Kate Larose sat slack-jawed on Monday night in Canaan as she watched her local school board deliberate its back-to-school pandemic policies.
Larose, whose 8-year-old son is immunocompromised, had requested Zoom access to the in-person meeting. But about 30 minutes in, people took over the virtual room, calling in to say the n-word on loop. A man eventually appeared on screen and began masturbating. Officials then shut off all access.
Karen Conroy, Canaan’s superintendent, wrote apologetically to Larose later that night to fill in the blanks. The board had voted 5-0 to reject Conroy’s recommendation that the district begin the school year masked.
“Based on the school board’s decision, it would still be highly recommended to wear a mask, but not required,” Conroy wrote.
Canaan School Board Chair Dan Wade did not return an email and phone call seeking comment. In a phone interview, Conroy said she had urged masking and that the district had spent more than $1 million in federal aid on ventilation improvements. But community sentiment in Canaan, tucked at the farthest northeast edge of the state with a population in the hundreds, was decidedly against mandatory masking, she said. A larger crowd attended Monday than usually turns out for the district’s annual meeting.
“We had always followed the guidance of the state, and I just think our family’s voices were very loud these last couple meetings, and the school board opted not to follow through,” she said.
Despite a surge in cases, Vermont is taking an entirely local control approach to pandemic mitigation in schools this fall. The Agency of Education and Health Department have released a two-page advisory memo for schools, but many school leaders criticize it for lacking detail, and its recommendations are nonbinding anyway.
The state’s guidance recommends universal masking, at least for the first two weeks of school. But the decision to enact any public health measures in schools this fall is up to individual school boards.
Several school district leaders report they plan to follow the outlines of the state’s suggestions and require masks indoors for everyone until 80% of eligible students are vaccinated. Others, as in the Montpelier-Roxbury school district, will go even further and follow the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which urge universal masking for the foreseeable future.
Even in the most vaccinated state in the country, pandemic mitigation measures such as masking are often received along partisan lines. Libby Bonesteel, the superintendent in Montpelier, said that her decision was easy. The families she serves have generally embraced public health measures — indeed, not mandating universal masking would have likely prompted more pushback. But Bonesteel said she worried for some of her peers elsewhere in the state, who must now do the dirty work of requiring the Covid-19 prevention protocols that the state itself is unwilling to mandate.
“I was on a call with superintendents today, and there’s a lot happening in those districts and at board meetings right now, with just absolute vitriol coming at superintendents. Comments like ‘Why are you killing my kid with a mask?’” she said.
More than political cover, school leaders also say they simply want clear, thorough and concrete advice about how to handle the logistics of pandemic protocols this fall. The little guidance that the state has provided is silent on a litany of subjects, including how contact tracing and quarantining will take place, what to do about lunchtime, and how to collect vaccination information.
“The state gave us this humongous document the last time,” said Brian Ricca, the superintendent in the St. Johnsbury school district. “Two pages does not seem like enough to me right now.”
Ricca also expressed distress that the state would recommend masking measures more lax than what local public health experts say they would like to see.
“I don’t understand what’s preventing our administration from being more emphatic and giving us more to support a safe return to school,” he said.
In the absence of strong guidance from on high, superintendents have largely crowdsourced solutions themselves, meeting in regional groups to hash out common approaches. But it “shouldn’t have to be this way,” said Penny Chamberlin, the superintendent in the Orleans Central Supervisory Union. Administrators should be spending their time figuring out how to make a state plan work in their local contexts, she said. They shouldn’t be figuring out that plan from scratch.
“Thank God the superintendents come together in a very strong way and a supportive way because it would be very difficult to operate the public school system in the state of Vermont if they didn’t,” she said.
Back in Canaan, Larose is at a loss about what to do. Her family moved to Essex County last year because cases were so low for so long in the Northeast Kingdom, and she thought her high-risk son could get a safe in-person instruction. But now, she doesn’t see how that’s possible in Canaan schools.
Since the summer, when Vermont first dropped its masking mandate in schools, Larose has been publicly pleading with the state to reimpose certain restrictions. Online, some of her neighbors have not responded kindly.
“GET F— OUT OF CANAAN !!!!” one wrote in a Facebook post Larose shared with VTDigger.
For Larose, this is the natural consequence of the state’s opt-in approach to pandemic mitigation, which puts the onus of asking for things like masking on those most at-risk in the first place.
“It creates a very dangerous dynamic where people who are already in a vulnerable position are now in a more vulnerable position,” she said. “And this isn’t how public health should be working. This isn’t how our school systems should be working when it comes to protecting kids who are at risk, or when it comes to any issue of equity.”
