Hate incidents, racism and other forms of harassment in Vermont’s pre-K-12 school system have prompted a coalition of 13 organizations to launch a website to collect and document those experiences among students.
Vermont Narratives of Change is “a storytelling campaign against harassment and bullying” that “seeks to raise awareness about the impact of these negative behaviors and advocate for positive change within schools statewide,” according to the website launched this week.
“What this project does is it allows children and families to tell their stories, to share their truth, and for the community at large to let those children and families know that this is not OK,” said Melissa Houser, a doctor and executive director of All Brains Belong VT, an organization that provides neurodiversity-affirming health care and education.
The Montpelier-based nonprofit is one of 13 organizations that formed the coalition. Students and their families will be able to share their experiences via a secure and confidential form, an interview with one of the members, or in a small group discussion. Participants will also have the option to decide how their information is used, according to a press release from the coalition.
The coalition formed in part to call attention to and address shortcomings with the state’s current system for handling such incidents. Its members include the Vermont Human Rights Commission, Outright Vermont, the ACLU of Vermont and the Rutland NAACP.
Dana Kaplan, executive director of Outright Vermont, a statewide queer youth service organization, said that at a time when LGBTQ+ youth face unprecedented attacks, projects like this can be “powerful and healing” by giving them a voice.
The state’s policy on preventing harassment, hazing and bullying of students was issued in 2016, according to the Agency of Education, and all schools are required to adopt their own policies.
Schools and districts have wrestled for a long time with how best to handle reports of hazing, harassment and bullying. But Hudson Ranney, vice president of the Vermont Student Anti-Racism Network, which is part of the new coalition, said the current system does not work for most students.
Ranney told VTDigger he’s heard from many students dissatisfied with how such reports are handled. “I’ve heard a lot of, ‘Oh yeah, I’m sorry, we can’t do anything,’” he said. “It’s just an immediate shutdown from my experience and from other people’s experiences.”
Whether to include students in an anti-harassment bill divided lawmakers earlier this year. After education officials raised concerns that doing so could create more liabilities for schools, lawmakers passed the legislation without including them.
Shelburne parent Leah Mount-Namson — who said her daughter had been repeatedly bullied, called the N-word and harassed at the Champlain Valley Union High School over the past couple of years — said she would use the website to share her story, as the traditional method of reporting incidents has not worked for her.
Reporting those incidents served only to further marginalize her daughter, she said.
“I feel I tried everything to help my middle daughter while she attended CVU. And time and time again nothing ever came out of it,” she said via email. “In the end, do I look back and feel like I was fighting a losing battle? Yes, absolutely.”
The coalition, in its release announcing the project, pointed to the results of the annual Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as evidence of a “concerning prevalence of bullying and harassment among our youth.”
It also criticized the “the inaccessibility of data from the (Vermont) Agency of Education,” which, it said, “prevents a complete understanding of the extent of this problem in our state.”
In 2018 a lawsuit by the Vermont ACLU forced the agency to make some data about bullying available publicly on its school climate page.
Spokesperson Ted Fisher said in an email Wednesday the agency takes incidents of hazing, harassment and bullying “extremely seriously” and is “very interested in working with all parties on potential solutions that protect students. He pointed to the annual data now available on the exclusionary discipline dashboard.
The data, however, can be hard to decipher and presents an incomplete picture of the problem.
In the 2020-21 school year, for instance, Fisher explained that the 102 incidents of bullying and 138 incidents of harassment refer only to students who were disciplined.
Fisher admitted it’s not the clearest dataset and said the agency is aware of that and is working on simplifying it.
Advocates hope the new effort to collect stories and data will fill in some of the gaps.
“The hope is we’ll be able to really work together to find some solutions on how to deal with this and make students feel safe,” Ranney said.
