Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Let's go live. We are live. We are live. And we are back. And I asked John and Julia to kind of join us so they could hear some of the discussion. We started with $2.20, which is per pupil spending, and there is, I would say, a fair amount of concern with the per pupil amount because if you lose a a student that's waited for poverty and English as a second language, and maybe you pick up another student with no weights, that that skews your cost per student, you know, that and you don't really control if and at Senator Chittenden, you can fill that in with your family of five.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. I think two things surface and so one thing exactly what the chair is speaking about, which is I think there is a valid concern about the volatility in smaller districts when people, absolute people numbers could change. And so Senator Beck not mentioned a notion, really two notions percolated. One, I guess there might be precedent for it previously where imagining a district that has a decrease in pupils if there was a backstop so that the amount that they wouldn't be penalized even with the smoothing function to get less money allocated to them than what they spent the previous year. That he seemed to speak to the fact that that has been a construct in another discussion or so on. The construct of the five kids is the testimony from one is if you take a small district that loses five pupils and that's the $10,300 times it, the pupil amount that they get that year, that represents a much larger proportional amount of decreased spending capacity than five kids that leave a really large district. And so that the concern is if a small district in its current construct loses a multi unit housing complex or even just the large family leaves or other factors that could be affecting that area, some sort of backstop or catch so that that district would have some sort of smoothing. Did that speak to your

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, think what they're wondering is we've got the per pupil spending. Could it be either the per pupil spending or your overall education spending can't go up more than because the per pupil spending can be a lot more volatile than your overall. And then the other thing that came up is there's always going to be something we can't imagine. So, could there be an appeal? We did it to the Secretary of Education on minimum school size or class size, but just an appeal process and maybe either or kind of thing with school either for pupil spending or overall ed spending because we've got well, we've got Roxbury, Montpelier, I don't think is having you know, is not going up in their spending, but Roxbury's tax rate's going up something like 34%. That's the CLA. It's it's weird out there.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: I have a thought, but I don't wanna jump in there.

[Speaker 0]: Well, okay.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Oh, yeah. Have you guys modeled this kind of proposal, but doing it on a not on a per pupil basis, but on a total education spending basis. Because one of the concerns that I have and that came up in the discussion is that this is very, very dependent on the change because it's related peoples. You could have a change in data. The changes at the federal level are potentially going to change our poverty data with the direct cert being less direct and certified. And then if you have students who are just you lose a couple ELL students, it could have a huge huge impact on district because that weight is so big. So, doing it instead of on a weighted per pupil on a total education spending and applying a percentage to that instead.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Julie Richter, JFO. I understand the idea. I haven't done that modeling. It could be done, and I can work on it and come back to the committee about what that would look like. A couple of just general preliminary thoughts or do you wanna go?

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: You're good.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: One one piece is and I haven't listened to your conversation, so maybe you've already explored this. It is the the per weight of people spending is a long term weighted average daily membership. So it is the average over two years. So the impact and change of weights won't be felt as acutely as it would be if it wasn't a weighted average. That being said, I understand the concern you're facing.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I would I would just say that two years is not very long term. That's pretty pretty short term medium term. So The official I know. I know. Know. Think we've got to

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: worry about it. And then the other piece I would say in terms of the appeal process, the first thing that comes to mind is the the there was the tax rate review board that was set up during the transition for Act 127. Remember, this was the 5% cap transition, but there was also the piece of it where if your district had spent I don't know if it was Ed spent or weighted Ed spent, but if some some figure grew by more than 10%, you would There

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: you go.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: You wouldn't be eligible for the transition unless you went before this tax rate review board. So that's the first structure or type of structure that comes to mind.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: The backstop.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: And from a fiscal perspective, that would be I I don't see any challenges in adding that to the modeling.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: What what do you mean by that stuff? I can't remember how what that

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: So I'd love for senator Beck to chime in on this, because I thought you were saying that this is something that's come up previously, but in imagining that small district that loses a few kids and then they're spending their portion allocated amount with the applicable growth cap per pupil would bring their total budget permissible amount to be less than what they had in their budget the previous year to basically tap to say no. You would by default, never having lower an allocated amount than your previous year. Is that a construct that you've seen in another bill?

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Yeah. Which I remember checking it around in the previous committee having a, you know, a two buckets you fit into one, whichever one you get the most, you would set that. I mean, I have a I have a district this year that lost 9% of their long term lead. I mean, this would if they didn't have that protection of saying, but you at least get what you spent last year.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: How long, though? Does it Yeah. Pays out? Say what does what pays out? I guess for how long would they just continue to get that even if they keep losing kids? Do they just keep staying at that budget in perpetuity?

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Well, this is only a two year shift.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. It's only a two year.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Yeah. It's only two.

[Speaker 0]: So and we're we've done this before. We've done this with a major spike in value that through your granules. We've done it with a major decrease in value during the housing crash that your tax rate can only go up or down x percent a year, and this is only two years. So

[Scott Beck (Member)]: And they're not absolved from the tax rate that's calculated from the spending level. Has nothing to do with that.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Right. Yeah. But if you

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: if you're if the backstop is the prior year's budget, that, again, doesn't account for the fact that their costs are going up, sort of contracted costs, their fixed costs

[Speaker 0]: that we can't.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Education spending plus some percent or something. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: I mean, I think Yeah.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: It's harsh to say last year's amount. Everybody's getting Yeah. It's just a big question. I just wonder if if you played around a little bit, Julia, with changes to I mean, we already have an excess spending threshold, is supposed to meant to moderate the increases, and districts do take it pretty seriously. They don't wanna go off of that threshold for the most part. Have have you looked at changes to the threshold to bringing it down, if that what that impact would be in terms of?

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Nothing that I'm prepared to speak about. Okay.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah. That's fair. Totally fair. Just because that is a construct that districts already are used to. They already use it. They already know how it works, etcetera, and it's not implying imposing something on top of because this this proposal would keep the excess spending threshold and put a cap on it. Yeah. So how much would we could we do it could we do the same thing by just adjusting the excess?

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Just walking the threshold count or something.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah. And what what what how would we do that? And and then if we do walk that down or do we do impose caps, another another backstop that that is potentially we could consider and just throwing this out there, but is what do what could we exclude or should we exclude? Because in the past, we've excluded things from the excess spending threshold for imposing a cap. Instead of having a fast stop, we could just say, you know, your your school construction or debt service is not included or whatever.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: We've already excluded those decisions that were made before a certain date. Yeah. But they're

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: only for a certain date. So, like, you know, there there are could that could be another way of getting at it is what do we exclude it from the calf?

[Speaker 0]: One fraction of '73 removed all the exclusions.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Well, that was yeah. That's what happens to the excess spending threshold is you should roll it up to exclusions and search them.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Right. And I'm not saying we exclude everything. I'm just saying, are there things that would make it more palatable to those customers to clarify those things?

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Clarifying question. Julia, when you I I think I somebody said that if we did what's in two two twentieth draft, it would save $67,000,000. Is that Is that the number right?

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: The number is right. Okay. The framing, I would adjust slightly.

[Speaker 0]: And I

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: would say the estimate is that if s two twenty were to be implemented in f y twenty seven, based off of our f y twenty seven data, then we estimate it would save 67 and a half million. Okay. We can't forecast what school districts are gonna build into their budgets in FY twenty eight.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Okay. So that leads me to my the question is is that when you so when you make that assumption, you're talking an apples to apples long term weight exam to because we know that the long term weight exam next year is not gonna be the same as it is this year. It's probably going to Be lower. Decay, go down a little bit. Okay, that's just why just wanna understand what the baseline calculation is there.

[Speaker 0]: Okay.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: So, Doctor. Assata's here.

[Speaker 0]: Oh, John.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. John Gray, opposite of council. I guess my first question was just in terms of thinking about the population volatility point. We have an existing law of mechanism for dealing with population volatility. The hold harmless provision of the pupil waiting section, which is just currently under suspension, but under that you can't have lower than 96.5% of your prior year weighted long term membership. So, you could tweak that number, you could remove the suspension of the hold harmless provision if you're just concerned about population volatility, and that would go into determining your per people spending. Totally separately, the second point I wanted to make was about if you make exclusions of school construction payments or the like from, we typically think about the exclusion being from the excess spending penalty, and that's meaningful because what it means is that the funds for that are raised across the state rather than more heavily shouldered on the district making the decision, but a cap is different than an excess spending threshold. So an ex I don't know how an exclusion from the cap would really work because it would produce literally higher ed spending across the state, and it would raise the per people's spend. So just calling out that a cap is quite different from a threshold in terms of whether or not you can exclude, it's no longer an effective cap if you actually just write it like it's not a limitation on the per people spend, but just to the population volatility, I think you could just remove the suspension of the whole harmless provision and consider changing that percentage if you wanted.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, please.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Just thinking about the context of the education fund, of course, is right. He's always right. So

[Speaker 0]: don't know. Get that.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Listen to me.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Think thinking about that from a fiscal perspective and thinking about the way that the hold harmless provision works is essentially it creates phantom students, right, where we are counting kids in districts where those kids do not exist.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Don't

[Speaker 0]: carry over anymore. And they don't

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: carry over anymore. Good. In a fixed system, like the education fund, the more pupils you give in one district, and the higher their weighted pupil count, the lower their per pupil spending, which means the lower their tax rate. So absent any other policy changes, this gets back to the pushing on the balloon. The school districts that are receiving these extra pupils will not be carrying as large of a share on their taxes than they would have if those extra pupils didn't exist. That's a policy decision if you want

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: to do it. That's just the underlying mechanism. Well, I think that's why doing this on a per pupil basis is somewhat problematic because you either if you try to create a backstop, either create phantom students by having that or you if you don't create a backstop, you punish districts for their weeks changing or their the things are out of their control. I so that's why doing it on a total education stand. I mean, that's the thing, like, the the the full budget. Like, you have a budget, and you can't increase it by a certain percentage of the whole thing. And then there's a lot more give and take within it than on a per pupil basis, seems like.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I'm agreeing to a large extent of what you just said. And my question is, though, from your familiarity with the last couple of years, how often does this happen? That this, if it wasn't suspended, that this would have triggered, like, is this a real thing to be concerned with, that the volatility is swinging the pupil count to be so noticeable, especially the smaller districts?

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: I don't think, I certainly don't know, but I think it's literally just a question of how population counts changed in districts and state.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: The only other piece I would add is we're currently in FY '26. FY '25 was the first year of FY 2027, which changed the way certain pupils are counted, So we really don't have any time series data that we can compare now to pre act 01/27.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Ann, I can look into it, but I don't know. Well, I do know just as an example, Senator Chittenden, of the districts in my senate district that they got incorrect data from the agency and that had a significant impact on the number of students that they were getting poverty weight for. And the agency was basically like, we can't really change it. So, you're gonna have to eat it this year. And so, when something like that happens and it was like a 100 students, it was not it it was a significant difference to them. If something like that happened and they couldn't change it because of a data error, then that's punishing that district for something that is just an error. Which maybe

[Speaker 0]: you could just leave it alone and let there be an appeal to somewhere and you can go in and say, your data was wrong, or you can go in and say, look, I lost three, core, you know, Spanish or Chinese speaking students, and I got three middle class, you know, English language speakers, and it's impacted my per pupil spending this way.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah, I think that puts districts in the position where they're gonna have to reveal confidential data, especially the really small districts. Once there's a certain fewer Under 10? Yeah. Under 10, they want what is it? 11. Under 11, they're not gonna be able to say and to come in and say Well, the school I mean, whoever

[Speaker 0]: somebody knows what their weighting is because somebody's giving them the weight.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah, so the districts know and they report that to the agency of education and it becomes protected data. Okay. So, people

[Speaker 0]: remember what it's saying? Because based on our protected data, Lee?

[Randy Brock (Member)]: But I remember looking at this, oh, a number of years ago, more than once, in which you got the data, but without the individual identifying information associated with it. As I recall, part of the purpose of doing that was to see our folks manipulating the number of people they have who have special education needs and the like so as to get additional money. I remember when I learned this to it was that the variation of districts right next to each other, just in terms of the amount of special ed and other kinds of things, that disfigured compared to the district right next door to it, but had a similar kind of demographic. I haven't looked at this a number of years now, it still wouldn't surprise me, but would that still exist?

[Scott Beck (Member)]: That's pre Act 173. Yeah. They're all in census block right now. Yeah.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: That too, really like your fuel idea. I also would like to know, is it unfeasible for us to consider rather than two year smoothing, but three years smoothing two year just does seem a little too short period of time. There was gonna be a major fluctuation. Can we average it over three years rather than two for a student count?

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. We'd have to create a new definition, but I don't know why you couldn't

[Speaker 0]: do But this is only for

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: But it's This

[Speaker 0]: is only for two years. So if if it worth the is it worth the effort for a two year Well, it's stock average.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Three year rolling average instead of the two might be a good policy no matter what.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay. This was something, Scott, you might remember. Think in Julia, we looked at this during the pupil waiting study in act one twenty seven because actually Wisconsin maybe still does used to have a three year rolling average for that purpose because it smooths everything out more than a two year average. And I think we I remember at least talking about it during

[Scott Beck (Member)]: the whole week. Yeah. We talked about it.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah. So I tried to do that. Do you remember that, Julia? Did we

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I didn't hear that. You weren't here during the school I came in the the November after the pandemic. I

[Scott Beck (Member)]: don't think it was ever modeled or anything but it was definitely, you know, who it really helps are these small districts that have a lot of volatility. Know, they can go up or down to five kids can blow their budget.

[Speaker 0]: I have a friend who moved out of Granville. Her two daughters took out half of the third and fourth grade class. I mean, it was disclosed but it was that small. Yeah.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: Think it really

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: helps their planning too because they'll they can see it coming and so then they can make more strategic decisions over one and two budget cycles.

[Speaker 0]: Maybe. Now that you've heard the concerns, we can let you go contemplate and see if you can help us make our way out of the hole. I mean, the concern is that, you know, really small schools, one family moving out, you've got weights attached and one moves in that doesn't or nobody moves in, that that school through no fault of its own, but is getting significantly less money and is being held to.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: Can we just confirm on this point because I think this has come up a couple of times, when we talk about money variation in the foundation formula, because the amount of money that you receive as a district is a function of your pupil count, but here we're talking about tax incapacity. Right. So I just wanted to make sure that that's That's true. The

[Speaker 0]: That's true. Yeah, understanding the difference. So Thank you.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: So it is changing rates rather than

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: It's changing rates. We don't we're trying to hold down spending for two years while we decide where we're going or figure out how to get there. And we want to find a mechanism that won't let schools off the hook, but also won't penalize them for things way beyond their control. If the school burns down, you're going to need an appeals process. If the furnace dies, you know, if you have x percent of your students move or go into a residential placement, Those are things maybe you have some control over residential placement, but you don't really it's not really a choice. We're going to buy new this this year, and how do we protect schools from that, and maybe Justin Peel's process is easier. If something extraordinary happens, you can appeal to the Secretary of Education or her designee or to the state board, but we've already given them several sets of appeals, but then there's some backstop in that somebody will look at your situation and say, yeah, you're right, we gave you bad data,

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: I wanna clarify one thing, the cap is on a per people spend, it can affect the max spending, but we are talking about a tax capacity concept, so what it's doing is shifting liability, but it does mean that if you had a different count, your per pupil figure would change the result of that count, and then the maximum spend available would change. So it's hitting both, so it is sort of complicated. But I think you guys have identified a couple of different ways of doing this that I've heard, so maybe I can summarize what I've heard. I don't know. So one is minimize volatility in in population counts, which could be done either through a hold harmless or changing the duration over which you calculate the long term membership rate it'll be a three year count and you could change the 96.5, whatever it is. Another is to say you get the greater of, right, this was something we just discussed earlier, you get the greater of.

[Speaker 0]: The less profit is going.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: Or you could just say you're not gonna, you know, there's a minimum spend below which you're not gonna go. So there's different ways to do the thing, then you've also identified a tax review board, which I don't frankly know anything about, but

[Speaker 0]: I can learn about. Yeah, when you say hold harmless, I still have nightmares about what happened to that weighty and hold harmless, and everybody, your tax rate couldn't go above 5%, but if you spent 10%, you had to go to this appeals court. So, half the school boards in this state spent 9.9% and said, but our tax rate can't

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: go up more than

[Speaker 0]: five and I don't want to have to write any more things about that, that's a recipe for bankruptcy. It wasn't what was meant, it wasn't done in the Senate, but we didn't catch it, and this is two years, so there should be some backstop, but if if we have to recalculate and for two years, you know, it it just I'm thinking maybe just an appeals process would do it so that if something goes really off the wire, your school can come in and say, look, you know, if you flatten that out, micro people spending is down this year. Yeah.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: But we have to put in statute. Right? What is that process? What are those criteria? We have to put in a copy of appropriation for something.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And we probably have to put in, you know, staff.

[Speaker 0]: I think we just tell the secretary of education. So

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I I would I know that tax rates are are calculated based on per pupil spending so that we're trying to lower tax rates. But if we're trying to be more fiscal you know, have more fiscal oversight about budgets, nobody else has to budget on a, like, per staff member basis. So what I I it seems to me an an unfair thing. Why why would we not look at it on a on a total budget perspective? Like, total education spending rather than per pupil. Then it avoids the whole process problem of the weights and the three years versus two years, the whatever. It's just it's just looking at it on a whole budget, and people have to budget within the big number instead of budget within a tiny fraction of the big number and say, like, that this is I

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I guess what I'd say to that, I'm not opposed to what you're talking about. I feel like we need a a mixed balanced approach, but I think one of the macro problems that why we're spending so much time on this is we're seeing declining students. And so what I like about the per pupil aspect is if a school district is losing pupils, this puts downward pressure on their spending so that we start to right size and make decisions. But I'm not against thinking of other more comprehensive ways to also look at the total spending within that district.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: But I think if they're losing pupils and they are hitting the sort of threshold where they can reduce costs because of losing pupils, then they should be doing it. You know, there are plenty of places where they're you know, we've seen the data where they're they're the number of teachers has gone down, and that's because school districts are cutting teachers in order to do It is. The number of licensed teachers has gone down. Cut over

[Speaker 0]: the lab of pupil cost keeps

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: going Well, the number of support staff has gone up. But as school districts have lost pupils, they've cut classroom teachers because they don't use any classes. But as students have gone up, they've they've increased the support staff to meet those student needs through other mechanisms. And so school districts should and I think are cutting costs when they get when they have enough pupils that they're like, okay. We've lost a whole class so we can

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Yeah.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: You know? Or we can combine and do a two, three classroom or whatever it is. And and, you know, looking at a budget from a perspective of your budgeting to this big number, and we want them to hit that target is is, I think a fair way of of looking at it for them because they still are gonna have the building. They're still gonna have to pay the school buses. They're still gonna have to do their contracting costs. All of those things. So, Kim, is would it be possible to hear from the sponsor of the bill as to why he structured it like this?

[Speaker 0]: We can ask. I think what he said is leave on the floor that he didn't have pride of ownership and that we could play with it. He was trying to provide some tax relief. This doesn't say your spending can't go up. It limits how much it can go up for two years. So to get a long term, you gotta recalculate all kinds of stuff, think might not be worth it for two years. We could do your per pupil or your total spend. I'd love to see if Julia can do any calculations or runs on that, plus put in an appeals process. And I'm sorry, this has a long way to go. I'm very happy just modeling what we did with the school size and saying

[Scott Beck (Member)]: school size?

[Speaker 0]: The classroom class size, remember minimum class size, Doctor. Appeal to the Secretary of Education she worked with you to figure just

[Scott Beck (Member)]: to testify. Still has

[Speaker 0]: got a long way to go, and if it's gonna see it to the end, I don't know. So I'd like to get it moving without getting it to be as complicated as that sixty for anybody else.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I really like the appeal idea and then the three year rolling average. Would we have three years of data in the new LTE WADM for FY '28?

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So for FY '28, we could use '25, '26, '27.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: We would update.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. One consideration with the three year rolling average, policy choice, something to keep in mind is just like the general, how easy it is to administrate it and administer it and how easy it is to calculate it. And if there's different weighted long term memberships being used in different parts of the calculation, it would I could see it being challenging for a school district to try to understand which weighted pupil membership. And that being said, don't know about the school district.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And I wouldn't be able to

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: do any modeling for a three year average because we don't have three years data yet with the new leads.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: First

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: problem we have now, we could do the two year Right? So they are gonna have that issue about knowing which numbers to use.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Wait. Sorry. Which which problem?

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: So the the problem you just described about a school district not knowing which piece of the LTWDM to to use. We have that now because current law is two year rolling average. Right? Okay.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. So I don't I just mean, like, using different cap. Right now, current law uses the same weighted pupil count across tax policy. So it's for for people spending at the two year or the extra spending threshold as a two year. We treat it not

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: right now. So, I mean, that's the question, but I I was reading it as you were thinking of changing everything to three years, or were you thinking about just changing just this one pizza?

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: Go either way.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah, because I think Julie is right that having three years for some things and two years for another thing, it's really confusing. So kind of an all or nothing. And that's what we were looking at with the pupil waiting study was what if we change everything to three years? And we ended up not doing it, but I can't exactly remember why.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I like three, but you do it three year across the

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: But are we do we wanna change it to three for two years before we go to a foundation formula? Like, that seems like something that is a lot. By the time

[Speaker 0]: the school doesn't catch on. Exactly. Yeah.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: One comment I'll say is Yeah. What I see around here is if we get this if this passes and this is in place for two years, I just would predict us likely to be the extended a year or two years after because whatever this master vision plan is gonna be, it's gonna take longer than we're anticipating and might not

[Speaker 0]: We will go until we see said that last time. But, anyway, I think we're looking for something that doesn't upset the apple cart. It's fairly simple so that it doesn't take schools three years to understand it, but that would give some flexibility in if something extraordinary happened that altered their Yeah. Her pupil spending, that there would be a way for some relief. Yeah. We've been at this all afternoon. Yeah. This is the best we've got to. So I think that's what we're looking for.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: I don't know what I'm doing, but that sounds good.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: You think you're gonna make sure that we're

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: I'd love to see a three year rolling average for whatever makes sense across all the board and what that would look like. So who are for everything else too? No. No. If that's what you said

[Speaker 0]: People have other things. When we get to the future state, we could talk about three year rolling averages for everything. This is a two year temporary bridge. Can

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: I state less flippantly my last comment?

[Speaker 0]: I don't know. What

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: do you do y'all want? What what do you want? I couldn't I was

[Speaker 0]: trying to answer that question. Yeah. We're looking for an out for school finds and their per pupil spending goes up

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: Okay.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: A lot.

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: You want us thinking rather than bringing you something right Yes.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. It could be as simple as an appeals process and let the other body flush it out if they even get that far. Or it could be whichever is less your per pupil spending or your overall ed spending. Those are the two suggestions that came up.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Overall ed spending?

[Speaker 0]: Right, for the district. Yeah, the

[Scott Beck (Member)]: district's education.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, yeah.

[Julie Richter (Joint Fiscal Office)]: One thought about the overall ed spending is that if a school district saw it, most school districts have declining enrollment in the state. Some school districts would increase. Yeah. So you may see school districts that would have a higher cap if it were the greater of. That's a policy choice.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Yes, it's in the greater of the two.

[Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Right, so for some districts, they would get more if it was on a per pupil basis because they're Yeah. They're increasing students. Like maybe South Burlington, because they have a lot of they have a lot of housing going in there, as Scott and I heard this morning. That was an awesome presentation. Yeah. That was really great. Or or it could be districts that are declining, in which case they would look at it on a full budget. Yeah. Basis. Okay.

[Speaker 0]: The tax update. Yes. We've mispended your condos. So always told us. That's what we were doing. South Burlington is growing.

[Thomas Chittenden (Vice Chair)]: It's grief when I talk about South Burlington.

[Scott Beck (Member)]: Yeah. That's an impressive presentation.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. And I'm showing up and being willing to even listen to us in this hour

[John Gray (Legislative Counsel)]: of

[Speaker 0]: the day. We