1 LIGHTLY EDITED FILE Statewide VRS Community Partners Forum MN Department of Employment and Economic Development Remote CART May 15, 2020 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. * * * * * This text is being provided in a lightly edited draft format, and is the work product of the CART captioner. Any reproduction, publication, or other use of this CART file without the express written consent of the captioner is strictly prohibited. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility, and this lightly edited CART file may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. Due to the live nature of the event, some names and/or terms may be misspelled. This text may also contain phonetic attempts at sounds and words that were spoken and environmental sounds that occurred during the event. * * * * * CART Provided by Jayne Carriker, RPR, CRR, CRC Paradigm Reporting & Captioning, a Veritext Company 612.339.0545 captioning-paradigm@veritext.com 2 >> Hello. Good morning everyone. Good morning community partners and VRS staff and welcome to what I believe is our first all state community partner meeting. Where each of us are coming to you from different locations all over the state. Some of you I know where still working in your offices. We at VRS are all working remotely. We're in our homes, so coming from home offices or couches or kitchen tables or wherever we can find a quiet spot along with our coworker pets and children who may sometimes come in and interrupt us. That seems to be kind of the new norm for all of us working here. So thanks for your patience as we are trying out some new technologies. We continue to get better at this. We've been using lots of different formats as a way to hold meetings with ourselves and as a way to reach out and provide services to our participants because I know 3 you all have been as well. You know, when we originally were first planning this, the community partner committee, we do have a new name for that committee. It's formerly the CRP advisory committee. We envisioned it much differently and we have been planning for a few months to do a statewide meeting or event. And of course this is now looking differently than what we first imagined. But we did want to continue with this. There is a lot of changes, a lot happening. We want to make sure we're giving you the most up-to-date information. We will do additional meetings like this to make sure we are able to connect with everyone. So again thanks for your patience with that. One of the more important things I wanted to talk with you about is to reinforce VRS is still open for business. We are still serving participants. Even though we are serving them remotely at this time. We are continuing to see new applications and we're conducting new -- new in-takes and working with new participants. 4 So we will -- we certainly have a need to continue to work with community partners and we need your services now more than ever. We've seen a bit of a decrease in terms of new applications, and that has resulted in some challenges and some opportunities. One of the opportunities that has come out of that is we have been able to -- before we went out on COVID, we had -- actually right before we had gone out we had taken 150 people off of our wait list, and those who wanted to move guard with services we've moved forward. Those who weren't yet ready or were fearful we gave them the option to put their services on hold. We recently took another 317 people off of our wait list. Those were all of the people that had been on category 2, so we cleared out the wait list for category 2, which was an opportunity. And again, it's the same -- we're giving them the same option. There's a lot of work that we can do to work with people to help them to decide what they want to do in terms of their career and work, and a lot of planning and getting ready for that employment plan, so many people have chosen to move forward with that. 5 And, again, some have said they're not ready and we have those cases on hold at this point. I just want to emphasize we did not open up category 2, so we continue to only have category 1 open at this time. And we'll continue to monitor that closely, continue to monitor our budget closely over the next several months. We do have -- even though we're all working remote, we have gotten an exception to allow one staff from each of our office locations to go into the offices periodically, so we are collecting our mail and faxes as well. And that has helped to keep services moving, and especially in cases where the participants that we're serving do not have a means to manage some of that information and communication virtually. Some of you have likely heard about the hiring freeze. So the hiring freeze, I just want to emphasize because we've had several questions about this. This is a statewide state of Minnesota hiring freeze and we are part of that. So it is not related to any budget concerns or it's not specific to VRS. It is not something that we imposed within VRS because of difficulties we're having here. 6 Our budget is currently stable. So I just want to clarify that. We are, you know, accommodating positions where we can. As I've said earlier, our intakes were down a little bit. If we -- there is a process where we can request exceptions and hire if we need to. We haven't had to do that yet because we've been able to manage as we are, so I just want to be clear about that. And several of you, I know Jan has recently announced, she announced this week to VR and to community partners about her upcoming retirement. As you all know, Jan has been a very stable and steady and inspirational leader with VRS for many years. I think Jan, you may talk a little bit about this later, but I believe in August will be 50 years for Jan. So we're looking guard to celebrating virtually with her as well. And we've had some questions about that position and again because of the hiring freeze we are not going to be filling behind Jan at this time. Just a couple more comments about the budget because I know there's been a lot of talk in the news particularly around the state budget and the deficit which certainly is concerning. 7 The legislators and the governor have not yet produced any proposed budget cuts. We are and we will continue to work very closely with DEED's commissioner's office and government affairs to keep a close eye on that funding. We've been working with our SRC group and others and strongly advocating for our programs that includes all of our programs. The VR program, EEIPS, independent living, deaf and hard-of-hearing grants. We know that these programs are going to be vital. We have to continue to provide our services. We do expect at some point we're going to have a surge of new applicants. I'm just not sure when that's going to be. We do know that people with disabilities have been disproportionately unemployed due to COVID. We're well aware that we also are aware that there's very likely will be newly disabled people due to COVID and again we want to be prepared for that wave of people coming in for services, and we want to be geared up and ready to keep those services, so it's vital that we continue with the funding that we have, and we are strongly, strongly advocating for that. I think that's -- I think that covers my updates. 8 We know as community partners that you also are making decisions about your organizations, your services and your employees, and we just want to stay -- have a close connection to that with what the changes are, so please make sure that you're communicating with us, letting us know if you are eliminating new referrals, if you're taking new referrals, if you're temporarily closing some work spaces, if you're reducing staff, restricting travel, anything that may impact services. And if you can, you know, talk with your local RAM, of course, the regional directors, and also send an e-mail to Kim Babine and Ann Paulson in our community partner group. Also if you're doing some new services. As I said earlier, we still need to provide services. We need our community partners to help us with that. We still have to meet our 15% preETS requirement. That's been difficult for us and I know Alyssa later on this morning is going to be talking a little bit more about that because we're not able to be in the schools. So we're doing what we can. We're doing what we can remotely and we're looking to you to help us with that and help develop some programs and help us to get in touch with those students and help prepare them for the future of work. 9 We're also -- we're going to be talking about some flexibility that we've been able to do within Minnesota. We're also continuing to seek federal flexibilities from RSA and congress. We have not gotten very many flexibilities yet at this point and we will continue to advocate for those and we will let you know as we get more information about that. So with that I think I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Jan Thompson who is our current field services director to give us some updates from the VRS field. >> Hello, everybody. I'm hoping that you can hear me. If someone can signal to me that you can hear my voice, that would be good. I want to just cover some basic things on how do you contact VRS. I think there were some questions, are there questions out in the field both from our staff and from the community partners about contacting and sending referrals. If you usually contact the local office, please continue to do so just as you've done before, contact and leave a phone message or send of course an e-mail and we'll be picking that up as we normally do. Staff are covering their phone calls through the iPhones 10 and so forth and they're picking up the phone calls as well. And if you have any difficulty in reaching people, you can always contact the office REM and I believe you have the numbers for that. If not, send us a message and we can get that information out. I forgot to say good morning to all of you, so excuse me. Good morning. So good to know that you're on this WebEx event. It is the first that I can recall, and I've been at so many other statewide meetings, so just welcome and it's good to have as many people as possible join us. Now, questions about -- a question came up from one of our community partners at the last community partner meeting. They were saying can we have as much information as possible on the technology of participants, and of course, that's absolutely something that we can do as long as a participant gives us permission. So if you're not getting enough information about how to reach someone through technology, please let us know. Please let the counselor know. We absolutely as the counselors and field offices can 11 give that information out so that you can provide virtual services to our participants and give as much service to them as possible remotely. We've also had a question about job hires. This has come up in the past, and now it has come up more recently with the COVID question. They wondered whether a temporary employment, for instance, if it's a seasonal employment would qualify, and if this -- this situation things have not changed. The definition of a job hire, it has not changed due to COVID. Job hires are based on our federal requirements of 90 days of employment. If it is out of the employment plan -- if it's on the employment plan and if -- if it's -- excuse me, I just got another call. If it's on the employment plan and the participant agrees this is the goal they want, certainly we want to make sure we get as many permanent employments as possible but -- but we know that we want to serve our participants and if they have agreed that -- if they have agreed that they want temporary employment, that's what they want, they have it on their employment plan, we certainly can do that. Also with regard to temporary employment, we want to 12 make sure that if possible they will be able to switch into permanent employment if that becomes available, and we also want to make sure that everything is consistent with the employment plan. The other thing that has come up is a question in terms of working from home. Of course, working from home is allowable. We are working from home. Others are working from home. So we are saying that to be sure that you take those closures, take those employment outcomes because as long as a person is working and receiving a salary, receiving a paycheck, that is considered employment, and of course, employment for 90 days and there will be a little bit more comment from that I believe from Jeri. Now I think I should turn this over to Jeri Werner who is the regional director for the northern area. Jeri, are you available? >> I am. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I've got a couple sections that I'd like to talk about this morning. The first one being the VRS [indiscernible] regarding RBPAs. 13 If you have an individual who is remaining on the job but furloughed at this time due to COVID the 90 day clock will continue during this period of time without interruption. When the individual returns to work and again is on returns to work billing for the third milestone may be considered if the 90 day standard has been met and stability has been established. Now while the individual is furloughed, the VR counselor. The PPA provider and the individual should be connecting with each other to discuss the support and job coaching needs railroad going to be required once the individual returns to work in an effort to reestablish their employment and then gain stability. If additional job coaching hours are required and that would be above and beyond the 20 hours that are included in the PBA, these may be authorized at this time. Be sure that a discussion has been had with the counselor and the team in discussing how many additional hours would be then authorized. Another situation, unfortunately that we know is happening out there is that individuals are being laid off from their positions. If this does happen and the individual has not met the 14 90 day count, the provider will continue to provide the job development and placement services from the existing PBA, so we will not be reauthorizing those PBAs as new PBAs but continue with the existing one. If you have any questions related to these scenarios, please contact the REM or the regional director. And then I'd like to move on to discussing the flexibilities related to assistance with unemployment insurance. So as we know that many of you have been and continue supporting individuals who are needing assistance in applying for unemployment and requesting their weekly benefits. We know this is of great importance to the individuals we serve and want to compensate you our providers for that assistance accordingly. Community partners may use the 20 hours of job coaching included in a PBA if the VRS participant has been laid off for furloughed from employment due to the pandemic and they require assistance of applying for the unemployment insurance benefits and/or completing the on going UI reporting requirements to ensure the continuing of their benefits. If the 20 hours of job coaching included in the PBA have already been provided, community partners may request 15 that the VR counselor authorize for additional job coaching hours to provide the assistance needed. As always the authorization for services must be in place before the services are [indiscernible]. Community partner staff should contact the VR counselor for an individual to discuss whether the job coaching hours to assist with UI is appropriate for the Vic individual. VR's REMS are available to consult if there are any questions or concerns. Now I would like to turn it over to Becky Sunder for an update regarding our flexibility that we have regarding signatures on documents. >> Thank you, Jeri. We appreciate the updates regarding that from some of the other areas that we're talking about today, so good morning, Minnesota. Good morning, community partners, and good morning VRS staff. It's really exciting to do a virtual meeting as many of us are from all parts of the state joining in today and I think as Jan and Dee have said, this is the first time we're doing something like this, so I'm really excited about the opportunity to directly talk to all of you today. 16 One of the things I wanted to talk about are the VR flexibility around receiving signatures, and regarding our previous policy as to having the individual or their guardian sign directly some of our documentation. Due to COVID-19 and our remote work, this has become problematic. So some of the flexibility that we are going to continue during this period of time is to allow electronic signatures. Electronic signatures would be from VR staff, the individual, community partners, guardians, anyone that is required to provide signatures on all of our documentation including applications, VFP forms, employment plans, placement plans. I will note that there is one exception to this policy, to this COVID-19 exception, and that revolves around our release of information and our data privacy forms. We still will require that these forms are signed directly by the individual and our staff and/or community partners during this time. So that is -- this is the one exception that is included at this time. We will still need an actual signature on the release of information forms. If we cannot get an electronic signature on the 17 previously mentioned documents, VRS staff are temporarily permitted to accept a written or a verbal agreement in place of the signature. VRS staff will be requiring us to document in the workforce one case file how we received that approval, so, for example, if an individual is giving approval of an employment plan, we will document that in the workforce one case file. If a guardian is giving approval and if necessary, we will document that in the VRS case file. Again, we always want to try to get written approval and signatures, but we understand during this remote work situation due to COVID-19 that that can be problematic, so we want to make sure that everybody is clear on this exception during this COVID-19 time. If there are additional questions on that, again, please contact the VRS staff, the local REM or any of our regional directors. We'll be happy to talk more about that. And now I'd like to turn it over to Chris McVay who is our director of community initiatives. She is going to give you an update on what is happening with our business engagement networks. Thank you. >> Good morning, everyone. 18 This is so cool that we are able to connect virtually. I have -- just wanted to share a bit with the state and our leaders and community partner leaders and others about what we're doing around the business engagement network. Some of you may be quite familiar with hearing the term placement partnership, which has been something that we have supported really since the great recession concluded. But now what we're doing is kind of turning things a bit so that we are more inclusive of how we serve business and also the other types of services that we can support and leverage within the business engagement network. So I think it's something that we want to be clear about is that we invite any community partner that is providing direct services to VRS clients for placement and retention services or preemployment transition services for both the eligible students as well as potentially eligible students. We want to be able to connect VRS clients preETS potentially eligible students to employers because we know that employers are interested in hiring people to meet their business needs, but they're also interested in offering work based learning opportunities as well. We have DEED VRS has hundreds and hundreds of employers 19 that reach out to us each year because they either have a state or federal contract which requires that they demonstrate their efforts to the Department of Human Rights that they are taking steps to hire individuals with disabilities as well as provide work-based learning opportunities for them. So BENS but it's the business engagement network are led by our VRS placement staff. So we have placement coordinators in every VRS team in the state. We also have a handful of placement specialists that are supporting the business engagement network. And I've been able to join many of the meetings in the last month, and it's so good to see that we not only have placement professionals joining that meeting. We also have preemployment transition services representatives from each VRS team. We also have joined at times by school district staff. They have work coordinators who have students that need preemployment transition services. And we even have one of our business engagement networks that has an employer that is joining their meetings on a regular basis and that's down in Rochester. So in thinking about the business engagement networks, our efforts are to serve VRS job seekers, absolutely, 20 that continues to be the reason why we exist in public VR program, that's why we do what we do, it's to help people with disabilities get and keep jobs. But we're additionally serving and supporting the VRS eligible and potentially eligible preETS students and then as well as Minnesota business. We have multiple opportunities to many hundreds of opportunities to connect with businesses and we want to join with our community partners and in some cases our school district work coordinators to be able to serve business, support business, hear what business is looking for, what their needs are and what we understand is they're not always asking for a talent pool. We want them to do that but they might have other questions and when we as a VR community are able to provide the supports that they need, then we have a lifelong customer, and that's really why we're doing what we're doing with the business engagement network. I do have a map that I know we're not able to get up on this particular WebEx today, but I would like to send that out to the delivery the map of where our business engagements networks are in Minnesota. And I have to say it's very colorful but it really does speak to a statewide representation of both VRS, community partners and others that are helping to serve 21 business across Minnesota. And I think that even though this virtual world that we're living in has created lots of headaches for all of us, I think that what it has taught us that no matter how distant we are from each other leveraging the virtual technology is really helping to bring people together especially in those areas of the state where there's quite a bit of distance of square mileage between the partners. So I just wanted to give an update about that and provide further information as we go along and here is the map. So again we will be sending that out to everyone through gov delivery so thank you. And I believe I'm now passing it on to Kim Babine director of community partnership. >> Wonderful. Thanks Chris. All right. Good morning everyone. I am just thrilled. I've been looking to this all week and just really excited to connect with all of you and touch base on some of the things that are going on in our world but then, you know, take as much time as we can to be able 22 to hear what's going on in your world and what questions you have. So thank you for joining us this morning. I do have some updates on the PT contracts, and these were e-mailed out but I wanted to talk through them here on this call, this WebEx. So the -- one of the biggest ones is that we are increasing the contract amount cap for limited use vendors, so we are so grateful for all the work that all of our community partners do in providing services, and we are just looking at all the ways that we can support sustainable access to those quality services statewide. And in some parts of our state there are not -- we have some counties that don't have providers at all, and so we want to look at how we can increase access in all parts of our state. So just a little background that many of our providers, many of you are cart accredited and that is in our state rule that governs the program. We say that the CARF accredited providers have no maximum budget in their contract. So again the budget that's in your contract is not a guaranteed amount. You all know that. And then it is a -- you earn -- you know, you get 23 reimbursed on those authorizations up to that maximum contract amount. And if you're CARF accredited we can always bump that up. With limited use vendors the state rule says that we can use limited use vendors, those have community partners that don't have accreditation but we have to put a cap on it, so a lot time ago the cap was set at $20,000 a year, and no one can quite tell me exactly when that was put in place, and so I think it's safe to say that it was a few years ago, and it hasn't been revised since. We have not had increased it, had conversation about when and how to increase it until recently, until it conversation. But we know that the $20,000 per year hasn't even kept pace with inflation or cost of living increases. And so we wanted to -- you know, there's a range on increasing this amount to make sure that we have access across the state, but we thought we would focus on that kind of cost of living indicator, and so looking at some cost of living data across the state, we wanted to look at what it might take for, you know, one person to have that cost of living with their contract. And so that came out to be obviously it various by county and various across the state. 24 But we looked at about $100,000 per year and so that is the max that we're going to set for those LUV contracts. Some of you know that there's a little issue with our accounting system that we often give these LUV contracts for two year period and our accounting system doesn't let us necessarily cut off for the year. It only goes through the contract period. So when that accounting system came into place a couple years ago, we shifted it to 100 -- so in this case it would be $100,000 per year or $200,000 over two years. So the thing that we are really concerned with or really focused on with increasing this cap is looking at the standards by which a provider becomes an LUV, has their cap raised and add services. And what are the ongoing measures that we are looking at to judge performance and have accountability for those contracts. So we have some of the pieces that we're starting to put in place -- or starting to develop for that but we don't have it completely done yet. So that is forthcoming. We will be in conversation and dialogue with specifically our community partners committee as Dee said that's formerly that's our CRP advisory committee. We will also bring that to our full community partner 25 group here as well. So know that we know that we have relied on CARF accreditation to be that framework that our providers have for accountability and quality assurance in cases like that, and without CARF I think raising that cap we want to really develop that internally. So we'll be doing that and we will be in touch with you on that, but we really want feedback from you. And so initially right now you can feel free to contact me. First name dot last name@state.mn.us so kim.babine@state.mn.us. Feel free to reach out at any time as we're developing that and we will stay in close contact on that. Another piece that I wanted to talk about was we set those standard rates for the preETS services last year and we know that the wages plus 25% for the preETS work experience wages, we heard from a lot of you that that is not enough to cover your cost. And we want to make sure that you're able to cover the cost of your service, the service that you're providing. So we did some research and took a look at that and we will increase that rate. It used to be the wage plus the 25% for administrative cost and we will raise that to wage plus 50% for 26 administrative cost and hope that works a little better for you. Both this and the maximum contract amount for LUVs, both will require an amendment to your contract, so if you're an LUV and want to raise your contract limit, you will need to request an amendment to do so. Same thing with the preETS work experience wages. You will need to request an amendment to raise that, and we will get those moving so that leads me to my last piece about letting you request amendments and getting those moving. So there's a lot of needed amendments. It's going to be bigger volume than we've ever had before except for getting new ones through. So we know that we asked many of you to wait on rate increases last year while we developed that rate methodology we discussed. It's not yet completed and we know you need the rate increases now so we will consider those with this amendment period so you can send those and we will consider those. Again, if you need to change that preETS work experience wages, request an amendment. If you wanted preETS on your contract and it is not yet there, then you can request to add those preETS 27 services, and that was rate increases, preETS, and the minimum -- or and the cap amount. There are a couple other changes that we will be making to those who have preETS on their contract. We're kind of sorting those out right now. We have some ideas to simplify the process of authorizing and what's on your contract, and so those will be coming out when I announce open amendment period and hopefully that announcement will come out next week. We're just waiting for a few pieces to fall in place. I did see that I saw a question come in about when we will be implementing the new LUV amount and I meant to include that. So we said it would be effective June 1, so if you get amendment requests in, that should be about the right time so you can request amendments to have it moving guard. So if you have my questions Ann Paulson on my team is the go to person right for you for questions on these PT contracts. But I'm happy to announce that Sarah Sundene who many of you know from her career here in rehabilitation that she has joined my time right now on a temporary work reassignment, and so she is going to be helping with PT contracts, and we are thrilled to have her, so you might 28 be hearing from Sarah Sundene or Ann Paulson or myself on these issues. So stay in touch and fell free to reach out with any questions. And now Alyssa Klein is going to talk about -- she's our preETS and transition specialist and she is going to talk about those preETS flexibilities. >> Hello everyone. First I want to thank all of you, our provider community, our VR counselors, our preETS representatives and placement staff, etc. Everyone working hard to be creative right now in providing preemployment transition services during this really difficult time. I know -- obviously we want to continue to provide those services and to be creative, especially through the summer. I know many students haven't been as engaged this spring because they've had to deal with online learning opportunities through school and it's been difficult to always engage them, and we're hoping we can reengage them more this summer. I know that students are also talking about work experiences, and there's been a lot of questions about that. 29 We can support students in work experiences. Of course, that conversation needs to happen, though, about the student and the family and how comfortable they are with that. But the next thing I wanted to talk about briefly is about preETS flexibilities. In February of 2020, the rehabilitation services administration or RSA announced some flexibilities to the VR programs across the country and using preETS funds in serving students with disabilities. So based on that guidance, there are now some new things that VRS can pay for with our preETS funds. Before I get in to talk about those items, there are three really important things to keep in mind with these flexibilities. The first is that these flexibility are only for students who are eligible for the regular VR program so students who are potentially eligible can only receive the five preETS services and nothing outside of those services so we need to keep that piece in mind. Secondly, the flexibilities that we'll be talking about only pertain to how a service is funded and titled. So in other words there's nothing really new about these services. They would be provided just as they normally would for 30 VR participants. And lastly there are only two of these items that will impact your PT contract with VRS, and those two items are preETS intake and work-based learning coaching. I'm going to discuss how staff will authorize for those items in the interim, but once contracts are amended we will be adding those items on to all contracts that have preETS on them. So the flexibilities include intake fees for preETS services, so VRS staff will be authorizing intake under your current PT contract in-at a time fee rate and again that's for eligible students only. So potentially eligible students we still need to authorize one to two hours for a first meeting for those students. Work-based learning coaching, this looks just like typical job coaching. We are required to collect work-base learning coaching because with preETS anything related to jobs is work-based learning. And so other than that I know there's been a question about social coaching, whether that can be included within work-based learning coaching, and the answer is yes. So for any of you that provide social coaching, that can 31 also be included within work based learning coaching and again this will be added to PT contracts for those of you that provide preETS services. The last four items that we can provide with preETS funds now are transportation for to and from any preETS service, maintenance, which would be most typically like clothes, shoes or uniforms that a student needs. Again, a VR apartment, unfortunately not for potentially eligible. Book supplies, tools and equipment related to a preETS service. And then also in pretty rare cases where this is needed and a student doesn't have it is personal assistant services. The last thing I will say before I hand it over for Q and A is we are working on training modules and we will send out an announcement when those are ready and you can feel free to contact me at any time if you have any questions related to preETS at Alyssa.Klein@state.mn.us. Thank you everyone. I will pass it over to Ann Macheledt who will be helping us with our Q & A questions. >> Thanks, Alyssa. So I wanted to just ask -- I think we have two questions in the chat right now, so feel free to plug in some of 32 the questions that you have. I'll start with the first one. And the first is regarding Jeri's update on PBAs. VRS will no longer be authorizing a PBA for participants laid off due to COVID. When does this change or go into effect? Who would like to tackle that one? Can we give that one to maybe Dee? Or Jeri? >> Yeah, sorry. Jeri or Kim I guess I would ask to address that one. Thanks. >> Hi, this is Jeri. Let me give my video started again here. Sorry about that. Okay. So I would say it's in effect, so if you have somebody in that situation, please be connecting with your REM regarding any questions that you may have. >> Okay. And the next one is related to the rate increases. Can the rate increases be retro to this change as it will take time to work on the contract? So I'll give that one to Kim. >> Yes. 33 Did I come up? I'm sorry. I'm still getting used to this. Can you see me? >> Yes. >> Excellent. Thanks everyone. So the rate increases, I'm sorry, cannot be retroactive just the way that our contracts work. There's no way that I know of. I can always check, but I don't know of a way that we could go back and retroactively do that. So as soon as we get the contract amendments through, then the new rate increase will take effect. So I -- we don't have a lot of flexibility there unfortunately. >> Thanks. >> You bet. >> Other questions that people have? >> Ann, this is Dee. I see one in the Q and A around the EE rule, so Kim, this would probably go to you. And it says does VR anticipate the new EE rule that goes into effect July 1 regarding the waiver rule will be revised or will implementation possibly be delayed? 34 >> Thanks for noticing that one, Dee. I only had the chat open, not the Q and A. Yes, the EE rule. So regarding the waiver piece, so the -- for those of you who are maybe not familiar, as of July 1, a lot of changes with the new EE rule that was promulgated about a year ago take place starting with this new fiscal year starting July 1, so there was a little bit of lead time. So what is happening is one of the things that was put in there to keep things -- make sure there was -- everyone had access to funding was to say if there was a person on a waiver that they would get those employment services through their waiver, through DHS, through the counties or lead agencies and that EE participants, folks that didn't have funding elsewhere would be able to receive funding through the EE process. So I just heard this yesterday that there's some concerns about making that shift as of July 1 just because the world is upside down, so we can't change the rule. I might be able to look into see to see what we might be able to do for flexibilities. What I'll do, I heard from one provider yesterday and now I'm hearing this, I'm looking into it and I will connect with the EE providers to see what we can do or 35 how we can help each other out to make that transition. So thank you for bringing it up and I will look into it and be in touch with the EE provider. >> Okay. I have another one and if I could just encourage people, I know some people are selecting the panelists so you guys might see some guys as well but I have some for the host and the host and presenter. Are you considering making the preETS authorization and billing easier given the high administrative load to manage the different rates when a provider has several groups, perhaps one group rate? So that was Andrea's question. That was a high five? >> Yes we're trying to make it simpler and yes I will answer it. Yes, absolutely. And we're sorry that the preETS authorizations and billings and how it's on your contract and how that all has to work with groups, we knew when we set it up that it was far from ideal, and unfortunately there are specific rules that RSA has that requires us to tie the -- every little dollar, every bit of time to the individual person, every little bit of time has to be coded to those five core services, and so we -- we -- it 36 has to be right now as complicated as it is for a lot of -- in a lot of areas. But one idea that we do have and we'll be sharing more information about once we get it kind of finalized but I'll give you a preview is that we've got the five main service categories and under a couple of them there are several subcategories, subtitles, service titles if you're familiar with that. And we're going to collapse those into just the overarching category. So there will be fewer things to break down on your authorizations, fewer things to have to understand and bill for, and hopefully that will cut down on some of the confusion and some of the issues with that. We will still be keeping -- so in particular the one I'm thinking of is work-based learning and that includes like informational interviews and job -- job coaching -- not job coaching, oh, don't say that. Work tours and things like that. That will be collapsed into one work experiences. Work experience wages will stay separate and of course we're adding the work into -- Alyssa mentioned those two services. So it's not perfect. It's one step to streamline and trying to make it 37 simpler. Again it's not perfect and we just are still working with, you know, going back to RSA, going back to our federal folks to say that this is really hard to implement and really hard to do day to day on the ground. So keep in touch with just the barriers that you're running up against, and keep in touch with any ideas that you might have, but unfortunately we have some -- we're in between a rock and a hard place on a lot of it. >> Okay. I'm going to ask one more question and I'm going to have Dee wrap it up and we'll try to capture all these questions for response following this. But there's some related to the amendments. So do we have some timelines for when the amendment process will start and when those contracts could be approved just for kind of a ballpark sense of that time frame. >> Yep, so this is Kim again. So we are hoping that we will put out the amendment request, the call for amendments hopefully next week. Again there are some things that are outside of my control about getting some pieces in place before we actually say we're ready so that we don't want to say go 38 before -- while some things are not set because it will just increase confusion. And then once they come into us, last time I did kind of a -- actually we don't have time for that. Once they come in it takes a while to get them through. We have to do a number of steps and maybe in the future I'll go into more of the steps that it takes and the number of things that are outside our control. But we will get them through as quickly as possible. So next week they will call for amendments will come through and then you should expect at least a month and sometimes up to two months for them to go through and be completely executed. Not ideal, again, we're going to do the best we can and we're happy to have Sarah on board as another set of very smart hands and so we have a little bigger team, hopefully we can move things through a little faster. >> Great. And I know we're at 10:00 and we want to be respectful of everybody's time. So I'm going to have Dee just do a final kind of comment and wrap this up. So go ahead, Dee. >> Awesome. Great. 39 We continue to welcome questions. Please contact Kim and Ann directly. They've given their e-mails. Thank you everyone so much for joining us. We will have more of these sessions. We are interested in hearing from you. We want to know what's on your mind. We want to know what questions you have. We want your feedback. Kind of the new buzzword for us during this time is flexibilities. We are working hard within the scope of what we're able to do to offer those flexibilities. We're working with our federal funder, RSA, we're part of Department of Education. We're working with congress to get some additional flexibilities from. We care about our providers. We need all of you. We need all of our community providers now more than ever. We need to figure out how to gear up for what is to come. We need to figure out how and when and what it looks like as we're starting to reopen services. 40 How to do that safely, not only for our staff but for the vulnerable people that we're serving. So again, I look forward to hearing more from you about that. Thank you so much, everyone. We hope this was helpful, and have a very good weekend. >> Thanks, Dee. And everybody, enjoy this beautiful weather. We have a lot of great questions that you put in the chat. And please remember to complete the eval. And thanks for joining us. Have a great weekend.