Updated Sept. 1 at 12:31 a.m.
Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, has called for a review of Senate rules after one of her colleagues publicized contact information for a teacher who gave students the chance to share their pronouns.
Although a review found that Sen. Russell Ingalls, R-Essex/Orleans, did not violate any formal rules, “it is clear that he violated our general principles of decency and professionalism by conduct on social media,” Balint said in a statement released Tuesday.
Irasburg Village School teacher Sam Carbonetti on Sunday tweeted that Ingalls had doxxed him after Carbonetti had asked Grade 8 students to introduce themselves using their pronouns, preferred names and interests in a humanities class discussing identity.
Doxxing refers to the act of publishing private or identifying information about a person online without the person’s permission. After a parent complained on Facebook, Ingalls shared a post that included Carbonetti’s email address.
Within a few hours of Carbonetti’s tweet going viral, Balint weighed in via Twitter, calling Ingalls’ behavior “abhorrent.”
In her statement, Balint said she had “spent the last 48 hours gathering information from the teacher, from townspeople, from educators” and from Ingalls. She said she also consulted with Senate Secretary John Bloomer to discuss whether Ingalls violated any official Senate rules and found he had not.
Balint said she plans to sit down with the Senate Rules Committee to evaluate whether rules changes are warranted in order to address social media conduct and related topics. She also plans to consider expanding the purview of the Senate ethics panel to include discrimination and conduct issues, and called for expanded training for legislators for their interactions with constituents in person and online.
“The demands of the job have changed dramatically over the years and so has the (sometimes) fraught dynamic with our constituents,” she wrote.
Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, also tweeted about the incident, saying she supported Carbonetti and that he did not deserve to be doxxed for “making sure kids feel welcome as who they are.”
Ingalls did not respond to multiple phone calls and messages seeking comment Tuesday.
Balint said she spoke with Ingalls and that he plans to contact Carbonetti directly to make amends “for his poor judgment,” as well as release his own statement to the press.
“He understands that by sharing a private citizen’s email in the manner that he did, it appears that he was using his elected position to target a constituent,” Balint wrote in her statement.
The incident comes at the tail end of a summer in which Balint said she heard repeatedly from constituents that “people are exhausted and frustrated, they are scared about what the political future looks like in our country. There is so much rancor.”
While such bitterness often bypasses Vermont’s political landscape, Balint said the incident left her fearful for the political future of the state, prompting her strong rebuttal.
“This constituent reached out to me to talk about the incident, and he said, ‘I’m afraid this kind of thing is going to destroy the fabric of life in Vermont,’” she said.
“Democrats and Republicans have lived in the [Northeast Kingdom] for as long as he can remember, and yeah, they disagree, but they don’t personally attack each other,” she said.
Balint went on to say that Vermont has an exceptional level of “local control” over how teachers within a school address social issues such as gender identity, explaining there are no uniform guidelines for this statewide, so it can vary significantly between districts and towns.
She said she supports Carbonetti’s choice to ask students about their pronouns and wants “every student in Vermont” to feel comfortable.
Senate Minority Leader Randy Brock, R-Franklin, said he is still “gathering information” on the matter and has yet to discuss it with Ingalls. He’s hesitant to “micromanage” what elected officials say, he said, noting that “the public and the voters decide that, not those of us who are colleagues.”
He questioned where the contact information came from and whether it was already available online.
This is not the first time in recent weeks in which Sen. Ingalls has come under fire. In mid-August, the Senator defended the actions of Rep. Brian Smith, R-Derby, who stood up in a forum on critical race theory and proclaimed he is “proud to be white.” At the time, Ingalls defended Smith’s statement, saying “everybody should be proud of everything that they are.”