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5 BEFORE THE WYOMING STATE LEGISLATURE
6 JOINT EDUCATION COMMITTEE
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10 JOINT EDUCATION COMMITTEE PROCEEDINGS
VOLUME I
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8:45 a.m., Thursday
12 November 20, 2002
Casper, Wyoming
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1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 (Meeting proceedings commenced
3 8:30 a.m., November 20, 2002.)
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Devin, do you
5 have any comments before we get started?
6 COCHAIR DEVIN: No, I don't, Mr. Chairman.
7 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you. I have one
8 comment to make. As we work through the agenda over the
9 next few days, we have a lot of bills that we will be
10 working on, talking about, and, Committee, as you are well
11 aware, we have another meeting in December that we will be
12 looking at some further bills.
13 Also, there's not a whole lot of reason to go
14 through all of these bills line by line by line because
15 folks who are sitting up here at this table, there's going
16 to be a whole new group sitting at this table come January
17 and they will have an opportunity to look at these bills
18 and change them as they want them to move through the next
19 legislature. Keep that in mind as we look at these
20 upcoming bills.
21 The minutes of the June 18th and 19th meeting
22 were sent out in your packet. Are there any additions or
23 corrections to those meeting minutes?
24 SENATOR PECK: I move approval as
25 presented.
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1 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Second.
2 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Been moved by Senator
3 Bob and seconded to approve the meeting of the June 18th
4 and 19th minutes.
5 All in favor, aye.
6 Opposed, no.
7 Motion carried.
8 Minutes of September 23rd and 24th meeting were
9 also in your packet. Any additions or corrections to
10 those minutes?
11 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: I move acceptance
12 of the minutes.
13 REPRESENTATIVE LOCKHART: Second.
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Moved by Representative
15 McOmie and seconded to approve the September 23rd and 24th
16 meeting minutes.
17 All in favor signify by saying aye.
18 Opposed, no.
19 Motion carried.
20 Also, October 23, 24 and 25 meeting minutes sent
21 out in your packet. Any additions or corrections to those
22 minutes?
23 SENATOR PECK: Move approval.
24 REPRESENTATIVE LOCKHART: Second.
25 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Moved by Senator Bob to
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1 approve the meeting minutes of October 23, 24, 25.
2 All in favor signify by saying aye.
3 Motion carried.
4 Takes care of that part of agenda. We will move
5 right into number 3, special education, Dr. Parrish and
6 Rebecca Walk for presentation.
7 MS. WALK: Good morning, Representative
8 Stafford, Senator Devin, members of the committee. I'm
9 Rebecca Walk. I'm the state director of special education
10 with the Department of Education.
11 I'm going to apologize at the outset for my
12 voice. I have a little head cold going on so my voice is
13 a little weak, so I will make every effort to be heard by
14 members of the committee.
15 We're here this morning to have Dr. Tom Parrish
16 give you the final report on the cost study of special
17 education. As you will recall, the legislature as well as
18 the Department of Education collaboratively contracted
19 with Dr. Parrish and the American Institutes for Research
20 to conduct a cost study on special education for the
21 legislature as well as the department.
22 His charge was to determine the costs of the
23 expenditures of special education, what we have been
24 spending on special education over the last several years
25 since we changed the funding formula from an 85/15 percent
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1 to 100 percent reimbursement on the part of the State for
2 the local districts.
3 Dr. Parrish has carried out the study over the
4 last year and last month did present to the Education
5 Committee his initial report. Today he's here to present
6 his final report along with recommendations for future
7 funding of special education.
8 So at this point I'm going to turn it over to
9 Dr. Parrish to give his presentation to the committee.
10 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
11 DR. PARRISH: Good morning. I'm going to
12 walk through -- I think everyone has the PowerPoint
13 presentation. I will walk through that. We have it on
14 the wall here for people who don't have a copy.
15 I think the final report everyone should have a
16 copy of and then there's a briefing paper, numbers 1 and
17 2, along with some simulation tables. I will refer to all
18 of these in the presentation.
19 The purpose of the presentation is not to repeat
20 everything that I did the last time I was here. It was a
21 rather lengthy presentation. But I will review some of
22 the high points. I will talk about some of the changes
23 and then I will discuss some of the alternatives I think
24 that are before the committee.
25 So just -- did we skip a page?
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1 MS. WALK: It needs to go back one.
2 DR. PARRISH: There we go.
3 So the purpose of the study -- just to go back
4 from the very beginning, the study's purpose was
5 threefold: First to determine how much is spent on
6 special education services in Wyoming.
7 The second purpose, then, was to go beyond what
8 is and define adequate resource guidelines for special
9 education within the context of the state Supreme Court
10 case.
11 And then thirdly, the charge was to consider how
12 to best fund special education within the context of the
13 first two objectives asking for our recommendations in
14 regard to point number 3. So today in regard to that
15 final point I will present three options I think the
16 committee could consider in moving ahead.
17 The purpose of the presentation is to review
18 changes made since the last presentation. The changes
19 appear in the 2002 report. As we proceeded in time, new
20 data continued to become available, little more timely
21 data, and we're also moving where we're talking a little
22 bit more beyond the concept to actual implementation. I
23 will talk a little bit about data in the table that
24 apparently still aren't right, but we report the data we
25 receive. I think it is best, though, to kind of consider
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1 it as a model of how implementation would appear even
2 though we know -- I will point out some of the numbers
3 that we know aren't exactly right.
4 Also report changes made since the November 2002
5 report. That's the report you all have. We have made a
6 few changes since then as new data became available.
7 We will briefly review the findings and model
8 from the full study.
9 We will present and discuss recommendations and
10 we will discuss implementation issues.
11 So the first change made since the October
12 presentation is a slight change in the average daily
13 membership. It was pointed out that some adjustment had
14 been made since the data that we had and so there was a
15 slight change from 85,426 statewide to 85,353. It has
16 relatively small implications, so we will move then to the
17 next.
18 Another change since the October presentation is
19 the cost model simulations are now compared to 2001-2002,
20 state and federal special ed revenues whereas before we
21 previously compared to 2000-2001.
22 The next change is that districts gaining
23 revenues -- just a point of clarification, districts that
24 gain revenues in the cost-based approach will receive the
25 increase from a combination of state and federal funds
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1 over a six-year period. We originally proposed a phase-in
2 of 12 years. I think as we thought about it, we thought
3 that six years perhaps made more sense.
4 The reason we had gone to 12 years originally
5 was to try to create as soft a landing as possible in
6 phase-in for districts that would lose money. And through
7 the hold harmless we realized really no one will be losing
8 money and we're simply holding back the districts that
9 would be gaining money. So it made sense that that could
10 happen over a shorter time span. Again, there's nothing
11 sacred about the 6 years either, but we thought the 12 was
12 probably too long given further consideration.
13 The next change, again, a fairly small one, the
14 Wyoming Cost of Living Index inflation rate was used in
15 place of the consumer price index that we had used before
16 to inflate nonpersonnel and other services, so again that
17 made a slight adjustment.
18 Another change, the estimated additional cost to
19 the state, that we're going to find that again because
20 some of the federal revenues we're given apparently are
21 not correct that this is still not exactly right, but the
22 estimate -- given the latest data we had, is that the
23 estimate of implementation of at least the cost-based
24 block grant funding approach alone would be about $453,000
25 in the base year if the base year of 2001-2002 is used.
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1 Another change, there's now somewhat more
2 elaboration in the report on the responsibilities of the
3 new staff positions in the special ed program of the
4 education department. The initial recommendation is for
5 one supplemental staff position.
6 So we've made a recommendation before. We added
7 a little bit more elaboration about some of the roles that
8 this person would take on.
9 Another change is that student outcomes are
10 emphasized in the report, in our opinion, as a necessary
11 component of monitoring and assessment of district
12 practices. So we talk about using the guidelines to beef
13 up some of the state monitoring, that you can actually
14 look to guidelines to look at resource patterns of what is
15 actually being provided in relation to what the guidelines
16 suggest.
17 We've added some new emphasis around emphasizing
18 also that in addition to resources going in, student
19 outcomes coming out should be very important in terms of
20 monitoring. That seems sort of obvious, but it is not as
21 easy as it seems and it is somewhat of a new thrust.
22 Another change is that it was requested that the
23 four districts that are shown in the report as, I think,
24 A, B, C and D in regard to the variations in percentages
25 of special ed students receiving services are now listed
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1 in the report and all of the districts are now shown in
2 Appendix H showing, again, the patterns of service that we
3 see based, again, on the data that we have available
4 through the SEEDS report.
5 Another change is that data tables for exhibits
6 have been added as Appendix J. And it may be remembered
7 that in the last month's presentation we did not have the
8 full claim amounts and so we didn't have a good estimate
9 of what the State was estimating was being spent on
10 special ed for 2001-2002. We had only our independent
11 analysis of what was being spent at that time.
12 So we looked to what was being spent in
13 2000-2001 and we estimated what we thought was being spent
14 from the State's perspective in 2001-2002, and we saw a
15 large gap between the State's estimate and what our
16 independent estimate was.
17 But now that we have actual revenues for
18 2001-2002 from the State, an actual estimate of spending,
19 we now find that the gap between our independent
20 assessment and what the State is reporting is actually
21 relatively small at .6 million. It was somewhere like 10
22 million before. And that .6 million, I think, can be
23 explained by the fact that our independent estimate
24 includes an assessment of capital expenditures, for
25 example, annualized estimates of what it cost to provide
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1 building space, whereas the State estimates do not include
2 capital on an amortized basis. So we see the two
3 estimates as very close now.
4 Another change is a point of clarification. I
5 know after the last presentation there was some discussion
6 about what the hold harmless meant that we were
7 recommending. A point of clarification is that the
8 districts will not lose state special education funds
9 beyond that received in the base year. I think that's
10 consistent with what we had recommended the last time.
11 But we also want to emphasize that districts
12 will continue to receive federal special education
13 revenues based on the allocation formula currently in
14 place. So districts may be held harmless in terms of
15 state revenues if the model shows through the block grant
16 funding that they would lose, but federal funds could
17 actually go up if there are increased federal allocations.
18 There is a specified formula for allocating federal funds
19 and so districts that are held harmless at the state level
20 for state funds could continue to gain in terms of federal
21 funds, depending on, of course, federal allocations.
22 Another change is that the cost model
23 simulations are now inflated to 2002-2003 dollars and
24 compared to state and federal revenues received in the
25 2002-2003 year looking again to possible implementation in
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1 the year 2003-2004 and what that might look like.
2 So we have the chart and we will talk a little
3 bit about that.
4 Another change is that the Wyoming Cost of
5 Living Index rate of 2.5 was used to adjust 2001-2002
6 amounts to 2002-2003 dollars in the cost model stimulation
7 so people know where that came from.
8 Due to these various changes, the estimated
9 additional cost to the State just from the block grant
10 funding approach alone is estimated to approximate
11 $345,000 if the base year of 2002-2003 is used. Again, I
12 just found out last night that the federal revenues we
13 were given apparently are erroneous. If that's true, then
14 the estimate of the State's share of this would go up a
15 bit.
16 So this is kind of a work in progress as the new
17 data comes in, and I think we will see that while the
18 model can be demonstrated through what we see, there will
19 continue to be some adjustments in terms of what the
20 estimated actual cost will be.
21 Okay. Now, kind of reviewing where we were
22 before, this is just sort of a bit of review of what was
23 presented last month when I presented before the
24 committee. It sort of summarizes what is in the report.
25 There is much more detail -- of course, if anyone wants to
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1 refer back to the prior presentation we can do that as
2 well where there really was a lot more detail.
3 But one bottom line figure from the first
4 objective for the SEEP study was to derive an estimate of
5 special education spending in Wyoming based on independent
6 analyses that we conducted. Now, these independent
7 analyses were conducted based on something we call an
8 ingredients approach. So we do not simply look at fiscal
9 records, we gather information from teachers about
10 students, about teachers themselves in terms of how they
11 spend time, schools, school administrators, district
12 administrators.
13 And, in fact, all of the districts in Wyoming
14 participated. We really appreciate, by the way, the
15 support that we got in terms of completing surveys that
16 were somewhat onerous at times, we realize, but we felt we
17 got a very strong database that not only estimates
18 expenditures but provides a lot of information about the
19 actual services being provided to children.
20 The result of that estimate or that analysis was
21 that total spending on special education in Wyoming as
22 shown in the left bar is 15,515 per special education
23 student on average for the 2001-2002 school year. Now,
24 the way that breaks out for a special education student is
25 that the special ed component of that total is -- was
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1 estimated to be 9,957 plus virtually all special ed
2 students get regular education services as well.
3 That component was estimated to be 5,406, plus
4 some special ed students are in things like compensatory
5 education or English learner education, so there was
6 another 152 from other special programs to derive the
7 total estimate of 15,515.
8 REPRESENTATIVE LOCKHART: Mr. Chairman.
9 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative
10 Lockhart.
11 REPRESENTATIVE LOCKHART: Thank you,
12 Mr. Chair.
13 The 5,406 regular education expenditure, there's
14 a lot of numbers on expenditures per student out there.
15 That's significantly off the average number across the
16 board. Could you help me understand the difference
17 between the nominal 9,000 and this 5,000?
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
19 DR. PARRISH: Yes, Mr. Chair and
20 Representative Lockhart, it would be quite different
21 because the average expenditure per student you're
22 probably referring to normally would take total spending
23 and divide it by total students and we may get a number
24 like -- I'm just guessing for Wyoming maybe it is 10,000
25 or something like that.
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1 What we're looking at here is saying for the
2 average special education student we're spending in total
3 15,000. The majority of that expenditure is for special
4 ed services, but they're also receiving regular ed
5 services, so that is a smaller component of their
6 individual program, if you will.
7 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative.
8 REPRESENTATIVE LOCKHART: Mr. Chairman,
9 follow-up.
10 So your explanation would be students on
11 average, 10,000, whatever that number is, half of that
12 would be this 5,000 plus the 9,000 that you get for
13 special ed, rolling that up to 15,000 versus a 10,000 kind
14 of comparison, just -- is that how that would work?
15 DR. PARRISH: Representative Lockhart,
16 that's correct.
17 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative McOmie.
18 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Thank you,
19 Mr. Chairman. The issue that Representative Lockhart
20 raises makes me wonder where the other approximately 3,000
21 is going that we put in for regular students, regular ed
22 students. Are these receiving double pay there?
23 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
24 DR. PARRISH: Representative Stafford and
25 Representative McOmie, if you're looking at an expenditure
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1 amount as opposed to a revenue amount, it would probably
2 be important to distinguish the two.
3 Let's just start with an expenditure first. The
4 concept average per pupil expenditure and that is total
5 spending divided by total students, so total spending
6 could be from special ed, general ed, EL, comp ed,
7 federal, state, really all sources.
8 So there I think it wouldn't be a double
9 counting issue because we're talking about an expenditure
10 and not a revenue.
11 But you may have a point -- I don't know if you
12 want to speak to this as well -- but if you have a block
13 revenue amount, let's say, of $10,000 that a special ed
14 student would generate, and then they would generate --
15 let's say the special ed component of this claim, so
16 they're generating 10,000 and their general ed expenditure
17 is 5,000, then possibly. I don't know enough about the
18 general ed component, but somebody else might want to
19 speak to that.
20 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Chairman Devin.
21 COCHAIR DEVIN: Yes, Mr. Chairman.
22 I guess, Mary, this is a question for you.
23 Because as I read the report, the same thing troubled me
24 and I had highlighted it, as our other two committee
25 members have asked.
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1 As I looked at that piece in reading the report,
2 my question was we do pay out in a block grant an amount
3 per student which I believe statewide is a little over
4 9,000 at this point in time in an ADM piece, and, in fact,
5 it appeared to me as I read exactly as Representative
6 McOmie described, of that about $5,400 is being used for a
7 special ed student there would then be the administrative
8 component and so forth on top of that.
9 But as I understand it, then, we would pay the
10 ADM figure of approximately 9,000 plus for that student,
11 and then we would pay at a 100 percent rate all of those
12 special education expenses over and above that. Do I
13 understand that correctly?
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Miss Byrnes, would you
15 like to comment?
16 MS. BYRNES: Madam Chairman, if I can give
17 you a figure we are familiar with for school year '01-'02,
18 the average dollars per ADM on the guarantee was $8,262.
19 And that's systemwide, statewide. And I believe what
20 Dr. Parrish is looking at here is exclusively the costs
21 for the special ed student which would be a subset of that
22 population.
23 So if you want to think of it as that figure,
24 that 8200 figure versus what you're looking at here, they
25 are probably two different, obviously, derived figures.
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1 One is considering all students, K-12 for that year, and
2 Dr. Parrish's figures here -- and Dr. Parrish, it could be
3 that you also have federal dollars in here, perhaps? I
4 don't know. It is possible.
5 But I'm just guessing. So you're looking
6 probably at a little bit -- it is not apples and apples,
7 the figure that we're all very familiar with.
8 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Chairman. I
9 understand that we're not looking at exactly apples and
10 apples. And I'm not really asking that piece. But we're
11 coming up with -- it is my understanding that the amount
12 above that piece that says special education expenditure
13 is actually paid by the State at 100 percent rate,
14 reimbursement rate, is that correct, that the part labeled
15 special education --
16 MS. BYRNES: Madam Chairman, we do
17 reimburse all expenditures in the model for special ed;
18 however, I'm not certain that this does not also involve
19 federal dollars. So that would be a different category.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: I'm really looking, Mary,
21 more than the detail you have, to a ballpark concept. But
22 it appears that if you backed up to '01-'02 where we were
23 less than we are now, we're still looking at about 2800 in
24 the system out there per student that is not being
25 expended in general education expenses, in regular
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1 education expenses but is going out in the block grant
2 from the State.
3 MS. BYRNES: Madam Chairman, I'm not
4 familiar with your 2800. That's the difference --
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's the subtraction of
6 the 5400 from the 82.
7 MS. BYRNES: From the 82? I believe it is
8 different comparisons.
9 Mr. Chairman, Senator Scott is anxious to speak.
10 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, the 8200
11 figure that we're all used to as our per-pupil
12 expenditure, you take the total amount the school district
13 is getting including its special education and divide it
14 by the total number of students so you get a figure that
15 is not just the regular education expenditure, but the
16 regular education expenditure plus the special education
17 expenditure.
18 And what he's done here is say, okay, how much
19 of that 8200 is for regular education. I think he may
20 have split some other things out, too. That gets you your
21 regular education expenditure you see here and then the
22 special education, for special education students you have
23 the special education expenditure on top of it.
24 And when you derive that 8200 figure, you
25 average the special education students in with all of the
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1 others and put all of the costs in there. So that 8200
2 figure is not a cost per ADM for a general education
3 student because it has a share of that that is a special
4 education component.
5 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Biggio.
6 MR. BIGGIO: Mr. Chairman, Larry Biggio
7 from the Department of Education. I think Senator Scott
8 nailed that one. Also there could be a substitution of
9 expenditure. For example, a special education child may
10 be in a resource room for part of the day. That would be
11 considered normally a special education cost which then
12 special education would absorb that part of the cost and
13 that child would not be drawing regular education
14 expenditures for that part of the day.
15 The issue of whether it is in the mix or not, I
16 think Senator Scott has nailed that one. It is all in the
17 price there somewhere.
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Further, Senator Scott.
19 SENATOR SCOTT: If we've disposed of that
20 one, I have another question.
21 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative McOmie.
22 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Thank you,
23 Mr. Chairman. I understand what Senator Scott is saying.
24 My problem is are we adding to the special education
25 9,957? I know we're dividing it out after we add it in,
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1 but I'm still concerned that we've got some duplication in
2 there and I would like to later on have somebody like Mary
3 explain this to me a little bit more.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Devin.
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: One follow-up before we
6 leave that subject, Mr. Biggio or Mary, and your comment,
7 I guess, raised a question that I don't understand if it
8 is there and that is when you said that student goes into
9 a resource room for a portion of the day, do we actually
10 back them out of the ADM count for that portion of the
11 day? I was under the impression we still counted them in
12 the ADM.
13 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Biggio.
14 MR. BIGGIO: Mr. Chairman, if you remember
15 how the model works, we start with the prototypical amount
16 and essentially back out from that an allowance for
17 special education and then add back in 100 percent. So I
18 don't believe there's a duplication in the process. We
19 take out what the model allows in the prototypical portion
20 for special ed and add back in the special education
21 reimbursements.
22 CHAIRMAN DEVIN: Mr. Chairman, I don't
23 think that answered my question because you made the
24 comment that, you know, if they went to the resource room
25 for a portion of the day, they were then not counted as a
22
1 regular student. But in order to do that, that changed
2 the payment piece of that. We would actually have to back
3 them out of the ADM count and I don't think we do that,
4 unless I have not been aware of that.
5 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Biggio.
6 MR. BIGGIO: We don't back them out of the
7 count. I think I was trying to address that issue of why
8 there's a difference in here of 5400 and a prototypical
9 amount of funding per student. I think as Dr. Parrish
10 tried to allocate that amount, he saw that of the total
11 cost of the estimated 5400 was regular education and that
12 child needs both regular and special education and the 62
13 to 6400 is probably as a result of that child being in
14 that special education classroom or receiving those other
15 special services when normally they would have been in
16 regular classroom services.
17 Is that clearer? Does that answer your concern?
18 COCHAIR DEVIN: It does, yes. I didn't
19 think we actually backed them out. So what we're getting
20 is it is probably not -- it is somewhere between our 8200
21 figure and the 5400 that we're actually spending? We're
22 probably -- there's probably some extra in there but
23 there's probably not the full 2800.
24 MR. BIGGIO: Mr. Chairman, when we talk
25 about extra, I'm not sure that's the right concept. We
23
1 put this money into the model, the, quote, extra dollars
2 on the 100 percent reimbursement that we've provided in
3 special ed, and we've pulled out of that model the normal
4 special ed reimbursement in the prototype.
5 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Another subject,
6 Senator Scott.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: I want to follow up a
8 little more. I can see special education -- say a student
9 was mostly in the regular ed classroom and three times a
10 week, twice a week, whatever, was pulled out and given
11 special speech/language instruction, speech language
12 pathology. By pulling them out of the classroom and doing
13 that, you really haven't cut down on any of the regular
14 education expenses, but you do have the expense of the
15 speech language pathologist. And that's what is 100
16 percent reimbursed and that makes all kinds of sense to
17 me.
18 Now, when you have a student that is -- has a
19 much more severe disability and you have them in a special
20 education classroom, you've got the expenditures for that
21 special education classroom all accounted for in the 100
22 percent special education reimbursement. It is very
23 different, a much smaller class, takes a specially trained
24 teacher, a whole bunch of features that go along with
25 that, but does that student stay in the count that we use
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1 to figure out the general education reimbursement for the
2 district?
3 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Biggio.
4 MR. BIGGIO: Mr. Chairman, the student
5 always stays in the ADM count, always.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: So there is potentially a
7 piece here where you actually reduce the school's general
8 education costs because they've got two classrooms of
9 these very special kids, that's one less classroom of
10 regular ed they may have to have and they're getting fully
11 reimbursed for those two classrooms of very special
12 special ed kids, but they're also getting reimbursed as if
13 they had one more classroom of the regular. Is that
14 right?
15 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Biggio.
16 MR. BIGGIO: Mr. Chairman, let me go back
17 to the whole concept that you've established with the
18 block grant. You've given the districts a certain amount
19 of funding to meet their needs and that funding included
20 in the prototypical model is what they use to fund all of
21 the regular operations. To say that they would then incur
22 less expenses as a result of pulling that child out, I
23 don't know that I could make that leap. I don't know if I
24 can say that.
25 I think you're going to incur those costs
25
1 because you have to staff that classroom, have that
2 teacher there, reg ed, have all of the other associated
3 expenses. I don't think I could make that leap.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott.
5 SENATOR SCOTT: I would suggest to the
6 committee Mr. Biggio's model works fine for a large number
7 of the special education students but it doesn't work for
8 the case where you've got a specialized classroom that
9 kids really are not in the general education. You still
10 have perhaps some general administrative expenses that are
11 in common, but that's one that I think is going to require
12 some thought.
13 Mr. Chairman, if I may have another question.
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Another issue. Yes.
15 SENATOR SCOTT: Just in terms of how
16 useful these comparisons are, the -- what you're doing is
17 taking the total special education expenditures and
18 dividing them by the total number of students, right, in
19 terms both of the Wyoming and U.S. bars on this chart?
20 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
21 DR. PARRISH: Mr. Chairman and Senator
22 Scott, that's actually not what we do. It is actually
23 sort of the opposite. We have a sample of students and
24 for those students we have descriptions of the services
25 they receive, and then from the teacher surveys and school
26
1 surveys we know the characteristics and salaries of the
2 people providing those services. So sort of from the
3 ground up, almost student by student, if you will, we
4 build a cost profile and that's an average of those cost
5 profiles, both for the state and the nation.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: So it is an average of the
7 profiles.
8 And when you look at shown here on a per-pupil
9 expenditure for special education, it strikes me there
10 isn't such a thing as a special education student that's
11 typical. They're radically different depending on what
12 kind of services they receive. Somebody who is profoundly
13 disabled has to have a special classroom, maybe one
14 teacher and one aide. Those are much more expensive.
15 Whereas in the case I was talking of earlier,
16 which I think is a fairly large number, it is just one or
17 two disabilities that receive specialist treatment a few
18 times a week and that's much less expensive per student.
19 And it would seem to me as you've compared us with other
20 places, that the mix of those students would determine
21 their average per student as much as anything else, unless
22 that mix is constant across the various districts and the
23 various states, and I strongly suspect that it isn't.
24 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
25 DR. PARRISH: Mr. Chairman and Senator
27
1 Scott, first of all, you're correct. As any average, it
2 has the weakness of masking considerable variation, and we
3 know that the variation is immense within special ed
4 expenditures, but the average, I think, still has a useful
5 perspective in terms of sort of simplifying comparisons.
6 As to your question whether there's a reason to
7 believe whether there's a mix of severity in Wyoming is
8 different than sort of the nation, I don't know that
9 there's much evidence to suggest that that would be true.
10 We did an analysis -- we did not analyze it and I don't
11 know really how you would do that analysis, quite frankly,
12 because you could analyze by category of disability, but
13 even that tends to be quite gray in terms of where
14 children get placed.
15 As I think I mentioned last month, for example,
16 California has one-half the average of emotionally
17 disturbed students of the nation, so is there less
18 emotional disturbance in California, one half of the
19 nation. Most people think it is the opposite. So I think
20 that's probably not very telling.
21 So the concept of measuring severity is very
22 tricky. We did try to do it in a California study. If
23 this helps, one thing we found was that -- we tested the
24 hypothesis as to severity. As best as we could
25 operationalize it, was it randomly distributed throughout
28
1 the state and we found that it was not. We found that
2 there was strong evidence that it tended to cluster in
3 some districts more than others. But measuring that and
4 compensating for it is tricky.
5 Now, whether for a population the size of
6 Wyoming compared to the nation, you know, it could be --
7 and that could be one factor to explain some of the
8 difference that we see here.
9 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott.
10 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, there's two
11 factors that are going to make the distribution that you
12 observe differ from one area to the next. One is actual
13 differences in the distribution within the population, and
14 since some of these things -- poverty, different rates of
15 substance abuse, a number of factors of that sort -- will
16 vary, cause the reality to vary. You've got that.
17 And then looking at what you found in this
18 state, it seems to me there's quite a variation in the
19 ability of the school districts to identify the kids that
20 have those and the local practices with that respect.
21 So I think we do need to view all of these
22 averages, Mr. Chairman, with a certain grain of salt as to
23 do they really mean very much.
24 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish, let's move
25 on.
29
1 DR. PARRISH: Again, just to finish up on
2 that slide, what we're looking at, we talked about
3 Wyoming, just to make clear that we have the point of
4 comparison for the U.S. I would also like to point out
5 that these numbers are fairly uniquely available at this
6 time because these are not analyses that are commonly
7 done, particularly at the national level. We have not
8 known what we're spending on special education as a nation
9 since the last study done in about 1985.
10 So it turns out that these data have just been
11 released for this year, so it is the first time in a long
12 time that we can make the comparison. But I think the
13 point that there are a lot of -- there are some other
14 reasons we could talk about as well why we might expect
15 these differences. So it is simply, I think, reflective
16 of what we found in terms of looking at expenditures.
17 Moving to the next slide, let's compare the
18 variation that we saw in special education expenditure per
19 pupil. So if we look at the 9,957 component from the
20 prior slide and compare that to what we see for the nation
21 of 8310, we see that in terms of the special ed spending
22 alone, Wyoming is 20 percent higher than the nation,
23 whereas in terms of total expenditures per pupil, Wyoming
24 is approximately -- based on data from the National Center
25 for Education Statistics is where we got total average
30
1 per-pupil expenditure for Wyoming -- in relation to the
2 nation Wyoming is about 5 percent higher for all children.
3 Moving to the next slide.
4 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman.
5 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: Is this state and local
7 expenditures or is federal dollars included in these as
8 well?
9 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
10 DR. PARRISH: Mr. Chairman, that includes
11 total spending divided by all sources divided by all
12 students, the bars on the right. Federal dollars are also
13 included in the bars on the left, but the methodology is a
14 little different.
15 Moving to the next slide, another basis of
16 comparison was that in addition to the national study for
17 which we've just presented data are represented again in
18 the last bar on this chart. In addition to Wyoming, ten
19 other states elected to do their own analyses. AIR
20 conducted these analyses for them.
21 So again, the methodology used was exactly the
22 same, the same ground level up approach, and we have
23 comparisons across the ten states. We're not able to name
24 the states unfortunately because the states have not
25 released the data and so they're not public information
31
1 yet. We can release the numbers. I can't tell you -- I
2 can tell you what the ten states are. I can't tell you
3 which goes with which bar.
4 What you see is that Wyoming is in the upper
5 half. It is at about the middle, though, of the five.
6 However, there's a fairly substantial line of demarcation
7 between the lower five and the upper five and you can see
8 where Wyoming lies across that distribution.
9 Moving to the next slide, we now look at special
10 education spending as reported on the state -- these are
11 claims of state reimbursement against the 100 percent
12 reimbursement. And the point of this slide was to look at
13 the variation in the claims across districts.
14 Now, again, there may be reasons for these
15 claims and we will explore the relationship between the
16 amount of the claim and certain characteristics such as
17 poverty in following slides, but the point of this slide
18 is simply to show that there is considerable variation in
19 the amount of claim made. So that the lowest spending
20 quartile of districts in Wyoming are claiming an average
21 of about $7,000 per special education student in
22 reimbursement as opposed to the highest quartile which is
23 claiming an average of over $10,000 per student.
24 Moving to the next slide, we begin to explore
25 these variations in spending and look at possible
32
1 relationships to factors that we might expect to influence
2 variations in spending. So I think as we talked about
3 Wyoming, Wyoming is spending more than the nation. There
4 may be a number of reasons why they are spending more than
5 the nation. So now we're saying some districts are
6 spending more on average for special ed students than
7 another and are there certain factors that might explain
8 that variation.
9 So the first thing we looked at was percent
10 special education with the hypothesis that districts that
11 identify much higher percentages of the children as
12 special ed may be expected to experience lower average
13 expenditures per student. Arguably they cast a broader
14 net, they haven't just focused on the most severe
15 students.
16 We see that in relation to percent special
17 education identified as special education, as we go from
18 the lowest to the highest spending districts that we see
19 relatively little variation in the percentage of children
20 identified as special ed so that does not seem to offer a
21 good explanation as to the variation in spending that we
22 see.
23 Another possible explanation is that some
24 districts have a different mix of students, sort of akin
25 to the conversation we just had. Some districts may have
33
1 more students that are mental retardation, emotional
2 disturbance, some of the categories of disability, deaf,
3 blind, some of the categories that you might expect to be
4 higher cost.
5 So do we see a relationship between the
6 percentages of students in these districts that fall in
7 hard disabilities in relation to spending? And again, we
8 really don't find -- in fact, when we go to the highest
9 spending districts, we find a lower percentage of
10 so-called hard disabilities than we do in the lower
11 claiming districts. So again, that relationship doesn't
12 seem to hold to explain variations in claims.
13 When we look at percent poverty, that might be
14 another factor that we might expect, that districts with
15 higher poverty might have socioeconomic factors, other
16 things that might create a greater demand for special ed
17 and higher claims. And again, we don't see a relationship
18 between percent of poverty and the percent claimed. None
19 of those hypotheses seem to explain the percent
20 differences we see across the state.
21 If we go to the next slide, we do see one factor
22 that seems to correlate with the variations in spending is
23 district size. We look at what we call very small
24 districts to large, and I think if you look at -- if you
25 want to see what districts kind of fall into those, one of
34
1 your handouts at the back of the briefing paper number 1,
2 not the very last page but the second-to-last page in that
3 briefing, shows what districts fall in the categories,
4 large, medium, small, very small.
5 Those are somewhat suggested determinations that
6 our committees helped us with, but one could argue what
7 categories districts are placed in. Regardless, we see a
8 relationship between size of districts and spending at
9 least in the sense that very small districts seem to claim
10 more which might be expected due to certain diseconomies
11 of scale that one might expect.
12 Moving to the next slide, in addition to
13 variations in spending throughout the state, we also see
14 variations in service provision as best as we can infer
15 that looking at the state's database on individual special
16 education students, the SEEDS database.
17 Now, it was pointed out the last time I
18 presented that the SEEDS data are not perfect. There may
19 be problems with the data in some cases. So again, we're
20 reporting what was in the SEEDS database, but we also
21 heard quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to suggest that
22 speech and language therapists, for example, just were not
23 available in certain parts of the state; therefore, that
24 service was not being provided.
25 So we looked at five districts as a basis of
35
1 comparison labeled at the bottom of the slide and we see
2 variations in percentages according to SEEDS, special
3 education getting speech and language, for example. So
4 that the data suggests while -- let me be sure I have this
5 right -- Laramie Number 2 I believe is what this suggests,
6 68 percent of students receive -- in special ed receive
7 speech and language therapy -- am I doing this wrong --
8 I'm sorry. Hot Springs -- thank you for the correction.
9 68 percent in Hot Springs. Laramie Number 2, the data
10 suggests that 1 percent are getting speech and language.
11 Occupational therapy, you see considerable
12 variation, not as great but considerable throughout the
13 state. Counseling, social work services and so on.
14 The concern here, the reason we explored this
15 and the concern is that according to federal law the
16 unavailability of therapists in a certain area is not a
17 reason for not providing services that are required in
18 Individualized Education Programs. And one concern about
19 the current allocation system is that it does seem to have
20 led to considerable variations in funding claims as well
21 as in services actually being provided to students
22 throughout the state.
23 Moving to the next slide, then, we attempted to
24 define adequacy in Wyoming for special education based on
25 what we have called staffing guidelines. And what we did
36
1 through this process, we worked with a committee of
2 Wyoming educators, including special educators and general
3 educators, parents -- were there other categories?
4 MS. WALK: Business people,
5 superintendents.
6 DR. PARRISH: -- business people,
7 superintendents. It was an excellent committee. I'm not
8 saying the committee will completely agree with all of the
9 recommendations in the report. The purpose of the
10 committee from the onset was that the study team was
11 charged to make independent recommendations but that we
12 valued the input of this committee considerably. And I
13 want to commend the committee for the hard work they did.
14 They assisted us in developing these adequacy guidelines
15 for the state in the area of special education.
16 The way we approached this was focusing
17 primarily on primary types of service providers in special
18 education. So you will see special ed teacher right down
19 to school nurse, and the last column is the one in which
20 we really specified the recommended staffing guidelines.
21 And those guidelines came from input from the committee,
22 review of what we saw with actual practice in Wyoming from
23 the various databases that were available to us.
24 We looked at actual practice the best we could
25 explore it in other states across the country. We looked
37
1 at state regulations across the country. And we looked at
2 professional recommendations across the country. For
3 example, speech pathologists have a professional
4 organization and they make recommendations or may make
5 recommendations about an expected ratio.
6 Based on all of the input that we could
7 accumulate, we recommended these ratios as you see in the
8 last column for the state as what we believe to be
9 staffing guidelines that would underpin a definition of
10 adequacy in special education for the state of Wyoming.
11 Just to explain what it means, again turning to
12 the last column, we're saying that for every 120 students
13 in average daily membership, the guidelines would allocate
14 funding for one special education teacher for a district,
15 one instructional aide per 100 students in average daily
16 membership. Go on down the column.
17 But the other columns simply show how that would
18 then relate to the number of special education students,
19 special ed teacher. For example, 120 for average daily
20 membership would equate to approximately 16.6 -- teacher
21 per 16.6 special education students.
22 If you go down to adaptive physical ed, per
23 5,000 students, per 690 special ed students or per 34
24 students actually receiving adaptive physical education.
25 So that's the guidelines and that's where they came from.
38
1 We will talk, then, as to how that translates
2 into funding recommendations.
3 Moving to the next slide, in terms of
4 administration, we also specified administration. Again,
5 going back to the typology of large, medium, small and
6 very small, we specified that large districts would have
7 two directors, could be a director and assistant director,
8 for example; medium would have one, down to very small
9 with .8. We also specified allocations of secretarial
10 support and costed those out as well.
11 Now, we also -- if you look to the next slide,
12 one of the issues that we talked about in terms of why one
13 might vary the recommended staffing ratios, we felt that
14 it wasn't so much school size, per se, or even district
15 size, necessarily, it really had to do with some
16 combination of size and remoteness.
17 So in special education, as you know, there are
18 many therapists providing services and to the extent that
19 these therapists are spending two to three hours a day in
20 the car driving from one remote site to another, it has
21 got to affect the cost of services. So we went through a
22 fairly extensive attempt to try to identify remote schools
23 in Wyoming in relation to what we call nonremote,
24 simply -- I think we actually put them in several
25 categories. There's a fairly detailed description of it
39
1 in the report.
2 The bottom line I think is that we changed these
3 ratios somewhat for what we considered to be remote
4 situations. This is something that would probably benefit
5 small and very small districts more than large ones.
6 They're probably more likely to have remote schools, but
7 in fact some of the very largest districts in Wyoming also
8 have a few remote schools and these smaller ratios kick in
9 just for those more remote schools in the larger
10 districts.
11 The teacher allocation for remote schools is on
12 the next slide. Again, the consideration is a little
13 different for teachers because it is less likely that
14 we're going to have a teacher sort of driving and
15 providing a half hour of service here, half hour service
16 there the way a therapist might do. We really said that
17 any school that had 35 ADM or less we allocated one
18 full-time special education teacher with the assumption
19 that there would probably be about 3 or 4 special ed
20 students there and at that point it probably makes sense
21 to allocate a full-time teacher to that school.
22 We also looked at nonpersonnel items, and the
23 committee -- it was really beyond the scope of the
24 committee to spend a lot of time trying to do detailed
25 analysis on things like supplies and materials,
40
1 transportation, equipment, and so we relied pretty heavily
2 on current expenditure patterns in the state to develop
3 averages across these areas of reporting.
4 I will also say that the reporting categories
5 are not particularly well defined and sorted out so it is
6 difficult, for example, to find out really how much is
7 being spent on equipment. It sort of seems to be
8 dissipated across a bunch of categories that don't really
9 say equipment even though that's a very important
10 component within special ed.
11 We did beef up the technology and equipment area
12 while we reduced some of the categories just called other
13 or generic. We also tried to beef up extended school year
14 services, believing that that is a very important
15 component of special education services. It wasn't clear
16 the degree to which the emphasis is being placed on that
17 in Wyoming. I think the committee and the study team felt
18 that was very important. We probably need better data on
19 it, but based on the data we were able to come up with,
20 our best estimate, we put in an amount in the model for
21 extended school year services.
22 Again, just moving to a summary of findings,
23 from the report the first conclusion we want to
24 emphasize -- because as I mentioned, I think, the very
25 first time I appeared in the state and started this study,
41
1 I probably would not go into any state and recommend 100
2 percent reimbursement. The general concern is that 100
3 percent reimbursement will lead to runaway student
4 identification and spending, or the potential is there.
5 I think it is important to emphasize we did
6 longitudinal analysis in Wyoming, change over time, it is
7 in the report, and we did not find in Wyoming any evidence
8 of what we would call at least case in point of runaway
9 student identification or overspending. We want to be
10 clear about that. Do we see higher identification than
11 the nation? Yes. Higher spending than the nation? Yes.
12 But we don't see sudden escalation that I would call
13 runaway or out-of-control identification or spending.
14 Secondly, Wyoming's identification rate is 5
15 percent higher than the national average, so we do see
16 higher identification of students in special ed than the
17 national average. Again, there may be reasons for that.
18 That in and of itself is simply a point of comparison.
19 And secondly, we found spending per student on
20 special education exceeds the average for the nation by
21 over 17 percent.
22 We also find that variations in spending and
23 service have occurred under the current funding system.
24 We showed some data about that. But identification rates
25 for special education vary in districts throughout the
42
1 state from 8 percent of the students being identified for
2 special education to 29 percent of student enrollment.
3 And while these were extremes, we see a pretty
4 broad distribution throughout and so we see a lot of
5 variation in terms of the practices in regard to
6 identifying students for special education.
7 Now, we also may see variations in the
8 characteristics of the students that may warrant or
9 justify some or perhaps all of that variation.
10 We also see average spending for special
11 education students ranging from under 6800 to over $13,000
12 per student across the state. So the 100 percent
13 reimbursement system has led to considerable variation in
14 claims, in services being provided and in students being
15 identified.
16 Summary of findings, next, the cost study task
17 force with which the study team worked, and as we
18 mentioned, their recommendation to us was that the
19 guidelines that we developed, they believed, would be
20 useful as monitoring guidelines. So that when the State
21 goes out and looks at a district and looks to see what
22 they're doing and assess 29 percent of your students are
23 in special ed, 70 percent get speech, the guidelines would
24 suggest something else and so now we have some clearer
25 criteria to talk about sort of extreme variations in
43
1 practice and the extent to which they're justified or not.
2 The task force, however, did not recommend, did
3 not wish that these guidelines be used as a basis for
4 block grant funding.
5 The study team, however, came to a different
6 conclusion. The study team recommends that the 100
7 percent reimbursement approach be replaced with block
8 grant funding based on the special ed staffing guidelines
9 included in this report. So it is our recommendation that
10 these guidelines be used for monitoring purposes, in
11 accord with what the task force believed, but we also
12 believe that they should provide the basis for a new
13 funding system that would replace the 100 percent
14 reimbursement approach.
15 We recommended a six-year phase-in and that
16 districts not lose state funding over that received in the
17 base year. So we recommend a hold harmless provision.
18 Let me say a little bit about why we think that
19 is important. There are a couple of reasons. One, in
20 special education, students, once they're identified for
21 special education and an education plan is developed, that
22 is a legal contract between the parents and the school
23 district to provide the services that are specified in the
24 IEP, so districts are now legally obligated to provide the
25 services that are now in place. So we believe that it
44
1 would be a huge disruption just from an operational
2 perspective.
3 But another important perspective is that
4 federal law requires that districts maintain efforts in
5 terms of spending and that when federal money comes in,
6 that federal money cannot supplant local effort. If a
7 district spends a million dollars last year, the model
8 dictates that perhaps the spending should have been
9 800,000. But if they spent a million, they're required to
10 continue that maintenance of effort in the future. There
11 are a few conditions under which that can be lowered
12 somewhat, but generally that's a pretty stringent
13 requirement of the maintenance of effort.
14 So we recommend for both of those reasons that
15 districts be held harmless and not lose state funding over
16 that received in the base year.
17 We also believe, turning to the next page, that
18 critical to the implementation of any block grant
19 approach, and in fact, our recommendation would be against
20 a block grant approach without a contingency fund to
21 accompany that block grant approach.
22 The contingency fund would be a fund to which
23 districts could apply in situations in which they believe
24 that their costs are substantially higher than that which
25 is awarded through the funding allocation that they
45
1 receive. So they no longer can receive or claim simply
2 100 percent of whatever they're spending, but if they
3 believe that they can document the cases of, for example,
4 a family with several very high-cost children moving in
5 and that the funding that they received through the state
6 through the block grant approach is insufficient, there
7 needs to be an insurance fund that they can go to, that
8 this needs to be a state responsibility. So we believe
9 that part and parcel with the block grant approach has to
10 be a contingency fund.
11 We also believe and recommend enhanced regional
12 services and we believe that state support for these
13 regional services are necessary. The notion that a small
14 district might be solely responsible for, for example, a
15 deaf/blind child and be able to develop all of the
16 technology and expertise that's required to serve a
17 complex situation like that we believe is totally
18 unrealistic, it is not efficient, and that everybody could
19 benefit from much more efficient services for
20 low-incidence children provided through enhanced regional
21 services.
22 We believe that for that to be enacted and to
23 take place, that could be transitioned over time. We
24 don't think it has to be immediate but that it be
25 encouraged and that for that reason and also through the
46
1 bolstered monitoring that we suggest, we believe that
2 supplemental positions in the special education program of
3 the WDE are needed to allow for bolstered state level
4 special ed support, monitoring and facilitation of
5 regionalized services.
6 In the report we have suggested that one staff
7 person be added as a phase-in. I think we need then to
8 see over time as we move to regionalization and increased
9 monitoring -- the perception is likely it seems that more
10 people may need to be added, if at least we add one
11 person, our belief was that would start the ball rolling
12 in terms of increased monitoring and placement of
13 regionalized services.
14 Based on the most current data available at the
15 time we ran the last simulation, the cost-based funding
16 model would cost the state alone an additional 345,000,
17 but exact start-up costs are contingent on more current
18 data and exact details and conditions of implementation.
19 We also recommend that these guidelines be used for state
20 monitoring as suggested.
21 On the very last page you simply see a summary
22 of what's in the handout, so I think I will turn right to
23 the handouts now if I may. The handouts are called
24 Briefing Paper Number 1 and maybe I will walk you through
25 that and that will end my presentation.
47
1 What we've attempted to do in Briefing Paper
2 Number 1 is try to be as clear as we can with the
3 alternatives that we believe face the committee in regard
4 to the recommendations that we're making. We see three
5 possible options. I'm sure there's always more than
6 three, but we came up with sort of three options and we
7 tried to do some analysis and thinking about what we saw
8 as possible advantages and disadvantages associated with
9 each of these three options. So you could consider the
10 three options as broadly as possible, as least from our
11 perspective. You may see other advantages and
12 disadvantages, of course, that we didn't anticipate or
13 see.
14 The first option that we believe the committee
15 has is the committee could just continue the 100 percent
16 reimbursement of special ed expenditures exactly as you
17 have them. In other words, one option is to ignore the
18 report entirely and you could go simply with exactly what
19 you have.
20 And that -- we think one advantage to that is
21 disruption would be minimized, would provide districts
22 with full financial flexibility to meet the needs of the
23 students in the future.
24 The disadvantage, we believe, is that it is
25 likely to perpetuate special ed service and spending
48
1 variations and that the state may also continue to
2 experience escalating rates of identification and special
3 ed spending.
4 Now, we do note, for example, in the last year
5 that even when counting for inflation, special ed spending
6 of state funds increased over 6 million from 2001 to --
7 2000-2001 to 2001-2002 although special ed enrollment
8 dropped from 11,771 slightly to 11,750.
9 Now, it was pointed out to me and I should point
10 this out as well, there may be other reasons why the
11 claims went up. We can talk about that if you want.
12 That's, anyway, one likely disadvantage we believe in
13 staying the course.
14 A second recommendation we believe is that you
15 could go with the task force committee recommendation
16 which is to retain the 100 percent funding but use the
17 guidelines for monitoring and to use them perhaps with
18 sanctions with districts that continue to be way out of
19 the -- that vary substantially from the guidelines over
20 time, especially when we go in and look and see according
21 to the monitoring that these variations are not warranted.
22 We believe that an advantage to this has some of
23 the same advantages of the above option in terms of
24 minimal disruption and continuing of 100 percent funding.
25 But the guidelines also may help address some of
49
1 the variations we see in services across districts over
2 time at least. The WDE could assess district staffing
3 patterns and those districts under or overserving students
4 could be held accountable for those practices.
5 Negative, we believe as described above there
6 are no specific caps or controls on special ed spending.
7 And, lastly, we believe that the State may continue to
8 experience increases in spending and identification if the
9 second option is elected.
10 We recommend the third option as mentioned which
11 is that the guidelines be used for monitoring and as for
12 block funding. The reason is that we believe that the
13 block grant funding will continue to generally provide
14 districts with adequate resources. We believe that the
15 ratios are generous and we believe that it also with the
16 hold harmless is a pretty soft landing for districts in
17 terms of -- in perhaps coming into an era of somewhat
18 increased fiscal accountability. We believe we still
19 offer considerable fiscal flexibility to meet the needs of
20 special ed students, assuming there will also be a
21 contingency fund in place which we believe is part and
22 parcel to this recommendation.
23 Secondly, we believe that it should assist over
24 time in a much more instrumental way in mediating the
25 special ed spending and service variations we find across
50
1 the state.
2 Another advantage we believe is that the cost is
3 expected to be minimal at an estimated 340,000 or about
4 half a million, let's say, in additional revenues. We
5 recommend a $2 million startup. Maybe those are minimal,
6 maybe they're not. But in relation to what we might
7 expect in terms of escalation through 100 percent
8 reimbursement, that may be relatively minimal.
9 Controls on special ed spending discourages
10 overidentification as funding is based on average daily
11 membership, another important underpinning of our
12 recommendation.
13 Disadvantages is that districts may not
14 experience special ed funding gains expected under the
15 current approach and such a substantial change would
16 likely be subject to review by the Supreme Court.
17 We then in briefing paper 2 outline some more of
18 the particulars in regard to our proposal. I don't know
19 if I really need to go through all of those. I think they
20 largely repeat some of the points that have been made
21 already. Just looking through to see if there's anything
22 really new, but I think it sort of bulleted some of the
23 main features.
24 One thing I would mention is that under the
25 contingency fund there may be a question of how would it
51
1 be determined if -- when a district makes a claim as to
2 whether it is a legitimate claim or not. We suggest that
3 this might be done through state purview of state WDE
4 officials or has been done in other states through a
5 committee of sort of peers where other district special ed
6 directors review the claim and make a determination on its
7 merits.
8 Now, we do have some additional adjustment we
9 still need to do. We're still trying to gather data or
10 obtain data, I should say, in terms of salaries for
11 certain special education categories of special ed staff.
12 A mechanism for updating the model to reflect annual
13 changes in salary is needed. We believe that's an
14 essential component of this.
15 And I think the rest of it simply summarizes
16 what we have said before.
17 I will then turn your attention to how this
18 would play out if we used the base year of 2002-2003 and
19 made some attempt to estimate proposed block grant funding
20 for 2003-2004.
21 Just to walk you through these columns fairly
22 quickly and to let you know that what you see on the
23 second-to-the-last page and last page is the same
24 information, just sorted in different ways. And the first
25 page it is sorted by district side. The second page, the
52
1 same information is sorted by district name and in alpha
2 order.
3 Column A reports the special ed revenues
4 received through the state, 2002-2003.
5 B is supposed to report the federal revenues
6 received in 2002-2003. I was told last night these data
7 are incorrect. They were the latest data we were given so
8 that's what we put in there. In talking to a few district
9 representatives I was told this is not what they received.
10 So again, this would be seen as a demonstration. These
11 obviously would need to have the correct data in them.
12 Based on these data again, simply as an example,
13 column C sums column A and B to show total special ed
14 revenues received in 2002-2003.
15 Column D shows what the simulation for the block
16 grant model would develop or generate for the districts.
17 So if we take Laramie 1, based on what we see, if we
18 compare column C to column D, they actually receive more
19 in revenues in 2002-2003 than the model would generate for
20 them in column D. Therefore, the amount that would be
21 under the proposed block grant funding for them would
22 revert back to the hold harmless or what we see in
23 column C.
24 Now, this does not allow also for any update,
25 though, in salary increase, which we think some kind of a
53
1 factor needs to be built in there. It should be built in
2 consonant with what is being done under the MAP model, so
3 that's another topic yet to be discussed.
4 So I went through this fairly quickly, but I'm
5 sure you have many questions so I'll stop at this point.
6 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you, Dr. Parrish.
7 Miss Walk, do you have anything further before
8 we go to comments?
9 MS. WALK: I will let the committee go
10 ahead with questions.
11 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative Shivler.
12 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: Mr. Chairman, it
13 certainly makes sense to have this fallback for extreme
14 cases. I think you called that a contingency plan.
15 Conversely, if we're going to have a hold
16 harmless for -- is it for six years?
17 DR. PARRISH: Well, Mr. Chair --
18 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: That's a
19 phase-in, at any rate.
20 DR. PARRISH: We believe that it would be
21 phased in in six years. Probably the hold harmless would
22 be in place probably forever, quite honestly.
23 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: If that base is
24 always going to be there, you go into a small district,
25 you may start out with an extreme case that would go away
54
1 in a year or two and that would be a significant increase
2 in funding after that student was gone or those students
3 were gone in that case.
4 So I think if you're going to have, you know,
5 the fallback or the contingency, that you also need to
6 account for the fact that you may lose this student and at
7 that point the base should change. Does that make sense?
8 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Rebecca.
9 MS. WALK: Mr. Chair, Representative
10 Shivler, that's a good point to bring up and what that
11 leads back to is the maintenance of effort. And there are
12 a couple reasons under the federal law where a district
13 does not need to meet the maintenance of effort. The
14 exact case you brought up, that is an example why they
15 wouldn't need to meet the maintenance of effort, that base
16 year amount that they spent.
17 If I can just let you know what the reasons for
18 not -- for a district not meeting the maintenance of
19 effort are is the departure of personnel, teachers that
20 are paid at a higher salary and they retire and then a
21 district replaces those teachers with new teachers at a
22 lower salary. That's a reason not -- for a district not
23 to meet the maintenance of effort.
24 A decrease in enrollment in students with
25 disabilities. Certainly they don't -- a district would
55
1 not be held to that maintenance of effort if their
2 enrollment of students with disabilities decreased.
3 The termination of the obligation of the
4 district to provide special education to a particular
5 student that is exceptionally costly. For instance, if
6 you have a high-cost student and that student ages out,
7 turns 21 and we are no longer required to provide special
8 education services, has left that district, moved out of
9 state, or no longer needs the program.
10 Those are reasons.
11 And the final reason for not meeting maintenance
12 of effort is the termination of costly expenditures by the
13 district for long-term purchases such as equipment or
14 facilities. Exactly what you're saying, those are reasons
15 a district would not need to be held harmless to that
16 higher rate if they don't need to meet their maintenance
17 of effort due to those reasons.
18 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: Thank you.
19 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative
20 Samuelson.
21 REPRESENTATIVE SAMUELSON: Mr. Chairman, I
22 appreciate this report a lot, but there's something that
23 really bothers me and it has been a question we talked
24 about earlier. We have a 35-percent discrepancy on the
25 cost of expenditures. I won't be in the legislature this
56
1 year but I thought when we were going to get this report
2 we wanted to see what the cost of special education was
3 above and beyond a normal average ADM, if there is such a
4 thing in Wyoming. We're missing 35 percent of the normal
5 cost of education now and I don't think we back out 35
6 percent, as Mr. Biggio said, on our base model.
7 And I think this -- something needs to be done
8 to show if we're going to have 21 new people in the House
9 that are going to look at this and go, "How come you're
10 telling us regular cost is 5400? The MAP model says
11 8300." Those numbers don't mix in my mind very well. I
12 think it needs to be spelled out.
13 It has all of a sudden made it much more
14 complicated and every year we get much more complicated.
15 But I think we need to do some further work on this so we
16 can compare those two numbers and find out what we're
17 spending above and beyond our normal ADM. I would really
18 like to see that. I think my recommendation to the new
19 people would be don't vote on anything until you know
20 exactly what that increased cost is.
21 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mary, did you have a
22 comment?
23 MS. BYRNES: Mr. Chairman, we could as
24 staff work with Dr. Parrish on maybe dissecting that a
25 little bit to make it comparable for an explanation, if
57
1 that would be of help.
2 REPRESENTATIVE SAMUELSON: That would be
3 great.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
5 DR. PARRISH: Mr. Chair and Representative
6 Samuelson, I appreciate your comment and I think you raise
7 a good point. I want to be clear -- and maybe you weren't
8 saying this, but I want to be clear, what we have here I
9 think is a very solid estimate of what we're spending and
10 how it compares to average per pupil expenditure. But the
11 earlier discussion or discrepancy has not been totally
12 resolved and I think that would be a useful discussion.
13 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Chairman Devin.
14 COCHAIR DEVIN: Well, Mr. Chairman, I
15 guess before we -- the issues that have loomed before this
16 committee, and I know there will be probably people that
17 want to comment today, but as you comment, I guess there
18 are three points that I would like to be included in the
19 comment from the public, if there are, and that is, you
20 know, we stay with the current system, how do we avoid
21 excess use or abuse of this system at the 100 percent
22 reimbursement? We are the only state in the nation that
23 takes this approach. Some states are as low as 50
24 percent.
25 And it has been -- it was intended to be a
58
1 temporary piece and I served on that committee where it
2 was put in because we didn't have the data to do anything
3 else that was fair. But it was with the promise we would
4 try to come back. Once you institutionalize something it
5 is always difficult, but certainly with declining
6 populations, we're still seeing quite a growth.
7 And here is the spot we legislators are in:
8 We're turning down programs like expanding kid care,
9 getting our state employees' families covered with health
10 insurance, getting prescription drugs out there. I just
11 sat on Revenue. We're having difficulty getting property
12 tax relief for those in great poverty, not marginal
13 poverty.
14 So how do we assure that there's not excess use
15 in this program or even abuse in it to the taxpayer when
16 we're turning around and turning down other important
17 expenditures? And that's our struggle and that's where
18 we're trying to come down where it is fair. And I guess I
19 would appreciate your addressing that because you are
20 citizens, too, and obviously have concerns in those areas.
21 The other part that really concerns me as we dug
22 deeper into this piece is that whole issue of what is
23 adequate and are we delivering it and is it -- you know,
24 no one knows any more than some of us the shortage of
25 personnel, but maybe that's where we've got to, you know,
59
1 start to address cooperatives. We have to bring the BOCES
2 in and we've got to share their expertise. We've seen
3 this happen in the mental health sector of the state where
4 Dr. Hernandez brought the mental health expertise of the
5 state hospital out into isolated areas and bolstered
6 significantly the delivery of care in those areas. We've
7 seen a whole different picture than where we were eight
8 years ago.
9 So adequacy, fairness of adequacy is the second
10 point that I think this program offers over what we're
11 seeing now, either excesses or where we are really missing
12 pieces.
13 And the third piece I guess I would like to have
14 those who are really on the front line address is that
15 nowhere in the present system do we appear to ask for
16 outcomes. The money goes out, but we don't appear to say
17 what did we do with it, what did we accomplish, did we
18 move these children in their abilities. And that is a
19 piece I think morally we need to be accountable for,
20 ethically, but I think it is a piece that No Child Left
21 Behind is going to force us to produce the data on.
22 And, you know, I guess as a part of comments
23 those are three issues that concern me that I would like
24 to hear from the public on their perceptions.
25 COCHAIR STAFFORD: As we move into public
60
1 comment I would ask you to keep those three areas in mind.
2 At this point, thank you, Dr. Parrish, Rebecca.
3 We will take a short break and come back with public
4 comment and further questions for you down the road.
5 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, after the
6 break several of the committee members have questions.
7 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Yes, we are going into
8 public comment after the break and back to committee
9 comments later.
10 (Recess taken 9:55 a.m. until 10:10 a.m.)
11 COCHAIR STAFFORD: We're going to start
12 with public comment concerning the special education
13 report furnished by Dr. Parrish. I would ask you, first
14 of all, to identify yourself for the court reporters.
15 Please don't be repetitive. Let's keep this
16 constructive, keeping in mind the suggestion of Senator
17 Devin. The committee will have to make a decision whether
18 to move forward with legislation on this issue.
19 With that, please identify yourself and I'll ask
20 you to give public comment.
21 MR. ANDERSON: My name is Andy Anderson.
22 I'm the president-elect of the Wyoming Association of
23 Special Education Administrators. I would like to thank
24 you for this opportunity to make comments and provide
25 input.
61
1 Several studies have been completed, many
2 dollars have been spent seeking a solution to a very
3 complex problem of equitable and adequate funding for
4 special education children in unique Wyoming communities.
5 We were hopeful that the formula would be unique and
6 workable for districts to meet the federal obligations to
7 provide adequate services to all children with
8 disabilities.
9 We are here to communicate to you that the
10 funding recommendations made by AIR which you are
11 considering do not meet the needs of our special students.
12 Now, I would like to preface that remark with the fact
13 that we did not have the latest recommendations of AIR.
14 We were working off of some that we were given a couple
15 weeks ago and now we see that they are saying there are
16 three possibilities.
17 But anyway, we still feel that AIR is
18 recommending this block grant, and when we look at it, we
19 feel that it is actually a census-based model of funding
20 and that just really doesn't meet the unique needs of the
21 communities in Wyoming.
22 For example, the adequacy guideline developed
23 based on student needs is 40 children need speech therapy,
24 which would result in the school district needing one
25 speech therapist to meet that need. So they have built
62
1 into that the assumption that if the district has more
2 than 40 kids, then they're overidentifying, or if they
3 have less than 40 kids for that given ADM number, then
4 they are underserving. So we're either overidentifying or
5 underserving and it just doesn't meet our needs.
6 I would like to take a couple of minutes to
7 address some of the comments that I heard today. Some of
8 the data that you have received has been expressed in
9 percentages, and I would like to tell you that the
10 percentages don't always represent what are happening in
11 our school districts.
12 It shows that the average number of kids in our
13 state of identified special ed kids has been going up
14 every year. Well, for example, in my district last year I
15 had within two kids the same number of special ed kids
16 that I had four years ago, but then my percent of
17 identified kids compared to the ADM in my district was
18 about 11.5 percent. Well, last year it was 15.26. And I
19 had two kids less and yet my percentage has gone up.
20 Now, the one thing that I do not have control
21 over in my district as a special ed director is the
22 emigration of people out of my district. Now, why are my
23 special ed population families not moving out at the same
24 rate that the regular ed population are? Even though I
25 hear that poverty has nothing to do with it, I would
63
1 strongly have to disagree. Who does not have the
2 resources to move out of my community or relocate? Who
3 does? It is the special ed families that cannot afford to
4 relocate nor do they have the vocational training to move.
5 So those numbers, those percentages belie what
6 is actually happening. I had gone through the expenditure
7 reports that you have received for the last couple of
8 years and have examined the special ed numbers in many
9 different districts. You will not find significant
10 increases. Where is this myth of overidentification? It
11 is not happening.
12 As far as costs escalating, they certainly are.
13 In my district I have no control over increases in wages.
14 I have no control over the benefit packages which includes
15 insurance in my district. And those things make my costs
16 just jump tremendously. The costs of medical services,
17 the costs of psychological evaluations, boy, I can't
18 afford to provide the same level of services over the next
19 few years, over the next six years, if there's no
20 corresponding rise in revenues for us. I know that those
21 costs are going to go up.
22 I just feel that there's a myth being
23 perpetuated that districts are overidentifying, that
24 districts are overspending, and we're not. We're just
25 bare bones. We're doing what we can do. I have one
64
1 physical therapist in my district. That person travels
2 110 miles from the northernmost school to the easternmost
3 school in my district. That's a lot of seat time for one
4 person.
5 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, would the
6 gentleman identify which district he's from?
7 MR. ANDERSON: Sweetwater County School
8 District Number 1 and that northernmost community is
9 Farson which is 42 miles north of Rock Springs, and the
10 other community is Wamsutter that is 67 miles to the east
11 of us out there, as well as several other rural
12 communities.
13 Our roads are closed frequently. We're not able
14 to hire enough people. There are critical shortages.
15 I've on occasion had to contract with a physical therapist
16 out of Oregon who flew to Lander who would drive to Rock
17 Springs for the sum of $800 a day. And I had advertised
18 locally, statewide, regionally, nationally to procure some
19 help. And I'm in the same situation now with
20 speech/language people.
21 I heard that the current funding model
22 contributes to the variation in services. It is not your
23 funding model. The 100 percent comes as close to doing
24 what I need to do in my district as we can do. It is the
25 lack of people to hire. I'm short a speech language
65
1 therapist. Now, is there going to be a variation in
2 service from my district to Riverton? You darned right
3 there's going to be. I have two speech therapists who are
4 traveling all of these distances. We cannot write in the
5 district therapy that the parents would like, that they're
6 used to coming from various communities. We have to go to
7 a consultative model. And even that is inadequate. My
8 folks feel like they're not providing the services that
9 they need.
10 We are more than willing as an organization to
11 accept the second model that is being proposed there which
12 is the 100 percent with staffing guidelines, with the
13 realization that each community is unique and it has its
14 own little idiosyncracies. As I've looked through -- and
15 I've examined these special education expenditure books
16 for hours -- the communities that have higher levels of
17 identification have had those for several years. And they
18 have changed directors. They have changed school board
19 members. They have changed superintendents. There's
20 something unique about each one of those communities that
21 demands the kinds of services that they're asking for in
22 those communities. And we would ask you to please give
23 consideration to the 100 percent funding.
24 As far as us misusing special education funds,
25 twice in the last two years I believe the LSO was
66
1 initiated to audit, come out and look at our 408 reports,
2 and in most districts there was no abuse. They found so
3 little abuse of funds the first time that they decided to
4 do their own audit and they didn't find any more abuse
5 themselves.
6 So we are not out there abusing this money. We
7 are using it to give these kids an even playing board. We
8 are not overidentifying. I challenge anyone to come in to
9 my district and look at each IEP and each child to see if
10 they have been overidentified, if we are overidentifying.
11 I just don't believe those things are happening in my
12 community or your community.
13 So one of the questions I heard Senator Devin
14 ask is how do we avoid abuses that are being perpetuated
15 under the 100 percent funding model that we now have? I
16 say that we do not have these abuses, that the numbers of
17 special ed kids is not going up. It is remaining
18 relatively the same. Is the percentage going up?
19 Certainly is because the general student population is
20 going down. That's why an increase there.
21 Increase in spending are over issues that most
22 of us have no control over as special ed directors such as
23 increases in pay, increases in benefits, insurance costs,
24 et cetera.
25 Are we asking for outcomes? Yes. The State
67
1 Department of Education has changed their monitoring
2 process to try to look more at outcomes. NCLB, No Child
3 Left Behind, is soon going to have major, major impacts on
4 the reauthorization of IDEA which should have happened
5 this last summer, will undoubtedly happen next summer.
6 And I just came from a conference in Pittsburgh where the
7 national legislators were talking about that almost
8 certainly the reauthorization of IDEA will follow right
9 along with No Child Left Behind. We're going to have even
10 more stringent requirements put upon us in terms of
11 qualified personnel, which is already an issue for us, as
12 well as annual, early progress.
13 So I would ask you to seriously consider the 100
14 percent funding model. We're more than willing to submit
15 to any kind of staff recommendations. We welcome the
16 state department or any other investigating bodies to come
17 out and check. Thank you very much.
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you,
19 Mr. Anderson.
20 Next.
21 MR. KOURIS: My name is Mike Kouris.
22 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott.
23 SENATOR SCOTT: Are we going to have an
24 opportunity to ask these people questions?
25 COCHAIR STAFFORD: When public comment is
68
1 over we will.
2 Continue.
3 MR. KOURIS: My name is Mike Kouris and
4 I'm the special education director in Riverton, Wyoming.
5 I spoke about a month ago to you, which now this is the
6 second time I'm becoming politically involved and I'm not
7 used to that. I'm used to being home and taking care of
8 business.
9 But I just had to come and speak up because --
10 again to reemphasize the uniqueness of our communities.
11 My district is one of them that the study shows that I
12 may -- shows that I'm spending a million dollars too much
13 according to those guidelines. And if, in fact, I was
14 held to a block grant, which is actually just frozen to
15 that amount, I would have to catch up to that or lose that
16 amount of money before it is unfrozen.
17 Riverton is a unique community. Over 60 percent
18 of our children require speech services. I don't recruit
19 those children. I don't just willy-nilly identify them.
20 But that's way above the state average. That requires me
21 to have double the amount of speech therapists. The
22 census-based approach would fund me for those positions.
23 Also in Riverton, and I don't know why, I've got
24 double the amount of children with emotional difficulties.
25 So we have to have programs K-12 for those children. And
69
1 I'm a mid-sized district so that means having teachers
2 that may only have two or three kids in class that I have
3 to have that classroom for for kids that have behavioral
4 problems. So as Andy echoed, I would welcome the 100
5 percent funding with any kind of oversight and sanction.
6 And then I wrote down some things on Senator
7 Devin. I sure want to address those. How do we avoid
8 excesses? I think the state rules for identifying
9 children with disabilities could be rewritten, could be
10 looked at, could be tightened up if, in fact, our state is
11 overidentifying children with speech disabilities. So
12 that's one way.
13 The way children qualify for speech services and
14 disabilities, adequacy, I think -- yes, yes, I'm getting
15 help from above.
16 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Read Morse code
17 and you've got it.
18 MR. KOURIS: I think adequacy, if we have
19 the flexibility built into the system in order to co-op
20 services with other districts -- it really hasn't been
21 flexible enough that we could do that in our districts,
22 share services and co-op and also with the State
23 Department of Education doing some things that help
24 districts rather than on an oversight thing.
25 And then outcomes, our special children in
70
1 Wyoming -- and I would like a study to be done on that. I
2 think we're way above the average of keeping our special
3 kids in school. I think our dropout rate compared to the
4 nation has to be way down there. Most of our special kids
5 that start in Riverton graduate through the system, many
6 of them work in our communities. I just don't see a lot
7 of them dropping out which is really a huge outcome for
8 special kids.
9 Also, as Andy said, the outcomes, going by the
10 rigorous standards written into IEPs, we sure want to be
11 accountable and I think we are. Thank you very much.
12 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you, Mr. Kouris.
13 In the back there.
14 MR. LEAHY: Yes, Mr. Chairman. I'm Lou
15 Leahy. I'm from Newcastle, Wyoming, Weston County School
16 District Number One.
17 Just a comment, especially brought up by the
18 gentleman to the left of the Chair, that the complexity of
19 these formulas are continuing to increase, becoming more
20 complicated. And as I served on the committee -- on the
21 stakeholders group with Dr. Parrish, many of these ideas
22 were interesting and certainly I could start to see that
23 obviously these systems, again, are becoming more and more
24 complex.
25 Now, across the street and up the road a couple
71
1 blocks other elected people, school board members like
2 yourselves, elected officials are grappling with trying to
3 make some of these things more simplified because I think
4 what they're feeling is the same thing as elected
5 officials like you folks must be feeling, is the more
6 complex these things become, the more reliant that you
7 folks become on the bureaucracy. You become reliant on
8 the bureaucracy of the Department of Ed, the bureaucracy
9 of myself and my colleagues, the education bureaucracy,
10 even your own bureaucracy, the LSO.
11 And the more you have to listen to the
12 bureaucracy, the harder it is for you to hear the people
13 that elected you. Thank you.
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you. And you
15 will find, sir, that pretty much everybody on this
16 committee is left of me.
17 Next.
18 MS. GAZEWOOD: I'm Ramona Gazewood,
19 director of Special Services in Laramie County School
20 District 1. I was also on the task force that was working
21 with Mr. Parrish on this very complex issue.
22 I have been a director in the state for 23 years
23 now so I've been hanging around a long time, so I've seen
24 a lot of changes. First off, I want to say that Wyoming
25 is unique in that we have some of the most outstanding
72
1 special education services in the nation and there's a
2 reason for that. And you guys are part of that reason.
3 We do fund special education very generously, and
4 rightfully so.
5 And I guess as directors and there's change
6 coming about, we get nervous about what that change could
7 be and how that is going to impact our ability to serve
8 children with such complex needs.
9 So I've had the opportunity to travel around the
10 nation and see other states and what they do for special
11 education. We don't want to go there. We don't want to
12 have caseloads that are so astronomical we cannot make a
13 difference for children. We don't want to have our
14 psychologists be nothing but testing machines, which they
15 are in most states. We don't want speech and language
16 therapists to have caseloads of 90 where we really can't
17 see children and make a difference.
18 So I think those are some avenues and some
19 aspects you need to keep in mind as we go through this
20 change. I'm not opposed to change. I wouldn't be in
21 special education if I was opposed to change. I've always
22 had a concern about the 100 percent funding because it
23 puts us under a very, very large microscope.
24 You asked about how -- if we don't -- if we
25 continue with the 100 percent funding, how do we go about
73
1 maybe not abusing the system. I think one of the
2 challenges as directors out there is the eligibility
3 criteria that is in our present rules. It would be pretty
4 difficult not to qualify a student in speech and language
5 if you really wanted to.
6 I think eligibility criteria needs to be looked
7 at. Our rules need to be looked at and tightened so that
8 we have a better, clearer understanding and our staff has
9 a clearer understanding of what qualifies a student for
10 services and eligibility.
11 I also -- you also asked a question what is
12 adequate and are we delivering, fairness and adequacy.
13 That's a good question. And we struggle with that all of
14 the time. I'm constantly talking to my colleagues about
15 what is your caseload here and what are you doing there
16 and how many occupational therapists do you have, how many
17 physical therapists, because it is a problem for us. It
18 is very difficult. Establishing some guidelines would be
19 very beneficial, I think. And I don't have any opposition
20 to that whatsoever.
21 I have some in my own district that I've
22 established in certain areas such as the resource room
23 because I'm looking for adequacy across my own district.
24 We're now looking at adequacy across the state.
25 Another thing to help with adequacy is we do
74
1 have a state complaint procedure. We have mediation and
2 due process. Those avenues do exist. Maybe they need to
3 be clarified and tweaked as well. But when we're not
4 doing something that's adequate and the parent doesn't
5 think we're providing appropriate services, believe you me
6 we hear from them.
7 On outcomes, I'm going to piggyback onto what
8 Andy said earlier about the new state accreditation
9 process. We went through that process last year just like
10 Andy did. We did survive, barely. We went through it.
11 It does go through graduation rates, dropout rates. We
12 look at WyCAS scores for children with disabilities to see
13 how they're doing, regular ed programs, a number of areas,
14 so we are looking at that.
15 We are looking at how our students are also
16 performing toward the standards and we're making gains
17 along that along with everybody else. We haven't arrived
18 yet but we're making appropriate strides to make sure that
19 our students do have the appropriate outcomes.
20 I would also want to emphasize that we
21 continually -- I think one of our greatest fears is that
22 with a shortage of personnel that we have in education
23 across the board, but especially in special education,
24 that we remain competitive so we can attract staff to our
25 state to serve our children.
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1 I used to get 20 applicants for a given resource
2 room position. Now I'm lucky to have one. Many of the
3 districts across the state cannot find personnel such as
4 in speech and language and occupational therapy and
5 psychologists. It is a dwindling pool that we have.
6 One of the things, if we do change our method of
7 funding, that we have a method in there that will address
8 the rising salary costs and for us to remain competitive
9 nationally with those salaries. When I was recently in
10 California looking at specialty management systems, some
11 of those salaries were in the 30s and same way back in
12 North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
13 So another point I would like to make is to be
14 absolutely sure of as we base any funding formula or any
15 change in the funding formula, that our data is correct.
16 I met with Dr. Parrish last night and we were going
17 through some of the new data and I was able to point out
18 to Dr. Parrish that the Part B money in the newest chart
19 was in error. We need to make sure if we're going to use
20 data that it is, in fact, 100 percent accurate.
21 And then finally, if we change to a different
22 funding formula, to make sure that those funds be
23 designated for special ed purposes and not blended into
24 the other block grants, because if it is blended into the
25 other block funding we will not have that for special
76
1 education anymore. It will be going for other purposes
2 and other needs. Thank you.
3 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
4 MRS. SCOTT: Elaine Scott, Board of
5 Trustees, Natrona County School District Number 1. I have
6 a couple items about numbers I would like to bring to your
7 attention. The IDEA legislation permits special ed
8 students to stay in the public school system and be served
9 until age 21. Very few of our regular ed kids stay past
10 18. So now not as many of them but there are some of your
11 very involved special ed kids that will stay under the
12 school services for an extra two or three years, and
13 they're usually the expensive ones.
14 And then, in addition, it also requires that all
15 children be served, not the students of public schools, so
16 your special ed personnel have to go out and serve the
17 private schools, home schoolers and, you know, those that
18 are not actually served by your ADM, so that's another
19 little factor there that probably tweaks a little bit of
20 your numbers.
21 Then just to switch channels a second to talk
22 about your specialists, the server mode areas and
23 sometimes maybe one side of Casper to the other is
24 sometimes remote if you're the only one running around
25 town. But I would like to see some option for innovative
77
1 solutions being brought forth.
2 For instance, most schools have enough need for
3 a speech therapist and her space is usually small enough
4 that they can accommodate that. But your schools that
5 only need your physical therapists one or two days a week
6 for one or two kids, they don't allocate space.
7 One idea that's come up in our district is put a
8 school bus that's about to go out of service for
9 transportation of students to and from schools -- be
10 refitted as a mobile therapy office that you could drive
11 from place to place and then you don't have that time to
12 make two trips in and out of the building, lugging your
13 stuff, setting it up, go get Johnny and give him his 20 to
14 30 minutes of services and spend as long a time taking
15 your equipment down as you had bringing it in.
16 So I think just an idea of how to use innovation
17 sometimes would be nice.
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you, Elaine.
19 MS. CALMES: I'm Glenna Calmes, special
20 services director in Evanston, Wyoming. I was a member of
21 the task force and was pleased to see some of the changes
22 in Dr. Parrish's report from the report we received in
23 October.
24 I particularly want to support the second option
25 that he gave which is to consider the 100 percent
78
1 reimbursement with the guidelines as presented for
2 staffing and so on.
3 I would like to address a couple specific items
4 I think are very positive and one is the addressing of the
5 maintenance of effort and the nonsupplanting that we
6 talked about both last month and again here this month.
7 I'm glad we're recognizing those. I also appreciate the
8 fact that you're going to look at moving to this year as
9 the base year if we do go into a block grant, which I hope
10 we won't do.
11 I would like to talk a little bit about a couple
12 of things in the block grant that are specific concerns to
13 me and to my district. My district in the previous
14 data -- haven't had time to look at the data I received
15 just this morning -- spends 86 percent of the statewide
16 average on special education of students and yet we would
17 lose $160,000 in the block grant formula.
18 So this tells me that we're doing something way
19 wrong somewhere and I don't believe it is in what we're
20 doing for kids.
21 We have an IEP process that is set in place by
22 the federal government, by our state guidelines, and I
23 believe that what we're doing for kids on those IEPs
24 provides a free, appropriate, public education. So I'm
25 concerned if I'm suddenly taking -- looking at cutting
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1 back on the services provided in those IEPs because of
2 lack of funding, that it brings up a real potential
3 political and legal issue for my district.
4 Senator Devin specifically asked about how we
5 could avoid abuse of expenditure of funds and so on. I do
6 believe that that IEP process is the primary way for doing
7 that. That is in place. It has been in place for 20-some
8 years and I think that that is what keeps us from abusing
9 funding.
10 Adequacy of the IEP process and the due process
11 procedures are also in place to keep us from misusing the
12 funding for kids and being sure we are providing a free,
13 appropriate, public education.
14 One of the questions that has come up and we've
15 talked about in my district recently in looking at WyCAS
16 scores, for example, because that's the statewide example
17 that we have of whether or not students are proficient and
18 making progress toward the standards is that each year
19 that special education population changes in a variety of
20 ways. One of the ones that concerns me most is that as we
21 have kids who have reached their goals on their IEP who
22 are proving they are learning, we no longer write an IEP.
23 We drop them out of special ed. They move up, so to
24 speak.
25 So when we look at special ed scores for the
80
1 next year we don't have those children who are proficient
2 as showing on an IEP, so our number of kids who are
3 nonproficient or partially proficient is about the same
4 maybe as it was the year before. Why is that? Because
5 the child who was proficient who is now proficient no
6 longer perhaps is on an IEP.
7 So one of the ways we know that our kids are
8 making progress, one of our ways of looking at the
9 adequacy of what we're doing is those kids who move from
10 IEP status to non-IEP status. Thank you very much.
11 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
12 MS. STAAB: My name is Teresa Staab. I'm
13 a special ed director in Big Horn 1, which is Cowley,
14 Frannie, Deaver, Burlington --
15 COCHAIR STAFFORD: You might want to say
16 that again a little slower.
17 MS. STAAB: I have it memorized -- Byron
18 and Burlington. We're a spread-out district up there, a
19 lot of little towns, and I think we provide wonderful
20 services, adequate, appropriate services for our special
21 needs students.
22 I think I would like to address mainly the
23 accountability issue because I think in the nation as a
24 whole, and in our state, too, that's a big issue and for
25 legislatures at a national and state level is what are we
81
1 doing with our money and how do we -- how are we
2 accountable to that.
3 And I think in special education we can say that
4 we are accountable to the money that we spend based on the
5 outcomes of student scores. And with the No Child Left
6 Behind legislation, that's going to become even more
7 pronounced because right now in grades 4, 8 and 11 we have
8 the WyCAS and we're required to disaggregate -- state
9 disaggregates based on different groups and one of those
10 groups is special ed.
11 And we look at in our district, as well as I'm
12 sure other districts, are we moving our students, regular
13 ed and special ed, out of that novice to partially
14 proficient, or whatever it is called now, to proficient.
15 We're working at that. Those numbers are there. And so
16 we look at those.
17 Soon we will have testing in third through
18 eighth grade so every year there will be numbers to say
19 have our students met AYP, annual yearly progress, and we
20 will be held accountable to that.
21 Now, disaggregated special ed population,
22 disaggregated there, so we're held accountable there, so I
23 think that piece is in place at the state and national
24 level. At the district level the accountability piece,
25 we're accountable to the progress on those goals and
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1 objectives, and I want you to know, parents hold us
2 accountable in my district and expect us to show progress
3 through assessment of our special education students.
4 So not only are we showing accountability,
5 showing progress at the local level, but we also have and
6 will have even more accountability at the district -- at
7 the state and national level with the No Child Left
8 Behind.
9 I guess in overidentification -- that was an
10 issue -- we have federal rules and regulations and from
11 those federal rules and regulations the Wyoming rules and
12 regulations have been written. And in those rules and
13 regulations, as it has been said, there are eligibility
14 criteria for each disability area. And we have people --
15 school psychologists who are qualified. I am an ed
16 diagnostician who does the testing in my district. And I
17 suspect now my school psychologist will follow those
18 eligibility criteria. Kids do not qualify unless they are
19 in need of services based on the Wyoming rules and
20 regulations that are given to us.
21 Now, if that process needs to be looked at,
22 that's something at the state level maybe that needs to be
23 looked at. But right now we're held accountable to the
24 criteria that we have for each of those disability areas.
25 A student cannot qualify as other health
83
1 impaired unless he meets the guidelines of a physician
2 verification of a medically -- medical condition that
3 interferes with learning and so on and so on. So there's
4 another accountability that we as districts have.
5 I have another concern of regional centers
6 that's proposed in this model. I want you to know, we
7 have a little -- we have a difficult area because we have
8 a difficult time getting speech and language therapists.
9 I've been really lucky because we're up close to Montana
10 and Montana therapists are fleeing the state of Montana.
11 Just because of that, because I just hired two within the
12 last three years out of Montana, because a lot of them
13 provide services out of a co-op. And they travel and
14 their frustration is that they're not able to provide
15 adequate services to the students that they see because
16 they're on a time limit. They are in this school one day
17 and if the student is missing because of a field trip
18 or whatever, they can't come back until the next week.
19 And I am really appreciative of my board and my
20 superintendent who supported hiring a full-time speech
21 therapist, a second one, because the logistics of
22 Burlington being 42 miles from Cowley, which is another 12
23 miles, or 16 to Frannie, so we're looking at 60-some miles
24 between.
25 In this model that I just read or have read, Big
84
1 Horn 1 is used as a small school example and we would be
2 allocated .9 speech therapists. Last year -- just like
3 Andy said, sometimes we have no -- we have no say over
4 what comes to our district. We had last year an impact on
5 our district of several deaf students and a high-needs
6 student and all of a sudden my speech therapist's services
7 were not adequate to meet the needs of two deaf students
8 new to our district. And I have increased. I am thankful
9 I didn't have to go begging to the state for more funding
10 to hire another speech therapist.
11 Now, I invite you to my district and I will
12 justify the money that I'm spending on my students and I
13 could have a line up of parents here that would be happy
14 to talk to you about special ed services in my district.
15 And I don't think we're overdoing it in my district.
16 So there you go. I guess that's it. Thank you
17 for letting me speak to this issue.
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you. And Miss
19 Staab, there's a lot of other good reasons why people are
20 leaving Montana.
21 Anyone else like to speak at this time?
22 Mr. Atkins.
23 MR. ATKINS: Al Atkins, board member,
24 Laramie County School District Number 1. I support
25 recommendations number 2 and all of the comments you heard
85
1 previously.
2 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
3 Committee, do you have any questions for any of
4 the -- I'm sorry.
5 MR. GOETZ: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ed
6 Goetz, business manager, Albany County School District in
7 Laramie. I was also a member of this task force.
8 I would like to refer to a few pages of the
9 report and the briefing paper specifically to deal with
10 the concept of abuse. The two areas that have been
11 brought up which may illustrate that issue is the higher
12 identification rate and the higher level of expenditures
13 in Wyoming than the national average.
14 First of all, on page 18 of the report it shows
15 the national trend of identification versus Wyoming's
16 trend of identification, and you can see that the national
17 trend is outstripping Wyoming's identification.
18 Also, on the briefing paper it actually states
19 at the bottom of page 1 that the total number has
20 decreased of students that are identified. On page 23 of
21 the report, in the last sentence it says that over the
22 five-year period in which this graph is measured that
23 Wyoming's percentage increase of expenditures was 5.9
24 percent compared to 18.5 percent for the country as a
25 whole. And so these increases in identification and
86
1 expenditures are, in fact, a national trend.
2 Then I would like to refer to page 70 of the
3 report where in the first paragraph it states Wyoming's
4 current 100 percent funding reimbursement system has not
5 resulted in runaway student identification or spending.
6 These numbers are rising over time and are higher than the
7 national averages and generally surpass practices found in
8 neighboring states.
9 It also says that we have established over a
10 longer period of time this pattern and that there's not a
11 sudden reaction to the 100 percent reimbursement; that, in
12 fact, in previous years we had an 85 percent reimbursement
13 rate which was greater than the national average.
14 And so the point that I'm making here is I think
15 that these items in the report show that we are not
16 abusing the system, that the 100 percent reimbursement
17 that was implemented did not make any significant
18 increases and, in fact, we've recently seen decreases in
19 ID rates.
20 Now page 1 of the briefing paper where it refers
21 to the $6 million increase in special education
22 expenditure, I think that that can be very easily
23 explained by what happened two years ago during the
24 legislative session when the external cost adjustment was
25 implemented and significant dollars were brought into the
87
1 districts for salary and benefits and districts made a
2 commitment to put that into salary and benefits.
3 Well, that's obviously going to impact the
4 salary and benefits of special education staff as well,
5 and so that $6 million is easily explained by how we spent
6 those ECA funds. It impacted special education as well.
7 As far as the 85 versus the 100 percent, I would
8 like to do a little history and point out the 85 percent
9 reimbursement is something that's been going on in Wyoming
10 for something like a period of 15 to 20 years, and so the
11 higher expenditure and identification rates are, in fact,
12 a product of a policy decision that was made many years
13 ago by the legislature to reimburse special education at a
14 higher rate than the national norm would be. And so what
15 is going on is something that has been established over a
16 long period of type, not something that just happened in
17 the last three years.
18 As far as the committee recommendation of
19 continuing 100 percent and then using the personnel
20 staffing ratios as guidelines and for increased monitoring
21 by the State, that is something, obviously, as you've
22 heard, that we support.
23 And I would look at the two negative issues that
24 are listed here: That there are no specific caps or
25 controls on education spending, and this is on the top of
88
1 page 2, and that the State may experience continuing
2 increases in spending and identification. And I think
3 I've just established that, in fact, that isn't going on,
4 that there is not abuse, there is not runaway increases in
5 expenditure or identification, and that under the model
6 that we have had for the last three years that there is no
7 pattern that is shown that we're doing that.
8 And so I would say that essentially this
9 recommendation is trying to fix a problem that does not
10 exist. The model that is proposed effectively caps
11 funding from the state. We have to maintain effort, but
12 it appears to me that the overall level of funding for
13 special education under this scenario would not increase.
14 And I have a concern about how, if the resources
15 are not increasing as expenditures will increase --
16 obviously we still have to continue to increase salaries
17 to remain competitive, our benefits costs are going out of
18 sight just as they are at the state level, so our costs
19 also go up. So I am wondering how do we legally shift
20 costs without supplanting from what is paid for by the
21 state to federal funds since apparently under the
22 recommendation that is what is implied, if we are capped
23 for state funding, where do we go to for increases in
24 funding? It appears that we would have to go to Title 6B
25 federal funds.
89
1 I realize that one of the components of this is
2 that this model, instead of being 100 percent
3 reimbursement that would not be subject to the external
4 cost adjustment would, in fact, be subject to the external
5 cost adjustment. However, my concern with that is that
6 the external cost adjustment is not based upon any
7 particular index or model, it is not a predictable amount.
8 We don't know from year to year whether or not we'll get
9 that and if we do, how much.
10 So we know our costs are going to increase, and
11 this appears to cap our funding, and so essentially the
12 school districts I see would get caught in a squeeze
13 between either having to cut from other areas of regular
14 education or figure out ways that we can try to avoid
15 supplanting and creatively use federal funds, which I
16 think would be extremely difficult to not trip over
17 federal regulations.
18 As far as adequacy of the delivery of services,
19 I think that that speaks to the issue of the variation in
20 the services that are delivered across the state. The
21 basis of my argument on that is there are many small,
22 isolated communities around this state. When you have so
23 many small populations, you're going to see a very high
24 level of variation in services delivered. As your
25 populations become more homogeneous and they're larger and
90
1 closer together, then obviously you're going to see less
2 variation. But we don't have that in Wyoming.
3 Now, in order to make sure that those variations
4 aren't just due to population, again, our recommendation
5 is that we use these guidelines as a monitoring mechanism
6 and as triggers for special monitoring visits. That's one
7 of the things that this committee stated in our meetings
8 is that we realize we're going to have to have more
9 accountability from the state level with 100 percent
10 reimbursement.
11 So we said yes, we need to have more
12 monitoring, there needs to be more staff, and instead of
13 coming every five years with accreditation or when there
14 is a significant problem that is identified, that instead
15 this would be a random process and that it would happen
16 more frequently so that districts are held accountable to
17 those guidelines, identification rates and that if there
18 is variation, it is applicable and something that makes
19 sense based upon what is required on the IEPs for the
20 students in that district.
21 And so I guess to close I would just again like
22 to reiterate that the committee of the practitioners, the
23 people from the districts and parents did say that they
24 wanted to see 100 percent reimbursement continued with
25 stronger oversight by the State and using those
91
1 guidelines. And I am very concerned that the block grant
2 model will ultimately result in greater problems and is
3 trying to fix something that really isn't a problem.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you, Mr. Goetz.
5 MS. BAUMGARDNER: Mr. Chairman, members
6 of the committee, I'm Lynda Baumgardner, director of the
7 WIND Family Support Network. Betty Carmon here is a
8 representative from the Parent Information Center. Peggy
9 Nickel, the director of Uplift, is not here but she was
10 also on that task force committee.
11 I have worked with parents and families of
12 children with special needs throughout the state of
13 Wyoming for the last 20 years. I also have a young adult
14 with significant disabilities who traveled through the
15 school system after being at the Wyoming State Training
16 School.
17 Therefore, I stand before you as a
18 representative of hundreds if not thousands of parents
19 that these decisions that you make today and in the future
20 will affect.
21 As the three questions from Senator Devin have
22 been pretty thoroughly addressed by the special educators,
23 I would just say ditto to those. I feel that they've
24 answered those quite effectively and I won't reiterate.
25 I have had the privilege to attend many of the
92
1 Individualized Education Programs throughout the state of
2 Wyoming as a parent advocate and I can assure you that
3 these districts are not abusing the 100 percent
4 reimbursement. If anything, they're very prudent in their
5 use of special education funds. And I just wanted to say
6 that before I went any further.
7 But I would like you for a moment just to put
8 yourselves in the shoes of a parent of a child with a
9 special need. I think so many times we talk numbers,
10 numbers, numbers. We forget there are individuals, actual
11 families involved here.
12 So think for a minute if you had a child with a
13 special need. Maybe you have a couple other children.
14 Maybe you live in Wyoming's many, many small towns. Maybe
15 you have a child that has CP, cerebral palsy, and he's in
16 a wheelchair and he has moderate cognitive abilities. You
17 come to next year's IEP and you hear that because of the
18 changes in the funding services your child will be
19 provided services at a BOCES which is like 250 miles away.
20 Put yourself in those shoes. Think of this
21 child maybe for the last five or six years has developed
22 friends and those peers come over and play video games
23 with him and he's maybe the manager of a softball team and
24 he's in Boy Scouts and he's in the church youth group.
25 How would you feel finding that that child would go -- and
93
1 granted, he would come home on the weekends, but a lot of
2 that community involvement, a lot of that community
3 ownership would be gone. That's just one of the scenarios
4 that might happen if some of these recommendations are
5 followed.
6 And I assure you that if some of these
7 recommendations are followed that there will be litigation
8 from parents and families. I can just about guarantee
9 that. Because the federal law requires a free and
10 appropriate education in the least restrictive
11 environment. And I beg you not to return to the
12 litigation of the 1990s. That was kind of an era of
13 litigation. And many of these recommendations might fit
14 for California, but they don't fit for Wyoming families.
15 Thank you.
16 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
17 Anyone else at this time? Mr. Biggio.
18 MR. BIGGIO: Mr. Chairman, I would like to
19 address those numbers that we keep saying we've sent wrong
20 numbers out to the contractor. I asked my secretary to
21 pull the numbers that we sent out to AIR on Monday to
22 confirm that they were the right numbers and they were.
23 They don't match the numbers that are in this report.
24 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
25 Committee, questions for any one of the
94
1 presenters or for Dr. Parrish or Rebecca Walk?
2 Senator Scott.
3 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, be warned, I
4 have a great big list of questions I've been keeping track
5 of.
6 COCHAIR STAFFORD: That's fine.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, first for
8 Mr. Anderson, I believe it was, from the Rock Springs
9 district, a couple of questions: One, as chairman of the
10 Health Committee I'm getting increasingly concerned about
11 the shortages of allied health people around the state and
12 it is a problem that is a Wyoming-wide problem and one I
13 think that we're going to have difficulty grappling with
14 here.
15 You have at least three of them -- physical
16 therapists, occupational therapists and speech
17 pathologists -- in this particular area, and what I'm
18 trying to figure out is how you deal with the circumstance
19 where we just plain have a shortage in Wyoming and have
20 trouble getting them.
21 So the first question I have for you is in your
22 district do you pay those people where you hire them as
23 district -- maybe you don't hire them as district people,
24 but do you pay them on the same pay schedule you use for
25 teachers and to what extent is that a common practice
95
1 across the state?
2 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Anderson.
3 MR. ANDERSON: In our district we pay --
4 we have negotiated with our education association that we
5 have a doctorate column on our salary scale, and due to
6 the difficulty of hiring these specialists, if they have
7 what we call national certification, we will start them on
8 the doctorate scale. And that helps somewhat, but it
9 doesn't come close.
10 That means that I can start a beginning speech
11 language person at about $3,000 a year higher salary than
12 I can a regular ed teacher or a resource room teacher.
13 And that doesn't begin to meet competitive or surrounding
14 states. Nevada is just killing us.
15 Now, as far as other districts in the state, I
16 am aware of some that their school board has authorized
17 hiring salaries -- beginning salaries that are off of the
18 district salary schedule. So that is a common practice in
19 many districts, but it just really ties us down to what we
20 are able to pay. It helped when we were able to give
21 total years of service within the state. We need to move
22 to total years of service also out of the state. That
23 would also help us compete, years experience as to where
24 we can place people on the salary scales.
25 And as far as mental health, that's a critical
96
1 shortage in our community, and I can really address that.
2 I serve on the multi-disciplinary team for juveniles in
3 our county, and we just -- we cannot provide the mental
4 health services in the community that we need to for our
5 youth. They're just not available. And salaries are not
6 competitive.
7 Did I answer your question, Senator Scott?
8 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, in part.
9 And I would pose to the committee that there's a dilemma
10 there that in some of these specialists, due to market
11 competition, we're going to have to pay more than we are
12 now and pay more than the teacher-based salary schedules
13 allow. And we're going to have to figure out how we're
14 going to accommodate that within a block grant proposal
15 because we do have a problem there.
16 Let me ask, if I may, Mr. Chairman, a second
17 question for Mr. Anderson.
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Continue.
19 SENATOR SCOTT: And it does relate to what
20 we're talking about here. If your superintendent were to,
21 say, put you as head of a committee in your district
22 charged with figuring out how do we decrease the number of
23 students that we get that really need special education
24 and the severity of the special education, what sort of
25 suggestions would you examine as ways you could go about
97
1 doing that?
2 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Anderson.
3 MR. ANDERSON: Whoa, that's putting me on
4 the hot seat. I've heard several of the other commenters
5 refer to the identification criteria, and so often it is
6 what is not said in the legislation or in the rules and
7 regulations that gives you an area of -- it is kind of a
8 gray area and boils down to opinions so often.
9 But I would say that dealing with identification
10 criteria would probably be the area that I would start
11 with, and that I really don't have a lot of control over,
12 nor the populations that move into my community.
13 Sir.
14 SENATOR SCOTT: Let me ask a further
15 question, then.
16 Would a preschool program be an effective way to
17 decrease the number of kids that need special education?
18 Could you do things like that?
19 MR. ANDERSON: Well, we already have
20 several -- we have Head Start, we have the Child
21 Development Center, and what we are seeing is increased
22 numbers of children with disabilities in those programs
23 also. Early intervention, of course, and prevention is
24 always a good direction to go, but the number of severe
25 disabilities that we're seeing in communities are just
98
1 not -- some of them are not preventable.
2 Medicine has made such tremendous advances that
3 the number of surviving young children with serious
4 physical disabilities is much higher than it has been in
5 the past, and no amount of early intervention is going to
6 keep those kids out of the special education system.
7 Reading programs, yes, they help, but they will not
8 totally -- they will not stabilize or decrease the numbers
9 of special education kids coming into our districts.
10 Now, that's a personal opinion and my cohorts
11 may not agree with me. In response to your question
12 that's my personal observation.
13 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, I would say
14 my personal observation is exactly the same. You can with
15 prevention programs deal with a number of the kids that
16 aren't as severely involved, but you are seeing more of
17 the very severely involved because of the medical
18 interventions, and frankly, because of Wyoming's substance
19 abuse problems.
20 Mr. Chairman, I have several questions for other
21 people.
22 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Continue.
23 Thank you, Mr. Anderson.
24 SENATOR SCOTT: The lady from the Big Horn
25 School Districts, could you expand a bit on the -- what
99
1 does it take to qualify somebody for speech and language
2 and how much judgment is involved as to whether somebody
3 really needs speech and language services?
4 MS. STAAB: I think before a student even
5 is referred for speech and language possible testing --
6 I'll talk about my school district. In our district we
7 have a building intervention team process that the student
8 is referred to the building intervention team which isn't
9 a special ed process, but interventions are talked about,
10 what's been done in the classroom already, what is the
11 child's problems affecting their learning. That's one of
12 the most important things.
13 At that point that team within the building, if
14 they feel after interventions are made within the regular
15 classroom and the child isn't progressing adequately in
16 the classroom, then the referral is made to special
17 education.
18 So there has to be a process -- there is
19 supposed to be a process already set up in regular
20 education for interventions to make sure that that
21 referral to special education is a real one or whatever,
22 you know what I mean. So we already have a regular ed
23 process.
24 When the testing is done, for example, a
25 referral to speech and language, a child can qualify --
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1 and if there's any speech and language pathologists in
2 here, I'm sure you could help me out -- in articulation,
3 in language and in voice and fluency. So there are
4 several individual areas within speech and language a
5 student has to meet the eligibility criteria for.
6 In our district we have a speech and language
7 pathologist do assessment with standardized tests and they
8 have to meet the guidelines of a certain percentile. And
9 I don't have those right in front of me, I wish I did, and
10 I could tell you. There's -- that's not only it, though.
11 One of the most important things is the child
12 has to be in need of services. You know, a student can be
13 eligible and meet the eligibility criteria but not be in
14 need of services because they're progressing adequately in
15 the classroom. So sometimes they meet the eligibility but
16 the IEP team determines they're not in need of services,
17 do you see what I mean?
18 In speech and language there are definite
19 guidelines set up on the -- does anybody have that -- they
20 have to meet below the 12th percentile on the standardized
21 tests. They have to be in need of services. Their
22 disability is affecting -- possible disability is
23 affecting learning -- anybody else -- I don't have those
24 guidelines right in front of me.
25 The other thing, the checks and balances, I'm a
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1 big part of that as director of special ed. When those
2 things come through to me, those referrals come to me from
3 the regular ed and I check those out. If I have a
4 question, they go back to the school before the referral
5 to say did you do the -- let's look at these interventions
6 and that sort of thing. So in my district the special ed
7 director is a checks and balance.
8 Does that answer your question?
9 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Go ahead.
10 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, yes, it
11 does, and I will have a similar question for the lady from
12 Laramie County School District in a moment.
13 Again, Mr. Chairman, if I may.
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Continue.
15 SENATOR SCOTT: The lady from the Big Horn
16 County School District -- and I'm sorry, I can't hear your
17 name well enough.
18 COCHAIR DEVIN: Ms. Staab.
19 SENATOR SCOTT: Thank you for that. On
20 the issue of accountability, one of the things this
21 committee is going to have to deal with is how do we deal
22 with the IDEA accountability. From what you said I
23 couldn't tell, are you talking about accountability in
24 tracking individual students from one year to the next to
25 see if they make real progress during the year and maybe
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1 there they eventually go off the IEP. Is that the kind of
2 thing you are talking about?
3 MS. STAAB: I think I talked about that
4 but I also talked about there's different levels of
5 accountability, and within the district level we have the
6 IEP process of goals and objectives. We write goals and
7 objectives and we have to say are the -- and, you know, we
8 report progress in my district for at least minimum four
9 times a year. And it is progress on the individual goals
10 and objectives of that. And that's done yearly and
11 determined annually do they meet progress.
12 Now, the accountability that I think you're
13 talking about, if we're talking about accountability to
14 the money that we're spending and are our kids making
15 progress, I think that system is set up and going to be
16 even -- become more stringent with the guidelines of No
17 Child Left Behind because already in grades 4, 8 and 11
18 the WyCAS is used to test whether those students in our
19 district are meeting the standards as set forth by the
20 State.
21 And when we get those scores back, those scores
22 are disaggregated in male, female, gender, ethnicity,
23 special education, in disability. And as of the next
24 couple years we will be having state testing in grades 3
25 through 8 and that right there every year I'm sure the
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1 scores will be able to be disaggregated.
2 And what we're looking for is the number of
3 special ed -- are we moving our special ed and at-risk
4 population from the novice. And we may not get them to
5 advanced, but, man, we want to get them from novice to
6 partially proficient to proficient. That's the
7 accountability, are we moving our students.
8 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman.
9 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Go ahead.
10 SENATOR SCOTT: Will it be important to
11 you to follow the individual students in their progress
12 through that as you evaluate how well your department is
13 doing.
14 MS. STAAB: Absolutely. And that's not
15 just for how we're doing within our district with special
16 education but how are we doing for the individual student
17 based on the goals and objectives. And if they're not
18 showing progress, why not, and is our program appropriate.
19 So that's a determination made at the local level.
20 At the state level I would think that our state
21 would be looking at my district and saying you had a high
22 percentage of special education students in the novice and
23 you didn't move them, why didn't they move in reading,
24 writing and math on the WyCAS or on the state from novice
25 to partially proficient. We look at that.
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1 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, what I'm
2 trying to figure out is is it good enough to take just a
3 snapshot of your population every year without being able
4 to say are they new kids coming in or the same kids
5 progressing through the system.
6 MS. STAAB: I think the thing you have to
7 look at is you have to look at that for individual needs
8 of your district. I think at the state level what has
9 been done with the WyCAS that I appreciate is taking a
10 three-year rolling average and when you look at scores --
11 especially in my district where we have a small number,
12 and one low score can significantly impact, you know, the
13 whole look of the whole thing.
14 And so I think that three-year average is
15 important because that discounts, then, those scores that
16 can skew in one -- a fourth grade class that has five
17 special ed kids in it, which is unusual in my district,
18 but that could totally blow that fourth grade teacher has
19 to -- it is hard on them. But if you do a three-year
20 average that kind of takes that out.
21 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Go ahead.
22 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, thank you
23 very much.
24 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you, Mrs. Staab.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: Just a couple more.
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1 For Laramie County Number 1, again.
2 MR. MCDOWELL: If I may, Mr. Chair, Ramona
3 Gazewood had to leave. She had to return to Cheyenne for
4 an IEP meeting.
5 SENATOR SCOTT: She had to take off? That
6 isn't going to work, then.
7 Mr. Chairman, since the parent advocate also
8 left --
9 MS. CARMON: I can help you, though.
10 SENATOR SCOTT: The question is she saw
11 something in the report that made her think we were going
12 to go to some kind of regionalized away-from-home services
13 and I thought the regionalization concept was to bring the
14 specialist to the kid rather than the other way around.
15 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Would you please
16 identify yourself?
17 MS. CARMON: Betty Carmon, Parent
18 Information Center, also parent of a child with a
19 disability.
20 I'm not sure exactly what she had in mind for
21 that. What she was fearful of was having regional centers
22 set up in strategic areas for the kids to go to rather
23 than them coming to us. And I don't believe that was what
24 was brought out, but that was her misinterpretation.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, I will have
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1 several more questions for Dr. Parrish, but I don't want
2 to monopolize this thing. If I yield the floor, will I
3 eventually get it back?
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: We will see.
5 SENATOR SCOTT: Then, Mr. Chairman, I will
6 have to ask them.
7 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Did you have one?
8 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: I wanted to thank
9 Senator Scott for asking all of the questions.
10 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Continue.
11 SENATOR SCOTT: Okay. Mr. Chairman,
12 looking at page 77, Chapter 5 of the report, Exhibit 45,
13 this is where it does turn out to show the percent of
14 students in special education. And I raise the question,
15 question for Dr. Parrish, there was considerable talk in
16 the presentation about the variation among the school
17 districts.
18 As I look at the way you have the districts set
19 up in bands, the difference in the percentage of students
20 in special education between the highest and lowest is 6
21 percentage points in the large districts, 8.2 percentage
22 points in the medium districts, 11.5 percentage points in
23 the small districts and 20.5 percent in the very small
24 districts.
25 And what that suggests to me is that a major
107
1 component in the differences among the districts is not
2 necessarily any difference in the level of services
3 provided but random variations due to the small numbers in
4 the districts.
5 And I would like you to comment on the extent to
6 which that's what's going on. And let me say the reason
7 I'm concerned about that is as we look at making a block
8 grant work, if you get big, random variations, you're
9 going to have problems with the block grant approach.
10 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Parrish.
11 DR. PARRISH: Mr. Chair, Senator Scott,
12 Rebecca Walk may want to comment on this as well because
13 she would be more familiar with the actual patterns of
14 what is occurring throughout the state.
15 I think your observation is correct -- obviously
16 your observation is correct that the variation is greater
17 in the very small districts. That's where we see the
18 greatest range of variation.
19 However, in the very large districts where I
20 would expect a lot of variation in severity, in
21 distribution of need to be sort of evened out at that
22 scale, although even the large districts we realize in
23 Wyoming are not huge, still we're seeing a variation
24 there. I would say I guess it just depends how much
25 variation you think is large.
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1 Variation between 10.9 percent of students being
2 identified to 16.9, I would call that a large range of
3 variation at that scale. But you're correct in terms of
4 the very large sweeps in variation in the very small
5 districts.
6 I can give you an anecdote, maybe it helps, and
7 then you may want to comment. I was able to visit two
8 districts -- and I don't know which two they were. Maybe
9 you know -- I can find out. They are both very small.
10 They were both about 100 percent minority population.
11 They were six miles down the road from one another and
12 they're of the same size. In one district it was
13 identifying -- this was self-reported. I have to look
14 back to the data from the SEEDS.
15 But self-reported, talking to the special ed
16 directors from the two districts, the one district had
17 identification of 28 percent and the other district, very
18 comparable population, reported an identification of 8
19 percent.
20 When I explored the differences, the only thing
21 I could infer from the explanations I was given was that
22 it was very much determined by sort of different
23 perspectives, kind of a different view of the world, a
24 different view of qualifications.
25 So, you know, to what extent it is based on true
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1 variation in population and to what extent it is based on
2 interpretation of categories that others have described as
3 being rather broad today it is a little hard to sort out.
4 But that was a critical incident for me in terms of
5 holding an awful lot of confidence in huge variations that
6 I'm not sure are explained by variations in populations.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: These were districts with
8 minority population and close?
9 DR. PARRISH: Six miles or closer.
10 SENATOR SCOTT: The least variation had
11 what?
12 DR. PARRISH: This is self-reported. If
13 you give me the names, it may show a somewhat different
14 number -- the two districts, one said something in the
15 range of, let's say, the 25 or above range. The other one
16 was more in the 8 to 9 percent range.
17 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman.
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Rebecca, did you have a
19 comment on that?
20 MS. WALK: Mr. Chairman, Senator Scott, I
21 believe those districts Dr. Parrish visited was Pavilion
22 and Ethete or it was Ethete and Fort Washakie.
23 SENATOR SCOTT: It would have to be
24 Ethete, Fort Washakie or Arapahoe if you had that big a
25 minority. That's the only districts in the state that fit
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1 that description.
2 DR. PARRISH: This is knowable. Cheryl
3 would know.
4 SENATOR SCOTT: All of those districts are
5 reporting on this more than 21 percent, so I think the 8
6 percent figure was a result of some kind of a
7 misunderstanding because the data as it shows here in this
8 table makes a lot more sense than that kind of a variation
9 because it has to be Fremont 14, Fremont 38 and Fremont
10 21. They're the only districts in the state that meet
11 that description.
12 Your 8 percent is Park 16 which is Meeteetse
13 which is a very different kind of population and it
14 would -- Mr. Chairman, it would make sense in a small
15 district like that that you could get the random variation
16 that low. My observation is that where you're dealing
17 with very small schools, including some of the one-room
18 country schools, you can have a special ed kid that the
19 regular ed teacher can take care of in that very different
20 setting and you might not get them identified.
21 Mr. Chairman?
22 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Continue.
23 SENATOR SCOTT: Question, and it is
24 probably for Rebecca, although Dr. Parrish may want to
25 comment as well.
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1 In these categories of special education to what
2 extent is the identification of the student that qualifies
3 for special education based on objective criteria that can
4 be measured with a test that can be replicated? I know in
5 some categories that's true. Is it true universally or is
6 there some where you have to use a lot of judgment?
7 And the second follow-on question, to what
8 extent does the State currently audit those findings on
9 some kind of a basis, random or otherwise?
10 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Miss Walk.
11 MS. WALK: Mr. Chair, Senator Scott, there
12 are 13 disability categories that children can qualify for
13 under the IDEA. Probably the most lenient of the criteria
14 is speech/language. One of the more current things that
15 happened under the reauthorization of the IDEA in 1997,
16 under other health impairment -- the disability category
17 of ADD, attention deficit disorder, and ADHD, attention
18 deficit hyperactivity disorder, were allowable
19 disabilities under other health impairment.
20 Those categories were not previously allowed
21 under other health impaired prior to the reauthorization
22 in 1997. Those -- that disability category certainly has
23 increased over the last several years because ADD/ADHD
24 have become more paramount disabling conditions.
25 All of the 13 disability categories have the
112
1 caveat that the disability must have an effect on the
2 child's ability to learn. When IDEA was reauthorized and
3 we changed our rules in 1999, I believe it was, when we
4 finally got federal regs out two years after IDEA was
5 reauthorized, we put that caveat in under each of the
6 disability categories, that it had to have an ability --
7 the disability had to have an effect on the child's
8 ability to learn.
9 Is there variation? I will say yes, I think
10 there is a certain amount of professional judgment that
11 must be used whenever you are identifying a child with a
12 disability. Certainly there are some disabling conditions
13 that are more specific than others. There is a wide
14 variation within the medical community that contributes to
15 identifying children with ADD/ADHD, emotional disturbance
16 because you get other categories of behavior that is not
17 included in emotional disturbance, but it may be depending
18 upon the psychologist, the diagnostician that is looking
19 at the child.
20 I believe that one of the things that whatever
21 funding formula we move forward with -- whether we stay
22 with what we have, we move to a block grant or we move to
23 the 100 percent using these guidelines -- I think it would
24 behoove the State to reexamine all of the eligibility
25 criteria under our rules and under the IDEA. IDEA is up
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1 for reauthorization. We have not moved towards that
2 looking at the eligibility until IDEA is reauthorized
3 because it would be sort of a moot point at this point in
4 time.
5 So I would strongly urge the State -- if I was
6 going to be remaining in the position of state director, I
7 would make sure that that did happen, that we moved
8 forward with looking at all 13 eligibility criteria to
9 tighten them up, especially in the area of
10 speech/language.
11 And --
12 SENATOR SCOTT: Auditing.
13 MS. WALK: Auditing, thank you. What we
14 do now as far as looking at monitoring special education,
15 we at this point follow our accreditation timeline which
16 is an every-five-year cycle. We follow accreditation
17 teams into districts. When they do accreditation, they
18 monitor the consolidated grant, we monitor special
19 education. So we follow that same timeline on a five-year
20 cycle.
21 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Devin.
22 COCHAIR DEVIN: In follow-up to that audit
23 question, there is a requirement for an annual audit, and
24 I guess I would appreciate it if you would -- and that --
25 because I think when we did that we were more of the
114
1 impression that this would be looked at in terms of the
2 appropriateness of the money.
3 And the explanation to me at one point was no,
4 that is just looking at whether it was legally spent but
5 not whether the IEP was appropriate, whether the services
6 in there were appropriate, whether -- you know, is that --
7 in other words, I think legislators have a perception at
8 least that there's one form of audit in place and there
9 actually is another form of audit in place on that annual
10 audit.
11 Can you enlighten us at all on that as to which
12 comments and what is happening? Because if it is a
13 five-year look at the details, what's the one-year look?
14 I guess maybe that's the point of my question.
15 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Miss Walk.
16 MS. WALK: Mr. Chair, Senator Devin. I
17 think we're talking two different audits and I'm looking
18 at Larry Biggio, the director of the department's finance
19 unit. I believe they go in annually to audit finances.
20 When I'm responding to Senator Scott's question about
21 auditing special education, we go in to monitor the
22 appropriateness of the IEP. We look at several different
23 components of monitoring special education for compliance
24 under the federal guidelines.
25 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's five year?
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1 MS. WALK: That is every five years.
2 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Biggio.
3 MR. BIGGIO: Mr. Chairman, Senator, the
4 statutes require an annual CPA audit for all of the
5 districts and that's a financial audit so that really
6 wouldn't get into program issues like are services
7 appropriate, is the child being served adequately. It
8 would look more at things like were the expenses reported
9 correctly as they were incurred. So more of a financial
10 overview.
11 There was some done in the past under the AUP
12 audits that you folks authorized through LSO and the
13 independent contractors. They did a similar process but
14 more targeted towards special ed but it was again an
15 expenditure-related process, not a qualitative process
16 that looked at identification of services and programs.
17 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott.
18 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, I would
19 suggest that we really have a need, especially if we're
20 going to continue with any kind of a percentage
21 reimbursement, that we have to have an audit to look and
22 see is the -- you know, are the tests really being done
23 and the same kind of cut scores being used on similar
24 tests to identify who is eligible and who isn't for
25 services. Otherwise, you have an open invitation to have
116
1 a rift that's going to be very expensive for the State.
2 And probably a good idea to do because of the
3 variation that we are seeing under any option, but clearly
4 if we have 100 percent reimbursement, I think there's a
5 substantive audit need that's well beyond the financial.
6 I would also suggest to the committee that some
7 of these categories -- and I pick ADD/ADHD because I know
8 a little about it -- is not a single yes, they have it -
9 no, they don't kind of diagnosis. You're dealing with a
10 spectrum and figuring out how to be consistent on the
11 spectrum with where the cut point is going to be is quite
12 difficult.
13 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Bob.
14 SENATOR PECK: Mr. Chairman, a couple of
15 general questions. Considering our extra investment in
16 special education, are we going to be subject at any time
17 to charges that we're making this investment to the
18 detriment of the general school population or to the
19 shortcoming -- or shortchanging of the gifted and
20 talented?
21 We're coming out of a protracted litigation
22 where rich schools are accusing us of investing more in
23 small schools. Are we possibly subject to the same charge
24 at some time that we're overly investing in special ed to
25 the detriment of the regular population?
117
1 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Who would you like to
2 respond to that?
3 SENATOR PECK: We have an assemblage of
4 experts here. I don't know who would care to answer that.
5 Maybe we're protected by the litigation and deterred by
6 compassion, but I do raise the question.
7 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Anybody like to expand
8 on that? Mrs. Staab.
9 MS. STAAB: Teresa Staab, Big Horn 1. The
10 first thing to remember is the state and districts are
11 held under the federal guidelines and we have to provide
12 the services that are in our Wyoming rules and
13 regulations. And I think the key is to determine that we
14 provide appropriate services and then I guess we have to
15 decide how much does that cost and then how are we going
16 to fund that.
17 And the key is to remember that in Wyoming I
18 think we do an excellent job of providing appropriate
19 services for our special ed population. And federal law
20 says that if a child qualifies for services, we're
21 required to provide those services as determined by an IEP
22 team. That's the key.
23 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Devin.
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: Just kind of a follow-up,
25 a couple of my questions are similar to Senator Peck's in
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1 terms of some of the thoughts, but maybe I broke them down
2 a little differently.
3 For the lady from Laramie 1, which I would
4 invite colleagues to answer, but I guess I wonder how our
5 results -- you're saying our results are very different
6 with our 100 percent funding and I guess I'm really
7 questioning how are our results different?
8 Because the piece that I have from other sources
9 is that if we look at our general student population, you
10 know, as a state, we look at Montana's funding and Montana
11 is outperforming us as far as the general student
12 population.
13 I can't tell you special ed because I don't
14 think we really measure that. But is it my
15 understanding -- and I would ask those who might know --
16 we actually are looking at zero -- if we look at where
17 we're going to start at No Child Left Behind, we have zero
18 proficiency in special education in this state? That was
19 indicated to me that that is where we're starting and I'm
20 getting a yes, that's our base? We have zero?
21 So I really have to sit and say if we're
22 starting at zero percent proficiency and that's what our
23 base year looks like, are we getting that much more for
24 100 percent investment? And that's the outcome piece when
25 I talked about accountability. That's one thing in terms
119
1 of the money. But the outcome, I guess I'm concerned.
2 And I heard a remark about those kids being
3 moved off of the IEP, and yet when I talked to parents,
4 and parents have called me, they tell me it is almost
5 impossible, and in the words of one parent, you have to be
6 one determined Nellie to get your child moved out of
7 special education and off of an IEP once they're
8 identified. And I guess that concerns me.
9 But at what rate -- I'm looking for data. At
10 what rate do we move children off of an IEP and do we
11 continue to measure that as a proficiency in the program?
12 I'm not clear how those interact. But I have concerns
13 that we are really making the strides we need to make in
14 outcomes with these kids even though we're investing at
15 100 percent.
16 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Time out.
17 (Discussion held.)
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Who would like to
19 respond? Rebecca.
20 MS. WALK: Representative Stafford,
21 Chairman Devin, in response to your questions about
22 outcomes, I too am concerned about the outcomes. On our
23 special education monitoring one of the items we do look
24 at are WyCAS scores which are one of the things we have to
25 look at to measure students' progress.
120
1 I can say that they're very -- they're poor.
2 They have just instituted in the last several years
3 districts writing students' IEPs to stay under as
4 critical. It is critical for their progress and
5 participation in the general curriculum. We have been
6 doing a tremendous amount of staff development across the
7 state on teaching teachers how to write IEPs to standards.
8 It is a huge paradigm shift for us from writing different
9 kinds of IEPs that were not specifically addressing
10 content standards and general curriculum.
11 It is a huge change for special education as
12 well as general education. For many, many years, since
13 1975 when 94-142 was first enacted we had special ed, we
14 had general ed. All we wanted to do back in 1975 was to
15 get kids with disabilities in the schoolhouse.
16 With the reauthorization of 1997 we want
17 progress now on general curriculum. Kids with
18 disabilities deserve that. We're just starting to see
19 that. We have just hit the tip of the iceberg on that.
20 Our data right now that we have does show that
21 we are not -- we need to make a lot more progress than
22 that and we are starting that. We are doing a tremendous
23 amount of staff development, as I said, across the state.
24 Districts are using their federal dollars for staff
25 development to improve those results. But that is
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1 something we definitely need to move forward in.
2 No Child Left Behind means no child left behind.
3 When we look at the amount of increase we have to make in
4 the subgroup of children with disabilities, looking over
5 at Annette, we know that our kids with disabilities are at
6 a zero percentage across the state. In three years in
7 order not to be -- in order to meet our AYP we must
8 increase 24 percent. It is a huge undertaking in our
9 state for kids with disabilities. It is a huge burden on
10 the school districts and these directors to improve
11 results for kids with disabilities, but it is what needs
12 to happen. It is absolutely what needs to happen.
13 So in our monitoring of special education, we do
14 look at WyCAS scores but we need to move beyond just
15 looking at those scores and saying, "Well, you need to
16 make improvements," we need to be accountable. If in fact
17 we do stay at 100 percent, what are you -- what are the
18 citizens in Wyoming getting for that 100 percent? Are
19 kids with disabilities moving out of special education?
20 Are they achieving? Are they staying in school?
21 Our dropout rate -- I respectfully disagree with
22 Mr. Anderson from Sweetwater 1. Our dropout rate for
23 students with disabilities is not something to be proud
24 of. It is dropping, yes, but it is not something to be
25 proud of. Our graduation for students with disabilities,
122
1 while it is increasing, it is barely over 50 percent. We
2 need to improve in that area.
3 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott.
4 SENATOR SCOTT: Yeah, following up on this
5 particular issue two things come to my mind. First,
6 talking about the students with very severe disabilities,
7 you get a special education classroom of those who do not
8 for physical reasons -- just don't have the potential
9 mental capability to become proficient in our standard
10 academic standards, you have an alternative measure for
11 those under WyCAS. I would think it would be very
12 difficult to figure out how good a job the teachers across
13 the state were doing with that particular set of
14 classrooms, but could you expand a little what the
15 alternative measures are there and how you do it?
16 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Please.
17 MS. WALK: Mr. Chair, Senator Scott, I
18 would be happy to. We have an alternate assessment in the
19 state of Wyoming that is based on what we call expanded
20 standards. It was a requirement under the IDEA '97 that
21 all children would be accounted for in a state's --
22 statewide assessment system. And if children with
23 disabilities who had severe disabilities could not
24 participate in the general assessment with accommodations,
25 we needed to provide an alternate way to assess those
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1 children. It is a very, very small percentage in our
2 state.
3 We have a small percentage of -- small number of
4 students with disabilities, 11,770, I think, something
5 like that. That's smaller than the city and county of
6 Denver in and of itself, you know. So we have a very
7 small percentage of kids with disabilities, and an even
8 less -- an even smaller percentage of those students who
9 are so severely disabled that they cannot participate in
10 the general assessment.
11 We have the alternate. It is based on our
12 general standards and what we call them are expanded
13 standards. Where the general standard says by grade
14 level, we've just taken those words out. So the standard
15 for -- that we assess in the alternate is for reading,
16 writing and mathematics in 4, 8 and 11 and those standards
17 we just take out the part that says grade level.
18 The alternate assessment is an assessment that
19 is driven by student performance and we look at real-world
20 indicators for the students, so that if a student is
21 working on maybe a math -- one of the math benchmarks of
22 counting money, for instance, maybe they will do a
23 performance indicator through trial and error of maybe
24 going to the grocery store and picking out through
25 pictures on their list those items and then we judge --
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1 the teachers make an assessment of where they are
2 proficient on those real-world performance indicators.
3 That is disaggregated from the general
4 assessment. The federal requirements want us to aggregate
5 those scores with the general assessment and our director
6 of assessment has successfully argued that those are
7 apples and oranges and makes no statistical sense,
8 especially with our small numbers of children that are on
9 the alternate assessment, to aggregate those results.
10 But when we're talking about children meeting
11 the standards and moving above that, we're talking about
12 the general assessment with accommodations. We're talking
13 about general standards, not specifically this small
14 population which is less than 2 percent of our entire
15 population participating in the alternate assessment.
16 Does that address your --
17 SENATOR SCOTT: Yes.
18 Mr. Chairman.
19 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Yes.
20 SENATOR SCOTT: Let's look at the opposite
21 end of the spectrum. Suppose you had -- for a fairly
22 large special education population you wanted to see a
23 percentage on the standard WyCAS getting into that
24 proficient and advanced categories. How do you deal --
25 you know, I would think that one way you could do that
125
1 would be to make sure that a bunch of pretty smart
2 students got assessed into your population for speech and
3 language or ADHD or something like that and you could
4 really show some big percentage progress without doing
5 anything very real.
6 How do you prevent that?
7 MS. WALK: Mr. Chairman.
8 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Bohling, did you
9 want to address that or previous --
10 DR. BOHLING: I'm Annette Bohling with the
11 Wyoming Department of Education. Mr. Chairman, members of
12 board, of the committee, I just wanted to address two
13 things.
14 One is the zero percent proficient and above
15 which we use as our baseline to move forward the No Child
16 Left Behind requirement is arrived at using the formula
17 that is required where you count up to the 20 percent
18 level which gets you to the zero percent, but, in fact, I
19 believe we do have approximately 9 percent overall of
20 students with disabilities that are in the proficient
21 range and above.
22 COCHAIR DEVIN: 9 or 90?
23 MS. WALK: I wish it was 90.
24 DR. BOHLING: And I do believe that that
25 is an increase over the first time we ever gave it, which
126
1 I believe we had 5 percent. So we have made some gains.
2 And of course it is not what the No Child Left Behind
3 is -- the gains are going to have to be very, very huge,
4 and we are working on those ideas with the districts about
5 how to address those students.
6 So I wanted to set the -- I wanted to explain
7 that about the zero percent that we're starting with as a
8 baseline. We actually do have students with disabilities
9 who are in the proficient range and above, but that
10 doesn't just automatically pull them out of being
11 identified as having a disability simply because they
12 reach the proficient range.
13 And I want to clarify that because I think we
14 were left with the impression earlier that if you reach
15 proficient, you automatically are no longer a student with
16 a disability. And I wanted to make sure we did know that
17 that is not true.
18 If I may just take a moment, I would like to
19 address Senator Peck's question about the gifted and
20 talented students and how we address those in the state.
21 And in our state accreditation model when we
22 evaluate the teaching of standards, we actually do score
23 the districts and schools on an area in standards called
24 correctives and enrichments. And the model that we use in
25 Wyoming is that in the regular classroom we are required
127
1 to teach to all of the students, regardless of where they
2 are against the standards.
3 So the implication is you do not have to have a
4 pull-out program for gifted and talented students.
5 Rather, you provide in the regular classroom for students
6 who are already meeting the standards and you provide
7 enrichments in the regular classroom. And there is in the
8 block grant model -- and I believe it is $9 per student
9 that districts receive for all students to provide those
10 enrichments.
11 So I just wanted to say that. We do monitor
12 that. I will also say that is probably the one area along
13 with at-risk students where districts receive the most
14 corrective actions in accreditation, and it is not
15 providing the correctives. I think it is -- I think that
16 all of our district people would agree, that it is trying
17 to understand fully how we provide enrichments to that
18 group of students in the regular classroom.
19 But they have joined in in many other sessions
20 with us to understand that better so that we aren't
21 neglecting the students who fall into that range, and I
22 believe that with all of the working together that we're
23 going to be able to make sure those students are not
24 neglected.
25 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you, Dr. Bohling.
128
1 Miss Walk, would you like to respond to Senator
2 Scott's stacking-the-deck theory?
3 MS. WALK: Yes, Mr. Chairman, Senator
4 Scott.
5 On the other end of the spectrum, as you were
6 commenting on, any child who qualifies for a category
7 under IDEA, the caveat that it must have -- the disability
8 must have an effect on their ability to learn has to be
9 embedded in that and show that would be a safeguard from
10 just overloading the, if you will, ADD or ADHD. You also
11 have to have parental permission to test and parental
12 permission to ultimately place the child in special
13 education.
14 And so the parent must agree to the test results
15 and agree to the placement in special ed. If the parent
16 does not agree to that placement, the only alternative the
17 school could have -- there really is no alternative, quite
18 honestly. The federal government does not support school
19 districts taking parents to due process over forcing them
20 to place their child in special ed. So -- and we as a
21 state do not support that as well, so it does rely
22 ultimately on the parent to say, "Yes, you may place my
23 child in special education."
24 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Okay. We're going to
25 take a break for lunch now. When we come back after
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1 lunch, if there are any further questions we need to ask,
2 we will take a short period to do that, and then,
3 Committee, we need to make a decision which way we want to
4 go with this so the department and Dr. Parrish and our LSO
5 staff knows what direction we will be going with this
6 issue.
7 We will come back and reconvene at 1:00.
8 (Meeting proceedings recessed
9 12:00 noon and reconvened
10 1:05 p.m., November 20, 2002.)
11 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Call the meeting back
12 to order. We will spend a few more minutes on this
13 special education issue and make a determination which way
14 we're going from there.
15 Senator Scott.
16 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, during the
17 break I was reviewing briefly the numbers on the -- as
18 much as anything the turnover in the special education
19 population, and I would like to ask the director of
20 special education for our Natrona County School District,
21 Dr. Dal Curry, if he could share a few of those numbers
22 with the committee.
23 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Dr. Curry.
24 DR. CURRY: Mr. Chairman, committee
25 members, Senator Scott said it had to be brief. Last year
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1 we returned 148 special ed students to the regular
2 education program. That's about 9 percent of our special
3 ed children were able because of our services, we think,
4 to return to the regular program.
5 Another number that I think is interesting and I
6 know is shared by my colleagues is that although our child
7 count last year was 1664 -- I think that's the number
8 that's reflected in most of these reports -- we actually
9 served a total of 2130 special ed kids. And although
10 those kids came in, moved out, and although they're not
11 occupying a seat unless they're actually here, there's
12 considerable expense related to doing the assessments,
13 doing the staffings, setting up the services as those kids
14 come and go.
15 So that affects our -- I'm sure everyone's costs
16 somewhat.
17 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
18 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, could you
19 read the other categories and the numbers you had there?
20 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mr. Kouris.
21 MR. KOURIS: This was our end-of-the-year
22 report last year. Unfortunately we had three special ed
23 students die. We had 89 drop out which, as Becca
24 indicated, is not good. We had 37 graduate. We had seven
25 students who reached the age of 21 and therefore were
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1 exited. We had about 170 kids who moved out of the
2 district.
3 SENATOR SCOTT: 107 or 70?
4 MR. KOURIS: 70. We have a lot of
5 mobility. As pointed out earlier, we have more in
6 mobility of special ed, more out mobility of non-special
7 ed and then 148 were returned to the regular program.
8 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you, Dr. Kouris.
9 Appreciate that.
10 SENATOR SCOTT: I think that gives us a
11 sense of the turnover in the program and the problems that
12 carries with it.
13 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Mary, would you explain
14 the sheet you just handed out?
15 MS. BYRNES: Mr. Chairman, the sheet that
16 was just passed out -- and Dr. Parrish can probably review
17 it better than I. This was faxed in from his associates
18 to correct the briefing paper chart number 1 and 2 that's
19 found on the handout we had earlier today. The federal
20 funds, I believe, have been corrected on this chart.
21 Column C on both sides of your page. We will get better
22 copies. I apologize for the poor quality. The shaded
23 areas on the fax do not come through. We will get that
24 from his office and supply it to you by mail.
25 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
132
1 MS. BYRNES: You're welcome.
2 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Committee, any
3 further questions of anyone, the presenters or Dr. Parrish
4 or Miss Walk?
5 Representative Lockhart, I think you have a
6 comment or question.
7 REPRESENTATIVE LOCKHART: Mr. Chairman, I
8 had my hand up earlier because I think we at times forget
9 why we're here. And the reason we're here is that there
10 were multiple lawsuits that were taken up through the
11 court process to the Supreme Court. The decision was made
12 that we had to cost justify the additional expense of
13 special education, so through the morning we heard people
14 objecting to all of this data. That wasn't something we
15 thought up to kill our afternoons and days with and give
16 you guys nuisance. That was the directive: You have to
17 cost justify.
18 And so what we're doing here is trying to cost
19 justify special ed costs. It is not to give you extra
20 routines or take money away, but to do that. And if we
21 don't do that, we asked for an exception on special ed to
22 give us a little time to do this. Somebody else is going
23 to do it and they may not be as favorable to special ed as
24 legislators have been historically.
25 We haven't done it for the fun of it. There's a
133
1 reason we're having the meetings and all of the special
2 work. We asked them to do a fairly difficult task and
3 that's to identify costs that have not been identified in
4 the same way and roll it up to the state legislature so
5 that we can make a decision on it. Just a reminder of why
6 we're here.
7 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you,
8 Representative Lockhart.
9 Dr. Parrish, any further comments concerning
10 your report?
11 DR. PARRISH: Well, I guess, Mr. Chair and
12 committee, in summation I would make a few points, if I
13 could.
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Certainly.
15 DR. PARRISH: First of all, I would like
16 to clarify, we do not claim or see any evidence of abuse.
17 So that's not our claim. We do see a lot of variation.
18 The extent to which that occurs we believe -- I think
19 we've acknowledged the categories for identification are
20 fairly broad and it is -- the subjectivity associated with
21 identification is fairly large, which there's been a fair
22 amount of discussion about that.
23 So we believe that the variation that we're
24 seeing across the state is real, and we think it is
25 problematic. Some of it is based on variation in need.
134
1 We think a lot of it is based on varying levels of
2 subjectivity and that guidelines will be helpful. We
3 believe that students deserve uniform standards of
4 provision throughout the state, irrespective of their ZIP
5 code, as is required by federal law. We think the
6 guidelines will help in this regard and should be used
7 regardless of funding.
8 But moving to the 100 percent reimbursement, in
9 our opinion the time is now ripe to move on. The study
10 has been done. The recommendation is on the table. We
11 would expect to see increased federal funding over the
12 next few years which would help to make this a good time
13 for transition. I think the bottom line is our sense is
14 that while 100 percent reimbursement has not led to
15 runaway anything, that there are still serious questions
16 about whether the State can sustain that over the long
17 haul.
18 This is probably -- the opportunity is ripe now
19 and we would think it would make sense to do it now when
20 we can do it with a fairly soft transition.
21 Just to clarify what that transition would mean,
22 no one would lose money under this. In fact, all should
23 gain. People are held harmless at the state level. They
24 will get at least the money they had before. Federal
25 money is expected to increase, so all districts would be
135
1 expected to get some additional money, although perhaps
2 not -- some will gain less than they would have otherwise.
3 We also believe the committee should seize the
4 opportunity to provide for stability and consistency in
5 special ed provision throughout the state through the
6 adoption of guidelines using them as a basis for future
7 funding, along with contingency funding and greater
8 regionalization services.
9 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
10 Miss Walk, any further comments?
11 MS. WALK: Thank you, Representative
12 Stafford, members of the committee. Change is difficult
13 for everyone. We have been used to 100 percent
14 reimbursement for the last several years. We were at 85
15 percent before that. While going to 100 percent wasn't
16 that much of a jump, it was certainly a paradigm shift
17 looking at 100 percent allowable costs.
18 I think it is important we look at all of the
19 aspects to look at funding for special education. I think
20 it is important to remember that local school districts
21 must maintain their effort using state dollars. The model
22 Dr. Parrish has presented allows the districts to do just
23 that. The federal dollars are not included in their
24 maintenance of effort. They may not be included in their
25 maintenance of effort, so it is local, state dollars that
136
1 districts must be held to.
2 I strongly support the concept of looking at
3 regionalization of services. Let me be specific. That
4 does not mean that we're looking at regionalized
5 institutions for childrens to go to. What we're looking
6 at in this model for regionalization of services is
7 services going out into the school districts, not children
8 being institutionalized.
9 Strongly support, of course, the addition of
10 department personnel to help support the monitoring of
11 local school districts on their special education
12 services. I think we need to improve our monitoring and
13 our accountability of students progress towards general
14 standards and the progress in the general curriculum. I
15 think this model supports this.
16 I think there needs to be a great amount of
17 collaboration between the department, between the
18 legislature and local school districts with the
19 implementation of any kind of funding formula that we go
20 to.
21 I think this has been a very well-done study.
22 We've received a lot of support from local directors, from
23 superintendents, support from parents across the state
24 with the cost study that Dr. Parrish did. I think it has
25 been thorough, and I think it provides all of us with a
137
1 lot of data, a lot of information to make a good,
2 responsible decision in funding special education at the
3 local level. And thank you.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Thank you.
5 Senator Devin.
6 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Chairman, I would like
7 to move that we move forward as a committee on
8 recommendation 3 which is the AIR recommendation, that we
9 do a cost-based funding model with the caveats of the more
10 current years as was delineated today, the more current
11 years being used as our base model, and the development of
12 the contingency fund and the development of moving towards
13 some regional support is how I see those regional
14 services.
15 And I guess in addition to that motion I would
16 just say that this study -- I, too, am struck by the
17 amount of participation that went into it and, frankly, it
18 came out much better than I had at first hoped it might in
19 terms of the thoroughness and the fact that we were -- we
20 are at an opportune moment that we can protect districts
21 from any loss without having to go back to the legislature
22 on the chance that we need huge additional investments,
23 and at a time when federal funding is increasing and make
24 that transition.
25 The innovations I heard mentioned this morning
138
1 and the flexibilities and the cooperativeness are the
2 things we need, but frankly there's no incentive there now
3 to do innovations or cooperative agreements or those types
4 of things.
5 And so I would agree change is difficult, but
6 this was never meant to be a permanent solution, the 100
7 percent without the other things.
8 And I guess additionally the part that I perhaps
9 like the best about this is the no loss of funds, but the
10 fact that it gives districts back some flexibility in
11 terms of the fact that that group of transitioning
12 students and the group of students that are on the edge of
13 going in and out can also be supported.
14 So I would throw that recommendation out. We
15 need to address it one way or the other.
16 COCHAIR STAFFORD: We have a motion.
17 Is there a second?
18 SENATOR SCOTT: Second.
19 COCHAIR STAFFORD: It has been moved and
20 seconded to have as a committee-sponsored bill LSO to
21 draft a bill concerning replace the 100 percent
22 reimbursement with cost-based funding with the additional
23 comments that Senator Devin included.
24 Comments on the proposed motion? Senator Scott.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, first a
139
1 question for Senator Devin: Was it your intention that
2 this block grant be part of the general block grant so
3 that a school district could shift money from special
4 education to something that decreased the need for special
5 education?
6 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Devin.
7 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Chair, it would be
8 that those preventative services or those support services
9 as students are on the cusp of that type of learning
10 problem I see as very advantageous, however, that
11 flexibility in judgment I think is something local
12 districts should have.
13 SENATOR SCOTT: So that would give them
14 clear flexibility to do that, to use various strategies
15 that mixes special education and general education
16 populations without having to worry about some of the
17 accounting problems.
18 Mr. Chairman.
19 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Continue.
20 SENATOR SCOTT: If I may, I would like to
21 ask the experts, both the department and Dr. Parrish, how
22 this meshes with the federal law requirements. Do we have
23 a -- is it a strict maintenance of effort that the feds
24 are enforcing? Is it a no supplant rule? How does it
25 really work with the new federal legislation?
140
1 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Miss Walk.
2 MS. WALK: Mr. Chairman, Senator Scott,
3 sort of both. There's a supplant issue that you cannot --
4 once you start using state funds for a program, you may
5 not quit using state funds and replace that with federal
6 funds.
7 Then the state maintenance of effort is at the
8 local level, that the local districts must use at least
9 the amount that they used prior -- the year prior, either
10 total amount or per child amount. They have that
11 flexibility of local funds.
12 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, so it would
13 seem to me with our current system of 100 percent
14 reimbursement, if the feds don't allow us to supplant,
15 theoretically we couldn't accept any federal money because
16 theoretically we would be supplanting anything that's
17 already through the state. Is that the difficulty with
18 the federal program? I have difficulty understanding the
19 federal programs.
20 MS. WALK: Yes, Mr. Chairman, Senator
21 Scott, sometimes the federal programs are challenging to
22 understand.
23 The purpose of the federal dollar is pretty
24 flexible under the IDEA in that the federal dollar is
25 meant to provide the excess cost of educating a child with
141
1 a disability, and so that is the purpose of the federal
2 dollar. It is pretty open-ended under that definition
3 under the IDEA in that it, as I said, is the excess cost.
4 When you're looking at 100 percent, yes, it does
5 sort of pose the question what is excess cost, then.
6 The districts, I think, have done a good job
7 with allocation of their federal dollars. They have to
8 apply for it through the consolidated grant. It is
9 outlined in the grant what they will use those federal
10 special education dollars for.
11 Under a block grant there will be -- they will
12 be needing to be more creative with their federal special
13 education dollars. There also is within the federal law a
14 caveat that allows districts to use up to 20 percent of
15 the extra federal dollar that they received from the prior
16 year as local funds, and it says they may, is what the
17 federal law says.
18 So if a district received a million dollars in
19 federal funds last year and this year they received 1.5
20 million, they could use 20 percent of that half a million
21 dollars as local funds and it could be meshed in with
22 their local funds and they don't have to separate that
23 out. And so they have that flexibility with up to 20
24 percent of those local funds.
25 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Committee, as you were.
142
1 MS. WALK: I may have just muddied the
2 waters for you.
3 COCHAIR STAFFORD: I would remind you as
4 LSO drafts some type of legislation, we will have a
5 meeting in December to look at legislation specific to
6 this issue and also at that time the public will have
7 ample opportunity to comment on proposed legislation.
8 Further, Senator Scott.
9 SENATOR SCOTT: I will comment -- I think
10 I will vote for the motion. I want to see the legislation
11 drafted. I have some deep concerns in that I see some
12 problems. We're having a block grant amount that is, if
13 you disregard the hold harmless, significantly lower than
14 many of the districts are spending and that gives me
15 concern as to whether we've got the formula right.
16 I can see the need for escalation in some of the
17 areas where you're using particularly health related
18 professionals where I think they're going to have to pay
19 more just to be competitive in the marketplace, and I
20 don't think our external cost adjustments adequately deal
21 with that problem, so I'm concerned about that factor.
22 And somebody that's being held harmless is
23 effectively being cut out of getting the reimbursement
24 needed to deal with that problem. So I think we may need
25 to refine that regulation before it is ready to go to the
143
1 floor. But I think we ought to take the first step in at
2 least drafting it and looking at it, so I would urge the
3 rest of the committee to support the motion.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Motion on the floor.
5 Representative McOmie.
6 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Mr. Chair, I would
7 like to ask a question. Would the Chair accept a motion
8 to have an alternate drafted so the committee would review
9 both of those?
10 COCHAIR STAFFORD: That would be up to the
11 committee after we vote on the first motion.
12 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: In case we can't
13 address some of the -- I have some real problems with this
14 approach right now and in the long run I think it could
15 cost the state more money because the districts we're
16 holding harmless, then we're building a 2 million
17 contingency fund, if somebody comes in you can say well,
18 I've got this extra person that's come to me now and I
19 need more money and it goes on and on, and yet the money
20 was there, it might wind up costing us more money. I'm
21 not clear. I am with Senator Scott. I'm not real clear
22 on some of this.
23 So I will vote no on this and make a motion, if
24 the Chair would allow me to, to have an alternate bill
25 drafted using the second recommendation.
144
1 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Very well. We do have
2 the motion on the floor.
3 Senator Goodenough.
4 SENATOR GOODENOUGH: Mr. Chairman, I had a
5 question concerning the federal money and the testing
6 requirements that are coming along, because there's going
7 to be a lot of pressure on everybody to test well and I
8 think it is probably pretty clear it is difficult for
9 special ed kids to test well.
10 So what are the possibilities of directing the
11 federal monies to teaching to the test, or whatever you
12 want to call it, to just respond to the pressure to do
13 well on the test? Would that be considered supplementing
14 local funds or would that be allowable to introduce these
15 measures to make sure that people do as good as possible
16 on the test, which is what is driving the whole debate
17 now, it seems like?
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Miss Walk.
19 MS. WALK: Mr. Chair and Senator
20 Goodenough, the local districts have at their discretion
21 what they're going to use their federal dollars for. So
22 if they perceive at the local level, based on their test
23 scores, that that is one of the goals that they need to
24 improve on under their consolidated grant, they can use
25 that federal money for staff development, for assistive
145
1 technology, for parent information, implementation of
2 programs.
3 They really have at their discretion what
4 they're going to use the federal dollar for and if they
5 would like to use it to improve test results, based on,
6 you know, if they have a scientifically research-based
7 program they would like to bring in that would help
8 students achieve on WyCAS or any of the district tests,
9 they certainly could use that money for that.
10 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Mr. Chairman.
11 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative McOmie.
12 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: One further
13 comment, Madam Chairman, in making the recommendation
14 talked about the great work that the committee did and all
15 of the various other things, and I have yet to hear one
16 member of the committee that got up and testify and say
17 they supported the block grant. They all asked us to do
18 number 2. And they did the same research as everybody
19 else did and I think expressed completely their concerns
20 with it at the present time. Maybe someday we can look at
21 this as a block grant, but I don't think now is the time
22 to do it.
23 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Devin.
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: Just one comment and then
25 I had a question. You know, I think that a part of what
146
1 we're hearing in each of these pieces, whether it is
2 vocational education or this, is that leap of faith that
3 you can have your money go into the block grant and it
4 doesn't have to be earmarked.
5 We're hearing from vocational ed, yes, we would
6 like more money and we would like these pieces, but we
7 want our piece pulled out of that block grant and
8 earmarked. And there's not a high level of trust or leap
9 of faith that if it goes out in the block grant, there
10 will be a local decision made to spend it that way. I
11 guess I'm still in that leap of faith piece that it will,
12 you know. And that's front lines where those ideas have
13 to come from.
14 And in regard to Senator Scott's question
15 earlier, as I understand it, when expenses -- if the State
16 is paying for a certain amount into a program, they need
17 to continue that maintenance. But if there are additional
18 expenses, professional salaries, et cetera, pieces of that
19 can come from the federal monies.
20 MS. WALK: Mr. Chair.
21 COCHAIR DEVIN: I'm getting yes?
22 MS. WALK: If they're starting a position,
23 they may use the federal dollars to support that position
24 but if that position has already been paid for by state
25 funding, that position needs to be maintained with state
147
1 funding unless one of those circumstances comes up that
2 allows the district to reduce the maintenance of effort.
3 COCHAIR DEVIN: Such as?
4 MS. WALK: Such as reduction in number of
5 children with disabilities in the district. If they
6 reduce that number of children, they don't need those
7 teachers anymore, then those teachers are not going to be
8 teaching and they can reduce the maintenance of efforts
9 that comes out in the salaries so that that state money is
10 reduced. But that's an allowable reduction. But you
11 can't take a position that has been paid for by the state,
12 maintain your effort and then pay for it out of your
13 federal dollars.
14 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Chairman, this may get
15 more technical than you want to, but is that true when you
16 contract for certain health care professionals also? In
17 other words, if their services do go up and you're
18 contracting for those, that's not a position, that's an
19 additional cost, can that be covered in that manner?
20 MS. WALK: Mr. Chairman, Senator Devin, if
21 you're paying for the contract out of state money and
22 those services increase, you can -- you will continue to
23 pay for those out of state money, not out of your federal
24 money.
25 Now if you hired a new contractor -- let's say
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1 you were already under contract with the district and your
2 services went up and Representative Stafford came on and
3 we wanted to contract with him and he's new and we haven't
4 contracted with him, then I can pay for him out of my
5 federal monies and increase my state money for your
6 contract.
7 COCHAIR STAFFORD: I'm available.
8 MS. WALK: You are? And your expertise
9 is, sir?
10 COCHAIR STAFFORD: It is not special
11 education.
12 Further discussion on the motion?
13 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Call for the
14 question.
15 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Question being called
16 for -- I'm sorry.
17 Senator Bob.
18 SENATOR PECK: Before we vote on that I
19 would like to make the observation we're great devotees of
20 local control and pretty much all of our experts dealing
21 with this every day have said they would prefer option 2.
22 And we've been told over and over again there's
23 been no abuse, no overidentification of special education
24 students, no incentive to overidentify, and I would ask
25 the committee why we would be inclined to not give heed to
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1 the recommendations of the special ed experts who served
2 on the task force?
3 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Devin, would
4 you like to comment on that?
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Chairman, I can. You
6 know, I don't know that I would be redundant, but I will
7 say that I think the number 2 suggestion keeps that money
8 separate and specific. It is designated and isolated out
9 from the block grant. It doesn't have the flexibility.
10 You're very sure that it is coming in. And these are
11 parties with vested interests. You're very sure that it
12 is your money and it is going to stay in your program and
13 it is not going to be used for prevention or it is not
14 going to be used to transition students out of special ed,
15 you know. There won't be any of those pieces that it can
16 be used for.
17 So I suppose it is a natural, protective sort of
18 thing to keep that whole where I'm not -- I think the
19 flexibility has a lot more latitude to be good for
20 students overall, and I think that there's also the
21 incentive -- not the incentive at 100 percent
22 reimbursement to work out the cooperative things. We
23 heard this morning about, you know, there should be more
24 flexibility for cooperative services. We actually have an
25 incentive in the law right now that provides an incentive
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1 if you cooperate with another district and yet that
2 apparently isn't a well-used or well-known piece because
3 we're driving to the opposite ends of our district
4 abutting another district and still using it.
5 I think that we just need to get the options out
6 there. We need to -- and there really -- at the 100
7 percent level I have continued to hear this brought into
8 question all of the years that I've served on education as
9 an area you will never convince people that there is not
10 an abuse piece going on. And it is not runaway, but we
11 are 17 percent higher in our costs and I don't think
12 there's a good reason we should be.
13 I guess I see -- and maybe a real important
14 delivery of care is if we develop some regional services,
15 I see the ability to get these big swings out of here and
16 get some adequacy so a student in this district is getting
17 zero speech or zero physical therapy and a student over
18 here -- we're seeing huge percentages. So we're just
19 seeing big swings based on where you live and I don't
20 think that's equitable or adequate. That would be my
21 slight preference.
22 But I do understand if I were in the field and I
23 wanted to protect my program and make 100 percent sure I
24 could keep it whole without the district interfering, I
25 would be more in favor of number 2 also.
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1 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott, did you
2 have a comment on that?
3 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman, Senator
4 Devin expressed my sentiments more adequately than I can.
5 COCHAIR STAFFORD: The motion has been
6 called to go with option 3, I guess I'll call it, go with
7 the 100 percent reimbursement with cost-based funding
8 based on resource guidelines provided by the American
9 Institute for Research.
10 All in favor, please raise your hand.
11 Opposed.
12 5-4, motion carries.
13 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Mr. Chairman.
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Representative McOmie.
15 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: I would like to
16 offer a motion to also prepare a bill that would provide
17 the recommendation that the -- the task force's second
18 recommendation, task force continue 100 percent
19 reimbursement with personal staffing ratios used as
20 guidelines and adequate special education services, et
21 cetera.
22 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Is there a second?
23 REPRESENTATIVE ROBINSON: Second.
24 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Moved and seconded to
25 also have a bill drafted containing the recommendations in
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1 recommendation 2.
2 Discussion on the motion.
3 Representative McOmie.
4 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: I feel there would
5 be an advantage to the committee to be able to look at
6 them and have a final discussion hopefully limited where
7 we don't have people saying the same thing over and over
8 and make the decision based upon that. And I would
9 request respectfully the committee to go along with me on
10 this.
11 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Further discussion on
12 the proposed motion.
13 SENATOR SCOTT: Mr. Chairman.
14 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Senator Scott.
15 SENATOR SCOTT: I seconded it because
16 although my instinct is the third choice, I'm not sure
17 we're going to be able to work out some of the problems
18 that we see due to the variation among the districts on, I
19 think, a random basis and some of the problems I see with
20 recruiting and paying for the additional personnel.
21 So I think we need to have both options
22 available to us in December and maybe both options
23 available to us during the session, so I would urge us to
24 at least get it drafted.
25 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Further discussion on
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1 the motion.
2 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Mr. Chairman, I
3 grovelled already.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Question being called
5 for.
6 All in favor please raise your hand.
7 That motion is carried.
8 Further discussion on special education issues.
9 Dr. Parrish, we thank you for your work.
10 Rebecca, good job. Thank you very much.
11 Senator Devin.
12 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Cochair, we will move
13 on to our next subject which is the regional cost
14 adjustment, not promising to be any easier at all so we
15 will hope that after lunch doldrums don't set in too
16 heavily. We get a chance to change out.
17 Dr. Godby, you will be presenting.
18 COCHAIR DEVIN: Dr. Godby, your report is
19 before us. Would you like to take us through this?
20 DR. GODBY: Well, I don't know if you have
21 the patience. Madam Chairman, Mr. Chairman, at the
22 request of the LSO I've prepared a short brief that
23 outlines the specifics.
24 In writing the report -- it is fairly long, I
25 guess. I took some time and hopefully you've had a chance
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1 to read it or parts of it, to try to create some
2 background that I thought maybe was lacking in some other
3 reports or maybe not lacking, but to create additional
4 background or additional context.
5 So I've tried to outline why you -- I think you
6 would do a regional cost adjustment, what it should be
7 for, and I've also outlined in a little detail, not a lot,
8 about how it could fit in with a small district adjustment
9 or a small school adjustment.
10 And I won't go into that because that's not my
11 place, but they are related. And coming back to questions
12 from the last time I was before you or at least informal
13 questions, there was an issue of the hold harmless funds,
14 and clearly they don't go ahead with just a regional cost
15 adjustment.
16 So that being said, let me take you through the
17 recommendations of the report or at least the approach.
18 There's two issues. One is to properly prepare
19 the data that we might use, and in particular, when the
20 legislation for the study was drafted or at least as it
21 was presented to me, there was some concern that we look
22 seriously at the WCLI, the Wyoming Cost of Living Index,
23 to determine what problems there might be with it, how it
24 could possibly be redefined for use in school finance.
25 That was the first part of the study.
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1 And the second was to try to define an approach
2 that could be used to maybe reconfigure the method used
3 for regional cost adjustment.
4 And so the outcomes of that, first with respect
5 to the Wyoming CLI, it is not a negative comment on that
6 index. This is important for a lot of reasons and there's
7 a lot of policy issues that could use that data that maybe
8 don't use it now. In addition to school finance it is
9 used by the state, people in the state as well as state
10 offices, and it is also -- and it also could be used for
11 other issues in regional development.
12 In particular one thing that comes to mind is
13 the issue of where do people shop and how often do they go
14 out of state. And that can sometimes come into this if
15 you were to expand how you look at cost of living. But
16 again, that's outside of the issue of school finance.
17 My concern was to try to clean up that data, and
18 one of the issues that's come up in our meetings and
19 presentations made to me is that Afton in Lincoln
20 District 2 is damaged -- I suppose is maybe not too strong
21 a word -- by the current adjustment mechanism in the sense
22 they use the cost of living data that's collected in
23 Kemmerer to apply an adjustment.
24 In the report you will see an argument where I
25 argue that Afton is a separate area and it appears that
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1 that community should also be included as a sample site.
2 It was pretty informative for me and also for Justin, the
3 person who administrates WCLI, when we met in Afton,
4 actually, to take a look at that community. There are
5 enough facilities, enough retail outlets to sample that
6 community. And comment is made in the report it is a
7 separate community in terms of its demographics. For that
8 reason I would suggest that minimally the WCLI should
9 expand the sample set to include Afton.
10 Secondly, there are some issues that I went into
11 a little detail about in the report regarding the shares
12 of expenditure that are -- how they define those in the
13 cost of living index used in Wyoming. They use federal
14 expenditure shares that are defined from the federal
15 consumer expenditure survey which is mainly an urban
16 survey, and when you use those weights, you find that
17 housing is a very large part of an individual's budget.
18 It is regardless, but I make the argument in the
19 report that it is possible that the federal budget shares
20 used in the WCLI are not indicative of Wyoming consumption
21 patterns and given that housing is -- has been
22 historically the part of this adjustment that has been the
23 most contentious, because of the big differences in
24 housing prices between Teton County and the rest of the
25 state, and we may find if we add Afton, Afton as well.
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1 But some study needs to be done to determine the Wyoming
2 consumption patterns.
3 In the report I included a few tables. I forget
4 which ones they are now, Table 5-A, B and C, I believe was
5 in the larger report, not in the handout. They started on
6 page 32. And those are meant to demonstrate how the WCLI
7 index would change just by adopting different weights.
8 And some of the choices you would have, if you were to
9 stay with federal rates you could use the CPIU which is
10 currently used which is everyone. You could use CPIW
11 which is full-time employed wage earners. If you're going
12 to use this for school finance, minimally I think that's
13 the acceptable one to use since this is used to adjust
14 full-time salaries.
15 Just moving to that lowers the -- lowers some of
16 the scores -- well, it tightens up the index a little bit
17 with not quite as much variation. But then if you start
18 to consider where the survey is taken in the United
19 States, the consumer expenditure survey, you will find
20 that areas that look like Wyoming in terms of population
21 make up only about 6 percent of the survey and that's
22 described on Table 4, page 31 of the report.
23 The point of that is if you looked at Table 5C
24 in the report -- I apologize if you don't have this in
25 front of you, that was on page 34 -- doesn't really matter
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1 if you look at it, the bottom line is that housing is
2 weighted less in places that are smaller. Housing is
3 cheaper in smaller places.
4 So with that in mind, I am not arguing that we
5 should use federal numbers. What I'm arguing is that the
6 numbers that we currently use to define expenditure shares
7 in the index probably don't reflect Wyoming. And as we
8 move towards places that are more like Wyoming, we find
9 the index can change quite a bit.
10 So the second thing I have recommended is that a
11 consumer expenditure survey be done in Wyoming and this be
12 done on irregular basis, I suppose, although regular in
13 the sense it will be five years. How often that might be
14 done, it may be done more often, may be done less often,
15 but I think some effort needs to be made to determine
16 consumption expenditures in Wyoming, the patterns of those
17 and that you do it on a regular basis.
18 The third thing I would argue -- and this is a
19 minor detail in some places, it could be implemented
20 fairly easily. It is unfortunate that Buck isn't here
21 today. I haven't had time to talk to Buck about this. He
22 hasn't given me any feedback. I hope the fact he's not
23 here isn't feedback.
24 But there are some issues with data collection
25 in the WCLI. I think maybe part of the problem with
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1 housing numbers is the fact that the resources they
2 currently have to measure prices are minimal and
3 particularly the most difficult prices to collect are
4 housing and automobiles. They're also two areas that make
5 up probably the largest proportions of most household
6 expenditures.
7 And the problem with housing, I think, comes
8 partially -- I'm not saying it will cause a problem to be
9 eliminated, but it might be reduced if we were to look
10 very carefully at what types of houses are being priced.
11 It is not clear to me that there's enough effort taken to
12 ensure that the quality of housing is equal when they
13 price it. It may be the case it is a two-bedroom house
14 for rent but there's very little control after that to
15 determine the size of the house, age of the house, quality
16 of the house.
17 And for that reason, if you have a systematic
18 pattern or difference across areas, for example, if Teton
19 County has high prices -- and I'm certainly not claiming
20 this will go away in the index -- it is going to be high,
21 but it is not fair to compare those houses if they're
22 newer, larger, more modern with houses that are, say, in
23 Lusk, not to pick on Lusk, but someplace where housing is
24 maybe of lesser quality.
25 So some control in terms of improvements in
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1 procedures should be made to collect data that ensures
2 that you're comparing apples to apples.
3 And the second part of that has to do with
4 automobile price, and and we talked about this somewhat
5 last time in October. One of these came from the idea on
6 the panel to get the data and that was with the county
7 treasurer's offices.
8 Currently automobiles don't have a variability
9 in the index. They're priced in one place and it is as if
10 everyone goes to Cheyenne to buy their car. It may be the
11 case that Cheyenne is a competitive auto market and it may
12 be that people that shop locally don't get the benefit of
13 prices in Cheyenne. That's their choice.
14 But if that's the case and we go to so much
15 effort to track shampoo and toothbrushes, it doesn't make
16 a lot of sense in this data that we don't go to the same
17 amount of effort to track prices in cars or at least
18 what's being paid.
19 With that in mind, there are some very specific
20 recommendations because it is a fairly complex issue as to
21 how to improve your procedures and it depends a lot on the
22 resources you have available, how you do it. So this will
23 be an internal improvement, although if it were possible,
24 I imagine that the offices in Cheyenne could certainly use
25 more resources in order to make these improvements. They
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1 wouldn't be free.
2 In particular, the effort to ensure that housing
3 is of equivalent quality when you look at it is going to
4 be expensive. It is going to require some surveying on
5 the ground and it may require that they change their
6 policies from just polling real estate agents or
7 advertisements in the papers to actually creating a survey
8 group, a set of renters that they know that they could
9 actually ask them what they're renting so you may locate
10 units or something or types of units and they wouldn't
11 necessarily have to be vacant to find the price, which is
12 how they do it now.
13 Automobile prices are difficult because you
14 never know exactly what somebody pays. It depends in a
15 lot of cases on your ability to dicker. Again, the idea
16 came from this panel, this committee, that possibly county
17 treasurers' numbers could be used. There are some
18 procedures that the federal -- the consumer expenditure
19 survey uses to price those or at least the federal CPI.
20 Those could be adopted as well.
21 Those are issues in terms of data quality. Why
22 would you expend all of that energy on the data? The
23 issue then is at least you would have better quality data
24 to look at that school finance issue, but I try to go to
25 lengths, and it has been an issue in this problem for
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1 quite a while, that cost of living is not the only issue,
2 or at least the cost of living measurement only looks at
3 goods and doesn't look at things that are not market
4 priced.
5 And we have heard a lot about amenity issues.
6 In our last meeting I suggested to you that the regulation
7 relationship between the cost of living and salaries may
8 not be linear in the sense that if you have a higher cost
9 of living, you need to pay more. Certainly that's the
10 case. But if the cost of living is less that may not be
11 the case that you pay them less. You may have to actually
12 pay them more and that that cost of living, as measured,
13 may be reflecting something else.
14 I would argue that the best way to go about
15 looking at a regional cost adjustment in Wyoming is to
16 look more carefully at the determinants of a teacher's
17 willingness to accept a salary offer. I know I bored you
18 to tears last time with the hedonic stuff, so we will just
19 skip that, but there are ways to at least incorporate
20 other concerns.
21 And unfortunately, the data has not been
22 available. I'm not sure it is yet. I've still been
23 waiting on some. I haven't been able to look at that. So
24 in the meantime on the final page in the handouts you will
25 find a picture based on real data that corresponds to the
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1 picture I gave you last time we met which was a parabolic
2 relationship coupled with a linear relationship that shows
3 you how the cost of living is applied to adjust salaries.
4 If you look at the solid straight line at about
5 45 degrees through the parabola. That's the current cost
6 of living adjustment as it is applied given current data.
7 If you were to follow the horizontal axis, find
8 the WCLI value, go up to that line, read what the salary
9 is on the vertical axis and that's what the adjustment
10 would be for whatever your community's cost of living
11 index value is.
12 A little bit of a red herring the last time we
13 met was why not just throw Teton out. Do the same
14 procedure -- and when that was last shown to you, it was
15 just meant to be an example, but because there was some
16 interest in it I have shown you what that does to the
17 adjustment if you look at the dashed line that sits next
18 to the solid line, the straight line, I mean, that kind of
19 intersects the data on a 45-degree angle. That's what you
20 get.
21 So if you look at all of the little data points
22 with little titles next to them, those are the counties.
23 Those are the average starting district salaries and
24 associated cost of living index value in the state.
25 Anybody to the right of either of those lines is being
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1 compensated more than they currently pay, at least based
2 on starting salaries. Anybody to the left is being paid
3 less.
4 You will notice that there is a systematic
5 pattern to who gets enough funding to cover their current
6 costs and who doesn't and it is typically the smaller
7 communities that don't receive enough to maintain current
8 expenditures.
9 For that reason I would suggest there is a small
10 district adjustment and part of that is the reason for
11 this. You will need to incorporate that into what you're
12 doing.
13 The dashed line shows you don't get much
14 improvement. If you look at the movement to the left of
15 the dashed line instead of solid line, to refresh you,
16 that was based on the cost of living, take Teton out,
17 define a base, create an index from that base and then
18 just assign Teton its original index value. That's the
19 reason that the line isn't parallel to the top of the
20 page. It is only defined for every other county except
21 Teton. You will notice it shoves the line a little over
22 to the left and what you get is Uinta ends up getting
23 enough to cover expenditures, where previously they were
24 just on the other side of the adjustment.
25 What I would argue is until we have better data
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1 or at least we've looked at this a little better, that we
2 shouldn't really consider this linear adjustment is the
3 one we want to do.
4 This adjustment would be appropriate if amenity
5 levels in communities were approximately equal or at least
6 not too variable. So, for example, if you were trying to
7 decide how much you should pay teachers in New York versus
8 Boston versus Washington, D.C., maybe, it would be an
9 appropriate way, possibly, to go about it, although,
10 again, you would still need to include other issues in
11 this adjustment. In that case their amenities might be
12 safety issues, possibly, possibly congestion, things like
13 that.
14 But in Wyoming where you have such dispersion in
15 terms of we don't have any place that is really big, but
16 in terms of how many places we have that are small and a
17 few places that are big, we have variation in what
18 communities have to offer any teacher considering teaching
19 in one of them. And for that reason, the omitted data
20 that's not included in this adjustment -- and remember,
21 what we're trying to do with the regional cost adjustment
22 is reimburse districts for costs they can't control,
23 particularly personnel costs and how those vary across the
24 state, what it takes to get somebody to come in and teach
25 for you.
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1 And with that in mind, I would argue that and I
2 did argue last time that a parabolic relationship like the
3 one shown here is probably a better one. The one shown on
4 this page is the one that best fits the data. And what
5 you would do to redefine that index is you would define
6 where the minimum point on that parabola is. It turns out
7 to be right around a WCLI value of 108.
8 You then find the associated salary that that
9 relationship predicts and that becomes the base of your
10 index. Every other WCLI value, then, while each community
11 can be ranked using the WCLI value to create an index call
12 and it turns out with this index everyone is above the
13 base level so nobody would lose in this regional
14 adjustment in the sense they have funds taken away.
15 Recall from the standard adjustment, if you're below a
16 hundred you would lose funds from your base. This one
17 wouldn't do that.
18 So it would be maybe politically more acceptable
19 but it doesn't blow the budget the way inflating the
20 lowest county up to 1 when you did the standard adjustment
21 and everybody went according to that the way we talked
22 about last time.
23 That's my recommendation, to try to construct an
24 index like this as a temporary one for one year. And the
25 reason I would suggest moving to something like this is
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1 that in terms of district planning, I would guess, MAP
2 guessed, seems that everybody that has looked at this has
3 guessed that using full WCLI adjustment that includes
4 housing overcompensates some places and undercompensates
5 others.
6 MAP's suggestion to that that wasn't allowed in
7 the courts was to drop housing from the index which
8 effectively just flattens the straight line through the
9 data.
10 Mine is to do it a little differently. What you
11 choose to do, I suppose, is up to you. Whatever it would
12 be, it would only be on an interim basis anyway. I would
13 suggest you only use this until we can actually look at
14 the data and consider the way that other states have done,
15 for example Texas, where they've actually built their
16 index using other data as well as cost of living.
17 So it would be in the final report that
18 hopefully will be submitted in June where we can actually
19 define an index like that. But in the meantime, I would
20 suggest we go more towards an adjustment like this just to
21 avoid the distortions that it includes.
22 Some of the benefits of this adjustment, it
23 really doesn't increase funding in a percentage way very
24 much. I hate to say that $7 million isn't a lot, but when
25 you look at the numbers that we're using in the 700
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1 million to finance education, it increases the education
2 expenditures by about 1 percent.
3 But if you look at hold harmless, it actually
4 goes a long way to reducing those. They're reduced by
5 almost 60 percent. And these are indicated by -- if you
6 compare the two tables, Tables 7 and 11, in your handout,
7 if you look at the numbers on the bottom, these are
8 simulations using the most recent WCLI values. There
9 aren't six values in this. We're using the four most
10 recent. By the time any index would be defined you would
11 have two more WCLI surveys to create your three-year
12 rolling average. The numbers are unlikely to look too
13 much different from this.
14 But using the standard adjustment, total costs
15 are about $717 million with about $10.3 million in hold
16 harmless funds. And using the suggested adjustment,
17 education costs rise to 723 million; hold harmless falls
18 to 4.2.
19 One final thing to note, though, and I'm sure
20 I'm going to hear about this regardless if I don't throw
21 it out anyway, is that Teton County is the big loser in
22 this adjustment in the sense that they were the big winner
23 in the previous adjustment.
24 So in the previous adjustment they had their
25 personnel expenses inflated by 41 percent. In this
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1 adjustment they're inflated by 10 percent. From the
2 guaranteed levels -- I don't know if you can call them
3 guaranteed -- the simulation shows that their funding goes
4 at 18.7 million whereas under the standard adjustment
5 they're at 22.3 million. So that's something I'm sure I
6 will be talking about in a few minutes.
7 With that, a couple other caveats about the
8 wording in this document, some things people have asked me
9 about. I used the term in the report "underfunded." It
10 is pretty uncertain what underfunded means or overfunded
11 means. When it was used in this report, and I suppose it
12 was used a little too casually, it was meant to describe
13 those places that currently have hold harmless funding, in
14 other words, where the district is reducing the funding
15 they're receiving.
16 Whether a district is over or underfunded I
17 suppose depends on who you talk to. I didn't mean any
18 normative judgment when I used the word "underfunded."
19 One other point to make, going back to Teton, it
20 is likely that the current adjustment mechanism, the one
21 that uses the WCLI in the linear manner including housing,
22 likely overcompensates Teton for uncontrollable costs in
23 terms of personnel. That was the feeling that MAP had.
24 That's the feeling I get from this data without a lot of
25 extra knowledge from it.
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1 And when you consider just the basic theory of
2 how an amenity affects your salary demand, when you live
3 in a great place like that, sometimes you're willing to
4 sacrifice a little bit in terms of monetary compensation
5 to get in those places. How much that would be remains to
6 be answered.
7 So with that, I guess I can await your
8 questions.
9 COCHAIR DEVIN: Committee, questions.
10 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: I guess I'm
11 obligated by address to answer this.
12 COCHAIR DEVIN: It may have your name on
13 it.
14 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: I will say what I
15 said before, shoe don't chew like grits. The issue you
16 made earlier -- and I thought about this because you
17 mentioned it in the last meeting -- that a house in Teton
18 County that rents for, say, 2500 a month may be much nicer
19 than a home, for example, in Lusk, a three-bedroom home
20 that rents for 800 a month.
21 In fact, that's not true. We find that our
22 teachers, young professionals, nurses are living in garage
23 apartments. They're living anywhere they can. I
24 personally know of two young ladies that are living in a
25 house that the wind blows through, 800 square feet, that
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1 they pay 1500 a month for. So, you know, the housing for
2 rent for young professionals isn't of a better quality
3 than you would find in another area. Possibly it would be
4 the same. You can't assume just because it costs 500,000
5 it is of better quality than a home that costs 80,000 in
6 Lusk because, in fact, that's not true.
7 Again, we've argued this point over and over.
8 The amenity of living there is great the first two weeks
9 and then you get hungry, you're living with five people
10 and your boyfriend runs away with your roommate so the
11 amenity is not that great, so I think that is something we
12 need to look at carefully.
13 Possibly it is too much money -- don't quote me
14 on that -- the difference. But in fact, I think there is
15 a difference that is significant because we found that
16 although we can hire teachers because there is an amenity
17 there, there is something nice about living in Jackson --
18 that's why I moved there 22 years ago -- after they've
19 been there four or five years that amenity is no longer a
20 good thing. What you end up with is short-termers. They
21 live there until they no longer want to live with three
22 roommates or mourn the loss of the boyfriend and at that
23 point they leave. So I think that's another issue we need
24 to look at, how long do these people last, because that's
25 certainly important to the quality of education that our
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1 students get.
2 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
3 DR. GODBY: Can I reply to that, Madam
4 Chair, Mr. Chairman?
5 With respect to the quality of housing, you're
6 probably absolutely right. If I have to pay 1500 for a
7 basement apartment versus whatever for the above-ground
8 two-bedroom house or something, then given a salary
9 constraint, it is probably all I can afford.
10 What I meant when I said equivalent quality was
11 that when they actually construct the index that they
12 price equivalent houses. If they were to price the
13 garage, converted garage, in Teton and full-blown what you
14 might call a normal apartment in, say, Cheyenne, it could
15 be the case that Teton becomes the big winner if that's
16 actually what is going on because once they find the
17 equivalent apartment in Teton and price that one instead
18 of the one that's available which it is the garage because
19 the teachers keep moving out of it because it is available
20 when they price it, it might be the same.
21 My argument is improve the quality of the data
22 and that's certainly possible, you will find the housing
23 numbers in Teton actually go up even higher than they are
24 now. So that part of your comment hopefully wasn't
25 misunderstood.
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1 The second part about the amenity effect is, I
2 mean, you know, we're both arguing the same thing, is that
3 there needs to be some consideration of it. And I don't
4 disagree with you that people in Teton are going to need
5 more money to live on to maintain a certain standard of
6 living. The question is how much.
7 Let me leave it at that.
8 COCHAIR DEVIN: Dr. Godby, a couple of
9 other questions, then.
10 You discussed improving the data with the WCLI.
11 Would it be your recommendation that we -- if we were
12 to -- that we pursue continuing to use the WCLI, do you
13 think, in some modified form due to the size of our state,
14 due to all of the other issues that have been raised in
15 the various studies, that that is an index that in some
16 form we're going to need and therefore the pursuit of
17 improving that data has some merit?
18 DR. GODBY: Yes, Senator Devin, that's
19 exactly what I'm saying. No matter what happens, cost of
20 living is an important determinant of salaries. You're
21 going to have to take that into account. This is the best
22 data you have. It is a good data set as it is, but
23 there's some questions regarding how closely it measures
24 actually what we might call cost of living. That's what
25 it is called. It is actually the cost of goods in an
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1 area. It doesn't take into account how people might
2 substitute the combination of goods in different places
3 due to relative prices, so it doesn't really measure the
4 qualities of living in terms of cost.
5 What it does, it just measures how much it costs
6 to buy stuff, and of course you need to consider that, and
7 that data should be as clean as possible. With respect to
8 school finance, you're going to need to use it. And I
9 would argue that that data set might be underutilized in
10 the state anyway in terms of regional policy.
11 COCHAIR DEVIN: Then aside from that, last
12 time you had mentioned a little bit when we came into this
13 whole discussion of the amenities of living, say, in Teton
14 County but you suggested, perhaps, that we needed to
15 consider -- and I'm not sure how you put this tactfully --
16 but the disincentives, the costs for the disincentives of
17 living in some of the more remote areas and that those
18 small school districts are having in recruiting
19 individuals to live there.
20 DR. GODBY: Well, I spent a lot of time
21 trying to think of how not only to carefully phrase
22 disincentives or disamenities, but it is not really right
23 to say that. What it is is just the opportunities that
24 different communities present.
25 If somebody is offered a salary offer from a
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1 certain community, it may be the case that they find
2 living there more difficult than, say, another community
3 because their church isn't in that community. We're
4 talking really small communities in some situations. It
5 doesn't have to do with mountains or streams nearby.
6 Oftentimes it is just the case that they're small
7 communities and don't offer a lot of opportunities
8 relative to a large one.
9 If this teacher is maybe an older teacher with a
10 child, they may hope that this child plays football on
11 a -- I always get this wrong -- the big schools are the
12 5As, and the little schools are the 1As -- it might be
13 that. There's lots of things that come into play. The
14 larger the community, the more it has to offer.
15 How do you proxy those things? You can look at
16 the way other states do it, and particularly Texas. Other
17 states have also tried to estimate this sort of thing. In
18 New York where statistically you try to estimate the
19 relative effects of each of these influences using proxy
20 variables like population, like distance to the -- if
21 mountains really are important, that's why people come out
22 West. If we're attracting teachers from elsewhere, how
23 far are you from maybe some of the natural amenities?
24 The last few pages, I think the second-to-last
25 page of this report, actually page 55, I listed a set of
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1 data that I would like to see us use, and in there there
2 are a number of things that you could think of as amenity
3 measures. One is the population. Another is the distance
4 to the nearest natural amenity, for example, mountain or
5 natural park. Another is distance to the nearest
6 metropolitan center. How do those proxy? How important
7 is it to people to go to places like Denver, Salt Lake
8 City? A larger population usually means a larger town
9 which usually means more opportunities.
10 So we can -- there are ways to account for these
11 other influences that may drive salaries up just because
12 they're not in certain places. To some people the fact
13 that there's no population may be the biggest reason that
14 they want to go there. It is just that it may be the case
15 that in general it is the opposite.
16 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
17 SENATOR SCOTT: Chairman, several
18 questions. The first one is actually for Mary. If we go
19 with the funding formula that we see reflected in Table
20 11, there must be -- I presume this was run through the
21 model to produce this series of numbers. Am I right that
22 it is specific enough so that you can plug it into the
23 model in a practical way?
24 MS. BYRNES: Madam Chairman, Senator
25 Scott, Dr. Godby could help us organize. It is a review
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1 of the trend line of index of salaries right now. How
2 could we write this index if it was to be drafted as law?
3 Is that the question, Senator Scott, what do we call it?
4 It is not the WCLI index but it is a transaction of that.
5 SENATOR SCOTT: I guess the real question
6 I'm asking is a more practical one. We write you a bill
7 that says use this cost of living adjustment or instruct
8 you to write a bill that tells you to use this cost of
9 living index. Can you translate that into something
10 specific enough so that when you follow that after the
11 session it will run through the formula and produce the
12 kind of result we think we're getting?
13 MS. BYRNES: Senator Scott, I believe we
14 could, with the help of Dr. Godby, to get the terms and
15 language down. It could be an instructional -- it could
16 be used and implemented in the current model.
17 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
18 SENATOR SCOTT: Well, Madam Chairman,
19 frankly I think, then, we've got something that makes a
20 lot of sense, but I think we've still got a problem with
21 Teton County looking here at Table 11, they -- you really
22 hit them pretty hard. They are so different than the rest
23 of the state, and I think the Supreme Court had a real
24 point here that goes beyond just having a member from
25 Teton County, yes, they have all of these nice things that
178
1 make Teton County a desirable place to live, but you still
2 have to be able to afford to live there. And you can
3 attract maybe the starting teachers without fail, but you
4 can't keep the balance you need because they can't afford
5 it.
6 What I would suggest is if we go with the
7 suggestions made in Table 11, that we have a hold harmless
8 for Teton County based on their current formula so that
9 they get the larger figure, while we figure out a way that
10 better describes how to deal with the special
11 circumstances of Teton County.
12 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: Hear, hear.
13 DR. GODBY: Madam Chairman, could I
14 respond to that?
15 Senator Scott, Madam Chairman, there's a way out
16 of this, too, in terms of that issue. When this report
17 was drafted, although the recommendation says to use a
18 parabolic index, I call it parabolic, in the paper it is
19 called an amenity cost of living adjustment. That was
20 suggested by a member in our department, Jay Shogren, who
21 really hated using the word "parabolic." It is a
22 temporary measure.
23 And if you look at Table 11, the intention that
24 comes out of that, or if you look at figure 7, the one
25 that's in your handout, that's more of a demonstration.
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1 It uses old data. We don't have the current starting
2 salaries, and I know for a fact that Teton's starting
3 salary is 32,000. It has been updated. They are now --
4 those starting salaries aren't available right now. This
5 estimation can be redone to reflect the new salaries. It
6 is currently the case that Teton has increased the salary
7 from 27,500 to 32, and that would be incorporated.
8 The way this fitted line works is it is because
9 of how Teton is, it is the one place on the right of the
10 minimum. When you do a statistical fit like this, it is
11 guaranteed that one point, when that's all there is to
12 drag that tail of the parabola up, will have almost an
13 exact fit.
14 So in a sense when you reestimate this index
15 using more recent data, the shape of the parabola is going
16 to change. The formula that generates it is going to
17 change. The method won't change. So we can recompute an
18 index and until we get that data, we don't know what that
19 is going to look at.
20 But we know that Teton will be at least as good
21 as it is off now, and unless everybody else has increased
22 their salaries by 4500 -- yeah, 27,500 to 32 -- unless
23 everybody else has increased their salaries by 4500, Teton
24 County is going to end up better than they currently are.
25 So until we see the index comes out, there's no
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1 need to put a hold harmless in there. This is only a
2 one-year measure anyway. And my argument for making a
3 one-year measure and using this one instead of a standard
4 adjustment is to just give districts a better idea of what
5 the likely adjustment is in the future.
6 This linear adjustment -- let's ignore Teton for
7 a while. Everybody on the other side of the page -- the
8 little places like Niobrara, Weston, Platte -- the
9 standard adjustment just wasn't helping. That was taking
10 money away. And just judging by these data points with
11 old data, it seems that they must pay a lot of money. I
12 mean, Niobrara in this old data set had the highest
13 starting salary in the set. You could call that anecdotal
14 evidence to support the idea that sometimes small places
15 need to spend more money.
16 Now with the new data that Teton is spending 32,
17 one could argue that Teton was historically underfunded
18 and it has only been in recent years they've had money to
19 set a reasonable salary relative to communities like
20 Teton.
21 So with that in mind, from some of the other
22 information I've read, Teton's current starting salary is
23 representative of other communities like Teton, Aspen and
24 that sort of thing. So it may be the case that when you
25 recompute this index with the new data you don't need to
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1 do a hold harmless because Teton has used the current --
2 their new funding -- that they've made corrections they
3 need to make.
4 That all being said, this standard adjustment,
5 that linear fit that was in here would have predicted a
6 salary of almost 36,000 to start in Jackson and they only
7 chose to start everybody at 32 which may be more anecdotal
8 evidence that there is some -- you don't have to
9 compensate to the full amount of cost of living as
10 measured, but it is pretty clear that you need to --
11 according to their own actions, anyway, and according to,
12 you know, the girlfriends and all of this stuff that we
13 just heard about and people moving out, you probably need
14 to give them more money to stay.
15 And so, you know, I'm pretty certain when we get
16 the new data in here that this methodology will top up
17 Teton and they won't be whacked quite as badly as they
18 were with these old numbers.
19 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
20 SENATOR SCOTT: Chairman, are you using
21 average salary or starting salary?
22 DR. GODBY: No, as described in the paper
23 I was using starting salary. With the idea in mind that
24 you got to work hard to attract those people and then the
25 funding formula has built into it all of the experience
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1 adjustments that go above whatever the starting floor is.
2 So I used starting salary. That's the one thing that they
3 choose and then the formula takes over from there and sets
4 everybody's salary from that reference.
5 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I tell you
6 one thing I like about the proposal is you've reduced the
7 number of districts in the hold harmless from 22 to 14 and
8 you've drastically reduced the amount of hold harmless.
9 And we've heard a lot of testimony about the problems that
10 hold harmless is giving with our transportation and
11 special ed adjustments, so I think something that reduces
12 the hold harmless is of distinct benefit.
13 COCHAIR DEVIN: Representative McOmie.
14 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Madam Chairman,
15 we've heard -- we've studied small district adjustments.
16 We're studying small school adjustments. We're studying
17 this and I think the means to end was so that the small
18 schools would get chopped off and I kind of wonder if we
19 shouldn't be looking at all of this before we decide so
20 much on trying to get ourselves back into court with this
21 salary adjustment thing.
22 Because if we're looking at actual costs, some
23 of this is going to show up, what you're talking about,
24 what they have to pay for small schools and for small
25 school districts, and I think -- I think for me to make a
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1 decision, I would like to look at all of that data finally
2 cooked, boiled down into one place and didn't we say we
3 were going to look at this stuff for two years.
4 COCHAIR DEVIN: The final report, I
5 believe, Dr. Godby of yours is due in June.
6 DR. GODBY: That's the date we've set,
7 that we can get the data together and estimations. One
8 estimation incorporates the small districts. Effectively
9 it tries to estimate the scale of economies. So it may be
10 the case you will see in that report -- assuming we can
11 actually carry it out with the appropriate data, you might
12 get some estimate of what both of these things look like,
13 both the regional adjustment and the small school
14 adjustment, at least from the framework that we're looking
15 at which is very different from the framework you're
16 considering with the small school adjustment and small
17 district adjustment.
18 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Madam Chair, the
19 reason I said that, I was just glancing back to what
20 Representative Shivler showed me, the basically 4 million
21 difference, whatever it is on any of those tables, where
22 some of this started was Campbell County. They're taking
23 a million bucks there, trying to get some of this stuff
24 worked out, and I'm not sure that's where we should be
25 looking.
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1 Part of the problem started, as I was told --
2 and I wasn't here -- that we looked at what it would
3 actually cost and there was a whole bunch of schools that
4 would instantly lose a bunch of money if they started at
5 this point.
6 So they raised where they were going to start,
7 funded people to try not to make the impact so great, and
8 now we're trying to deal with that and that's what we're
9 trying to deal with with all of the rest of this. And I'm
10 not prepared really to sit here and say I want to do this
11 or I want to do that until I see how it is all going to
12 come together.
13 COCHAIR DEVIN: And in further answer to
14 your question, I know that the small district/small school
15 piece is going to go into the second year. There's no way
16 we are going to -- we're making progress on that.
17 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: And, Madam
18 Chairman, that would give time to Dr. Godby to finish what
19 he's doing -- I will never get that right. Whoever he
20 is -- Godby. Sorry.
21 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
22 SENATOR SCOTT: So let me understand the
23 schedule correctly. We have a problem what we're going to
24 do with the regional cost of living adjustment over the
25 next year. I think Representative McOmie makes a good
185
1 point but you're saying the small school/small district
2 are something that will be handled and voted on at the
3 next budget session.
4 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's correct, we will
5 have nothing this particular session.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: That would fit with the
7 recommendation to do this as a one-year thing and we can
8 look at that in combination with all of the others,
9 because I think there is really a chance that we'll double
10 correct somewhere if we don't do that.
11 Madam Chairman, I will move that we ask to have
12 a bill drafted that implements the one-year recommendation
13 here and I would suggest we further call it a parabolic
14 adjusted cost of living adjustment or a parabolic cost of
15 living adjustment.
16 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: Can I expand that
17 a little to also include current data, in other words,
18 this year's data?
19 SENATOR SCOTT: Yeah. Will this year's
20 data be available by the time of the December meeting?
21 MS. BYRNES: Senator Scott, it should be
22 very available soon. Probably within the next couple
23 weeks we will have that data in. And that's for school
24 year '02-'03, so we will know that you're looking at that
25 data.
186
1 SENATOR SCOTT: And, Madam Chairman, I
2 would ask them to separately draft a hold harmless
3 provision to be put in that bill if we need it in case
4 Teton County comes out way low with the new data.
5 Then, Madam Chairman, I will have a
6 recommendation on a separate bill for the improvements on
7 the cost of living index.
8 COCHAIR DEVIN: Is there a second on
9 Senator Scott's motion?
10 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: Second.
11 COCHAIR DEVIN: There's a motion and
12 second.
13 Is there further discussion by committee?
14 Is there comment by those in the public before
15 we take a vote on your feelings on -- Dr. Higdon.
16 DR. HIGDON: Madam Chairman, Mark Higdon,
17 Campbell County School District. I don't know whether to
18 speak in favor of the motion or against it because I think
19 the data would be good for you to look at. Let me throw
20 out things for you to consider at least at this point.
21 As I understand it, we're moving from the WCLI,
22 which we all agree is not an educational cost index, it
23 wasn't for that purpose, and we've all talked about
24 improving it, to a system that is going to use base
25 salaries.
187
1 I've notice our salary listed at 24,500 is not
2 accurate. Our base salary is 28,000. We accomplished
3 that with a bonus for the first-year, second-year,
4 third-year and fourth-year teachers. So I don't know how
5 you accommodate that, but essentially that's how we do it.
6 We list it both ways on the salary schedules.
7 The concern I have about using a starting level
8 salary initially, even if we use it for a year -- and I
9 don't know why we would use it for a year if it is a
10 mandate -- is that it is so easy to manipulate. If you
11 continue to use that in the future, districts can change
12 that and we have the costs that we don't control. And
13 there are reasons why larger districts even though they
14 have high costs are not able to improve starting salaries,
15 because the majority of their staff are senior staff and
16 whenever you move the beginning salary up, you have to
17 flow that through the entire salary schedule and you don't
18 have the flexibility to make that adjustment. That's one
19 thing I hope you would look at as you move forward with
20 this.
21 What I would ask you to do is if you decide to
22 do this, compare it to the other numbers. And I'll
23 guarantee you that Teton County is not the only one that's
24 going to need a hold harmless. We're going to need a hold
25 harmless, too. And if that's the case, if we're suddenly
188
1 going from a cost index that has demonstrated high costs
2 under the WCLI to an index that now needs a hold harmless
3 at the top and at the bottom, I don't know how accurate
4 the measures are.
5 I would encourage you to look at this data and
6 after I look at it I can probably give you a better
7 recommendation. But should you have a choice, I would
8 think that the recommendation to study this, continue to
9 study this, use what we have, make it better. Maybe this
10 is something we should implement in a year after we've had
11 a chance to look at it. But when it has big impacts for
12 high-cost districts, impacts districts like ours, suddenly
13 our funding decreases by 1.5 million upon a regional cost
14 index over what the WCLI would provide and I have to
15 question whether that makes sense or not, and when it has
16 a $3 and a half million impact on Teton County.
17 But I do apologize because I don't understand
18 the methodology well enough to tell you whether I think
19 you're doing the right thing or not. You are working in
20 the right direction. We do need to do something for the
21 smaller districts, and I don't know if this is a way to do
22 it. Maybe we can do it in the small district adjustment
23 where they have an opportunity to recruit people to remote
24 areas.
25 And districts do this. When we have teachers
189
1 going to rural schools, we pay them incentive to go there,
2 additional above the schedule to teach in a rural school
3 30 or 50 miles from town. And maybe in the small areas as
4 part of the small district adjustment there should be an
5 additional salary component put in there to take care of
6 them.
7 The advantage of that, it would only apply to
8 those that are small and remote and have low-cost housing
9 but have to pay more to get people to live there because
10 of the remoteness of the area and using that methodology
11 wouldn't disadvantage the districts who do have high costs
12 for all of their staff according to WCLI.
13 So I think there's a couple ways to look at
14 doing it. So I'll trust your wisdom and move forward with
15 this, whichever way you want to do it. It is not good
16 right now, but it is the best we have. We would certainly
17 support making it better. Thank you.
18 COCHAIR DEVIN: Dr. Head.
19 DR. HEAD: Charlie Head, superintendent of
20 schools, Albany County.
21 Speaking as another potential hold harmless
22 district, when I first read this -- all I've read is the
23 summary, Dr. Godby, so I may well be in error. I assumed
24 that the salaries on this chart here were depicted as a
25 result of a funding level, but then I -- and part of the
190
1 discussion sounded like the salaries were going to be a
2 driver in this system.
3 And if the salaries do become a driver in
4 determining this cost of living formula, then Dr. Higdon
5 is exactly right, this is very easy to manipulate. I know
6 some of these salaries, there's some things in here that I
7 have a suspicion are counted in one district and not in
8 another.
9 The question that I would have is when we say
10 salaries, are we just talking about actual salaries that
11 goes to the employee or are we including all fringe
12 benefits as part of salary? Because districts treat those
13 things differently and my suspicion is just looking at
14 this, but I could be wrong -- my suspicion is this is just
15 salary so I could very quickly manipulate it if I wanted
16 to and take health insurance as a fringe benefit, give it
17 to the employee as a salary and they pay out of the salary
18 directly for health insurance. But I may be
19 misinterpreting this.
20 DR. GODBY: No, you are not. The point is
21 it would be done one year, and given the data is already
22 done for this year, that's why it is only a one year. In
23 the report I go to some length to discuss that you don't
24 want to get into that, the tail wagging the dog. So the
25 idea is to describe something that looks a little more
191
1 like what is actually going on versus the -- what's much
2 more distortionary on the low end, the current adjustment
3 mechanism, and in the meantime develop something that
4 doesn't just use starting salaries but it is using all
5 salaries.
6 And at this point we're trying to get data on
7 benefits packages across the districts but you've hit on
8 something that's been really difficult to pin down, which
9 is getting a district to tell us exactly what those are.
10 The data on that table came from the WED in
11 2001; is that right?
12 MS. BYRNES: WEA, 2001-2002 data.
13 DR. GODBY: Again, I will reiterate, the
14 diagram or the figure is meant to describe a principle,
15 the principle of the index and how it would look using the
16 current data, but it is not really current since some of
17 it is not available. It is the best data we have. With
18 respect to benefits, they aren't factored in. We're using
19 the WEA report of starting salaries and it would be a
20 one-year thing for exactly the reason that both of you
21 have described.
22 DR. HEAD: Madam Chairman, then I would
23 posit that there are apples and oranges here, that some
24 districts treat those benefits differently than others and
25 causes this table to perhaps have distortions. I would
192
1 support if this one-year study would be a study to see
2 what would happen as opposed to actually implementing a
3 factor into the funding formula that would positively or
4 negatively impact our funding for next year. If that is
5 the direction we're headed, I would definitely want to dig
6 into this much deeper before we went much further. Thank
7 you.
8 COCHAIR DEVIN: Other comment.
9 MR. MCDOWELL: Gary McDowell, president of
10 the Wyoming Education Association. Just a couple
11 comments. One is that within the education community a
12 concern has been there for several years there's not
13 adequate staffing in the current model nor adequate
14 compensation built in, so what you have as a starting
15 point is districts are paying the salaries that they
16 believe they can afford within the funding model, the
17 funding that they receive.
18 So whether that's an adequate level to begin
19 with to me is somewhat questionable.
20 I do have a concern separate from that with this
21 proposal and also with the one you approved on special
22 education, and that is moving forward with legislation
23 that has as a fundamental component of it a hold harmless
24 provision. It seems to me there's something inherently
25 suspect when you're designing a cost-based system but
193
1 within that you have to construct it with a hold harmless.
2 It seems to me that those two points are at odds.
3 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I will
4 respond to that because hold harmless has been a constant
5 component of this alleged cost-based system. Frankly, I
6 think it is a symptom of the fact that it is impossible to
7 really do a cost-based formula. The Supreme Court
8 decision we're running off of is not based in reality, it
9 just doesn't work, and you're going to have these hold
10 harmless things under any device we come up with.
11 COCHAIR DEVIN: And I think there's also
12 the political reality that it is very difficult to get
13 anything through that has the perception or the reality of
14 someone losing money. And I guess that -- you know, I
15 understand some elements of the wisdom of putting this
16 piece in, but we just witnessed trying to go through a
17 very painful process where a temporary piece was put in of
18 100 percent funding with all of the quotes being that it
19 was indeed temporary at the time it was done, and yet it
20 is really painful anytime we try to back up. The longer
21 I've been in the legislature, the more I've come to
22 realize you never back up.
23 And so I'm not sure how a one-year provision
24 will be perceived one year from now.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman.
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1 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
2 SENATOR SCOTT: This one because of the
3 ability to manipulate it once you know it is there I think
4 it is limited to one year.
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's an excellent point,
6 it is there.
7 Any further comment from the public or questions
8 from the committee?
9 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Question on the motion.
10 COCHAIR DEVIN: Question on the motion you
11 have before you which would be the draft legislation that
12 would reflect Table 11, with another -- now, did we add to
13 that another potential hold harmless caveat?
14 SENATOR SCOTT: Asking that a hold
15 harmless be drafted separately so it is available in case
16 we need it.
17 COCHAIR DEVIN: All those in favor, raise
18 your hand.
19 Those opposed.
20 That motion carries.
21 You had a second motion then on the data?
22 SENATOR SCOTT: Yes, Madam Chairman. I
23 think this will be a lot less controversial potentially.
24 I would move that the -- we draft a bill that authorizes
25 and funds the recommended improvements in the Wyoming Cost
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1 of Living Index and ask that it be done in a way that's
2 flexible enough that the experts deal with the details
3 rather than the legislation.
4 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Second.
5 DR. GODBY: Madam Chair, one point you
6 might want to consider are the exact costs. Those aren't
7 exact costs. I haven't had an opportunity to talk with
8 Buck McVeigh regarding how his staff could deal with --
9 I've used words in there to the effect you will need extra
10 money or resources in Cheyenne to accommodate some of
11 these. There is an approximated cost, but I haven't had
12 Buck's input on that.
13 Secondly, the consumer expenditure survey, the
14 price tag on that is a rough one that came out of a
15 discussion at the survey center talking to some of the
16 people at the survey center at the university, and it may
17 be the case that that is off.
18 So there could be -- given that we're only
19 presenting this a week after it was drafted, it may be the
20 case that some of those costs are adjusted between now and
21 when you see the final bill.
22 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Nelson, with that
23 latitude, if the maker of the motion and the second is
24 agreeable, it is the understanding of the committee that
25 then we will give them the latitude to work out these
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1 details.
2 All of those in favor raise your hand.
3 Opposed.
4 That motion carries.
5 Any other questions or any other comments,
6 Dr. Godby, that you wish to add?
7 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: I would like
8 to -- in spite of Dr. Godby's suggested hedonic approach,
9 I think you've really done a great job in a short time and
10 I'm looking forward to your final report in June.
11 COCHAIR DEVIN: And you have, believe it
12 or not, made hedonics something other than a strange word
13 to us.
14 DR. GODBY: I will try not to use it next
15 time. I will say an estimate. It actually -- a funny
16 thing about that word, it comes from the word hedonism.
17 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's kind of how we felt
18 about it the first time we heard it in the legislature.
19 Any other questions or comments? Then I would
20 like to take a break at this point. We will reconvene at
21 3:00. Give our recorders a rest and pick up vocational
22 education at that point in time.
23 (Recess taken 2:45 p.m. until 3:00 p.m.)
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: Teri, would you like to
25 introduce our next subject? Teri Wigert and Steve Klein
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1 are here for us to discuss vocational education. And as
2 you remember, we had a couple presentations on this and we
3 need to come together on some of our pieces. I think our
4 staff should be back in shortly.
5 Go ahead.
6 MS. WIGERT: Thank you. Good afternoon,
7 Senator Devin and members of the Joint Education Interim
8 Committee. I am -- again, I will introduce myself, Teri
9 Wigert. I'm the state director of the Wyoming Department
10 of Education for Career and Technical Education, or as we
11 commonly refer to it as vocational education.
12 And I'd like to reintroduce Dr. Steven Klein
13 from MRP located in Berkeley. Steve actually hails from
14 Portland and you will recall he's been at JEC committee
15 meetings for the last three or four months. And this
16 afternoon he's going to recap the work that the MPR
17 Associates has done in concert with information gathered
18 from school districts and from the advisory panel and
19 other national data.
20 So Steve will begin. We will be happy to answer
21 questions of either of us as you have those.
22 DR. KLEIN: Senator Devin, members of the
23 committee, thank you again for the opportunity to meet
24 with you. What I would like to do in the next few minutes
25 is, number one, briefly review with you the operation of
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1 the model with two purposes in mind. One is to refresh
2 our minds. It has been a while since we tackled this.
3 The other is to share with you new information.
4 Basically we now have data from all of the
5 districts operating programs. Since we last spoke two
6 districts supplied data we did not previously have, and,
7 in addition, a number of districts sent us information.
8 After reviewing -- as I mentioned, we sent all
9 of the information that we collected back to the district
10 staff and asked them to review our calculations on
11 full-time equivalent students to allow them to see the
12 basis for the analyses that we did. Based on that, people
13 did respond to us and we are heartened to get feedback.
14 So based on that information, I will also share some new
15 numbers with you.
16 One other slight change and that is that, if you
17 recall, we talked about this idea of a two-program minimum
18 quality standard. Nothing has changed in that, except
19 that what we have done is aligned our numbers on the
20 course taking. When we last spoke, we had used national
21 data, averages from the National Center for Education
22 Statistics based on transcript data analysis.
23 After meeting with the representatives from MAP,
24 we've adopted 24 courses as a student who graduates --
25 from on average a graduate of a Wyoming school, and also
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1 adjusted the vocational course work, course taking to
2 reflect that course taking, 24 courses.
3 As a consequence, we've changed the threshold
4 for a small school to qualify for continuous weighting.
5 It is increased from 131 to 152 students. Five districts,
6 it changes five districts. And the weighting also as a
7 consequence changed slightly. It went from -- when we
8 last spoke it was 1.25. It is now 1.29. It is all
9 mathematical. It is based on the number of courses
10 students take. That has nothing to do with data reported
11 from the districts. It is the basis for the model.
12 I will be referring to the handout that you have
13 in front of you. It is very similar to what you've seen
14 in the past with the new data incorporated within it.
15 Looking at the first page with the boxes, very
16 briefly, in approaching this exercise we first came up
17 with a conceptual framework, underlying that framework
18 identified some assumptions I'll share with you again. We
19 collected the data and then we modeled the resource
20 distribution.
21 With respect to the conceptual framework
22 underlying the model, we designed the formula to
23 compensate for the increased cost of providing vocational
24 education, recognizing there is variation among districts.
25 So we need to be very clear on this: The model
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1 funds districts based on students participating at the
2 school level, and it does so based on the course-taking
3 concentration or intensity of students such that districts
4 that have above-average levels of student participation
5 would gain resources. Districts across their schools with
6 below-average participation would lose resources. If one
7 would reallocate funding based on an assumption that we
8 were going to hold spending constant and reallocate
9 funding based on the intensity of course work, underlying
10 that assumption is within the funding system currently
11 vocational education resources are included. They're
12 allocated on an average basis.
13 And so what we have done is we will reallocate
14 based on the intensity of course taking as we believe the
15 Supreme Court intended when they said funding accordingly.
16 Under the assumptions governing the model
17 operation, if you look on the next page, it is that we're
18 going to concentrate funding on the high-cost students,
19 that being students taking vocational education; we were
20 going to do so equitably and do so in a cost-effective
21 manner.
22 First challenge, we had to decide what is a
23 vocational course. To do so we looked at basing funding
24 on vocational course work taught by vocationally endorsed
25 instructors. We collected data from all schools in the
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1 state, providing them with a list of their endorsed --
2 their teachers endorsed in vocational subjects and asked
3 them for their enrollments in those courses. We also
4 allowed people to provide us information for course work
5 that was taught either by -- that was seen as vocational
6 in content but taught by a nonvocationally endorsed
7 instructor.
8 For purposes of the funding formula, we
9 recommended that funding be based on course work taught by
10 vocationally endorsed instructors, but, in addition, you
11 allow schools and districts to qualify courses that would
12 not normally be taught by a vocationally endorsed
13 instructor or perhaps are taught by a vocationally
14 endorsed instructor outside of their endorsed area. We
15 have built into the model waivers to accommodate unique
16 circumstances that can occur at the local level.
17 We recommended that a vocational course be part
18 of a sequence, that is, at least three courses or a
19 program cluster area with the idea that vocational
20 education is intended to lead to some sort of outcome. We
21 recognize that there are introductory courses that are on
22 average cheaper to offer, you will have advanced course
23 work that is relatively more expensive to offer, but we
24 would expect that the course work be in some sort of
25 cohesive sequence that prepares students for an outcome.
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1 And again, we recommended a waiver so that if a
2 school or district wanted to qualify programs that were
3 less than three courses in a sequence or program area,
4 cluster area, that they could do so.
5 We also recommended that the funding be
6 concentrated on grades 9 to 12, students participating in
7 vocational education offered in grades 9 to 12. And that
8 was based on data I shared with you last time showing that
9 the cost of providing vocational education with respect to
10 salaries and benefits and equipment and supplies did not
11 warrant having a separate adjustment for grades K through
12 8.
13 The second step after we've identified what's on
14 the table, what are the courses that we will be counting,
15 is to actually count the students and weight them at a
16 weight of 1.29, which is the class size differential
17 between nonvocational/vocational course work.
18 Using that approach, counting the number of
19 students who participate in vocational education in the
20 year 2001 to 2002, weighting it -- well, just in general,
21 we generated 3,991 FTE vocational students. Each of those
22 students would be weighted at a weight of 1.29 for formula
23 purposes because that would compensate for the smaller
24 class sizes in which vocational instruction is provided.
25 We also recognized that small schools face
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1 costs, additional costs. There's a fixed cost for
2 providing voc ed, and to ensure that small schools would
3 be able to provide that level of quality, we recommended
4 that the committee consider a two-program minimum quality
5 standard; that being that all schools should be funded
6 with sufficient resources to offer at least two programs
7 of vocational course work. And we defined a program as
8 being taught -- each program would have a
9 full-time-equivalent vocational instructor.
10 To provide additional resources, we developed a
11 continuous weight so anyone below the threshold, any
12 district below the ADM -- this is not vocational, this is
13 across the board -- the ADM of 152 students would qualify
14 for an increased weight and that increased weight is to
15 reflect the cost of providing course work in smaller class
16 sizes for vocational education.
17 Under our scenario 31 districts serving 10
18 percent of the state's grades 9 to 12 ADM would be
19 eligible for the supplemental weighting.
20 And finally, we talked about cost effectiveness,
21 and we said that small schools -- this was based on
22 conversations with our advisory panel -- that small
23 schools within five miles of a larger school in the same
24 district should be treated as a single entity in the
25 allocation formula.
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1 That doesn't mean they don't get funded. It
2 simply means we're not going to qualify them for a
3 two-program minimum quality standard when they could take
4 their students and bus them or in some cases students
5 could walk to an institution nearby to participate in
6 services. And we found that there were 11 schools
7 enrolling less than 2 percent of the state ADM that would
8 be affected by this provision.
9 SENATOR SCOTT: Question at this point,
10 Madam Chairman?
11 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
12 SENATOR SCOTT: On this point, this looks
13 suspiciously to me like the number of alternate high
14 schools that there are in the state and it would seem to
15 me that mostly what you're doing is disallowing the
16 adjustment for those alternate high schools and I wonder
17 how practical that is. Those students are in alternate
18 high schools for a reason and there may be good
19 programmatic reason for not commingling them with the
20 other schools for vocational and I would like any comments
21 you might have on that.
22 And I would wonder if the audience, to the
23 extent that we still have an audience, would care to
24 comment on that, too.
25 DR. KLEIN: Senator Scott, with respect to
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1 that issue it may be in some cases that there would be
2 alternative schools that would fall into that category.
3 SENATOR SCOTT: Maybe all alternative
4 schools?
5 DR. KLEIN: I don't know, actually,
6 without having looked at that, but it is conceivable that
7 would be the case. The idea underlying this is otherwise
8 you run the situation of running duplicated programs and
9 duplicated equipment and staffing and in some cases
10 staffing at two separate sites that are within some cases
11 walking distance from one another.
12 So from a cost effectiveness approach we felt
13 that that was defensible and we did keep it in the same
14 district, though.
15 COCHAIR DEVIN: I guess I would ask,
16 though, do -- is it the practice that alternative high
17 schools all have their separate vocational facilities now?
18 MS. WIGERT: Senator Devin, no. I can't
19 think of any alternative high school that has vocational
20 programs and labs separate. I can't say unequivocally
21 that there aren't, but I don't know of any that do. In
22 the most part, alternative high schools are kind of pieced
23 together somewhere on site or, you know, maybe even off
24 site in a modular unit, but they're still -- they're
25 trying to provide, I would say, the core subject areas for
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1 those students and I don't know of any that are trying to
2 provide full-blown vocational programs.
3 COCHAIR DEVIN: Thank you.
4 DR. KLEIN: Then just moving along, if one
5 looks at the next page, from the assumptions to the
6 recommendations --
7 COCHAIR DEVIN: Before you do that, to
8 keep it clear, though, anyone in an alternative high
9 school who was enrolled in a vocational education program
10 would get the weighting of the 1.29?
11 DR. KLEIN: Senator Devin, that's correct.
12 COCHAIR DEVIN: It would just not
13 guarantee a whole separate set of facilities that's
14 probably not there now?
15 DR. KLEIN: Senator Devin, that's correct.
16 It would be a 1.29 versus treating them as a separate
17 entity, applying a larger continuous -- a larger weight
18 based on their ADM, and then ostensibly, if they can reach
19 the requirement for a two-program minimum, funding them to
20 provide that, that's correct. Instead they would be
21 counted along with the institution that's nearby and the
22 combined ADM, FTE vocational would generate a 1.29 weight.
23 With respect to the recommendations, we provided
24 four. And I will very briefly run through them so you can
25 see because some numbers have changed slightly. But we
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1 did talk about option 4. And with respect to option 1, we
2 looked at applying a weight of 1.29 to all students
3 participating in vocational education on a FTE basis and
4 then real low indicating resources based on how districts
5 qualify for funding with respect to the average.
6 So districts above the average would gain
7 resources. Districts below the average would lose
8 resources. State spending would stay constant. The
9 effect of that would be to redistribute $460,000
10 statewide. 31 districts serving 42 percent of the state
11 ADM would gain resources and 15 districts serving 58
12 percent of state ADM would lose resources.
13 If one were to introduce a hold harmless for
14 districts with below-average rates of student
15 participation, now the state would incur costs of
16 $465,000. We also molded in the report the effect of just
17 reducing that hold harmless over a period of time and we
18 selected five years.
19 With the anticipation that districts by that
20 time would have an opportunity to grow their programs,
21 that is, grow the number of FTE students they have
22 participating in vocational education to avoid losing that
23 money in the long term.
24 The third option was we introduced the idea of a
25 two-program minimum quality program and redistributed
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1 allocations based on vocational education. In this
2 approach 31 districts would qualify for a two-program
3 minimum quality standard. The cost to the State would be
4 1,035,448. 37 districts serving over two-thirds of the
5 state ADM would gain resources and 9 districts serving 32
6 percent of the state ADM would lose resources under this
7 approach.
8 Again, option 4, which is the option that we
9 talked about, the JEC agreed to look into for this meeting
10 was the effect of holding the two-program minimum quality
11 standard with the hold harmless provision. To recap, this
12 is all students in schools above 152 ADM would be weighted
13 at 1.29. All FTE vocational students would be weighted at
14 1.29. In schools with less than 152 ADM students, there
15 would be a higher weight applied to all FTE vocational
16 students that would go anywhere from 1.291 to .56. It
17 depends on the ADM. It floats with the school.
18 There's a hold harmless. Districts with
19 below-average participation rates in vocational education
20 would not lose that money. They would be held at the
21 spending level that they are. Schools -- in the
22 aggregate, districts with above-average participation
23 would gain resources. And to do this approach it would
24 cost the state, based on the data that we have for the
25 2001-'02 school year, an additional $1.4 million.
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1 And again, the State would have the option of
2 doing some sort of a phased-in reduction over time so that
3 allowing the schools and districts to grow their programs
4 at a 1.29 weighting for each FTE vocational student to
5 offset any potential loss they might have.
6 The average does not change over time. It is
7 not that we reaverage every year so everybody increases
8 their vocational education. The average increases in
9 people, it stays where we are and as we add students, if
10 there are new students, they're generating a supplement at
11 the margin 1.29 weight that is used to provide programs.
12 The fifth option proposed by Senator Scott was
13 to explore applying a 1.29 weight to all FTE vocational
14 students currently and look at the cost implications of
15 that. And I believe that the LSO has done some work on
16 that and they will share that with you. And then that
17 approach, recommendation 1, is intended to adjust for the
18 intensity of student participation in vocational program
19 services.
20 We also collected data on school and district
21 expenditures for vocational equipment and supplies --
22 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, do you
23 want questions on these options at this point or do you
24 want them later?
25 COCHAIR DEVIN: Let's go ahead and finish
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1 that report and come back.
2 DR. KLEIN: We found that on average
3 districts were spending $4,822 per vocational instructor
4 for supplies and $1,300 per vocational instructor FTE for
5 equipment. This is money already put out in the state,
6 not uniquely identified in the funding formula. It falls
7 under column D in the Wyoming block grant model which
8 catches all of the other expenses not otherwise explicitly
9 included in the formula.
10 Based on our data, if -- now this is if all
11 districts were spending on average $4,822 for vocational
12 instructor for supplies, $1,300 for vocational instructor
13 FTE for equipment, the statewide we would expect that
14 approximately 2.064 million would be being spent on
15 vocational instructor for vocational instruction. That's
16 not to say that's what is happening. That's what our
17 expectation would be on average. We're not saying the
18 State should fund this. This is already money going out.
19 But we did find that there were two other areas
20 we would want to explore providing additional
21 compensation.
22 The first is we talked about having a
23 two-program minimum quality program standard. If you're
24 going to offer two programs, we said you have to have at
25 least two instructors and those instructors one would
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1 expect would be generating resources for the programs.
2 So to provide sufficient funding for equipment
3 and supplies for instructors for schools with less than
4 two FTE instructors, the State would need to spend an
5 additional 50,386. It is very small because on average
6 most schools across the district have at least two
7 vocational FTE instructors on staff.
8 We also heard -- when we were out in the field
9 we did a number of case studies. We visited 16 school
10 districts this year. We visited 16 the year before. One
11 of the biggest complaints was there wasn't enough money to
12 buy new equipment to replace the equipment that they
13 currently had. It was outdated. It was unsafe.
14 So what we recommended is that for each
15 vocational instructor FTE the State consider a 50 percent
16 augmentation, about $650 per FTE instructor for the
17 purpose of allowing them to replace -- to begin to
18 purchase -- they can pool these resources, spread them
19 over different programs, but begin to purchase new
20 equipment. That came out to $225,000 for a sum for
21 recommendation of $275,871.
22 Recommendation 3, as you may recall, this is
23 base funding in retrospect from the year before in the
24 number of FTE vocational students. To start up
25 introducing a new program you have to have the students to
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1 pay the teacher but to have the teacher you have to have
2 the students and this is a catch-22. We looked at you
3 have a start-up program that districts could apply for
4 resources to be used to fund a teacher, to purchase
5 equipment, to get a program up and running. And that we
6 recommended $250,000 each year. Districts would apply to
7 receive that funding.
8 The fourth recommendation, to monitor the
9 resources, to allocate these resources, there would be a
10 cost to the State. We estimated -- and this is nothing
11 more than a ballpark -- of about $100,000. I believe that
12 the Department of Education has or will be coming up with
13 their own estimates. But we estimated about $100,000
14 based on our own figures. And again, that's a ballpark.
15 And then finally, the last recommendation which
16 there was some question about should this money be
17 categorical. During discussions with our advisory panel
18 there were differing viewpoints expressed among all
19 participants. We were not able to come to any form of
20 consensus.
21 And what we recommended is not to require
22 districts to report annually -- not impose a categorical
23 requirement that money be spent -- money generated using
24 the vocational formula be spent on voc ed, but there be a
25 means of following expenditures over time. So if we find
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1 all of this money is going out of voc ed and going into
2 other programs and voc ed is not seeing any of it, then at
3 least the State has that data available so they can begin
4 to think about whether there's a need for a categorical
5 requirement.
6 Based on the options that we spoke of at the
7 last meeting, the total additional cost to the State to
8 adopt the recommendations that we came up, that would be
9 option 4, two-program minimum quality program standard
10 with the hold harmless; compensating for equipment and
11 supplies that would be needed to provide two vocational
12 programs; provide upgrades, grants to vocational
13 instructors for upgrading equipment; providing start-up
14 grants to fund the system in perpetuity and to implement
15 and monitor program efforts would be about $2.1 million in
16 the base year.
17 And I want to be very clear that in subsequent
18 years -- in subsequent years if districts and schools were
19 to add -- not talking about a student that comes out of
20 consumer homemaking and enrolls in agriculture, but if
21 they were to attract students in vocational programs,
22 thereby increasing the FTE vocational students, the State
23 would incur additional expenses associated with that.
24 Realistically there are academic requirements
25 for graduation, it is probably -- we didn't try to
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1 calculate a cap, but this isn't something that one might
2 expect to go on to infinity. There is the potential over
3 time that this cost could increase as schools and
4 districts added students. And that concludes my formal
5 comments.
6 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott, questions.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: Yes. And my questions
8 center around this reallocation mechanism and talking
9 about this as an ongoing system. Are you proposing the
10 reallocation only in year one or is that going to be an
11 ongoing feature as the number of vocational students
12 changes relatively among the several districts?
13 DR. KLEIN: Senator Devin, Senator Scott,
14 the intention is actually in the base year when you're
15 spending the money of this model, we recalibrated some of
16 the components in the Wyoming block grant model to
17 generate a zero cost to the State.
18 The expectation would be in subsequent years you
19 would simply multiply the number of vocational FTE
20 students that you had participating in each school in your
21 district and sum them up, multiply them times this
22 recalibrated amount and that would be how much money you
23 would generate for vocational education.
24 So to answer your question directly, it would as
25 a consequence indeed carry over this reallocation, if you
215
1 will, carry over in subsequent years to the extent that
2 you did not add vocational FTE students within the schools
3 across your district.
4 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I'm still
5 fairly confused about this. We get out in year two and
6 some school districts have got more full-time equivalents,
7 some have got less. The ones that get more because of the
8 1.29 weighting, they get more and the others get less
9 because they have less students at the 1.29.
10 DR. KLEIN: Senator Devin, Senator Scott,
11 that is correct. The intent is the programs would be
12 funded accordingly based on the propensity of
13 participation.
14 SENATOR SCOTT: I understand that.
15 COCHAIR DEVIN: Let me see if I'm
16 understanding what he's asking. Would your school
17 continue to function -- school A, does it continue to
18 function against its base of adding more students or
19 subtracting more students, or is it in relationship to
20 some proportion of what another school does?
21 DR. KLEIN: Senator Devin, it is against
22 its own base.
23 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's what I understood.
24 SENATOR SCOTT: So the base adjustment is
25 only in year one?
216
1 DR. KLEIN: Senator Devin, Senator Scott,
2 that is right. Base adjustment is made in year one and
3 that is carried through with adjustments for experience
4 and whatnot, but you establish it in year one and you
5 compare to yourself over time.
6 COCHAIR DEVIN: Now, let me clarify a part
7 of our standing piece because it is important, I think, to
8 understand this. Our standing formula -- Dr. Smith, jump
9 in -- but our current formula now presumes a certain
10 number of students in vocational ed and funds to that
11 level. And if you have less than that, that's why we're
12 seeing some decreases among certain districts if you
13 have -- is that why we're seeing a decrease in certain
14 districts, is because they do not have the number of
15 students in voc ed that are presumed to be the average?
16 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, sort of yes
17 and no. The original block grant model said that you have
18 an average population and how the resources get allocated
19 is up to the local districts. Some districts will
20 emphasize academic subjects. Some districts will
21 emphasize vocational subjects. The Court said you have to
22 account for vocational.
23 So what MPR did is they determined, okay -- and
24 this is how they get to the adjustment -- is that 14.3
25 percent of the students on average are vocational, 14.3
217
1 percent of the FTE students are vocational. So if every
2 district in the state, every school in the state, had 14.3
3 percent, there would be no reallocation.
4 Some of them -- some schools have emphasized it
5 more, there's 16, 18 percent. Some have deemphasized it
6 and there's 10 percent. So that the initial calculation
7 just makes that adjustment that says within the model
8 there's sufficient resources to provide a vocational
9 program and on average you break even. If you deemphasize
10 vocational and emphasize something else, then you will get
11 a proportionate decrease, and vice versa.
12 So that's sort of step zero and from there
13 forward, then, for example, if you were a school with 10
14 percent, next year you had 14 percent, you would get a
15 proportionate increase. No one would gain or lose as a
16 result of your proportionate increase. It starts out
17 making -- it sets the clock back saying we've accounted
18 for voc ed now and go forward and you get 1.29 percent for
19 every vocational kid.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: Thank you. It was the 14
21 percent average statewide figure that you presented last
22 time in your presentation and he's refreshing my memory.
23 DR. KLEIN: That's right.
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, thinking
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1 back on the original model, did you -- when you were
2 calculating that, did you put any explicit allowance in
3 that model for the fact that vocational students were more
4 expensive?
5 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, Senator Scott,
6 we took an average -- we took the advice of all the
7 sources cited many times and we said here is an average
8 cost. It takes into account very low-cost programs,
9 physical education, freshman English, very high-cost
10 programs, physics, advanced mathematics, art and
11 vocational education, and we said it is not our place to
12 say how you allocate those resources, but on average
13 here's what it costs.
14 COCHAIR DEVIN: Questions? Is there a
15 question on the end?
16 SENATOR GOODENOUGH: Yes.
17 COCHAIR DEVIN: I need your flag higher.
18 I can't see around it.
19 SENATOR GOODENOUGH: There's interference.
20 Madam Chairman.
21 I was under the impression over the last five to
22 ten years the quantity and quality of voc ed offerings
23 throughout the state has deteriorated because of our
24 changes in the funding models, so on and so forth. Is
25 that true from what you've seen?
219
1 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, Senator
2 Goodenough, when we went out and spoke to people in the
3 field, what we heard over and over again, interestingly,
4 wasn't -- not to suggest this isn't the case, but wasn't
5 that we don't have enough teachers or that the quality of
6 our instruction isn't very good. The complaint was that
7 we don't have the equipment.
8 We would go into a welding room and we would see
9 welding machines at the stations from the mid-'80s, early
10 '80s. We would go into someplace that used CAD or
11 computers and they would say, "The equipment that we have
12 is not up to standard."
13 People were very good in the field at
14 parasitizing old equipment and pulling in new equipment
15 and coming up with additional ways to come up with
16 additional resources; for instance, putting candy machines
17 sponsored by vocational clubs into classrooms and all
18 proceeds from sales would go towards programs. Students
19 were picking up some of the costs for purchasing supplies
20 or go on trips.
21 So what we heard and saw was that it was the
22 feeling there wasn't sufficient resources to keep up the
23 infrastructure, the equipment that was used for
24 instruction. There's no doubt whoever you speak to you
25 will get a different story, but there's certainly the
220
1 perception in the field that the level and quality of
2 vocational education being offered does not meet what they
3 would like to see. You definitely heard that.
4 COCHAIR DEVIN: You're saying the primary
5 concern was the equipment piece that you're asking us to
6 address?
7 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, the primary
8 concern, the perception -- see, I think there's a
9 perception, because it is what you see on a day-to-day
10 basis and sort of what underlies that that you don't see,
11 yes, what people were saying is, "Look at my equipment.
12 I'm not able to provide my students with the level of
13 instruction, quality of instruction I would like."
14 However, underlying that it may be because it is
15 a class size difference or in some cases allocations are
16 made at the administrative level that the money is just
17 not going to voc ed, it is coming in and being used for
18 other purposes. Whether that's for reducing class size in
19 nonvocational subject areas, that's a decision. That's
20 what the purpose of the block grant is. It manifests
21 itself in the equipment component, but that's not to
22 suggest it is only the equipment that's causing the
23 problem.
24 MS. WIGERT: Madam Chairman and Senator
25 Goodenough, I would like to respond to your question or
221
1 your comment about the deterioration of vocational
2 education. I'm speaking as the director for vocational
3 education and working on a daily basis with vocational
4 educators.
5 They do lament that their educational programs
6 have deteriorated because of funding because they're
7 making the comparison to when they had the classroom unit.
8 Their contention is they have not been able to grow
9 programs because they have not been able to replace dated
10 equipment, they haven't been able to buy state-of-the-art
11 equipment and they think had they had the resources to do
12 that that would have generated interest in students.
13 So I feel it is incumbent on me to speak on
14 behalf of the educators because those are the comments
15 that I hear on a regular basis.
16 COCHAIR DEVIN: Representative McOmie.
17 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: My concept of what
18 the Supreme Court said was there was not adequate
19 vocational education and that we needed to address that.
20 And I believe, Madam Chairman, it was you that
21 said in one of our meetings either in Afton or Laramie
22 that one of the things that happened is that some years
23 ago the funding model changed and monies where no longer
24 it was said, "This is voc ed money. You use it where you
25 want." And a lot of places didn't want to do vocational
222
1 education.
2 And I look at this number and think to myself,
3 boy, from everything that I've heard it is not a very big
4 number to do all of these things and provide adequate
5 vocational education because your example of the welders,
6 most everybody uses wire welders now and more high-tech
7 equipment. And to keep the kids in school, through
8 vocational education they can go out and work on
9 somebody's house, all of a sudden it becomes clear why
10 they need a little geometry, they need fractions, it helps
11 them understand why they need fractions.
12 I have a concern about recommendation 5 when you
13 said do not impose a categorical spending constraint
14 because all I've heard since I've been on this committee
15 is that's what happened to vocational ed is that we didn't
16 impose this and all of a sudden it went away because there
17 was other demands for that money that people felt were
18 more important than academics.
19 And yet we sit here and hear that 60 percent of
20 kids don't go on to college, and of those, 25 percent or
21 more are gone after the sophomore year. So we need to be
22 teaching people trades. The research -- I like everything
23 you've done, what I hear, but I was concerned about this
24 do not impose a categorical spending constraint.
25 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, Representative
223
1 McOmie, there were some people who did feel they would
2 like to make it categorical or at least some portion of
3 it, for example, 85 percent of resources generated by voc
4 ed should be earmarked for voc ed.
5 On the other hand, we heard from superintendents
6 who felt that they would like to have the flexibility to
7 be able to allocate resources where they're needed. In
8 some cases, in some years they might be flush and want to
9 send them somewhere else and then come back.
10 If we erred, we erred on the side of providing
11 choice and the idea that if we did, we in fact wanted some
12 type of accountability, at least plausible or possible, so
13 at least we could look at that data and see what are the
14 circumstances in terms of its use.
15 However, we felt that given the operation of the
16 block grant model, the idea of preserving local control
17 and flexibility on how many were spent, that allowing it
18 to be at the discretion of the superintendents within each
19 district would accomplish that and so that was -- at the
20 end of the day we acknowledged that we couldn't find
21 consensus and as a result we suggested sort of both sides
22 of that.
23 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Madam Chairman, a
24 follow-up to this. I understand where some of these
25 superintendents are coming from because there are the
224
1 areas of the state where the type of vocational education
2 I'm talking about isn't really what is needed there in
3 that system, probably, although I would disagree with
4 that, but that's the conception.
5 So I understand where they're coming from, and I
6 realize that we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars
7 trying to maintain local control in our education system
8 in Wyoming, and I have always been one of the ones when I
9 was sitting out there when I was the mayor complaining
10 about the legislature telling us what we ought to be doing
11 with our money. I'm kind of torn here but I feel real
12 strong about the need for vocational education.
13 I just wanted to voice that, Madam Chairman.
14 COCHAIR DEVIN: Representative McOmie,
15 you're bringing a current TV character to my mind who
16 says, "And how is that working for you?" I'm wondering.
17 MS. WIGERT: Senator Devin, Mr. Chairman
18 and Representative McOmie, I just would like to add to
19 what Dr. Klein just said. The advisory panel was a group
20 of approximately 13 people, you will remember, but the
21 operational standards, so to speak, that we set up when
22 the panel was convened was that we were looking for
23 consultative input from them representing each of their
24 positions: Educators, superintendents, principals,
25 business manager, and of course the one outside consultant
225
1 from Ohio.
2 Our intent wasn't to come to a form of
3 consensus. So that's why when we heard among them both
4 categorical spending, ear marking or leaving it to the
5 discretion of administrators and local boards, MPR came up
6 with, as Steve described, kind of a middle of the road
7 because we weren't seeking a single solution to bring to
8 the committee.
9 COCHAIR DEVIN: Well, and I guess the
10 option this does present, if we got the funding clarified
11 and asked for an accounting of that funding, then the
12 legislature would have an opportunity in a year or two to
13 look at that piece and see if, in fact, that amount seems
14 to be going in the proper direction.
15 Senator Scott.
16 SENATOR SCOTT: I would suggest to
17 Representative McOmie that the reason you're seeing the
18 deemphasis in the vocational education is that it costs
19 more to provide the programs and where that's not
20 compensated for you have pressure that will then cut them
21 back. You put the 1.29 rating in, which I think does a
22 good job of capturing the additional costs that the
23 program does take, then you remove that incentive because
24 you're getting more money that will compensate you for
25 that higher cost, and I think that will solve most of the
226
1 problems without having to violate the principles in the
2 block grant.
3 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Madam Chairman, I
4 agree with Senator Scott. I would just hope that this
5 committee and the people in this room in voc ed would keep
6 this committee informed if, in fact, this has happened and
7 not what happened in the past.
8 COCHAIR DEVIN: Committee, we do have.
9 MR. SCHMIDT: Madam Chairman, Fremont 1 in
10 Lander, Kirk Schmidt. We're the gatekeepers for the
11 accounting manual and we've been struggling and making
12 sure that we give everybody clear definition of accounting
13 for things and this keeps coming up. One of our biggest
14 struggles right now is with vocational education. And I
15 think MAP relayed to you many times as far as costs for
16 vocational education were not very accurately reported.
17 Well, right now we are struggling with it
18 because there's no clear definition of vocational
19 education. If you look in your report on pages 12 and 13,
20 there's kind of two different things that we need to know.
21 We need a hard definition. If you look on 12, it talks
22 about certification for teachers. If you say okay, you
23 report the classes taught by teachers who are certified in
24 those areas, well, you're going to leave things out
25 because people who are certified in those areas may be
227
1 teaching classes in other areas that may or may not be
2 vocational education.
3 You look at the proposed definition on the
4 bottom of 13, while that may work, it is going to be very
5 global as it relates to all 48 school districts. They're
6 going to define in their school district what is
7 vocational education and that's how it is going to get
8 reported.
9 I mean, we need help from the Data Advisory
10 Committee. We need to know what do you want us to tell
11 school districts to account for dollars under vocational
12 education. Right now we have a meeting next Monday and
13 right now I can't think that we're going to get anything
14 resolved as it relates to that that's going to help
15 anybody track those expenditures because we flat don't
16 know what that definition is.
17 You can go back to the old traditional welding,
18 auto mechanics, things like that, but the world has
19 changed. You have computers that have completely changed
20 vocational education. How many of those classes are
21 vocational ed, how many are applied math, things like
22 that. We need to know. And that is the thing, one thing
23 that hung us up last year, somebody needs to tell us,
24 define voc ed. We will tell you what it costs but until
25 we know what the definition is, we can't help.
228
1 COCHAIR DEVIN: Let me ask, is it your
2 perception that that is still unclear at this point if we
3 would move forward on the funding of one of these pieces,
4 if we move forward on funding, has that clarified that
5 piece for you? Does it take further work by this group or
6 work by the data facilitation group if we move forward on
7 the data facilitation piece? Where do you really feel you
8 are?
9 MR. SCHMIDT: Speaking personally -- and
10 Mr. Biggio can speak from his point -- this doesn't change
11 it in my mind. This doesn't tell us here what vocational
12 is. It is talking about weighting of different vocational
13 classes, but what exactly are those? If this definition
14 on the bottom of 13 is adopted that tells each school
15 district okay, you're going to have to use your judgment,
16 define in your school district what's vocational education
17 and if it is by definition voc ed, here is how you report
18 it.
19 SENATOR SCOTT: Technical question,
20 definition on bottom of 13, we can't find it. What are
21 you talking about?
22 COCHAIR DEVIN: Maybe it is getting late
23 in the day, but if a course -- if the funding fell in the
24 category that Mr. Biggio's department would actually fund
25 at 1.29 or a higher figure, would that, in fact, not
229
1 define then what is a vocational course? And if you're
2 working backwards, to me that seems to clarify it, but it
3 seems I'm missing something.
4 MR. SCHMIDT: Madam Chairman, from my side
5 of it, the department wouldn't know from our school
6 district what was vocational unless we said, "Here is our
7 vocational classes," and then it would be funded
8 accordingly. I don't think it works the other way. The
9 department doesn't come in and say, "Let's look at all of
10 the classes at Lander High School and define which ones
11 are voc ed and which ones aren't."
12 COCHAIR DEVIN: Could you comment because
13 it is my perception it does --
14 DR. KLEIN: Let me ask a question. If you
15 were told that for the courses that are taught by
16 instructors that hold a vocational endorsement you could
17 generate -- you could look at inception of those courses,
18 correct?
19 MR. SCHMIDT: Yes.
20 DR. KLEIN: I called the PowerSchool and
21 they said there was a way to program it. Conceivably that
22 would be courses that at the district level would be seen
23 as vocational in content perhaps but not taught by one of
24 these vocationally endorsed instructors, at which point
25 there would be a need to apply for a waiver and then
230
1 ultimately there would be criteria developed by the
2 Department of Education which would say yes or no, they
3 would review the application, approve or disapprove and
4 then you could or could not count those students.
5 And the same I would apply -- if you have
6 courses taught by a vocational instructor but it is out of
7 their area, ag teacher teaching a business ag course, for
8 that circumstance it could be approved or disapproved and
9 count or not count those students.
10 If you can identify instructors and that's
11 collected on a 602 -- if you can identify who was an
12 instructor with a recognized vocational endorsement and if
13 you're able to identify courses that you believe are
14 vocational but may not be taught by instructors without
15 that, you would have a basis under our model to be able to
16 then count the students within those courses.
17 MR. SCHMIDT: Madam Chairman, I would
18 agree with that. But it still comes back to this
19 definition is going to be individual by district because
20 some districts may apply for the waiver saying, "Okay, we
21 think this is vocational," but another district may think,
22 "We aren't going to apply because we don't think that's
23 vocational."
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: I guess that begins to get
25 sorted out as we go along, but the approval or disapproval
231
1 of the waiver would clarify that piece.
2 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, I want to tack
3 on one thing. There's also the three courses in a
4 sequence or in a cluster area. Again, that would be up to
5 the district and/or school to decide what is course work
6 that fits together. And it may well be that there's
7 considerable leeway in that a business ed course is part
8 of agriculture cluster and industrial arts or trades part,
9 because one could argue that's all interrelated. So that,
10 again, becomes an opportunity. If you can't find three
11 courses, then you have an opportunity to apply for a
12 waiver to go for your two.
13 COCHAIR DEVIN: Mr. Nelson, did you have a
14 comment before I go to Senator Scott?
15 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, Dr. Klein
16 just said what I was going to say about the sequencing and
17 the cluster requirements. The guidelines are there. When
18 we get through the bill that may help you a little bit
19 more. They still will require some kind of statewide
20 guidelines and criteria that Larry's shop and Teri and you
21 as the Data Advisory Group have to work on.
22 This doesn't do it all. It provides you a
23 big -- you know, some parameters but you still have to
24 finesse it in because it will require more work than what
25 Steve has put together and what this bill puts together.
232
1 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
2 SENATOR SCOTT: I'm really concerned that
3 he put his finger on something that's going to be quite a
4 problem for us here, and let me give you an example.
5 Suppose you have an instructor who has a vocational
6 certification but is also competent and certified to teach
7 mathematics at the high school level. How are you going
8 to separate out that and if the school says, "We have a
9 vocationally certified instructor teaching the math course
10 and the math course is vocationally useful," which most
11 math courses are, are you going to wind up in those
12 circumstances with all of your math vocational at the 1.29
13 rate or is there some further definition that's needed
14 here?
15 MS. WIGERT: Senator Devin and Senator
16 Scott, I would like to reference you back to the full
17 definition, because when we talk about a vocational
18 program as a sequence of three or more courses in a
19 vocational area or cluster, the caveat there is that these
20 are technical knowledge and skills and proficiencies that
21 are needed to obtain paid or unpaid employment in emerging
22 occupations. So the definition of vocational education
23 still comes back to the fact that we're talking about
24 occupations for which you do not need a Bachelor's degree.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: It strikes me there's a
233
1 world of occupations for which algebra courses are
2 extraordinarily useful, that they are a reasonable part of
3 any vocational sequence or many vocational sequences and
4 it strikes me if you had an instructor properly certified,
5 all of your math courses or at least all of -- maybe not
6 advanced calculus, although that certainly leads to an
7 engineering profession -- but a tremendous number of your
8 math courses are going to end up being vocational, and I
9 don't think that's exactly what we have in mind. But I
10 don't quite see under the current set of definitions how
11 that problem is solved.
12 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, Senator
13 Scott, that's certainly a possibility. In fact, it may be
14 even in the data that we collected that people were
15 counted that way. We did not do a study, sort of
16 cross-tab vocationally endorsed instructors with other
17 academic nonvocational subject instruction areas and see
18 if there was that situation going on.
19 It is probably fairly straightforward if one has
20 the 602 data procedure and it might be worth looking into
21 that to see to what extent this is really a problem or to
22 what extent it is a hypothetical problem that could arise.
23 COCHAIR DEVIN: I would like to take the
24 last two comments that are being offered and then I would
25 like to move to some of our bills and options because we
234
1 do yet have another subject and if -- you know, I guess my
2 sense is that if we're down to the detail that we have a
3 certified math instructor and a certified vocational ed
4 instructor in the same person, we may have a rare
5 individual in this state. But if we need to further
6 refine that, we need to look at that in detail when we get
7 narrowed down a little more.
8 But I do want to take the two comments because
9 you're raising areas that further down the road or as we
10 get into these drafts we probably need to consider.
11 MR. SCHMIDT: Madam Chairman, Kirk
12 Schmidt. I think Mr. Nelson hit it right on the head.
13 This is just the first step. I think to get everybody
14 together and get it more defined is going to take a lot of
15 work by a lot of different places.
16 And sometimes we act like Wyoming is this huge,
17 you know, 40-million-student, 100-school-district state
18 that we can't get things done very easily, and that's not
19 true. It is pretty easy to get things done. What Dave's
20 point was going through this is just the first step to
21 defining it and getting it in one place because in Wyoming
22 big, small, medium-sized school districts have a lot of
23 teachers that teach across different subject areas. We're
24 all going to have to sort through that because there are
25 teachers who teach two classes of vocational education and
235
1 six that don't qualify.
2 So I think it is probably headed in the right
3 direction, but just so you know, we're far from done.
4 From the Data Advisory Committee, we're still kind of
5 tumbling along as far as cost. When we talk about those
6 things, you're going to have to bear with us all.
7 COCHAIR DEVIN: I appreciate knowing that
8 because it is one of those details when you get into
9 trying to actually apply it.
10 Mr. Nelson, we have in our possession one bill
11 that's been drafted, but I understand there are two more.
12 MR. NELSON: Right, Madam Chairman. What
13 Mary will be handing out now will be the LSO 238 and that
14 is the draft that carries forward the MPR recommendation,
15 option 4 as we called it, from Laramie. And it was not
16 sent out with your other packet of bills. We just
17 completed it Monday. So it is hot off the presses. But
18 that would be perhaps where you want to start.
19 COCHAIR DEVIN: So this is option 4 as
20 presented in here?
21 MR. NELSON: Option 4 as Dr. Klein just
22 described to you in the report summary.
23 And, Madam Chairman, would you like me to just
24 go through the elements of the bill?
25 COCHAIR DEVIN: I think that would be good
236
1 since we've just received it.
2 MR. NELSON: The first program is covered
3 in the draft, begins on page 2 and this is language that
4 would implement the grant program that is recommended by
5 MPR, the startup grant for new program development.
6 The language attempts to reflect the basics of
7 the program as presented by the MPR report and essentially
8 it is a grant that is activated by an application from the
9 districts, is in an amount that is outside of the block
10 grant amount under the special voc ed adjustments within
11 the model, and it would be something that would be limited
12 to those programs that are initiated and are new. It
13 would give them money to get it going, so to speak.
14 And that language continues through the bottom
15 of page 4. Essentially the timelines are that the
16 district would have to get it to the state department such
17 that by August 15th of each school year the department has
18 to make a decision on that grant.
19 The criteria for the grant applications are
20 stated on page 3, lines 8 through 22, which are pretty
21 much reflected in the MPR report. And essentially that's
22 the grant program.
23 On page 5, this is where we get into the
24 cost-based adjustment for vocational education. Pages 5
25 and 6 are important. They provide the definitions, in a
237
1 sense the eligibility criteria that set the parameters for
2 the adjustment. And we just got through discussing some
3 of that.
4 The first definition is for what constitutes a
5 vocational course. Again, it is limited to high school,
6 grades 9 through 12. It is something that has to be
7 taught by a certified instructor, voc ed instructor.
8 A program is defined on pages 17 through 24
9 which, as Dr. Klein just pointed out, is a 9 through 12
10 program that has a sequence of three or more courses as
11 defined in paragraph 1, or a career cluster. And as Teri
12 pointed out, it has to provide them with sufficient skills
13 or proficiencies to obtain employment in emerging
14 occupations.
15 And continuing on page 6, we define the voc ed
16 student. We specify the grade levels and that has to mean
17 an FTE count. And, again, that's according to guidelines
18 that the state department will prescribe for districts on
19 submitting that count to get a weight, the 1.29 weight.
20 The same thing with the voc ed teacher on lines
21 9 through 21. The FTE count is as prescribed by the state
22 department guidelines and high school instruction in the
23 vocational course as we've defined in paragraph 1. Those
24 set the parameter for the adjustment.
25 On page 7 begins the actual calculation, and
238
1 beginning on lines 5 through 16 this is where we extract
2 amounts within the model that are available for vocational
3 education, both for the teacher salaries and benefits
4 components and also for the equipment and supplies
5 component. So what the proposal does is extract voc ed
6 related amounts within the model, within those components
7 and only within the high school prototype component model.
8 Subsection D adds back in amounts for vocational
9 education as allocated under the MPR proposal. The first
10 statement at the bottom of page 7, lines 23 through 24 and
11 on the top of page 8 puts together the five-mile
12 requirement, that they be treated as one school that was
13 discussed by Dr. Klein in his report.
14 Page 8, paragraph 2, lines 4 through 9, that's
15 the 1.29 weight factor times your FTE student count. That
16 count, then, in paragraph 3 is multiplied back into the
17 model by the teacher salaries and benefits component in
18 the prototype for vocational education. That brings it
19 back into the model, reallocated based upon the 1.29
20 weight.
21 4 deals with the equipment and supplies
22 allocation that is included in the MPR report, and
23 paragraph 4 essentially puts it back in the model based
24 upon the FTE count of teachers, so it is reallocated back
25 into the model, again at the high school, programs based
239
1 upon FTE teachers.
2 In addition, paragraph 5, page 9, lines 5
3 through 15 puts in an additional amount for vocational
4 equipment that is an enhancement, an amount that is over
5 and above the FTE instructor count, so it is an additional
6 amount that is based upon necessary equipment enhancements
7 that you may find necessary for your program. And that's
8 based upon an allocation factor that is in the MPR
9 recommendations.
10 So it is an additional factored amount that is
11 brought back into the model for -- we phrase it vocational
12 equipment replacement and enhancement assistance, so to
13 speak, that's built into the model and that's taken care
14 of in paragraph 5.
15 Paragraph 6 at the bottom of page 9 and
16 continuing over on the top of page 10 is the two-program
17 minimum weight adjustment that is recommended in the MPR
18 model. And what that does, it looks at the amount that's
19 generated under the reallocation of both the student
20 participation and the vocational education equipment and
21 supplies and ensures that each district is capable of
22 providing the two-program minimum amount in the model.
23 And this guarantees that two-program minimum funding. And
24 that's consistent with the MPR report.
25 Paragraph E simply is the infusion into the
240
1 model where we add it up on a school basis to a district
2 basis and bring it back in on an ADM basis. That's
3 consistent with our model application in the block grant
4 model.
5 Subsection F at the bottom of page 10 and
6 continuing on over to really all of page 11 is the waiver
7 process where a district can apply for a waiver for both
8 the student participation, for certified teacher
9 requirements that we impose, as well as the sequencing,
10 three-course sequencing and cluster requirements that are
11 imposed for becoming a valid vocational education career
12 program.
13 Section 2 of the bill is just an amendment to
14 the existing adjustments that we provide in our statutes
15 that reflect all adjustment needs of the prototypes. And
16 that amendment really is on page 12, lines 12 through 14
17 where we just add that as an adjustment to the cost-based
18 model. That's all that amendment is doing.
19 Section 3 of the model is the hold harmless and
20 that is done for the five-year period only as referenced
21 on page 12, line 20 for school year '03-'04 through
22 '07-'08, so it is limited to a five-year phase-in period.
23 It essentially is dealing with student participation rate
24 only. That's what we're holding harmless -- wait a
25 minute, it is also holding harmless the equipment and
241
1 supplies also. I'm sorry. The latest version does hold
2 everything harmless, both the student participation amount
3 as well as the vocational education and supply amount to
4 what you're getting under the model now compared to the
5 reallocation. And that is limited to a five-year phase-in
6 period and that's what Section 3 does.
7 Section 4, the bill requires the state
8 department with the assistance of the Department of Audit
9 to verify numbers, participation rates and data that was
10 used with the MPR-recommended adjustment.
11 The Section 5 provides the 250,000 appropriation
12 for the grant program, and part of this bill is 239 which
13 you really need to implement it which was distributed to
14 you, but I will go over that separately.
15 Keep in mind there are many duties that are
16 imposed upon the state department to carry out 238, so
17 they would kind of go together.
18 COCHAIR DEVIN: Now, do we have a fiscal
19 note on this bill or do we know --
20 MR. NELSON: We do have the
21 district-by-district breakdowns and --
22 MS. BYRNES: Madam Chairman, it will be
23 the same figures that Dr. Klein reported to you in the
24 summary. But here is the district-by-district review of
25 it. So they should match what Dr. Klein presented.
242
1 COCHAIR DEVIN: Essentially we have the
2 1,485,000 in option 4 plus the 275,871 in the upgrading of
3 vocational equipment?
4 MR. NELSON: Right, upgrading.
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: And then we have the
6 $250,000 grant program?
7 MR. NELSON: The one caveat to that, Madam
8 Chairman, is the 100,000 that's included in there from the
9 state department, a little more than that, and that figure
10 is isolated in draft 239. It will be contained in a
11 separate appropriation.
12 COCHAIR DEVIN: And then do we know -- the
13 last figures that Dr. Klein gave us do not include the
14 hold harmless, or they do?
15 MR. NELSON: They do, Madam Chairman.
16 COCHAIR DEVIN: They do? So this is the
17 amount of additional money?
18 MR. NELSON: Over and above what you're
19 paying out there.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: Okay. To go to
21 Representative McOmie's concerns, some concerns that he
22 had raised, do we know how much money we are backing out
23 of the current formula and then putting back in? Because
24 this is in addition to what is already in there; is that
25 correct?
243
1 MR. NELSON: Yes, this would be over and
2 above the amounts contained in the model currently.
3 COCHAIR DEVIN: And do we know --
4 MR. NELSON: Exact amount.
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: I guess I would be happy
6 if we had a ballpark, or do we know that?
7 MR. NELSON: I will refer that to
8 Mr. Jensen -- and he's trying to avoid me. I think
9 Richard Jensen is back there working on that right now,
10 total extraction cost.
11 COCHAIR DEVIN: I guess the point that we
12 need to be clear on, there's a great deal more than $2
13 million in the formula when you have funded these
14 students?
15 MR. NELSON: Right, right.
16 COCHAIR DEVIN: Committee, questions.
17 Senator Scott.
18 SENATOR SCOTT: In the sheet that was just
19 passed out, I'm looking at the column in the middle of the
20 page that says, "Adjusted Teacher Salary to Support
21 Reallocation. No new dollars," and I see a statewide --
22 on the statewide column, Wyoming, first space I see is
23 .959, et cetera, figure. My understanding is you've
24 multiplied some teacher salaries, is it just the 9 through
25 12 ones, in the block grant by that number?
244
1 MS. BYRNES: Madam Chairman, Senator
2 Scott, this is Dr. Klein's work.
3 So you may want to answer this yourself.
4 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, Senator Scott,
5 this is all predicated on 9 through 12 resources.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, the figure
7 there, the .959, that figure is based on, am I right when
8 I'm saying based on what it costs to make this neutral?
9 DR. KLEIN: Exactly right, to make this
10 cost neutral we adjust teacher salary and benefits per ADM
11 in the formula by a proportional amount to take everyone
12 down and multiply by the increased ADM and it zeros out.
13 SENATOR SCOTT: So there's no cost basis
14 for this other than the need to make this cost neutral?
15 DR. KLEIN: Exactly.
16 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I will
17 suggest to the committee that's going to get us in legal
18 trouble.
19 COCHAIR DEVIN: I think we're deep in it.
20 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, Senator Scott,
21 maybe it would help if I -- if we had built the formula
22 with the vocational adjustment at 1.29, conceptually
23 that's what should have gone in for 9-12 to address the
24 vocational. What we've done is mathematically incorporate
25 that into the formula so we could zero this out.
245
1 And that will leave in the Wyoming block grant
2 amount -- there will be differing categories. We will
3 have to add columns. And one we will look at the cost for
4 nonvocational and then we would have the vocational to
5 generate those amounts so that explicitly we account for
6 it in the formula.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, you know,
8 I think the work of the consultants has been very good and
9 very useful in determining the vocational costs. It is
10 this piece of the thing that bothers me because it seems
11 to me sure enough we had vocational accounted for in the
12 main formula, but we didn't account for it using the 1.29
13 weight because we didn't have the data available to do
14 that, so he couldn't have done it. And of course he
15 didn't and it has been a problem, it was known from the
16 start, Supreme Court further identified it.
17 Now that we know it, it doesn't seem to me to
18 make sense to go back then and mathematically adjust
19 everybody else down. It seems to me that we've uncovered
20 a piece of the formula that was more expensive and that
21 the sensible thing to do is to say okay, the allowance we
22 had was based on the old weight where you treated them the
23 same, and now we found that vocational education is more
24 expensive and we ought to use the 1.29 weight consistently
25 throughout the districts and not have this artificial
246
1 re-evaluation now.
2 And, Madam Chairman, I don't think she's passed
3 the sheet out, but it does imply an increased cost of
4 about 4 million. And I think that's the extra cost of
5 running the vocational programs.
6 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, Senator Scott,
7 I'm aware that there is another sheet that does show it is
8 around 4 million and I think we just need to be very clear
9 about the assumptions underlying it. The model that we
10 put forward reallocates resources. Recognizing that
11 resources are already being, on average, incorporated in
12 the funding that districts get, we calibrated -- we
13 accounted for how many FTE vocational students there were
14 across schools, multiplied by 1.29 and then reallocated
15 the resources as if there were this many students in the
16 state.
17 And if we did not adjust downward the salaries
18 and benefits to make a fiscal-neutral solution, we would
19 get your solution which is the second assumption which is
20 that vocational education is not on average included in
21 the formula at all and that we need to, by applying a 1.29
22 weight to everyone, thereby increase funding by the
23 marginal cost.
24 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman.
25 DR. KLEIN: Two separate assumptions.
247
1 COCHAIR DEVIN: So you have computed the
2 assumption in the first set of figures here that it is
3 available at the average rate of 14 percent?
4 DR. KLEIN: Yes.
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: And it is funded at that
6 rate because that is being provided and so forth with the
7 caveat that the equipment and start-up grants and those
8 types of things needed to be additional?
9 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, those were an
10 addition that we in fact said if on average people were
11 getting what they were -- if people were supplying
12 vocational course work, extent of program comparable to
13 the statewide average, there would be no need to
14 reallocate. Everybody would be getting what they're
15 getting.
16 But the problem was that some people offer above
17 average and the Supreme Court said we have to recognize
18 that and fund accordingly. What we, in fact, did was pull
19 out and then reallocate back so that around the average
20 people above it were compensated. People below the
21 average would in theory -- without hold harmless would in
22 theory -- not in theory -- they would lose those resources
23 but we would be holding state spending constant under this
24 assumption.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I think
248
1 where we are in the assumptions is right in there. It
2 seems to be what has happened in the models, the weight
3 has been 1 instead of 1.29 because we didn't have any
4 justification for going any higher and, in fact, we have
5 nothing perfect but as good as we're likely to get
6 evidence that the proper weight is 1.29. And I think we
7 ought to apply that uniformly across everybody and not
8 have this artificial adjustment down. And that's the
9 difference in opinion.
10 COCHAIR DEVIN: Dr. Smith.
11 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, what's
12 happening, though, is that you're looking at voc ed
13 weighted 1.29, physics may be weighted at 1.4, art may be
14 1.7. So you're headed down a slippery slope if you go the
15 way that Senator Scott implies because it is, well, this
16 is more expensive. True, physics is more expensive,
17 chemistry is more expensive, and if you do that, then you
18 should say and PE is .4 and freshman English is .6 and
19 eventually you're going to have to weight every single
20 class to come out where -- to come out even.
21 If you did that, and if you just said well,
22 let's look at voc ed at 1.29 and the next one is well,
23 let's look at art, 1.6, let's look at this, and pretty
24 soon you've doubled the amount you're spending because no
25 one is going to say let's look at PE, freshman English,
249
1 let's look at freshman social studies, courses that are
2 demonstrably less expensive than these more expensive
3 courses.
4 COCHAIR DEVIN: In your earlier testimony
5 you said that you looked at high cost and low-cost courses
6 and made a recommendation.
7 DR. SMITH: That's correct.
8 COCHAIR DEVIN: Committee, we have a
9 bill -- Dr. Higdon.
10 DR. HIGDON: Madam Chairman, are you
11 looking at the other bill?
12 COCHAIR DEVIN: We are looking at both
13 bills. There's a companion to this and an additional one.
14 DR. HIGDON: My recommendation on this
15 bill would probably look like one of the bills that you're
16 going to look at. But let me just echo what Dr. Smith
17 said because we actually agree on a lot of things and one
18 thing we agree on is when they did the initial study and
19 made the recommendation, they looked at the average cost
20 of programs, but the class size number they recommended
21 the legislature adopt was 17 students per teacher and
22 since then we've had two increases in class size which
23 decreases the number of teachers you have.
24 We went to 19 teachers and then we went to 21
25 teachers. And I think mixed into this when you go from 17
250
1 teachers, around 41 teachers in a high school of 600 --
2 when you go to 19, you are down around 37 and when you go
3 to 21 you're down around 33. And so there's really -- I
4 have a real concern that MAP was consulted to see that
5 the -- I don't know that they knew the exact number in
6 Wyoming of the additional costs for special ed. But at 19
7 I would say we could handle that additional cost. Given a
8 class size of 17, it wouldn't have been a big issue. At
9 21 it is because we're down approximately two teachers.
10 The .29, to maintain the vocational classes we
11 need that applied to all of the classes that fall under
12 the new regulations you're going to adopt, we need that
13 additional cost. As quantified by a third party it is
14 based on what we're expending even though that expenditure
15 is depressed historically. Representative McOmie said he
16 would like it categorical. It is. We have to spend it
17 for a year and report it to the State to get reimbursed
18 for it. We have to do it with certified vocational
19 educators and in approved state department vocational
20 classes. So it is categorical because when we spend it,
21 we get reimbursed for it.
22 So I would ask that as you consider the other
23 bill, you would look at the fact that have you had
24 information from anyone that when you went from a class
25 size of 17 in a high school to a class size of 19 that
251
1 that would cover the increased cost of vocational
2 education. I would say no, because we did not know what
3 it was. We knew what the average might be. We didn't
4 know what it would be. And did you get that information
5 when you went from 19 to 21 in the legislature and my
6 belief is you did not.
7 And so I would ask you, regardless how you
8 interpret the court decision or the adequacy of 21 or
9 whatever, that you look at the importance of vocational
10 education and you look at funding it at whatever level
11 exists with increased funding by .29 percent as they've
12 recommended and demonstrated.
13 Because I think without doing that, you're going
14 to lose programs. This idea we will take money away from
15 the block grant for people that don't offer it violates
16 the whole concept of the block grant. Hopefully in
17 another bill I hope you will have something similar to
18 that. And I ask you to give that consideration. I don't
19 think it is that expensive.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: Shall we take a look,
21 Mr. Nelson, at the companion bill to this one which I
22 believe is 39?
23 MR. NELSON: 239, Madam Chairman.
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: It was in our packet.
25 MR. NELSON: This implements the remainder
252
1 of MPR recommendations that are required for
2 administration, implementation, monitoring, auditing
3 activities by the state. I will briefly go through the
4 main parts of the bill.
5 On page two, Section 91.513 deals with the
6 auditing function. It requires the Department of Audit to
7 audit districts on their reporting of FTE counts, program
8 course, determinations and other information required in
9 reporting for vocational education. It puts this on a
10 three-year cycle that the rest of the audits are conducted
11 under.
12 Page 3 deals with the additional duties imposed
13 upon the state superintendent, state department.
14 Paragraph 23 at the top of page 3 deals with
15 those student counts, the FTE counts of students, of
16 full-time faculty as well as the identified --
17 identification of the vocational education courses which
18 we were just discussing as very integral to the operation
19 and the continued implementation of the adjustment.
20 Paragraph 24 provides for the waiver process.
21 It directly requires the state department to administer
22 that and to implement it.
23 Paragraph 25 at the bottom of page 3 gives the
24 grant program and puts that responsibility on the state
25 department.
253
1 Paragraph 26 at the top of page 4 is a catchall
2 primarily directed at reporting district voc ed
3 expenditures.
4 21-2-203 on page 4, lines 5 through 15 deals
5 with the Data Advisory Group which was just discussed
6 about their involvement in establishing the parameters and
7 criteria for voc ed courses, student counts, so on and so
8 forth.
9 Page 5, lines 4 through 10 bring in the state
10 board to make sure that the programs are aligned with
11 state standards and performance and content standards.
12 Page 5, lines 17 through 21 require the school
13 districts to report by school vocational education
14 information, and page 6 brings in the state department's
15 costs associated with administering and implementing the
16 adjustment and the information necessary to operate and
17 administer the adjustment, 185,000 and one full-time
18 position and one part-time position.
19 And essentially that's 239.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: Any questions on that,
21 committee?
22 Mr. Ehlers.
23 MR. EHLERS: Madam Chairman, John Ehlers
24 from the Board of Education.
25 Page 5, you have a paragraph, lines 4 through
254
1 10, that offers some duties to the state board and right
2 now we haven't really had a chance to take a very hard
3 look at it. This is not the typical wording that we would
4 see and we may have some suggestions we would like to
5 offer on that, but we could get that back through the LSO
6 office or whatever, if that's okay with you.
7 COCHAIR DEVIN: Thank you. Would
8 appreciate your studying that.
9 Then let's move on to -- if there are no further
10 questions or comments, I would like to move on to --
11 SENATOR PECK: Madam Chairman, page 2 of
12 this bill, periodic audits, is that standard language to
13 provide for flexibility or are we usually more specific?
14 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, I borrowed
15 this language from existing language in the audit and so
16 it is their current language that directs them to do their
17 audits. I might defer to Pam Robinson who is here, if she
18 has any comments, if she would rather a different language
19 be used.
20 MS. ROBINSON: Pam Robinson, Department of
21 Audit. When I initially read this I did not see that this
22 was terribly out of the norm. It is a little more
23 specific on who you have to report to, but I think we can
24 abide by it.
25 COCHAIR DEVIN: I would ask the parties
255
1 involved to take a look at that, please.
2 We have another bill that we need to look at at
3 this point.
4 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, LSO 240 which
5 you have not gotten and which we will get to you right now
6 is the option 5 of the vocational education adjustment.
7 And many of the elements are very similar to 238. The
8 prime difference is on page 5, lines 4 through 9, this is
9 where we put back in the student participation amounts
10 into the cost-based model. The 1.29 weight is put back in
11 at the full amount for teacher salary and benefits
12 component, is not put back in at the vocational education
13 teacher salary and benefits amount in the model. So it is
14 put back in more broadly and not restricted to the teacher
15 education -- the vocational education amounts.
16 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, this is
17 the bill that I asked to have drafted, and frankly, I saw
18 it ten minutes before this section of the meeting started,
19 but my understanding is that you aren't applying the 1.29
20 to anything outside the vocational program?
21 MR. NELSON: No, we're not reallocating
22 based upon the amount contained in the model. We take it
23 times the full teacher salary and benefits amount to
24 infuse it back in.
25 SENATOR SCOTT: Okay. Madam Chairman, so
256
1 what we're doing is instead of having -- best I understood
2 looking at the cost sheets, what happens is instead of
3 having this .9599, et cetera, adjustment that's in the
4 previous cost sheet, the adjustment there is 1.0, in other
5 words, no adjustment, and you aren't doing the reduction
6 in the -- to keep the thing cost neutral. What we've done
7 is identified a new expense at 1.29 times the old expense
8 for vocational students -- vocational teachers, and that's
9 basically the difference between them.
10 Otherwise my instructions were to draft it to
11 include the two-program feature and the other features
12 that have been recommended. So that's really the
13 differences in that area.
14 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, there was one
15 other change on the waiver. This proposal, 240, does not
16 include a requirement under the other waiver program that
17 would limit it to a two-year thing, to ensure that the
18 instructor was certified within a period of two years to
19 maintain that waiver.
20 That is excluded under 240 and it does appear in
21 238, and where that appears at 238 is on page 11, lines 14
22 through 16. That is not included in the 240.
23 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, that is
24 really a separate issue from the funding. I think there
25 instead of having that two-year limitation then where you
257
1 have teachers who may not have the vocational education
2 but have been teaching a particular vocational course for
3 years, that there's no point in having that two-year
4 limitation. They ought to be allowed to just continue to
5 do that. And that's a little piece of unnecessary
6 fencing. It is a separate issue from the financing.
7 COCHAIR DEVIN: Okay. It may be clear on
8 these sheets, but the first option that we looked at in
9 238 was $2.1 million new money implementation.
10 What is the new money implementation in 240?
11 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, I think
12 that's not reflected on yours -- is that on the back page
13 of your -- I believe it was $4.7 million. I don't see
14 that reflected here.
15 MS. BYRNES: The total cost will be found
16 on the first page, 4.827, do you see that, under option 4,
17 and then you would add also the --
18 MS. WIGERT: Mary, we calculated it.
19 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, we calculated
20 it. We calculated that the combined cost -- this would be
21 let's net out the 100,000 and not talk -- for the
22 recommendation 4, so let's talk about the --
23 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's the piece attached
24 to 238?
25 DR. KLEIN: Yes --
258
1 SENATOR SCOTT: No, 239.
2 DR. KLEIN: 239. We calculated it would
3 be 2,011,325, so 2,011,325 for the MPR option 4. And then
4 with option 5, again without the 10,000, it is 5,353,021.
5 So 5,353,021 is the cost difference between the two
6 approaches.
7 MS. WIGERT: 238 should be 2,011,325?
8 DR. KLEIN: 2,011,325.
9 COCHAIR DEVIN: Committee, you have before
10 you the three bills with essentially two different options
11 in them.
12 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman.
13 COCHAIR DEVIN: Yes, Senator Scott.
14 SENATOR SCOTT: What I'm going to suggest
15 is that we work off of 238 and then I'm going to move to
16 amend the 240 provision into 238 with regard to the
17 financial model.
18 Madam Chairman, is that a way to structure the
19 committee's decision that would meet with your favor in
20 terms of getting a decision out of the committee?
21 COCHAIR DEVIN: So you would ask that we
22 approve 238 --
23 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I would
24 ask we work off 238 and then ask to amend the financial
25 provisions out of 240 into 238.
259
1 COCHAIR DEVIN: I guess we could do that.
2 We've got a piece in 238 that we back out, but then I'm
3 wondering how you perceive then people would either vote
4 up or down the provisions --
5 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Vote amendments.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: -- up or down the
7 provisions of 240 and if you vote yes, those replace --
8 what it does, if I'm not mistaken, is remove some of the
9 238 provisions.
10 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, what is not
11 in 238 which I believe was intended to be included in 240
12 was the grant program and some of the other elements that
13 go into the whole option. What 240 just focuses on is the
14 exact cost-based model adjustment only without going into
15 the grant program that consumes pages 2 through 5.
16 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, he's
17 exactly right and I certainly didn't intend for the draft
18 to in any way disparage that grant program. I fully
19 support the recommendations there.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: So we would -- is it your
21 perception we would move 238 and then work it in the
22 fashion that 240 would be amended or not amended into it?
23 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, so move.
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: There's a motion that we
25 move 238.
260
1 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Second.
2 COCHAIR DEVIN: And there's a second.
3 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I move we
4 substitute in 238 the financial provisions adjusting the
5 model out of 240 as an amendment to 238.
6 COCHAIR DEVIN: Does the committee have
7 any questions on that?
8 Is there a second?
9 SENATOR GOODENOUGH: Second.
10 COCHAIR DEVIN: There's a second.
11 We've heard comments on this. Is there further
12 comment or discussion?
13 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Question.
14 COCHAIR DEVIN: All of those in favor of
15 amending -- I'm not sure how to state this correctly --
16 240 -- those provisions proposed in 240 that are
17 essentially the financial differences in the funding of
18 per student, weighted student, all those in favor, raise
19 your hand?
20 All those opposed.
21 That motion does not carry.
22 Do we need to do it both ways? That motion
23 doesn't carry.
24 Is there further work you would like to do?
25 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Madam Chairman, I
261
1 would like to strike on page 11, lines 14 through 16 --
2 and the reason I do that, Madam Chairman, I feel that some
3 of the smaller school districts might really have a
4 problem with this, and as far as that goes, maybe even
5 some of the larger school districts. I don't know, but I
6 do believe some of the smaller districts.
7 COCHAIR DEVIN: Okay. Orient us,
8 essentially striking of that is essentially the waiver
9 process?
10 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: It said that if
11 the -- I believe -- my intention was that after two years
12 they can't get the money unless they've got a certified
13 vocational instructor, and this says they don't have to if
14 you take it out.
15 COCHAIR DEVIN: And this is a separate
16 issue that Senator Scott --
17 SENATOR SCOTT: Right, I will second his
18 motion.
19 COCHAIR DEVIN: Discussion?
20 I guess my question would be is there --
21 traditionally there are people who have taught these
22 courses who have skills in this area. Does this give us
23 any additional problems that we're not seeing at this
24 point in time?
25 MS. HILL: Madam Chairman, the committee
262
1 should know that teacher certification is handled by PTSB,
2 and there are provisional certifications and temporary
3 certifications. Those are not likely to last any longer
4 than this language here. Further, there's the
5 accreditation process which also monitors certification of
6 instructors. So there is no leniency granted specifically
7 to vocational educators that you wouldn't have for other
8 fields.
9 So you should just be clear knowing that part of
10 it, that this probably doesn't have any effect one way or
11 the other.
12 COCHAIR DEVIN: Representative McOmie.
13 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Madam Chairman, it
14 was not my intent and I don't think in reading the bill --
15 we still have to have a certified teacher. This is just
16 saying they don't have be certified vocational teachers
17 because we have some people doing this in some of the
18 smaller school districts that aren't. So that's why I
19 wanted to make that clear. Then we can deal with the FTEs
20 or whatever they are later.
21 COCHAIR DEVIN: Any additional questions
22 the committee has?
23 Then we are voting in favor of -- we are voting
24 on the amendment to remove the language lines 14 through
25 16 on page 11.
263
1 All those in favor -- I may get it out yet --
2 aye.
3 Opposed, no.
4 That motion does carry.
5 Any other pieces you would like to act on on
6 this bill before we take a vote on introduction?
7 SENATOR SCOTT: You're expecting to take a
8 final vote on introduction at this time?
9 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott, I felt we
10 were there. Unless the committee has objections, we could
11 get this one moving forward.
12 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Well, Madam
13 Chairman, I thought Dr. Higdon had a comment on a second
14 bill or something. I would like to hear what it was.
15 COCHAIR DEVIN: It was my understanding
16 that given the classroom size change he was in favor of
17 240, but I would ask you to speak for yourself.
18 DR. HIGDON: Madam Chairman, yes, I was
19 speaking in favor of 240, especially the teacher component
20 of it. And depending on what the committee does, we will
21 still come back and try to provide more information to ask
22 you to -- should you approve 238 as it is now, to
23 reconsider inserting the ideas in 240.
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: While we have our
25 consultants here, might you give any -- in your work -- I
264
1 understand Dr. Higdon is addressing somewhat more the big
2 picture, the forest. You addressed class size in voc ed.
3 Is there any information you feel the committee should
4 know or review? You did feel there was smaller class size
5 and for that reason the weighting.
6 I guess my question to you would be do you feel
7 you have accounted for the costs at this point?
8 DR. KLEIN: Madam Chairman, be careful
9 what I say. We found when we looked at the data we
10 collected that the average class size for vocational
11 courses currently in the state is running at about 13 and
12 roughly 16.7 for nonvocational. And that's what people
13 are running now on average. That suggests that people are
14 within districts making choices about how they're
15 allocating money within the block grant model, and if
16 indeed the funding is structured, it is based on 21
17 students in the class, then I would see where running
18 those class sizes as they are would cause complications in
19 terms of trying to fund resources.
20 I think that some of what I've heard suggests
21 that there's a disagreement about to what extent on
22 average vocational education is included in the funding.
23 And what we've seen is what is. We've looked at what is
24 being spent and we looked at the class size ratio that we
25 found reflects the class sizes we're seeing. We asked and
265
1 audited to the extent we could the 16 districts, certainly
2 the equipment and supplies expenditures and tried to get
3 our best estimates based on the additional needs for
4 classroom structures for equipment replacement and
5 startup.
6 I think it really comes down to what your belief
7 is about whether or not funding is sufficient and is on
8 average included within there. I think that if we look at
9 option 5, underlying that assumption is that vocational
10 education is not, was not and on average is not included
11 and by in effect not reallocating but instead of assigning
12 the marginal .29 for the students we've identified will
13 indeed inject roughly two and a half -- two and a half
14 times as many resources into the model.
15 I would question what people would do with that
16 additional money if they were to get it. Is it the case
17 that it would be spent on vocational education or would it
18 be the case that some of that money would be used to
19 remedy perceived problems with the formula in other areas?
20 And probably depending on the district and the school
21 those choices would vary.
22 It really comes down to, I think, that some of
23 this goes beyond what we at MPR were asked to do. We
24 tried to look at what was there and then hold spending
25 constant. There are clearly conflicting viewpoints in
266
1 terms of what is included in that base, but based on what
2 we observed, based on the existing infrastructure, this is
3 what -- what we proposed would provide what we thought
4 would address the Court's concerns and go beyond that
5 perhaps somewhat in that we're looking for the two-program
6 minimum quality program standard for which small schools
7 are compensated. Beyond that, I think it becomes a
8 discussion I'm not prepared to take aside.
9 COCHAIR DEVIN: We have been debating
10 since early on what was included and what was not.
11 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Madam Chairman,
12 one quick comment that goes along with his comments, and
13 Dr. Higdon got up and talked about, you know, it is
14 included and it is spent. But as I go through this sheet
15 here -- I've had four granddaughters go through this
16 school and they have great programs. But if you look at
17 what I've highlighted here, these are schools that aren't
18 doing it, they're losing money because they're not doing
19 it. And that was my concern and that's something that you
20 were just talking about.
21 And so I'm still not comfortable with that, but
22 we have a long time to go ahead and address this. We will
23 have lots of hearings once we convene and everything else,
24 so I'm not concerned.
25 COCHAIR DEVIN: We will be munching on it
267
1 for a while, I'm sure.
2 Senator Scott.
3 SENATOR SCOTT: Before we vote, I'm going
4 to urge a no vote on this motion. We have 9 out of the 14
5 members of the committee here. We do have quite a
6 philosophical difference over how this is proceeding and I
7 think Dr. Klein summarized it fairly well as to what the
8 differences are.
9 I would simply add that, you know, when you look
10 at the sheet now you've got the hold harmless which
11 gradually phases out, but you are looking at cutting the
12 Albany County schools, Fremont Number 1, that's Lander,
13 isn't it, Laramie County Number 1, Natrona County,
14 Sheridan County, Teton County takes a large hit, as do
15 both of the Sweetwater County districts do and Worland.
16 You are going to make it much more difficult to
17 offer vocational programs in those, and I think that's a
18 high price to pay for the mathematical adjustment to hold
19 everybody harmless when I don't see the cost justification
20 for making that. So I would urge us to defeat this motion
21 at this time and come back to this bill next time.
22 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Question.
23 COCHAIR DEVIN: Question for the
24 committee. I guess we need to poll the committee, right?
25 MR. NELSON: I have a form for that.
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1 Senator Goodenough.
2 SENATOR GOODENOUGH: No.
3 MR. NELSON: Senator Peck.
4 SENATOR PECK: No.
5 MR. NELSON: Senator Scott.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: No.
7 MR. NELSON: Representative McOmie.
8 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Yes.
9 MR. NELSON: Representative Robinson.
10 REPRESENTATIVE ROBINSON: No.
11 MR. NELSON: Representative Samuelson.
12 REPRESENTATIVE SAMUELSON: Aye.
13 MR. NELSON: Representative Shivler.
14 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: Aye.
15 MR. NELSON: Cochair Devin.
16 COCHAIR DEVIN: Aye.
17 MR. NELSON: Cochair Stafford.
18 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Aye.
19 MR. NELSON: Four -- five absent.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: Then we have 239 which is
21 the implementation piece. Do I have a motion on that bill
22 to -- this is essentially the mechanisms to implement.
23 COCHAIR STAFFORD: So moved.
24 COCHAIR DEVIN: There is a motion on 239.
25 Is there a second?
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1 SENATOR PECK: Second.
2 COCHAIR DEVIN: There's a motion and
3 second on 239.
4 Any further discussion?
5 Would you poll the committee on 239?
6 MR. NELSON: Senator Goodenough.
7 SENATOR GOODENOUGH: Aye.
8 MR. NELSON: Senator Peck.
9 SENATOR PECK: Aye.
10 MR. NELSON: Senator Scott.
11 SENATOR SCOTT: Aye.
12 MR. NELSON: Representative McOmie.
13 REPRESENTATIVE MCOMIE: Aye.
14 MR. NELSON: Representative Robinson.
15 REPRESENTATIVE ROBINSON: Aye.
16 MR. NELSON: Representative Samuelson.
17 REPRESENTATIVE SAMUELSON: Aye.
18 MR. NELSON: Representative Shivler.
19 REPRESENTATIVE SHIVLER: Aye.
20 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman.
21 COCHAIR DEVIN: Aye.
22 MR. NELSON: Cochair Stafford.
23 COCHAIR STAFFORD: Aye.
24 MR. NELSON: Nine ayes.
25 COCHAIR DEVIN: Thank you, committee. I
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1 know that we will be working on these for a while.
2 We have another subject to cover here yet today
3 and the reason that I'm going to try to do it is because
4 we have an entirely full day tomorrow. We have compressed
5 the two days -- the three days we had scheduled to the
6 two. Let's take a ten-minute break and we'll reconvene to
7 do the piece on reading.
8 (Recess taken 5:00 p.m. until 5:15 p.m.)
9 COCHAIR DEVIN: Committee, we have the
10 subject of reading assessment and intervention, a subject
11 that has had a lot of hard work by this committee, that we
12 would like to get updated on and get a report of where we
13 are from the work that's been done.
14 Dr. Smith.
15 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, members of the
16 committee, we're still in the early stages of gathering
17 information about assessment intervention. And I can -- I
18 will share with you sort of some early preliminary
19 findings that basically won't mean very much in the
20 overall scheme of things but sort of gives you a sense of
21 what is going on out there.
22 First of all, it is important to note that --
23 you know the details of the bill. The school districts
24 are given a great deal of flexibility in terms of the
25 assessment and interventions that they employ. The
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1 allocations to the districts range from 3,085 up to
2 $466,000, so you can imagine that there's some differences
3 in how the program gets implemented. And I will speak a
4 little bit about that in the end.
5 We found that there are clusters of programs
6 that school districts use for interventions -- for
7 assessment. There are -- and there are lots of different
8 kinds and some -- most school districts use just one but
9 some use multiple assessments. They range from -- 37
10 districts used observational surveys and studies, OS; and
11 29 districts use the Developmental Reading Assessment; and
12 4 districts use Fox in a Box -- I haven't the faintest
13 what Fox in a Box is, but some assessment, clever
14 assessment program for little kids.
15 The cost in terms of teacher time, the
16 assessments run about 15 to 25 minutes to administer, and
17 the cost for materials ranges from about 35 to 116.15 per
18 teacher for the assessment costs.
19 There are consumables, but they tend to be
20 reproducible forms, for the most part, so costs for those
21 are negligible. The big costs of course are in the
22 interventions and again there are several that comprise
23 the programs that most of the districts use. The most
24 prevalent is Reading Recovery, which incidentally is the
25 most expensive. This intervention is employed by 16
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1 districts.
2 The next most prevalent is Early Success which
3 is in 10 districts and Guided Reading which is in 9
4 districts.
5 Then there are miscellaneous others in other
6 districts and many of those are variants of the Reading
7 Recovery or Early Success. They are all in many ways very
8 similar. Reading Recovery is the most expensive and is
9 the most popular. It is expensive for two reasons. One,
10 is it a very intensive program. One teacher which has to
11 be trained in a certified Reading Recovery program, the
12 nearest one of which is, I think, in South Dakota.
13 A trained teacher works one on one with four or
14 five students for half an hour each day. These -- and
15 obviously the school districts that are receiving grants
16 of, say, 25 or $50,000 or less are not using Reading
17 Recovery because they just don't have the resources to
18 implement it.
19 Then the additional costs for Reading Recovery
20 and similar programs is the training programs where
21 teachers, teacher leaders and so forth are trained. And
22 it is a fairly intensive training program. I think it
23 takes approximately a year for some of the training
24 programs.
25 The Early Success program is -- and I think the
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1 Directed Reading or Guided Reading is on the other end of
2 the range of costs where they are primarily kits and books
3 that are scripted and are aimed at a very systematic and,
4 as I say, scripted way of teaching reading. These costs
5 are quite nominal. They're about a thousand dollars a
6 teacher with supplemental materials ranging from 25 to 50
7 and then a set of 30 texts are -- in Early Success, for
8 example, are about $1,000.
9 One of the things that is likely to be a
10 recommendation coming out of our report is that we will
11 probably recommend that there be some minimum grant that
12 allows small districts and small schools at least enough
13 money to do X, and we haven't decided how much and what X
14 ought to be, but certainly some level of training and some
15 level of materials that would allow them to do it.
16 It is the problem that you have a flat amount
17 per ADM and the little schools and little school districts
18 don't generate enough ADM to generate enough money for a
19 program to be particularly effective.
20 The other issue that we will bring back to you
21 that is likely to be, if not contentious, at least will
22 have adherents on one side or the other, and that is
23 whether the program, as we've recommended in the past --
24 and we may reconsider our recommendation, but in the past
25 we've recommended that the program be rolled into the
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1 block grant but you continue the accountability
2 requirements that are associated with the program and you
3 allow the districts to supplement or use resources any way
4 they want.
5 And, in fact, the reading programs in the school
6 districts are not funded entirely by this. First of all,
7 it is the basic thing that they do in the primary grades.
8 Secondly, there's a number of categorical
9 programs like Title I and special ed and others that
10 augment this. So if you look just at this, you're just
11 looking at a slice of it so we will try to parse that out
12 for you.
13 On the one hand we've argued in the past that we
14 think you should roll the cash into the block grant and
15 recognize the reality that it is only a portion of what
16 supports the program but continue the program requirements
17 for the assessment, the reporting and so forth.
18 On the other hand, in some of our conversations
19 with district people, they have said as the voc ed and
20 special ed and other people have told you, if you roll it
21 into the block grant, we will have trouble protecting it.
22 It will get sopped up somewhere else. This is really a
23 philosophical argument and one that the legislature is
24 particularly well designed to sort out.
25 There's no -- it is not a technical issue. It
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1 is not a scientific issue. It is really a philosophy of
2 do you believe in local control and do you not believe in
3 local control and how much local control do you believe
4 in.
5 Everyone believes in local control except when
6 it comes to their programs. Wyoming is not unique to
7 that. In fact, I recall when we -- one of the first
8 hearings we had when we started this process and we were
9 proposing a block grant, we predicted that there will be
10 groups that will come up and say, "We like block grants
11 but we want you to earmark funds for us." What they don't
12 exactly say is, "We don't trust the local process to honor
13 the commitment to whatever our programs are."
14 That's where we are on that to date. In
15 December we will have for you a hopefully complete report
16 where we can sort out these costs and give you a little
17 clearer picture.
18 But I think the message that I bring to you
19 today is that it is sort of all over the map on what
20 people are using in terms of programs. There's some
21 commonalities but there's some big differences in cost in
22 the programs they're implementing.
23 What we can't tell you and what I would urge you
24 sometime downstream to do in the next year or so is to do
25 a study of effectiveness. Cost is only half the picture.
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1 And it would seem to me what you would want to know is is
2 the thousand-dollar program as good as -- probably is not,
3 but I have no way of knowing -- some people say you get
4 what you pay for sometimes. Sometimes you don't get what
5 you pay for. But you ought to see what the cost
6 effectiveness of this program is and maybe provide more
7 direction to districts or leadership or however you want
8 to do it in terms of the types of programs that you will
9 fund and types of programs that you would encourage them
10 to implement.
11 We can't get to that at this stage because the
12 program is new and it is beyond the scope of what we're
13 doing.
14 COCHAIR DEVIN: What kind of a timeline,
15 staff and Dr. Smith, do we have on this? Do we need to
16 make decisions before this session by statute on any piece
17 of this, whether it goes into the block grant, whether it
18 does not, whether we have a bill drafted or not?
19 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, my hope is
20 that the committee will be able to forward something for
21 the next session, but it may be, as we've done with
22 others, deferred if you need more information or just are
23 unable to come to a solution.
24 But the hope is you get it in a form that you
25 can forward it to the next legislature.
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1 COCHAIR DEVIN: As Dr. Smith's
2 recommendations would come together, would you envision
3 drafting something that would reflect those so that we
4 could work on it in our December meeting?
5 MR. NELSON: Madam Chairman, yes, that was
6 staff's thoughts, that we would try to draft proposals
7 that are contained in his report and that we give you
8 something to act on immediately in your December meeting.
9 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman.
10 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
11 SENATOR SCOTT: Technical question there.
12 We're now in the first year of a two-year biennium. Was
13 the program financed in the budget for one or both years
14 of the biennium?
15 MR. NELSON: You mean the separate
16 line-item program?
17 SENATOR SCOTT: Yeah.
18 MR. NELSON: Well, I don't know. I can
19 check that out.
20 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's a good question.
21 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I think
22 that really determines whether we need to do something
23 this time.
24 MS. HILL: Madam Chairman, it was funded
25 for the full biennium, the program to the districts as
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1 well as the administrative, technical assistance funds
2 that are part of the department's budget.
3 COCHAIR DEVIN: Appreciate knowing that.
4 I am trying to avoid a January meeting. We will probably
5 see enough of each other in January, if we can possibly
6 not have to have a January meeting in addition.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I would
8 comment on a couple of the issues that Dr. Smith raised.
9 One of them I think we may have sort of stumbled
10 on by accident here in this categorical earmarking versus
11 no earmarking argument, I think it may pay us in the
12 future in these programs to do what we've done with this
13 one, do it as an earmarking for a period and then once it
14 becomes well enough established so it can stand on its own
15 merits, then you roll it into the block grant.
16 And that's particularly effective here where it
17 is so much a part and parcel of the basic business that
18 school districts have to do in the first few grades, and
19 then the question becomes how long before you roll it in.
20 Is one biennium sufficient or do you need a second?
21 Then one thing I think to keep in mind if we go
22 looking at effectiveness, my hypothesis is that the
23 effectiveness is going to relate in good part not to the
24 specific program that was adopted, but how effective the
25 management of that was and how much the people that
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1 adopted it believed in it and were willing to make it
2 work. And so I would be reluctant to say, you know, this
3 program works, therefore everybody has to because I would
4 suspect that the people who you were telling them, "Your
5 program is no good. You've got to do it this way,"
6 they're going to prove that we were wrong and at
7 considerable harm.
8 I would also comment our district -- I'm sure we
9 should be on your Reading Recovery list -- were using it.
10 We're also using a number of other programs. So you have
11 multiple programs at work, and that does give you some
12 advantages in terms of being able to fit the program to
13 the particular needs of the kid.
14 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, Senator Scott,
15 your point on the cost effectiveness is well taken and
16 what I sort of glossed over is I think there are two
17 things and I think you can parse these out. One is the
18 quality of the program. The other is the quality of the
19 implementation.
20 But I think that the most important thing you
21 can get out of that is it comes in terms of state
22 leadership in helping those programs that are not well
23 implemented or whatever, just anecdotally. But one of the
24 things that I found that is most powerful in changing
25 programs and attitudes at a school is taking people from a
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1 school who are struggling to another school that is not
2 struggling and let them spend a couple days there and ask
3 questions, how did you do this, so forth. It sounds sort
4 of simpleminded, but it actually changes attitudes and
5 often changes skills so that they say, "Oh, I didn't get
6 it right," and they're able to take off from there.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, this is
8 where the assessments we're building in in terms of what
9 we've already done with WyCAS, in terms of what we're
10 going to do with the No Child Left Behind which will take
11 it a grade lower and in terms of what was in the Reading
12 Recovery in terms of goals, I think will all give us the
13 kind of feedback we need to identify the schools that are
14 struggling and see that something gets done. This is
15 where your assessments pay off.
16 COCHAIR DEVIN: That's true.
17 Are there other comments, questions, committee?
18 Anyone else?
19 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, I have -- if
20 we're done with this, I have one separate issue that I
21 would just put before the committee to think about.
22 We have -- and this is sort of a plea from the
23 people who have to make the model work. We're at about
24 four or five hold harmless and all have different dates
25 and so forth. I would urge you to think about a single
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1 hold harmless. Go all the way over to the right and say
2 if you lose money from any source, this is -- you know, we
3 will hold you harmless to that because all of these -- it
4 all ends up the exact same way, but all of these separate
5 ones create lots and lots of noise in the spreadsheet. It
6 introduces more opportunities to make an error.
7 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman.
8 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
9 SENATOR SCOTT: And this issue, given that
10 it is funded for the biennium, I move we instruct MAP that
11 the target date for completion on this effort is in the
12 fall of 2003 so we could have legislation for the 2004
13 session.
14 COCHAIR DEVIN: Is there a second to that
15 motion?
16 REPRESENTATIVE SAMUELSON: Second.
17 COCHAIR DEVIN: Further discussion?
18 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman, I'm going
19 to ask you for guidance. Does this fit with your notion
20 of what the appropriate schedule would be or do you really
21 want us to push and get something this time?
22 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott, I really
23 have no strong feelings that it needs to be pushed this
24 time. What I wanted to avoid was if it did need to go
25 forward this time that we didn't get ourselves in a
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1 position that we weren't ready in December to act on it,
2 that we would have to schedule another meeting for this or
3 other purposes, if it could be avoided by some foresight.
4 But I don't have strong feelings aside from that that we
5 have to move it this year.
6 As a matter of fact, particularly if we're going
7 to move it to a block grant, I guess my gut feeling might
8 be it might do well to let it have another year of
9 maturity. But that's just a personal feeling.
10 SENATOR PECK: Madam Chairman, question
11 for Dr. Smith.
12 In your examination and assessment of costs of
13 the reading enhancement programs, as I understand it,
14 District 25, Riverton, they've been doing Reading Recovery
15 for a number of years and now they have added on
16 additional literacy programs for second and third grade,
17 maybe up to the fourth grade.
18 As you assessed these reading assessment
19 programs are you looking at the amplification of them that
20 some districts have implemented?
21 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, Senator Peck,
22 at this point I can only tell you anecdotally that we've
23 been told by districts that many of them have a story very
24 similar to your district in that they did -- they were
25 able to do Reading Recovery, or in Laramie Number 1 they
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1 did CLIP, and they did it primarily with Title I funds.
2 This money came in and they were able to expand the
3 universe of students that they were able to serve.
4 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman.
5 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
6 SENATOR SCOTT: On the motion, one thing I
7 think we might want to think about is the minimum program
8 size for the small districts. If MAP can get a decent set
9 of figures there, that might be something we might want to
10 do on a one-year basis while we've got everything else
11 sorted out because small districts will be disadvantaged
12 in the coming school year if we don't.
13 SENATOR PECK: Madam Chairman, as
14 discussing the motion, I would ask Dr. Smith and LSO
15 staff, are you confident you will have the data you need
16 by the December meeting or is there a necessity for
17 putting it off six or eight months?
18 DR. SMITH: Madam Chairman, Senator Peck,
19 we believe that we will have virtually all of the data
20 that we can get, that's available by that time, and we
21 will have done the analysis. So we can -- you know, we
22 can do -- we can certainly get the -- I am sort of
23 waffling here because I understand what Senator Scott is
24 saying in that I think the timing is probably better
25 later. There's only a modest amount of money in the
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1 budget, in our contract, to do this, and so if -- and I
2 would look to these guys, but if it entails coming back to
3 Wyoming again in the fall -- we just have to take a look
4 and see.
5 That would be my only concern. I'm sort of
6 indifferent about whether we do it in December or next
7 year. If it is more convenient with your schedule to do
8 it next year, you know, we're fine with that. But I'm not
9 positive that this is -- it is a very modestly funded
10 study in that contract, so we would talk with these guys.
11 Let me say we will bring you a report in
12 December. You can decide from there what you want to do.
13 And we will get as much in there as we can, and it will
14 inevitably raise questions that you don't have yet. So we
15 can decide what we want to do from there.
16 SENATOR SCOTT: Madam Chairman.
17 COCHAIR DEVIN: Senator Scott.
18 SENATOR SCOTT: I will withdraw the
19 motion. You've heard the discussion. I think this is
20 something we can leave to the discretion of the Chair in
21 scheduling the December meeting as to whether we ought to
22 try to complete the thing, given what we've just heard
23 from that, whether we ought to -- I sure hope we can do at
24 least the minimum program size for the small schools, even
25 if we have to do it as just a one-year thing, and leave it
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1 up to your discretion as to how to handle it from there.
2 COCHAIR DEVIN: My memory is failing who
3 seconded that. Is that agreeable to the second?
4 REPRESENTATIVE SAMUELSON: I did and
5 that's agreeable.
6 COCHAIR DEVIN: Motion is withdrawn at
7 this point.
8 Anything else that you wish to discuss on this
9 subject?
10 Any other subject?
11 Do we have a new legislator among us, did I
12 overhear in the hall? Would you introduce yourself? And
13 welcome. We appreciate your attending.
14 MR. BUCHOLZ: Thank you for the
15 opportunity. I'm Kurt Bucholz, representative elect from
16 District 47, which is the predominant geographic area of
17 Carbon County. And this is one of my most intense
18 committee interests and I'm happy to be here. Thank you.
19 COCHAIR DEVIN: Thank you.
20 Any other business?
21 Okay. Then in the morning we are scheduled to
22 start at 8:30 a.m. and we will follow our agenda. My
23 suspicions are that it will take, because of our
24 condensation, most of the day. I know that some of you
25 have a lot of interest in the other piece going on in
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1 town. If we should finish early, we will certainly make
2 that effort. But we squeezed three days into two, so I'm
3 not going to make those promises.
4 But thank you. And thank you to our court
5 reporter.
6 (Meeting proceedings recessed
7 5:40 p.m., November 20, 2002.)
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6 I, JANET DEW-HARRIS, a Registered Professional
7 Reporter and Federal Certified Realtime Reporter, do
8 hereby certify that I reported by machine shorthand the
9 proceedings contained herein, and that the foregoing pages
10 constitute a full, true and correct transcript.
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12 Dated this _____ day of ______________, 2002.
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15 _______________________________
JANET DEW-HARRIS
16 Registered Professional Reporter
Federal Certified Realtime Reporter
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