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Good morning. We will call the Government Operations and Audit Committee to order. I want to welcome you all here if you're in the room or if you're listening online. A little reminder, we're going to shut our cell phones off so we don't have any disruptions And with that, I'm going to ask the secretary to call the roll.

Foster?

Here.

Grove?

Here. Karr?

Here.

Otten?

Auch?

Here.

Emery?

Lems. Moore.

Here.

Howard.

Sorry, Representative Emery, I'm here. I couldn't get my phone unmuted.

Got it.

Yeah. Overweg.

Here.

Mr.

Chair, you have a quorum. Boy, barely, but we did, didn't we? Okay, well, I'm sure all the committee members have read the minutes of our last meeting, and with that, I would Do you entertain a motion to approve those minutes?

Mr. Chair, so moved.

Second.

It has been moved by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Auch, to approve the minutes of our last meeting. All those in favor will say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? We are approved.

Okay.

We're going to move through our agenda. If you're going to testify at all today on any of the things we're talking about or the end at the committee. Please go sign in on our cute little computer back there. And let's see, we got everything else, so I guess we can move forward and get going on our agenda. So the first thing on the agenda is performance management reviews, and up first is Department of Labor and Regulations. Welcome. Please come up, introduce yourself.

All right. Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of— members of the committee. My name is Kendra Ringsmeyer, and I am the Interim Cabinet Secretary for the Department of Labor and Regulation. I'm almost a month on the job and learning new things every day, but I did work for the agency for about 15 years prior in the area of workforce development. I'm— I look forward to working with all of you in this capacity. So our department is broad with workforce reemployment assistance, labor and management, boards and commission, banking, and insurance, but our common mission is to promote economic opportunity and financial security for individuals and businesses through quality, responsive, and expert services, fair employment solutions, and safe and sound business practices. We have 4 main goals and various measurements that help us strive for that mission. So we are here today to report out and recommend some changes to the goals that we set for our agency a few years back. As you can imagine, a few things have changed since that time. So 2 documents were provided, and the first was kind of our original goals, and then there was a second forward-looking document that I have on the screen, and I'm going to focus on that forward-looking document as it includes all the original items and then anything that we're looking to revise or add. Okay. So starting here with Goal 1, which focuses on the agency's delivery of quality, responsive, and excellent services, the first Activity A focuses on you know, efficiently providing services, and under Activity A is related to Reemployment Assistance Division. So with this, we want to process claimant applications and determinations on appeals as quickly as possible, as those financial resources are important to those consumers in that time. And so we, with this, we have goals 1, 2, 3, and 4. Measurement there. We are well easily meeting that 14-day measurement now underneath number one, and so looking to continue with one, three, and four. Those are all federal measurements where the second one was not a federal measurement. And we are well above the federally established goals for the other 3 measures. Any questions over Activity A? Otherwise, I'll move on to Activity B. Under Activity B, this is really providing measurements from our quarterly satisfaction surveys. These are surveys that are sent out to any consumers receiving our services over the last quarter. And for those that respond, we are above that 70% satisfaction mark. And this includes both those participants and the businesses.

Senator Howard has a question.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As you stated, you are well above the 70%, especially on B1, BI. So have you thought of increasing your target?

You know, I think it would be ideal if this was always maybe even 100%, right, that we had 100% satisfaction. So I do think that that's something that we can We can certainly consider doing. Always room for improvement.

All right.

Everybody good?

All right. On to goal number 2, Mr. Chair.

Please continue.

Goal 2 is to achieve a skilled workforce contributing to economic development by serving businesses, job seekers, and community partners. So Activity A is regarding a partnership that we've had with the Department of Education. Funding for this program ended in June of 2024. Currently, Department of Labor has a partial of a federally funded FTE that we utilize to support schools when they want to have someone connect to a business. So, if they have a student that's in need of connecting to businesses. So, we've really adjusted and scaled down this program from having multiple FTE to having a partially federally funded FTE. So, we are looking to remove these goals to the future. I would say to the credit of many of our schools, they are implementing some of these services in the classroom, which is really the ideal standard. Moving on to Goal 2, Activity B, which focuses on building the skills of the workforce. On this one, we are seeking to remove numbers 1 and 2 from the first portion. Those are regarding registered apprenticeships, and the main reason is that these do not align with the federal performance measures that are being— I should have said— federal measurements that are being held federally. And so looking to remove those because it requires a lot of manual tracking, agency-made definitions, and it's just not as accurate. However, you can see shortly after that we have 3 measurements that are regarding apprenticeships because that model certainly is a valuable model that we are implementing in South Dakota. And so we have the number of active apprentices, active programs and apprenticeship completers that we have identified as goals there in replacement of numbers 1 and 2. We do have some lofty goals here nationally. There's a goal to have 1 million apprentices in the United States, and we maybe will look at adjusting these at some point to probably not increasing but decreasing. And really the reason for that is, is when you're bringing people onto the apprenticeship program and having new apprentices, you're also hopefully seeing completers coming out the other end. And so this is active apprentices, not total apprentices at, at, um, like an accumulative number. So, uh, fairly lofty goals there, but we'll continue to strive towards that. The, um, knowledge and interest in this employer-led training model continues to see, continues to see growth in our state.

Excuse me, Senator Howard has a question.

Yes, thank you, Mr.

Chair. Um, it looks like I'm looking at Activity B4, and your goal is to increase by 5%— well, 3 and 4, 5% each year. What's our average population growth per year? And I'm just wondering why we don't have something tied to population growth versus just a random 5%, or where that comes from.

Go ahead.

Mr. Chair, um, I'm going to address that one next, if you don't mind. And I don't know if I have an answer to your question, but I will keep that in Keep that in mind. So we are seeking actually to remove numbers three, four, and five. Those are not federally defined measures. So again, that's not the accuracy. And as you can imagine, our budget doesn't even support always having a five percent increase in those. So we're looking to adjust those. And as we move on to the next, apologize here. I haven't been keeping up on the screen. As we move on to the next page. There is a list underneath number 5 there of the measurements that we're looking to add, as those are federally defined measurements with cohort periods that we report every quarter on all the programs that we provide federally.

Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So you're eliminating 3, 4, and 5, but you're keeping number 2.

Correct.

Can you answer that?

Mr.

Chair, yes. So we're under Activity B. We are proposing to remove 1 and 2. We are adding in the number of active apprentices, active programs, and completers, removing 3, 4, and 5. And then we have quite a little list here of federal performance measures we're adding in.

Good. All right.

Please continue.

Okay, on to Activity C, connecting businesses to untapped labor pools. So Measurement 1 is regarding out-of-state workforce recruitment efforts, or our Dakota Roots program. We were able to connect 19% of individuals living out of state that we worked with, with jobs in South Dakota the first quarter after exit from working from— with us. So This is verified through a wage match. The only hindrance would be if somebody's not providing their Social Security number, we would not be able to do that wage match. This is the highest that we've had since, since the pandemic. We are proposing to remove measurement 2 underneath that, which is the number of out-of-state job seekers utilizing SD Works who were hired in South Dakota.

We have a Senator Howard.

Yes, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Can you tell me how much does South Dakota Works cost per successful referred person, and how does that compare to private recruitment efforts?

Go ahead.

Mr. Chair, I am not able to answer that, Senator. I do not have that information with me, but we can certainly look into that and get back to you. I'm hoping that I have someone on taking notes.

As a follow-up, I mean, to me it's not about numbers. I don't really care numbers-wise. I want to know how much is it costing the taxpayers, how long are they employed afterwards, what wage are they receiving. I just want to know that what you're doing is a cost-effective way of doing this for the taxpayers. Numbers sometimes really don't mean anything. So just encourage you to look at that and maybe go, okay, you know, I— we want to know what's the outcome of these individuals that were referred. And if the private sector can do it cheaper and more effectively, then maybe it's a program you shouldn't be running.

Thank you.

Okay, please continue.

Okay, thank you. Um, all right, so on to that Goal 2, Activity C, Measurement 2. Again, this is a— it's a raw number, it's not a measurement, and so we are looking to remove this one. This was added during the pandemic in an attempt to measure in-migration, but it was matching those with out-of-state addresses in SDWORKS with wages in SDWORKS. Our wages in South Dakota, but with the increase of remote work, individuals commuting from out of state into the state, and the customer's ability to adjust their address in our SDWORKS system, it was really not measuring what we had hoped it would measure, and so we are looking to remove that. Measurements 3 and 4 under Goal 2 there, they are very similar, but the difference is in the denominator of who's being served. The first one you can see is someone with a significant barrier. So those are individuals who might be receiving public assistance, justice involved, individuals with disabilities, English language learners. And then the second one is those that would not have any of those barriers identified.

Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay, on these 2 again, I would, I would just ask, could we increase the the goal, because these two, I mean, you've consistently been well above these, I mean, every year. So I would just encourage you to look at that. You know, let's— you could bump up the one to 65%, you could bump the other one up to 80%, and it would give you something to shoot for. But I also am curious to know the difference in cost between each of the placements of these individuals, and then what's the long-lasting Thank you. Again, you know, this is— it's nice information, but it doesn't tell me if what you're doing is effective, and especially for the taxpayers. So, you know, what's the long-term effect of helping place somebody with a significant barrier versus somebody without? What's the cost? Can we do that more effectively? So I would really like more information along those lines.

All right, please continue.

Yes, and Mr. Chair, to, to that point, up above in that series above that were the new measurements added that are federally reported measures, we do have placement in employment second quarter after exit and credential rates, earnings, some of those metrics that are federally defined that might, might help with some of that. But the cost, I I don't have them there, obviously. So, okay, Mr. Chair, we're moving on now to the job openings written by DLR staff. That is under Activity C, number 5. This is a measurement that we, we want to see go down, and we are going to seek to remove this. With technology, we have been really focusing on helping businesses learn our system so that they can write these job orders and post these job orders on a weekend, on an evening, whenever it's convenient for them. So putting that information, that tool, into their hand rather than having our team members do that while still being there to assist as needed. And then also, number 6, this is individuals that are in our base-level services and being matched with employment second quarter after receiving services from one of our team members. It's a federally negotiated performance measure, and we are actually seeking to keep this one, but to move it up under the Activity B just above here, which we have— up here at the— a few lines above under Activity B. All right. So Goal 3 is ensuring safe and sound business environments and practices. And on this measurement, Mr. Chair, I would like to have Brett Afdahl, the Director of our Division of Banking, and Larry Dieter, the Director of our Division of Insurance, to come up and share about Activity A with you.

Sure, that would be great. Have them come up, introduce themselves, and give us their testimony. Welcome.

Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. Brett Aftall. I am the Director of the Division of Banking. So, in Activity— or Goal 3, Activity A, and I will just go through them here in order. So this is a measure of bank exams completed within the mandate. We had a couple that missed by one by three days, one by five days. Just to be clear, South Dakota law we have a mandate in South Dakota law that every bank has to be examined every 24 months. That has been met every single time. What this measure is really looking at is our alternating exam agreement with our federal partners, which all these banks are. Examined typically at least on an 18-month schedule. So sometimes they just fall on the schedule where several of them need to be done at the same time, and we work with our federal partner to make sure that we can move them around a little bit. And then in 2, this is the same measure for our trust companies. Same thing, South Dakota law, the mandate for these exams is 36 months, and we've met that with all of these Examinations.

Stop here for a question from Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Somebody else needs to ask some questions, but I can't—

I—

okay, I'm just confused. So, um, you're saying we have a mandate that banks have to be examined every 24 months and trusts have to be examined every 24 months?

These are basically an accreditation standard for us.

Okay, but I'm wondering then why under AI, why isn't that the 24-month requirement that you said we're meeting, but we aren't meeting the federal one that's every 18 months?

Mr. Chairman, yeah, it's a little confusing here. So the South Dakota law requires each bank chartered in South Dakota to be examined every 24 months. The federal system has its own mandates. So what the states and the feds did a long time ago is got together and entered into alternating examination agreements. So they're not examining our banks every 12 or 18 months, and we're going in on our own schedule every 24 months. So we just take turns. We do our exam, they go in 12 to 18 months down the road, we go in 12 to 18 months after that.

Follow-up?

Go ahead.

Okay, but it sounds like you are meeting the requirement of doing it every 24 months. So why is this one even on here? I'm just confused still.

Mr. Chairman, because for accreditation we are evaluated whether we're meeting the alternating examination agreement in addition to what our state law is, and the alternating exam agreement is a more frequent exam cycle than what is required under South Dakota law.

Are you good?

Okay.

Clear as mud? Please continue.

The second one's a little bit more straightforward on the trust companies. State law requires every 36 months. The accreditation standard wants us to examine those companies every 24 months. We're moving towards that standard. We've hit all the 30— we've hit the state law mandate in all of them, but we have— we had kind of a rough transition. We had a retirement and a couple people leave for the private sector, so we lost some momentum there, but we're back. We're getting back to where we need to be to get those all done within that 24-month cycle.

Yeah, go ahead, Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay, why not have 2 separate— you know, have the one that is the state mandate and it would show that we're meeting it every time, and then the other one that shows the federal mandate?

Mr.

Chair, we certainly could.

Okay, go ahead if everybody is okay.

All right. The 3rd measure there is issuing the reports after an exit meeting for banks. And then the next one on 4—

I'm going to stop you. I am going to go back to that other one, what Senator Howard was— can you back it up? It does concern me a little bit. If I'm reading this right, you're saying that Only 30% of the trust funds are being examined in a 24-month period. What am I missing here? It's— your goal is 100%, your actual is 31%. So can you just explain that a little bit more to this, to this old man?

Yes, Mr.

Chair.

So the target for those public companies is to get in there and examine every 24 months. And what this is showing you is that in a good chunk of those, we're getting in there between 24 and 36 months. So we're meeting the state law mandate. We're not meeting the 24-month goal.

Thank you for clearing that up.

Thank you.

So they're all—

all the trust companies, all the banks are getting examined within the statutory mandate, but not within the goal.

That makes some sense.

Senator Howard, follow-up.

I guess why? I mean, do you need more examiners? What's the holdup for meeting that 24-month?

Go ahead.

Mr. Chairman, good question. It's a little combination of things. Like I mentioned just briefly, so 3 years ago, our Deputy Director of Trust, who actually created our trust exam program, retired. We transitioned that role. That didn't work out, so we had to reset. And along the way, we had a couple senior examiners go to the private sector. Right now we're in the process of— so we have enough examiners at the moment to meet the mandate. Really, the bottleneck has been in the review and issuance function. So we're in the process of adding another couple more middle managers that will help add capacity in that review role so we can get those findings reviewed before we have exit meetings and then get the reports reviewed before they're issued. And then we do have a request in the budget for 2 additional FTE to backfill for those. So you've been on that committee a long time, so you've seen that song before.

But okay, everybody good? Please continue.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So really, I mean, one way to look at this, we're kind of a victim of our own success because in addition to those kind of that rough spot we hit, you know, we've been adding, you know, 5 to 10 new companies every year. So It's kind of a moving target. Each year there's more exams to do. All right, so Measure 4 under there, similar story on the— so this is after an exam is wrapped up, issuing the report within 30 days of the exit meeting. It's kind of the same, went from good to not so good, and we're kind of bounced back and we're I think we have a handful of those more dated exam reports that we need to get out, and then we're going to be back on track. But it's just one of those scenarios where, you know, you don't get to call a timeout and say we want to get caught up on this backlog. The new work keeps coming in. So because we're doing about 50 exams a year in this trust space, so it's pretty busy. But again, that additional review capacity will help us get these exam reports kicked out on time, and this is primarily an accreditation standard to get those turned around. Then the complaint process—

Just one minute. Representative, go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So just so I'm clear, you guys can't hire like a private firm to come in and catch you up? This is all done with state employees?

Mr.

Chair, go ahead.

It is currently, yes.

But could you, if you got really behind, could you just never have?

I mean, Mr. Chair, there's audit capacity, like especially in the Sioux Falls market, there's a couple firms, but there's nobody that actually does this type of exam work. You could hire contract employees to augment, but I think we're on the, I know the numbers, there's a lot of red there, but I think we're on the path now to get caught up and And we're building out the capacity to be more sustainable.

Thank you.

Continue.

Oh, got a question? Yes, Representative Auk.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just just out of curiosity, are you seeing an increase in trusts?

Are we?

Are they? I mean, are they the same level of trust that we've always had? Are we seeing an increase in foreign trusts? Are we seeing an increase in trust for estates? Can you can you kind of tell us? Because I mean that would. maybe answer some questions for us, too, with the number of trusts, the number of examiners.

I mean—

Mr.

Chair?

Go ahead, please.

I think the short answer is we are seeing a lot more interest. I think when I took over as Director in 2011, we had somewhere around 50 state-chartered trust companies, and right now I think the number is 115. So the growth has been pretty steady. The last number of years, the number of companies has leveled off. We have been chartering new companies, but we have had several that have been acquired by other companies. And a few surrenders, so that number flattened off the last couple years. But we're still going through all the work of reviewing the new application, meeting with them, get getting them started, and then you know some of them are are making the decision to to do something different. But quite a bit of interest. The foreign activity—I mean, that's certainly people all over the world look at the United States as the place to be. So that's a growth area, but a lot of, primarily it's domestic in the US. Folks from high-tax states looking to do tax planning.

Follow-up?

Go ahead, Representative.

Thank you very much, Chair. So by other states, so foreign, and I mean they're foreign to South Dakota, so foreign individuals investing with their trust using South Dakota as their trust. Domicile, correct?

Mr.

Chair, go ahead.

Yeah, I don't know the percentage, but a pretty good chunk of that business is coming from outside of South Dakota.

Thank you.

That's what I thought.

We do have several bank trust departments. I think we have 8 of our banks have trust departments, and those are almost not exclusively, but primarily South Dakota residents. And then there's a— we have several trust companies that do focus on Thank you.

And follow-up, one last question.

Sure, go ahead.

So those, those foreign trusts, foreign trusts, trusts that even come from people in the United States using South Dakota as their domicile for their trust, we're not taxing them, are we?

Mr.

Chair?

Go ahead.

The trust companies themselves pay the bank franchise tax, which is an income tax based on their net income, but South Dakota does not have a tax on the underlying investment assets.

Okay, everybody good? Please continue.

I think the last measure for us is related to complaint resolution. So this is a formal process, but something not in state law. This is really another accreditation and a service to South Dakota residents. But so we get a complaint. We respond to the company and provide them 14 days to get an answer back to us to get kind of their side of the story. So sometimes there's a delay in getting that back, which impacts our— we try to get a response back to the complainant within 30 days. And a lot of times we're able to resolve those pretty quickly. Sometimes it's a miscommunication or they're waiting on a report from the company, so we help facilitate a good outcome there.

Okay.

Sometimes it's an issue that we can't necessarily resolve, so we refer them to someone else that can hopefully help them.

Okay.

Any questions for Mr. Afdahl? I have one, if you don't mind. Just going to pick your brain here a little bit. What role do you envision AI playing in bank, trust, insurance oversight in South Dakota?

Mr.

Chair, good question.

That's not mine, but I was asked to ask it. So go ahead.

Well, the State Bureau of Information Technology has adopted an AI policy and they've approved some tools to be used. So we've been testing some of those internally, not using confidential information, but just testing to see, because one thing we've been looking to try to do is how do we, or what they're, We need a tool that can help us read a 50-page trust document to find the 5 pieces of information we need out of that document and do it accurately, do it consistently. We're still looking for that, by the way. We've been on this journey for a while. So I think that's one way it could help us. Really, my goal is to figure out how to take some of the drudgery out of it. Like I said, you know, find a more efficient way to process that 50-page document to allow the examiner more time to analyze the risk instead of spending their time reading the document looking for 5 pieces of information. As far as industry perspective, credit card companies have been using, maybe not AI technically, but machine learning algorithms for a long time to detect fraud. That's probably the most obvious example. But it's an ongoing conversation with industry to try to figure out how are they going to use this, how are they going to use it safely. There's a few tools out there to help companies analyze and plan for using it safely, but that's the trick right now. And I just encourage our companies to all have a policy because people are going to use it. Whether you have a policy or provide a safe environment for them to test it, people are going to use it because it's kind of become the easy button for a lot of things. Like, I don't need to know anything, I'll just ask Google. And sometimes that's a true statement, but it can be— it might get you the 90% answer, it might just make something up, and you need to know, you need to be able to know the difference.

Okay, thank you. You were the right guy to ask.

All right.

Introduce yourself, please. Very good.

Good morning, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. Larry Dieter. I'm the director of the Division of Insurance, and I'm going to discuss the three items that we have under Activity A. So, if I can proceed, Mr. Chair, the the first item is six. Division of Insurance on-time completion of insurance company financial exams. One of the biggest consumer protection in the insurance industry is a company's ability to pay claims. So, what do we do? I mean, that is what protects consumers. So, we complete financial exams, an in-depth exam every 5 years on the companies that are domiciled in South Dakota, that call South Dakota home. Home to make sure that they will have the ability to pay those claims. During this review period, there were 5 companies that were examined that we completed the examination on. It isn't just every 5 years we do an in-depth exam every 5 years. We look at those companies on an ongoing basis every year and had discussions with them about their plans and their financial abilities. So 100% of our exams completed in that year were completed on time. Next item, number 7, is the number of Division of Insurance conducted broker-dealer and investment advisor exams in a year. The Division of Insurance also has the— what used to be called the Division of Securities, now we call it Securities Regulation, as part of the Division of Insurance. So, we oversee the securities industry in the state of South Dakota also. I have 2 examiners that examine those broker-dealers and investment advisors every year. During that period, they completed 63 exams. Our goal with those is for them to complete 3 of those a month each, and they've done a good job of that. That's completing them, issuing the report, having the report signed off on, and delivering the report or letters to those Senator Howard. Thank you, Mr.

Chair. So, how often is each individual broker-dealer being looked at?

So, there are multiple levels of examination in the securities area, because you have the SEC, you have FINRA, and you have us as part of the examination process. The larger broker-dealers, et cetera, are It's kind of a joint responsibility, but it largely rests outside of us. The ones that we're absolutely responsible for are state-registered investment advisors, and the number of those is in the 50s. So we try to— again, we think that's a reasonable number. We couldn't complete all of them. You know, it'd be a 4- or 5-year process, again, or longer to complete Exams on all of them, but we're out there, and those are randomly selected. You know, so we're getting out there. They don't know we're time. You know, it's not a, but consumer doesn't feel like that policy has met their needs or has paid according to state law rules and regulations. They will be in contact with us during this fiscal year. We had 558 of those calls. Complaints are actually complaints filed. We also take a lot of calls, but complaints are something that they actually file through a portal with us. They provide us with the information in regards to that claim. We then typically reach out to the insurance company to discuss that claim, get information. Insurance companies statutorily have 20 days to respond to a request from the Division of Insurance, so we're helping consumers resolve those. Resolve those complaints that they have with their company. A number of times we're actually explaining coverage a little better. Insurance consumers don't necessarily understand or want to. I know I don't necessarily want to understand everything that's in that contract. You know, Director Aftal talked about 50-page trust documents. Insurance company filings are far in excess of that. But we have folks that read through those filings to make sure that they're complying with our laws and regulations. Along with that, we help a number of consumers have their claim paid or understand their claim or work their claim a little harder for them. There's 2 folks that do that in my division on the property and casualty side, and there's 2 folks that do that on the life and health side. So, I have 4 complaint analysts at the—

Okay.

At the division. And with that, unless there's questions, those are the 3 measures.

I'm going to have you sign in. You didn't sign in.

I will do that.

I figured that.

Yeah, yeah, I apologize, Mr.

Chair.

Representative, go ahead.

That's just out of curiosity. So if you get somebody calls in on a claim and then you guys contact insurance company and then they end up paying the claim, Is that usually just a misinterpretation by somebody that's at the insurance company?

Mr. Chair, go ahead.

It could be, but a number of times it's us actually working with that company and the individual. Sometimes it's just kind of a misunderstanding of where things are at in the claims process. A lot of times it isn't necessarily based on a denial. It's based on here's Here's where we're at with this homeowner's claim, for instance. But because we regulate that industry, we do have some leverage when we, you know, when we talk to them about that or compare that to other experiences that we, you know, are aware about. So it's a little mixture of both. But I don't have the ability to order a company to pay a claim, but I have the ability to look into what their practices were. Did they look at all the facts? You know, did they treat this consumer in South Dakota fairly? And do we feel that they should be That the results should be something different. And if we feel the results should be something different, we express our concerns with how that claim's being handled, paid, or the timeliness of that. And we usually get pretty good results with those discussions.

Thank you.

I would just say don't undersell what you do. My wife and I used it years ago and it got us out of them, you know. I mean, it really is a great tool for citizens of South Dakota to use. You guys do a great job. Thank you. And you know, so don't sell yourself short on the reporting. It does help.

Thank you.

I appreciate that very much. Any other questions or comments?

Okay.

Just, Chair, just would also like to say that I think your division does an excellent job. I'm in the industry and have worked with your office in several situations, and you always do a great job taking care of my clients and others.

Thanks, Representative.

I appreciate that.

So do you have more testimony for us? All right. Thank you, gentlemen. Please reintroduce yourself and continue.

All right, Mr. Chair. Kendra Ringstmeier, Interim Secretary for Department of Labor and Regulation, and I couldn't do that justice, so I'm thankful that they were able to be here and come to do that. So I'm continuing on for goal number 3 under Activity B, we are seeking to remove the first and the second measure. As you can see, we've been, you know, almost at 100% throughout the 5-year period here, but I'll just explain those measurements here briefly for you. The first one is that all of the Department of Labor and Regulation Job Service offices have to meet federal standards to be a part of the American Job Center network. Again, this is federal resources that are utilized to support these the work done in these areas, and we review these standards every 3 years, and then they're certified by the Workforce Development Council. We've had this process in place for many years, and so you just continue to see fewer and fewer, you know, areas that we've made improvements upon over the course of time. For the number 2, this measure— this measures the time that DLR receives a human rights complaint That's signed and notarized to opening that case and connecting with the respondent. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires us to do this within 10 days, and we like to do better than that, so we have set our target to be 7 days, and as you can see, have pretty good success at being able to reach that. We do not let those— let those sit. Goal 3, Measurement 3 there, this is the ratio.

Okay.

So, this is the ratio of wage and hour complaints that we receive and those that we're able to resolve within the calendar year. So, if for some reason we get it, it's not resolved in that calendar year, it's carried over, but for the most part, we're able to receive those, process them, work them, and get them resolved within that time period. And then we have 4 and 5, and these are regarding the accreditation for Division of Banking and Division of Insurance. As you can see, this is a yes or a no response, and we've been able to successfully do this for many years. So we are seeking to remove these measurements. All right. Moving into our final goal here, which is goal number 4. This is about DLR's internal workforce. So under Activity A is about recruiting and retaining qualified candidates. We're looking to replace Measurement 1 with the second Measurement 1 there. The current measurement is based on a new employee survey, so it's how the employee kind of felt when they complete that survey that the time was from the time that they applied to starting the job, so it's fairly subjective there. The revised version aligns with BHRA data from the time that DLR posts a job to the time that we identify that position as being filled. So, this can help us really determine if we need to reevaluate job postings, wages, promotion of postings, and also, I think it could— ties in a little bit to our longevity, as typically, when there's a vacancy, there's somebody filling that workload while somebody is absent, so it can lead to— Satisfaction there as well. Then the second measurement there, we are again seeking to replace the first number 2 that you see with the second number 2. The first measurement includes the entire time someone's worked at state government, not specific to their time just at Department of Labor and Regulation. We're seeking to replace it with that information that is just specific to the agency. And we're identifying those that leave within the first year of employment. So, we really want to have less than 25% leaving within that first year, and the reason for this adjustment is that we know if we can keep them for a while, we tend to keep them a little bit longer. So, we want to get them through that first year. Our agency has worked hard on our onboarding processes and will continue to do that and look to have ways to improve that, but this gives us a way to really be able to see how that first year is going for Next slide, please. All right. We would like to add measurements 3 and 4 that you see there, and these 2 go together. Both of these measurements are offered— are data offered by BHRA, and the first is a turnover rate for the Department of Labor and Regulation. The second is the statewide turnover rate, and so we're not setting a target for that second Rate there number four, but our goal is always going to be better than all of our peers. So we want to be better than whatever the statewide average is. So a little friendly competition there. Moving on to activity B, this is regarding professional development of our DLR team, which is an interest to our employees and a driver for satisfaction in the agency. Number one there is the percentage of our team members who took advantage of. Courses through our learning management system, which is an effective way for us to be able to provide training and resources in an efficient manner. This system— sorry, just shared that— it has been primarily used in the workforce divisions, but looking to expand that and offer some other required training through that platform. So, I would anticipate seeing some increases here over the years. And then the second measurement there, which is The percentage of new employees who complete the Welcome to DLR onboarding course. This is a fairly new course that we launched at the end of June of 2025, right before the measurement of this went into place. So we're still kind of getting that traction built there and getting people used to using that. So also, I hope to see this increase in the future. And then the second number two I see there—that percentage of learning management. system learners who have completed a lesson. We're seeking to remove this one because as someone completes a course, which you see under number 1, they're going to complete a lesson. So it's fairly duplicative as on their way to getting a course completed, they're completing lessons. So looking to remove that one. And Mr. Chair, that is— if there's no questions, that kind of summarizes our recommendations.

Okay, we'll check one last time with the committee. Does anyone have any Any questions for Ms. Ringstmeier?

Okay.

Oh, Senator Howard.

No questions, but thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a comment, if you could, if you could, you know, you exist at, at, to benefit taxpayers, and I would just ask you to go back and look through these for next year and just go, you know, instead of numbers where you're just giving us numbers, what's the return on taxpayer investment? How can you demonstrate that? And because my goal would be— my goal is always less government. So maybe there's something that when you actually— the numbers may look high, but maybe it's not really a good return for our money. So maybe that could help us do a better job of looking at different programs and evaluating them, and should they exist or shouldn't they exist.

Mr. Chair and Senator, I hear your comments there, so I appreciate that. I just want to thank you for the dialogue on the conversation on these and the LRC staff helping us to prepare these, and we'll, we'll be back in future years for sure.

All right. Well, thank you. Thank you all 3. Really good report. So, okay, we have received the report. Senator Howard?

Yes, Mr. Chair, I would move to acknowledge receipt of the performance management report submitted by the Department of Labor and Regulation pursuant to South Dakota Codified Law 2-6-2017.

I'll second it.

Okay, it has been moved by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Moore to receive the report. All those in favor will say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? That report is received. Moving on, Department of Education. Welcome, Mr. Secretary.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. As you may know—

Introduce yourself for the record, sir. Sorry, I should have reminded you that.

Joe Graves, Secretary of Education, and I've been in this position for just a little short of 4 years now. So as you may remember, last year we presented this document to you on the terms of the goals, and we were asked to then return again this year. Unfortunately, the data to give us our update on those goals will not be available until October 30th, so we're unable to update that document for you. So what I'd like to propose instead is for us to talk about some accountability and initiatives and other ways that we look at student achievement both in South Dakota and across the country and across the world. Would that be acceptable, Ms.

Chair?

Okay, please continue.

Thank you very much. So, looking at the national perspective, we look at a number of different accountability measures from across the country. One is the ACT. Another is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is sometimes called the National Report Card. A third is PISA, which is the international testing that's done. And then finally, the state assessment language arts and mathematics that we do here in the state of South Dakota. In terms of the ACT, again, we do not have updated data on this. We're looking at the ACT data from 2025. As you may know, the ACT is a college—

Mr. Secretary, let me, let me just stop you for a minute because otherwise we're going to get this question, but can you explain a little bit Why you don't— because when we scheduled you for this meeting, you know, you guys had said that you would have them. Maybe you could just tell the committee what happened or why you didn't have them. If you could just go a little deeper into that, that would probably help.

Very good. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, last year we presented in November, so we felt that would be the last— that would be the last committee member— committee meeting this year as well. And we knew we'd have it in November and we'd be able to produce it.

So that was the error.

So you just don't have your information on hand, or you don't have it evaluated yet?

The information is in raw form, but it has to go through a number of psychrometric checks to make sure that it's accurate. So we don't have the data that we can even evaluate or release at this time, but we will soon after October 30th.

Okay.

Sorry. I just wanted to get that clear for the committee why we were doing this. And I don't really care how much you go into this today. If that's your case, you do what you want to do.

Okay.

It is our intent to produce the document, the chart we've always used for you, as soon after October 30th as we possibly can. So within a week, I think we should be able to have that for you, and we'll send that out to all members of the committee at that time.

Okay. So then we will— this is probably staff more, but then we will have— you'll have to probably come back and report that then to the committee next year, right?

Mr. Chairman, Jacob Carlson, Senior Research Analyst. I can also forward that document to the committee this year as well.

Okay, but we won't— will we have to officially accept it though, or not?

That would require a meeting.

So—

My question is, can it go to whoever is in this next year, then they'll have to come back and do their— and okay it?

Yes, right?

Yep, we can do that.

Okay, are you good with that?

Yes, I'd be fine.

Okay, thank you.

Please continue.

Thank you. Okay, so the American College Testing program is a college entrance exam. There's 2 major college entrance exams in the country, the ACT and the SAT. The Midwest tends to use the ACT. The 2 coasts tend to use the SAT. So ours is ACT. You'll notice here from the chart of the country of our area. South Dakota does— has done quite well on this, about a 21.0 composite score, again, as of last year, which tied with Iowa, but which was higher than North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. South Dakota's public school average composite score is 21.1, so it's roughly the same because most of our students are public school students. And the national average composite score is 19.4, so well above the national average.

Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm just— I'm wondering, so we are not— we're not producing graduates that are college ready. I mean, in math, the, the, the only most recent number we have is 45%. College readiness rate for English language arts is 67%. How in the world How are they— and I know, is it 21? Is that the lowest minimum requirement to get into colleges? If that's so, how do these numbers— how are they scoring well enough to get into college when they're not prepared for college? I mean, is it a problem with the ACT test that they've lowered the standards so everybody is scoring higher than they really should be? Or do we need to tell our colleges that they need to increase their minimum ACT for admittance? Because if we're not producing kids that are ready to go to college, why are we putting that on to the colleges to force them to accept these kids and then do all the remedial classes?

You got a few questions in there.

Yes.

And maybe, and maybe if while you're answering all those questions, you could kind for the committee explain on the goal 21, what does that look like in a goal? Are we average? I mean, like, is it the middle, low, high? What's the high number that, that this could be? Just kind of also explain, give us a little bit of an idea there.

Yes, Mr. Chair, thank you. And Senator Howard, yes, so the ACT test is given to students. We're about 60% of South Dakota students took this exam. I need to step back a minute because you'll know that last spring we gave the ACT as a state accountability test to all of our students. This is from ACT 2025, and you're also going to see coming out ACT 2026, which is still on this rubric because our seniors did not take the test. It's the juniors who take the test. So you're going to see this score again this year at about these levels, Probably, because they don't tend to change that much. Again, ACT is also embargoed until somewhere in November. So the scores are pretty much there. Frankly, South Dakota does quite well in terms of the ACT. To my knowledge, the ACT has not been moved downward. There's been no report of that. I know when we have our meetings with ACT, there's been no report of that at all. I would say that, yes, do we have some students who require the remediation in that. And that's frequently based upon the student's course schedule. So if a student hasn't taken the necessary courses or the courses that they should be taking that we identify and that the Board of Regents identifies also as being college ready, then frequently, yeah, they won't have that score that they need to do that. I'm sure I missed a question in there, Senator Howard.

Yeah, go ahead.

I guess, do you know what percentage of our kids are going on to college? And how— just how does it— how do we supposedly score pretty well on the ACT when we have such a low percentage that are showing readiness? I just don't— the numbers just don't correlate to me.

Okay, go ahead. Ms. Chair, yes, so In terms of readiness, I'm trying— what metric are you using to determine readiness?

Mr. Chair?

Go ahead.

I'm just looking at Goal 4 and where you have the college readiness rate for ELA and the college readiness rate for math. So you're using the state assessment ACT or Accuplacer, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so the Accuplacer that is in in place for the ACT identifies those students who are ready to take on college math and college reading. We do have a number of students who decide to go to college even so. There is a sense that there's an ACT score which you need to achieve in order to go to college. And certainly there are colleges in the country who require you to have a certain ACT or a certain SAT. In large part, many of the South Dakota colleges don't actually require a number like that. What they do require is that you haven't— you have done the coursework you need to do, you've gotten through those, and that you want to pursue college. And so then it becomes a matter of, all right, and actually, frankly, I agree with that. I think everybody should have a shot at college who wants to go to college.

And can you tell us what a high score is? If 21 is average, does that mean 42 is high?

What—

how does the range go?

Mr. Chair, a 42 would be an extraordinary because the high score is 36. So, uh, maybe flip. I'm sorry.

That's what I wanted to know, what the range was for.

1 to 36. Um, once you've hit a 24, you're eligible for many scholarships. Once you hit a 28, you're eligible for lots of scholarships. So, and of course, it is on a bell curve. So the difference between a 35 and a 36 is the very difference between a 21 and a 22. So when you get to the higher scores, it becomes quite an extraordinary deal.

Okay.

Thank you for explaining that. I didn't know that. Any other questions for the Secretary?

Okay.

Can you please continue?

Yes. So I'm going to move on to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This is sometimes called the Nation's Report Card. And one of the issues we have with our state accountability is that when we look at state accountability, you can't make any comparisons to any other state. So some people will say, well, in the state accountability, your proficiency rates are higher in South Dakota or lower in South Dakota than in, say, New York. Well, the problem with that is every state sets their own cut scores. So what constitutes proficiency A cut score is the score on an examination in which you can say, okay, this student is now advanced, proficient, basic, or below basic. And those are set at the state level, so you can't really make the comparisons. However, there is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and this is how you make those comparisons. So you look at this. Here we have the grade 4 comparisons, and we look at South Dakota. The South Dakota is the lower— is the The lighter color and the darker is the national public score. And in the case of grade 4 comparisons in reading, in 2024, so these tests are a couple years old now, we were basically at a tie. But you also see the pattern there. In math grade 8 comparisons, and again, this is one of the areas where we have the state accountability, South Dakota is well above the national. So 281 versus a 272. Those scores, those numbers don't frankly mean a lot other than the extent to which they are represented in advanced, proficient, basic, or below basic. So what I've done here is we've looked at South Dakota standings. How do we compare? So we went to the psychometricians at the National Assessment of Educational Progress and started. So how do we rank in South Dakota? So you'll see there, I'm going to move over to the right of the chart there. 2024 in ELA, we ranked 31st. In math, we ranked 11th. At 8th grade, we ranked 16th in ELA and 6th in math rank. So you might ask yourself, how can we be 31st in 4th grade and, and 16th in 8th grade? Some will say, well, that's because of the cohort. It's because of those students who happen to be at that grade level. That frankly isn't a very good explanation because we tend to see a similar group of students come through at any one time in a given state. What it does mean is that states are probably pushing harder at the lower elementary grades when we rank lower, and by the time we get to 8th grade, we're then ranking higher. 8th grade is more representative of where we actually are, and I would say if we had a test in NAEP of 12th grade, that's the grade I would really like to look at because that's the culmination of what we've provided in K-12 education. So an ELA rank of 16th in the country and a math rank of 6th is decent. And we want to be higher than that. We want to score better than that. But it is frankly a reasonable score. With that, I'm going to move on to the Program for International Student Assessment. Now, you may say, well, you've misspelled program. Well, no, we haven't because that's an international test. So it's— The spelling is different, but my point being is people sometimes ask, you have said that we do well in the nation, but the nation isn't doing that well. Well, then the question is we need to ask is, how is the nation doing? This is the test that does that.

I think we have a question here for you, Mr. Secretary. Senator Foster, did you have your hand up for a question?

Yes, I did. It was regarding the last On the last slide, when he was discussing the test changes from 4th grade to 8th grade—

Go ahead, state your question, Senator.

Oh, thank you, Chair. Sorry, um, it was regarding the, the, this slide. Could that also be explained with, um, a dropout rate that's happening in the elementary to where we have less children That are deficient academically making it to 8th grade or 12th grade?

Mr. Secretary, go ahead and answer.

That would be a pretty strong explanation at the high school level, because when we tend to see dropout rates, we tend to see them at the high school level. It could also be an explanation for the issue of students who choose alternative instruction, i.e., homeschool. But that would be predicated upon the idea that South Dakota has a disparate number or percentage of its students going to homeschool, whereas, frankly, homeschooling has been spreading throughout the country at a pretty rapid pace. There doesn't seem to be a lot of change there. So because it's only at the 8th grade level and because most dropout occurs after the 8th grade level, I wouldn't think that would be a significant explanation for Senator Foster, do you have any more questions for the secretary?

Not at this time. Thank you.

Thank you. Senator Howard has a question.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just— on this slide as well, so I just want to make sure I'm understanding this right, and this is using the '25 numbers, but grade 8 math proficiency rate was less than 42%. in the state, but that was still good enough to rank us 6th in the nation?

Mr. Secretary, go ahead.

Yeah, that's correct. There is a great deal of— there's a lot of clustering of states at a certain level around this level, so even tiny changes would make us change in standing.

You're good? Please continue.

Okay, I'm going to move back to PISA. And this is the only comprehensive source of international comparison. So if you want to know how's America doing compared to other states and other countries, and if you want to know is the NAEP an accurate source, you would kind of match its coordination of its testing against the PISA. This is administered every 3 years. It's taken by 15-year-olds. And the 2025 results resulted from 690 760,000 students taking the test in 91 countries. So a lot of students, but if you think about the global population, it's not a tremendous amount. It's based upon the ability to pick a random selection and go from there.

I think we have a question from Senator Foster. Oh, Senator Grove, sorry. No, it's for you.

We both have questions. Um, good morning, Dr. Graves.

Good morning.

I do have, I do have questions, um, regarding all of this, and I guess it's probably more in regards to the last comment made by Senator Howard in our ranking. Um, and I know you want to get on to the international part, but, um, so my concern is, um, when you're talking about where our children rate and fall into this whole ranking place. In the 8th grade, you said, was a significant spot to consider. So in my personal experience with one of my children, I had to pull him out of the public school system in South Dakota because in the 8th grade he was passing with A's and B's but couldn't read past the 2nd grade. And so then I had to homeschool him as a single parent. And so I learned a lot in that, obviously, but one of the big things is what happens in the 4th grade when our children can't read beyond that. And so we're looking at these rankings and we're saying, well, we're 16th here and whatever. But we're at like 45% or 67% for readiness. And when you can't read past the 4th grade, you become that forecaster of how many prison beds we need. And so this all becomes very, very significant in that regard when we're talking about what does the future actually look like for children in South Dakota. And I, you know, I too want to see where we're at on the international side, and I don't mind having those conversations, but I am really concerned about the fact that our little kids, they can't read and they're not proficient in math. And I don't— I care about where we rank, but I don't care so much when understanding that we're at 45%, you know what I mean? And so I'm just wondering, like, how do we actually drill down on that so that South Dakota, maybe we become the lead instead of, you know, like a real number where we're at whatever the target is, is the target is only for English readiness is what, 70%? How do we, how do we get to that point where we're really actually doing right by our kids?

Mr. Secretary, go ahead. Thank you. I'd make 2 points. One is I think you've correctly pointed to 4th grade as an issue because many districts, many states, many countries look at 3rd grade as the point where they say, okay, wait a minute, we have an issue or we don't have an issue. For example, in Mississippi, and we've seen, of course, the Mississippi Miracle that I know you're familiar with, has moved hard on that, and that's where they've said, okay, if you're not reading at grade level at 3rd grade within the margin of error, because you have to have some boundary for that, then you're retained in 3rd grade. And that's quite a— It's quite a statement. It's quite a thing to do, and of course, it creates a lot of issues with parents and everyone else. But that has been one of the solutions that some states have offered is to say, all right, we're not going to just retain everybody at 3rd grade who hasn't gotten there, but if they've demonstrated quite clearly they haven't gotten there, then 3rd grade is the issue. And that's where they still think that— and that is where most people who teach literacy believe you can still have the difference. When you get to 10th grade, for example, It's very hard to make a difference in reading because— probably because of brain plasticity and brain readiness to learn reading. The second point I want to make though is then— and the issue isn't that we're just trying to look at rankings here. One of the reasons we're trying to look at rankings is to try to figure out exactly where we are. How big is the problem? How small is the problem? And because you can't look at the state itself compared to itself, You have to look at the national comparisons. And because the national comparisons are sometimes suspect and people say, well, the nation isn't doing very well, then we need to look at the international comparisons. And that's why we've chosen to do that here as well.

Senator Grove, are you okay?

Just a follow-up, I guess. Okay. So I appreciate that, that we don't need to stare at our own belly button and And kind of look and see what everybody else is doing. That makes sense to me. But I guess, like, how do we— so we're going to compare to the other states. I love the fact that we're talking about holding children back in the 3rd grade, like we're having that real conversation because that became a thing that we just didn't do.

Right.

It was the no-no of things to do. And I think it's caused us great harm. So I love the fact that we're considering that. But is there anything else that we need to be doing that we— where we can truly be progressive in the area where we're actually— our students can read? When, when my child was passing, literally passing with A's and B's, but his proficiency— I think that's what that test is called— was a 1. How do, how do we— we're like, how do we do that? We're missing it. And I, and I'm just kind of wondering, um, how we address that issue.

Mr. Chair, Mr. Secretary, how we address the issue, I'm going to talk about a little bit later in the presentation. However, I would want to say this, and that is, if you create enough incentive to The specific example is Campbell's Law, which says that if you create enough of a metric, enough of a high-risk or high-stakes metric, you will create situations in which people begin to redefine what is success. And I think that is part of what happened in education. And the retention rates are exactly a great example of that. So in the research, What the research indicated for many years was if you retain a child, their likelihood of graduating from high school is reduced because it somehow had an emotional impact on the child. And the research also said that if you retain a child the second time, they basically will not graduate from high school. Okay? So many educators took that research and said, okay, we just can't retain kids anymore. Well, That probably was a mistake. And again, retention is— it's easy to talk about retention up here, but when you're talking to, in a parent-teacher conference, to a parent saying we're going to need to retain your child and they see that look on their child's face, it is— it becomes a difficult thing. But do I think retention needs to be brought back and as an acceptable alternative? I do. I also think if we could deal with children in the classroom at their level, Without worrying about retention, that might be a better way to go as well.

Okay, we're going to go to Representative Auch first.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is in correlation to the actual reading scores here in South Dakota, and I think across the nation, and you could probably fill in some of the gaps for me, Dr. Graves, who our prisons are full of young men who could not read at the 3rd grade. And I think that this exactly what we just were discussing is part of that problem. And we are failing our kids in the state of South Dakota. And if we don't get this right, we're just going to have to keep building more prisons. And I don't think anyone on this board or in this legislature or anyone in the state of South Dakota wants to see that happen. So if I'm right, Aren't most of our prisons filled with individuals who 80% cannot read, 60%? Do you know the number? I apologize. I guess that's what I'm asking.

I do not know the number. I do know that people in prison tend to be, on average, much less well-educated than people who are not. So, I mean, education is a major factor. The question, of course, always becomes, so why was the education so poor? Or was it family? Was it school? Was it what?

But thank you.

Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. You mentioned the Mississippi Miracle and that they have the policy if they can't read at grade level in 3rd grade, they're retained. I'm wondering if you— and, and I, I understand, you know, if you're the only kid in the class out of 20, 25, and you're the one being retained, where that might have quite a bit of an impact. But if, I mean, based on our numbers, we could probably have 30% of the class retained. And I'm wondering if you know what that looked like in Mississippi, if that kind of made the process better in a way to where they, they weren't seeing what you were saying, you know, if you're retained once, you have less of a chance of graduation, or the outcome is less likely That she'll graduate. I just retaining versus lowering standards. And, and so we're doing a disservice to the kids because, I mean, how often— I know that's an anecdotal story, but how often does that happen? You know, you got to make your numbers look good, graduation rate has to be high, and we have to overcome that somehow.

Mr. Secretary?

Yes, Mr. Chair. I, I think what I would add to that is that What we've seen in the nation in the last 10 years is the highest graduation rates on record and the lowest academic proficiency rates. So Campbell's Law is on fire right now. We are making those choices. And again, if you— but you have to be careful then. When you set those scores, when you set those ranks, people are going to find ways to meet them that not only are not really Productive or effective. What they are doing is they're escaping that measure. So we—I mean—we have to take some credit for that. We have to take some responsibility for that. We need to set those metrics in a way that doesn't have that problem.

Okay, Representative Moore.

So thank you, Mr. Chair and Dr. Graves. This is kind of looking into—I don't know if you can even answer this. But how many kids do you think we got, or what percentage? I don't want to call it a learning disability, but I have a granddaughter that struggled kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and she finally got the help she needed. And you probably know what I'm talking about. Her eyes wasn't sending a message to her brain, and virtue she had to go for treatment to teach that, you know. I don't know what you call that, but I think about this every year because, you know, she was fortunate that they had the money. It's like $5,000 and it isn't covered by insurance. And I always wonder how many students are being left behind because of that, or dyslexic students.

Well, of course, um, because it's, it's a not— it's not a known number, I, I wouldn't know what it was. But, uh, currently our special education rates are 16 of our student populations, and it's going up. So it's hard to say that the issue is that we're not identifying enough kids and finding disabilities and helping treat those disabilities because the numbers are going up every year.

Okay, are you good, Representative?

Thank you.

Yep. Okay, Representative Emery, do you have a question for the Secretary?

I do. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. So since the department, or the, I guess, Indian Education was moved under the Tribal Relations, has that shown to be successful or beneficial towards our Native students here in South Dakota?

Mr. Chair, Mr. Secretary, we believe it is, and we believe it has. What it's given is that office a greater voice in the Department of Tribal Relations than it had in the Department of Education. And it was not that the Department of Education was not giving it a voice. It was simply that we have so many different divisions that it wasn't— it was one among many, whereas at the Department of Tribal Relations, it has a much stronger voice. So we believe it's more effective there. Yes.

Representative, you okay? You have a follow-up?

I guess I do have a follow-up and more or less just a kind of a statement, because I don't really see that in any of the metrics here. that really measures any of that. So I don't know if that's something that we can develop and put into our metrics so that we can see that.

Okay, was that a question for the Secretary?

Yeah.

Okay, Mr. Secretary, can you answer that?

Mr. Chair, we can certainly look upon that and see if there is a metric that could potentially measure that. It would seem difficult to find, but we will take a look.

Okay, Representative Emery, are you okay?

Yeah, that's fine.

Okay, Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I know we do the state aid education formula now based on teacher pay, but do you have any kind of records as to the ranking of schools based on per student, how much we spend per student?

Mr. Secretary.

Mr. Chair, well, the state finance formula makes sure that the amount of money we spend per student, or we allocate per student, student is equivalent across the state. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other sources of income that then take that out of disparity, such as the— I'm trying to think of the federal program that takes care of that. I cannot think of the term right now. It's the one that provides funding for schools based upon the federal tax not being paid because it's federal lands, those kinds of things.

REDI Fund.

And so there's those dollars. There's also differentials in capital outlay and other funding. So there is that. But we have not seen a connection with that. We haven't actually done any research on that. In education, though, in general, education research has demonstrated there isn't much of a connection between amount that you spend per student and the student achievement.

Go ahead. Ask your question.

I would love—

Okay.

If we had the ability to produce that, I would love to see that, because I do know there are schools that are receiving a lot of federal funding, and I'm just wondering what— I'd like to just maybe prove to everyone that there is no correlation really between, you know, you can spend— I mean, New York, some of these more liberal states, they spend a fortune, way more than we do on per-student allocation, and they're doing worse than we So, I would love to be able to show that to people.

Okay, please continue, Mr. Secretary.

Thank you. With that, I'm going to return back to the PISA. And this rather— some very interesting results came out of that. And I'm going to get more to how this relates to South Dakota in a little bit. But internationally, reading scores fell by 28 points. That's a year and a half of learning. Okay? That's amazing. It's absolutely astonishing. That we would lose a year and a half of learning in that short period of time. Math scores fell by 22 points, about a year worth of learning, which is also huge. So you have to ask yourself, well, what's going on there? Well, what's going on is there are those 3 factors. The pandemic is one. The student attendance and teacher shortages, that's the second one. So what we had is people not in the classroom, and that has continued, although it's getting better in South Dakota and across the country. across the country. And then finally, the social media distraction or the anxious generation results. So those are being described as the reason for the fall-off in the PISA scores. But again, to have it affect an entire grade level or an entire grade level and a half is frankly quite amazing. The highest performers are areas of China. Now, China does not test all its students in the PISA. It's always hard to figure out what that means. Estonia, which is, of course, one of the Baltic republics. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania often have very high scores, have a very homogeneous population, a very strong connection to education there. And then some of the Asian countries, in addition to China: Japan, Korea, Singapore, and then finally the UK. The UK is an interesting issue there because— and that's what I want to get at when we kind of get to this point, what I'm going to result that. I'm going to step on from that, but UK— doesn't fit with the rest of them. It's not a Baltic Republic. It's not in Asia. So how did the UK manage that? A couple other points before I get to that, and that is the split between higher-performing and lower-performing students widened globally. So you have this group of students who are doing very well, and the students who are doing the very worst actually fell off even further. So a great issue, but it's not in America. So our disparate scores between the highest and lowest actually did not expand like it did in the rest of the country. And in terms of the U.S. results, America was ranked 13th overall in reading and 27th in math among the 91 countries. Science scores held steady while math and reading scores fell. You'll notice there that the rankings are affected not by countries largely getting better, as staying where they were while other countries got worse. And again, why did they get worse? Well, those 3 factors we've already discussed. There are some issues regarding the PISA, and that includes how many people they're actually testing. There are countries we're not quite sure whether they're testing everybody. So for example, in Europe, they tend to have a test at the end of the 8th grade which determines whether you're going to college or whether you're going to go to a vocational school. And so the lower the score, the more likely you're going to go to the vocational school. We don't view that that way in America, but that's how they view it there. And so what happens is if they're only testing those— the college-bound students as 15-year-olds, they're going to have higher scores. So we're never sure whether that's a fair comparison, but we're not sure it isn't either. Additionally, China is also a factor because they're only testing some areas within the country, specifically those closest to the the ocean. So some of the most impoverished areas are not being tested. So there's a couple of issues there. But what I'd like to do now is go back to the UK. The UK bucked the global decline. They didn't see the decline. They didn't increase that much, but they didn't fall like everybody else did. This is interesting because the UK, 25 years ago, was an academic basket case. Their schools were a mess. There was a Secretary of State for Education— that's how they term it in the UK— by the name of Michael Gove. And he launched 4 major initiatives in his schools. He said, first of all, we're going to have a knowledge-rich curriculum, facts-based curriculum. Second, we're going to have science of reading. It's going to be strict, systematic, and phonics-based. Third, our mathematics is going to focus heavily on basic facts. And fourth, we're gonna have a greater commitment to tougher exams and accountability. Why do I mention that? Because this is also the pattern, not because we were following the English example, but because we were following the research that the DOE has tried to pursue in the last few— several years. First of all, the knowledge-based curriculum is exactly what we did in social studies. So we got rid of this notion of trends and social phenomenon And we went back and said, we're going to teach history, we're going to teach geography. And that's what we've returned to now, especially at K-5. And beyond that, that already was focused in that manner. Second of all, science of reading. Well, we've already done that. As you know, we've been spending the last 4+ years working heavily on this. We've worked with the Board of Regents to make sure our incoming candidates for teaching at elementary school are trained in science of reading. We've taken the money from the state, that's $600,000. We put it into that fund to help the regions get there. We've also secured another $53 million grant, which we've used to help school districts. We've identified schools who really need the work the most, and we've provided the grants there, as well as providing summits and other aspects, including professional development on our webpage to get all of our teachers there. Secondly, the math, the basic facts, and the mastery, pursued a goal— we pursued a program called explicit instruction. Explicit instruction means you're going to explicitly teach students what it is they need to know, including the basic math facts. So I just— the only contrast I'll give you here, California in their last review of their math standards, which was less than a year ago, said we're no longer going to require students at the 3rd grade level to master the multiplication tables, to memorize it. Okay, that's a disaster because when you're trying to do algebra and you've got to multiply when you're doing algebra, if you don't know your multiplication tables, you're now set back a whole point. You have to whip out the calculator or do it on paper, and if you just know, then you'll get there. Of course, we reinforce that in our recent math standards, so we actually put the chart in there. That applies to addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. So it's in there. That's That again, the research was there. Professor Monte Meierink, one of our BOR professors, helped us with that and got us there. And then finally, the tougher exams and credibility, that's accountability. Again, we've held the line on that. We've had a number of pushes to say, you know, your cut scores are too high, we need to reduce those cut scores. Well, reduce cut scores, I can produce proficiency numbers much higher levels.

So.

Let me score them higher. I can come back at your next meeting and I can demonstrate how we met all the metrics. But that's not right. South Dakota expects high expectations and that's where we're at. Now, okay, well, so what? You've done this, England did this, but you can't really prove that because England did this, this is what resulted in their results. And that's true. There's a difference between correlation and causality. But there was something interesting happened in England in this last test, and that is there was— we call it a natural experiment, a historical experiment. The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, did this. But— and by the way, in England, as in European countries in general, there is no local control on these issues.

Here it is.

It applies to everybody. And that's because they have unitary government. I'm not saying that's the way we should go. I'm just saying it's a great difference from us. But interestingly, in England, he did not have control over the schools in Wales or Scotland. Before you get too bored, what's the point of this? Because Wales and Scotland saw the decline in their scores during the last 3 years and the last 10 years, as did the rest of Europe. England's schools didn't. Okay? So, United Kingdom includes more than England. These are just the English scores. They held firm where he did not impose those new things because he could not. He didn't have the authority to do so. The scores fell. It's a very convincing argument to make in my point. But when again, my point is these are the things we've done and we're consistent with what England's done, not because England did it, but because we did. We followed some of the same research. We received we received the same.

research conclusions.

Now, are there any negatives to this?

There are.

I should point out to you that in the PISA report, it also mentioned that English kids from the last test have had a very low level of life expectation. That life expectation has fallen off, and they've also had much higher anxiety. Whether you say that's because of these educational changes or because of the social media issues that have resolved. I would argue the latter, but it is— it did occur at the same time. Additionally, it was a loss in teacher autonomy. So when you do these things, teachers who, like all employees, want autonomy in their field, they want to be able to do things the way they want to do them, you do lose that when you make these kinds of changes. So in any case, that's that point. What is my point in all this? Those things we've been pursuing are what seem to have resulted in positive outcomes in the research. A knowledge-based curriculum we did in social studies. Science of reading, that's our elementary focus, and we've been, we've been focusing on that for many years now. And then the math basic facts. So we're in that same ballpark.

Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Have you had pushback from any of the schools on any of this?

Mr. Secretary?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, we have had pushback. We had pushback, though I should say, you're all familiar with pushback. We had social studies curriculum. That wasn't hardly a secret. In science or reading, we have not had a lot of pushback. I think most districts are saying, yep, we made an error in education. So I'm not blaming this on any particular school district. This was an education-wide departure from science or reading. In mathematics, really the major issue we had was from a professor at the Board of Regents who objected to that. Beyond that, though, our districts have not expressed any concerns with that.

Follow-up? State your question.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate what you're doing. I support it wholeheartedly. The schools that pushed back, did they eventually implement the new social studies curriculum? Ms.

Chair?

Go ahead.

In the first year of the implementation of Studies Weekly, which is the K-5 weekly reader kind of device there to teach the standards, we provided those at no cost to all schools. Every public school district in the state adopted them, and many of the private schools.

Okay. Everybody else good? All right. Oh, Senator Grove.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um, so in, in the science of reading, um, so we're doing the entire program where you're, you're learning the phonics and, and you're reading the, the chapter books and whatever. You're implementing both of those at the same time?

Go ahead.

Yes, that's correct. Okay, follow-up?

Yeah, go ahead.

Thank you.

Okay, so I'm just wondering overall what, you know, we're talking about different initiatives and stuff that are being implemented, and I'm, you know, I'm glad to hear the stuff that we're talking about here, but I'm just wondering as a parent if we've learned anything in that area. It seems like a part of the I think that's part of, you know, somebody mentioned the more liberal schools. Over the years, like, we've really just pushed parents out of the child's education, and it's kind of been like, we're the educators and we're going to do the education thing. But there's a lot of studies that would state that having an involved and active— involved and active parents plays a huge role in the success of a student in school. And I'm just wondering, I understand— let me just say this up front— I understand that there are some parents who choose to not be involved, and I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about solid parents who want to participate in their child's education. There has been, and I know this from personal experience, Yes. a real line that's been drawn by education departments that says, you're not a part of this, we're doing this. And I think that that's really harmed our children. And I'm just wondering if there's any thoughts or ideas on how we can kind of swing that pendulum back and make it more open to parents to be involved and easier access for parents to be involved.

Mr. Secretary, go ahead. One of the very first standard conclusions from educational research came out in the '60s, and that said the number one factor that correlates with high student achievement is an active, engaged parent in their education. So you're absolutely dead on. That's never been refuted. It stands as it was. In terms of Districts— of course, everyone encourages that on paper. The policies are. It's the implementation that occurs. We've had districts that do a phenomenal job of engaging parents and they do. I do think that there are at least 2 factors that have fit into alternative instruction students or homeschool students in South Dakota. One is that people have found they love homeschooling and homeschooling is a great feature when it's done well.

Right.

But the other factor is that we have seen parents driven out of the public education sphere. I know that to be true. I know we've had students invited to depart from the public education sphere, and so that is out there as well. And that is why last year we were at 12,500 homeschool students in the state of South Dakota with public school enrollment at about 130,000— 133,000. 134,000 students. So it has become a very significant percentage of our students in our state, and I think that has been one of the reasons why. It's not the only reason why, because I think homeschooling has its advantages, and you can like it even though you liked your public school focus. But I think it's a matter of competition, and people have left for that reason as well. I think that schools who don't try to engage with their parents are losing students and they're having a natural consequence for it. Whereas those who do engage and find ways to include parents are including those— are having those students stay with them.

Senator Grove, you okay? Or you have a follow-up?

Just a quick follow-up. I really respect that and I appreciate your response. I would just say, you know, like something very, very simple that could be done is— and I don't I don't even understand why it's not already there, but if a parent has a concern, maybe they're intimidated by the whole education process, whatever, a million reasons why it's not easy to just call up a principal, maybe they don't feel like they're getting the answers, whatever. We don't have an easy access button on our websites where parents can just state, I'm concerned about my child and I have a dispute with the district in general or, you know, a facility.

Um-hum.

And when you do finally find that place to report it, the information that you receive, or at least in my case, they deceived me. And so they put time limits on when you can file complaints And do all this and that. And so there really is like— it becomes— I was actually told, we're taking care of this now and you're not a part of this. I was actually told that. I'm a doctor. Everything I've ever written has been published internationally. You know, I don't say that to say anything. I'm just saying I'm not an idiot. And I know how to raise a child, but they literally said, you're done here, and they wanted to take over. And so I think that, you know, just from my own experience, that just being able to have that open communication, not just with the teacher, but when you disagree, to be able to go through a chain of command and feel like you're being heard and that there's a real relationship. That's occurring. Just a thought.

Mr.

Chair.

Mr. Secretary.

We receive parental calls on a daily basis at the DOE. Some of them get routed into special education because of special education issues, like I'm not happy with my child's IEP, I need to— we— and we have people who then advise them how to move from there. We also have inquiries about library books, for example, and then we explain to them the process for dealing with that. And then we have the others, and basically what we do in those cases is we say, okay, if you have these concerns, you need to start with your teacher's— your child's teacher, and when that is not satisfactory, go to the principal, then to the superintendent, then the school board. So there is a process of going through that. There is a process that they can pursue to do that, and that tends to be how we advise that. Now, there are some extreme examples about child abuse and those kinds of things, and they go in a different direction, but the vast majority Fortier and those other areas.

Senator Grove, you okay?

Okay.

Any other questions?

Okay.

You have a question? Oh, well, please continue.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So at this point, I would just point out our trend lines. This is our— now our state assessments, and this is back through the spring testing of 24-25. So we're yet a year away, and we're going to have this for you very soon, and we'll get that report to you. But our English language arts proficiencies were about 52%, recovering from 2021 at 53%, and then math proficiency has risen from 43% to 44%. So that's where we're at. Again, I've had people ask me, well, change the cut scores and we'll have higher percentages. I don't think that's the answer. What I think the answer is, is to say, all right, Yes, we're at 44% in math proficiency. That does not mean that 56% of our kids can't do math. What it means is 44% of our kids are doing it on grade level or above. So you've got some kids who are just below. It's not— I mean, you need to make sure how you state that correctly. South Dakota does pretty well in the nation. America does pretty well in the international comparisons. And so, So these percentages should be understood to reflect that reality. South Dakota kids are doing pretty well in many ways. Not as well as we'd like, and we always want to make it better, but these results are— you can overstate these results as well. And I want to make sure that the educators in South Dakota get credit for the fact they're doing a pretty good job in many of these areas. A couple of the other performance indicators that we did talk about, college and career College, career, and life ready. So we have student graders. The proficiency ranks here are students entering 4th grade proficient in reading. That's that 3rd grade focus we have. Students entering 9th grade proficient in math. Increasing the academic success of Native American students. And finally, students graduating high school ready for post-secondary and the workforce. You will notice there we have not committed the Campbell's Law error, which says We want to have a higher and higher percentage of high school graduates. Now we want to have a higher and higher percentage of high school graduates who are ready for the next level. And then we have these scores on meeting each of those. I guess I'll leave those to you. You'll notice that our ELA growth rates and proficiency rates, when you look at, say, the 3rd grade, our Native American students are well below where our— the regular student population is.

Right.

Both in meeting growth targets and in their overall proficiency rates. The same is true in mathematics at the 8th and 9th grade level. Our percentages are in the 40s, but for our Native American students, they're, they're much lower than that, and that is something we have been and are continuing to attempt to address. Finally, attendance. We are getting our attendance rates back to the pre-pandemic level. We had a huge error that was made across the country and in South Dakota and everywhere else, in which we said, look, if you have a cough, if you're not feeling well, stay home. You can only tell a 7th grade boy that so many times before he goes, hey, I'm not feeling well, because it's kind of fun to stay home. So we really oversold that, and it was one of those messages you sent that gets accepted really easily and probably shouldn't have been. So we're We're getting that back. As you may know, we issued a number of grants to help schools get to that point, and all schools are now making a recovery. Not all of them are getting there as fast as they should or as fast as they would like, but they're all, they're all definitely pursuing that.

I think we have a question from Senator Foster, Mr. Secretary.

Thank you.

Senator Foster, do you have a question for the Secretary?

Yes, I do.

Thank you, Chair.

In relation to South Dakota students are doing pretty well, and then except for Native students, who is the point of contact within DOE offering support for Title VI administrators and parents?

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

The Title VI contact, I'm sorry, I don't know that name. I would have to look that up. Title VI is handled in a different way than all the other title programs. So in Title I, we have lots of consultants at our level that help the schools do that. Title VI is awarded directly from the federal government to the local school district. And that's why we don't tend to have a lot of involvement in that. But I will go ahead and I will get back to you, Senator Foster, on any information I can give you on an actual contact on that and where that person would be. Because again, that program tends to be implemented directly from the federal level to the local school district level. And I, as you know, as a superintendent prior to this job, I was in Mitchell. We had a Title VI program. It was quite active. And again, we worked directly through the federal government. We were audited directly through the federal government on the implementation of that program.

Senator Foster, are you okay? Do you have a follow-up?

I do have a follow-up.

When you—

in addition to that information, what is the frequency of meeting? Can you also add this information, what the frequency of those meetings with the DOE and the Office of Tribal Relations Director of Education? And then where can we access the progress and impacts on those reports?

So on Title VI? Yes.

Okay. Does that handle you, Senator Foster?

Yeah, it does, but this can wait until later, but I just really want to get to how are these deficiencies being addressed for Native achievement rates and what the role of the DTR is in this.

Okay.

Okay, you'll ask that later then. Okay, go ahead, Mr. Secretary, continue.

Another metric we have is, of course, college and career readiness, and that is, are the students ready for that level? And as you'll see here, the items here, we have the ELA readiness in the red, the math readiness, and the workforce readiness in the black. So you will notice that math tends to be our area of least readiness. for college and career success. And that's, of course, we'll get you that metric when we, when we go forward. The strategies we've been pursuing, I've already talked a little bit about this, but I'll just cover these really quickly again. Restore science reading to the classrooms by training all elementary teachers across the state. Have our leaders receive Blueprint courses through the BOR and coaching model for local implementation. We also did receive that $53 million CLSD grant And we are holding annual literacy conferences. This year, we're going to add an extra day to the literacy conference for a math conference on explicit instruction as well. The newly improved mathematics standards have focused on the explicit instruction in mathematics. We've also secured a $3.5 million, 5-year federal grant to support professional development in that area. And we are focusing on K-5 professional development on math instruction, explicit instruction, and peer coaching. And we've had a previous SPDG grant also lead to the success of the South Dakota Literacy Initiative. So again, we've been capitalizing on those. And finally, of course, the knowledge-based instruction is focused on in the social studies. Our strategies in other areas have included investment in programs that have produced outcomes. So we've been focusing and saying, look, if what we're doing isn't having the Manifest income that we need to get— and manifest outcome, we need to get rid of it and pursue something that is. Those that have seemed to have produced some outcomes, including JAG. Our JAG program is nationally known as producing the results that it's supposed to produce, which includes retention in high school, graduation from high school, success in either a full-time job, enrollment full-time in a postsecondary institution, or military service. We also have the Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports Program. That is a program that trains school districts and school buildings at that level on how to produce a well-managed behaviorally school. And that has been a program that has been very much in demand. We've also focused heavily on career and technical education because that tends to be grabbing some students who would not otherwise be graduating from high school, or who have a particular focus in making them, frankly, want to come to school. And that has been proven very successful, in part because the legislature and the governor have been good about providing some one-time dollars in that area to provide equipment to make that happen. And then finally, our South Dakota Sturdy Program, which is a program teaching resilience at the 4th and 5th and 6th grade levels. We've also been addressing the teacher shortage. The biggest Success we've had there is a teacher apprenticeship pathway that takes paraeducators who are currently serving in schools and getting them through their last years of college, however much they lacked, because most of these people had started college but not finished, and getting them to be teachers. Our success rate at those who make through the— make it through that program have been phenomenal. Almost all of them then take a job at the district at which they were serving as a para. Our teacher shortage data is coming out now. And we are going to see our teacher shortage, our teacher vacancies at the beginning of the school year has now fallen to a level that is smaller than it has been for the last 5 years. We're happy with that. We've also, as you know, and as the governor worked very hard on, improved compensation for teachers by making sure that there is a minimum teacher salary and that each year teachers share in whatever increase there is in the state finance formula at the same level in terms of their compensation goes up. And that— and school districts have been very good about that. We've had almost no one fall behind in that area. So in fact, the minimum teacher salary doesn't actually kick in until next year, but in the very first year, almost every school district moved their minimum teacher pay up to that level. So that had a very quick impact. As a result, we moved from 49th teacher pay in the country as measured by the NEA to 46th. And that's 3 steps. That's, that's a huge, a huge jump. Now, again, 46th, some people say, well, that's not doing very well. Well, but you got to look at progress sometimes. And frankly, none of that information in any way focuses in on COLA. So cost of living is an issue there as well, and something needs to be factored in, though it isn't currently being done. And then we've, we've also addressed the teacher shortage through certification flexibility. We've been focusing on temporary flexibilities. So we'll say things, all right, we're going to hire you on an alternative certification for now, and you have 3 to 4 years to fix that problem and get that certification in place. What we don't want to do is permanently reduce the expectations of the people who come into the teaching field. Because you, you, the one thing I'm very sure of is you can't improve student achievement by reducing expectations. You lower expectations, you're going to get lower outcomes. And then finally, we've had a very strong focus on an improved data connection and system. We have the State Longitudinal Data System, and currently we are almost getting ready to be completed and moving that from a K-12 system to a P-16 system. So we're getting that data in place now so that we can look at preschool results, K-12 results, and university results as well, under the direction of Joe Moran, our Division Director of Data and Research. So that's gone extremely well in addition. With that, I'll end and say we'll be getting that information to you on our accountability the minute we have it, and that should be coming again. We'll definitely have that to you by the end of November and hopefully Okay.

Thank you. I'm sure we've got some questions. We're going to start over there with Senator Grove.

I guess I thought I was going to be last. Okay. I didn't catch all of what Senator Foster wanted to ask, so if I'm stepping on your toes, I'm sorry. But I just wanted to go back to Goal 3. Where we have the Native American students rankings here. So it's— this is frightening. You know, we're talking about 9%, 13%, 16%. I need to put my glasses on. I'm just wondering, okay, this is This is just has to be deeper than this has to be deeper. Why are we where we're at here with these with these numbers, and how do we dig out of this? So I guess that's maybe two, and I don't know if you can even answer those. But a third one that came. This did come up in one of the conversations with correctional, of course, because we're forecasting here. If we can't read, we're forecasting where people will end up. And in the correctional task force, we had the conversation about Native Americans tending to trend higher with dyslexia, and there is a misdiagnosis. in that, which I could see where, you know, kind of going back to what Representative Moore said, I mean, if you have this problem, you're probably going to struggle to learn in school. Is that something that we've considered, that there's perhaps a misdiagnosis going on where we have some students who have— tend to have a higher level of dyslexia and we're not catching it?

Mr. Secretary? Thank you, Mr. Chair. So the issue of what has caused it is less interesting to me than how do we get out of it. This is your second point. And I always wished I could invite General Beadle to come here because General Beadle identified the same problem, as has pretty much every Secretary of Education since that. And General Beadle was the territorial Secretary of Education. We're not getting there. Secretary after secretary, year after year, we're just not getting there. And if you look at South Dakota, and you map it out in terms of proficiency rates, I continue to believe we have education deserts in the state. We have areas where parents have no school to go to where proficiency rates are at a reasonable level. That's a disaster, 'cause I don't even have the opportunity, and I don't have the resources or the wealth to then move or to send my child 50 miles away or whatever it is. And so, that's why I have been— since I got here, I've been an advocate for student choice, for school choice. I think there have to be ways we can put in situations, and there are some school choice programming out there. that have produced the kind of results we would expect among all students, including Native American students. And that's why I've been advocating for that purpose. Is dyslexia, on your third question, is that a possible issue? It is a possible issue. In terms of how we deal with it in special education, it's addressed through the fact that dyslexia is a learning disability among many other learning disabilities. And so once it's identified, then the idea is the student needs to be tested. There are tests for dyslexia that go out there. The good news is that the best way to teach a child with dyslexia to learn to read is through the science of reading. So that's at least some kind of a bright spot.

Okay, Senator Foster, you good?

Yeah?

Okay. Senator Grove?

Why do I say Foster all the time? I know, sorry. Representative Moore, you had a question?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, thank you. I think, uh, 35 years ago this thing started in education, and I think we're finally moving in the right direction, getting back to reading, arithmetic. And so I appreciate that you're heading that direction. I think we're going to be successful. Just with a little time, we'll get there. Like I said, it took us 35 years to get where we're at. Hopefully it only takes us 10 to get back out of it. And then you brought up the apprenticeship, and I— we put that in place since I've been here. I think it's a great program, but I do got a question. Is there an end? You know, we got this deal, we start this stuff, but as we get the positions filled, Will the Department of Education say, okay, now we're going back to hiring teachers that come out of college? Not like these— no, not like the apprentice. They're doing a great job out there and they filled our need. But do you see an end in the future?

Mr.

Chair, Mr. Secretary, go ahead.

So year 1, cohort 1, because we're in cohort 4 right now, cohort 1 was financed through federal dollars, epidemic dollars, and we did that. We didn't have the money for Cohort 2, and so the Department of Labor joined with us. Now, they were actually assisting us in a small amount in Cohort 1. Cohorts 2, 3, 4, they've assisted us much more than we've assisted them, so they're— in terms of financing. We're still doing the legwork and getting the people and finding them and doing those kinds of things. We recently secured a grant, a federal grant, that will help us with Cohort 5.

Right.

But you took the words right out of my mouth. I think There needs to be an end to this program, not because there won't always be people who could benefit from it, but because I don't want to change the metric of how we train teachers in South Dakota or America to, you don't really need to go to the traditional college placement. College is a positive experience, and I think they need to go through that. There's a lot of other things you learn in college. Other than simply the courses you take. I would hate to see that replace that. And I've actually been talking to superintendents about this. I think there does need to be a point where we say, okay, that's it. Because what I don't want this to turn into is I graduate from high school, I take a paraeducator at one of my local elementary schools, and I start taking virtual coursework. And after 4 years when I've stayed at home the entire time, I now am a certified teacher. I think there's a benefit It's a benefit for our teachers to know what college is like as an experience. So I'm in agreement with you on that.

Then one more.

Go ahead, follow up.

So this is a high-dollar question. What would it take for South Dakota to get preschool? I think it's well known that preschool helps young children. Get into kindergarten, whatever beneficiary, but it always comes down to the dollars, it seems like. And I know some schools will offer— I think they offer it and some don't.

But would—

do you see a benefit in having a preschool?

Mr. Chair, Secretary, go ahead. I don't know what that would cost. I imagine it would be a very large cost. I will say this about preschool. There is There is some research on preschool and much of it does not really indicate that it has the long-term effect.

Okay.

Some does, but I think the balance of it doesn't. There's something in education research called the 3rd grade phenomenon. If you take a young kid and teach them much more thoroughly, much more comprehensively at a younger level, You will see a growth in their academic achievement. But frequently in the research, the differential that's created in that child disappears by grade three. So that's that's the one factor I want to bring to mention. I I don't believe that preschool is a panacea. I think it can be done well or done poorly, and I think there are schools who are trying it out. One of the things I love about South Dakota is, like the federal level, we experiment. So we have a school district doing this. And a school district doing that. And we have more schools doing preschools as a way to compete against other schools. So we have this competitive marketplace out there. So I'm certainly not downgrading or diminishing the point of preschool, but I'm also saying I don't think the research bears out that it will be the real solution to many of these other academic deficiencies.

Representative Good.

Thank you, Dr. Graves.

Representative Auch. Ms. Koch, you have a question.

Thank you, Chair. This is maybe more of a where do I go to find the research question. And just to let you know, on a personal level, I think, and I respect what you've done, and I agree with Representative Moore that, you know, we went kind of backwards and now we're catching back up, and I am so thankful for your leadership in that area. We had a forum last night in our district. 4 out of the 5 individuals running for elected office, the question was raised, the 46th, 49th in teacher pay, and we just need to pay our teachers more to have successful schools. That was the consensus except for one individual who is running for representative in District 18, and I'm sure you know who that is. Anyhow, where can I find, or where can we find, the research that shows South Dakota— exactly, we get COLA. How can we compare our teacher salary along with all the other benefits in reference to other states? Is there a matrix here in the Department of Education or with the Department of Labor so that we can defend our Teachers Pay, defend how our teachers are being compensated. I mean, I do— I would always, of course, like to see teachers earn more money. I do think they deserve it. They have a very, very difficult job. But is there somewhere we can go and do a comparison to show how our districts are being compensated, that kind of thing?

Mr. Secretary?

Mr. Chair, yes, and please don't think anything I've said I'm not prepared to say teachers are paid enough. Again, I think that when we worked toward those metrics on minimum teacher pay and teacher compensation, that was an acknowledgment of the fact that we can do better on this. And so we've had good results with that. In terms of the COLA comparison, I'm trying to remember who actually did those. I know there is a resource out there. We will find it and I'll get that sent to you.

I greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

Okay, are you good? Then we're going to Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a comment on the teacher pay, um, because I was on the, the Teacher Compensation Board along with you, uh, and I very much appreciated being on there. However, I just want to remind people, because there was a slide in there and it was comparing teacher pay to other professions, but literally it was comparing apples to oranges. Because it wasn't annualizing the teacher pay, so you were comparing a teacher who gets paid for 9 months, essentially 9 months, however many days that is, comparing that to someone who is working 12 months of the year and their salary. So, I just want to remind people, when we are talking about teacher pay, we always have to remember that. And you did have— there was some good information that they did eventually come back with when they annualized that. It actually shows we're doing very well. So—

Mr. Chair? Go ahead, Mr. Chairman.

Yes.

At your request, we did an annualization. We didn't base it on months. We based it on days because it varies. We did provide that. I'd be happy to resurrect that file and get that to you as well. I also think with AI disrupting much of the economy right now in terms of that, I think that's going to have an interesting impact on the whole question of educator pay as well.

Okay, you good? Representative Emery, did you have your hand up for a question?

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Just kind of go back on the—

thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Just to kind of go back on something that the Secretary said. So Secretary Graves, on the statement that you made about preschool, Are you saying that the data does not support long-term benefits from preschool? Like, are you referring to standardized test scores, or is that correlation to high school graduations and college entrance?

Mr. Chair? Yes, the research is all over the place. I mean, and there's research gauging that, okay, how do they do in kindergarten? How do they do? Do they graduate? Do they So there's any number of metrics out there. One of the things I'm looking forward to is as we produce the State Longitudinal Data System and the metrics on that, including preschool, we'll be able to get a pretty good measurement of that in the state of South Dakota. That will take a number of years because it has to start with preschool and depending on what metric you're using, get all the way to high school. But we're going to have a better data source on that in our own state and for our own students. I'm looking forward to that being available. Currently, the research out there is very widespread, and it's, it's not all in agreement.

Representative Emery, do you have more?

Secretary, if you could just follow up and send me that data or where you're pointing that to, I'd appreciate that.

Thank you.

Okay, are you good? Representative Foster? Okay, then we're going to go to Senator Foster. Do you have a question?

Thank you, Chair.

I do. I just wanted to kind of circle back around the wide Well, does anybody else have anything?

We'll see if she gets back on to ask her question. Anybody else have anything?

Okay, I would just like to say that tribal relations focuses more on cultural inclusion.

Senator, we lost. Senator, we've Missed everything. We thought we had lost you forever. You're gonna have to start way from the beginning again.

Okay, I just mainly wanted to say, what are the measurable steps that Department of Education is taking to address the academic outcomes of Native students? Are there any strategic planning sessions that are inclusive of Native education leaders or of Native American student improvement just to address that gap? Is there anything that's decisive? Because as I stated, that the Department of Education mainly focuses on cultural inclusion, which is important, but I need to see what steps we're taking to address the academic outcomes.

Mr. Secretary?

Yes, thank you very much. And I'll be happy to send you something on that. Basically, we We tend to focus on districts that are underperforming, those districts who are having the biggest struggle, and that in some cases matches up, and that's how we've been doing that focus. But I'll be happy to send you a report on that as well.

Okay.

Senator Foster, are you okay, or do you have more follow-up?

Thank you.

Okay.

Anyone else? I was just going to say that The secretary and I had the privilege to be a couple days ago at an awards for Korsika Stickney Grade School. Oh, and so it's— we have success stories. It's not all bad information here. We, you know, we see some schools and some kids really advancing. So, yeah. Representative Emery, you had more?

No, I don't have a real question for the secretary.

I just kind of have a point. I don't know if it's an IT problem or if there's something, but I, um, for whatever reason, the Teams just kind of stops.

I mean, we can see everybody moving, but there's absolutely no audio.

So I think that's kind of what happened with, with Senator Foster.

I could hear her asking the question the entire time, but apparently it just didn't get transmitted over to you guys.

Okay, well, I think we got her. I think she— we got her back on and she asked again. Did you hear that? I mean, I think Senator Foster is fine. But we'll check into it.

But I mean, it's happened to me a couple times where I just completely lose you guys.

Okay.

We will get someone smarter than me on that. So, okay. Seeing no other comments or questions, and since we didn't receive an actual report, we don't have to make any motions right now to accept it because we can't. So I appreciate you and I appreciate the time and the report. Keep up the good work.

Mr. Chair, thank you so much. Okay.

We are going to continue to move ahead on our morning schedule, and we are going to talk about adopt the ADA complaint performance measures template, right? Oh, we got to do number 3. Sorry. Thank you, Jacob. Man, good thing you're here. We have to propose changes to performance measures. And did you all get these and have you all seen them? And then I would say, does anyone have questions on anything on the changes? Wow, pretty easy bunch. No questions on any of the changes. Okay, well then I guess seeing nothing, the chair is going to ask for a motion.

Mr. Chair.

Senator Howard.

I would move to adopt the proposed changes to the performance metrics.

Second.

Okay, it has been moved by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Auch to receive these. All those in favor will say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Aye.

Okay. We have received the changes. Okay. Now we're going to move to 4, adopt an ADA complaint performance measures template. This is the LRC count— the LRC is going to give this report. And as chair, we— and co-chair, when this came, we asked Elijah if he would come to this meeting today. and give you all, the committee, some insight on exactly what he's talking about so you know what you're voting on. So with that, Elijah, if you please introduce yourself and give us your intake.

Good morning. Elijah Rodriguez, LRC's Chief IT Officer. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me here today to— and allowing Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to present an issue and a possible solution regarding the format of the performance measure reports that agencies submit to GOAC. Just to provide a little bit of context, I want to get into a few definitions here. First of all, digital accessibility. If you haven't heard that term before, you will be hearing a lot about it here in the near future throughout state government. So what is digital accessibility? It's ensuring that your digital assets, such as your websites, your apps, your digital documents, are designed in a way that they can be used by everyone without barriers. And this includes people with a disability, such as the blind. Okay. They don't use a website the same way that you or I might. They use a screen reader. Of course, they cannot use a mouse because they cannot see where the mouse is pointing, so they have to rely on keyboard-only navigation. Another example: someone who is deaf. If they're watching a video or if there's audio playing on a website. They can't hear that. There has to be captions for that. Another example, someone who is colorblind. If there's a document that relies on solely color to provide context and definition, that would be very difficult for a colorblind person. So when we talk about digital accessibility, it's making your websites, apps, documents, accessible to everyone, including those with some of those examples that I just provided of those disabilities. To provide some more context around this, I want to talk about the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. So the ADA is meant to ensure that people with disabilities can fully participate in all aspects of civic life. So under Title II of the ADA, this requires state and local governments to give people with disabilities an equal opportunity to benefit from all programs, services, and activities. So how does ADA Title II and digital accessibility come together? Well, the DOJ published Published a rule that mandates digital accessibility. Before, it was voluntary. That rule was finalized back in 2024. LRC, and I'm sure other government agencies everywhere, have been working diligently to get their digital assets up to par to comply with this rule. So there is a deadline. In this rule, the deadline is April 26th, 2027. It says that all of your digital assets, your websites, documents, all of your public-facing stuff has to comply to a specific set of standards. Those standards are WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Standards. There's different levels to that and different versions. The version and level that we have to comply with is 2.1 AA, and of course there's A, AAA, but we have to be 2.1 AA. So, how does it affect the performance measure template used by this committee? Well, of course, it's a digital asset. It's out there on our website for the public to see, and according to South Dakota Codified Law 2637, this committee shall develop that template and agencies shall use it to report back to this committee. So, like I mentioned earlier, we have a much larger project within the LRC to get all of our digital assets up to date. Because of this law, or that Yeah, this is in codified law. It is not up to LRC to make the decision and say, hey, we're changing this template. That's up to this committee. So I want to go— I'll stop for any questions at this point before I start looking or showing the templates.

I'm not seeing any.

Do you?

No?

No.

Continue, please.

Let me see if I can find the correct document.

Senator Howard has one.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm not advocating this, but I am asking out of curiosity, what is the consequences if we do not adopt this?

Go ahead.

So if you do not adopt this, that opens up To opens up the legislature to civil lawsuits brought forth by individuals. DOJ investigation, if DOJ thinks that you're intentionally doing it and or or intentionally not complying, there are federal fines from what I've read. A first-time violation is about $115,000, and they can go all the way up to $230,000. There are other consequences that would impact other agencies. Doesn't— they don't impact us, like loss of federal funding. I mean, we don't get federal funding, but we would have to go back and remediate this anyway if we were under investigation and found not to be compliant.

You okay?

Well, follow—

I just took a moment. Senator Howard.

I just want to make sure people understood why we are doing this, because I mean, you know, most of us here would say we believe in less government, less regulation, less— but this is— it's necessary. So I just wanted to make sure that was out there so people understood.

Okay.

Mr. Chairman?

Yeah, yeah, Representative Aylward, go ahead.

Thank you. Just, just to clarify for those of those individuals who are listening, this is across the state, local and state and county governments, city governments, correct? This, this needs to be at these standards?

This is correct. This is nationwide. Like I said, this is a, this is a federal mandate.

I'm on it.

I'm on the right one.

Oh, you're on the right one?

Okay.

Yes, this is nationwide. And there are different deadlines for different levels of government. Let me see here. So in our case, state or local government agencies, So, any agency that serves a population of 50,000 or more people has to comply by April 26th, 2027. If it's a smaller entity that serves a population of 49,999 people or less, you have until April 26th, 2028 to comply.

Okay.

So, a year from a larger entity.

One more question.

One follow-up, go ahead.

Is LRC or the state legislature or the state government putting together a booklet or a program, or is there guidelines that counties and municipalities can follow to make sure that they're checking off all the boxes? Is there going to be a 1-800 number here in the state? How are we as the state— are we helping any of our local entities with this process?

Go ahead, Mr. Rodriguez.

Well, with me being the Chief IT Officer for the LRC, the scope of my authority and the LRC's project is for the legislature only. I have been in contact with several people from BIT, and I know that they have been working with agencies to remediate some of this stuff. The details of that, I don't know the extent of that, but I know there has been some effort and some communication throughout the executive branch agencies about this.

You didn't want to take this minute to put your personal cell phone out for everybody to call? Did you have a follow-up?

No, I didn't. Just a comment. Thank you very much. That was what I was looking for. And so, and I'm assuming it'll probably come through the planning districts also, correct?

That's correct.

Thank you.

Okay.

Seeing nothing else, please continue.

Okay. I have our current or your current template up as an example. And I just want to walk through a few things. that make this template non-compliant. For once, or first, color contrast. One of the success criteria under these mandates is color contrast. So if I take a look at this cell here where this number 5 is on a red background, that would not pass a color contrast test, and that's even difficult for me to see, and I have great vision. Yellow is okay. The green, or black text on this dark green, is not okay. Another thing, like I mentioned earlier, we can't rely solely on color to provide context. Well, then you take a look at your status column where it's the yellow light, red light, green light. If there's someone that's colorblind, they cannot interpret that at all. Also, if there's any images throughout documents, those have to have what's called alt text. So if someone is using a screen reader or navigating without a keyboard and they come across that image, they They can't see it, so it has to have that alt text that describes that image. So those are several examples of why this document is not compliant. So I'm going to go over an example of what LRC staff put together as a possible solution. And this is a document here. All we did was, for this example, took DLR's performance measures that you all saw earlier in this meeting and put those in this new template just to make sure this template fits what you guys are currently doing as far as process. But as you can see visually, it's quite a bit different. Okay. So one thing we had to do was get it out of Excel. Excel documents converted to PDF lose a lot of context and information during that conversion. So the best approach was to put it in a Word document. The downside of that is that in Word you use— you lose a lot of functionality of Excel. So those were the trade-offs there. From a formatting standpoint, Word definitely fit better. If we would have left it in Excel, there would have been a lot of work that needs to be done to remediate the document after it's converted to PDF, which was not feasible for for staff or agencies submitting those documents. So one thing you can see here, the status, we got rid of the red light, yellow light, green light. That's the actual text from the status key that's in the template. If I go back to the template, there was a key at the bottom of the page there telling what the indicators mean. In the new template, we just spelled it out there. Another thing we did was get— we got rid of the trendline. Like I explained earlier, for every single image in the document, you have to have alt text. That would have been a lot of work for every little trendline on every single report to apply the alt text As to what that trend line means, another thing we did was we got rid of some redundancy here as far as information. Here on the old report, you have our your actual versus target, where really your actual is your current year. So in this report, this actual was the same as FY. 20 from this old template. We got rid of some of that redundancy and put the most current year right next to the target so that you know you're comparing the current year to the target. Then at the same time you have the historical data, but we're going backwards from the most current year. Another nice feature I want to One thing I wanted to point out about this new proposed template is how it's all bookmarked and you can easily navigate. If you take a look at the right pane there, you know, I'm at the document title, I'm at Goal 1, Activity A, Activity B, Agency Comments. I can jump to Goal 2. If you were to pull up DLR's performance measures that they— that you went over earlier, none of this is there, and it's not possible in Excel. That is all I have for our proposed solution, and I will stand by for any questions.

Okay.

Is there any questions? Okay, Senator Grove.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

I'm just wondering if, you know, when you're talking about Excel, you're, you're putting numbers in, you're getting results, whatever. Can you, can't you, can't you just save whatever you have in your Excel sheet and convert it into a doc or no? Do you lose stuff when you do it that way?

Go ahead.

When you convert an Excel document into a PDF, you lose a lot of, a lot of the technical information that's, that's in the background that you don't necessarily see. So there's, like I said, these headings that I just gave you an example of, and bookmarks. You lose those in Excel. And the reading order has to be specified. There's a reading— what's called reading order and tags in the back of PDF documents that if those aren't set right and you start adding and removing lines and sections in Excel, a screen reader will jump all over the document because the logical reading order of the document is not correct. And that's one thing that this proposed solution does, is it provides a structure which the agency does not have to change. They just fill their information in and delete any of the sections that they don't need.

Follow-up.

Go ahead.

So, but isn't that going to, in some situations, increase the amount of work? That you have to do because you're— if you're putting a bunch of numbers in and you're, um, you know, you're figuring things and then you're going to get percentage and like in the past it would just be there, here's the answer. So now you're going to have to do that. You still have to do that, but then you would have to then put it into this program. So is it making extra work or—

No.

Go ahead.

It's the same amount of work. If you take a look at this old template here, this is a current one that's being used. There are actually no calculations in this at all. All of this is just numbers that are being plugged in, and there isn't really even a calculation as to actual versus target, like how far off you were from the target. It's just numbers. I mean, it's basically a one-to-one to transpose all this information to the old format to this new format. We made sure there was no functionality loss there as far as the information being recorded.

Okay. You good? All right. Any other questions? Seeing none. You all see what's ahead of us, what we have to approve here. So the chair would look for a motion. Senator Howard.

I move to adopt the ADA compliant performance measures template.

I second that.

It has been moved by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Auch.

What?

Oh, okay.

Is there any comment on your motion?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank you, Mr. Rodriguez, for all the work that you put into this. It's staggering to me what, what has probably been going on behind the scenes for however long you've been working on this. So I just want to thank you. I think it looks great. The other was really tiny and hard to read at times, so I do think this is an improvement. So.

Further comments?

Mr.

Chair, Representative Auch, I would have to agree. I thoroughly agree. I, I actually like this report better than— even though Senator Howard likes the color coding, but I do think it's easier to read. And once again, thank you for all your hard work because I, I bet this was an immense amount of effort. Thank you. All right, Mr.

Chair, comment?

Sure, go ahead.

Yeah, I don't want to take all the credit. This definitely was a group effort. Several from the LRC contributed to this. Joslyn Jessop, Caitlin over here, Bill, Jacob also contributed, Mitch who isn't here. So it was definitely a group effort on this. Another thing I want to mention, I don't see this as being our final product. So after going through this and thinking about it, kind of along the lines of what Senator Grove was getting at. I think our final product should be some kind of web application or web form that agencies can plug their information into. Another thing that would happen if we went that route is that we take the formatting out of their hands, off of their plate, and also off of staff's plate, so we can have some kind of web app that agencies plug their information into and it just spits out the report in the format it's supposed to be and automates that, I think that would be great. We don't have the time for that now. I would say that's a project about a year or 2 down the road. Another thing that would benefit— that we would benefit for if we were to have that kind of program is the type of analytics that don't have access to right now. If we have all of this information in a database, you can start asking questions and extracting that information that you can't get right now. You can start comparing measures and metrics across different agencies if they have similar measures. You can take a look at the history in a different way. And another thing that this Word document and the old Excel document did was leave that historical data open to manipulation. And our staff did find that in a few instances where a report was submitted and someone from the agency accidentally fat-fingered or typed over the historical section. If you get into a web application, it locks that down and you don't have that risk anymore.

So, okay, thank you. Yes, excellent job. Okay, so we have a motion to adopt the ADA compliant performance measures template. All those in favor will say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? That is adopted. Thank you again, Elijah. So I'm going to work around the schedule here just a bit. We've got working lunch coming in, but we're going to go down to number 9, discussion of committee bills. And we're going to try to do that before we break for lunch. We have one bill that we're looking at, draft 14. And I am going to— this comes from the LRC, and we are going to let Mr. Carlson— I can't say doctor yet. Okay, Mr. Carlson, explain this to us.

Mr. Chairman, Jacob Carlson, Senior Research Analyst with the Legislative Research Council. So, on your screens before you, you can see Draft 14, and Draft 14 came out of the same working group that essentially produced the ADA-compliant performance measure template. And so, this is part of our— the conversations that we've been having regarding the third-party posting of documents onto the LRC website. My understanding is, and Elijah can correct me if I get this wrong, that with our website, everything that we post to the website, we are responsible for maintaining ADA compliance. And so, session documents and everything like that, that's going to be a whole different thing. But this committee receives the majority of the reports that state government produces. You know, when, when the law says they shall report, more than likely it's to you guys. And so as part of that, in order to assist the LRC, but then also to minimize sort of our responsibility when it comes to making sure that these state agencies and their reports produced are ADA compliant, we are asking that this committee submits or introduces this bill to not change any of the reporting requirements, but one— It would require the agencies to post the bills— or not the bills, their reports to their own websites, thereby making them the ones responsible for ADA compliance. But then, 2, in order— since they are still submitting it to us and to you, the GOAC committee, they would then submit a link. So rather than them submitting the report to us, all they would do is submit a link. We would post that link in the agenda and then in the minutes, and that is how we would maintain a record of the acceptance of the reports. So I would be happy to stand by for any questions from the committee.

Okay.

Thank you. Any questions from the committee?

Wow.

You must do a good job explaining stuff. No questions. Okay. Then the chair would— this is now— this will be This is this is just to see if this is what this committee wants to run for this bill. So if there's no questions, Mr.

Chair.

Okay, go ahead.

I move to recommend that draft 14 be introduced as a committee bill.

Second.

Okay, it has been moved by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Auch to for this committee to introduce this bill. Is there comments on?

Your motion?

Well, I would just say with the enormous amount of effort that's going to go into being ADA compliant with all of our digital resources, I do believe it's reasonable to ask that the agencies do this. I mean, LRC simply cannot take on doing this for all the various state agencies.

So—

Okay. Further comment? Okay. Yeah, the chair would just agree that That this— things are changing, and I believe this is a good bill. This will be a good change. So no other comments? We have a motion for this committee to introduce this bill at the next session. All those in favor will say aye. Oh, we got a roll call. Madam Secretary, would you please call the roll?

Senators Foster, Grove?

Aye.

Karr?

Aye.

Otten is excused.

Auch?

Aye.

Emery?

Aye.

Lems?

Moore?

Aye.

All right, and we'll go back to Foster. And back to Lems.

Okay.

And Howard?

Aye.

Overweg?

Aye.

Mr.

Chair, you have a quorum.

Thank you. Okay, so that bill will be introduced by this committee. Okay, I think looking at the time, I think we'll just— the committee will break for its lunch. I think our lunch is here. So we will be at rest for no more than a half hour if we can get this done. And we will be back. Thank you.

Okay.

We are going to call the committee back into session. And we are going to go to number 5, Our Rural Health Care Transformation funding update from the Department of Health. And welcome, Madam Secretary.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Melissa Magstadt, Secretary of Health. Glad to be here. The last time we visited was in July, and a lot has happened in the Rural Health Transformation Program since that period of time. So glad to be back here to kind of give you an update. It feels like this particular program is on a sprint that's actually a marathon. It's 5 years of funding, but we're really in a sprint year after year. So thanks for bringing us back. We'll give you some progress up to date. I told Mr. Chair that I could be here for 4 or 5 hours because this is so big, but we decided to dial it into some of the things that you asked about in July, some of the requests that you— and conversations that we had back then, and then of course open to other conversations or questions that you might have as well. So today we'll kind of focus on these areas based on the conversation from last July, and then let you know, kind of flesh out some of these a little bit deeper than we knew back then. Some of them, your concerns or questions around plans for sustainability, outside vendors, where's the money going, and then some peer support and community health work initiatives as well. So those are some of the high-level things that we'll be tending to, but also just let you know where we're at how we've gotten that money out and where we're sitting in the federal process of this. So just a few reminders. This comes out of the one big beautiful bill. We are in year 2 of this already. Year 2 started a few weeks ago for the federal government. And so it might just feel like this is fresh and new, but this is actually year 2 funding. It's $50 billion to the states over 5 years. South Dakota's year 1 award was $189.4 million. Number 2, year 2 award, we're not sure yet. It's supposed to come out October 15th. So it could be any time that we'll receive our notice of award for year 2. Because again, we're in year 2 already. This thing is a marathon moving at a sprint pace for sure. And it's differently structured than any other grants that we've had before. Some grants are what we call block grants, where they give you a 3-year grant or a 5-year grant and it's a period— a set set of dollars for that next 5 years that you're to spend. Not this particular grant. This grant has a yearly, yearly cadence where we have to send in an annual report every year and we have to prove that we've met our performance measures, our outcomes, our sustainability plans. We have to show that we successfully hit their milestones year after year. That's different than we've had in other grants before. So we are wrapping up a grant funding year at the same time applying for the next year. We did that both on August 31st. We put the annual report in, and then we also applied for year 2 funding. Every time we have something that can be made public, it's already out there and put on the website. So the annual report, for anybody who wants to look at it, is already out for year 1. And it's on the website already. Now, it's a different structure than we've done before, but it really does lend to thoughtful planning. Things that are— and accountabilities and program outcomes are really wired into this particular structure. So it does mean more additional resources to put those reports, those quarterly reports, those yearly reports, those yearly applying for funding, but it does sort of lend to making sure that structure and accountabilities and infrastructure and program outcomes are marching along as the federal government would like to see that happening. And then the last piece is that we will be bringing a federal authority, a spending authority bill again back to the legislature. So the one that you voted on last year was for year 1 and 2. We're into year 2 right now. So that will be the next set of funding. We'll be bringing that bill too. So that will be another one that will be coming back to the legislature this year. So reminder, the eligible uses and strategy areas, these were defined by the federal government. Even though these are the taxpayers' dollars, these are actually federal dollars that are given back to the states for the sole purpose of these 7 domains. These 7 domains, we had to pick at least 3 of them: preventative and chronic disease, innovative provider payment models, Tech and telehealth, workforce, health IT, cybersecurity— that's a big one— behavioral health expansion, innovative community-centered care models. We had to pick at least 3. After we did all our community conversations last year during this exact time when we were putting our application together, it became very clear based on what we heard from communities, healthcare providers, legislators, county and city officials, nonprofits, and community members that South South Dakota really needed investments into all 7. So all 7 of those domains are represented in what became 10 initiatives out of the state of South Dakota. All of those initiatives are on ruralhealthtransformation.sd.gov if you want to dig into the deep on what those initiatives are to accomplish, what the goals are. But for instance, there's one on maternal and infant care. There's one on community health workers. There's one on EMS. That's right. Structure. There's one on workforce, for instance, and they all have 10 initiatives that are related to these 7 domains. Now, when we looked at it all together, those 10 initiatives really have about 4 strategic goals. Number one, connect technology and data for healthier South Dakota, advance the rural workforce. We heard loud and clear that workforce is a big challenge. Keep and access local and strong. There are 2 healthcare centers on both ends of the state, one in Sioux Falls and one in Rapid City. They're on both sides of the state. 50% of the people of South Dakota live in those 2 communities. 50% of the rest of us live in other places. And so those healthcare communities are very essential. They provide that specialty care. They're essential to the healthcare system. But how healthcare is delivered in the local and rural communities— is also very essential in the state of South Dakota. And where it makes sense to keep a local service there to make sure, for instance, if you have a woman who needs to have a mammogram, she has to go 3 hours to get a mammogram and 3 hours back. The likelihood of her actually following through, that's going to be less and less based on her time off from work or childcare or gas money. So where it makes sense to keep these things as local and strong as possible is beneficial to us all. And then to redesign the systems for sustainability. For instance, and your other legislative committee, the EMS Task Force, is tackling this piece. EMS services. You may live in a town that has a paid ambulance service, but your drive across the state of South Dakota crosses into different districts that do not have paid ambulance services. They are all volunteer. 90% of the state of South Dakota has volunteer ambulance services. And so And so how ambulance services are across the entire state means something to every one of us because we drive across this beautiful state and our families live in different places of the state. So systems for sustainability. Another piece that we're looking at is the maternal and infant care. Every time a birthing hospital closes, that's an entire gap. It doesn't mean that women don't have babies there in that area, but it does mean that their access to prenatal care and delivery care becomes even more challenged.

Thank you.

That's kind of the areas of the strategies that all came out after the conversations that we had with the healthcare providers, and they gave us an enormous amount of information, great information, great conversations were given to us so that we could apply for grant dollars that were very meaningful for them. The second thing that we had to do this year is that we had to develop a governance structure. This grant is different than we've ever had it before. We have to be able to turn around reports and have quarterly reports per the federal government's requirements, different than we've ever had before. And when you look at 10 initiatives that are so broad all the way across, it takes an enormous amount of expertise to make sure that we are putting together RFPs that are meaningful, initiatives that are meaningful, that we're monitoring it, that we're making sure that all the documentation is in place so that when we go back to apply for year 2, we can say, here's what we did. So the governance structure, the TAG team, Transformation Action Group, is 26 people between Department of Health and Department of Social Services. Those people meet on a weekly basis. Why? What they make sure that they get their RFPs ready. They evaluate all the applicants. They put the accountabilities and guardrails in. They iron out any challenges or wrinkles that we're seeing as we're building up a brand new program. They set up guardrails for accountabilities and outcomes. They implement the federal requirements. That's a big player in this. Our federal partners have been very much interested in making sure that when they give us the dollar, that they're getting back from us what they're requiring: great outcomes, sustainability, programs that are meeting metrics. Give them their reports.

And when this is over, are we going to be able to maybe reduce some something?

Just a great question. Yes, Mr. Chair, thank you. That is a great question. That acts— and those 26 team members are all current employees. They have literally added this to the— about 15 to 20 hours is what we're estimating is what these folks have added to their work week. And so when this is all said and done, that's where that takes us into the contractor conversation. So you had 2 philosophies for the different states of that. Some states hired 15 to 20 people and they hired them as full-time employees. South Dakota has not had that perspective. When we have one-time money, we use it for one-time expenses. And so when we have a one-time project of one-time money, South Dakota tends to hire a set of contractors to be here for the short term so that we don't have to give them their pink slips when it's all said and done. It's a great question because, you know, honestly, these 26 people adding 15 to 20 hours every week is not sustainable for 5 years. It's just not. So it's a lot of work, especially the first year, because we're building a governance structure. We're building all of these pieces in place. But we also needed to add some contractors to help us with that short-term, one-term use of dollars to lift this program up. That's how South Dakota tends to do their one-time money, one-time expenses. rather than ongoing FTEs that have to get their pink slips at the end of 5 years. So that's a great question.

You good?

Any follow-up? All right. Please continue.

Sure. The governance team, that really is a team of DOH leaders and some additional contractors to help us lift this up. That does— the workhorse is that tag team. The governance team helps give some direction, some strategic infrastructure, some direct direction to make sure that the 10 initiatives they're marching forward, that Initiative 1 is not doing something different than Initiative 2, Initiative 3 is not doing something like 1 and 2. So really to give a good consistent structure to the 10 initiatives. And then the executive leadership team, that really is the cabinet secretaries of DSS, DOH, the deputy secretaries in the governor's offices meeting monthly, more times as needed, but really gives that overall decision-making some direction, more strategic direction to help with the governance team and the tag team. And then we meet with our federal CMS partners every other week, weekly emails, daily emails if needed. I will have to say that our federal partners have been fantastic. The people that we have had assigned to the state of South Dakota have been so responsive to us. If we ask an email, they have that information back as quickly as possible. So they have been great federal partners for us. And the way we're really defining this is not necessarily in the dollars spent. So that is a metric that we're measuring finances and where they're going, but I think the taxpayer expects more from us than just spending money. They expect at the end of the 5 years to have a system that they can count on for EMS, to have a system they can count on for chronic disease management and maternal health. That's what they expect from us. So our measurements of success are, yes, the dollars being spent and where they're going. But it should be more about patient outcomes, access to local care, systems that are sustainable long past year 5. That's where we're really looking for measurements of success when this is said and done. You know, it's really easy to spend money, but it's really more difficult to spend meaningful dollars. You know, I think about this investment in healthcare as being likened to the investment into the interstate system. Public money, Public money involved in infrastructure that everyone benefits from. And that's the same with the electric grid. Public money invested into a system that each person benefits from. So a strong healthcare system in our rural and frontier communities that we all benefit from as well is what this one-time expenditure is for. And I think that is really the measurement we're looking to have at the end of 5 years, not just have spent money for the sake of spending money. And then Even though we're looking at year 2, we're waiting for the notice of award, we're really building for year 6. When we're done with 5 years of this, what did it mean to the state of South Dakota to have these dollars invested in infrastructure and sustainability of EMS, in the maternal and infant health structure? What does that mean at year 6 when we have spent these 5 years in dollars of investment? And so we're looking at year 2, but we're really building for way beyond Year 5 and looking at year 6. By the end of this quarter— so the first year we've gotten a lot of dollars into the hands of providers, we've set up our governance structure. By the end of this quarter, we'd like to have a master plan. Now that we've looked at the initiatives, now that we've seen what people are turning back into us and saying these are the projects we'd like to do, we need to start moving into cohesive planning and going, okay, so we have these 100 different projects. How do they cohesively start us moving towards those 4 strategic goals of keeping healthcare local and strong, of improving workforce, connecting tech and data, and rebuilding systemic sustainability? So that master plan is in the works right now. Now that we've seen what we were getting for projects, now we're seeing what the health systems and the communities are bringing forward. We can start marching it forward to those 4 pillars. All right. So sustainability, that's a big deal. And sustainability is also a big deal to our federal government. There's 3 lenses they wanted us to look through. And when we're looking at projects, number one, there is no supplanting. So in other words, if we as a state of South Dakota or a county or a city were already paying for that particular service, this cannot replace That, those funding, no supplanting. Number 2, must be transformational. So in other words, you can't keep doing the same thing and paying for it for 5 years. It has to be transformational in its core. And number 3, has to have sustainability plans. There are, there are applications that we were not able to approve because they did not have sustainability plans in it. And the sustainability plan cannot be coming to the state government now. Thank you. Asking for dollars at year 6. It has to be something more sustainable and independently sustainable than coming to the state government. So sustaining—

I was— okay, you probably beat me to it, but okay, go ahead, Senator.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay, it's great that they won't come to the state government, but what about local governments? I mean, taxpayers are taxpayers.

Yep.

So yes, that's, that's a great Thank you for that question. Yeah, so the sustainability plans can't also say, we'll go to the county and have them pay it either. It has to have some sort of reimbursement model, whether that's woven into their reimbursements of private insurance, whether that's absorbed into their cost of— some of, like, the restructures have been, yes, we just need these dollars to help us restructure, and then we'll move into the same operational prices that we've done before. So that's That's been some of the sustaining planning, not offloading it on the taxpayer. So that's a great question. Thank you for pulling that out.

Okay, continue please.

So sustainability planning, these are— when you ask where is the money going, these are some of the projects. These are some of the things that have gone through our approval processes. One of the big things that we heard from rural and frontier communities is their access to behavioral health services. That's a real struggle, especially in substance use disorders. And the further away that you get from resources, the likely that people will not necessarily have the resources to get to those facilities. So the integrated behavioral health models is really moving into— and that CCBHA, sorry about the acronyms, Certified Community Behavioral Health Center is what that is. And it really is moving the behavioral health services and Coordinating them with other healthcare services such as primary care, weaving behavioral health services into the rest of the healthcare system to try and coordinate that care a little bit better, also making it more local accessibility. The regional EMS system improvements, a great partner for us is that committee that's going on right now. They're having some real deep dives into what does it mean for EMS services to have The infrastructure that their ambulance services can sit in and have long-term sustainability. The 2 things that you're going to find in that conversation with EMS is if you are a paid service, it's going to be the dollars of payroll is about killing those ambulance services. For the little small volunteer services, it's not the dollars of payroll, it's workforce. It's the volunteers. How do you staff that volunteer long-term? So that EMS system The system improvements piece has a financial piece that your fellow legislators are also looking at as well, but there's a workforce structure and sustainability structure. It's not about dollars all the time. You know, I said in some of these communities, it's the local rancher who is the EMT. I will never be able to convince a rancher to go be a full-time EMT in a small little community, but he will show up for his community. EMS services. They volunteer on their behalf, but he will remain a rancher. So how can we make sure that this system exists so when he wants to volunteer as an EMT that he has the support he has? And so we have to think differently in our EMS structures depending on what city you're in. If you were going to go to my Watertown area, it's a paid EMS service. They have people, no problem, but the payroll and the expenses of having a 24/7 EMS service is a different challenge than volunteer services. So how does that look in the long term for EMS services? And then some of the requests that we've gotten are support for long-term financial and operational sustainability. And that almost sounds like, wait a minute, they're coming to us for operational and financial sustainability? No, they're coming to us for infrastructure investments to build their own operational and financial sustainability plan.

Thank you.

And so we're funding some of those types of projects. And then the primary care transformation alternative payment models. This might get into the weeds a little bit, but in healthcare, there's— it's called fee-for-service, and you've experienced it every time you go into healthcare. You go with an illness, they give you a diagnosis, they do a treatment for you, and then they send you a bill. Fee-for-service. In healthcare, The design of the reimbursement model doesn't really have to do with preventative care. So upstream talking to you about nutrition, upstream talking to you about exercise and diet, trying to prevent diabetes or trying to prevent cardiovascular disease. That's not in the reimbursement model of current healthcare. There's a model, it's called value-based care, where we actually have a reimbursement model where we're paying healthcare providers providers to spend time in the prevention space, hopefully preventing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke downstream. It's a shift in models of care, but moving upstream to try and prevent illness rather than doing the most expensive type of healthcare, which is waiting for someone to need emergency services or waiting for someone to need critical care or hospital services. And so that Primary care transformation through alternative payment models is a Medicaid program shifting to preventative care as being a reimbursement model for primary care providers to be able to utilize. So, and it's called value-based care. So if you ever see that in the news or whatever, that's what that means. Other examples, the digital health modernization technology, regional innovation centers. Now, this sounds kind of— I'm sure what This is actually one of my favorite projects under the digital health tech. Yes, we are giving dollars to people for small technological grants and some big tech projects, but the regional innovation centers are a unique piece. And for 5 years, these centers are going to exist to really help small critical access hospitals, small EMS services, long-term care facilities that have not had either the clinical expertise or the technological expertise or the bandwidth to start utilizing technology. We have some facilities, and we heard this from them, they'd like to get into technology, but they don't have the experts to help lift it up. They'd like to develop it, but they don't have anyone who— with expertise in cybersecurity, and they're not exactly sure how to even build those things in place. These regional innovation centers are specialty centers that are going to be there and available to help the critical access hospital, help the long-term care facility, help the local EMS provider dive into these areas of technology that they have maybe never had the expertise to do, but they'll have these expert resources to lean into. So that was one of my favorite ones. The transforming rural care through community health workers. Does this group of folks know what a community health worker is? I don't need to dive into that.

No.

I love them.

They're my favorite.

Okay.

The community health worker. Darcy, can you pass those out to the gang? Where's our pages?

We usually have our pages introduce themselves.

Well, the page introduced itself.

What's your favorite movie? Where do you go to school?

So community health workers, they've been in our tribal nations for about 20 years. They're called community health representatives in that area. So CHW, community health worker, is the same as community health representative, CHR. But they've been in healthcare for about 3 to 5 years. Community health workers very much specifically are in the community. I call them the utility knives of healthcare because they do everything. They just kind of do everything. For instance, community health worker in Huron, South Dakota. I'll just give you an example of what she did and I think it'll start painting the picture of what they actually do. Because they don't have a job, but they have all jobs. So a community health worker was assigned to a patient who had diabetes, and the community health worker goes to the home of this particular patient, finds out that the patient doesn't have any furniture and doesn't have any food, those 2 things. And if you're going to work with someone with diabetes, they're not going to care about their blood sugars if they don't have food in the refrigerator, and they're not going to care about going to their appointments if they have no furniture and a place to lay their head. So the community health health worker worked with the local community to find some furniture for this particular patient and then worked on getting what we call food security, Meals on Wheels. So this particular elderly person was eligible for Meals on Wheels, had furniture, and now has food in the refrigerator. From that, the community health worker is also trained in health education and coaching. So this particular community health worker, because she gained some trust with the patient, started talking to her about having colonoscopy screening because she was over 50 years old and needed to sort of met the criteria for needing colonoscopy screening. The patient goes to have a colonoscopy screening, screening for colon cancer. Patient had colon cancer, was positive. However, it was so early on in the screening, the patient was treated very successfully. And so was found early, screened early, treated early. Now what's very interesting in the Huron population that there's also some sub-communities in Huron, some Mexican populations, some Korean populations. So these sub-communities that live in Huron, because this person was integrated in one of these sub-communities, when she had a positive outcome from this colonoscopy, the rest of the community looked at that and went, hold on, I need to have my colonoscopies as well. So the rest of the community started showing up for the colonoscopies. So the power of one community health worker Could healthcare have done that? No. But healthcare absolutely had a healthier patient because a community health worker went out into that patient's home and saw that these other things were contributing to the outcomes. That's what a community health worker does. So like I said, I can't tell you what their job is. Their job is all things and anything that the patient needs to help them be successful. So the community health workers are new to healthcare.

Question from Senator Howard.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Why aren't social workers— sorry, but a lot of this sounds like what social workers do. Why are they not already doing this? Because I listen to you and I'm sorry, it just sounds like ka-ching, ka-ching, more money that we're all paying for to expand government. And I struggle with that.

Go ahead.

Yeah, thank you. Community health workers are hired by the local either nonprofits Or they're hired by the local hospitals. So they're not government employees, but they're hired by healthcare or nonprofits or organizations, churches, behavioral health centers, those types of things. That's a great point though. Where does the community health worker sit with when it comes to caseworkers and social workers? Because social workers typically will work in, they have a caseload of a certain set of patients. A lot of times they work in hospitals. A lot of times they work in behavioral health centers. So let's look at if I was to have a patient, most of the patients I take care of, 80 to 90% of them, if I give them a health prescription, they're going to be able to go drive to the pharmacy, get it filled, no problem, take the— read the directions, take their medications as prescribed. 90% of the people can do that. And then there's some people that need some contact with what we call wraparound services.

Okay.

The social workers are really great at finding those wraparound services such as assisted living placement or such as getting someone Meals on Wheels or managing case managers. Maybe we'll get the patient coordinated to the 5 different appointments that they have to. That's a small pool. That's probably about 9% of the patients that need that kind of just a few more wraparound services. The community health workers are really in the community, in the patient's home, and they're that 1% that need an enormous amount of connections to resources, not necessarily connections to healthcare. It might be just needing some furniture, needing connecting to Meals on Wheels, some healthcare coaching to go get your colonoscopies, reminders to send you to the appointment that you're supposed to get there. But these That 1% are the very heavy lifts in healthcare that need a lot of coaching, a lot of wraparound for them to be successful. Now, do they maintain community health workers for the long term?

No.

They are there with a certain number of visits that you could have as a community health worker. And the purpose is, is not to have involvement for long term. The purpose is to get you connected to the things that you need so that you are employable again. Or so that one of the community health workers— now this was interesting— this patient was 50 years old and had been through the healthcare system multiple times, and the only person who figured out this patient can't read was a community health worker because you were actually in the home, saw what was happening in the home. We had missed it in healthcare for decades that this patient couldn't read. So when they went home with diabetes instructions, they couldn't read the instructions.

Right.

And so the community health worker put together the pictures. And so they fill in the gap of the heaviest lift of patients, whereas the social worker and case managers, they get you connected to wraparound services, but they don't necessarily go into the homes and work with those patients one-on-one in the heavy lift. So I get questions like that quite a bit.

Senator has a follow-up for you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. All great stories. Sounds like they're doing wonderful work. I'm not discounting that. But everybody knows America, we have some of the highest healthcare costs in the world. How does this not simply increase those costs? I mean, most nonprofits at this point are getting taxpayer-funded in one way or another. So I'm just— they may not be directly employed by the government, but the burden does come back on everyone So do you, do you also look at what other, other countries are doing? I mean, are we doing the best we can to get the best return for the dollars that are being invested in this?

Sure. Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Great question. Part of the community health worker outcomes is cost avoidance. Usually these persons are the ones that are in the emergency room the most frequently. They are They're oftentimes referred by the hospital to the community health worker because of their frequency in the emergency room. And so these folks access healthcare in the most expensive manner they possibly can. And so one of the reasons the community health workers became so popular and they're embedded in hospitals a lot is because they have cost avoided tens of thousands of dollars in one patient alone because they're actually getting the needs taken care of Out of the hospital rather than coming to the hospital that can't fix the help about— the emergency room cannot help you with your meals. They cannot help you with your furniture. They cannot help you get to your next appointment. They see you, they treat you, they send you on your way. That's the emergency room's role. But if these folks are not getting their access to healthcare outside of the ER, they use the most expensive route. And so some of the outcomes that we look for community health workers is cost avoidance. Looking at a person who's maybe been in the hospital— well, there was— I'm just thinking of a little medium-sized town that had one patient who was in the hospital in the emergency room 20-plus times in the 3 months before they had a community health worker, and then after a community health worker, 2 to 3 times. That is a massive cost avoidance when it comes to healthcare. Because you're actually fixing the underlying problems. Healthcare hospitals are not equipped to find food and employment for people. They're just not. That's not what their roles are. So those are great questions, and thanks for asking them, because see how that weaves into the cost avoidance piece. The Rural Strong grants—

All right, please continue.

Okay. The Rural Strong grants, these are just a couple of the examples of the grants that we funded this first year. The Frontier Pediatric Dental Surgical Readiness Project. One of the pediatric dental surgery locations out West River, out by Rapid City, has a 5-month wait period for pediatric dental services and surgical services. And what they're finding is that waiting that 5 months turns an average surgical case into an emergency case. And so what they're What we're hoping to do is through this one-time infrastructure build, change their processes, change their workflows to reduce 5-month wait times, but also decrease the number of regular surgery visits that convert to emergency surgery visits. And so that's one. So when we're looking at, you know, these Rural Strong grants, it's not just about hospitals. It's also about dental care, eye care. It's about behavioral healthcare. The Rural Strong grants of the Avera Cure project. This is kind of an interesting one. This one comes out of the Heart Hospital. So the Heart Hospital receives a lot of transfers in from critical access hospitals and rural communities. What they'd like to do with this is really push out their telehealth capabilities into the rural health community access hospitals, the rural communities, and push their cardiology expertise to that local community via telehealth connections. In other words, being able to have the cardiologist weigh in on the patient in the critical access hospital before transferring them to the heart hospital and hopefully avoiding transfers that are not necessary, keeping the patient and the family close to their home, that they can be seen and evaluated in the critical access hospital rather than the expense of transport and expense of hospitalization at the heart hospital. When I was talking to some of the leaders at the CURE project, they think that they can reduce the number of transports by 20 to 30% by getting the cardiology expertise out into the critical access hospitals. That's one of their metrics that they are aiming for to do is to be able to keep people locally rather than transferring them when it's not necessary and keeping that patient and their care close to home. Just for examples. So a little bit of the tech and data sustainability, what we're This was— and, you know, when I look at these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, this is kind of how we're building all of these multiyear projects. Some of the projects we've gotten dollars for have been like a $15,000 one-time investment, all the way up to multimillion-dollar investments over multiple years of time. We've done hundreds of different contracts, but really it's what— a variety of projects that people want. But for the first year of technology and data, the foundational piece is the capacity building and foundational level setting. We have South Dakota providers that have never dived into technology at all, that their paper charts or they've never used telehealth. A lot of times they're telling us that that barrier is they do not have the expertise to lift it up. Insert those regional innovation centers to help them with expertise. Expertise to lift it up. And then we have other healthcare providers that are fully embracing highest tech possible and the full variety of paper charts all the way to very advanced technology in these communities. And how do we make sure that we move everyone forward? If you want to move from paper charts to electronic records, helping you move— make that jump. If you want to start adding for your clinicians artificial intelligence and your decision-making capabilities, that we can help you do that as well. So making sure that our grants have all different types of levels depending on what the community and the health system and those local entities are asking for us. But the first part is foundation building. The second piece is interoperability, cybersecurity. You know, I know that this— people talk about cybersecurity constantly, but healthcare is one of the number one targets for cybersecurity. Why? Because we're so rich in data. We're rich in information. So optimization with cybersecurity, making sure that people have all of their cybersecurity technology assistance that we can help them with that. Electronic health record optimization. In other words, not just have an electronic health record for this entity, but when you send a person from this entity and you transfer them over there, their record follows them. The one piece of critical information that didn't get reported to the hospital that was receiving that patient can be the one piece of information that absolutely is the life or death of that patient, especially if it's a death-related allergy. So it's critical that we be able to share electronic health records. Second, in that third place, advancing the innovation through interoperability, starting to look at key performance indicators, moving into evaluation and then outcomes when this is all said and So, you know, you're going to see not from year 1 it's this, year 2 it's this. No, it's just a fluid moving all the way to the end to have outcomes in our technology and basically every initiative that we're doing. Some of the sustainability pieces are going to be in rural workforce. We heard loud and clear that our biggest struggle in rural and frontier areas is workforce. This is not a new conversation for us. You guys every year pass the Rural Rural Assistance Program, the RAP bill, and you pay for clinicians to have been recruited by small towns. This particular initiative expands that capability for the next 5 years for clinicians and support staff in rural and medium-sized towns. But even more important is not only recruiting workforce but keeping what you have. It is a lot cheaper to keep people that you have and they're oriented to your space and continue hiring hiring new people. So workforce retention strategies are a big piece of this. Expanding and strengthening the rural workforce, sometimes it's challenging not just to get nurses and doctors in rural communities, but respiratory therapists and radiology technicians and EMTs are all part of the rural workforce initiative. And then we also heard loud and clear that if you are working in a rural and frontier community, being able to keep on up on education and training and best practices and current evidence-based practice becomes more and more challenging. If you take a provider out of that community for a week, that community is without a provider for a week. And so having an education and education center for these providers to be able to get continuing education, advanced education, maybe take an RN and making them a PA or an RN turning them into a nurse practitioner A nurse practitioner adding nurse midwife skills. All of these things people can level up in their communities through this education Rural Health Forward Training Hub. And that's kind of the vision of that. So as we're talking about, we're building for year 6. This, it feels like a sprint. It feels like we're moving really fast. But 5 years will be done very quickly. Time goes by very fast. So what It looks like in year 6, we want to make sure that we created value for South Dakota at the end of this grant term for the long haul, for this generation, but generations yet to come. And we want it to be sustained locally. We're requiring applicants to explain how each request continues beyond the funding that we have and not just coming and asking for more funding. And then strengthening the systems of care that all of these things lean in, our EMS, our interoperability of electronic health records, our community health workers, our workforce. All of these things need a system restructure to help them for the long-term sustainability in rural communities. So where's the money going? I want to— there's 3— the word obligation has 3 different definitions in this particular context. And everyone uses it differently. So I need to give you those 3 definitions. The first one is an obligation, and it's an internal one. So the first year we were given $189.4 million. We have looked through all of the applications, and we have assigned to Jim this amount of money, and Sally this amount of money, and John this amount of money. We know where those $189.4 million— It's an internal one. formal obligation that we have in the Department of Health and Department of Social Services. The second way obligation is used is defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, CMS, the people who own this grant. When they say obligation, they mean that we have approved those projects. So we have our informal list of who's getting what. When they approve it, then they title that as obligated by CMS terms. The third way obligation is used comes out of the state of South Dakota's procurement laws. So, Representative, if you and I were going into a contract together and I'm giving you rural health transformation funds and you're not getting any, I know we— no conflict of interest there. Don't worry about that. But if I were to give you rural health transformation funds, you sign the contract, I sign the contract, it officially becomes obligated in the state of South Dakota and becomes public information at that point. So there's 3 ways that the word term obligation is used in this context. Sorry about that, but everyone uses the word obligation, but there's 3 different ways of doing this. So when we look at this grant and contract obligations per CMS, they're using that second terminology. What we have approved right now is $137 million in funding. And you're looking at— well, you said that we have $189 million.

Yes.

That's obligation 1. We know where the $189 million are going. CMS has till the end of October to approve it in their obligation. So by the time this $137 million— by the end of October, CMS will have about $189 million, just the same as our first list has. And then you're going to look up here at grants, contracts, supplies, personnel services. You're looking at that and going, well, there's only like $10, $11 million there. That's the third terminology of obligation where you and I have both signed the contract that has now made this an obligated fund in the state of South Dakota, and it becomes public information at that point. So that's why there's 3 different numbers there. The $189 million, we have our list of who's had it, we're going to approve, we send them to CMS and they approve them. And the 3rd time is when you and I sign that contract that now is officially obligated in the state of South Dakota. So that's why you have 3 different numbers there. I wanted to talk a little bit about contractors, administrative costs and gaps. And the cap. So when, when the federal government gives us a program to implement and to execute, they also give us the funding to help do it. And I'm glad they do, because should the state of South Dakota in our general funds pay for a federal program to be executed? No, we shouldn't. It's their program. We're executing it on their behalf. The state of South Dakota's general funds are Our G bill should not include payment to execute a federal grant. And that's very common across all the federal grants that we get. We get administrative costs built in to pay for the people who are going to execute this on the ground. This is also true with this particular grant. The administrative costs that CMS has said that we cannot go above is 10% of the full grant dollar amount.

amount.

So, there's a cap, and what includes that? It includes both direct administrative costs, in other words, the people, the salaries, the people who are writing the grants, the people who are evaluating the applications as they come in, those are considered direct costs. And then they have this thing called indirect costs. That's for the people, like, who work in our finance department, who pay the bills, who are not necessarily directly running that grant, but they pay the bills, they write the reports, they do the payable accounts receivable and the accounts payable. And so those are considered indirect costs. Both of them are paid for in that administrative cost. All the compliance stuff, all the data collection, all the reports, all the independent project evaluations have to be within that limit as well. And then that also applies to people who are getting grants from us. So if someone got a million-dollar grant from us, they have the same 10% cap as we do.

We got a question.

I bet you have questions because it's complex.

Senator Howard has a question.

Yep.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So a couple of questions, but the first, so are you taking the maximum 10% in administrative—

Mr.

Chair.

Go ahead.

Yeah, it looks like we're probably going to somewhere land between 2 to 4%. And so most— the vast majority of dollars will be going to the communities, but it's going to be somewhere between 2% and 4% by the time it's done.

Follow-up.

So is any of that 2% to 4% going— because you said you hired a couple of contractors, I think 3 contractors.

No, 7 contractors.

7?

Yep.

So is that strictly going for them, or— because you said a lot of your You're doing it internally, a lot of it, and so we're already at the state level, we're already paying those salaries. So are we going to see any savings because you're going to, you know, use these dollars instead of the normal state dollars for their salary?

Sure. So some of these, when we do payment of salaries, you have to be able to— our employees, if they're working 2 hours on this particular project, they would bill this particular project 2 hours of time. But all of these folks are salaried. And so if we add 15 to 20 hours a week on them, they don't— they're not paid in overtime. They are just added. Now, here's the challenge with the 26 people that we have on theirs. They already have full-time jobs. They're executing our WIC program. They're executing our Bright Start program. They're doing all of the programs that we as the state have said that we want in our Department of Health. And so the 26 people that we're doing, the vast majority is going to be lifted up by contractors, not the vast majority by state employees. Yes, we have the leadership. Yes, we own it. Yes, we are responsible. But a lot of hours will be happening in the contractor space. Otherwise, we would have had to hire 15 to 20 people, and that's just not feasible. Nor do we want to fire them at the end of five years. So will we be seeing discounts in other places? We are not giving up any of the other responsibilities that we have to do to maintain a maintain the government's responsibilities. My team would like to be able to; they'd like to be able to go back down to cut fifteen hours off of this, but their responsibilities continue. So with this shift to more contract. contractors now after this program is built for infrastructure will help bring them back into the hours that they are allotted for their work week without— because I can't keep doing that for 5 years. People won't do it for 2 years. Barely do it for 1.

Okay, you're good. Please continue.

Thank you, ma'am. All right, so the main contractors that we have are Northstar Solutions. These are some of the most complex initiatives that we have. A lot of moving parts, a lot of applicants, a lot of dollars. So North Star Solutions, Black Hills Special Services, Foundation for Medical Care, CHWSD, some Guidehouse, and these folks who have different specialties in each of these areas. Some of these folks like North Star Solutions have a very expertise in tech and data. Black Hills Special Services have a lot of expertise in EMS and regionalization and workforce. So these different areas had expertise in those various subgroups, and that's why when they put the application in, it's all competitive. They have to compete for it just as much as our applicants do to be able to do this work on behalf of the state. So funding opportunities. There's a set of rules, and we talked about them in July, but those rules still stand. The state of South Dakota has transparent and fair procurement laws. I can't give money to Melissa's best friend. Everyone has to compete for it in a fair process. So to do that, they have to go to the Office of Procurement Management. There's the website, sd.gov/bhra, to be able to apply for those. And anything that is a rural health transformation project will have an RHT at the beginning of it. So if you want to peruse and dig in there, you can. The funding forecast, that is a map that we've started putting together. What's happened, what's going now, what's coming in the future, so that anyone who wants to apply can start putting that in their budget. They can start putting in their planning. They know what's coming down the road, and so it's not a surprise to them. And this funding forecast is constantly changing. What happened in the past, what's happening now, what will happen in the future. And then the, I think the coolest thing is this thing called a GIS map. This was turned on on Friday. This is an interactive map. I don't think anybody in this room or probably online knows this even. This was turned on and this, when we have done that third obligation where you and I, we signed the contract and became public information, All of that information will go into this GIS map. Who got the funding, what amount of funding they got, where they were located, what their service areas, what initiatives they're looking to impact, what healthcare indicators are connected to that. You will be able to filter through your districts, your constituents, find out what you got in your area, and all They'll have pop-ups, they'll have search capabilities, interactive filters, summary dashboards, all on the GIS map. And every time we get a signed contract, that goes onto the GIS map. And so that thing will fill up year after year after year with all of the contracts, where they're located, and who was impacted by it. And that will get more and more full as the years go by. So you'll be able to see the places and how gaps maybe that haven't got a lot of funding and maybe the healthcare provider in that area would like to say, hey, we haven't got some funding, we'd like to have some funding to cover this area. And you're going to find areas that where long-term care maybe have really done really well in their area, but long-term care up in this area could maybe use some support. So it will also help planning for long-term gaps in this funding. And then the coming in the end in year 2, we're also building a financial dashboard. So in other words, that you'll be able to go on our website and see at a glance what was sent out, where it was used, what initiatives, dollars left in that particular grant year, and to easily look at the financial dashboard to be able to have a glimpse at a high level where these things went. Budget period number 2 is on its way. Some of our priorities are workforce expansion, EMS regionalization, chronic disease, maternal health, interoperability, and cybersecurity. We'll find out soon. It could be 5 minutes from now that we're going to find out what our notice of award is. Our next quarterly report is due November 30th. Look at this list of what's required in these reports. What we have to give back to the federal government is very detailed, this particular grant, and On a quarterly basis, submitting to them this entire list over and over again. It's a lot of documentation to make sure that we're meeting those milestones and the outcomes that our federal government is requiring from us. So closing comments. I think my— the coolest thing is that we've been sending out these awards and we notify awards. Do you know how many people have sent us back a thank you note and said, man, we really appreciate this? We're really excited to do this for our community. We really want our patients to receive this. We're excited about what we can do with this. And the gratefulness of the communities to these dollars has been enormous. And they're excited. And guess what? They didn't have to participate in this. You know, honestly, the state of South Dakota was taking a chance. Some states were very prescriptive and they at their state government created A whole bunch of programs that they wanted to implement. In the state of South Dakota, we said, okay, what would you do with these dollars? And we were hoping that our healthcare providers and our nonprofits and our nursing homes came forward with ideas. And they did. They came forward with many ideas. And so, you know, rather than us saying you must do it this way, they came forward and said we'd like to do it this way and here's why. So this is just one of the The areas that— the little thank-yous that we got and the excitement. They said the collaboration taking place across our state is unmatched and we look forward to building on this work in the years ahead. So we have the commitment of the healthcare providers and the nonprofits in the communities to go forward with this, not because we demanded it from them, but because we gave this opportunity and they said, here's how we can contribute, here's the part that we can play in this. So I know probably have more questions or might not have more questions, but I'm open for them if you got them.

All right, well, thank you. Is there any questions of the secretary? Is there anything online? My monitor is down. Representative Auch has a question.

Just quickly, thank you for your presentation. Very informative. Is there anywhere on your website that is informing the public of who's been awarded Or have you released those names yet?

Yes, so there's a couple places, but the GIS map, when you hover over that location, you'll be able to see who was awarded, what they got.

Is that on your—

On the ruralhealthtransformation.sd.gov. It's in the Department of Health, but that's where we are loading up all the initiatives, all of that mapping, all of the funding forecasts. And so yes, who got what, and they're in their area of impact are all on there. And it's only the ones that are in that third class of obligation where you and I have signed it and became public. And so by the end of October, as we're signing more and more contracts, that will start. It should be like under GIS map. Did you find the rural health transformation?

I'm at South Dakota Department of Health.

Go somewhere else?

Yeah, maybe you look under that search terminology, Rural Health Transformation, get to that particular page.

Go to Department of Health.

Yep, ruralhealthtransformation.sd.gov. The applications are on there, their RFPs are on there. It's all on opensd.gov, but that's sometimes harder than Search RHT.

Okay, you got it?

Got it.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Very good.

Any other questions or comments for the Secretary?

And if you think of something, yeah, please feel free to tell me.

I would just say, you know, I'll follow up a little bit on Senator Howard's, I think where she was getting to. You know, the thing I worry about the most is the sustainability. You know, it's hard to imagine we can spend this kind of money over 5 years in the state and then all of a sudden just shut the door and say, okay, everybody on their own.

Yeah.

You know, so, and I feel really comfortable with you watching it. It's not, you know, I do, you do a great job over there, but it is something that we really need to watch the sustainability. You know, I've had so many small All hospitals in my district say, we want an MRI machine, we want an MRI machine. I go, well, not everybody can have an MRI machine, right? Well, they say, yes, we can. So, I mean, it has to be really—

Stocked up.

I live in the country, right? So I'm used to traveling for bigger events, right? My doctor says you need this test. I know it's going to take a day, right? I'm going to travel. That's part of living where I am. And it would be nice if we could afford it for everybody. I don't know. So watch that because it really is to me, it's gonna be a— you're gonna have to prove that to me.

That sounds like a good challenge, Representative.

There you go.

I love it. And you're absolutely right, thoughtful investment. Does it make sense in a town of Little Town, South Dakota to build an entire new OR suite when the surgeon's 85 or 95 years old? No, you have to think about strategic investments. Completely agree with you.

Okay, thank you. So nothing further? Representative Howard, you've got a motion for that.

BS all he wants.

Thank you again, Madam Secretary. Okay, we are going to move on to number 6 on our docket, the University Center's financial review of the Board of Regents. Welcome. Please introduce yourself when you get up there.

Good afternoon, Mr.

Chair, members of the committee.

Heather Forney, Vice President for Finance and Administration for the Board of Regents here in Pierre, South Dakota. We have before you today our 2 centers, the University of South Dakota in Sioux Falls and Black Hills State University in Rapid City to give their annual financial reviews. And I'm just here for kind of introductory remarks, and then I'm going to turn it over to the people who really know what's happening there in detail.

And we'll start with the University of South Dakota staff.

Okay, and the chair will remind, since some of you weren't here this morning, if you do plan on testifying today, please register with the computer in the back. And if you have troubles, just holler at us and Jacob will come and help you. Thank you. Welcome. Please introduce yourselves.

Mr. Chair, Jay Perry, the Vice President for USD Sioux Falls. Thank you for having us here today. I will try to be brief and then I will turn over my comments also to my partner here, Julie Creeks, who's the CFO for USD. When you visit USD Sioux Falls today, you can actually feel energy that wasn't there 5 years ago at that site. Students, faculty, staff, visitors will tell you there's an excitement on campus that hasn't been present in a long time. So we think the future is extremely bright. The benefits to the state and the region have only just begun. We're doing well but still have work to do, and we appreciate that the Regents and the legislature have put their trust in USD to make that Sioux Falls site— thank you, Julie— a success. So just a real quick, to bring everyone up to speed, a brief history of how we got here. The Board of Regents started offering classes in courses, programs in Sioux Falls in the 1980s. Those efforts later became a joint effort between USD, DSU, SDSU at a rented space on the campus of Southeast Technical College. In 2009, they opened a site in the northwest corner of Sioux Falls, which is the present site of USD Sioux Falls.

Okay.

At that time named the University Center, continued to be the collaboration between the 3 institutions. In 2019, the University Center changed its name while still operating as a joint effort between the 3 schools, emphasizing that you could start there and then transfer to any Board of Regents university, changed the name to the Community College for Sioux Falls. However, around that era, enrollment at the site had been declining. There's a number of reasons. I think the primary reason was probably affordability. And that's because the authorizing statute for that site would not allow any university state-appropriated funds to go to that campus, which resulted in a higher tuition rate than you got if you went to Vermilion or if you went to Brookings or you went to Madison. And when I say higher, when we got that changed a few years later, thank you to the legislators who were involved in that, it was a $12,000 more expensive bachelor's degree. than you would get on main campus. And this is to go to a campus that doesn't have all the bells and whistles that the main campus does, but have since got that changed. In 2020, the legislature passed Senate Bill 55, which asked the Board of Regents to come up with, among other things, a sustainable plan for that site. After discussions between the board and the legislature, USD Sioux Falls was created in June of '22. Part of that plan allowed us to align that tuition with main campus and solve part of our affordability issue, and then also to have these great discussions with GOAC every year to talk about the things that we are doing at that site. So since becoming USD Sioux Falls, we have stabilized finances and grown enrollment, and we'll talk about in detail those things in a moment, but I want to point out how different The Sioux Falls campus is from the main campus in Vermilion. We complement the work of the main campus. We do not compete with the main campus. I don't think we actually even compete with any other of the Board of Regents institutions either because our students are very different. When I say that, again, we're a non-residential commuter campus. Our students are largely regional. They come from a 30 to 45 minute drive of our campus.

Right.

90% of our undergrads are South Dakota residents, which is different than main campus, which is 53% are residents of the state. Our students tend to be older. As an example, as you can see on your slide, if you're on main campus, traditional students, non-traditional students make up 4% of the student body. It's a quarter of our student body at the Sioux Falls campus. And we also have a higher percentage of students who are part-time students. Nearly every student, anecdotally, I know from talking to, also has a job and is working while, while going to college. So in short, the students we have at the USD Sioux Falls campus, they are typically place-bound, meaning they have family, work, or community commitments that keep them in Sioux Falls, keep them close to home for college. These are students that were never going to go to one of our main campuses, Vermilion, Brookings, anywhere else to begin with. And in many cases, when talking with our students, if it wasn't for a public university option there in Sioux Falls, they probably weren't going to college, period. So again, not competing with the main campus, doing a very— serving a very different student body. Our enrollment numbers continue to show this energy that the campus is generating and the value we're adding to South Dakota. In— since 2021, so 5 years, our headcount enrollment at the USC Sioux Falls site is up 44%. Full-time student numbers are also up significantly, and I mention that because while we will always support and appreciate and work with part-time students, we also know statistically full-time students graduate at a much higher rate than part-time students do. And while we are a business and we do like credit hours, Our goal isn't to enroll students; our goal is to graduate students. So we want to get students to full time as quickly as we can. The future continues to be bright. This year, from fall 25 to fall 26, we had a 20% increase in first-time new freshmen at the site, meaning we continue to attract new students. One of the reasons that our enrollment has grown and finances. have stabilized is that our programming is directly aligned with regional workforce needs in Greater Sioux Falls. We understand our role, and that is largely to educate students from Greater Sioux Falls that want to go to college in Sioux Falls and stay in Greater Sioux Falls to work in their careers after they graduate. So when we add new programs, they are very Sioux Falls-centric to the regional workforce needs And I'll just give you a couple of quick examples of things we have added in the last few years in Sioux Falls and how they meet these workforce demands. One example, if you look at the South Dakota Department of Labor statistics on fastest growing, most high demand jobs that we have in greater Sioux Falls, you will see on that top 20 list, or at least as of about 4 months ago, last time I looked, it was on the top 20 list, is CRNAs, which are Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists. In order to do that role, most of those people are trained as Doctors of Nurse Anesthesia Practice. So that's why we launched that program in 2022. That now, that program now has over 50 students, already had, I think, what, 1 year of graduates, Julie, from that program working with Avera, Sanford, in the local workforce to supply our health needs in the community.

Can I just ask you on that?

Absolutely.

So you have 1-year graduates?

Yes.

How—

what percent of those graduates stayed in South Dakota and what percent went out? Do you know?

I think we had this question last— not too long ago, and I looked it up. Let me give you— get back to you so I don't— I will tell you this.

Well, it's fine if you don't know. I was just wondering, as we, you know, just kind of as a as a matrix of our success.

The majority of them have stayed local. I don't want to give you a made-up statistic.

You don't have to give me anything. I just thought if you knew, I'd like to know.

No, but I do know from talking with our dean and the people who work in that program at USC Sioux Falls that the majority of those students, the recruitment of those graduates are largely coming from the Sioux Falls healthcare systems. But if you want, I can get you the actual— okay.

Thank you.

So hit the— similarly, we know, as I'm sure you heard this morning, there are teacher shortages in various places in South Dakota. Sioux Falls is no different. Working with the local school districts, we launched an elementary education program in 2022 to create more opportunities to fill that pipeline. A prime example is working directly with the Sioux Falls School District, who has a teacher pathway program where they will provide a couple of college credits, taking education courses at the college level while still in high school, to students who think they might want to be teachers. They will guarantee them student teaching in Sioux Falls when they get to that opportunity and pretty much guarantee them an opportunity to then teach in that school district once they graduate. They're trying to grow their own teachers. The old model, if you wanted to go do that, you had to leave campus and go to Vermilion and take the interim. When you already have students who have— they're from Sioux Falls, they've declared they intend to work in Sioux Falls, why make them leave that interim period? We've launched again the elementary education program. It's since grown in 4 years to currently there are 58 students enrolled in that program. And then the last example I would give you of how we relate to the workforce issues is just the general things that our School of Business is doing. They are constantly out working with industry leaders in Sioux Falls, trying to figure out what are the needs of that community. And when you say business, that's very broad. I mean, that's anything from accountants to marketers to entrepreneurs, et cetera.

Right.

But those discussions over the last few years have led directly— hearing what they need has led directly to launching a Master of Business Administration program in Sioux Falls. Also a second version of that, the Executive MBA program, which is for businesses who identify people that are already in their company that are mid-career who they think are rising superstars, and they invest in these Students, in most cases, they actually pay to send the student. It functions a little different, a little different curriculum, but that is a thing that we heard from the leaders of the community, like, we need this kind of program. So we've filled that gap and have launched that. Just recently launched an undergraduate and graduate sales certificate. Those are discussions we'd had in the community with business leaders, like, we need people who actually have training in sales, and they do this in other states, why are we in other big cities, why are we not doing it in Sioux Falls? That just started, we've launched it, started this fall. And then also trying to recognize there are different pathways for different students to get into business in Greater Sioux Falls. So our business school worked with our friends down the road at Southeast Tech, just signed an expansive articulation agreement, meaning students who So, start out wanting to do the 2-year version of a business degree can do that. And when they are ready and decide, if they decide that they want to come back and get a bachelor's degree, there's near seamless transfer of credits. And then 2 more years and you can get out with your bachelor's degree from the Beacon School of Business at USD. If you need the next one, thank you. We have partners at that site where USD Sioux Falls are that are both the Discovery District and the GEAR Center, which is GEER stands for the Graduate Education and Research Center. The GEER Center houses our biomedical engineering program. It also serves a secondary function as an incubator space for several bioscience companies that as they work on their own research necessary to get new products to the market, they have access to equipment and things that they wouldn't otherwise get at that stage in their development. Meanwhile, the Discovery District houses customizable labs and office space for companies that are also in the bioscience field, but they're at the stage where they're ready to become profitable. Why this works for USD Sioux Falls, this gives an opportunity for our students to have ready access to cutting-edge research, internships, jobs while they're in college, jobs after they graduate that they would not otherwise. So as we look towards the future, we think there are great opportunities to continue the success we've been having, and part of that is the growth of Greater Sioux Falls and the number of high school graduates that are coming out of that region. Since 2013, the number of high school graduates in Greater Sioux Falls has increased by 41%. Today, roughly one-third of all the high school graduates coming out of the state of South Dakota are coming from greater Sioux Falls. Many of those students, not all, but many of them will want to stay close to home for college or have these commitments that we talked about earlier, and we want to be there and be prepared to serve them. I will also tell you that all the studies that are coming out that I am reading and others are reading that talk about the future of employment and the future of the workforce are telling us that The jobs that are going to be here in the next 10 years, the percentage of them that require some form of postsecondary education, meaning a certificate or specialized training or an associate degree or a bachelor's degree, those are growing. And the last one I saw is estimating about 70% of the jobs by 20— that are going to be created between now and 2031 are going to require some form of postsecondary education. And I I mention that because we have one thing that is our major obstacle challenge, the thing that really is our competition, and that is a declining number of students in South Dakota and certainly in greater Sioux Falls who are graduating from high school and going to any form of post-secondary college. And just for example, the Sioux Falls School District had released a report just a couple of weeks ago. In 2018, 61% 61% of their graduates were going somewhere, some form of postsecondary education after graduation. Today it's 54%. So that's a 7% decline in 6 years. That's one of the things we need to work with, with K-12, figure out how to solve that issue because we need more students getting education and not less, whatever that education may be. So I'll conclude by just sharing with you a couple of the things that are on your slide. Go over those. I'll be happy to answer your questions about any of those items. But we're going to continue what we've been doing at USD Sioux Falls, which is focusing our programming in healthcare, education, and business, because those are the 3 areas that greater Sioux Falls needs. We think we're making significant progress. We think we've positioned ourselves as key contributors to the education landscape in Sioux Falls and to the state for the foreseeable future.

Thank you.

And I think the future continues to be bright. So I'm going to stand by for questions, but I'm also— to get into some of the financial things, turn it over to Julie Creek, our CFO.

Okay, please introduce yourself for the record.

Yes, good afternoon. I'm Julie Creek. I'm the Vice President of Finance and Administration at the University of South Dakota. I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about our financial story. When USD assumed responsibility for this campus in 2021, Our commitment was to build a more coordinated academic hub and become financially a sustainable operation. And I think the central message today, especially as we are almost 5 years into that transition, is that the transition is working. USD Sioux Falls has moved from recurring deficits under the prior model to covering direct expenses and the program costs for the last several years and is Generating a modest positive result even after accounting for institutional overhead. So before discussing the financial results, just to explain a little bit how this financial statement has changed since it's become USD Sioux Falls campus. This financial report now pulls together all the revenues and expenses associated with the courses delivered there as well as the programs that are fully operating out of the USD Sioux Falls campus, which includes, as we've discussed in the past, the Center for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment, Master of Social Work, Nursing Sioux Falls, the CRNA program, as well as accounting for the direct campus operations and an allocation of university overhead. A little bit about the total credit hours generated and the students served, where Jay's enrollment update is a fall-to-fall snapshot. This accounts for all The credits and students served in the entire fiscal year. So summer, fall, and spring. We have programs that admit in the spring, so the increase— you'll have an increased number of students served that goes beyond just what we show you in a fall-to-fall snippet. I wanted to explain a little bit why you see a decline from '26 to '27 in both students served and credit hours. That is really a bookkeeping change. or an administrative change regarding high school dual credits. The last several years, even prior to the USD Sioux Falls campus construct, Community Sioux Falls, all the iterations before then, high school dual credits in that region were administered and coordinated by the USD Sioux Falls administrative team, and so they were counted for in this financial. There was a change made. Those high school dual credits in district were moved online. All the coordination and administration was moved to Academic Affairs. It didn't seem appropriate to account for them anymore. They are not a loss in credits and courses and enrollments to USD, but it didn't seem appropriate to account for them here. And so that was really 12 courses, about 130 students and 750 credits that we've removed from the financial because there's no relationship with the USD Sioux Falls campus coordinating those anymore. Setting that aside, the good news is, is we've seen a 15% increase in students served over the timeframe of this transition as USD Sioux Falls campus, and more importantly, a 34% increase in credit hour production. And as a CFO, I like that statistic where credit hours are growing at a faster pace than even enrollment enrollments because credit— we charge per credit hour. So increased credit hours means increased revenue per credit hour. And so in 2023, we had about the average credit hours taken by students served was 10. It has grown to almost 15 as the average credit per student served. And with the increase in incoming full-time learners, we should see that number grow Even more. The average credits taken per student served should increase beyond the 15 credit hours. So that's a good thing. On the revenue side of the house, the statement includes several diverse funding streams. You can see just from prior iterations there have been new revenue streams that have been introduced to the financial statement. That is because of the programs that are fully located They have diverse funding streams. Speaking a little bit to tuition and fees, that represents 55% of the total revenues. That is the largest-paced growing revenue that we have, as it should, as we increase credit hour productions with increased academic capacity and adding new programs. The one thing that I will point out there is that has proportionately grown at a higher clip these last 4 years than it likely will in the next 5 years because of ramping up the CRNA program. That is a high revenue per credit hour and cost per credit hour program where we would be charging an undergraduate student around $320 a credit hour. A CRNA student's paying almost $900 and some change per credit hour. And now that we've hit our class capacity, right, and in 3 years of that class size, it's going to level out the revenue increase with the CRNA ramp-up will level out a little bit. But we will see tuition and fees continue to grow as we increase credit hour productions, and it will also reflect any rate increases that are approved by the Board of Regents. So that's the lion's share of the revenue, not the lion's share, but 55%. The other revenue is a combination of diverse revenues, but overall you can see other revenues have remained fairly flat over this 5-year time frame.

Thank you.

I'll just talk a little bit about some of the larger revenues under other revenues. The general funds, as we've mentioned in past years, that are in the financial statement are the state dollars that are in state-supported academic programs that are now permanently housed there. It doesn't fund operations, but there is general funds in the Center for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment. There is general funds in, in the Master of Social Work, and there's general funds in, in the nursing program.

Thank you.

The only reason that we should see general funds increasing in this financial statement is with state-approved salary policy increases on state-funded salaries, and so it should— we should see modest adjustments to general funds. The extramural funds and the auxiliary operation funds, those are heavily tied to the grants and contracts out of these academic programs, so there are federal and public and private grants in Right now in Master of Social Work, in the nursing program, CRNA even has a workforce grant right now, and most importantly, the Center for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment generates a substantial amount of their operating support from grants and contracts. Those are usually proportionate with expenses, and they'll just go up and down based on award cycles. And so overall, we expect other revenues to remain relatively flat over the same timeframe. Moving on to expenses, there's really 3 distinct categories of expenses. The first one is the instructional cost. Proportionately, that is where you have seen the most increase over this 5-year period, as we would want. Those are the direct instructional expenses related to the course and the academic programs that are delivered on This campus. And again, we've seen a bigger increase over this last 5-year period than we will in the next 5 years in terms of expense growth because the CRNA program was ramping up. But now it's going to level off, barring a class size expansion. It's going to level out a little bit. The USD campus operating costs, they're growing at a modest pace of an average of 2% per year. That is Jay and his operations, the FTE that support campus operations, the utilities, facilities worker, the IT staff that work out there. That is really growing because of salary policy and some modest targeted investments in student-facing services and building out some of our technology and our classroom enhancements on campus. And then the other expenses relates to really those grants and contracts that are in Center for Prevention of Child Maltreatment, Master of Social Work, and again, those usually proportionately go up and down based on their contracts and their grant awards. And then we have an agreed-upon institutional overhead of 9.43% applied to both centers. So with that in mind, again, this year we've shown steady but We did see a modest improvement in our contribution margin. Again, it's a positive margin even after accounting for overhead, and that is what we will continue to project, we think, for the next couple of years. And I think that's really it.

Okay. Questions from the committee? Thank you, by the way, for both of you for giving us your report. Do you have a question, Miss? I almost called you Miss Auch, but I'll call you Representative Auch.

Just looking at— thank you very much, very thorough— and you probably covered this, I just missed it. Student fees, SDSU, DSU, are they not participating at— so I'm just— are they no longer utilizing the facility? Just curious.

Go ahead.

Correct.

Once, once we became USD Sioux Falls in June of 2022, it just became a USD site. So with that said, we may have and do have some DSU and SDSU students, but they are not being taught by USD and SDSU instructors. But they may come and take a class, general education classes, whatever, before they matriculate back on to SDSU or DSU.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, good.

All right.

Seeing nothing else, Senator Howard.

Mr. Chair, I would move to acknowledge receipt of the University Center's financial review report submitted by the Board of Regents pursuant to South Dakota Codified Law 13-51-1.4. Actually, Mr. Chair, I would hold that motion.

Hold that motion.

Sorry.

Thank you. Here, I was going to cut you out. You've been waiting so patiently. No. We are going to continue on. Okay, welcome, and again, I'm sorry I almost missed you. Please introduce yourself and give us your report.

I'm sorry. My name is Ashley Armstrong, and I'm the Vice President for Continuing Education and Workforce Development based out of the Black Hills State University Rapid City Campus. It's actually kind of nice that Jay went first because he gave a report about many of the same things that we see as opportunities, some of the same challenges that we've faced, and areas of growth. So I might sound a little bit repetitive just because some of the stuff that we are facing is very similar. So our mission really comes down to students having access building the workforce in Rapid City and the surrounding area, and opportunities for our students. So many of our students have jobs, families, responsibilities there, and they are not the student that would travel to a campus and become a traditional student somewhere else. So we really are serving a unique population. I wanted to show a map of the students that we serve. So the 5 counties that are shown here are where the majority of our students come from, and it's also where we focus a lot of our efforts in allowing students to know that there is opportunities for them that makes them not have to leave home, where they can stay home, which breaks down then our traditional and non-traditional student numbers. So we really are at about a 50/50 break between traditional and non-traditional. Traditional meaning these are students that are coming straight out of high school, Straight into the college life, and non-traditional, meaning that they might be of that age, but for whatever reason, they are place-bound. They are homebound. They need to stay, take care of family, take care of their responsibilities at home, and traveling to a campus outside of this area would not be feasible for them. Our motto in Rapid City is start here, finish here. So we offer pathways for students that might start with a certificate, move into an associate's. They might go out into the workforce and then come back to us for their bachelor's and then their master's degree. So we really have pathways for students to complete that work at their pace. So like I said, some of them, we don't see them for a few years after they complete one of these levels, but then they come back to us knowing that that is an option that's local for them. I won't read this big long list, but these are the partners that we've really solidified relationships with, specifically in this last year. I started a year ago and have really made it my priority to reach out to these folks, see what their needs are, and then build our programs at the Black Hills State University Rapid City campus around this. So, I'll point out a few of them specifically. So we work closely with Elevate Rapid City to look at workforce data to ensure that the degrees that we're offering are things that are needed in our community. So meaning our students leave with their degree and they have a job waiting for them. That's really the model that we work from in Rapid City. Monument Health is one of our internal partners, meaning that they've helped fund our facility, but Sanford Health Moving in just expands the opportunities for our students that are in those service areas. Rapid City Area Schools. So, I love Jay's story about working with the Sioux Falls Area School District. We have the same challenge with the Rapid City Area School District in that many of their students are not going on to some other form of education. The statistics that he shared are very, very similar for Rapid City, and so working directly with those schools and And showing students that there is an opportunity for them close to home to continue to move up in their careers and have a job waiting for them is really important. I'll talk about the South Dakota National Guard and Ellsworth a little bit more as we move forward. And I got to take a picture with your guys' friend Mike, so that was pretty fun too. So, from last fall to this fall, we've seen a 10% enrollment growth, which was huge for us. We had several years of decline at the Rapid City campus, but we've turned that page. We have growth, we have classes filled. We've had to add several new sections this year because of that growth, specifically in our lab classes. So classrooms, the instructional portion can fit more students, but labs are really limited based on available space and the instructor's capability to teach that many students. So We were very happy to add additional lab sections this year. One of the things we really focus in on our building is building trust with our students. So, knowing that they're going to have the classes offered to them so that they can stay on track. So, that is part of that Start Here, Finish Here model. That has helped with our word-of-mouth referrals. Students know now that they can come to the Rapid City campus, And they're going to have the classes that they need to complete on time and succeed in the future workforce. We're really maximizing our building, which helps maximize state resources. So our classes run from 8 AM until 10 PM Monday through Thursday, 8 AM till 5 PM on Fridays. So during the day, it's mostly nursing and health science courses that are offered. And then in the evenings, we have our business and technology courses. And then, there is a swift shift at 4:00 PM, where the entire parking lot changes over, and then, our evening classes are focused in the business, human services, um, and education programs. So, it's really nice to see the building being utilized that often, um, and seeing that we're serving students that fit those different timeframes.

Thank you.

I know this is really hard to read up there, but I think you have this in front of you as well. So the financial picture gives us reason to be encouraged. '26 shows $5.3 million in revenue with approximately $565,000 in net revenue. Student services— our students served and credits generated has also increased over the past year, and our projections for '27 and '28 show So net positive revenue in both of those areas. So the takeaway is that we're expanding our reach while still maintaining a positive operating result. A big focus of mine this past year is supporting those who serve. So we've been recognized as a veteran-friendly institution for many years. I told you I'd talk more about our partnerships with the South Dakota National Guard and So, part of that is not only meeting them where they're at, but reaching out to them. Some of them don't understand how to use their educational benefits. We have a veteran service officer right on our Rapid City campus. He is shared between our main campus, but having him available to answer all of those questions has been huge in increasing our military population of students.

Thank you.

I wanted to talk about a few things that I personally am involved with. So I was honored to be nominated by Ellsworth Air Force Base for their Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, which is a program sponsored by the Department of War. I traveled to the West Coast in August and was able to visit each of the 6 military branches and see the work that they're doing and then bring that information back to the work that I do every day. With that, then I help support the Black Hills Military Advisory Coalition, which supports 4 pillars of military well-being and life around the Rapid City area. We have somebody from our office that serves on the Quality of Life Committee. We help with the Black Hills Defense and Industry Symposium, and then we are also part of the South Dakota Defense Industry Planning Committee. Also, in supporting our military students, we've been working a lot on credits for prior learning. So our military students come in with lots of skills and lots of training, but we're helping them equate that to actual credits. So sometimes they can then complete their degrees earlier. They're able to utilize their educational benefits, which lowers the cost for them. And and has increased their access to educational services. We are also working on our Center for National Defense Studies. So this is statewide collaboration between the 3 universities that you see listed there. Black Hills State University will be leading the charge on this for our Center for National Defense Studies with a degree that's focused on public policy, engineering, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. This really ramped up with our partnership with the Governor's Office of Economic Development, who told us what the folks that are coming in or who they're trying to attract to South Dakota, what they're looking for for employees. So this Center for National Defense Studies and this degree will directly address that need. I talked about how we're working with the Rapid City Area Schools. One of the ways that we're doing that is Every year, we host around 250 students that are in these 2 pathways that are listed. Students come on campus, they can see themselves as a student, they can see the opportunities that are available right here in— or right there in their own community, with degrees that we offer at our Rapid City campus. So, the Education and Human Services pathway is coming up next week, and then, we'll host the business one in a few weeks. Last year, I gave a huge update on our West River Health Science Center because we opened the doors for that in August of last year. It's been successful to see how many new nurses we are producing out into the Rapid City area through this partnership with Monument Health and South Dakota State University. So it's really helped that pipeline of workers. So we have The hospital system that is sending folks that are maybe a nursing assistant or a health unit coordinator back to school because they know and recognize that they have the skills to be in the nursing field.

We have a question, Senator Howard.

Sure, thank you, Mr. Chair. Kind of just backing up to a comment that you made just a minute ago when it sounded like You're trying to design programs and implement things based on what government is telling you they want to bring into the area. And my question is, if that's, if that's not what the area needs right now, are you talking to the people who live in that community? Not, not GOED, not economic development people, the average citizen on the street, and talking to them and going, what do you want to see? I think that's a great question. see here? What degrees do you believe we need? How do you believe we need to be furthering education for our young people? I just get concerned when I hear, you know, we're doing this because this is what the governor or whoever said they want to bring into the area. Who said that's what the area wants? Sure.

Ms. Armstrong, go ahead and answer the question.

Thank you. Senator Howard, I can address that in 2 different ways. So the workforce data that we look at isn't based on anyone's opinions. That's just what's being offered in the area, and that is the degrees that we offer currently. So our focus for those degrees is based off of the workforce data in our area and then projections for the next 5 to 10 years. But it's— we're actually working on our strategic plan right now, so we're gonna have listening sessions coming up, which will allow us to get more of that public input. I wasn't here when the last strategic I was not here when the strategic plan was written, so I can't speak to if that happened at that point, but our president now is very involved in making sure that we hear what the community wants.

Follow-up?

How will you advertise that to the community?

Go ahead if you want to answer that.

I might turn to my colleague Kathy. Do we know exactly what those will look like? Yeah, we're currently working on it, so the strategic plan won't roll out for another year yet, but this is our period that we're, we're setting those meetings, not only with all the campus folks, with students, but with community members as well.

Are you good? Follow-up, go ahead.

But do you have any idea how the community, the individual community members, will hear about these?

I can speak to Spearfish because those ones already are kind of in development. I don't have more details on the Rapid City one specifically, but we really do work in conjunction with the main campus So the Spearfish ones are in collaboration with the state of the university and then the state of the community. So folks from the school board, folks from their economic development and their chamber are all a part of that conversation.

Okay. But once again, though, do you have just Joe off the street, Mary that lives down the street that is not in the world of economic development. Everybody tends to get in this echo chamber and they hear from each other and they go, well, this is what we need, this is what we need. And you're only hearing from those people in your echo chamber versus my great-aunt whoever that lives down the street, you know, what does she want to see in this community? And that's what I'm asking. How can she be involved in this?

I think you bring up a really good point, and I think I think that's something that we can definitely look at as we're setting these meetings, is to make sure that the public is aware of them and that they're invited.

You good? I'm going to pump off that just a little bit. You had said earlier, you know, you check with Rapid City Elevate and them, but the question I've always wanted to ask the higher learning, the colleges, is when's the last time you've ever went to an employer that has hired one of your graduates right out of college? Have you ever checked with them to see where that graduate, when they came into that workforce— because I do most of my hiring through SDSU because of animal science, and I can tell you, and I've talked to them before, they need to change some curriculum because the industry has sped way past of what, you know. And it's, it's hard, I imagine, to stay up with industry because industry's private, got all kinds of money. But I mean, I think it's It's really important for colleges to check with employers and say, how did our graduates do when you put them into an actual working situation? You get good feedback.

Mr. Chair?

Yeah.

So one of the companies that we work really closely with is Black Hills Energy. The reason that I didn't list them as a partner is because they're kind of in this standstill right now with their merger, but they're one that we go directly to for our business instance, say, how prepared were they? Do they have what you're needing when they enter your workforce?

Beautiful. That's what I was getting at.

Yeah, we find that very important. I had another thought and it seemed to waver, but yes, we try to do that as much as we can. Oh, I know where I was going. Catapult is a grant that was awarded that is being facilitated through Western Dakota Tech. I assist with that grant in looking at ways that the workforce doesn't feel that folks are prepared enough. There's folks from K-12 that sit on this workgroup. There's folks from technical schools and then folks from higher ed and then industry, and really working on where those gaps exist and what can we do. Like, what is an actual tactical thing that we can do, not just talk about it, not just complain about the problems, but what can we do to improve the situation. My small workgroup specifically has looked at bringing HR officials into the K-12 setting so that students and their parents understand what employers are looking for in the future. And I think having everyone in the room for that, then technical schools and higher ed institutions are hearing what those skill gaps are.

Good. Yeah, thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Please continue.

So we host a lot of groups within our building, so I feel that our economic impact goes far beyond just the courses that we're offering. 2 weeks ago, we had the basic economic development course. This is the only one offered in South Dakota, as well as for quite a large region outside of South Dakota. Most of the students are from small towns in South Dakota that attend that course and allows them to expand their economic development understanding and then take that back to their rural communities. Our facility rentals are very busy. So even when it might seem like a day that— well, summers are a perfect example. Students might not be in the building as much, but we have groups that are utilizing that space all the time through facility rentals. And I wanted to speak specifically of our Department of Corrections training partnership that we held over the summer. The Department of Corrections opened a new building in Rapid City, which I'm sure you're all aware, but they had a class of new employees coming in that they needed to train. They had rented a facility and then realized that they had more new employees than they had expected. Great news, right? But they didn't have the space for it. So on short notice, we were able to accommodate them for their summer training. They were in our building for 6 weeks, and it was the perfect space for them to conduct their training and have those employees ready for the workforce. So those are different ways that we partner with the community, and our hope out of it is that they see that this is an educational opportunity for either them or maybe their children down the road. We've really ramped up our student success services throughout the last year. These are some of the things that we've done. So we had a welcome event, which was a Homecoming was a huge success as well as Spirit Week. Because we're a non-traditional campus, students don't really care about Homecoming. They are not that excited about the mascot, and they really just want to go about their day. But we find the importance in bringing them together as a community of learners themselves. So the Spirit Week allowed for that. Students were able to gather in our common spaces, and it's still towards the beginning of the school year where hopefully those communities that they've created then can continue throughout the school year. school year. We also work closely with Monument Health and the J.T. Vukovich Foundation for scholarships for our students, which have proven to be life-changing for many of our students. Students that wouldn't have been able to continue learning, would have had to go back to their full-time employment, or just couldn't pay for their tuition altogether, that these scholarships have really helped them see success and get to the finish line. So just kind of rolling this all up together. So the return on South Dakota's investment is that we do have an enrollment growth. We're serving the students that would not otherwise see themselves in higher education and then aligning those with the workforce. We're supporting our military. We're continuing to partnership with many community entities and making sure that we are using our state funds appropriately. So thank you for your support, and I will—

Hang on, we're going to check one last time for questions. If anybody has any questions for you or comments? Nobody online. Okay, thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Good, good report. Senator Howard.

Mr. Chair, now I would move to acknowledge receipt of the University Center's financial review report. Submitted by the Board of Regents pursuant to South Dakota Codified Law 13-51-1.4.

I'll second that motion.

Okay, there's been a motion made by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Moore, to receive the report. All those in favor will say aye.

Aye.

Man, I'm losing it today. All opposed? Report's been accepted.

Sorry.

Getting tongue-tied here. Okay, we're going to move on to the annual accountability report from the technical institutes.

Welcome.

Please introduce yourself.

Morning, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. My name is Nick Wendell, and I serve as the executive director of the South Dakota Board of Technical Education. I'm joined this afternoon by a number of our college presidents. President Tiffany Sanderson of Lake Area Technical College is here this afternoon. President Teresa Creasy of Mitchell Technical College in Mitchell is with us. And President Corey Klossman of Southeast Technical College in Sioux Falls is with us. Dr. Kendra Erickson of Western Dakota Technical College had a full-day faculty training day on their campus, but I believe she is logging in in, in joining us virtually. Thank you for the opportunity to share our annual accountability report with you all. We have an opportunity once a year to come before this committee and update you on a number of items. Uh, before I dive into the report, I do just want to acknowledge our board members. We've got 9 gubernatorially appointed board members. You see them on the roster on the screen there. Uh, we work with the governor's office through the appointment process for these folks to ensure that they represent a diversity of industries and regions throughout the state. I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to acknowledge 2 of our exiting board members. Since our inception in 2017, Dana Dykhouse has served on our board. Mr. Dykhouse has served as the chair of the board and an outstanding champion for technical education throughout the state. His term on our board will wrap up at the end of this month, as will board member Terry Sabers of Mitchell. Terry was also an original member of the board, has been serving over the last 9 years. His time on the board will conclude at the end of the month, but he'll be transitioning to the South Dakota Legislature and become a colleague of yours in the South Dakota House of Representatives as his term concludes on our board. But these are folks that provide great leadership and support for technical education throughout the state, and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge them. I also wanted to spend just a moment acknowledging our strategic priorities. Much of the conversation we'll have today will be centered around these strategic priorities, and much of the conversation we have around advancing technical education throughout the state really is centered on these priorities, which as a system and a board we adopted at the end of 2023. They are attainment, affordability, and alignment. You see them noted at the bottom of page 1 in the executive summary of our report. We define attainment as increasing the number of South Dakotans who attain high-quality postsecondary credentials. We're very laser-focused on how we can produce as many technical college graduates for the state of South Dakota as possible. And the attainment priority is really centered on graduate production. That second affordability— or that second priority is the affordability priority, which we articulate as ensuring that technical education in South Dakota is affordable. That term is defined in many different ways for different students and families. So, we measure that by identifying a positive return on investment to ensure that students and families that make the choice to invest in a credential for from one of our technical colleges can get a return on that investment through advanced earnings in the state of South Dakota with that credential in hand. And then the third priority is the alignment priority, ensuring that our learners and graduates are prepared for meaningful employment and continued education opportunities, ensuring that our credentials are well aligned, in particular, with the needs of industries and communities in the state. That's just a high-level look at our 3 strategic priorities that really guide our work. The report that you have before you and that we get an opportunity to share with you each fall really highlights our graduate outcomes, enrollment and retention trends, and then a couple of key appropriations, in particular those FY27 appropriations, giving you all an update on how we've distributed those dollars. And you'll see at a high level those items reflected on pages 1 and 2 of the report in the executive summary. And then throughout my presentation today, I'll focus on pages 3 through 8 of the report. On each slide, I try to highlight where you will find that data within the report as you see it reflected on the slide. Pages 3 through 7 focus on graduate enrollment and retention trends, and we'll start with those graduate numbers. I'm proud to say that in the most recently completed academic year, '25-'26, we produced an all-time high for the system, 2,794 unique graduates. For the purposes of this report, we'll be sharing data from the Graduate Outcomes Report from the '24-'25 cohort. We collect graduate outcomes data 6 months post-graduation from our students. So the data from that '25-'26 class isn't in yet. We'll be sharing that report over the next couple of months as we collect that data. So if you're trying to match numbers, I just wanted to highlight that the numbers in the report really focus on that 2,664 number from '24-'25, but we grew in the most recent academic year, and I wanted to share that number with you all. So in the most recently completed academic year, we neared nearly 2,800 students. 800 graduates from our technical colleges. For us, it's not just about producing graduates, but it's also about tracking where those graduates go post-graduation. And we're proud to share that from the 2025 Graduate Outcomes Report, 98.8%, nearly 99% of our graduates were placed within 6 months of graduation. In South Dakota, we find placed as employed, continuing their education, or entering the military within 6 months of graduation. In the previous conversation, there were some questions around how well are we meeting the needs of employers and how well are we satisfying the needs of industry. This placement rate has been consistently high, nearing 99% for a number of years, and what we hear from our employers is that our graduates in South Dakota Dakota are well prepared to go to work into the workforce right after graduation. And most of our programs operate with an advisory council comprised of industry leaders and employers and community leaders. So we're updating our curriculum, ensuring our graduates are prepared to go directly to work. And I think this strong placement rate is an indication of that strong relationship we have with industry.

Keep going.

Okay, uh, we also want to highlight enrollment numbers from the fall of 2026. Uh, there are 700— or 7,827 individuals engaged in learning in one of our 4 campuses. The chart you see on your screen breaks that number down. The blue line at the top is the unduplicated enrollment number. That's all individuals engaged in learning, full and part-time students, and dual credit students. The orange line you see on the bottom are just full and part-time enrollment without dual credit students included. So we've seen growth in total students and also total or full and part-time students enrolled. This is a positive sign in South Dakota. We know that nationally and regionally enrollment in public 2-year colleges has continued to decline in recent years, but we've bucked that trend in South Dakota. And I think that's in large part because our 4 technical colleges remain mission-focused, that we're producing professionals that can go directly to work in the state of South Dakota. Placement rates are outstanding. Affordability is a focus for us. And we've really worked across the system to remain focused on that mission. You see in the report details related to enrollment and a breakdown. of enrollment across the system. On page 5, you see a further breakdown between full and part-time enrollment and dual credit enrollment since 2021 across the 4 institutions and the system as a whole. So you can sort of track that pattern.

We're going to have a question asked from Representative Auch.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Just, just off the top of your head, what's the average cost per credit hour for most of these programs? Just an average.

Go ahead.

Well, the credit hour cost is, is one number. Maybe I'll give you a full credential cost and then share. The average cost of a 2-year credential in our system is just over $22,500. So we think of the average 2-year credential coming from our system as an Associate of Applied Science degree. In general, that's a 4-semester, 60-credit degree, and that's just over $22,500 across all programs in our system.

You good?

Thank you, Mr.

Chair. Oh, you're welcome.

I was just checking.

Thank you very much.

Of course.

Okay, please continue.

Okay, I'll do that. Another number that's of particular interest to our legislative partners, of course, is the full-time equivalent number. For those of you that have been on the Joint Committee on Appropriations, you know that we apply the per-student allocation using that FTE number. This really gives you a sense of how many credits we're generating across the system. We think of the average full-time student is generating approximately 30 credits in an academic year, and so an FTE, or a full-time equivalent, we equate to 30 credits. In recent years, we've crossed that 6,000 threshold, which is a magic number for us, and we're proud of that. In the current academic year, we're looking at again being across now 6,100 FTE, and that was based on the most recently completed academic year, all credits produced. You see on page 6 in the report this chart that's on the screen, and then an institutional breakdown in Table 3 on the bottom of page 6. Okay, I'll move on to retention numbers. That's sort of the third pillar of the report we provide to you all. This really tracks students that are enrolled in one of our institutions and return to the institution or complete their credential the following fall. We're interested, of course, in increasing our enrollment numbers, but we're particularly interested in ensuring those students are retained one year to the next and ultimately Ultimately persists to on-time graduation. As a system, in the fall of 2025, we had an 80% retention rate. We've been hovering around that 80% number. That's really strong retention outcome throughout the system. We'll report the fall of '26 retention report at our December meeting for the board, but we've been very consistent around retention in recent years, and that 2025 number was 80%. Okay, you're good.

We'll stop you, trust me.

If we got a question, we'll—

well, I'll get a hold of you.

Appreciate that. Page 8 of our report really focuses on 2 of our FY27 appropriations. One of them is that equipment funding. This has been a longtime partnership with the state of South Dakota where The legislature has approved one-time equipment funding for the system. We've paired those state dollars with local or industry dollars to make necessary equipment investments across the system. You can see in the chart on your screen and on page 8 of the report, the first column is the state's investment in FY27. That was just over $4.3 million. The system matched that with just over $2.1 million, so we were able to invest in nearly $6.5 million in necessary equipment items across the 4 campuses. This is such a valuable partnership for us because equipment needs are ongoing on our campuses. Equipment are a key expense in providing high-quality technical education, and we're working very closely with industry leaders to ensure that we are maintaining our equipment, we're investing in new technology as fields evolve. In some cases, if we're Growing capacity in certain high-demand programs. We need to invest in additional equipment to provide seats for learners. And so these equipment investments help us maintain the quality of our equipment, invest in new technology, and grow capacity in high-demand programs. So this has been a phenomenal partnership for us.

How do you come up with the percentages? Like, when— how do you know what you ask the industry for or what you ask the state for. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, thank you, Representative. I'll take just one step back and tell you how we populate our priority list and then how we have arrived at this 67/33% partnership. We work multiple times a year with all 4 campuses to gather their equipment planning forecast. Our leaders across the 4 campuses are keeping a running list of equipment that needs to be updated in every program and every space on their campus. In many cases, those items are on the list because as I noted, we need to invest in new technology. We're looking to grow capacity. And oftentimes when we start those conversations, it's with industry leaders and partners to say, you're asking for new technology in this space, we'd like to invest in it. If you can help us, we could find state dollars to match with your investment to ensure we could do that next year. And so we're keeping a running list of those equipment items to share with you all as a part of our ask. And to share with our industry partners so they can bring some money to the table as well. We worked out this 67/33 partnership a number of years ago with the Joint Committee on Appropriations, and we sort of stuck to that where we've said, this is our overall needs. The committee has come back to us and said, if you can bring a third of that to the table, we could fulfill those needs. And so we've sort of entered the conversation with that in mind and entered the conversation with our industry leaders with that in mind as well.

Have you asked industry for more?

Of course.

Because they tell— the ones I've talked to said that they would give more towards industry equipment. I mean, it's— technical schools are that important to them. They would do more.

You're right, Representative. And I do want to also just capture that this equipment investment is not the only way industry is investing in technical education. In many cases, they're investing in scholarships for students. A number of them are great build Dakota partners with us, and that's a considerable investment in students. They're investing in physical spaces. We're finding any way we can to plug in industry support and industry dollars. Equipment is one very important piece of that, but it's also in, in other corners.

Please continue.

Okay, the other appropriation I wanted to give you an update on is our partnership in maintenance and repair funding. The state has an expectation that we continue to invest in the ongoing maintenance Maintenance and repair of our facilities, and that's a top priority in our system as well. If you've had an opportunity to spend any time on one of our technical college campuses, I hope you're impressed by our facilities. They're a point of pride for us. Absolutely crucial part of the experience for our students and their families is the quality of, in particular, our learning laboratories. But those are spaces that are heavily used, and we've got to continue to invest in the ongoing maintenance of those facilities. And we do that in partnership with you all in the state of South Dakota. Our goal is to invest 2% of the total replacement value of all state-owned facilities on an annual basis. About 10 years ago, we started a partnership with the state of South Dakota where eventually we would ideally get to a 1% to 1% match, where the state is investing 1% of the replacement value in M&R funding in and we're matching it with 1% of the replacement value in M&R funding. For a number of years, our local commitment has exceeded that 1% because we're going to continue to need to invest somewhere around 2% a year in ongoing M&R. And as you all know well, the cost of doing those projects isn't decreasing. And so we've had to make those investments regardless. But the goal is to get to about a 1% to 1% match. state funding, and local M&R investments. In FY27, the appropriation was nearly $2.8 million. You see it in the chart on the screen there and on page 8 of the report. This is how it broke down across the 4 campuses. That's based on a replacement value of all state-owned facilities of over $385 million. So our goal would be eventually To work up to a 1% to 1% match. We're not there yet, but the $2.8 million we received in FY27 has been very valuable, and we've distributed across the 4 campuses to aid in major M&R projects they're doing locally. If there aren't questions on M&R, I just kind of want to recenter our conversation where it started around the attainment, affordability, and alignment priorities. Ultimately, our goal is to produce as many graduates for the state of South Dakota as possible and to ensure that those graduates are ready to go to work in high-demand fields in our state. And so all of our conversations sort of come back to that graduate number and ensuring that those folks are well prepared, that they can get access to an affordable credential in our state and put it to good work to serve our industries and our communities. Oh, with that, I'd stand by for any questions. And our presidents are on hand and they can answer any of those as well.

Thank you so much. And our 4 technical schools are the jewel of this state. I am a huge fan. Great job. I'm glad to see that the technical schools are, are, you know, thriving because we need that workforce really bad.

So yeah.

Thank you, Representative.

Any other questions, comments?

Just quickly.

Representative Auch.

Thank you.

And I'm sure I'm not sure you covered this, maybe I wasn't paying attention. How many of your graduates do stay in South Dakota?

Go ahead.

Thank you for the question, Representative. About 84% of our graduates in the most recent cohort stayed in South Dakota. So that's more than 2,400 graduates going directly to work in the state or continuing their education here.

Fantastic. Well, I am a mother of 4 graduates of a tech school here in South Dakota, so I am a true and strong believer in them. So thank you for all you do.

Thank you.

Anything else from the committee? I would say I would add to that, your graduates are workforce ready. They hit the ground when the first day on the job. There's— it's a difference. So it's good to see.

Thank you.

Anything else? Okay. With that, Senator Howard.

I would move to acknowledge receipt of the annual accountability report submitted by Second.

It has been moved to and seconded— moved by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Auch— to receive the report. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Aye.

Thank you. It is received. Okay, next up we have the annual report of the South Dakota 911 Coordination Board, Department of Public Safety. I apologize, we should have had all your presidents stand up and introduce themselves. I apologize, we should have done that. But yes, I would really like them to come back. It's a little unorthodox, we're gonna— but I would, I would like to have you guys give you little recognition. So just whatever, just introduce yourself and just where you're from.

Thank you, sir. My name is Tiffany Sanderson.

I'm president at Lake Area Technical College in Watertown.

And just to add a bit of local flavor, our student body this year hit a new record high at just over 2,300 students. We're on our way to 2,800 by the end of the year. And to what Nick shared with all of you, we continue to focus on that That graduate number. Our class of 2025, the starting average wage was just over $57,000 per year.

We talk about return on investment a lot.

If you do the math, that cost of the average degree against the cost of the average starting wage meant they earned back the cost of that degree at Lake Area Tech in about 5 months. Across our programs, that ranged from 3 months to 10 months, but all in, we want to make sure to your point, Point representative that they're hitting the ground running on that very first day of the job and they're able to take care of themselves and their families well.

So thanks for your time today.

Thank you. Yes, Representative Moore, go ahead.

I think I heard right, last spring did you guys graduate like 860 or 880 students, something like that?

Representative, that's correct. We had 883 graduates who were eligible to graduate. Our Growth in graduates was just over 6% this last year.

That's good to hear. Thank you.

If you want to hear the accolades of Lake Area, just go to the coalfields up in North Dakota and they'll brag to you all day about the graduates they hire out of there. So great job.

Welcome.

Good afternoon.

My name is Theresa Kryzy. I'm the president at Mitchell Technical College. It's a pleasure to be here today.

We have similar statistics to Lake Area. I think one of—

when you talk about the number of graduates, we awarded our 20,000th degree this year at graduation. So it gives you an idea of the impact that technical colleges have in the state of South Dakota. We too have record enrollment this year, a little bit smaller than Lake Area. We're coming after you, but— We have 1,392 students attending Mitchell Tech this year. So thank you very much for everything that you do for us. The equipment funding, the M&R funding, as well as the general support has been gratefully helpful in achieving our goal.

So thank you.

Well, no, thank you. Great school. Okay, thank you. Oh, we have a question for you.

Oh, excuse me.

Oh, Mr. Chair. So yeah, I was wondering, years ago I was part of a I work for Electric Co-op, and I am a graduate.

Thank you.

Thank God I went to school. It made a world of difference. But at that time, we put money— we raised about just shy of $500,000 to go into the endowment fund to help with wages, like with the powerline program. Are you guys able to keep up? Because a lot of times, Instructors' wages would get underneath the trade industry. Are you guys able to keep good instructors because of that, or—

Sure. That's a really interesting challenge continually. We've had support from the state to do that.

We've had support from industry to do that as well. We're now at that tipping point again.

As you've noticed, wages across the nation have gone up in all areas, which is always good for our economy.

I'm not saying it shouldn't, but it proposes or poses a challenge for us to keep up with that.

So we do things in ways that we can. This year we had great support from the Touchstone Cooperatives in building the new facility and those types of things that help us to encourage that and keep people coming back. They also, you know, we tend to hire, especially in our power line industry, those that are reaching the point in their career where they no longer want to get called out in the middle of the night to do that kind of stuff, so that helps a little bit. But that's a continual challenge in technical education to be able to compete with industry for qualified faculty.

Thank you.

Thank you. We have one more to introduce, and I'm getting in trouble with LRC. They say if you want to be in the minutes, you have to sign in, but if you don't want to be in the minutes, you don't have to.

Good afternoon.

My name is Kory Klossman.

I have the privilege of serving as the president at Southeast Technical College in Sioux Falls. We're right about 2,800 students, and this year we passed over 1,000 unique graduates over the course of the entire year as well. So also just want to thank you for your support for the one-time funding for our Abner Center, the James Abner Center for Advanced Manufacturing, as well as expansion of our welding lab, which they beginning to move dirt on this week, so we're excited to see progress on that as well.

Well, thank you so much.

Oh, Representative Moore, just for everybody's knowledge, Jim Abner is from Kennebec, South Dakota, and he is— he— I lived just north of him for about 19 years and just south of him one house for about another 19 years, so I knew Jim real well.

It was great when we did the Sorry, Representative.

You just were in full right now.

It was really great when we did our groundbreaking back in August. We had several members of his family who were able to make it for that as well.

So it was really great to be able to celebrate his legacy to the state of South Dakota.

All right, nice. Well, thanks again for everybody coming. I'm glad you came back and introduced yourself. All right, now we're going to get back to business.

We're going to get on.

So, okay, we're going to do the annual report of South Dakota 911. Sorry about that. We had you up there and down. Please introduce yourself and give us your report.

Afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. My name is Jason Husby and I'm the state 911 coordinator with the Department of Public Safety. I've been with DPS for about 25 years. Just a little bit of background, the 911 coordination board is administered administratively tied to the Department of Public Safety and ultimately falls under DPS Cabinet Secretary Robert Perry. If you look at page 3 of the report, it details our 11 board members who have staggered 3-year terms, and membership representation is shown on that page. We also follow SDCL 34-45-18.1 in the members that are appointed.

Thank you.

it to that board. We have an excellent board.

Do you have it up on your computer?

Sorry.

There you go. That's easier for everybody to follow. We have video people looking at us now. See, we're not just audio anymore.

So we have an excellent board. They represent all aspects of 911 from 911 center operations to the responder agencies we work with cities, counties, and the telecommunications industry who help us provide a reliable network and 911 call delivery. This report focuses on the many operations of the 911 Coordination Board and the Public Safety Answering Points of South Dakota. If you hear me say PSAP, I'll try not to, but that's the acronym for Public Safety Answering Point.

Okay.

or 911 center. The South Dakota 911 Coordination Board was quite active through fiscal year '26, or last year, met 6 times and oversaw the implementation of major systems advancements, compliance reviews with those 911 centers, financial reporting requirements of any city and county that receives 911 funds. And statewide operational improvements. So I'm going to skip this forward just a little bit. Page 4 through 6, I guess, and I'm trying to note that for those that might be viewing it, is the total fiscal year '26 911 revenue or 911 surcharge was $20.96 million. 70% of that goes immediately back to the counties. I've got a diagram on page 11 instead of me trying to break down the 70%, 30%, and all that. The flowchart just is a little bit easier to follow. But, and if you have questions on that, please let me know. But the, the big thing to remember there is 70% goes back to the county in which the revenue is generated, and the 911 Coordination Board Also, from their portion of the surcharge revenue, funded approximately another $3 million directly to 911 centers, cities, and counties. We did that via grants, equipment purchases, incentive funds, things of that nature. Additionally, the 911 Coordination Board and fund support the Emergency Services Network, And I'm not going to bore everybody with that, but that's the network that connects all the 911 centers in the state. The fund pays for all 911 call-taking positions at the 911 centers operated by a city or county. So the board funds those positions, and today we have 148 positions across the state. A few years ago, we asked for and received a permanent increase to the surcharge of $2 per line. It's important to remember that in South Dakota, we have a uniform surcharge, and what that means is it doesn't matter if you live in an urban area or in a very rural county. We expect 911 service to remain the same at wherever you're at. So if you're downtown Rapid City versus up on the North Dakota border, our standards and laws apply to everybody. So our uniform surcharge allows those counties to maintain and train their people, and they all have the exact same equipment to take the 911 call, to map the 911 call. Everything is uniform. It doesn't mean that they can't have different operational policies or things like that, but we would have everybody at a baseline. There's some states around us that don't have a uniform surcharge, and if you live in the big city, you might pay 70 cents And if you live up in the Harding County of that state, you're paying $4. So we think it's important here that it's a uniform fee and a uniform service across the entire state. Based on that final fee increase, the 911 Coordination Board did have an efficiency study completed. That was some of the feedback we heard during session, and we have leaned on that in a program to help improve efficiency at all of our 911 centers. One of the big comments at that time was consolidation of 911 centers, and the 911 Coordination Board supports local governments pursuing those consolidations. One thing you have to remember is if you have County A and County B and they want to join their 911 centers, there's significant upfront costs to that. And that's where those consolidations maybe didn't happen in the past. Moving forward, the 911 Coordination Board has been funding those initial upfront one-time costs. And the report will detail on page 17 some key consolidations that we've worked on. Sorry, I need to get all the way to page 17.

Okay.

And I'm just gonna summarize those very, very quickly. Crow Creek and Buffalo County were previously served by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Law Enforcement Center in Fort Thompson. Based on a local movement, we moved their 911 service to Winter Police Department 911. They'd previously been on a basic 911 system, which was pre-911.

Okay.

2010. And so they have transitioned very rapidly from a basic 911 to a full next-gen call answering. The BIA Law Enforcement Center is still there. They're still dispatching officers, but the initial call goes to WINR, where those telecommunicators are trained in things like emergency medical dispatch, like CPR on the phone, triaging significant medical events, and things like that. If it's a law enforcement call, typically—

Okay.

Typically, they'll go ahead and send that back to the BIA Law Enforcement Center because that's the jurisdiction that would apply. Miner County elected to close their 911 center and they had previously served Miner and Sanborn. So Sanborn County moved down to Mitchell Police Department 911 and Miner County will be going over to Lake County. The board has funded 2 separate requests on that.

Okay.

I have a question from Senator Grove.

So loud and obnoxious. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have a question about the Winner 911 calls. So I'm in Lower Brule and mine goes to Winner as well.

Is it—

so we had quite an eventful evening Not very long ago. And we were on the phone with them several times, and it seemed that the process was we kind of said what was happening, and then they immediately transferred us. And I think that we were just transferred right to maybe local law enforcement, because they were kind of out on the road or whatever, coming back to us. So, Is that the standard procedure then, the way that it happens with WINR? Or like, if we were to have some sort of a situation where we called, do we say to them so that they don't— because they transferred us almost immediately— do we say something to them so that they don't transfer us right away? Like, we need this help or that help. Like, if you said, you know, like, it's CPR, let's say, for example, do we say that, or how do we—

Mr. Chair?

Go ahead.

So that would depend. I guess I would say that's a terrible answer to say that would depend. What would occur is, so in South Dakota, all 911 telecommunicators are required to have a basic certification. They're also required to have ongoing training, and this is Law Enforcement Training Commission rules, just like a police officer. 911 telecommunicators Caters have to have ongoing training, and the other big one they have to have is EMD, which is emergency medical dispatch. And that's when you call in and whatever the medical condition would be, it's a response base. So it could be a cardiac issue, could be somebody that had their hand damaged by a hay baler, or you know a variety of things in South Dakota. So in that case, if you called in for a specific medical issue, Winner would have held that call, provided EMD, and then. Probably notified BIA Lower Brule or something of that nature. In a case where it's a law enforcement only call, which it maybe sounds like that's what it was, Senator, that needs to go back to the BIA because they have jurisdiction in that area. They can't send the Lyman County Sheriff. It's obviously sovereign. So there is some movement around. I will note that, that Winner has 7 counties, and when Buffalo County and Crow Creek And there's definitely a delineation there. We're trying to find a 911 center. Winner was their top choice because, you know, the tribal jurisdiction can get a little confusing with, you know, different areas are not tribal. And Winner's answer was, we have 6 counties, we're going to have 7, every one of them has tribal areas. So they don't seem to care. So in this specifically, it maybe sounds like a law enforcement call and they would need to ship that back to BIA Lower Are you good, Senator?

Well, just one really quick question. So what happens when in the transfer and the call drops repeatedly? Like, should we— do we contact someone later and say, hey, our calls are dropping? Or like, what's the follow-through on that when we're When we're— those of us are calling and it's going to WINR and back again.

Go ahead.

So the 911 call is dropping, and that was part of the challenge we had in Crow Creek was we weren't getting any of the location of the caller, we weren't getting the number or anything. The 911 center should be calling back. So if it's going into WINR, WINR's got your information, and that's part of NextGen. We get your full mapping. We get where you're located, your phone, all of that, and we can proactively call you back or text you. Sometimes we text back as well because maybe phone signal isn't as good, so then they'll initiate a text. So that, that was part of the big move to get to WINR is now we have all those tools at our disposal instead of just picking up a phone on the desk.

Okay, you good?

Sure.

Um, so it was in So, when it went to transfer from— so, WINR was good, but when it went to transfer to BIA, there it was dropped there. So, would— like, who—

what do we do?

We just kept calling back, so I don't know what's the right thing to do.

Go ahead, Mr.

Chair.

So, I— again, BIA is operating on a basic phone system. We're trying to improve it. I can't necessarily answer for their system and how it works. And it's not that I don't want to answer your question, but there's a lot of things that go into it. And that's why it was so important to get Crow Creek moved over to the NextGen system. Part of the issues we're seeing there, and I've heard this from community members in that area, tribal council meetings, is this same thing. So we're hoping— I've been doing extensive work on this, especially with the wireless companies.

So, okay, Representative Auch.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have just a question. Not even a month ago, we had a situation in our county, Yankton County, where we had a young man that was seriously injured. And it was— it happened in Yankton County. And if you're at the tip of Yankton County, you're kind of right in a trifecta of Scotland, Menno, Freeman. Well, this young man was laying on the edge of the road. 2 AM in the morning and they sent an ambulance from Yankton. Well, the bridge is out. It took 45 minutes for that ambulance from Yankton County to get there, and he could have easily been serviced from Scotland, Freeman, Parkston in less than 7, 10 minutes. And when we were talking to the 911 operator, they basically said we have to send an ambulance from Yankton County because he's in Yankton County. Can you explain that to me? Is that your area or— I mean, it was the 911 caller, I mean dispatcher, that had told them that information. So is there a reason? What do you— is it the, you know, nonessential services? Can you kind of enlighten me a little?

Mr.

Chair.

Ma'am, what I would say is part of this is my area of expertise as far as EMS response. That's Department of Health, which I work with them on a regular basis. But what there are is emergency services. service number zones, and I don't know if Yankton dispatch was unaware of the bridge out. I don't know any of the details.

Oh no, they were told.

Okay, so I don't know any of the details on that. That sounds like it would be a specific area of that call, but I do know that Yankton County funds the paramedic service there, and so they may have local policies and protocols that dictate which ambulance service is sent first.

Even if it's a life or situation doesn't matter. It's coming from 45 minutes away. Doesn't— you don't know. So what you're saying is you don't know. That's— that would be it.

That would be it.

That'd be a county situation. Thank you.

Okay, see no other questions. Please continue.

Um, apologize, I got off on my slides. So I discussed Miner and Sanborn County consolidation. The next thing I'd like to discuss is Spearfish to Lawrence County. Spearfish previously operated a 911 center that has now been consolidated into the Lawrence County Sheriff's Office 911 center, and the board has approved a funding request for about $350,000 on that consolidation. And then the final 2 are Douglas County will be moving services to Mitchell PD 911, which has then caused Charles Mix County to review their 911 service, and they eventually, I think tentatively, are planning to move to City of Yankton 911 for that service. Excluding federal or tribal PSAPs or 911 centers, my records indicate we've been at 28 911 centers in the state. with no consolidation for at least a decade. With the funding support of the legislature in our fee increase, the 911 Coordination Board, and the Department of Public Safety, we've had 4 separate locally driven consolidations within the past year and a half. The permanent surcharge increases also enable the board to assist local agencies in funding for key— other key areas such as radio interoperability, Interoperability, like Representative brought up, we need to make sure that we can we have radio interoperability amongst responding agencies. For last fiscal year, the board awarded about $1.5 million in funding requests for efficiency, consolidation, etc. We recently awarded about $600,000 at our in-person annual coordination board meeting, and we also not only provide. the 911 call-taking positions and all that equipment, but we provide a backup to that system to all of the 911 centers. I know this part can get— I guess I don't want to belabor it, but it brings up a really good point that Representative Auch made, and that's that you get 3 counties in an area, and where does the 911 call go?

Right.

That's where it's critical to have our geographic information services accurate so that the call knows where to route and that we're routing, I'll say, in general via next-generation 911. We previously relied on out-of-date data. It just was not up to date, and we had a lot of misrouted calls in this area. She talked about everybody has There's an area like that that they know of. The call should go here, it gets passed off here, it moves over here. So that has been a real focus of the 911 Coordination Board. It's a real focus of mine, is to get that mapping data improved. And we made some really significant investment in that. What we had was a lot of rural counties don't have a GIS person. It's the Director of Equalization slash, you know, 3 other titles in his or her office, and GIS just isn't something that's on the top of the pile every day. So what we did is we went out and made direct contracts with the planning districts who support cities and counties, and we brought 46 counties into that direct contract, and now we handle all of their GIS maintenance for them. If you're a county that already has a GIS person, we'll pay you an incentive as long as you meet the criteria and submit the data in, in the way we need it submitted. So that's been a big part of those missed routes, is cleaning those up and making sure our GIS data is where it needs to be. One of the last areas I discuss in the report is our prepaid wireless fee revenue decline. One of the financial challenges that we highlighted was there's been a pretty sharp decline in prepaid wireless surcharge. And that's not the postpaid that you maybe think of. You get a bill every month, you pay your bill. This is when you go to a retailer and you purchase either a set number of minutes or a set number of days and a data plan, and you're good until whatever you've agreed upon runs out. So that has dropped by about half last year. And so we're continuing to monitor that. States around us are seeing The same thing. But we just want to make sure that we're paying attention to it because, you know, there's— there are market shifts, changes in the way consumers buy products, devices, et cetera. So that is something we're monitoring. One thing to remember there, though, is prepaid goes directly into the state's 911 coordination fund. So a decline there means that we're unable then to maybe approve funding requests for a small 911 center that needs a better radio system or a consolidation. Overall, South Dakota, I will tell you, you know, amongst nationally, we're in a great position as far as Next-Gen 911. Next-Gen 911 is a fairly broad topic. There's not a set number of things, but expanding our geospatial call routing, which goes back to GIS, making sure our primary system is working, our backup system is working, and that we're getting those 911 telecommunicators the right amount of data to locate callers is very important. Stable surcharge and, you know, the grant support I think has helped as well. And then we just need to continue to move towards the implementation of Next-Gen 911 and locally driven consolidation. I guess I wanted to, obviously, getting ready for this, I know it's a lot of financial words and a lot of mapping and technical terms. I just want to share this, though, and this is something I've presented on, and I just want everybody to think of how a 911 call works. You know, if you want to call, if I want to call my wife right now, or you call your husband or whatever, how does that work? So, How does your phone know to go there? Because you enter that 10-digit number, right? And if I enter a 10-digit number, it goes to my wife or my son or whoever. How does a 911 call work? Because whether you're sitting here today or you're on vacation in Florida or wherever you're at, you— it doesn't route back to Pierre. It doesn't route back to your, your home. It routes to the closest 911 center. And that's where it's critical that we continue to make the investments that we are in GIS and moving the system forward. As the devices expand, there's more and more potential to improve that location-based routing and get people connected faster.

Mr.

Chair.

Representative Aylward.

I thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess I am confused again in this call. Once again, so what you're saying, I mean, you're on the phone and they're telling them don't send Yankton ambulance and they still send the Yankton ambulance. So it doesn't have anything to do with spatial recognition or where the— it's based on what the county tells them which ambulance to send? I mean, I'm confused. So you're on a 911 call, someone is laying there bleeding, this is our location. They're not going to necessarily send the closest ambulance. They're going to send whichever one they're instructed to send. I guess I'm confused on the 911 next-gen you're talking about. It can recognize where you're at and then it sends whichever closest ambulance, correct?

Mr. Chair, go ahead.

Well, there's a human that has to send the correct ambulance. And on this specific instance, I don't know. I'm not aware of this. I don't know what their protocol is.

So there is a protocol?

Yes.

So there's—

so that's—

I guess that I'm trying to get to that answer. So you're telling me the protocol, even though everybody pays for it, it's determined by the county that you live in? The protocol?

It'd be up to the individual 911 center.

Okay. And there's a 911 center in Yankton?

Yes, ma'am.

Okay.

And I didn't see that on the list, so I guess that's where I'm confused. I heard you say it, but I didn't see it on the list on page— whatever page that was.

12, correct?

Can you answer that question? Are you able to answer that question? Is it page 12?

May I look quick, sir?

Yeah, take your time. I'm just trying to get some in between you two.

No, no, no, no, I'm not trying to be confrontational. I'm trying to understand when I go and talk to them, how do I go about doing this? Because I do think this is pretty important. Don't you think it's pretty important that we understand how this all works?

Mr. Chair, absolutely. I'd be more than happy to do that.

I'm going to just tell you, I got 6 phone calls about this situation in my county. So it really, it hit a note with my community that I live in. So if someone gets injured and And we're 45 minutes from the closest, you know, in Yankton, and we're 7 minutes from an ambulance in another county. It was a little disturbing. So I'm just— that's just kind of curious how it's handled.

Can you shed a little light on that? Or are you, Representative, you still have— like, are you still confused?

No, I think he's— I think he's informing me. But is it on page 12? I just didn't I don't see Yankton listed.

Mr.

Chair?

Yep, take your time. Yankton is listed on the appendices where they have to submit a financial report. But yes, there is a 911 center in Yankton.

Okay, it was just missed. It was just missed on the list because it says here administrative rules, eligibility, incentive funds, and Yankton— it says, you know, Sioux Falls, blank, Watertown, Winner. So obviously it was just missed, maybe.

Well, Yankton would not be an incentive 911 center. Hmm.

Okay.

Okay, are you good?

I'm good, thank you.

Okay, watch your mic.

There you go.

All right, please continue, sir.

Sir, I'm completed if there aren't any other questions.

You are completed then.

I have a question.

Okay, Senator Grove.

Actually, a comment, but I've heard of the same thing occurring that she's stating, where, you know, ambulances have— they've been sent from quite a ways away where there was actually people that were far closer. And I don't know how one goes about fixing that, but it is an issue, I guess, in the country. I wanted to note just really quick, If you could just explain, and you probably already did, so I apologize, the whole consolidation piece. Is that a positive thing when you're saying that you're consolidating some of this information? Was it like the call center in general? Are you consolidating those, or what was that you were saying that in the consolidation you're mentioning 2 things, and one of them was consolidation, and I was wondering if that was a good thing.

Go ahead.

Mr. Chair, um, so that was an area that was pointed out by the— I'll first, I'll talk about the, uh, the consolidation. That was an area that was pointed out by the legislature as something they wanted so that we were efficient with the fee. So the idea was if we don't have— if we have 24 instead of 28 911 centers, we'd be more efficient with the fee. So that was the feedback we received when we were working on the fee increase. And then to your other point on, you know, rural areas and maybe Representative Auch's question is every location has an emergency service number and that's what dictates what responder agency is sent. And those— that's a locally driven There's fire service boundaries. There's emergency service numbers for law enforcement and EMS.

Okay, Senator Grove, are you good?

Well, I guess I mean I'm just wondering if the okay, so it was a legislative decision to consolidate. Has that been a good thing then, or or no?

Go ahead, Mr.

Chair.

I would say it's a locally driven decision. So if if the locals want to consolidate and we can help them, that's good in my mind. We're not telling them to consolidate; that we're offering assistance in doing that.

Okay.

Are you good, Senator?

Well, I'll just clarify, and I appreciate your. Thank you for your answer. And the only reason why I'm sticking to this is because one of the things that I heard probably in '25, I guess, or '26, whenever it was— no, it was '25. They were saying that one of the concerns that I had heard in the whole consolidation thing was if, you know, Billy Joe is in closer to Winner and then— and there's a A bridge is out or whatever, they're much more likely to know about it because they live in that area. And so they would perhaps route people in a different way because they, they know their area better than somebody that's in Gregory or whatever, you know what I mean? And so I, I just— that's what I— that's what I was wondering, if the consolidation thing was a good thing or not.

Okay, I think you've answered that. Yeah, it's local. So unless you have anything to add.

No, sir.

Okay, let's move on. Is there any other questions from the committee? None online, Jacob. Okay, Senator Howard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would move to acknowledge receipt of the annual report submitted by the South Dakota 911 Coordination Board pursuant to South Dakota Codified Law 34-45-20.

I'll second that motion.

Okay, it has been moved by Senator Howard and it has been seconded by Representative Moore to receive the report. All those in favor— do you have comments on your motion?

Okay.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? We have received your report. Thank you, sir. Very good. I know we did 9 earlier before lunch, but I'm going to give the committee one last time if they had any bills that they wanted to discuss. I don't think there is, but in case we forgot something. Okay, seeing none, we're going to move on to number 10, which is public comments. Public comments is 5 minutes for anybody who would like to address and testify in front of the committee. As chair, I will ask everyone who does to be respectful, and I've got a short gavel today, so If there's anyone that would like to testify, we have one online and we have— we're gonna go to the room first though. Yep, so step up and introduce yourself and you have 5 minutes. Okay, thank you, sir.

Good afternoon, Chairman Overweg, Vice Chair Howard, members of the committee. I am Chad Bishop from Sioux Falls. I spoke to you on July 21st and September 8th. That testimony stands. 3 notes went to you today with every source for what I'm about to say in a draft request itself written out. I have submitted those when I registered to speak. When the chairman and I spoke in August and again after your September meeting, he told me his committee's subpoena power will be used as a rifle, not a shotgun. I am here with one target and the reason to use it. Here's the pattern. In April 2020, Congress passed the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, Public Law 116-139. It required every governor to File a testing plan with the federal government month by month to include diagnostic, serological, and other tests. South Dakota filed two. The federal form set a floor for diagnostic testing and none for antibody testing, also known as serology. The antibody answers were South Dakota's own, offered voluntarily. In the governor's filing, the Department of Health told the federal government that the state public health laboratory has validated an Abbott antibody test, that it will implement. Serological testing in early June. That antibody testing would support seroprevalence studies in long-term care, on the reservations, and in communities that support critical infrastructure such as large meat processing facilities. That the state laboratory would be the confirmation test for the hospital's antibody tests, and it gave numbers. The first plan, 4,410 people in May, 8,820 in June. The second was 17,700 in July, rising Every month to 61,950 in December, 238,950 people for the half of the year. In April 2020, the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls was, by the press accounts of the day, the largest known outbreak cluster in the country, in a state that was not locked down. The CDC's report, co-authored by our state epidemiologist, counts 929 cases amongst 3,635 employees in six weeks. If there was ever a time and a place. Place to measure how far the virus had actually spread and how deadly it was. It was South Dakota in the summer of 2020. The department wrote that down as a plan and sent it to Washington as the law required of every state that took the money. The money has been awarded on May 19th of that year. The plan followed on May 30th. Department's own slides to providers July 9th said they're going to have to delay, must delay. August 6th, they have a single Abbott test. August in August 2020. November 18th to Joint Appropriations: We're not going, we're not doing antibody testing, just checking for active disease. A copy of that exchange is in my notes to you. I can find no seroprevalence study, no monthly count, no published result, and I have not proven there is none. The records that would settle it exist, and they are not mine to open. Our governor told the federal government that we plan to test almost a quarter of a million for people for antibodies in 2020. I can find no public record of how many were run. Do you understand the implications of this? The public statements of the early pandemic show our officials understood the importance of this testing. The plan reflected it. The question is what happened operationally? They understood they needed to count everyone infected, not just those sick enough to be counted as cases, and that is how you measure the infection fatality rate. Our own state epidemiologist explained that on April 3rd, 2020, standing beside the governor. That number would have allowed rational, science-based decisions instead of decisions that were often driven by the case fatality rate, the number that counts only the sick, driven by fear, not measurement. It drove our citizens and it drove our institutions. So here is the chair's rifle: one agency, the Department of Health; one program, the testing plan it filed under Public Law 116-139; and the CDC laboratory award That paid for it, $58 million. One period, April 2020 through June 2021. Six records, each of which exists because a federal condition required it. The two plans submit first. The two plans submitted copies of the originals with any revisions and the federal feedback. Two, the approved work plan and the quarterly progress reports to CDC. Three, the state laboratory monthly count of antibody tests performed. Four, the count of hospital. Provider laboratory positives it confirmed. 5, the monthly count of antibody results received from every laboratory under the June 2020 federal reporting rule. 6, and any seroprevalence study record, protocol approval, and result. Why execute it? Because the records exist by the federal government as required by the federal government. So this is a retrieval, not an investigation, because it is inside this committee's lane— a State Department, state operations, nothing private. Because it asks the staff for one thing, because those answers may be entirely benign, and if it is, the department deserves to have them on record. Because whatever the answer is, we need to understand how this happened so that we are better prepared for the next crisis. And because this is the last committee meeting of this committee, and the next one starts from nothing unless you leave it a request. I'm asking the chairman to have the draft staff draft it and the committee send it. I welcome any questions. Thank you, sir.

You have a question? Senator Howard has a question.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm sorry, there's a lot of information there, so forgive me if you spelled this out and I missed it. Okay, but are you saying we did receive $58 million through the Department of Health directly to the Department of Health during COVID during the pandemic, in order to do the serological testing? Testing, Mr.

Chair.

Go ahead.

My understanding and what I've documented in the documents provided to you today and submitted when I registered to speak was I provided the links to the Federal Register and the details for that funding, and it is I believe fifty eight million. There's a number of grants during that period of time under the same law. They were sequential and interdependent, but in order to keep the money that was appropriated under the Bill that I mentioned, that was a requirement within 30 days of the bill being passed.

Okay, follow-up.

Follow-up? Go ahead and ask your question.

Um, okay, and maybe you answered this too, but why, why do you believe we did not do the testing?

Go ahead, Mr.

Chair.

I mean, just, I know you're just, you know, your opinion, but I'm curious.

I can find no record of it. So I can find no public record of it. If you recall, some of the most politically contentious portion or time periods was prior to the vaccine mandates being implemented in this state by private providers, and we protested publicly asking for them. We protested in public, protested at county commissions, protested at city council meetings, at school board meetings, came to this body and not this particular committee, but to the state legislature. And found nothing.

Follow up, ask your question.

Well, I just want to make sure I'm understanding it right, people listening are understanding it right. Essentially, if we had done the serological testing and known how many people were actually infected, we might not have gone down the road of having to have mandates. Is that— am I correct? And Mr.

Chair, go ahead.

So if you remember the early models that were presented by the Department of Health, the governor, I believe Sanford, Avera, and Monument were represented. Their models show that by September 1st, they expected up to 70% of our population to have been infected by September 1st. That was the theoretical approaching herd immunity at that time. So you're basically, you know, they made that prediction and then we didn't bother to measure whether or not that prediction prediction actually took place. We measured cases, but what this reflects is a gap between the cases. And I explained infection fatality rate, the number of infected. It would have shown potentially, depending on the outcome, that it was much less deadly than— and I think what's proven out over time— than what we thought at the time. And they were using fear. They were presenting numbers 15 and 20 times higher to the public to get the policies rammed through that they wanted. And so it was You know this, and this those set that September first of 2020. The mandates went into place a year later, so that we had the data. They were planning to collect this. They could have assuaged all concerns with science. We missed a massive opportunity. Perhaps, you know, I'm technical, so perhaps it's it's it's just incompetence. That's possible.

Okay, we good? Any other questions from the committee? So your—

I'm just— your request is, is to find out if this was done and where are the results. Is that what you want, is to know if they actually did it and what the results are?

Mr.

Chair, go ahead.

My understanding is that under the law, we were required to report monthly and quarterly numbers to the federal government. I'd like those specific reports provided. I would like to know if we ever conducted these tests as we put forward in our plan voluntarily. The serological testing was not mandated by the federal government. It was something we offered of our own free will. The government did, and our elected representatives. And what it showed was a significant understanding of the problem at hand early in the pandemic. And then for some reason we failed to do it, or at least I can find no evidence of it. But even in the testimony I mentioned, November 18th of 2020, when Representative Hunhoff asked the question of the Department of Health representative at the time in the— I believe it was Appropriations Committee. I believe Senator Karr was at that point the acting chair for that committee— that they said they were not doing antibody testing. As of November 18th of 2020, so it's not it's not my opinion. It's not entirely that it it they may be missing, but they flat said they didn't do it. I'd like to know why.

Okay, just a minute. Just a minute, Senator Grove. Are you good?

Yes.

Okay, we got to go to we got to go to Representative Lems first. She was up. Representative Lems, do you have a question?

Yes, I do.

I was just wondering for Mr. Bishop. Do you know what is the date that the emergency use authorization came down from the federal government?

Go ahead and answer that if you can.

Which emergency use authorization? My apologies. For the instruments that were used, the assays that were used, or for the Pfizer-BioNTech?

Can you clarify a little bit, Representative Lems?

Yes, I can.

For the vaccine, um, for the Pfizer-BioNTech, which was the first submission to the FDA, my recollection, and I reserve the right to be wrong, was it was submitted for emergency use authorization to the FDA on November 20th, 2020, and it was approved on December 11th, 2020. That's the best of my recollection.

Representative Lems, do you have a follow-up?

So we're saying on November 18th, 2020, that was when this came up in our Appropriations Committee, um, that they said we were not doing this testing. And I'm just— I would like to know too, what were the requirements for us to receive the $58 million, and did we meet those requirements?

Is— are you asking that question, Representative Lems?

I can answer it.

Yes, I am.

Okay, go ahead and answer.

The requirement was to file the testing plan, and the additional requirement was to file the reports monthly and quarterly per that testing plan. The, the, the law itself did not require serological testing. It had a floor for diagnostic testing, which was the PCR, no swab, but the serological Is the antibody blood test.

Okay, Representative Lems, anything further?

Just one follow-up, Mr. Chair.

Go ahead and ask your question.

We are not able to see the monthly and the quarterly reports.

Is that correct?

Go ahead and answer the question if you can.

To the best of my ability and all the tools available to me, which are not trivial, I have been unable to find them.

All right.

Okay, you good?

That's all.

All right. Senator Howard had a question. Oh, he answered it. Okay. Any other questions? Senator Grove.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. You mentioned something in your documents, and I think I've heard you say it also in testimony, but, um, just to clarify, so you did go to the Attorney General's office and, um, You filed, I think, online. No, you spoke with the Attorney General at one point, someone in their office. Oh, someone in there, whatever. And then you spoke to him at another event at Dakota Fest, correct? And they— so they—

Hold on, if you're going to ask a question, you got to wait for an answer.

Senator, may I answer?

Would you like to answer?

Well, that wasn't a big part of my question.

The first initiation, uh, directly with the Attorney General. Um, I had sent him a private message, just said, hey, I saw this submission, uh, where you signed the South Carolina Attorney General's letter, uh, laying out a strategy for prosecuting all wrongdoers, specifically Anthony Fauci, because they did not like— these 17 attorneys general signed this letter, this legal strategy, because they did not like the preemptive pardon that he was given. And so they laid out the criteria for that, which was violation of state law or violation of the public trust. Mm-hmm. And they laid out why they believed, given the select committee report on the pandemic out of Congress, why they believed there were grounds to do that. So I was offering up to him what I believed were reasons to investigate that within South Dakota. He called me back the morning of— I sent that message about an hour later. We had a very productive discussion. I'd sent him the description electronically. He responded. I asked if I needed to give him an open or formal request in writing. His response was he assigned an assistant attorney general to the case. I don't know, he did not use the word case. I'm not going to say that. But he, I, he said it would have to be after Easter. So he sent me, or he called me a few weeks after Easter. We had a brief 10-minute call, as it's documented in my open records request at the South Dakota Attorney General's Office, which is listed in the documentation I provided to you.

Okay.

So I did not find out, and the reason for my open records request was I was looking for any evidence that was actually taken seriously. And I didn't find out. It was only by chance that I ran into him at Dakota Fest last year and asked him how our fact-finding mission was going, where he then informed me he would be unable to help me. He did not give a reason initially. He did give a reason at the end.

Okay, Senator Grove, anything further?

I guess that So then my, my question was that, did you ever find out if this was a— I guess we don't know if it was actually ever opened as a case to know if it was closed. Is that kind of what I read, that you were kind of wondering if it was opened and/or closed at this point?

Go ahead and answer the question if you can.

Mind, I filed the open records request to discern if a case had ever actually been opened. I had assumed since he'd assigned staff to conduct an interview and contact me that it had. Perhaps that was naive on my part.

You good, Senator?

I guess so. Nothing ever came of it at this point.

Go ahead.

No, nothing ever came of it.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Any other questions from the committee?

Okay.

Seeing none, thank you, sir. Well, that kind of brings us to— there's no other public comment in the room and there's none online, you said? No one's on?

Okay.

Well, that brings us to the end of our work. And I guess I'd just like to take this opportunity to, you know, first thank the committee for all the hard work the last 2 years, and especially our staff. I mean, Katlynn, Mitch, Jacob, Bill, you guys are unsung heroes here. If the public knew how much work behind the scenes you guys did, it would flabbergast them. So your work is appreciated. We thank you. And with that, I don't know if the co-chair would like to say a few words at the end of them.

Sure. What politician says no to saying a few words? No, I am going to say to the Thank you. To the committee, it was an honor to be chair last year, vice chair this year. To you, it was an honor to serve with you, Representative Overweg, truly. And to the staff, again, we just could not do any of this without you. You guys are all phenomenal. And to the people, you know, who come and attend and dig into this stuff and provide public comments and hold our feet to the fire, thank Thank you as well. So yeah.

All right, well then, with that, if there's nothing else from the committee, um, I guess I would ask for a motion to adjourn.

So moved.

Second.

It has been moved by Senator Howard, seconded by Representative Auch, for that we adjourn. All those in favor will say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Aye.

We are adjourned.