Like so many working parents, Jubilee McGill started calling child care centers while she was still pregnant with her now 7-month old daughter. Running into one mile-long waitlist after another, she worked out a nanny-share agreement. But then that fell through.
She’s been making it work with flexibility from her employer, the John W. Graham homeless shelter in Vergennes. But she faces a deadline in just a couple of weeks, when she’ll be inaugurated as a first-term Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives — and be expected to report to Montpelier every Tuesday through Friday.
“I’ve been emailing everyone I know who’s kind of Montpelier-adjacent over the weekend and this week trying to figure something else out,” she said Monday.
As Vermont’s lawmakers grapple with policy debates about child care and paid leave, a handful of lawmakers will be living with the day-to-day reality of raising or bearing infants themselves. Their struggles underline the urgency of supporting working families in Vermont — but also the ways in which the state’s so-called citizen legislature, with its low pay and lack of benefits, makes it particularly challenging for everyday Vermonters to serve.
“We have this lovely ideal that almost no one can afford to adhere to anymore,” said Senate Majority Leader Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor. Vermont’s legislative body, which typically meets from January to May, still follows an agricultural model, Clarkson said — one that assumes that local farmers will “drop their work implements, their hoes and rakes” and head to Montpelier while their fields lie covered in snow to debate the issues of the day.
A number of young working moms — or moms-to-be — are joining the Legislature next year after Vermonters elected more women than ever during the November elections. They also include Montpelier Mayor Anne Watson, who won a Senate seat in Washington County as a Democrat; Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, a Shelburne Democrat who won reelection to the Senate; and Ashley Bartley, a Republican from Fairfax who won a seat in the House.
“My husband and I looked at each other, kind of looked down at the baby, and then started laughing,” Bartley, who has an 11-month-old daughter and a 7-year-old stepson, recalled about the moment she first voiced a desire to run for the Legislature.
It was particularly scary not knowing whether they would find a child care slot, Bartley said, although her family eventually did. To make ends meet, Bartley will keep her full-time job working as a human resources director for a property management company when she assumes her legislative duties. She jokes that she may be “putting rose-colored glasses on,” but she’s adamant about making it work.
“Children should know that they can do anything if they work hard for it,” she said. “And that’s an example that I’m trying to set.”
In certain respects, the stories of this incoming class are not particularly unusual. Plenty of lawmakers have parented babies while serving in Montpelier over the years. But until now, Clarkson said, most have been men.
“Lots of legislators had young children. But mostly they had somebody at home taking care of them,” she said.
Sen. Josh Terenzini, R-Rutland, is one of them. A father of four, he credits his wife, Jessica, who takes care of their children full time, with making it possible for him to serve in the Vermont Senate. But he still couldn’t make it work. After just one term, he declined to run for reelection, citing family obligations.
“I couldn’t be everything to everybody,” he said recently. “I couldn’t be a great husband. I couldn’t be a great father. I couldn’t be a great employee and I couldn’t be a great senator to my constituents all at the same time.”
Terenzini said it’s possible a more compressed, predictable schedule for the legislative session could make serving more accessible to the parents of young kids. But the low pay, he said, is also a huge deterrent to young parents like him, who must work full-time in addition to their legislative duties. Terenzini doesn’t like the idea of a full-time legislature, nor does he want lawmakers making “$80,000 or $100,000.”
But something, he said, has to change.
“If we want to attract younger people of my generation — and even younger now — we need to do something, to figure out what’s the balance, because what’s happening now isn’t working,” he said.
There are smaller — but nevertheless consequential — ways in which lawmakers are trying to square the logistics of pregnancy and parenthood with parliamentary procedure.
Senate rules forbid eating and drinking inside the chamber. Watson, who has an 11-month-old son, is looking into obtaining a medical exemption so she can be allowed to drink water during proceedings, since she is nursing.
And both she and McGill are trying to figure out how they can schedule use of the Statehouse’s only dedicated lactation space when both are stuck in committee all day, save lunchtime. (The space in question was installed only three years ago.)
Ram Hinsdale, meanwhile, is pregnant with her first child. Her due date is May 10 — smack dab in the middle of adjournment week. She joked that she’s hoping for an early adjournment, but she also worries about a scenario in which the year’s most consequential votes take place while she’s recovering from labor. Although the chamber allowed remote voting during portions of the past three sessions, Senate rules again require members to vote in person.
“People have every right to worry about someone just skipping off to Florida and enjoying the sunshine and wanting to vote remotely,” Ram Hinsdale said. “But I think there’s just the reality of life, with legislators in different medical situations, where it would be nice if we could talk about how to safely securely and thoughtfully have a remote voting option like we did during the pandemic.”
But the biggest hardship for several remains compensation. Rank-and-file lawmakers will make $811 a week for the roughly 18 weeks they are in Montpelier. They get a reimbursement for food, lodging in the capital and mileage. That’s it.
Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, a former executive director at Emerge Vermont, an organization which trains Democratic women to run for office, recalled a common refrain she heard from those she tried to recruit into politics.
“There were just dozens of people who said, ‘No, I can’t do that because I’m the one who gets the benefits in the family.’ So, you know, the lack of having health care benefits is huge. And for people with young children, the lack of support for child care,” she said.
Both she and Clarkson are planning to introduce legislation exploring how the Legislature should restructure to better meet the needs of the 21st century. Clarkson argues a summer study committee should explore a big-picture overhaul; Hardy is pushing that lawmakers move quickly to tackle some smaller changes in the upcoming session, even if larger reforms need to be delayed.
But both make the basic argument that unless the Legislature gets more support, a disproportionate number of its members will continue to be older and wealthier.
With a nanny-share arrangement, McGill calculated that she would be left with about $100 a week from her legislative pay. If she winds up paying for a nanny all by herself, she guessed she would be essentially paying to be a lawmaker.
McGill has spent a lot of time at the capitol over the years. Before working on behalf of people experiencing homelessness, she lived it herself as a young adult, and she’s come to Montpelier several times before to testify about her experience in hopes of enacting change. Walking around the Statehouse during orientation, she was struck by how much younger and more diverse the incoming class of lawmakers is.
“I’m really, really honored to be part of that,” she said.
She remains optimistic something will work out, and she said she’s grateful about how supportive House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, has been. But she’s also wondering how realistic it is to think she can make it through the entire two-year biennium.
“I was feeling confident,” she said. “And now I’m kind of asking myself: how long can I do it?”
