Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: We are live.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: This is senate finance and senate and house health and yes. I'm in my morning committee. This is house ways and means, and we are joined via Zoom to take a look at the school redistricting task force report. And we're gonna start with senator Larocque Gulick and then go to Rebecca Holcomb, and we have we will then we have other witnesses dash on the national scale we're going to hear from on another day. This not this week, probably next week. So, thank you Madam Chair. The floor is yours.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I am going to be brief because I would like to receive most of my time to my colleague, Representative Fulkem, who's gonna take us through the shared services model, which is a real integral part of our report. But I do just wanna sort of set the table for everyone. We here in Senate Finance have hard copies of the 147 page bill, which is fabulous. And if you look at the bill, the school redistricting section starts on page 18 and goes to page 24. So, it's a relatively small but mighty piece of the bill.

[Senator Martine Larocque Gulick (Member)]: It goes through membership. One of the things I've talked about a lot are all of the qualifiers that we had to take into consideration in our work. I'm not going to go over them now, but just so you know, wasn't just draw lines on a map. It was do that and take into consideration all of these qualifiers. So we met over the summer. We had eight meetings. We had four hearings across the state getting public input, which was fairly unanimously opposed to large scale mergers, but definitely in favor of some kind of reform. I think folks are really aware that there are inequities in the system. So we did hear that, but it was an eye opening experience and it was really good for some of us who are in more urban areas to be traveling around the state or rural areas to see what exactly it means to deliver education in small rural parts of the state, especially transportation issues. They came through loud and clear in the testimony that we heard. Have on our page, we have the legislative report, and then part of the report is the appendix E, which is the proposal. So I think it's important for folks to know that there are two really important parts of what we've presented, which is the general report, which is I believe about 44 pages, or 41 pages, and then the actual proposal, which is the appendix E. So hopefully you've had a chance to take a look at that. And I think the members of the task force who are here in the building would welcome any questions and would be happy to answer them. So, with that, I think a lot of you have heard me talk about this already ad nauseam on various platforms, so I think I will cede the rest of my time to Rebecca and I'm happy to sort of interject as we go along, but you can go ahead and talk to us about the CESA, or Shared Cooperative Education Services, that are part of Appendix E. Thank you. For the record, my name is Rebecca Gulick. I represent Wings Zero Orange too in the house, and he's also a member of the task force. And I would also encourage Senator Beck to jump in too. We're part of all of these conversations, and I think it'd be helpful to get all anything that you feel needs to be at the table at the table.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: This first of I want to thank you. I know this is in school, we call this a period, so everyone's ready to go pick a nap or get a bouncing off the walls. So I really appreciate you taking the time today to to let me come in and help speak about this work. I also wanna thank you because we are aware of how carefully you are deliberating the choices in front of us. I was telling the people in the house when they asked me in house education that I think I attended nine different schools over the course of my career. And I still remember most strongly my first teacher who is actually in in Head Start I attended, and I remember her name. And what she was was just this towering body of care that I still had very viscerally in me. And for those of you, including Senator Beck and Senator Gulick, who've been in schools and been with kids, you noted those relationships. They're so integral to the success of education. So I appreciate that care because first and foremost, we are talking numbers, but we are also talking about other people's children. And when we talk about other people's children, that's our public trust to do our due diligence, to do the best we can for them because they they really have one shot. And it's a pleasure to be in front of senator Cummings again. I feel like I I feel like we've had this rodeo before. Yeah. So We've

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: had this subject matter in a similar seat, but a different role.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: So, what I'm here today is just to talk about the box cooperative education services, but it would have been remiss to not mention that this plan came part and parcel with a close examination of some of the data statewide and what that said to us about opportunities for strategic mergers. It came with a review of what the recent research actually says about mergers and what they do and don't do, including the fact that we really couldn't find any evidence that they were likely to lead to cost savings. And then also the fact that there's there's real opportunities to maybe get scale through mergers, but maybe not always where we thought. And so that was where the voluntary regional high schools, and particularly this idea of more comprehensive high schools made sense. So we are gonna talk about the seesaws, or the cooperative education services, but please know that that can part and parcel in the proposal with this longer consideration of where do renters make sense, and what are the conditions under which they're likely to yield savings, but also better opportunities for kids and more consistent education. So, today, we're folk What's your tab? Forward. There we go. Today, we're focusing just on cooperative services. That is the live link you can go, and I would also encourage you to look at appendices A and F when you're in there of this full report, which is the longer report, because that speaks to both what seesaws can do as opposed to mergers, but also what are the big drivers of sagging performance in Vermont and how Seuss is gives you some examples of how kind of work that Seuss do in other states could be used to address some of those declining performance indicators that we're seeing as well. I wanted to start with overall goals because, you know, the governor's right. We have serious challenges around growing the economy in the state of Vermont, and growing the economy depends on really having high quality schools that make parents want to live here and send their kids to school here, and attracting Vermont to some of our businesses that depend on those really well prepared graduates to go out and strengthen Vermont's community. We're all hearing about affordability. This is a critical concern. People are struggling to pay for health care. They are struggling to pay for their groceries. They're struggling to put gas in their cars, and they're really worried about making rent. We have to be doing everything in every sector to try to find ways to make every single dollar we have go a little farther for Vermonters. And we really entered this process keeping that front and center. We know that has to happen. We also believe we have to protect the most vulnerable, and kids have one shot. You know? And and some communities and some parents, they can pull their kids out and they'll be just fine. But there are so many Vermonters who really count on schools, not just for education, but frankly for three meals a day, for access to basic health care, for access to basic social services. One of the surprise findings of the report was that Vermont schools spent about 2,000 more dollars on support services per kid than schools in the neighboring states. So we use schools differently, and that has to be part of our conversation. And we really wanted to make sure we thought about that, particularly the role that in Vermont, unlike other states, our schools seem to play as safety nets. Because if we're gonna change that, we need to be planning for that change, because that's how we use them currently. So why does this proposal exist? This proposal from the task force? Because we we know and we really agree that Vermont faces rising costs, uneven access, and some consistent implementation of quality across the state. So we went to this saying, okay. How can we tackle these challenges? How can we fix them? How can we put forth a plan that we feel we can stand behind, that we can do something better for for kids and for our communities. We also know that governance changes alone don't fix instruction instructional or cost drivers. We've spent a lot of time getting the data from the agency, looking at what's actually making schools more expensive, what's actually changing or getting in the way of instruction. And it's clear that just mergers alone may not do that. It's also clear that mergers take a really long time. I just talked to somebody in the hall,

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: it's one

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: of people who posted an Act 46 merger, And I said, how's your how how are you doing now? He went through that act 46 process. And they said, we're still implementing it. We're still trying to finish that murder. So this is this is hard work, and people are tired. And so when we're gonna make people do hard things, we need to make sure we're being mindful of capacity, but also certain that there's something better on the other side of it. And I was pleased to hear today the secretary said that ESAs, which are another another term for collaborative education service agencies, aren't another layer of governance. That's what she said today when speaking to standard education, because they aren't. They're we're proposing them as infrastructure, not as a governance form. And it's a it's a structure that is used in 45 other states, because it needs and they call different things, intermediate units, BOCES, ESOCs, seesaw. It's the same thing. There are some things that just need scale, need scale quickly, don't need mergers, but there are those high intensity, less frequent levers that can be together to make things work. So the key question that you have and that we have is how do we improve quality, equity, and cost control without destabilizing schools? Go ahead.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: On that point. Yes.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Do you would you reflect on how you see an ESA as starkly different than what I understand to be a supervisory union? Where are the clear distinctions between an ESA as presented by the secretary and the seesaws and a supervisory union and their authorities and functions?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: There there are some similarities, and, you know, I don't I wanna be clear, but I think when you look at how and I'm gonna address this specifically later on. But they're what they're doing in a regional, you know, regional education entity is you're trying to you're getting to a scale that is even bigger than what an SELMSD is. And so it's it's for example, we just passed a science of reading. Though interestingly, we passed an effort to do something very similar back in 2018, and that's 01/1973 was never implemented. So it's giving you that capacity at the regional level to both develop the high, you know, the high quality professional development in that case that you need statewide and then push it, the muscle to push it out to school districts in a way that we seem to lack the capacity to do right now. And and, you know, you you could develop that 15 times over. You can develop it five times over and get the best expertise in the state and then just share it statewide. And, you know, special ed, I'm gonna give you some specific examples on special ed. I'm sorry. District four thousand just isn't big for that. There's no evidence that districts bigger than four, you know, 4,000 aren't gonna yield you savings or necessarily better outcomes. There is evidence that you can do things at that regional level, particularly around some of the functions that we're really struggling with right now that might be better. When you get to special ed, gets easier.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: So we have another question. You had mentioned just a few minutes ago that as you look at the cost per student being expended, that some of our neighboring states are allocating monies differently, and therefore have as much as a $2,000 difference. Do you know of any statistics that actually show cost per state based on categories of service being assisted?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: If you look at the task force report in the in the main report, the short report, there's a section on cost drivers, and there's a breakdown there. Yeah. It's been actually, I had some UBM students analyze it for us, but it was the if you took what's called the f 32 data report, which is reported by agencies of education across the states, the federal government, and then it's published, and it shows you it's what states report in different functional categories, and that's where that evidence came from. And what that evidence says is that proportional to other states, we spend proportionally more of our dollars on social support. You'll also see where we're spending that in a sense.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: And is it does it detail and affect the state by state comparison, or does it make that simply as a conclusion?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: So we we I pulled out several states to show you what our neighboring states are doing. Mhmm. You could pull every single state if you wanted to.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: And is that in that that report? You look at elsewhere? Or is there a reference at least to find it?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Yes. That is there. And I'd be happy to actually send you the brochure.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: I'd appreciate that.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I'll send you all that data. Yeah.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: Good. Thank you.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: A lot more. I would the

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: only thing I would say is you wanna be very careful to analyze at high level categories because we get into small categories where a small state, very small differences in reporting across districts can be a very bizarre result. So you wanna stay in those instruction support services. Yeah, and I can see Julia and I, so she's obviously working this data. For my data, you have to be very careful. Learned that too. So what is a A CSOC is a regional public agency that provides shared services to districts. You can think of it as it's sort of like a a wraparound or enabling entity that provides the services district. It operates at cost, and it's governed by member districts. And when you have in the Association of Education Service Agencies and in the Southeast Vermont, you should have them talk to you about the finances, because we should be very transparent about this. And there are some startup costs, but once they're up and running, other states are maintaining their BOCES and their CSATs through fees based on cost of service. And there's certain checks to that that I'm to mention later on in this presentation, because there are ways to be transparent in how you set it up and how you structure the finances to ensure that CSEDs are only giving you better quality at a lower price, and you don't actually use the CSED if it can't be what you could do locally. You're not gonna use the seesaw for everything. You're gonna use the seesaw for things where that scale gives you a better price. And you're gonna focus on services that frankly are inefficient or impossible to deliver locally. We were struggling with data reporting. I mean, when we when we first, you know, ten years ago, talked about a single statewide e finance system. A third of the districts were thrilled because they were on Excel spreadsheets. A third of the districts didn't care because they were on the vendor we picked, and a third of the districts are really upset because the state plan didn't have all the bells and whistles that they were using locally. So you just had huge variation in the systems. What you need to we need to figure out is how to lick this problem. We have to have better data or you cannot make good decisions. And the CSUN couldn't look at how to contract for technology or finance systems or local student information systems to to help make sure that this is done more appropriately. And the principle for a CSUN, what makes it work and what makes it bring efficiency is that you build once and use it many times instead of duplicating this having having districts trying to bootstrap that capacity 52 times over across the state. It's just a waste. I would add a nine one one is build once, use big times. The other is do it right the first time so you're not servicing the warranty the rest of the way through. And how many times have we done something, done it poorly, and then we end up just throwing cash at it to try to fix it afterwards because we didn't do it right the first time. Again, there's a finite number of people with the kinds of specialized expertise in the state. Why not make it go farther? That's the power of a regional parent agency. And so every single superintendent, having

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: to try to figure that out.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: They are not some things, and this is what we need to be mindful of. They are not a new layer of school governance. It's not a merger. It's not a school district. It's a collaborative. It's not a school closure or consolidation mandate, and it's not a mandate. It's not a privatization. These are all things people have expressed concerns about. What districts retain is control over their own local operations, budgets and staffing decisions, community accountability, and instructional leadership. Making sure that they're getting that PD is actually getting used. And it frees your local people to focus on improving primary first instructions. That's where we're losing the game right now, and it frees them to do what our kids need us to do. And that's that's a little

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: bit different if we that's very different from what we do.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: So, you know, lot of people say, well, CSAs and why rural? I mentioned already that they're used in 45 other states. About 20% of kids are educated in rural districts across the country, but in Vermont, about 66%. We're actually, by federal, you know, federal categorization, we are the most rural state, and we're the only one of the most rural states that isn't using some form of structure like this a little bit more coherently right now. And that means that our local districts have to do everything, whereas in other states, they are often supported by one of these intermediate organizations that can help implement the changes that need to be implemented. So, this is a very common tool. It's used regionally. It's nothing new, and it is used widely, especially in rural areas. They use them, I've talked about some of these, so I'm not going to talk about everything here. But they, you know, you've been talking to some of the folks who are in the building today, particularly some of our smaller rural districts, but also some of our big districts struggle to hold on to the kinds of expert seats. I remember being in a smaller rural district, we received a child who had had, you know, traumatic brain injury and was not a native English speaker. We had to go to Massachusetts to get a special educator who could evaluate that child because that person didn't really exist here in the state of Vermont. Now they probably do, but not in all communities. So we spent a tremendous amount of money just to figure out how to serve this child well. If you didn't as a local district, you can't carry that capacity in your district, so you don't have access to it. You're not big enough to hold that person on staff. What the in Vermont is doing is it's actually contracting for that specialized staff, and then it's making it available on demand to add to the member districts in the Nevada school. That's another problem that we have. We have many districts that are struggling to meet the law in terms of the requirements around the how quickly you evaluate a child and get an ID in place. And this is a chance to to do that more quickly. Here's another example. If you can't get one black button or a while shift, you can't get that specialized person. If you can't attract good talent because you're too small to be worth it for someone to commit time to you, you can get very inconsistent service across your your districts and also across your schools. So what we see happening is the same you know, kids with the very same disabilities may come back with very different service plans, and this starts to roll up. So, for example, senator Beck teaches at a high school level. By the time the kids get there, they could have the same disability, but they may show up in senator Beck's classroom with very, very different IPs because they have different kinds of input and different kinds of service at the elementary level. What CSOs can do is front load consistency so that you reduce that kind of complexity down the road, and that makes it easier for teachers at other levels to serve and also, hopefully, reduce the number of kids who need that. That's just one example of special ops. There were a bunch of hands. I was just going to see if we could take a pause to answer any questions, and I think Senator Brock has one.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: Do have a I saw the chart that showed the percentage of differences about cost between states, in which Vermont was at the highest, and if you go to West Virginia and so on, it's several points lower. At least attributable to some degree to this kind of program. My question is, are there any statistics as to what degree is represented by this as opposed to other kinds of savings such as paying teachers less?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Yeah. Well, I I think you you know, those are things that you need to model. It's difficult to just pay teachers less if you're if you've already

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: got I'm just using it as an example, but we're able to characterize and select this particular kind of data for this particular kind of program. I wonder if it's been done with other programs in the same set of statistics so you can show how much this program reduced it compared to other things that the schools were doing.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: So you will get, and we've received, and I believe your chair has asked the current BOCES that has just stood up. They're just in their first year Mhmm. To come in, and they were able to document specific services and tell you what savings there were. What they saved by pulling certain things into the BOCES instead of doing it in house. That is exactly the kind of question you should be asking. I will also tell you it's gonna entirely depend on the quality of implementation. Again, so we need this is why, you know, I'm gonna talk about some of the oversight and the controls that need to be in place to ensure that we're actually achieving what we hope to achieve with this. But those are absolutely the right questions. And I have told them when they come that you will be at not you specifically, but that this committee will be asking that question for their prepared meeting.

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: Yeah. I just had

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: a comment because I I think, senator Brock, can

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: you go back a couple slides to that? Yes, that one. That's not costs. That's percentage of rural population.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Yes. Yes.

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: Okay. So I just wanted to make sure you understood that because I think when you asked the question, sounds like you were asking about costs.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: No, I was asking, perhaps didn't word it correctly, but I was asking where education is less expensive than in Vermont. And since Vermont is top

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: of the list, know that

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: everybody's less than Vermont. The question is, what? By what measure? Because they could be less in transportation or salary and costs, and not necessarily because of Aurora shared services. And so the real question is how much could rural shared services reduce each of these? That would be something that it

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I truly think that's absolutely the right question. This is not a causal relationship. And again, I prime the people coming in. I'm so glad that is the question that you're gonna be asking. So we'll always provide you with specific examples.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: I'd like to have the educational system of West Virginia. They keep talking about the Mississippi miracle, but I'm not sure I what the switch education systems.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I I think what well, we're I'm

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: gonna hold that thought because we're gonna come to that very soon. Yep. On

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: this slide.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: Mhmm.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I have in front of me 16 BSA two sixty one a, which describes what supervisor unions have as centralized authorities, which functions. I'm sure you know this was the secretary of education. Superintendent, hiring and hiring, special education, financial HR management, transportation, professional development. We have one of the most complicated education funding systems in the country by many people's point of view. I really am just gonna go back to this, like what you have on this list, if you had a Venn diagram of what a supervisory union is, what a BOCE is and what a CISA is, is it like 90% of it gonna be right down the middle on what these are? Or how do you see the seesaw different than a supervisory union in authority structure and so on? So

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: that's part of what if you choose to move forward, you'll have to decide. Right? And and so, for example, you know, the BOCES, one of the reasons we changed the term from BOCES is there were certain associations with what services are provided through BOCES, and we used education service agencies as a term because it's a little bit broader than BOCES. Most people either think CTE or special ed when they hear the term BOCES. That's what we're hearing from the field. That's what they told us. There are many things, and one of the decisions that we're we're gonna get to that, one of the decisions that we'll have to make is do we mandate CSAS, and do we also mandate which functions get consolidated? And do we also allow some of them to be more voluntary at the local level? For example, there are parts of the state that have very high concentrations of English language learner. They may have a different set of student needs than another more rural area where they had English language learners, friend who was just one or two in a class, and the service delivery model needs to be very different. Doing CTE is going to be different in different parts of the state and in different programs. So you may wanna have some flexibility, and you may wanna have some mandatory. And those are the kinds of things that the national folks who are coming in will speak on. What they tend to do, what they tend to identify is the highest leverage opportunities are the business stack. If somebody said to me, no one cares where their paycheck comes from. They just care that their paycheck comes on time. Exactly. And and so there's certain business functions that could be removed. HR, it's crushing some of our small systems right now. Those some of those functions are functions that could be rolled up and done much more efficiently at a regional level. So it's it's looking at what that and you should actually have Chris who was on the task force, who's a business manager who actually got hired by a CSO by both used to serve as an interim business manager. And they lost their business manager in the. And and so you should you should ask him about what are the business functions that are really done best. Other districts have done, other states have done tech contracting. If you think about the tech thing, if you have to buy a 100 computers versus 10,000, I mean, think of the leverage that you're you're getting. You're not gonna make it all on toilet paper, as you said, but there are some real opportunities. And it's not just the cost. It's getting the right stuff and not wasting it because because you did it wrong. As you know, when we you know, I know I've been out of rabbit hole, but when we tried to do we were trying to get broadband to every school years ago. We had to tell people for three years prior to the implementation of the smart and balanced assessment how they could use title money, how they could use their e rate, and exactly what the tech specs were that they had to buy to. No one's giving that, you know, kind of direct information right now. And that kind of information helps people make good decisions locally. It's avoided cost. And I'm gonna give you another example of avoided cost. That is if you do it wrong, then you end up spending more money. I I just I wasn't prepared to talk about this, but I I do think it's important to say that supervisory unions are a governance structure. And one thing that I heard this summer as we were working on this from almost every superintendent I talked to, although there are exceptions, a few, is that as superintendent of a supervisory union, you're possibly going to 12 school board meetings a month. This model aside, right, your time is already being spent going to multiple school board meetings and spending a lot of time in each of those districts. Another thing that we heard over and over again is that outcomes are tricky in a supervisory model because you might have one high school and multiple elementary schools and middle schools, each in a different district. So, when you're a superintendent of a district, you sort of have a governing structure and a strategic plan for that whole district. Whereas if you are a superintendent in a supervisory union, you've got kids coming into that high school from this elementary school, this middle school, in this district, in that district, and to get everyone on the same page might take a whole year. So outcomes are affected by that governance structure. And again, like that's totally aside from what this, but I think it's an important distinction to understand.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I said it's a huge issue with a five district model, but it just with what campaign Montres presented, I see that it's much more manageable if there should be any these things. It's just

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: And we may get there. Right? I mean, we may get there. I think I I I and I and I think we have to one of the challenges we have is our capacity to implement right now. And we are struggling with implementation. And, you know, if, you know, we've involved in it. I mean, we've asked for a statewide calendar a couple times. We've asked for this is not this current reading science of reading, though. That's what act one seventy three of two thousand eighteen was about. So the the issue is how

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: do you implement the fidelity?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Because it doesn't matter what your idea is if we actually can get it done. So what we're trying to go back to the first question, how are we building the capacity to make the difference our community needs right now? Because if we can't deliver, it doesn't matter what we thought we were doing. This is an example. I'm deliberately putting this in. This is an example. This is data from the agency's website. The intent of act one seventy three of two thousand eighteen was it was shift in funding for how we funded special ed, but it depended the success of it depended on instructional shifts. It depended on really focusing on improving primary first instruction, making sure that when a kid comes into elementary school, we are giving them the best literacy instruction, the best math instruction so

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: that they can be successful. Because if we don't, then we have

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: to remove The other thing it did is it made it easier to identify kids as needing specialized education. Here we are ten years later, and this is this data, to me, speaks to the failure of implementation of act 70 one seventy three. I can't look at this without saying, oh, this was a missed opportunity. We've lost this is data from the AOE. It's between fiscal year twenty and twenty five. In that period, we lost about 7% of our students from our school. School districts unwound their teachers by about 8%. So school districts are reducing the number of teachers teaching in k 12, Down by 2% overall because they actually added some pre k teachers, and look what they did with their special educators. So we changed the law to make it easier to identify kids needing a specialized instruction through special ed, and we have increased the number of students with an IEP even as we have a declining enrollment. That's a formula driven thing. The more IEPs you have, the more special educators you need. If you look at administrators, that's coming to help support that. But look at the line down below. We we reduced the number of total teachers by a 164, but we added 814 support staff. So we created, by failing to implement the instructional shifts in that bill, we identified more students as needing specialized interest instruction. Go back to what I said at the very beginning. Are we gonna build the model

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: right, or are

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: we gonna not do it right at the beginning and service the warranty all along? Vermont has chosen to service the warranty. Here's the thing about special ed. When you when you set up a cost structure that is higher like this and, you we have districts that are identifying kids as needing an IEP at twice the rate of the nation on average. When you set that up because of maintenance of effort, you're committing to spend more for years. And that's a failure of administrative implementation. And so we can do what we wanna do here. But if we aren't paying attention to how it's gonna get implemented on the ground, we could end up making things a lot more expensive very quickly. So that's that's the caution

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: on this. We can't spend this amount of money.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: That's our current And, arguably,

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: know, was it two years ago, schools were sending out letters saying your kid might not get their IEP because we don't have this back. Sounds like they found somebody in the community.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Well, they're putting in less specialized.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Less specialized training, somebody's mother. Mhmm. Well, I And but that amount of money we put in there, we can only decrease a certain amount with maintenance of effort. So we can't we can't we're limited in what we can step back from spending that much

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: Oh.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: No matter how much we improve the system so we don't need to spend that much. So we have locked ourselves in Mhmm. To very expensive system.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: And that you could go through other aspects, but that is a very good explanation of where a regional education service agency that took that specialized expertise did the high quality professional development that our educators need. Many of them enter practice before all this research on the science of reading. And provide appropriate expertise on demand around special education, you can prevent this from happening. Another problem that's happening here, and this is also related to our rollout, if you are a district, the way we are now reimbursing students for substantially separate settings, kids who are not in their schools are being placed out of their school to a different setting. If you look at the special education report that was just released by the agency, we are placing kids out into those other settings at a much higher rate than other comparison states. Those are very expensive settings, and once you place kids in those settings, they often don't come up. So, that's another place where in other states, they are using the BOCES or the seesaws to prevent that problem. Why is it happening? Because if you're a district right now, it's actually the the way our reimbursement works, it is in your financial interest to place that child out because you are being reimbursed more if you place them out than if you keep them in house and create your own in house program. So we have perverse incentives that are driving bad practice. They're making things more expensive, and they really aren't good for kids either. That's again where a regional approach to solving some of these children, these problems, this is not a problem about the kid, this is about how we're serving the kid. And if we took that regional approach, are opportunities there on us to develop it. But if there are opportunities there, we could actually do much better in this arena, both for taxpayers, but also for children as well. Was just, I wanted to give an example. Chris?

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, I was I was a little struck by the Act 173, how much, identification that we've increased over the years. Is it an issue of over identifying or being able to identify correctly or what like, I'm curious to learn more about why we are identifying so much faster than other states.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I think what what I mean, you loosen the if you teach well, if you are really focused I mean, people are gonna debate till next year about Mississippi. But if you do focus on improving the primary teaching, making sure that when you send your kids to school, that teacher has the best training in how to support struggling learners. Maybe it's not your kid. If they have if they have that if they have that skill, they can serve that child there. So, what we've moved from is a model that teaches people to learn in their classroom to a model that teaches people through intervention. Intervention is more expensive. We wanna build it right so we don't have to serve as many warranties down the road. And what we haven't done is focus on improving classroom teaching so that those teachers are better prepared to teach children so so that we have to we don't have to remediate quite as much possible. Does that make sense?

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. So they're not.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: But we made it easier to identify, and we've also created a situation where you may get more funding depending on how you identify. So what we wanna do is make sure kids have the support they need, but that we aren't just relying on interventions to support those kids. Again, this is not about the children because it's the same kid, and no one can tell me that, you know, Vermont has many, many more kids with disabilities than So they're this is about how we're serving them right now and being worked to do.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: That's right.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Do you have any work?

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: This has been going on for years, and one seventy three was supposed to fix that.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Well, you did But we

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: think it wasn't implemented. Think that's the point.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Yeah. It is. So we're still Alright. Yep. So the core value proposition, what they can add is more immediate benefits because you don't have to wait three to five years for merger. You can immediately once you set it up, you could if you decided that you wanna consolidate some of these functions at the regional level, you could you know, whether it's responsibility for substantially separate placements or business the business stack or IT, whatever, you could get that benefit as soon as you stand it up. And there's less transition risk, and that's an issue right now. We tried very hard at the task force to get specific data from the agency on which positions in which division were funded by which federal funding stream. We know they've already tried to zero out some of those funding streams, and that could still happen if some of it may be granted directly to districts, in which case they may need the CCI help administer the federal government if they still exist. But if they do block grant, there's not gonna be positions of the agency because they won't be needing positions to monitor anymore. So we also can see quite significant losses in staffing. And this is sort of like a it's risk management. In this moment of instability, it gives us a little bit more capacity to do risk management in the system as well. And again, they you know, you can't get away. They focus on the high cost, low frequency work. They can provide you with that resilience and that equity of access across districts, but you have to prioritize implementation. If you don't focus on making sure we can do it right, then we're not going have the capacity to make the difference our communities are screaming for right now. These are some of the areas you can come back to, as we've already talked about, so I won't belabor it. But these are some of the high impact areas that I suspect you will hear about from the people who come in. I know the secretary spoke about CTE as one. You know, I think there's a lot of interest in support around grants and grants management together with respect to federal funds, But these are all the kinds of things that that are used and done in other states. You needed cost control. I appreciate senator Brock's question because you can't assume that any of this will happen. It's how you implement it, and you do need to plan to make sure that when you're doing this, you're protecting taxpayers as well as kids. And one of the ways and if you look at the sample articles of agreement, there are the currency side did did start a fee in the startup because they didn't have the services yet, but their expectation is once they're up and running that it will be fee based. And, you know, so once you once you're purchasing special ed, you're gonna the the services will be moved from your district up to that regional level, and you'll be fee you know, doing it as needed at a cost of price there. So you need to make sure, and this is a place where the AOE could really serve a valuable role. You need to make sure that the services are priced at cost, and if revenues are higher than cost, that they're returned to the districts, that they're not accruing them at the CECL level. You support that with annual independent products, you have a fund in surplus, and you have minimum multi district participation rules. All of these regions, if you assume that they'll be adjusted, but all of them have many, many districts. You don't wanna be producing in the regional entity services that only one district is using. You're really trying to leverage scale. And so so there's some guardrails there to prevent that. Again, this is about replacing the fragmentation that we have currently

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: and not stacking on top of it. I'm thinking some of the mergers that took place, I assume, from act 46. And then we had individual towns that said, I don't like special ed my kids getting, you small town, you get one person, you can get enough people to say, we wanna do our And if that kind of, you know, is there a requirement that if you are in this Seesaw District, that you are in a Seesaw District and you can't just decide

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: that I'm not happy with it and therefore I'm gonna get five of my neighbors and we're gonna cause a brouhaha and get out. You would decide. This committee would decide that. The task force report recommended it's mandatory because it's like health insurance. If you're all in, you all benefit. If only some of you are in, you don't get the benefit. Exactly. You know, you can this this body could also say, these are functions. I mean, prior to act 46, this body actually moved special ed to the SU level out of the district. And the places where successful mergers happen were actually places where they successfully elevated special ed. And people are like, oh, wow. There's actually benefits to doing it at this level. Mhmm. And my point is that that's not enough. Like, we we need to elevate it enough. And so there are some opportunities here to to elevate and just say, you know, there are some things that are just you know, this this local level just isn't big enough. You don't have to scale on your own to create this opportunity in a consistent way, because you you don't you don't have enough of those kids on your own to make it a viable service. So you're absolutely right. I think and that's where I would be asking the national folks who come in, what should be mandatory, what should be done where, and how do we make this work, and what needs to be flexible. Because, again, you can need some customization. What Addison County needs may be different than what the Northeast Kingdom needs. And so you wanna have some capacity to to do flexibility. Just the speed and the risk comparison. Again, with we recommended that we think about building this and think about this as resilient structure before mergers because the benefits begin. We need people can't wait three years for some benefits. They need the benefits now. And so this was an an effort to try to to get some of that. You don't get the contract equalization shot. By that, I mean, when we start to look at some of the proposed mergers and we just compare the teacher salary schedules across districts, within some of the proposed districts, there was a difference in, you know, $20,000 by the time we were a couple of years in. Those of you who remember the health care merger at the state level, the first impact was to raise that spending because some districts had negotiated higher or better health care benefits, some had negotiated better salary benefits. Now, some districts have high salary and high health care because we level up that health care. You're going to get that same effect in a merger with contracts as well. There's also no construction dependency. We looked over and people went in. We were determined to have a map around comprehensive high schools. It's gonna be really hard to do without some construction aid. You don't have construction aid's dependency for getting collaborative education services jobs. The hope is that we could create some capacity to get traction on better education and more affordability without waiting for that construction to happen. And there's no because there's no military government. So, again, this is about stability and resilience, and some of this is addressed in the report. I threw this in because I do think we have to talk about capacity. This is the position count at the Agency of Education from fiscal year 'three to fiscal year 'twenty four. They are they've been gaining positions in most recent years, but they are significantly down from where they were. And I can tell you that even by, you know, 2014, 2015, the agency could not have met its statutory requirements if it weren't for federal funds. The entire accountability system is funded by the federal government, pretty much, with some matching, the minimum required state match. So in terms of what they have capacity to implement, we need to be a little realistic about what we're asking them to do right now, given all the demands, but also given the volatility. Again, if there's block granting of federal funds that bypasses the agency, those numbers are gonna drop even more. And so really being thoughtful. Is it okay if I ask you to give you a give? Yeah. So, you know, do you know

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: the yes. So I

[Representative 'Edie Gray' (House Commerce & Economic Development) — task force co-chair]: snuck in and I'm not stand very long. Okay. But I just wanna add one other thing because I'm Edie Gray, representative from Jericho House Commerce and Economic Development, also co chair of the task force. And, if you look at this, you can see a cost shift from the general fund to property tax. And I think that's important to note too because every one of those positions was either federally funded or general funded. And now all the work that was being done by those people, not only is it being done through our property taxes, but it's being done multiple times. So there's a multiplier on how much more we're spending because the work isn't being done at the agency, but it is being done all across the state in every different supervisory unit or every different district. And I think that's an important piece to note here that when we change something, there are consequences that are also

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: So when curriculum development must be done exactly in Montpelier Mhmm. Hopefully on federal funding, it wasn't a cost to the local school district except in implementing it. Now each district does its own curriculum development Mhmm. And training its teachers in that, And that's assuming that each district has equal capacity to do that, which they don't. So you're getting the inequity that we know is inherent right now.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: One of things I always appreciate you is you always cut right through the chase. I think that's exactly right. And in fact, one of the examples that superintendent Jen gave to us in committee was every single committee every single community has to figure out what the best math curriculum is. That's like, that's a waste of everyone's time. You know, there there are there that is the research that can be done once at the regional level and then just pushed out.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: And if you get to local school boards, what do I know about what is the best math curriculum? And when I went to school, we just learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, and that was it. And so, yeah, your kids can get penalized that way.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: And in 2003, we had graduate level courses at our school site that were in reading instruction. Yeah. That sponsored by the agency. That doesn't happen anymore.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: So now

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: now I'm curious because I thought I thought local districts want local control, which would be what we're coming up with. They're teaching our students. They're what they're doing. So I'm just a little confused.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Well, I'm I'm

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Depending on what it

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: is we want local control? Or I think probab I mean, I'm gonna let you figure that out, but think

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: No. No.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I think I think what people people feel very strongly about their schools, but I think there's also an acknowledgment, and I, I mean, do you wanna answer that one?

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: I mean, you can finish your sentence, Abby. I've just been away in on my thoughts

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: about that.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I think there are things that are best done locally at the school level, and there are things that, frankly, there's you you cannot look at our cost and our outcomes and say we're doing things the way we need to stand right now. And so I think the point is, I when I talk to superintendents, they're saying, yeah, there are some things that definitely we can use some regional support for. Mhmm. And I've tried to give you a couple examples here. Yeah.

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: And I I would just add that this the the school districts themselves would choose unless we required these are the things you have to do with the CISA, but the school districts themselves would choose what services their collection collective CISA would would provide, and then they would buy into those services, and then they would be monitored by the local school. So, like, if the business services they're buying from a CISA isn't good enough, they can be like, hey, you guys are we don't like the way you're doing the services. There's there's there's still the local control over the quality of the services that the CISA is providing. Yeah. And the contracts that they are giving that they are negotiating with the CISA and the services that they're buying from the CISA. So there is still it's not it's not creating a massive school district where the the local little town no longer have any kind of saying something if they would still have say through their school board about what the contracted services with the CSA is.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: And pool they can pool resources. And yeah. Yeah.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: You don't have to pay five of his managers. You can pay one.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: Plus, all the other ones have it.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: And if

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: there's issues inside those?

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: No. So that's I think the point is that you would no longer have a district business manager. It would be a CISA business manager that would do the budget.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: As long as they agree to that.

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: Yeah. Well, that's what you would contract for.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: This is what this is what you're deciding when you decide what is mandatory versus what do you there's some things you want less to go on.

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: And I believe that the that, and you too would know better than me, but the, and the, in the report, one of the things, the sort of like, provisions that would be a stop gap, would say that if the CISA is providing these services and you're contracting for these services, you can't also provide them at the school district.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Well, I'd imagine I would pay for something not used to.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I think that's the point, but you also want to make sure don't.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: So there was you're There would be some giving up of local control. It wouldn't be your town's business manager. It would be the CFOB Mhmm. Business manager who was not making policy decisions per se, like how much you pay your teachers, but they'd be maintaining the books. They'd be running the payroll. They'd be giving you information about what everything costs.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: However many districts choose to do that within the CESA.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Well, I Right?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: We can that's up to

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: us.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: That's up to you. Yeah. What's mandated and what's not. Yeah.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: That's huge right now. I have just one business office for multiple districts. That's the thing that I'm That's already how they operate. Right. And I'm still stuck on Senator Chittenden's point about the Venn diagrams. I'm just feeling like we're caught on the same thing. Can

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: I just I thought that looking at the surface he was trying?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Can I just say that my 2¢, and it may not help explain anything, but I've been on the school board in a district and I've had a superintendent who was an expert in buildings? He was really great with buildings, and we built some buildings, and we passed a bond to do some deferred maintenance, and it was great. That person didn't necessarily, and let's just say that this is a fiction, but wasn't necessarily an instruction expert. You want your superintendent, you want your educational leaders to be experts in instruction and experts in delivering education to kids. You don't need them to be experts in ordering paper towels. That is creating economies of scale to buy stuff is very different from being an instructional expert, and I think we suffer when we don't see that nuance. It's really important. Right now they're doing it all, and it's not creating economies of scale, and it's not efficient or cost effective, And sometimes kids suffer because of that.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: You might all have to buy a number two as opposed to a number two and a half pencil because you wouldn't buy the pencils and every you know, some you wouldn't have somebody say, well, I really prefer this brand of pencil to another. As long as it writes and the kid can hold it, it's a pencil. But, if you buy a whole box of pencils, it's a lot cheaper than buying a pencil case in front of pencils.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Software vetting has been another area where people just are overwhelmed. My kids are having a lot. And so, know, are, in New York, there are actually BOCES that have specialized expertise in software procurement who are actually now selling to the entire state because they developed such expertise that they're now able to scale not just within the CSOP, but

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: across the state as well. The state of Vermont just found out the hard way that we don't necessarily have the expertise in software. Yeah. And we've made some expensive mistakes because experts are few and far between, and the guy who's a techie in your local school district probably doesn't know enough about how you do a whole new tech system that has to integrate with 15 other ones. If you're bigger, you can afford to pay the cost, and state government has had a problem for years in competing in cost or salary with the private market or any kind of expertise in software, Internet. It's our our salary ranges aren't high enough to be competitive. You get that down into a little school, and you can't you just can't afford to hire the best. I just

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: wanna be mindful about time because I did wanna get to one example of how these guys can support I'm

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: I'm watching this. No. And I know I've got a couple people. I have a long drive. So So do so I'm gonna try and

[Unknown (possibly Senator Ruth Hardy)]: use

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I just I know a lot of there's been a lot of conversation about bigger districts, so I wanna make sure we saved a little time to get there. And just the structural logic is that the seesaw's and if you go to the longer report, section two, that depends on shared capacity and planning. In the report, it talks about strategic mergers where you're actually using local input and which, where, and what are the conditions under which mergers actually may yield savings and better services. And also section three refers to coordinating planning around regional high schools. I wanna make sure we get to an example because I'll give you a couple of graphics that speak to that. But these collaborative entities also could be the platform for having those larger conversations around, you know, coordination and creation of regional high schools, for example, which I think we all know in some places is overdue. Need to have risks and guardrails. Like, I've talked a lot about the book of vision and say again, we should be anticipating the need to make sure there's no duplication. We need to be anticipating the need to think about AOV capacity and what has to happen for collaboration. If someone just opts out and then tries to free ride the work of everybody else, that's a problem or sort of all in just like health care. Yeah. And we need to build in protections. The national experts will talk to you about performance scorecards that can be used to track improvements in service. And improvements in service are avoided cost in education. You know, I gave you the example of special ed. We could have done that for other things too. If you do it right, you save money. When you don't do it right, you often pay through the notes, and we need to be really careful about that here. Yeah. And regional shared services is not a new idea. I think we get nervous because we don't have them here, but I just wanna make really clear. This is sort of where people are moving right now. For example, the governor's strategy for health care reform, which he presented to us in our joint caucus, was regionalization. And if you look at the logic in those bullet points, it's very similar to what we're talking about with collaborative education service agencies. It's this idea that regional collaboration can help protect access to services even as you're bringing down costs. Yeah. And if you've listened to the testimony in and in Senate Economic Development today, there was a lot of conversation around a CTE seesaw. And, you know, one these eyeballs in Vermont is that we didn't do CTE. It wasn't college or career. It was college and career. And what the secretary was talking today was about an ESA, which is a seesaw, to support statewide access and improved regional development of teaching curriculum that could then be pushed into regional high schools in a way that really expanded access to career tech ed, not just in the tech centers. And there are some things that have to be done at the tech centers, but made it more accessible to more of them and made it accessible early. And I know I know, you were in that copy that testimony as well today. And I went to the proposal. So what you're being asked to decide, how this works is that we really have to this body, but it's whether to require regional shared services, whether to limit it to CT or to think about a more integrated approach where there's more robust support and maybe platform some of those conversations that we all know need to happen about governance. And whether to invest your how to invest your limited state capacity. So for me, the legislative test, and I think this is something we talked about at the task force, was how do we create real capacity to bring down costs and be better for kids, and make sure people have fair access to opportunity in places that we currently don't have it. So as we talk about CSAS or whatever we talk about, that's the sense. Are we actually making things better for kids and for communities? Because if we can't pass that Smith test, then we shouldn't be doing right now. This is the purpose of the map, and we expect this will be modified through district requests. We chose to go with the VSA regions, which were organized around restaurants where it was easy for superintendents to do years and years and years ago. And obviously, there'll be Seriously? Yes. That's how many I thought that was a final historical thing. But also, the mergers in Act 46 shifted some of those regions, which is why there's some discontinuous districts. So we're assuming that people may ask to be reassigned, and there is recommendation or suggestions in the task force report respect to that. And this is what the one of the leaders in the first postings that set up in Vermont has said. That just that this was cost savings, and you should ask her to be very specific. What were those cost savings? And why did this give you resources? Why did this give you opportunities and expertise you did not have before the proceeds? I wanted to I I started the very beginning by saying that we had the education service area conversation, but it also happened side by side with really hard efforts to try to figure out where there were opportunities to maybe consolidate or take buildings offline to make things better. And one of the interesting conversations that we had was realizing, first of it was much harder to do this in a way that actually made sense than he expected, but also that they also weren't always there and thought they might make sense. And I just wanna walk you through one quick example. This is the enrollment data. This is provided by the VFA. The grade spans we're mostly looking at high school here, and the grade spans of these schools differ slightly. So it feels k 12, but it's a small district, and U thirty two is seven twelve. Spalding and Mount Keeling are nine twelve. But if you look at this data between fiscal year ninety five and fiscal year twenty five, these schools collectively lost about seven sixty kids. That's the equivalent of multiple small schools. So we need to be clear that this isn't everybody's problem, this isn't some people's problem, and we all need to be talking about what

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: we do. And that bump in Montpelier is when they merge from Roxbury. Right. And part of

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: the spalding may have to do with the flooding too. Right? We there's some other things really going on there. This is the buildings, the facilities index. This these are some of the most depleted. That's a measure of depletion. Washington Central has done some work in their facilities. Obviously, U 32 is in much better shape than many buildings, but these are very in Montpelier. They're buildings one of them is in a flood zone. These are

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: significantly depreciated assets. Instead of just high school? Because our other schools in Montpelier were built in the early nineteen hundreds or earlier. Yeah. They're they're older. The high school has got

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: a new building. So if you look at this, this is an area that has capacity for another almost 800 students in its existing buildings, And it just had a failed bond vote around a new CTE program that was gonna add an additional 300 seats. So we're talking about adding CTE seats even as we know we've got excess capacity in deteriorating buildings. This is the kind of situation that is just screaming for a regional conversation. Yeah. The map on the right is a map that shows the thirty minute drive time. What we we actually had to export the data from the online portal that you see from the state. So this is from addresses. So we just rent it to everybody's address. We don't know if students live there, but this is the thirty minute drive time by school building for every address that could potentially host a family in this region. And these are circles. So what I want you to notice is how many of those buildings are located in the middle of the circle of the thirty minute drive time. So we've got excess capacity already. We're talking about adding 300 more seats, and all these buildings are really within a very short drive time with each other. This is the kind of regional conversation that we need to have to get to good solutions that both maybe take some of our retire abilities offline, expand opportunities for kids where we need them, but also bring down this is the kind of permanent reduction that would leave us leaner and better and more efficient every year, important, not just one year through a lifetime buy down. So, I wanted to share that, because I think that when people have a chance to work regionally, sometimes it opens the door to all kinds of conversations that just wouldn't happen if you're not sitting across the table from those people.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: And

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: the voters decide not to move forward with this tech center, but they're still in NEIF. But, you know, there's an opportunity here in a regional way to start asking questions about. And in the task force report, we did try to map a couple regions using this mapping technique that they give you a sense of where there are opportunities and also where it's really, really gonna be hard to do mergers or do anything constructive for anyone. Because if there's some places it just it just doesn't make sense. It really doesn't. And there are places where, yeah, we really need to figure out how to put some buffalo and some construction aid behind some of these places because they could do something really quickly. That would be really, really exciting.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: So relatively flat Pain Road just compared to other sections of the

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: Yeah.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Our very popular don't speak itself. And there's a lot of history.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: We don't talk to the open book.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Yes. I mean, there there is it's an old social Yep. But it's there. But if your kids all go to school together, that can get broken down. I mean, there are railroad tracks in Vermont. It's just not the traditional color barrier. There are other

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: And if you think of them and if you think about what made when when you passed act 46, which some of you were here floating on that bill, there was a provision for accelerated mergers. And sitting on the other side, we thought that those gates were so tight, you'd only get one accelerated merger in the first year. And our thought was that was a merger with training wheels at the agency of education. We had six people there who've been through mergers on their own in districts, but they didn't know how to support districts going through mergers. So the thought was one district will come through, and we thought it would be Addison Central or or as if you have Mid Mount Mansfield, and 11 districts came through the gate. And they were all every single district that moved quickly was a district where they already had a working relationship with us. Mhmm. And, you know, again, by creating opportunities for districts to work together on professional development, opportunities to work on special ed, to see that you actually we all care about the same stuff. We get people's kids. It's the most important thing in the world to them. They send it to us. We are all trying to do the right thing for those kids. And when you work together, you must be actually more in common than we have in women. Also, in this area, Washington County Mental Health runs school.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Barry Spaulding has a separate school building for its non traditional education. I don't know that that's full, but probably not. So there are other resources here that could be coordinated to help teachers Mhmm. To help all and help kids. I mean, in the end, right, it's all

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: And I'm glad you bring up the designated agencies. I'm thinking of different regions. But, for example, in senator Beck's region, my guess is that some of your students are coming from different designated agency regions. And Oh, yeah. And and so if you think about regional partnerships with multiple DAs, you could try to make those contracts more and the service bundles more consistent. Because one of the things we've heard from schools like your school is that it's hard because each of the DAs provides a different service bundle. So at the school, you're trying to integrate those service bundles. But if your seesaw was working to sort of normalize that across the DAs, you might get more confused. And it just reduces cost at the school level.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. He used

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: to be moved to the poster child. Yeah. For

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Memorial. We're being counted. Yeah. Circled. It's four counties. Yeah. He needs to tell the school about me.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: It's ridiculous. And that's the one that's the main thing.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Start with the demonstration. I chant them.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: That's done by the time.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: And that was it. I bet. But I'm here for questions if you have them, or encourage you to, you know, read the report. I've linked it here and see if it's on the appendices for other things. It's just been helpful.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: It's not really in our area of jurisdiction, but it does have a financial impact. And we will talk to Southeastern and hear about their numbers. Mhmm. Board members committee. I'm still I'm gonna have another conversation with the Department of Ed, and I'll try and talk to the administration about where are their numbers. I mean, if they don't want this, then how are they figuring in differently to come up with better numbers? But I have in the last year that we've been working on this not seen any specific numbers to the district proposal, just what will save money, but I haven't heard that. Nobody objects saving money. They do object to closing their local schools and if we can save money and not, we probably do need to close some of the schools. Kindergarten classes of four students is really not financially viable and I doubt it's really the best education for kids. But, yeah. So we will have more of this conversation. We'll see where we work those, but I again, you are having this with the education committees.

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: We did with the education committee, and I think the thought was this was CSO 101. Yes. So that when you would know what financial questions to ask. Yes. I think you have to understand what the report was so that then you can think about when they come in, you should you should ask them this question. But if if you had already seen the report, we

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: thought it'd easier to do that. Well, I'm listening to this, and my mind is saying, why can't we do this with hospitals? Isn't this for hospital transformation? Yeah. Okay. We can take that down the hall. But we did yeah. It is the same principle that there are just some things that are that can be done better in a larger scale. Probably not emergency medicine, you know, my appendix is rupturing, but remember

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: an old campaign phrase a number

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: of years ago, We don't need 62 different people buying toilet paper.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: No. We do not. Which is

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: what we had. Probably something that's still

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: forced strep throat. Mhmm. I'm assuming the insurance company is talking to the school boards about risk, but it had to be really inconvenient for parents who had to take time off from work to take their kid up to get a introvert.

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: But you know, one of the issues also that we keep hearing about a lot

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: of our

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: consolidations is the issue of upward lift of wages in order to keep things equalized, and that is a real concern in terms of just, and we saw in some of the statistics that we've seen here, that the cost tends rise overall, and the question is, can we measure benefit?

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Yeah, and I guess what I heard you say is those license contracts would still be done at the district level, at least initially. Mean, people decided they wanted, so then there still would be that local control. I know that people higher up in the system are concerned about the lack of wages because I've been told they train teachers and then the really good teachers go to higher paying agencies and they get left with either new teachers, teachers who for some reason don't wanna go, or I've been told teachers they couldn't get a job somewhere else. It's a mixed bag, but they they lose their the ability to compete for the best teachers. But it would add to the cost if you teach yourself. So the question is, will

[Senator Randy Brock (Member)]: it add to the benefit? Yeah. And that's the issue from that, because what's the benefit?

[Representative Rebecca Holcombe (Windsor-Orange-2)]: I don't think, and I don't think anyone thinks that there isn't some consolidation that needs to happen. Think your question is how do you do

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: it strategically? And how do you help with yes. Thank you. You so much. Thank you. This has been very helpful. Have a lot of questions to ask. Okay. Committee, I'm not gonna make you stay here in your lists.

[Senator Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Thank you.

[Senator Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Since I've been told that some of the schools in the kingdom are going home at 11:00 today or went home. No. We