Tag Archives: Libby Bonesteel

News You Should View: Education Reform With Bulldozers and Blasting Caps

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This week’s media roundup focuses on a single subject, which was almost inescapable as I made may weekly tour of Vermont news outlets. That subject is education reform, specifically the process outlined in Act 73, the wide-ranging measure railroaded through the Legislature by Gov. Phil Scott with the active connivance of Senate Democratic leadership. It’s now in the early stages of implementation, and wouldn’t you know, everybody seems to hate the thing.

But first. I took a brief trip to Cornwall, Ontario last week. It’s a smallish (by any standard other than Vermont’s; its population is bigger than Burlington’s) city known to Americans, if it’s known at all, as the Canadian side of an international bridge over the St. Lawrence River. While I was there, I did a little reading about Cornwall and came across the story of the Lost Villages.

I’d been through Cornwall many times while driving to and from my home state of Michigan, but I’d never heard of the Lost Villages. They were ten communities in the Cornwall area that were evacuated and deliberately submerged in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1958. Roughly 6,500 people were displaced.

When I was back home and scanning Vermont media for this column, I found a common theme: stories across the state about local reaction to the rollout of Act 73. Reactions that include confusion, budding outrage, school officials trying to forestall the worst effects of the process, and universal dismay from those who work in public education. The closest thing to a positive view was, “Oh well, I guess we have to learn to live with this.”

Which made me realize, this is very much a large-scale, top-down, St. Lawrence Seaway approach to education reform. You know, the kind of thing Phil Scott spent his nonpolitical life doing — big, mechanized projects that might do a great deal of good in the aggregate while doing damage at the granular level. But it’s one thing when you conduct such a project for a large-scale benefit like improving long-haul travel. It’s a whole different thing when you deploy the heavy equipment to try to improve the educational experience of public school students.

Which is the goal of Act 73, right? Right?????

Well, I’m seven paragraphs deep into this piece, so I’d better get to the actual subject, don’t you think?

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Gov Sends Thoughts, Prayers to Public Schools

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“It’s unfortunate, the number of deaths,” he said. Yes, he did.

If the Scott administration were devising a pandemic strategy meant to put maximum pressure on our schools, it couldn’t do much better than this. At his weekly Covid presser, Gov. Phil Scott made it clear that he expects school officials to do everything they can to keep kids in the classroom, but they’re on their own for staffing an ever-evolving, incomplete regimen of Covid testing.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

After brief statements from Scott and others, including the customary parade of carefully curated statistics from Finance Commissioner and CovidMeister Michael Pieciak, Education Secretary Dan French took to the podium and made it clear that the administration expected school systems to “maximize in-person learning” by any means necessary. His latest brainfart, “test to stay,” is a regimen of testing done at the beginning of the school day. Students who test negative can stay in class.

This policy, which is still being rolled out more than a month into the school year, puts the onus on school staff to conduct quick tests first thing in the morning. As for how the understaffed and overstressed schools should handle the additional work, French said, “I expect schools will add staff or reassign existing staff.”

But don’t think the state will kick in a single damn dime to cover the cost. French helpfully suggested that the schools use federal Covid relief funds to pay the freight. “Funding shouldn’t be the problem,” he said. I wonder how many districts have gobs of uncommitted federal dollars sloshing around right now.

But wait, it gets worse!

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