A group tasked by the Legislature with recommending ways to make Vermont schools more inclusive has begun its work.
The 20-member panel met for the first time Tuesday evening in Montpelier to elect its officers and attend to a few housekeeping tasks.
“We’re really trying to repair some of the systemic harms that it is time for us to repair. And if there’s a state that can do it, this is the one,” Kiah Morris, a former state lawmaker from Bennington, said.
Act 1, which created the working group, was the first bill signed into law by Gov. Phil Scott last session, and it passed the House and the Senate with unanimous support. The legislation charges the panel with making suggestions for better including the history and contributions of underrepresented groups in Vermont’s classrooms.
Because curriculum is, by and large, determined at the local level, state actors – including the panel – cannot dictate directly what Vermont schools must teach. But the State Board of Education does set academic standards, which define, in broad terms, what students should know. The group is due to submit recommendations for updating those standards by June 30, 2021.
“This is a really historic moment. And I hope you’re feeling that. And how many people have their hearts in this room right now,” Morris, who first introduced so-called “Ethnic Studies” legislation in 2018, told the panel. Morris, at the time the only black female lawmaker in Vermont, resigned from the Legislature later that year after repeated incidents of racial harassment. An updated version of her bill was passed by lawmakers in the following legislation session.
Morris is not a member of the panel, but she works as a diversity consultant and is a leading member of the Vermont Coalition for Ethnic and Social Equity in Schools, a grassroots group that helped shepherd the bill to passage. She told the group the Coalition was on hand to lend the panel whatever support it needed.
The legislation comes as Vermont schools are increasingly faced with the topic of race in the classroom. The group gathered in the library at Montpelier High School, which made national headlines when in 2018 it became, according to administrators, the first high school in the country to raise the Black Lives Matter flag.
Several Vermont schools have followed Montpelier’s lead in raising the BLM flag, and in Randolph, student activists, alongside their teachers, organized the first statewide, student-led anti-racism conference.
The group’s mandate extends beyond race and requires a consideration of other marginalized social groups. The Coalition, which appointed 11 members to the working group, included people with disabilities, religious minorities, and LGBTQ advocates in its selections.
Similar legislation has also been passed in Oregon and, most recently, California, though the effort in the Golden State has been mired in controversy about which stories ought to be highlighted in the re-drafted curricula.
