Legislature(2021 - 2022)SENATE FINANCE 532
03/02/2021 09:00 AM Senate FINANCE
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| Audio | Topic |
|---|---|
| Start | |
| SB22 | |
| SB19 | |
| Adjourn |
* first hearing in first committee of referral
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
| + | SB 19 | TELECONFERENCED | |
| + | SB 22 | TELECONFERENCED | |
| + | TELECONFERENCED | ||
| + | TELECONFERENCED | ||
SENATE BILL NO. 19
"An Act extending the special education service
agency; and providing for an effective date."
9:41:34 AM
TIM LAMKIN, STAFF, SENATOR GARY STEVENS, explained the
legislation:
SB 19 would extend the sunset date for the Special
Education Service Agency (SESA) to June 30, 2029.
SESA offers services not provided by any other
government or private sector agency in the State of
Alaska.
SESA is a public agency, created in 1986 under Alaska
statute AS 14.30.600. It is governed by the
Governor's Council on Disabilities and Special
Education. SESA was created to assist Alaska school
districts to serve children with low incidence
disabilities. Technical assistance, provided by
specialists with advanced training and specialized
disability experience, is provided at no cost to
school districts.
Specifically, SESA is tasked to provide:
(A) itinerant outreach services to students who are
deaf, deaf-blind, mentally retarded,
hearing impaired, blind, and visually impaired,
orthopedically disabled, health-impaired in
other ways, and severely emotionally disturbed, and to
students with multiple disabilities;
(B) special education instructional support and
training of local school district special
education personnel; and
(C) other services appropriate to special education
needs.
SESA must be reauthorized this session to avoid
discontinuation of these services beginning July 1,
2021.
SESA performs an effective and efficient service to
school districts educating students with low incidence
disabilities. SESA employs 11 education specialists
who provided services to 45 school districts and more
than 200 students during the last school year. During
this time, SESA also provided 320 onsite
consultations with school districts.
The latest AK Legislative Budget and Audit Committee
Report affirms: "SESA meets a valid public need by:
(1) assisting school districts in providing students
affected by low incidence disabilities (LID) an
education that meets their unique needs;
(2) affording opportunities to enhance the
capabilities of school district teachers and
paraprofessionals; and
(3) providing LID and special education resources
9:43:10 AM
Mr. Lamkin highlighted the Sectional Analysis (copy on
file):
Section 1: Extends the sunset date for SESA to June
30, 2028.
Section 2: Provides for a retroactive effective date
in the event the bill doesn't pass before June 30,
2021.
Section 3: Provides for an immediate effective date
upon its passage.
9:44:03 AM
PATRICK PILLAI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SPECIAL EDUCATION
SERVICE AGENCY (via teleconference), (SESA) spoke from a
prepared testimony related to the presentation titled,
"Introduction" (copy on file).
Mr. Pillai read from his prepared statement:
This is the homepage of SESA's website. It provides
online access to program services and resources, a
lending library, online professional development e-
modules, and an easy process for school districts to
submit online referrals for SESA service. The yellow
text, the agency's mission statement, reflects the
agency's focus on addressing the unique special
education needs of students, parents, and teachers
across Alaska's 54 school districts, via year-round
onsite and distance delivered consultation and
training.
9:45:16 AM
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
SESA's legacy of special education support evolved
from the intent of P.L. 94-142, the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act of 1975. Reauthorized in
2004 and amended in 2015 as the Every Student Succeeds
Act. The law mandates a free and appropriate public
education to students with disabilities. SESA activity
assists parents and school district staff, make
tangible, through specialized educational
interventions, the services mandated by special
education law.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
The Statute establishing SESA, specifically addresses
technical assistance and service to students with low
incidence disabilities. Low incidence disabilities is
defined in the literature as occurring in less than 1
percent of the total population. The rarity of the
disability manifests in the reality of possible
infrequent need by a district, and, as a consequence,
special education services therefore not normally
available. An example is a situation of one child with
deafness in a rural school district, with no access to
a sign language interpreter, and a special education
teacher with no prior experience working with a deaf
child. SESA affords such sites, access, to a
specialist with an endorsement in deaf education. In
addition to consultation, support and training other
supplementary services are available, e.g., assistance
with application of mini-grants, programming and
setting up assistive technology, cross district
trainings, etc.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
Although Alaska Statute 14.30.630(b) states that SESA
shall focus on provision of low incidence disability
services, it does under eligibility of service in
AS14.30.350, indicate that SESA may provide services
to disability categories other than low incidence
disabilities. It is through this qualification that
SESA provides services to students with autism. School
district requests for autism services currently
comprise a SESA autism caseload exceeding 100
students. Requests for in-servicing staff on the topic
of autism, continues to increase each year. Many
requests are for school wide or district wide
trainings when numbers of students with autism are
high. Larger districts have higher numbers. Anchorage
700, Fairbanks 169, Kenai 110 and Juneau 78 and Kodiak
38. Most rural remote schools have numbers that range
from 0 to 23.
9:48:13 AM
Co-Chair Bishop asked for the numbers in rural Alaska by
region.
Mr. Pillai agreed to provide that information.
9:48:47 AM
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
SESA's logic model captures the design of process to
deliver specialized services to parents, students, and
school districts. The intent is to address the gap via
solutions that promote not only availability of SESA
services, but increases, through onsite and distance
support, the local capacity of the individual site and
the school district. This approach is critical to
meeting the needs of rural schools and of creating
broad participant training to address staff turnover.
Through trainings provided to school districts via
common platforms, collaboration and networking amongst
teachers and paraprofessionals is increased. This
leads to sharing of resources, reduces isolation, and
ultimately promotes retention of teachers, especially
in rural remote areas of the state.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
As part of operational process, SESA created
benchmarks to guide specialist delivery of a high
standard of service. The benchmarks provide a
threshold of expectation and guides specialist
evaluation for continuous improvement. A flow of
service delivery includes:
Contact with district staff to establish relationship,
identify site need, to plan TA.
Complete activities of file maintenance and compliance
review
Prioritize site need as targeted (some local capacity
but site needs service), intensive (no local capacity-
greatest need for service), general (capacity present
but needs minimal guidance on how to proceed).
Create a technical assistance objective based on
review and site communication.
Provide technical assistance and training
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
Slide 8 demystifies technical assistance! The
continuum of services includes observations,
assessments, educational interventions, modeling of
strategies, in-service trainings, assistive
technology, and many more pertinent activities based
on requests from the child's educational team members.
It also includes other services such as assisting
families when they visit ANMC for medical services,
organizing and facilitating orientation and mobility
training in the larger city of Anchorage for O and M
exposure to navigate pavements, streetlights, and
traffic. Specialists also work with vendors to
troubleshoot assistive technology when teachers call
with complaints of device non-functionality.
9:51:41 AM
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
Using feedback from our annual public audit and sunset
legislative audits SESA has designed a management
system to include metrics for program and specialist
evaluation. Post service satisfaction surveys are both
emailed to service recipients and are available on
each specialist's I-pad to make service feedback
easier to collect. Feedback is shared and discussed
with individual specialists, and collective
information is shared with all specialists for
continuous improvement of individual and agencywide
performance.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
In addition to specialist evaluation, the SESA
management system is designed to collect data on
various aspects of agency activity. An activity is
designated as any service contact that is 15 minutes
or more. Service contact less than 15 minutes is
captured in communication logs. Metrics focus on
mission centric activities such as site travel,
creation of educational materials, training and in-
services and writing of student service reports. Data
is analyzed to understand variables impacting service
and variables impacting the SESA budget.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
This slide is a visual example of the customized
management system SESA has designed to ensure data
driven decision making. Individual reports provide
data on specialist activity allowing for measurement
of productivity, number of reports completed within
agency timeframe of 10 working days from date of site
visit, schools and sites requesting service, active
and historical student caseloads by district,
location, and school, etc.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
Both legislative audits, and the program component of
annual public audits, run tests of compliance with
regard to process, procedure and special education
laws and regulations. This section of the database was
created in response for specific data and with
feedback from auditors. Following a recommendation of
the SESA Board to go green, SESA management worked to
eliminate paper files. All of SESA's student record
keeping is now electronic. The compliance element of
the SESA database drives quarterly compliance reviews.
This section of the database earns praise from
auditors for its elegant simplicity of compliance
review.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
Slide 13 captures, in red, the number of students
attending Alaska's schools, in any given year between
2011 and 2020. The solid blue line captures the
steadily increasing numbers of students on SESA's low
incidence caseload. Increasing numbers of students
with LID means greater need for SESA services. High
turnover of staff in many districts often drives the
need for repeated trainings for new staff, especially
first year teachers who may be encountering any given
disability for the first time.
Co-Chair Stedman looked at the legislative report, and
noted that there were three students in Juneau, but 38 in
Sitka and Ketchikan combined.
Co-Chair Bishop stated that his office would provide the
question.
Mr. Lamkin stated that there was a threshold at which the
district needed to apply their own resources, and there
were also the type of disabilities that factored into the
issue.
10:00:14 AM
Co-Chair Stedman wanted a more detailed answer in reference
to the formula.
10:00:48 AM
HEIDI TESHNER, DIRECTOR, FINANCE AND SUPPORT SERVICES,
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT, JUNEAU (via
teleconference), introduced herself. She explained that
number of participants in the program varied based on the
needs of the students. The funding itself was based on the
adjusted average daily membership multiplied by $18.65 as
set out in statute.
Senator Hoffman wondered how long the rate of $18.65 had
been in effect.
Ms. Teshner replied that she did not have the exact
timeframe.
Mr. Lamkin explained that current formula was set in 2013.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
Slide 14 is a history of SESA fund balance from 2013
and projected to 2023. The cycle captures the low
funds usually seen at the end of a sunset cycle
(2013), higher funds at the middle of the cycle, and
the trending to lower fund balance at the end of the
cycle as a result of increasing costs. The typical
scenario is slightly different in 2021 due to two
premium holidays of health insurance, two unfilled
specialist vacancies, unspent travel funds in COVID
times, $175,000 in discretionary funding received from
DEED to assist SESA to hire two new specialists in
2019, and to boost fund balance beyond
reauthorization, without knowing when a funding
increase may next be feasible. SESA's last funding
increase was in 2014, fifteen years post the previous
funding increase. At the end of this fiscal year
(2021), due to the impact of COVID-19 on travel, we
anticipate adding $120,000 to fund balance. At the end
of FY22, factoring for cost increases we anticipate
using $578,000 from fund balance. This is as a result
of the impact of a CPI index increase of 6.3 percent
over the last 7 years and compounding salary and
health benefit increases to stay competitive with
hiring.
10:06:02 AM
Senator Wilson wondered whether SESA had any Coronavirus
Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding.
Mr. Pillai replied in the negative.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
The recently completed legislative audit concurs that
SESA meets the needs of students with low incidence
disabilities, provides professional development
opportunities to teachers and paraprofessionals,
provides special education resources to parents and
school district staff, and concludes with a
recommendation for an 8-year legislative
reauthorization.
10:06:46 AM
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
SESA is requesting reauthorization, to continue
providing the key services identified by the state of
Alaska, as being important to the full academic and
social development of a child with a disability. This
includes all the activities of technical assistance
reviewed earlier in the presentation.
Mr. Pillai continued to read from his prepared statement:
SESA's customized database allows us to run reports of
agency productivity. The slide captures activities of
technical assistance, of schools and districts served,
of trainings (customized and general) conducted onsite
and via distance delivery, and an analysis of funds
saved with SESA's investment in technologies of
distance delivery. Savings are more than indicated on
slide 17 since savings are also realized with site
consultation provided via distance delivery.
Senator Hoffman wondered whether the department or
administration supported the legislation.
Ms. Teshner replied that DEED supported the legislation.
Senator Hoffman queried department's position on the amount
of funding that had not been increased since FY 13.
Ms. Teshner replied that the department did not have a
position on the amount, but were supportive of SESA. She
felt that matching funds would be worth addressing.
Mr. Lamkin felt that the Ms. Curtis would provide further
information.
10:09:54 AM
KRIS CURTIS, LEGISLATIVE AUDITOR, ALASKA DIVISION OF
LEGISLATIVE AUDIT, discussed the audit (copy on file).
Ms. Curtis continued to discuss the audit.
Ms. Curtis stated that the audit had one recommendation.
10:15:24 AM
Senator Wilson wondered whether the recommendation was to
allow more students to receive services or to make them
ineligible for services.
Ms. Curtis replied that the recommendation was simply to
improve documentation.
Senator Wielechowski wondered whether Anchorage was exempt
from the program.
Ms. Curtis replied that there should not be many SESA
students in large districts, because it was considered
supplemental to "help fill the holes. "
10:19:05 AM
Co-Chair Bishop OPENED public testimony.
KATIE BOTZ, SELF, JUNEAU (via teleconference), spoke in
support of the bill.
Co-Chair Bishop CLOSED public testimony.
SB 19 was HEARD and HELD in committee for further
consideration.
| Document Name | Date/Time | Subjects |
|---|---|---|
| 01_SB019_SESA_SponsorStatement.pdf |
SEDC 2/5/2021 9:00:00 AM SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 19 |
| 08_SB019_SESA_Research_LBA-Audit_Full-Report_03April2020.pdf |
SEDC 2/5/2021 9:00:00 AM SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 19 |
| SB 19 - Summary-of-Changes_from A to B.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 19 |
| SB 19 - Sectional_version B.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 19 |
| SB 19 - SESA_Presentation_Pillai_05Feb2021.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 19 |
| SB 22 Sponsor Statement 2-12-21.pdf |
HRES 3/24/2021 1:00:00 PM HRES 3/26/2021 1:00:00 PM SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM SRES 2/15/2021 3:30:00 PM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 APHA Letter of Support 2.4.21.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM SRES 2/15/2021 3:30:00 PM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 DWC IM Activities and Spending FY18-FY20 Support 2.10.21.pdf |
HRES 3/24/2021 1:00:00 PM HRES 3/26/2021 1:00:00 PM SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM SRES 2/15/2021 3:30:00 PM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 RHAK Letter of Support 1.27.21.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM SRES 2/15/2021 3:30:00 PM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 Support Doc DF&G Hunting License Surcharge Revenue 1.21.21.pdf |
HRES 3/24/2021 1:00:00 PM SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 22 |
| SB22 DF&G IM Info Sheet Support 2.5.21.pdf |
HRES 3/24/2021 1:00:00 PM HRES 3/26/2021 1:00:00 PM SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM SRES 2/15/2021 3:30:00 PM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 Support Letter ADF&G 2.9.21.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 Support Letter Fairbanks F&G Advisory Board 2.12.21.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 Support Letter SCI Kenai 2.15.21.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 Testimony 2.15.21.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 22 |
| SB 19 - NEW FN DEED 021521.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 19 |
| SB 22 02.14.2021 SCI AK Support.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 22 |
| SB 22 Support Claus.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 22 |
| SB 19 SESA_Support Letters_bundled_as of 24Feb2021.pdf |
SFIN 3/2/2021 9:00:00 AM |
SB 19 |