The AOE partnered with New Solutions K-12 to provide a professional development series about strategic budgeting for educational leaders in Vermont. The series of live webinars took place in December, 2024, and recordings of the sessions can be viewed on the Agency's YouTube channel. Throughout the series, participants utilized a Q&A form designed to capture all questions related to the presentations given. Please see below for those questions and responses.
Questions & Responses
Question 1
Are there any courses or trainings that we can do to learn methods on maximizing schedules so we can more closely fit the ideal FTE?
Response 1
Edunomics also offers educational finance instructional modules designed to provide the handson finance skills education practitioners and policy makers need to make strategic financial decisions and tradeoffs on behalf of students.
Our team also offers extensive professional development specifically focused on this topic. Twice a year, we host a Secondary Scheduling and Staffing Academy, which is designed to help teams create improved schedules that meet student needs, address lost learning time, and maximize staffing efficiency within existing budgets.
Question 2
Have you taken into account that IEP services are designed to directly correlate with a student's disability and area of need for specialized instruction? Therefore, it is not always possible to group children. In my school we have many students who work 1:1 with the special educator and that is the expectation of the parents and the IEP team based on the student's need for specialized instruction. How do you propose we go about rebranding what services look like for students, especially in schools where families have extremely high expectations for student outcomes?
With suggestions made in previous sessions, it may be hard to have flexibility with the schedule. The proposals for unified arts teachers were to schedule their services first. That makes it difficult to be flexible with other components of the schedule. Will there be a session that will bring all the mini session together and show us models of schools who have implemented multiple strategies that have been shared?
So far, these sessions have given me a lot to think about, but much of what has been shared is not all that practical for my school. I am eager to continue listening to see if there are suggestions given that will benefit student outcomes. I appreciate the concept of these sessions, but would love to have them be more specific to the realities in small to midsize Vermont schools and balanced between student outcomes and financial pressures.
Response 2
While it is true that IEPs are intended to meet the individual needs of students, in our experience working with more than 300 districts across 30 states, we have found that it is almost always possible to group many if not most students with similar needs for instruction. This often requires close collaboration between the school scheduler and special education staff. A resource to learn more on the topic is Six Shifts to Improve Special Education and Other Interventions. Research is overwhelmingly clear that very small group sizes are not drivers of academic gains. This recommendation is good for students as well as the budget.
Regarding your concern about scheduling flexibility, we regularly hear that it can be limiting to other parts of the schedule when specials/arts teachers are scheduled first. Given these teachers teach across grade levels, however, it is an operational necessity they are scheduled first. It then becomes a matter of what you would like to prioritize from there. For more information, I recommend reviewing It’s Time for Strategic Scheduling: How to Design Smarter K-12 Schedules That Are Great for Students, Staff, and the Budget, which gets into more detail for how staggered groups can create flexibility while maintaining effective service delivery.
We have seen these strategies successfully implemented in Vermont, even in small districts with under 1,000 students or individual schools with as few as 40 students. However, these changes often require a comprehensive rethinking of schedules and are best approached at the district level rather than by individual schools.
Question 3
When you calculate time for educators, do you take into consideration the negotiated agreements and the time teachers have negotiated as planning and prep time? There are many assumptions in the models that have been shared in all the sessions. I wonder if actual Vermont principals in the mid to small sized schools have been consulted or if any of these strategies have been implemented in smaller schools?
I am hopeful that there will be a session where we take a mid to small Vermont school, look at current staffing, put in place all the suggestions given in the various sessions and then look to see if it could actually work. What would be the impacts on students and their education from implementing these strategies?
Response 3
Yes, we did take into account the Vermont context and requirements of negotiated agreements, including planning and prep time for teachers. We understand how critical this time is for educators and ensure that our models respect these agreements.
As for small schools and districts, we think the strategies we shared are absolutely feasible in those contexts. Over the past 15 years, we’ve worked with more than half of the districts in the state, including many small and mid-sized schools, and have seen these strategies successfully implemented in many of them. We realize that some recommendations seem difficult, but in fact that are different from past practice in some districts in the state but have in fact been implemented by other similar districts.
Question 4
Is there someplace easy to find a list of the services that research has indicated can be most effectively provided remotely? I like the "allowing remote work by your staff" as a hiring and retention strategy but given both the likely skepticism from some parents and the "not fair" reaction from other staff, plus the general goal of providing effective services, it would be most helpful to be pointed in the direction of where to start. I heard SLP, mental health counseling and case management. Perhaps there are others. But being able to say "and here is the research that supports this" would be really helpful.
Response 4
Here are some key areas where research has shown remote service delivery to be effective:
- Virtual Mental Health Counseling: Research highlights that teletherapy is a critical tool for expanding mental health services in K-12 settings. For example, here is an article detailing the success and benefits of virtual counseling services.
- Virtual IEP Meetings: Remote IEP meetings have been shown to increase accessibility and flexibility for families, leading to greater participation and collaboration among team members. Here’s an article to support virtual IEP meetings.
- Virtual Speech-Language Pathology (SLP): We’re heard from another schools about the efficacy of virtual SLP services, particularly for articulation, fluency, and language intervention. Here's a good article that documents some of the pros of virtual SLP.