been doing work since 2013 in the education space. We actually worked on a report we put out in 2014. Tom Pelham and I worked on together. He was the former finance commissioner for the administration, former tax commissioner for the Douglas administration, and we worked on a report that looked at a regression analysis of Vermont's education data. Basically, if you're familiar, if you're not a data nerd like I am, regression analysis essentially means you take two independent variables and you look at how they interact with each other. So in this case, we looked at a bunch of things. Most relevant for you all was the size of the school districts and the cost per student within that school district, as well as the performance outcomes of that district. So we did that in 2014, and we just updated that report in, well, shouldn't say just updated it, but we updated it in 2024, so we're using 2024, more recent data. We also looked at a couple more things in that dataset, and this is one of the slides from that report, but we looked at a couple extra things, and I'll get into that in a second. But the important finding that's relevant for the Act 73 discussion is that both in 2014 and in 2024, regression analysis shows that there is no statistically significant relationship between size of the school district and cost per student within that district, and again, that's on a total spending per ADM basis, that's what this chart is showing. We looked at it on a education spending per equalized and education spending per weighted pupil in both of those reports, and we found basically the same thing. So that was one of the major findings. We also did not find it, and I don't have a slide on this in this presentation, but it is the full report. If you click on the online version of this, that's actually a hyperlink based to the 2024 version, let's look at all the different data points we compared, but the other one that's relevant here is that the size of the district also did not correlate to better outcomes for students. So that's important as we talk about how do you move forward in Act 73 where do bigger districts actually provide, inherently provide better outcomes for students or a lower cost per student? Because in the current system, the data doesn't support that notion. The thing we looked at in so the 2024 report that was interesting and informative and why we arrived at the reports, two reports we put out last year, is that we looked at the cost per student at a supervisory union level instead of at a district level, and at that level, we do see a statistically significant correlation between cost per student and the size of the supervisory union. To put that in perspective, at the district level, only about 4% of the variation in spending can be accounted for by the size of the district. 16% of the variation in spending can be explained by the size of the supervisory. So that encouraged us to look at the supervisory level and understand what's going on there and what those cost drivers are, because there's clearly a stronger statistical relationship between scale at the SU level and so on. Can I ask you a quick question? Sure. The individual dots, are those specific SKUs and where they land the population, or student population size on the bottom? Is that Yes, that is correct. Okay, yep. And that's the cost of Yeah, so your x axis is cost per student on a total spending per ABM basis, and then across the bottom is the size on this ABM basis. Yeah, this is super helpful graphic. Data, where does that come from AOE? That is AOE data. This is FY23 from the report that we did in 2024. Was most risk to Annabel. Thank you.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Can I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: make sure I understand? So, CVSD, for example, biggest, big, long bullet point. Do it one

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: way, yeah, that's, yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is it a it's a supervisory district and a supervisory union? Because isn't Burlington a supervisory union in a supervisory district?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So there are supervisory unions that have member school districts. Yeah. And then there are supervisory districts that are essentially a district and a SU function combined.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I'll get a little bit into that actually further further along and how Okay. Those things interact with each other.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And this is sorry, who said this? This is weighted?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Is non weighted cost Okay. Per It's why you have a higher number than you might typically see because it's non weighted. Any other questions on this? Going back to the first one. The first one, yes.

[Speaker 0]: This is districts. Yeah, which would include SDs, right? So it's a combination of SDs and districts within SUs. Or is it only districts within SUs?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: It's only, I believe this is only districts within SUs. Because the way that it's reported, it's hard to break it out separately. Good question. But you can see there are some fairly large ones even in this dataset, but they start trailing off after about a thousand.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay. So I'm sure I'm sure you are gonna share your conclusion, but I'm confused if you have multiple districts in a Supervisory Union and there's no saving from the districts, but there is savings at the union level, doesn't that still speak for problems overlaying districts and supervising? Yes. Making sure I'm still tracking.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. So this chart in particular, between the two charts, those two data points really told us we need to be looking at the SU bubble and understanding the interaction between the SUs and the districts, because why is there to your point, why are we seeing a statistical relationship show up at the DSU level that we're not seeing at the district level? Gonna be some, this is probably some repetitive information on this slide. One of the important things that we started looking at is the number of supervisory unions in relation to the number of districts. So post Act 46, it's almost a two to one relationship, which changed fairly significantly because during Act 46, went from two seventy school districts down to 119 that we have today. So that and and but the number of supervisory unions did not compress nearly that same rate that districts compressed, so that changed the relationship between how many supervisory, how many districts supervisory unions are serving. The other thing that was interesting as we started looking at similar structures around the country, the scale of Vermont's SUs are quite small compared to what we might see in other states. 1,600 students on average, and the geographic footprint is also quite small at about 185 square miles per SU.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So you're saying our SU's function more like districts? Mean, or they're roughly the size, I mean, so there are a lot of school districts that are between one and twenty five hundred, 3,500.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: There are a lot of supervisory unions that are between one thousand and two thousand five hundred students. Okay. There are not a lot of districts that are in that range unless they are supervisory districts, but those are

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Oh, I see. Okay.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: But those are generally in very populated areas, which is where sub supervisory districts are. Right. Mostly in Chittenden County. Right. And large districts like Burlington, South Burlington.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Sorry, I'm in out of the state. I meant

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Oh, out of the state. Yeah. I'll get to that for a Okay. Yes. But you're right, more in line with 2,500. Yeah. So when we compare interstructures in other states, the National Center for Education Statistics classifies Vermont's supervisory unions as education service agencies or ESAs. Similar structures in other states are next door in New York. We've heard a lot about BOCES. Maine calls them regional service units. Pennsylvania calls them intermediary units, and then most other states call them ESAs, regional ESAs, and give or take 40 states have some sort of structure like this that is functioning as a service provider to districts. Vermont's are obviously a little bit different, and we think about them a little bit differently. Know, most states think about their ESAs as a service provider that is supporting districts. We think about it more as a governance structure, so that's a core difference, and part of the reason for why our supervisory meetings might be a little different than ESAs in other states are because we have the superintendent attached to the SU level, and the superintendent essentially functions as a chief executive for school boards, and in most cases a part time chief executive for school boards. So that's one key difference. The other key difference is scope of services. The only two services that SUs provide consistently in Vermont are those chief executive services and special education. There are examples of SUs that provide additional services, but when we look around the country, there's a whole range of services that ESAs provide, not just two. So that's the difference. And then the third one, which you sort of touched on already, which is scale. There's quite a bit of difference between scale that Vermont's SUs are operating at, the scale that we see the SSAs and other states operate at, and that goes back to both on the number of students faces, but also the geographic footprint of the SSA in terms of how many square miles per region. I'm not gonna go through all

[Speaker 0]: of these, but this is an example of So just for short answer, when you use the term ESA, others might think of BOCES.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Others might think of BOCES, you might think of CSAs, you might Yeah, think of okay. They're all various flavors of the same thing. ESA is the generic. So this is a range of services that ESAs provide around the country. I'm not gonna go through all of these, but it gives you an idea of the range of services that could be provided at that level. The one that I really want to call out because it's where we think the most bang for the buck is, is the business and financial services, particularly around payroll and benefit administration. You have 119 different payroll offices around the state today, plus 52 at supervisory, and we're talking 170ish payroll administrators, benefit administrators, ARAP staff, all of that, compliance staff, all of those services. We look at the private sector and you see mergers and acquisitions happen, I've been through a couple of them in the private sector, that's the first thing that they do. It's like they don't go in and touch a lot of the structure, they don't rip staff out immediately. Typically the first thing they do is they go after those business and financial services because it is so much more efficient to do that as a CFO.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Mr. Chittenden? Yes.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Okay, so something that is next

[Unidentified Committee Member]: to me since the proposal you all put out last year is that CTE doesn't show up here, And so we've been considering drawing lines around CTEs, drawing our maps around CTEs forever, but not necessarily even speaking out loud about what we would do with CTE if we had a shared sense of service otherwise. Yeah,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: and part of our recommendation is that CTE should be on this list, It's not on this particular list, but it is something that other states roll CTE into their ESAs, and that was actually a component of the ACCESS Advisory Task Force report as well, was to do, to look at doing CTE through the CSAs.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: we do think that in Vermont it should be, and we'll get into some reasons why we think it should be. And this is not an exhaustive list, but it's just meant to give you some illustrative, you know, an illustration of the things that we're not doing today that we could be doing.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: If I could, one aspect that I think is missing from the list, with the exception of special education, labor. You know, the French teacher being shared across multiple schools. Yes. And

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I have a slide on that later on, but you're absolutely right. There's a lot of things that are not on this list that could totally be shared.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But I think the House map was careful about areas where salaries could go up quite fast if you combined certain districts. Hence, South Burlington was left on its own because if you, and you can share services, but if you started trying to share labor, you can actually increase the costs.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yes, and that is one of the core struggles. So, the proposal that we put out last March and the one that we modeled in our November cost savings report is based on an ESA structure around CTE centers. So I'll get into some of the details about what that might look like and some of the reasons for that. Before I jump into that, I wanted to touch on, go back to one other thing, which is why are we not looking at districts in this proposal? And there's a couple reasons why. The first is there's a risk of breaking community ties and also that community engagement when you start merging districts, particularly when you start merging districts non voluntarily. We saw some of that during Act 46, where local communities pushed back fairly hard on mergers that they felt were forced by the state. But it's also interesting, there's some emerging research from next door in Massachusetts with Mass Inc. Institute, and looking at schools that have a really strong community engagement, strong ties to their community, where their community has a sense of ownership over that school. Those communities, there's benefits going both ways. Schools are better supported, both in terms of dollars, but also in terms of volunteers from the community supporting that school, and there's reciprocating benefit for the community. They found actually there's more investment in economic opportunity in districts where schools have close community connection. So there's reciprocating benefits for both the school and the district if you have that strong community tie, and forcing consolidations on districts who have not arrived at that conclusion on their own can damage those connections. So there's a little bit of a non tangible issue there to contend with. Of course, we talked about the regression analysis earlier. That doesn't appear to show that larger districts perform better on a cost per student basis, so just making them larger doesn't necessarily inherently save money. And the other one that's interesting, and you just touched on it, was the contract can buy up and level up when you start merging districts. I know you heard a couple weeks ago from Grace Miller on her report looking at districts that merged during Act 46, pre merger and post merger. She did a lot of great work on that, and we've referenced some of her work in the report that we did in November. But one of the interesting findings in that report was that there was almost a $1,500 increase in salaries and transportation costs when you merge districts. She attributed that to a voluntary increase of reinvestment of those dollars into teachers. Our experience from being on the ground in Act 46 and talking with school boards who were in the process of merging, those were less voluntary, and they were more mandatory, because as you start merging business entities, say for example you have five districts that are being asked to merge, when you're creating the new salary contracts or new contracts for that merged district, no one wants to tell someone in the previous districts they're gonna have to take a pay cut. So what do you do? You level everyone up to the most generous contracts of the five, and so that level up, we believe, is what drove most of this spending, and we actually talked with a lot of the Chittenden County districts who were looking at this in the governor's proposal, and their number came out very similar to this adjusted for inflation when they looked at what the level up would cause in their district if they hadn't merged their negotiated contracts. This is a major hurdle to achieving cost savings if you're looking at a district consolidation model. And the final thing is there's actually quite a bit of national research that shows this concept that bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. I'm not going to read these, but these are a couple of excerpts from some of the largest studies that have been done on this nationally. Generally, what the national research has found is that essentially the ideal district size is somewhere between 303,000. Under 300, you see fairly substantial cost savings if you merge districts up to 300 students. And then you have marginal cost savings between 303,000, and once you get above 3,000, you actually see a decrease in investment. So you've got it actually starts increasing the cost per student once you start getting past that 3,000 student threshold. So the interesting thing to note for Vermont post Act 46 is our average district size is about 600 students. So almost twice what that minimum threshold is, which again kind of indicates mergers could save a little bit of money perhaps, but likely not a lot, and you have the contract issue and salary level of issued contempt as well. And then this is just high level. There's a lot going on in this slide, but the important bit for this conversation is the blue line, which is Vermont's cost per student compared to the green line, which is the New England weighted average cost per student, the average of the five things. Then the yellow line, going from left to right, is the The US average cost per student. And we can see two inflection points on that trend line. One is in the 1999 and 2000 school year, and that is the full school year following Act 60. We see that there's an acceleration in spending cost per student in that blue line, and then there's a second inflection point, less dramatic, in the twenty sixteen-twenty seventeen school year, which is the year that the Act 46 consolidations really started happening. The point of this is that we actually see two accelerations in the cost per student in Vermont. One is when we changed the funding formula, which Act 73 addresses, and the second is when we started undertaking mergers, ten years ago. So

[Speaker 0]: the vertical lines? The vertical lines are just APE scores,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: also comparing Vermont to the New England average to the national average. And you can see there's a decline in that as well following 2012, 2013, And that's a whole separate conversation, but an equally important point.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So I'm just trying to make sure I understand this before, if you'd mind. Okay, so I'm just looking at twenty twelve, twenty thirteen.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Yes. Just because it looks

[Unidentified Committee Member]: exciting. So we had,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: no. So the virtual bars in 2012, 2013, the vertical lines are showing test scores.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: They're showing the test scores. So our test scores were very good.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: We were top five in the country for both fourth and eighth grade math and reading

[Unidentified Committee Member]: at one point in time. And we were bending three? No, that's the score, okay. So the scores are on one side and the dollars on the other Yeah,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: so the dollars are on the left hand side and scores are on the right hand side. Those are NAEP scores. Probably should've pulled them off this chart for this presentation, but I do like showing them together because it does tell an interesting story.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But that line is just spending increase.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So the line is just spending increase per student. Blue one is Vermont, and then green is New England. We can see that we were pretty steady with New England from that 2010 to 2015, 'sixteen time period. Right. And then there's an acceleration from that until we can see the COVID effect starting to hit in

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: the '20

[Unidentified Committee Member]: The only thing I wanna say is 2012 is when we went from a commissioner of education to a secretary of education. So

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: There's a couple things

[Unidentified Committee Member]: that happened. Only thing I remember having in 2012.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: There's a couple things that happened in that time frame that could impacted student performance.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Like, what would you say?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So, yes, there was a change in the AOE structure going from the departments to the agencies, and there was also a change in the proficiency based learning. Was in '20 And then there were also changes in how we handle behavioral issues at schools around the same time frame. It's a little hard to draw out exactly which of those things most likely impacted student performance, but my personal opinion is they probably all three had to apply.

[Speaker 0]: You may begin to this, yes, one spends more to a sense or to give, why, what is it that's causing one to spend more than argument, and what's worse than sort of the question of emotion?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, I think it was similar to the quality question. Think there's a number of contributing factors. I think ESAs are one of them. We're not leveraging ESAs the same way that other states are, and almost, give or take, 40 other states are using that, and they've shown quite dramatic savings. The BOCES, the Vermont flavor of this that's voluntary today, some of them in the southern part of state southern part of the state are reporting 66% of cost savings with certain service. So like, it's fairly dramatic.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: We have more money to get an infusion of money going to pay the rent.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, and everyone experienced that assumption.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So we, for a lot of times, we didn't know what to do with it. We spent it, and

[Speaker 0]: then we got used to spending it.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: And you can see that jump here actually in the last year, and that's when you start seeing COVID hit, and it hits for everybody. Everyone sees the jump in that fine year when first full year of COVID, operating under COVID conditions. One other thing I wanted to mention here, because you were asking what's different about Vermont, since Act 60 passed went into effect essentially for the, what would have been the nineteen ninety eight-ninety nine school year. Since that point, Vermont has grown, the cost per student base is at twice the rate of the national average since that one. So, you're looking at something that's unique to Vermont in terms of the spending side of the equation, funding formula is the thing that is absolutely unique to Vermont, and if you look at the historical data, that is definitely an inflection point when our cost per student started growing much faster than the national average, and it has grown that way for twenty five years.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Can you say anything about the next five years that are not on the graph, trend, It's

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: a little screwy during COVID. Would like to go

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: back keeping out of COVID. I would like to

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: go back and update this chart to show how things have stabilized post COVID. There is a lag in the reporting data, so it takes a little while to get both. The cost per student one, we know pretty quickly. It's the NAEP scores that take a while.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's one more question. So is it largely New England where we've lost students and young people?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Oh, that is a good question. How does Vermont's student population changes compared to as a whole? Well,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: or just that New England, from what I read, is losing young people, and the only thing keeping other places from losing young people is immigration.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: That is probably true to some extent, and we see that when we start looking at test score data in Vermont. We're a little packed right now, but when you start accounting for the fact that we have a very homogenous student population compared to other parts of the country where it is a very diverse student population, and there's a lot of socioeconomic diversity in those student populations, a lot more poverty in other places than we see here, quite honestly, as much as that is a problem in Vermont. It's even more so for student populations in other states. Yeah, Vermont is one of the least diverse school systems in the country.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And, well, and also, they are getting more students, and that means less per pupil. Like, the whole demographic trajectory of The United States would look like Vermont and New England if it wasn't for immigration.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. It is interesting to me because over that so to go back to this twenty five year window we're talking about from, like, you know, 2000 to last year. Yeah. The other thing that's happened nationally is the average class size has come down quite a bit nationally, so even though their student growth is much healthier in other states, they're putting more resources into schools. Yeah. And ours hasn't changed that much. Right. So, it's a little bit tough to make that comparison, because there's other things that are happening in schools, initially.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Right, like North Carolina builds a school every time they build a certain number of units of housing. Right,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, and we have a population that's stagnating. I think it's probably more comparable to New England. I think the New England trends are probably more submerged than the United Nations' fault. Alright, so what is our proposal, and what did we estimate cost savings for? So essentially, our proposal was to replace the existing 52 supervisory unions with 15 ESAs that are based around tech centers, loosely follow the tech center regions, and they would support upwards of 100 school districts. That's recognizing the fact that there may be some places, and there probably are some places where mergers make sense, but we think that those mergers should largely be community driven with potentially support state. So just touching on

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: the first bullet, if I can. So your 15 ESAs, are they essentially led by a superintendent? So they essentially become a replacement for an SU? Yeah. Okay, just wanna make sure.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: And those ESAs would achieve scale, particularly around those administrative and business functions, scale that the existing school districts can achieve on their own. They would also expand opportunities, which I think is something that Brooke has brought up earlier, could be used to expand opportunities so you could provide services like language, arts, AP, and CTE programming at the ESA level.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Did you go as far as mapping, being that the tool that we're all using is publicly accessible?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: We do have a map, I have a map on the next slide as a starting point. There's a lot of maps floating around.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, no, I'm just wondering if you want that said. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: So you're talking about, in a way, you have the ESAs also be SUs in effect? Yeah,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: because you think about, you know, again, SUs have two services they provide essentially today. The chief executive and the special education, consistently. There's other things that they sometimes also provide, but it absolutely makes sense to move the special education up to the ESA level to gain some additional scale. The governance component, the actual chief executive function, there's a couple different ways that that could go, and we have a recommendation. We've not necessarily, there's other options that you could look at from how you provide a chief executive type functionality to school districts.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Can I ask just for insight, because I don't really know the campaign for Vermont, is there like a board that votes on this, and was it unanimous, or how do you characterize this? Yeah, no, it's a

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: great question. So we do have a board of directors. We also have an advisory council, and when it comes to policy, the advisory council often is the one that is weighing in, and those are folks who are subject matter experts in a number of areas, of policy around the state. We have folks that are school board members, we have folks that have been in the education system as teachers or principals or superintendents. We have folks that work as a service provider with school districts, so we have a lot of these folks that have different perspectives that help us to flush this out, and generally it is unanimous. There's not a whole lot.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: If I could, just the reason why I'm asking is sometimes organizations come in, we eventually figure out it's like, that's the one person in the group. It's one person. It kind of comes their personal opinion, so I wanna make sure this is characterized properly. Yeah, no,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I appreciate that, and I try, whenever I'm injecting my own thoughts, I do try to call that out, that this is my personal opinion, but not necessarily a shared opinion on the grid.

[Speaker 0]: That's great. Do you

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: work with AOE on this?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: We do not work with AOE on this. We have reached out to AOE about this. There are folks that we have talked to about this and do like this proposal or a version of this proposal, like the Rural School Alliance likes this model and they're supportive of it. So there are folks that we have talked to in the education space, as well as individual superintendents and school board members.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Yes, go ahead. Funding, how do you support the board to get your money to run Camp Nadeus?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So, the way that CTEs, I actually have a whole slide on this too, so I'll hold that question for a second. I'll come back to it because I have a whole slide on how the funding of government

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Not funding you, did, where does campaign for Vermont?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Oh, If you fund us. Yeah, it bunch of the, just are Investors or Yeah, private donations from within Vermont. We don't take money from outside. Occasionally we'll take a grant if it's for a specific research project, but we're fully funded by Vermont, and we have a full list. We've put our donor list online, you can see it. And how long have you been established? We were founded in 2011. So we actually worked on Act 46, first go around to this, and one of our founding members was Tom Pelham, who I mentioned earlier, but he also was finance commissioner when Act 60 was written. So he worked on Act 60 when that legislation was being written. So a lot of what I know about education financing, I've worked for him.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. It's a good question.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Okay, a couple other things to touch on on this slide. One thing that we think is really important in terms of how, The reason we chose CTE as the center of this proposal is one, we think that it creates a really strong post secondary and workforce training pipeline, and it creates vertical alignment between our K-twelve education system and our post secondary education system. Right now, CTE feels like it's very much off to the side, and there's a proposal from the agency to use an ESA to create shared governance for all the CTE centers right now, and we feel like while that's a positive direction, we still feel like it doesn't solve that vertical alignment problem. It's still very much silent. The other thing that this does is it gets the scale much more in line with what we see in other states. This gets us up to 5,300 students per ESA on average, and it expands the geographic footprint to almost six fifty square miles, which is again much more similar to what we see in Pennsylvania than other states.

[Speaker 0]: If I

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: can, yeah. Some of the conclusions on that slide ran ran counter to some of the points that you made earlier in the presentation. For example, the the one slide about the size. This is a was a cautionary picture. The size of the district said 3,200. That's one comment that you left in here. And there was another about, you know, growing growing size of district, necessarily, in fact, you know, properly affecting or reducing the cost per student, etcetera. So the two messages to me just seem a little contradictory, and I'm wondering if you can at least address.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: No, that's a great question, and I'm glad you noted that. So when we're looking at the national research, which says that Goldilocks range is 300 to 3,000, That is looking specifically at districts. What we're looking at here are ESAs, or what we might think of as supervisory and exposes, CESAs. There's less indication at the ESA level that you get inefficiencies at a certain level. It's a larger range, like there's a shift in terms of what that Goldilocks range is. I think, to that comment, though, I think that while there's not a ton of data on this, the CISA concept, you go to five or six regional ones around the state, might be large enough on both a number of students and a geographic footprint scale that we do see some inefficiencies coming back in. Think about service providers, for example. There's no service provider in the state today that could provide transportation for an entity that large under one contract, or maintenance for that matter. So I do think there is a sweet spot in terms of the scale of the ESA, but it's not the same sweet spot as it is for districts.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: This is, again, an example of what this could look like on a map based on what our existing technical center regions are, and one advantage of using a sort of existing structure like this is there's already transportation patterns that are built into this. There's already transportation patterns that have been accounted for on this map. There are definitely some places where it could be tweaked, and that's something that, if you look at the work that the task force did, Senator Beck had a proposal that originally started out looking quite similar to this, and some districts were moved from one side of one of these lines to another. I think there was a handful of those that were tweaked, but this, I think, is a good starting point for an onset.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: What's the blue anomaly on the lower right? That is

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I think the Springfield CTE is on there, we have. Yeah, I think it is. It is too small on my screen as well. Too small, yeah. I would note there are 17 CPE centers, and there are, what we're proposing, 15 districts, which matches the 15 regions, and that's because there are, in a couple places, tech centers that are very close to each other, and you can see them, you can't really see them on the screen.

[Speaker 0]: St. Jay, you can hit St. Jay. St.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Jay and Linden. With a lot from England. Yeah, and the same thing in Chittenden County, you have Essex and Burlington very close to each other. So there are some places where it makes sense from a geographic standpoint to have two CTs in one region. Yes, go ahead. So you said possible map, but why didn't you

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: bring us a map saying, Hey, this is probably one of the best case scenario map. Is this the one? Or I know you don't wanna go, Well, I don't wanna say it. It's perfect, but- But you obviously, you've run enough analysis to say, when I hand you this one, from what we've been studying and pursuing, this is probably the best way to not go. So you have to break it up, if I was gonna go with a map,

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: this is the map I'd start with.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: This is the map I would start All right, that's, that's, like, It's not necessarily

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: because you have people come in, yeah, this is kinda, well, if you say this is what I'd go with, at least gives us something, you know that you've done the analysis, and out of the analysis you've done, this is the best match. Is that fair to say?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I think this is a good starting point. This is where I would start with and see if there are some districts that feel like they should be placed on a different side of the line somewhere, but I think this is a good one to put out as a proposal.

[Speaker 0]: It's important to keep in mind that this is a map that has in some ways a different purpose and function than what we might otherwise be thinking about as a house. And I want to get to the governance in bit, but I'm holding it up as history.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I have a whole set of slides on governance I that are in do want to talk about cost savings because we modeled what this would look like, and we modeled it from a cost savings standpoint. I think it is important, at any time we're looking at any of these proposals, to look at cost savings. That was something that was missing in the Act 46 conversation, quite honestly. I was sitting in this room for Act 46, and there was a lot of assumptions that there would be cost savings for the work that was being done. No one attempted to model them, and I do think it's important to model them, to understand what do we expect and then measure the results against what we expect and what we're actually seeing. So what we did is we looked at the savings in specific categories that other states had experienced. So we looked at around the country and what savings that other ESAs had experienced in specific categories. We then took that range of savings and tried to find a middle point in the range of savings that other ESAs had experienced, and then applied that to our actual spending in Vermont in those categories based on $20.22 dollars, which was the most recent financial data we had for those specific spending categories that translate into other states. What that yielded was 133,000,000 in savings from the transition of SUVs to the new ESA structure, and 200,000,000 in additional savings by pushing more services up to the ESA level. The whole range of services we assume to be pushed up, which totaled $3,000,000 in savings. Again, that's in $20.22 dollars so if that's were implemented in, say, FY 'twenty eight, you gotta adjust that for inflation. So it would be a larger number, but the other thing here is most of the savings, that $133,000,000 we've asked to use, a lot of that's coming from special ed, student special ed coordinators and the contracts and all that sort of stuff. So that's one thing to call out. You could do something like the model, but the CISA model would then be using existing SUs in place unless you're really moving all of that special ed, all those special ed services up. You're not gonna get all of the savings out of that SU. So that's something just to think about as you're looking at various models. The second way, and we tried to validate this in a couple ways, so we actually modeled this in a second way, which was taking the savings that the biller report found in specific categories. So there were savings in administrative services, quite a lot of savings in administrative services, contracted services. Were quite substantial savings. Again, was looking at the Act 46, the districts that merged in Act 46, looking at the year prior and the year following, and we made some assumptions based on that that we would not see the diseconomies of scale from the teacher contracts and staffing contracts having to plumb all those up. So if we assume that you don't have to do that and you get most of the cost savings that we experienced on the contracted services end of things in Act 46, we would arrive at $291,000,000 in savings if you pay that as a sheet.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Not familiar with the Miller report. Didn't give a little bit of background.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So basically, Grace Miller looked at this, she was a Yale Not a

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: guy that I looked at.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Is, we took her work on that specific categories and looked at, okay, if we did get the same sort of administrator cost savings that she found, but we did not have the offsetting costs of having to touch the staffing contracts, we would arrive just under $300,000,000 in savings, and that's scaled up from $20.19 dollars, which is what she was looking at, to $20.26 dollars Is that per year? Per year, yeah, both of these are per year. So the other interesting bit here is that, if I have it on this slide, if you, no, I'll save that slide. Both of these models, if you're looking at either way, they're coming out between 1214% of total spending. That would be the reduction of 12 to 14% based on current dollars. That is very close to the 16% number that we found in our regression analysis. The 16 saying that the size of the SU can explain 16% of the variation cost per student. So all three of those numbers are very close to each other, tells us that this is likely a pretty accurate model, somewhere in that 300 range is what we would see on an annual basis. We would not necessarily see that in year one. It takes time to phase these things in. You may not have all of the services up to the ESA level in year one. You also may have startup costs that offset that, so we're assuming that you probably won't reach 100% of this number until you're maybe three or four years in. Any questions on this before I move on to

[Speaker 0]: this question? What is Model one and

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Model two? Model two was based on the Miller Report, on the specific cost savings and cost expenditures in the Miller Report. Model one was looking at nationally what ESAs have saved.

[Speaker 0]: Oh, it's the same framework you're talking about. You're supplying different Different methodologies. Different Okay. Different methodologies to arrive at a savings. Okay.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, I think Model one, for what it's worth, is probably more accurate because it's based on what ESAs and other states have actually saved, and I will say the highest category that we estimated savings in was somewhere around 30% savings. Like I had mentioned earlier, the BOCES that are already operating in Vermont, some have seen savings up to 66% on certain categories. Ours was, I think, fairly conservative compared to some of

[Speaker 0]: the things we're always making. Is that just Windham County, the BOCES? I think

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: that was the first dispute.

[Speaker 0]: Alright, what is governance? Maybe

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: they could read. They came in, they came in as ruthless.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I think they were

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: They're ahead of that postage. But with actual

[Speaker 0]: savings. It's Sherry Souza. I guess the The ship, that wasn't when they got it. She's in from the don't think She was here to go Charles.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Yeah.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: And and they've looked at this model, or the model works for us really well, they like this concept and the CTE, but they're also happy with the CTE model, but they do like the CTE alignment that we're proposing.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: They're getting new governance.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Getting new governance. That's probably the most relevant thing. In terms of governance, the way we would envision this working is that the new ESA boards would function much the same way that SU boards do today. Member school district boards appoint representatives to the ESA board, basically the same way that SUs function today. Those ESA pledgets would be allocated back to the member districts proportionally. Again, basically the same way that SUs work today. ESAs would be responsible for operating the CTE centers going forward, and the funding for CTEs would be built into the ESA budget. That alleviates some of the funding challenges we have with CTE. Today, we also believe that addresses our integration challenges that we have with CTE.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay. So this, I think, is where we get into the interesting details about how different SKUs are set up Because if you're not sharing facilities decisions, don't know how you get those savings.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Why wouldn't you?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Because we some of the SUs we heard from don't all share facilities decisions. They keep they keep them within their district.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. And I think generally so because there are some dis supervisory districts. In fact, there's two that operate CTEs to that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Mhmm. I meant beyond CTE. Like so we heard from White River Supervisory Union. Each it it sounds like each town is responsible for some facilities. They might be responsible for the elementary school or the middle school. Two are responsible for the high school. Yep. But I don't think you can achieve same efficiencies in an SU if everyone's still making smaller level facilities division.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: That is a good question. To some degree, yes. In terms of capital expenditures, you can probably gain more efficiencies in capital expenditures if you're doing that planning at the regional level. Right? But regional being ESA or SU or whatever.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Well, especially if you're you're driving towards one high school.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Right. Especially

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: driving towards And one high that's

[Unidentified Committee Member]: everyone should be paying for one high school, going to one high school. Right. For a CTE.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: And, you know, a lot of and that's sort of within the CISA model, and trying to move towards comprehensive high schools, understanding that it's gonna take a lot of capital and time to get to that model. And we like the comprehensive high school model. We're not necessarily opposed to that, but we don't have I think it's safe to say the state does not have the funds to invest in that model today. So, how do you create a bridge to potentially get there, an ESA based around a tech center is potentially a bridge to build into that in the future, you have more shared facilities, especially the high school level, where it may not exist.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So the Rural School Community Alliance likes this because this would mean 15 superintendents?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: It could mean 15 superintendents, yes.

[Speaker 0]: They might get because the districts are are not the most important. Right. Their district has more districts get more pain.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But then-

[Speaker 0]: That goes back to the first page almost. Yes. The sweet spot is between 303,000.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But that you, so you'd still want to gain efficiencies from an SU? Correct. Without busing kids all over the place or leveling up salary?

[Speaker 0]: Or, and allowing districts to operate differently. And allowing, yes. The part we're about to get to is what I frankly really like about this, which is the playing on some strong pursuits.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Yeah. That's fair.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: That is my next slide. Maybe I'll at it.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: You should slip in the head.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, I slip in.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So if I can you characterize if you're recommending that districts remain essentially semi or autonomous as far as facilities as opposed to the ESA or the larger SU or whatever you want to call it kind of gaining authority to start making decisions about facilities within that geographic footprint? So, that's a great question.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I have a slide that's more on this in a second on how those decisions might be made, but it's a little bit of a shift. We kind of think about SUs I mentioned earlier, we think about SU as a governance structure, like something that's sitting on top of the school districts. The way that most states look at ESAs is they are a companion sitting side by side with the school district as a partner, and less of a top down structure that's telling the district what's clear.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Who maintains, who's got the authority to do the broader look over the region on school utility, know, which schools

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: And I think the the very real scenario is that a lot of facilities remain under the purview of the district. The one that obviously moves to the ESA almost immediately is the Career Tech Center. And I think eventually high school is probably gonna move into the ESA purview as well, especially moving towards comprehensive high school system. But that's gonna take state investment dollars to get there. It's not gonna happen, I think, in the next two or three years that we're talking about these governance changes happening. So it is a longer term goal, but this sets up a structure to get there.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I've noted here that the roles and responsibility of school leaders would adapt necessarily to that new structure. Mr. And Chair, to your point, really one of the pieces here is that school boards would refocus on spending decisions, school leadership, and outcomes. We feel like that the outcomes component of that in particular is something that's not as prevalent in the current system as it should be. And principals are empowered to work directly with school boards as the leaders of their school as opposed to having to filter through the superintendent, is normally the point person for the school board. There may be some, and we're potentially open to conversation around, does the school board feel like they need a chief executive, or do they want that direct contact with their school leaders? I think most of the folks that we've talked to feel like they do want that direct contact instead of it getting filtered through a central office, but there are ways to do both.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: If I could, so your first bullet, the spending decisions. Is your organization supporting the Foundation framework? Yes, we do support the Foundation framework. I don't think I heard you say that.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. I, in fact, and I should have said this at the beginning, think the foundation formula is the most important thing we can do in this whole thing because if we looked at that slide, this one, what was the big change that caused our cost per student to go up? It was the funding formula. The governance piece, there are absolutely savings there, and that's what we're looking at how to maximize the savings out of the governance system to stabilize costs, but if you really want to stabilize the system long term, the funding formula is, and you have to fix that. We talked about shifting the focus to ensuring outcomes. That's one of the big things we think school boards should be doing, and school boards should be holding school leaders accountable for outcomes. Similarly, we believe the Agency of Education should be holding school boards and school leaders accountable as well. So there's this double accountability measure. And we see this in other states. There are other states that have, you you have autonomy to run your school and you have a set of targets that you are shooting for in terms of student outcomes, and if you're not hitting that target, there's a statewide accountability mechanism that kicks in. So we see this in states like Massachusetts and more recently in Mississippi, who have seen really strong growth in their student performance data from having that type of system. You see?

[Speaker 0]: Yes, is that the first level of that is actually just reporting to them where they're not doing well. It's not coming down with

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: a hammer. That's not the point. Correct.

[Speaker 0]: Because the point, the assumption would be school boards actually want to do a good job. Correct. But they make mistakes or things are going off the rails in some area and the the state and the board of education comes in. Our agents comes in and says, here's what's going wrong and here's here's some suggestions around fixing. Correct.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So we look at next door Massachusetts, for example. They have a very clear set of here are the outcomes we expect from our school districts, and if you are not hitting those, then you have to report on those metrics as a school district every single year. Here are the metrics that, here's what the state goals are, here's how we're performing, are we performing at the state threshold, below the state threshold, in which direction are we trying to move to? And if they are not meeting those KPIs that are set at the state level, they get a letter from the Department of Education in Massachusetts that says, you're not hitting those standards. We want to see positive direction within the next two or three years, here's some resources we can help you with, and if things don't change, if you continue to trend down or don't trend up, then there's a second measure where the state actually puts your school district in receivership and takes away the keys for a certain period of time until things turn around and improve. But just the fact that that mechanism even exists, you get that letter as a school district and a school board, that's gonna get your attention. And and school boards, I I do believe that school boards wanna do the best thing for their kids. I think they don't always know what that is. And there's some level of state leadership involved in helping to chart that.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Thanks, Terry. So I'd like to see an organization chart from these words, because what I'm seeing it what what I think is missing is the superintendent. I'm wondering what got it?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. So

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: who's who's reporting to who? Who's responsible for what?

[Speaker 0]: That's exactly what I thought I was gonna say. Yeah. Okay.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. So the superintendent would live at the ESA level, and they would what their prime their role would change from what it is today. Their role would really be more less of a management role of the principal, which is essentially what it is today, and more of a focus on operating ESA, being chief executive of ESA, expanding service opportunities within the member districts of ESA, and working on programming cohesion and vertical integration. So those things that we were talking about earlier, aligning facility planning and things like that, you know, that is the role, that would be the dual role of the superintendent is to do that long term planning and coordination between people.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: But also, I mean,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: to to the point about Sherry Souza, if your high school's underperforming, you need to talk to your middle school principals and your elementary school principals so that instructional leadership can still happen for the same students feeding into particular schools. A principal can't really tell their fellow principals what to do.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Correct. So they would probably bring that to either the school board or the superintendent, depending on what the situation is, say, Hey, we need help coordinating between what's happening at the middle school and what's happening at the high school. And the real important piece that's missing now is that they could then also focus on that vertical integration of CTE in addition to just the high school program, and potentially providing services, and there's been some conversation in this building about providing services, exposure to CTE earlier grade levels. That could be a core component of this as well, getting more exposure on-site, lower grade levels to some of the CT programming or language programming or anything, really. Just

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: trying to make sure I understand the full message. Are you advocating maintaining 119 districts? Back. Or something we not necessarily pulling levers or back to outpatient setting.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. When So we go back to what the vision is, 15 ESAs replacing the 52 SUs, and maybe not the full 119 districts we have yet. Think there are some places where mergers are already happening, and mergers make sense, and people on the ground are figuring that out, especially when you put a foundation formula in place. If you have a foundation formula that says here's what you have to spend, and if you can't meet that, you know, then you're gonna have to have a conversation. And you have this other metric of if we do have put in place key performance indicators, like standards that we expect schools, school districts to be hitting, if they're not hitting one of those two things, then yeah, that forces a conversation about merging. So you can't meet obligations on either end. They can meet both obligations, and then They don't want. Yeah. Let let them do what they're doing, because it seems to be working. It's interesting. I've talked with the superintendent in the Royal North who has the last remaining one room schoolhouse and safe, and right next to a very large, relatively large district in Morrisville, and it gets questioned fairly often, Why do you still have this one room schoolhouse when you can bus these kids eight miles up the road, and you have a high school and multiple elementary schools and middle school options? He's like, Because my best teacher in the entire district is in that school. They're teaching multiple grade levels, it's cost effective, and they're getting great outcomes, so students are doing great. It's like, why would I touch that? That's a good question. Why would I touch that? So so

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you said governance is is a lot of what we care about. It's also what government operations has to care about because it's it I've heard since I've been here that it's frustrating that you you you don't elect the people on the supervisory union level. You elect people on the district level. There's just a lot of questions about who would vote and who'd be voting for people. I think we should get rid of voting for school budgets. That is part of the foundation formula, you know, because it it isn't necessarily something we're qualified to do. And As voters. Right. Yeah. And it it's part and parcel of the foundation formula, but voting and who you vote for and and what decisions they can make is a huge part of this that isn't just our charge. It's also a government operations question.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. I think from a voting, in terms of an elections standpoint, doesn't necessarily change this doesn't change how school boards are elected, and it actually doesn't change how ESA boards are elected. They're elected the same way. I think if you went to we had a debate about this, actually, with our advisory council about do you change the way that the boards would be elected if you went to a map like this, and you do an at large vote the way that, you know, like, the governor's plan read. Right? At large vote across that large region. And we think there's some disadvantages to that, and and one of the disadvantages is today school board positions are very apolitical, generally speaking. These are community members that want to help their community. If you scale them up to an at large election for larger region, even at this level or 60 miles across, like the governor is suggesting, those suddenly become political races. In fact, that would be the largest, outside of a statewide election. That would be the largest political structure in the state. It'd be larger than any of your senate districts.

[Speaker 0]: And they wouldn't really have districts at that point anymore. You'd have one. You'd just have large SPs. Yeah. Right.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But it's how you vote for the budget.

[Speaker 0]: Well, we're gonna with the foundation for me, that actually suggests that's set here.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Right. And then

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: It's a large degree. Yes. The electricity. 80 or 90% of it decided here. Yep. Yep.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: That we don't do. So,

[Speaker 0]: yeah. Yes. Well, the budget, they're

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: gonna get x amount of money per pupil. They can still decide, hopefully how they spend it.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Well, as long

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: as As long as they meet the education plans.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: And so in a lot of ways, actually, I think this empowers districts if you do this in combination with the foundation for it, because right now, the school boards are caught in this very difficult situation of anything I do, like what's happening to your tax rate, and what am I doing, and what am I doing, what am I doing, how does that impact the tax rate? It's a very tough position to be a school board member in right now, but if you have a foundation formula, you know what you're getting, and you have a little bit of a spending allowance, you're much more focused on, okay, how do I spend those dollars and not do I even have dollars to spend? It changes paradigm quite a bit. And those same conversations would happen at the CTE level, should be the ESA level, the same way they happen today, right? What do districts feel like they need from today's the SU, tomorrow it can be the ESA, and that's a two way conversation because there's members of the school board sitting on the ESA charge.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: So let's say

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you stop voting on your school budget, you still could end up voting on bonding capacity, but still probably gonna remain somewhat local. But you'd probably wanna do that at the ESA level and not at the district level.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: You could do it either way, potentially.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: It's complicated.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: And these are some conversations. One of the recommendations we have in the report is to create a governance committee and to help make recommendations on how some of those decisions will be made, but in a lot of ways they're made today. We have the same type of relationship today between the SCUs and districts that we make it work.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, I think you could make the case that you just need things, you know, districts make their own decisions and then you're gonna see is that financial formula begins to put pressure on spending downward pressure, then merchants will happen organically, but they have those larger variants. Especially

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: if you have, I think, the two goalposts of there's pressure from the foundation formula and there's pressure from a, you know, could be the EQS or whatever, you know, at statewide level, here are the performance metrics we expect you to hit.

[Speaker 0]: So I think that one of the key things here, which is what I was thinking about the whole time we were talking about this is isn't this really just larger SUs? Call it something else, but really it's not because your SUs are not governance units, they're more service providers. They're service providers. And the governance actually becomes,

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: is local. And this is, you know, I had the slide early on about the differences between SUs that we see in Vermont and PSH we see in other states. One of the big differences is governments and the way that we think about them. We think about SUs as a governance structure, and and they could be something different, and and that's what most other states do is something different.

[Speaker 0]: Thanks. Yes.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So I have one more question, which I think you'll find relevant. In your conversations amongst your group, did you discuss the representation of independent schools in the government structure?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Good question. Particularly if that independent school is operating a CTE, is that

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: the direction that not we're sure, but just in the overall ESA? In the overall ESA, would

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: depend on whether the district is operating or non operating or partially operating. So if it's partially operating, then you'd be a member of the ESA either way, quite likely, but the range of services would vary. They'd receive income from the ESA based on the grades that you're operating. Does get a little more tricky if the CTE is being operated by an independent school or there have to be some sort of operating or management agreement, I would think, between the ESA and the CTE in order to provide those services to their member districts. We'll go upstairs.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Your organization have any thoughts or recommendations on current districts which are low spending and how they ramp up towards the foundation formula level.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yes, we did. And I don't have them in this presentation but I can speak to it. And we we think actually if you look at real dollars on a cost per student basis, between our lowest spending districts and our highest spending districts, there's almost a 300% variation between our lowest spending and our highest spending with a cost per student basis. It's almost as great as in the 90s when we had the break up decisions. There's almost that much of sparing in the system. We kinda cover it up with all of these taxing calculations that are cost per student for taxing purposes. It's kinda high, it's they have the real dollars behind it. But if you look at real dollars, which is what they were looking at in the 90s, we have a 300% variation in range incentives. So anything we do with the foundation formula, going from a 300% to whatever, considering it's a 10%, that's what's on the table right now, variation is a very dramatic change, and if we widen that range a little bit, so let's say we go up to 20%, you know, in terms of allowable spending and we drop both, we go both directions, so you'd drop the foundation number a little bit, and then you'd increase the cap a little bit. And what you'd end up doing is there would be, I think, six or seven districts that would have to come down to be within that 20% range, and there's one or two that would have to come up. So just going from 10 to 20%, if you weighed it the same way we weighed it today, which is a question mark, but if you weighed it the same way we weighed it today, it would dramatically reduce the number of districts that would have to dramatically change their spending up or down.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: And hold it at that And 20 hold percent difference. So that would

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: be a 20% difference weighted versus a 300% difference on weighted.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Okay. Any thoughts on what to do over time? Do you just leave it there, or you ramp it to bring more income?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: You could reduce the cap over time, which is what Chairman Kornheiser wants to do. What I would do is I would start running into incentive finance. Was saying testimony on this last week, actually, is if you have a hard cap like that, you actually might accidentally, over time, end up violating Brigham because if you're mandating, you can't go over that cap, and the school district could argue that they need to go over that cap in order to provide equitable education for students, suddenly you've got essentially a Brigham point. So instead of a hard cap, what I would actually do is set your excess spending threshold today either in a 5% range above the base or all the way down to the base. So every dollar above base you spend is double taxed. And so that creates downward pressure on spending above base. You can still do it. It's not a hard cap, but it incentivizes you to stay close to base or at base.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. Thanks for your service. To

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: have you back. Thanks. Appreciate the time.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. Thank you. Very helpful. So we have, we are going to, and I got a request to have a couple of the therapeutic schools come in and talk about their role in assisting.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Thank you for having me. So,

[Speaker 0]: you know,

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: we don't we don't all know

[Speaker 0]: each other. So, we'll we'll go around the room to introduce ourselves for the benefit of our guests here today.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I'm not able to I'm able to share.

[Speaker 0]: So, so, over here, we have.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Hey, Sharon Rock, Salem, Chittenden County. Trying to visit the male school at Fresh Point. Yeah. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: That's the honor of the Windham County. Good afternoon, Dave Weeks. Seth Bongartz with Bennington Center District.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: It's Terry Williams from Welcome County Council. Steven Heffernan, Addison County District, and I've got

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: the pleasure of coming up

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: and visiting your school this last fall.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: You want to get lost there?

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: It's telling me it crashed. One second. Okay. I don't think I'll send Zoom a report about that.

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: I think I can restrict that. Sorry.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I know. It's just odd that all the rest of that is there because it's not on my screen. But

[Speaker 0]: It it doesn't matter.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: It doesn't matter. Okay. It takes to message me about things. Okay.

[Speaker 0]: Oops. I'm

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: sorry. I'm

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: not sure what's happening.

[Speaker 0]: We have it as long as you can see it.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Okay. That's another option.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Pretty interesting necklace you have. There is your icon.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: Oh. From the screen.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. There's Bare Binchler. Yes.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Oh, is that what it is? Yeah.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Maybe now I've done it. There you go.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Ah, I've done it. Okay.

[Speaker 0]: So, for the record before.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: My name is Elisa Walker. I'm the school director at the Middle School. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I am a school director at the Middle School. It's a small therapeutic independent school in Winooski. I've worked in collaboration on this presentation with Ryan Erickson. He's one of the teachers at the Middle School. As well as our school founder, Doctor. Feeney, who is sorry he couldn't be here today. Before we begin, during my testimony, you're going to see some photos of some middle school students and their family members, and I just want to assure you that

[Unidentified Committee Member]: we have written permission to share them.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: And also Tech issues. Not my favorite things in the world. But you're right, I could just go forth with just the presentation without you looking at it, but I think it's to a

[Speaker 0]: those. Copy, so if you just tell us what page you're on.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: Yeah. Maybe I'll just try one more time, and then we'll just be done. God, it was just working a second ago. Okay, well, I want to start today with two urgent questions about education in Vermont. How would we ensure that all Vermont students receive the education that they need? This is the first question, and every Vermont child has a right to an education that prepares them for a successful life, and we all have a moral obligation to make good on that promise. The second question is, how can we afford it? We have limited resources. Education is not exempt from this, and money that is squandered on inefficient or ineffective programs is both fiscally and ethically unacceptable. Those two questions are big, they're complicated questions, they do not have simple, easy answers. Their solutions are going to be complex and multifaceted, and what I want to talk about today is one small but vitally important part of that solution, which is therapeutic independent schools in general, and then the middle school in particular. I wanna give you some idea of the population of students that are served by therapeutic independent schools, and as you can see, it's a tiny proportion. It's less than 1% of Vermont's overall student population, but with a disproportionately high share of those within the special education. I also wanna take a moment to distinguish therapeutic independent schools from non therapeutic independent schools. Therapeutic independent schools like us serve less than 1% of the student population, but about 5% of students in special ed. Non therapeutic schools, on the other hand, enroll about 10% of the total student population, but it's less than 1% of students who have individualized education plans. Although both types of schools operate independently of the public school system, they are very different sorts of schools that serve very different sorts of students. So let's zoom in for a second and look at our school's population. The kids we're working with are just working.

[Speaker 0]: We're going along plus the page. Send the page number five times.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: Yes. And maybe Julie or Elias will work on this screen. Let me see if can think I'm of on slide Sorry, yes. Yeah. So, yeah, so let's zoom in for a second and look at our school's population. The kids we're working with are disproportionately poor, and the severity of that poverty is increasing. It's working sometimes. It's delayed, but working. Okay, great. I'm leading with this not because poverty is the single most important determinant for a student's ability to succeed, but because it's a proxy for a whole host of additional indicators, housing insecurity, food insecurity, access to physical and mental health care, to name just a few. In addition to trying to manage school and poverty, our students are also trying to navigate DCF, criminal justice system, drug abuse, trauma, and some things are actually dealing with all four of these simultaneously. These are the sorts of severe intersectional issues that public schools are just not designed or resourced at this point to adequately support. And this is why we need therapeutic independent schools. There is a population of students whose needs exceed public schools' ability to provide. While not all students who come to therapeutic schools have spent time in a homeless encampment, some do. A few of our students spend time in this one, that's shown here. Simply put, if we rely solely on public education to provide that education, there are going to be some kids who will inevitably never receive the education that is their right. There are a whole host of other reasons why a student might require an alternative to a public school setting. Some students come to us after having physically destroyed rooms in their previous schools. Some of those students have proceeded to destroy rooms in our school, as shown here. Public school staff do not typically receive training and practice in how to safely isolate such a student without restraining them, while quickly, calmly, and efficiently evacuating all the other students and staff that are in the building. Our staff do, Other therapeutic independent schools do. We have systems and procedures. We train for this. This is that same wall that you're looking at. Post destruction, public schools often struggle to help such a student repair the damage, the physical damage, the relational damage, and reintegrate back into the school population. More on this later, but we have a lot of experience doing this successfully. Emotional impairment. This one doesn't have a picture. That's because when students are in an emotional crisis, we're not taking photos. We're providing support, and that's what our students need in that moment. Most of our students have experienced trauma, often repeated trauma. This can be physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, parental drug abuse, hunger, homelessness, neglect, often a combination of these factors. That history of trauma means that their emotional responses are going to be unpredictable and extreme, and it's also going to mean that they are inevitably going to struggle with academics and all of their social relationships. In our school, most therapeutic independent schools, will be extensive and embedded clinical support to address these kinds of needs. We have multiple trained clinicians that both directly support the students and provide insight and advice to all of the teaching staff so that the teachers can better serve students that we have. In staff meetings, we go over every single student every single day. Their emotional triggers, their responses, how to recognize when they're becoming escalated, strategies to de escalate them. We also have explicit coaching around how to approach certain students, how to help them regulate emotions, how to navigate those social relationships. It's just simply a level of service that most public schools are not equipped to provide, but without it, these students are not going to be able to reliably access education. Every single one of our students is on an individualized education plan, so they receive special ed services. The reasons for that IEP can range. It could be ADHD, dyslexia, autism, auditory processing, traumatic brain injuries, a whole host of other issues. Many of them have multiple diagnoses. We only take students in sixth grade through twelfth grade, and so a lot of times when they come to us, they are usually coming off of years of unsuccessful interventions and are correspondingly years behind. And in the past year we have actually taken on two middle school students who could not identify all the letters in the alphabet. Other students are just discouraged by years of struggling in a public school setting. Running this situation is a long, hard road. It requires extensive academic supports and differentiation. We have special educators that work with classroom teachers to ensure that we're meeting each student where they are, providing that differentiated support that they need. Each class has a support staff that's either a clinician, a special educator, or an additional classroom teacher whose job is to provide that additional one on one support. Both of those students I previously mentioned are now reading basic sentences, happy to report, and we're not at this point concerned about their ability to meet the reading and writing requirements by their expected graduation date. What else makes therapeutic independent schools like the middle school different? Well, are a lot of qualities that make the middle school well suited to serve these types of students. Every educator in every school is wanting to tell you that relationships are central, but for therapeutic independent schools, it truly is a prerequisite. You cannot provide an education to these students if you have not built a strong relationship with them. For most of our students, their primary experience with adults is adults letting them down. It means they have trust issues, and it's broken, and it takes a long time to repair that relationship. We do a lot of things to deliberately mend that relationship over time. And we show them that we're interested in the totality of them as a human being, not just as a student. And again, we review those students every day at staff meetings, that we can flag anybody that we're worried about, that we can make plans to assign staff to help further build those relationships and make those connections. And because our students often have the same teachers, the same clinicians, the same special educators year after year, then we can play the long game when it comes to our students, We can build that level of trust and that level of relationship that allows us to work with them and not on them. This is just a level of support that public schools are not able to provide.

[Speaker 0]: How many students do

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: you tend to have?

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: We have a maximum of 25. Okay. Our students have high needs, but they also have diverse needs. For example, this student has a baby. This was just this week, actually. This picture was taken. But as you can see here, we have found a way to keep her in school. This approach, academic, social, and clinical, is going to look different for each student. The need for the differentiation exceeds far beyond just the academic part of it. Our small size and our high staff to student ratio allows us that level of flexibility that's not going to typically be found in public schools, and so does the fact that we also actively screen for that in our hiring process. Can I ask

[Speaker 0]: for it?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Sure. So, my understanding is that, because you keep saying they might not find it in public schools, but also there are public schools that say, we cannot take your student. Correct. I I have a I mean, you know, when I hear from friends who have that situation, I don't even know if what they're experiencing is, like, fully legal or if they have, like, legal recourse. But big school districts in Chittenden County, they are simply told, we your child's too dangerous and they need too much specialized attention. They are not gonna be able to come back to school.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: Yes. And that's that's how students arrive at our school as well. The way that a student would come to our school is that ascending school, so Burlington School District for example, they have an LEA, and that person would make an out of district referral after the IEP team met and determined, we've done everything we can to the school district to serve them, and we cannot. We are going to find them a therapeutic independent school. Oftentimes, our school is the last step before a student might go to residential treatment, if that's even available or an option, because a lot of times it's not. We are seeing an increased number of students that truly do belong in residential, but because residential is so difficult to get into at this point, many of them stay with us longer than probably would be best for them. But you are correct, they are not welcome at their public schools at that point. Their education is now, they have been removed from the public school.

[Speaker 0]: You say stay with you, you mean, so you're just days, students or No,

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: no, it's not residential. I'm saying they would just stay in our program longer than, but not half. What's preferred, because what happens is if a student, let's say we thought a student would be best suited by residential, they were with us for a while and things weren't working and we reported back to the district, really residential would be better. They would start that process, it's such a long, onerous, difficult process. That student may or may not even meet the requirements. The only other option, if we were to discharge them, is to put that student back on tutoring, which was already something they had already tried that already failed. So there's not really much recourse. It's kind of just the end of the road. What else makes therapeutic independent schools like the middle school different? Some of our students go into college. Many, however, just enter straight into the workforce. And for both groups of students, though, the ability to hold down a job or an apprenticeship is a critical life skill. Many of our students wish that they could go to SAC or have hopes for that, but because of their behavioral record, their attendance record, that's not an option for them. And so because of that, we have spent a lot of time building community partnerships so that students can have apprenticeships. So right now, we have two different mechanics, a chef, a rescue shelter for farm animals, and the Vermont Construction Academy that we work with that provides internship and training that leads directly, oftentimes, to some type of employment opportunity. And then, the last part about why we really need therapeutic independent schools and why they're different is a really important point, which is that we have a restorative repair based discipline system, which is truly what is needed for these kids, and that's because they are continually doing damage, both to themselves, to their community, to their peers, and they don't need to be suspended or expelled again. What they need are dedicated professionals who are going to sit with them and take the time that is needed to repair that relationship, repair that wall, make it right with the person that you've harmed, and then come back again at the end. And we go through that process over and over with several of our students. And it's incredibly important because not only does it give them a life skill for after school, which I would argue suspending and expelling them is not doing, it is also showing them that we care about them, that when you do a harm to your community, it matters, you're still part of that community. We're gonna make sure that that harm is repaired, whether it's to you or to somebody else. Even if you make mistakes, even if you cause damage, you can still come back. For the sake of time, I'm going to just move through these very quickly. I did spend a lot of time on the therapeutic part of therapeutic independent schools because that is what distinguishes us from public schools, but it is important for you to know that we are schools as well. I know that there are concerns about whether therapeutic independent schools are really providing a rigorous education, and we welcome any regulation or oversight and the closure of any therapeutic independent schools that are not fulfilling their educational duties. Education is our central purpose. All of the therapeutic stuff that we've been talking about is unnecessary prerequisite to get to the next part, but we are audited and approved by the Agency of Education. All of our teachers are fully licensed. Our graduation requirements are aligned with the Agency of Education's mandates and guidelines, and if our students don't meet those, they do not graduate with a diploma. But I'll show you quickly. Here are the EQS, recent standards put forth from the AOE. Here are all the classes that we offer that address all of those. Here is an example of a graph of one student's graduation progress. At the end of each semester, they do receive a report that shows how far along they are towards graduation, and then we custom their schedules to whatever it is that they are lacking for need. So this might mean individualized reading instruction pulled out from the general class. It might mean an apprenticeship. It could mean a variety of different things, but it's a way for us to track. And we also track health, financial literacy, art, EE. Transferable skills are a huge component of our program. They are things we usually, why our kids are referred to us in the first place, so we do make it central to what we're doing. Here they are all listed, all the ones that we need to use. This slide in particular, this second slide, is important to show you because this is actually an addition that we've added to the AOE's requirements. So they, all of the previous slide that showed all of these are transferable skills that we incorporated from the agency education, and then all of these categories actually come from CASEL, which is usually geared just towards early elementary, and they are on the AOE's website for early elementary. I think they maybe just assumed that middle school and high school kids already have them. However, our kids do not. So we put them back in. And they are really important, and I think recognizing the feelings and perspectives of others, being able to consider ethical and safety factors and applying decision making skills, those are central to what we're working at with students here at Genoa School. Now I just wanna get back to the second question of how do we afford it? So, what is the most fiscally responsible way to meet the educational needs of the students who cannot, for all the reasons that we just outlined, access education through public school? Specifically, are therapeutic independent schools the most efficient and effective way to spend those limited funds? So to address that, want to go back to this slide. The students who need therapeutic schools, they really are a tiny sliver of the population. We're talking about less than 1% of the total students in Vermont. And spread among Vermont's 300 odd public schools, they really amount to just a small handful, often only one or two, maybe, from each district, or each school, I'm sorry. In order to adequately meet those students' needs, then those schools would need to hire and train additional staff, often multiple additional staff, to adequately support each of these students. As small as we are, we do provide significant economies of scale by providing education for students from multiple different school districts. Which you can see on this slide, the cost of hiring even one additional specialist would often exceed the cost to educate a student at the middle school. Some independent therapeutic schools do have higher tuition rates. Tuition rates are set by the agency of education. Some of them do because they have determined that those students' needs exceed this particular cost, or are lower than this particular cost. It is a final point to consider also, which is that even if a school were to hire all these additional staff, the quality of education they provide is unlikely to match the quality of education at therapeutic independent schools because we're specialized, because we have extensive training, because we have a demonstrated track record of success, it's going to be a much better education than this. The cost of tuition at the middle school is expensive, but it really is minor compared to the costs of that student and to society of a failed education system. So how are we doing? Well, we're a small school. We've only been open for five years. But here's our score card so far. It's not all success, but most of our graduates are holding down jobs, and they're doing some type of college or post secondary training. They call, they text, they sometimes stop by and say hello, and by and large they are creating lives for themselves and contributing positively to their communities. They're reading, they're writing, they're doing the basic math that they need to get on with life, and they're using those transferable skills to navigate jobs and relationships. We don't have a counterfactual, we don't know what would happen if we rewound time of what it would be if they hadn't gone to a therapeutic independent school. But anecdotally, we can see that they are doing better than what they or their families predicted. To drive that home, I really want to showcase this one specific graduate who did give me permission today to share his story with you. This is JT. He's a natural leader. He's academically talented. He's a mechanic of science. He's funny. He's resilient. He started at the middle school in the 2021. He's 14 years old in this picture. Here's what JT's case file looked like when he came to the middle school. He had emotional disturbance. He had DCF involvement. He had childhood trauma. He had verbal aggression. He had physical aggression. He had juvenile justice involvement. He was expelled from public school. He also was expelled from alternative school, multiple alternative schools. This was a student that far exceeded not only a public school, but all the other available alternative educational settings. And here he is, we spent four years working with JT. Was long, hard work, both for him and for us. He was frequently involved in violent, verbal, and even physical altercations with other students while he was at our school. There were repeated cycles of harm, short air, reintegration. We tried a lot of different approaches. Many of them didn't work, some did. And when something didn't work, then we tried again. And because JT saw us working hard, he worked hard, and he showed up to school, even when things weren't going well. And eventually, we found things that worked, including an apprenticeship with an honest mechanic in Charlotte Law, and that played into all the talents and strengths JT had. Through these personalized approaches, he was able to meet our graduation requirements and receive his diploma last spring, and here he is, holding a steady, reliable job, working at The Honest Mechanic. He is supporting himself, he is supporting his family, and he is making his community a better mix. And now I want you to think back to that slide that showed all those issues in his case file when he joined us, and to think about where you would have predicted him to be based on where he was then.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: What's your motto there on the back of the shirt? The sweatshirt, I think I should hear that.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: The motto on the back of the sweatshirt is, which means, don't be an asshole, which we find resonates with some of our students. We really want to be relatable to them, and sometimes that does mean getting down to their level. Sometimes it means just kind of getting it to them straight, and in that situation it's really about that's, it's a central thing to help them understand what we're doing here is trying to be respectful to one another, and when we can do that we can move forward in Without a positive that, we're kind of stuck. So everybody sort of If gets in line behind

[Speaker 0]: you get some balls on the but you're not a residential program, what do go at night?

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: They go back to either their homes, they have one, possibly a hotel, possibly nowhere, possibly a friend's home.

[Speaker 0]: So do you tend to have students who live close enough to

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: We don't typically take students who are farther than

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: an hour away. Okay, that's okay.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: But we do have some students who do have to drive significantly. I know that the Middlebury area, for instance, does not have any therapeutic independent schools in that area. So if you were a Middlebury resident and you needed a therapeutic independent school, it would be a minimum drive, I think of like fifty minutes.

[Speaker 0]: Okay.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: No matter which one it was, which is hard for those kids to have to be in a van, especially in weather for an hour and a half in the morning.

[Speaker 0]: Great, thank you. Yeah, we need to move on because we can stay on schedule.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: I have a question. Again, so transportation included in the program to

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: Transportation is paid for by the district.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Good, that's good. So the other day, geez, I can't remember, special education and something association came in and had a critique about the foundation formulated in regards to special education as far as the amount of central funding, centralized funding in these different tiers. Okay. And I'm wondering if you have done any kind of look at whether those levels are in the foundation formula are appropriate for services that you're required.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: To be honest, I have not looked into that. Okay, great. I just want to quickly conclude that really what we're looking for is financial predictability, regulatory predictability, and statutory predictability. We need for there to not be wild swings in the budget for special education, or in how those thoughts are divvied up among the state and the LEAs. We need the regulatory predictability because we need to know exactly what the agency of education wants from therapeutic independent schools, and that has been inconsistent at times from year to year. And when it is inconsistent, it makes it very difficult to know if we're even in compliance with AOE's requirements. And then the last one is statutory predictability, just to know the long term plan for the continuum of special education services and where therapeutic independent schools are going to fit into that continuum. And this concludes my presentation. Thank you for your time. And if you have any questions, happy

[Unidentified Committee Member]: to answer them now for care.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you for coming.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: You did a great job.

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: Well, you. Appreciate you.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: That will be clear

[Elisa Walker (School Director, The Mill School, Winooski)]: And we shall attend the bounty.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Thank you. You guys need a copy.

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: I'm Blayne Skarner, executive director from the school of Montpelier.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I really wanna act a a lot

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: of what Peter said, so I'll try to be quick. But so I'm a special educator by training. I became executive director of the New School recently, but this is my twentieth year of school I've started as a one on lunch with the students. The you know, I'm also brought up to Vermont Public Education System, and I believe really strongly that a strong public education is a strong city, a strong democracy. And so my goal here is really just to highlight that, you know, therapeutic schools, our role is different than other independent schools. We are a part of the public education system. We're part of the continuum of services that public schools offer, and so we want to be partners in that system. So The New School, we are a worker cooperative. With the mission, our mission is that we are a learning community committed to preparing individuals with unique and complex challenges for successful lives. We use evidence based practices to promote independence, communication, social emotional skills, and academic growth within a culture of safety in Hawaii. Our very name comes from a student who came and had had a very traumatic previous experience at school, and Finance said, This is a school where I fit, and this is my interest. And so, in practice that means, as Elise said, we have students who have had just demoralizing failures at school through just no nobody's doing anything wrong. It just right program didn't come along for them. And our job is to make them feel safe and help them find belonging and to build relationships with them, because only then can they actually learn, and then we can help them find a place in society that's not ending up in jail or, you know, in a homeless neighborhood. Vermont has an ecosystem of therapeutic schools. There's 26 of us, and all of us have slightly different unique programs, and you know, in Central Vermont, we have a number of schools, and it's common for a student to go from one school to another a few times to find which program is really a good fit for the student so they can have good outcomes. And we let's see. We're only elected to accept students who need specialized special education services and that are referred by the public school, So we work for public schools. We carry out public schools' individualized education programs. They ride them. And public schools only make the decision to send students to us when they've exhausted their resources to do it. So we are really a last resort before trying to find a residential place in out of state, and they're extremely hard to find. Again, we're part of the school's continuum of services, and we don't exist if public schools aren't asking for services. We're regularly reviewed by the AOE. We go through a school approval process run by the AOE and then approved by the State Board of Education, and then there's ongoing oversight. It includes us reporting within five days changes to enrollment, programs, policy, facilities, financial capacity, staffing, and administration. So it's pretty close coordination that we have ongoing with the AOE, and part of that is because as small schools, small changes can put us pretty quickly into a a dangerous virus. But it's also our small size that lets us have a unique program that meets the needs of a small subset of state population. And, you know, New School's case, but I think with a lot of schools, it's alternatives alternative governance structure that allow that. We're worker cooperative. So my employees are members, and they speak up immediately when they see we're doing something that's not working for a student. It lets us really quickly adapt. You know, when a student hurts somebody or threw a chair out a window, we're meeting that day to have a new program for them tomorrow. We we don't believe in suspending or expelling students. When we have to tell a student they can't come back tomorrow, we tell them that this is a failure on us, we need a day to figure out how we can help keep them safe. You know, I listed a few examples here of things that come up. Like, best example more generally to me is the the old SVAX, the standardized tests. And the rules for them contained was I can't remember. Was three or 500 page manuals with multiple different roles. And they were written in a really good way for a school district with a thousand students or 10,000 students. In a small school, I played every one of those roles. And how much time I spent going back and forth between three references and manuals instead of having one. And so when possible, having legislation written with therapeutic schools in mind as being different from other schools leads to clarity in the regulations that the AOE writes and the State Board of Education writes. And it leads also to financial predictability, just like Elise said. And those are the things that let us focus on our job, which is teaching students. So, you know, finally, I think therapeutic schools serve a distinctly different role in the public education system than independent schools. We're not a replacement for public schools but partners, and we're part of the continuing lived service. So Okay.

[Speaker 0]: Same is true. Independent schools as well. Yeah. But all other than Yeah. And I

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: think we all serve a different place in in that. Right? You know, we're limited to only public students, special ed or five zero fours that that the public school sends to us, and the other independent schools serve a different piece of the entire critique. I totally agree with you. So yeah, that's really quickly.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. Yes. So you said you

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: have a relationship with AOE. Yeah. But if either of you could characterize, what is that relationship?

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: So I would say we never know. The people at the AOE are great, but the regulations are often, when not written clearly for therapeutic school, are have to be interpreted to work for us. And so the answers aren't always clear for what they should give us. And I think depending on the state of the AOE, like my my impression mostly is that they are so short staffed that they're barely eating their heads over above water. And it it so it can be really errantous. But the people that I've worked with directly there really are very good and dedicated parents, but it's it's our model. Yes.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: And then, you characterize your school as a worker cooperative? Yes. It's a new term in your So

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: that means every employee at the school has the opportunity to become a member of the cooperative. It takes two years in training and approval from our other members, and then they, elect our board

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: of directors. So the board

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: of directors hires me, and we work very much like a traditional organization day to day. Everyone has a job, and they do what we're told, but there's a feedback loop. So if if what I'm doing is not working for our students and for the staff, they can tell the board or tell me and then I have to act more quickly than in other organizations. It's also a great recruitment tool. It's we have some very long term employees, think, largely because of that. And being that of that, how long have you been in existence? So Oh, it's 2005. So this is twentieth year. Great job. We've a worker called for ten years. Yeah. Right up the hill. If you ever wanna visit and see what a school, therapeutic school is like, we're close.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Can I ask something I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: might have missed? So, you're a worker co op, does that make you for profit?

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: It does, unfortunately, make us for profit. You know, the way the AOE sets our tuition, it's, you know, it's based on cost. And so, for us, it's really a governance model. Yeah. But part of that model is that the employees elect the board, and you run into conflicts with nonprofits with the employees. Good. So I've actually been exploring alternatives to that because Yeah. We are not regularly making profits. We have Right. There's not money there, but, like, we yes, unfortunately, we're technically broke.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: No, I mean, I think, I don't know that that's unfortunate. Just really, it's been kind of maligned, but I think it's really helpful to hear that, you know, you're no different than other independent schools. You're not really making a profit, we shouldn't really be treating you like you're not a really critical

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: if we ever have a

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: small surplus, we divide it evenly between all of our employees based on the hours they worked. So it's really, you know, our pay tends to be significantly below public schools and our benefits are below. And so even if we make a little bit of money, we're not getting to, you know, parity with what the schools down the street are paying their spend.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I would also Go ahead. We are also a for profit, and I would also add that it does limit us in certain ways. We don't have access to the backpack programs, we don't have access to a lot of grants, and I would also add that it was also an issue with starting a therapeutic end in school when you don't have the funds needed. You would need some type of parent company that could come in and offer that type of loan, which you're not going to be able to get as a nonprofit. Right. We started, I believe, with over $800,000 of debt. That's a huge amount. So, we too are moving towards a non for profit status, but yeah, there isn't money to be made in therapeutic investments.

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: We had a situation during COVID when we weren't allowed to be open, and so if our student, we had a student from Burlington who was up in Burlington, and because that student had been enrolled with us, they were no longer eligible for free or reduced lunch. So they were using the buses to transport lunches, and the student could not get a lunch picked up because the public school had enrolled them in our school.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So are we thinking about lifting the moratorium on therapeutic independent schools?

[Speaker 0]: We haven't gotten to that. We're just sort of

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I think those are great cases, even if we said

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: if you're an

[Unidentified Committee Member]: employee owned, then we should just, we need more therapy schools.

[Speaker 0]: We should let them retire, but we've Okay, got so yes, so do we.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So in our communities that we represent, we have all kinds of schools that we're potentially looking, well, we've seen cases where they had to repurpose a school, the traditional school to something else, whether it's housing or whatever, and we have that conversation continues and will continue into the future. So I'm trying to envision your school. You know, I imagine it's, you know, so it's 25 folks, kids.

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: About the same in Montpelier I have eight in Newport.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: So where are you in a whole house, or are you in a

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: We have we have two distinct populations in Montpelier. One is in, like, an old Victorian yes. An 1899 Victorian old grocer's house. The other is in we've been in the basement of buildings from Vermont College of Fine Arts and, you know, basements where most of the toilets don't work anymore, the walls have been beaten up. We it's, you know, on the last legs. We are really lucky. I mean, BCFA liquidated their campus. We were forced to either get out or purchase. We were able to pull together money to purchase our buildings, and we're in the process of fixing it up to actually have more room for students and to be a much better environment.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: And as in Lisa?

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Hey, Lisa.

[David Weeks (Vice Chair)]: Your school, your facility, what was it before it was the middle school?

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I actually think it was an old mill at one point, which is where we got the name the middle school, but I'm not sure what was in that building before we were. But we did some extensive renovation to make it more suitable for our needs.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah.

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: What was the visit? I couldn't start in the buildings right now. They exist because they've met the code twenty years ago, but to get them up to code now, it would take millions of dollars, really, to do.

[Terry Williams (Clerk)]: I make profit, so I don't You

[Blayne Skarner (Executive Director, The New School of Montpelier)]: can probably think of it. So

[Speaker 0]: I assume you are both the list you gave at the end of the things you would like us to consider, I assume, the same. Yes, please. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for coming in. Thank you. It was helpful to hear from you.

[Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Thank you for having us.

[Speaker 0]: So, with that, we are