The sea change underway in Vermont’s public education system will affect many — school boards, administrators, teachers and (of course!) taxpayers.
But perhaps no other demographic is more affected than, well, the kids themselves.
A new bill introduced by Rep. Leanne Harple, D-Glover — and inspired in part by Vermont students — tries to give those students more say in whatever future awaits for Vermont’s public education system.
Under H.640, Vermont would join the likes of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New Jersey in requiring school boards to have voting student members. School boards that operate high school grades, under the proposed law, would have to have one student voting member per grade.
Additionally, the bill requires school boards that operate middle schools to have two nonvoting student members from grades 7 and 8.
“It really gives us an opportunity to put our trust in the voices of young people who deserve to be at the table,” Harple said in testimony last month.
Students say it’s long overdue. Isabel Harrington and Libby Gabel, South Burlington High School students, said during testimony last month that the legislation would empower students during a time of profound change.
“Now more than ever in Vermont, we need to be empowering our students, given all the decisions being made around education in our state,” Harrington said.
Members of the Vermont School Boards Association agree — generally, at least. On Thursday, Flor Diaz Smith and Sue Ceglowski, the president and executive director of the association, said they support the intent of the bill.
“If we are serious about strengthening our schools, then we must be serious about listening to the voices of those we serve,” Diaz Smith said.
No data exists on current practices around student board members in Vermont, but according to Ceglowski and Diaz Smith, at least 19 school boards have student members. Those students do not have full voting rights, although some boards allow students to cast advisory votes.
Still, “several practical questions” will need to be resolved in the legislation, Ceglowski told lawmakers.
For instance, would student board members’ emails be subject to public records requests? And would students be allowed to attend executive sessions — private meetings where board members discuss legal contracts and personnel issues like superintendent evaluations?
What would board composition look like under this bill? Under the current version of the legislation, the Stowe School District, which currently has five board members, would need to add four voting members and two nonvoting onto their board.
Lawmakers say they’re planning to tweak the bill to reflect some of those concerns. Harple on Thursday said parts of the bill, specifically around whether students should have the authority to hire or fire personnel, would be “cleaned up.”
“You don’t want students to fire their own teacher,” she said.
Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the House Education Committee chair, also suggested there may be legal issues in having a voting board member that is not elected by voters.
Nonetheless, he said they plan on having legislative counsel testify on the particulars of the legislation. “We feel it’s an issue worth hearing more about and pursuing.”
— Corey McDonald
In the know
Lawmakers in the House Corrections and Institutions Committee are considering a bill, H.294, that (among other measures) would make it free for incarcerated people in Vermont to send electronic messages or talk over the phone.
People incarcerated in Vermont currently have to pay 25 cents per text message and 16 cents per minute of video call, according to Sarah Staudt, who directs advocacy for the Prison Policy Initiative.
That arrangement exploits the fact that both incarcerated people and their loved ones are dependent on that service to stay in touch. “They don’t have the ability to pick a different service if the service that’s being provided doesn’t work for them or if the fees are too high,” Staudt said Thursday.
When a San Francisco jail made phone calls free, it saw an overnight 41% increase in the number of calls per-person that incarcerated people made, she said.
Opening up access to phone calls in Vermont could allow parents to have better relationships with their kids and could improve behavior within prisons, Staudt said.
— Charlotte Oliver
This morning, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee heard testimony on S.26, a bill it inherited from Senate Ed. The bill would prevent some artificial food dyes from being sold and used in school food programs.
The head of the Vermont Superintendents Association told the committee that she worried about schools’ ability to implement this, but Rosie Krueger, who runs the Child Nutrition Programs for the Agency of Education said that very few of these dyes actually appear in school lunchrooms to begin with. They are mostly in a handful of breakfast cereals, which are largely being reformulated to comply with new federal restrictions on the amount of sugar allowed in cereals, she told lawmakers.
— Olivia Gieger
On the move
S.208, a bill that would ban all law enforcement officers, including federal agents, from wearing masks is headed to the House.
Lawmakers approved the bill by voice vote on the Senate floor Thursday.
Under the bill, all officers operating in Vermont would be required to display their name or badge number and the agency they work for. Officers also would be banned from wearing a mask or disguise when interacting with the public on the job.
In the bill’s current drafting, state and municipal law enforcement officers would be tasked with issuing other officers a $1,000 citation for a first offense and a $2,500 citation for a second offense.
— Charlotte Oliver
Another bill, S.209, that could limit federal immigration authorities operating in Vermont, was approved on the Senate floor on second reading Thursday. If it became law, the bill would expand the list of locations in Vermont in which civil arrests are prohibited.
In a roll call vote, 27 senators voted in favor of the bill, while Sen. Russ Ingalls, R-Essex, and Sen. Terry Williams, R-Rutland, voted no. Senators fell exactly in line with their votes on S.208 the day prior.
Current state law protects people from civil arrests if they’re in, or traveling to, a courthouse. The bill would expand those protections to include places such as schools, hospitals, polling places, domestic violence shelters and churches.
“People are keeping their children home from school because they’re afraid of these civil arrests. And so this is meant to provide a reasonable level of protection,” said Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden Central, on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.
The third reading of the bill is scheduled for Friday.
— Charlotte Oliver
Notable numeral
Seventy.
That’s the percentage of farms choosing to pay the same wage or higher for farmworkers who come to Vermont on agricultural visas from foreign countries like Jamaica and Mexico after the Trump administration changed farmworker wages, in some cases lowering them more than $4 an hour, according to the Vermont Department of Labor.
— Austyn Gaffney
