Monthly Archives: August 2023

The Feds Place a Capstone on Dan French’s Tenure

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Well hey, here’s something. The U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office is investigating the Vermont Agency of Education for violating the rights of students by limiting school districts’ authority to enact public health measures during the Covid-19 epidemic and, in the Office’s words, “discriminating against students with disabilities” who were at heightened risk of serious illness.

Yes, that would be the Agency of Education then helmed by the mask-averse Dan French, labeled in this space as the Inspector Clouseau of the Scott administration. I’d suggest that the feds could have assembled quite the dossier simply by reading this blog, but doubtless their investigation has been more thorough than that. And to judge by the reaction of French’s successor Heather Bouchey, I’m guessing the feds have got the goods. In her reply to the feds’ probe, as reported by VTDigger, she didn’t claim there was no discrimination. She simply said the agency had no intention of discriminating.

“The AOE devoted significant effort throughout its COVID-19 pandemic response to ensure the equal educational access of students with disabilities including students with disabilities who are at an elevated risk of severe illness from COVID-19 exposure. If the AOE erred in its responses, guidance or otherwise, it is eager to address the error and make corrections for the benefit of students.”

That word “if” is the giveaway. Bouchey didn’t defend her agency’s performance; she tried to frame any offense as inadvertent, not intentional. And she laid out a glidepath to future surrender by saying the agency was “eager to address” any errors “and make corrections.” And don’t overlook her emphasis on “equal educational access” rather than, say, the health and safety of students. Gotta keep those disabled kids in class so they get “equal access,” you know.

But in case you needed any more evidence that the agency, under French, went too far in pressuring school districts to moderate their public health measures, let’s take a little walk down Memory Lane.

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Another Event I Won’t Be Attending

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Mark your calendars and then make other plans! This is the weekend of Libertystock, a Gathering of the Disaffected on a farm in Cabot which I like to think of as Klar-a-palooza. Libertystock’s market positioning is nicely encapsulated in the above T-shirt: an ultraconservative slash Libertarian message in alt-culture clothing.

It sounds like a downright tedious event. And it’s emblematic of the central problem of the far right in these parts: Way too many aspirational chiefs, nowhere near enough Indians, if you’ll pardon the dated turn of phrase. If you go a-Googling for conservative organizations in Vermont, it’s downright amazing how many you can find. All of them are starved for membership.

Anyway, Libertystock includes speakers, musicians, performers, and vendors in what its website describes as “an amazing event in a beautiful location” that will almost certainly draw an embarrassingly small audience. Probably more than VT Grassroots’ recent “modest but impassioned crowd of 25,” but I’d say there’s a very good chance that the performers, speakers and vendors will outnumber the actual attendees.

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You’d Think Maybe a Writers’ Conference Would Put Writers First

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Well, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is now over, but the consequences of an uncontrolled Covid-19 outbreak may continue for quite some time.

When last we left the situation, more than 10% of conference participants had become ill. Leadership responded by continuing activities as scheduled, including a dance, with masking suggested but not required. The infected attendees were sent home — or should I say were ousted from the conference. The departees, including some who had written about their experiences on Twitter, were not offered refunds or any help with unexpected travel costs.

Sometime during the day Friday, after several writers took to Twitter and I wrote about the situation in this space (and the paywalled Publishers Marketplace also covered the outbreak), leadership changed its stance. According to former participant and now Covid patient Caitlin Eichorn, Bread Loaf reached out to infected participants with an offer of prorated refunds for tuition, room and board — but only after, as Eichorn noted, “the bad publicity” around the Bread Loaf outbreak had begun to spread.

Better late than never, but it would have been preferable if leadership had acted on principle instead of damage control.

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Covid Outbreak at Bread Loaf

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Middlebury College’s renowned Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference has been struck by the Covid-19 virus. According to email communications with participants, conference officials had confirmed 26 cases as of yesterday afternoon. That is, according to one source, about 10% of all participants. There have been no reports of serious illness. So far.

This year’s Bread Loaf Conference began on August 16 and is scheduled to conclude on Saturday. The official response seems more focused on continuing to the finish than on containing the outbreak.

Bread Loaf attendee Caitlin Eichorn has been chronicling the experience on Twitter, which I still refuse to call X. Her Twitter feed is the source of many of the quotations included in this post.

At first, according to Eichorn, there were daily email updates on the number of cases. That practice ended after conference leaders had “conversations with Middlebury’s trusted medical advisors,” according to a message sent to attendees. The counsel from those advisors was to “turn the emphasis away from reporting the number of the cases, which health departments stopped counting awhile ago, focusing instead on hospitalizations which provide a better estimate of how COVID-19 is impacting the community.”

So far this summer, there have generally been fewer hospitalizations than in previous Augusts. That’s nice, but no guarantee. Plus, avoiding immediate hospitalization doesn’t mean you won’t get some variety of long Covid down the road.

I’d prefer not to get sick in the first place. “Trusted medical advisors” notwithstanding, if I were a Bread Loaf participant, I’d want to know what the hell is going on in every detail. And I’d want strict measures taken to limit the spread, if indeed you want to press on with the conference, including limiting the number of indoor events and requiring the use of masks throughout.

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A Deal We’re Likely to Regret Someday

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Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont is about to be swallowed whole by one of its much larger cousins. The deal seems benign and, since it holds out the promise of lower costs for health insurance, it’s virtually certain to go through.

The unintended consequences will come later. As will the intended consequences.

The proposed deal, first announced in May, is on a fast track to approval. The state Department of Financial Regulation set aside a two-week window for public comment, which closes the day after tomorrow. Next week, the DFR will hold a public hearing. After that, approval seems a certainty. The two partners have said they want to finalize the arrangement by October 1.

The deal involves BCBSVT, which I will call “Vermont Blue” for clarity’s sake, becoming “affiliated” with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, or “Michigan Blue.” And despite the seemingly collegial tone of “affiliation,” it’s a takeover. Like a shark devouring a tasty fish.

Or, to change midstream to a different animal analogy, Michigan Blue is the dog and Vermont Blue will be the tail. Michigan Blue insures more than five million people; Vermont Blue, at 200,000, will effectively be a rounding error on Michigan Blue’s bottom line.

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It Wasn’t Quite This Bad, But It Must Have Been Plenty Bad

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Here’s the saddest sentence I’ve read in a while.

The event took place at the Elks Club, where a modest but impassioned crowd of 25 attended with several left-wing protestors outside. 

“Modest but impassioned” is a well-meaning attempt at making lemonade out of some dried-up rinds.

Those words were typed by one Mike Bielawski, the QAnon-adjacent “reporter” who formerly plied his trade at True North Reports, and has now apparently sold at least one article to Guy Page at Vermont Daily Chronicle. He’d been dispatched to cover an all-day meeting, and I do mean “all-day,” designed to spread conspiracy theories among the True Believers of Vermont’s tiny contingent of ultraconservatives.

Yep, “tiny” sure does check out. “Impassioned crowd of 25” indeed.

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…Little Note Nor Long Remember

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We could have done something. But we didn’t.

More pointedly, Gov. Phil Scott could have done something. He is our leader, after all. But he didn’t.

Sometime during the first half of August, we recorded the 1,000th death attributed to the Covid-19 virus.

The moment passed quietly, without notice, buried in a routine statistical report. And that’s a damn shame.

Would it have been so hard for the governor to hold a brief, solemn event? Top administration officials, political leaders, and a sampling of those who have lost loved ones? Everyone holding a white flag? A few words, a moment of silence? A National Guard bugler playing Taps? Flags at half staff for a day? Is that too much to ask?

I guess it is.

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I Guess We Can Add John Klar’s Literary Career to the List of Those Victimized by the Flood

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Pity poor Farmer John Klar, twice-failed political candidate, leader of the doomed Agripublican movement, and essayist for right-wing sites like American Thinker and, well, Vermont Daily Chronicle, and author of a new book that just hasn’t gotten the attention that Klar thinks it deserves.

Small Farm Republic was published at the end of June by the once-respectable Chelsea Green Publishing, lately best known for publishing books by anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers. About six weeks later, Klar posted a piece on Vermont Daily Chronicle griping about the lack of mainstream press coverage for his terrible book.

(No, I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. I feel safe in labeling it as terrible because every Klar essay I’ve ever read has been terrible. I don’t need to go fishing in a brackish, stinking, faintly glowing pond, and I sure as hell don’t need to eat any fish that lived in that mess.)

Klar’s Komplaint is that “progressive” outlets such as Seven Days and VTDigger haven’t taken the time to “critique” his book. Well, a couple of points need to be made. First, our media’s attention has been dominated by the July 10 flood and its ongoing aftermath. It’s too bad for Klar, but even he might have to acknowledge that the flood is just a bit more important. In fact, it’s kind of tasteless for him to be griping about his book when thousands of Vermonters are struggling to recover. Of course, perspective has never been Klar’s strong suit.

But even in the absence of a major disaster, it’s doubtful that Klar would have gotten the attention he craves. Digger doesn’t do book reviews. And while Seven Days has an Arts section that publishes reviews, its primary focus is on creative writing, not sociopolitical polemics. These outlets to occasionally take on a nonfiction tome, but only when the author is a prominent figure. Think memoirs by Pat Leahy and Jim Douglas, not a guy who couldn’t come close to beating state Sen. Mark Macdonald when the incumbent barely campaigned at all because he was recovering from a stroke. (Klar also out-fundraised MacDonald by a margin of three and a half to one in that campaign.)

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For $250,000 You Get to Slap Your Brand on a Gubernatorial Press Conference. For Another $100,000 You Get to Interrupt the Governor.

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The Scott administration staged a nice little feel-good event yesterday. Gov. Phil Scott’s latest flood recovery press conference was held at, of all places, the 802 Subaru dealership in Berlin. Why? Because its billionaire owner, Ernie Boch, Jr., was presenting the governor with a donation to flood relief programs in the form of a great big cardboard novelty check for $250,000.

Boch and the administration got what they wanted. He got to open the presser with a boast about Subaru. The governor got a warm and fuzzy moment amidst the ongoing drudgery of flood recovery. But cynical ol’ me, it brought to mind a probably apocryphal anecdote that’s been variously assigned to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, and W.C. Fields, among others, but seems to have been first told in 1937 by newspaper columnist O.O. McIntyre:

“They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: ‘Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?’ She said she would. ‘And if be paid you five pounds?’ The irate lady fumed: ‘Five pounds. What do you think I am?’ Beaverbrook replied: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree.”

Well, our governor’s degree is a quarter million dollars. And for another 100 G’s, he’s willing to be interrupted in the middle of his prepared remarks and stand there like a goof while the sponsor hogs the microphone.

The money went to good causes, so I guess we can just ignore the unseemly optics. That’s how the media coverage played it, anyway.

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Man, the Agency of Human Services is Really Bad At This Emergency Housing Thing

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Well, in this context, “incompetence” is the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that the responsible Scott administration officials are deliberately biffing the emergency housing effort and obfuscating slash lying to try to cover it up. Fortunately, they’re pretty bad at obfuscation, too.

Actually, there’s a third thesis, and my money’s on this one: The administration has so thoroughly starved AHS of needed resources that its staff can’t possibly handle the workload, and its leadership is tap dancing around the inconvenient truth.

Let’s go back to last week’s appalling performance before the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, where AHS leaders presented their first mandatory report on the disposition of motel voucher recipients. For those just joining us, the last-minute budget compromise reached in late June continued the voucher program for most recipients, set some stringent conditions for those receiving vouchers, and mandated that AHS report once a month on progress toward ending the program and providing alternative housing for all recipients.

The report was an embarrassment, starting with a rundown of the 174 recipients who left the program in July. Of those 174, a mere 34 had found apartments to live in. (There was no breakdown on how many were helped by AHS in finding new housing and how many managed the trick on their own.) That’s less than 20% of those no longer in motels. The vast majority — 113 in all, a staggering 65% — left the program for destinations unknown because they had failed to renew their benefits, a process that appears to be devilishly difficult.

AHS Secretary Jenney Samuelson told the committee that “we had not been able to make contact with” those 113 despite multifaceted efforts. But a very different story was told by advocates for the unhoused.

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