I’m starting this post with a tip o’the hat to Glenn Russell, ace photographer for VTDigger. His thankless task is to get good images out of the Statehouse, that notorious den of tiny rooms and bad lighting. Seriously, it’s a terrible place to be a photographer. But Glenn got one hell of a shot for Digger’s story about the state Senate’s unfortunate education reform bill passing a key committee. For those in the know, the image was a masterful piece of reporting. It showed Gov. Phil Scott’s right-hand man Jason Maulucci talking to Senate Education Committee chair Seth Bongartz on a bench in the hallway. Not that I’m saying Democrat-in-name Bongartz colluded with the Republican administration on a bill that seems to lean decidedly to the right, but Russell’s image definitely paints that picture. Fair or unfair, I loved it.

Not that our next entry doesn’t deserve top billing. Journalist David Goodman devoted his latest edition of the “Vermont Conversation” podcast to an interview with freed detainee Mohsen Mahdawi. Apparently, Mahdawi consented to the interview only if Goodman conducted it during a walk in the woods near Mahdawi’s home in the Upper Valley. You come away from the hour with a clear picture of this alleged threat to national security as a devout Buddhist whose activism is purely nonviolent. Also with a clear picture of a real Vermonter — a person with a deep love for, and profound connection to, the Vermont landscape. Beautiful piece of work, not to be missed.

Next, a fine piece of reportage from the Chester Telegraph’s Shawn Cunningham, displaying the fine art of eye-rolling at Local Government Follies by simply reporting who said what. The occasion was the latest meeting of the Chester Select Board, where there was plenty of stupidiousness on hand. First, the Board declined an invitation to weigh in on filling a vacancy on the Green Mountain Unified School District Board. This, despite the fact that one candidate seems eminently qualified while the other recently pled guilty to a count of domestic assault and is under probation with 13 court-ordered conditions. Pardon me if I jump to conclusions, but that doesn’t seem like the best possible calling card for any position of authority.

Second, the Board heard complaints from the audience about May Day rallies cluttering up the town green. An estimated 250 people gathered to protest the Trump administration on May 1, while a much smaller group rallied nearby in support of the Unnaturally Orange Manbaby. Merchants fretted about lost business; I can kind of sympathize, but c’mon, First Amendment and all that. (Plus it was a weekday afternoon, not exactly prime shopping time.) But the Grand Prize for stupidity went to local resident Roy Spaulding, who asserted that peaceful protests had been the ruination of Burlington, “once the shining star of Vermont,”  now a hellhole of shuttered businesses and rampant crime because of them damn hippies with their signs and all. Spoken like a man who hasn’t been to Burlington in decades.

Here’s another entry in the category of Local Government Fun ‘N Games, this one from the NIMBY files. The good people of Charlotte, who fear the encroachment of more housing that could be occupied by who knows what quality of folk, have approved a charter amendment to exempt the town from key provisions of the HOME Act, the 2023 bill aimed at encouraging more housing development. The change would have to be approved by the Legislature, which seems highly unlikely. The House Government Operations Committee has made no moves to consider it, and the session is almost over. As committee member Rep. Chea Waters Evans noted, “I can’t really think of another time when I’ve seen a charter [change] that just flat out exists to exempt one municipality from a [state] law.”

We now take a detour from serious journalism to celebrate two pieces of Fun With Headlines, both coming to us from outlets of the Community News Group. The News & Citizen ran a piece about “scores” of migratory birds making an unexpected appearance at Lake Elmore under the headline “We Are Not a Loon.” And from sister outlet the Shelburne News, a debate about what to do with a local unpaved road prompted the alliterative topper “People Ponder if Paving Pond Road is Preferred.” Nice work by both newsrooms. Although if the News had consulted a thesaurus, they could have worked in “perpend” instead of “ponder,” thus avoiding the “pond/ponder” stumbling block. You’re welcome.

Now a couple of worthwhile opinion pieces. First nominee comes from a group of doctoral students at the University of Vermont, and it bemoaned UVM’s creation of a Center for a Circular Economy and Sustainability paid for — and named after — Vermont’s trashmasters at Casella Waste Management. Yup, an industry is funding research aimed at making its own business more palatable. You know, there’s a lot of concern — rightly so — about the Trump administration’s frontal assault on higher education. This is the backdoor version, but it’s just as potentially damaging. If Trump enacts deep cuts in federal research spending, then universities will be increasingly beholden to funders from the private sector. And like Casella, they won’t be funding pure research, they’ll be paying our educational institutions to conduct greenwashing exercises. It’s yet another way Trump is wreaking havoc on anything that’s good about America.

Second is a purely partisan but well-informed take on the state Senate’s version of education reform, recently eviscerated in this space. The writer is Democratic Sen. Ruth Hardy, who voted against the bill in committee. She was quoted briefly in some news reports, but in a blogpost called “Education Transformation Gone Wrong,” she lays out all the ways in which this bill is poorly conceived and problematic. It’s definitely worth your time.

Hey, let’s highlight a piece of good news. Peter Cobb wrote a lovely piece for the Barre Montpelier Times Argus about The Veterans’ Place, a small nonprofit that has given many a troubled military vet a new lease on life. It’s just a nice story about a group of people doing a lot of good on a shoestring budget. And hey, extra bonus: they had been worried about losing federal funding under the current reign of error, but now it looks like they’re safe from Elon’s giant novelty chainsaw. We’ll take all the good news we can find, thanks.

Our final stop is The Commons in Brattleboro, which published a story about local activists who want July 1 (Canada’s version of the Fourth of July) to be “Vermont Canada Day.” The goal is to, purely symbolically, make Vermont a province of Canada for a single day. One of the movement’s founders, former Brattleboro Selectboard member Dr. Franz Reichsman, calls it a showing of “support for Canadian sovereignty and independence and general goodwill and commerce and tourism, all rolled into one.” If you want to sign on to the Vermont Canada Day Association, well, they’ve got a website.

That’s it for this week’s edition of NYSV, filed a bit later than usual because I’ve been on the road and it’s unsettled the usual order of things. For instance, I can’t convince my wonky laptop to produce the usual robot-newsboy illustration, so I plucked another one from the Great Big Pile O’ Public Domain. See you next time.