Shouts and squeals echoed across the playground behind Big Sky’s Ophir Elementary as some two dozen kids reveled in one of their final recesses before the big sigh of summer break. Beneath the blistering spring sun, a young girl dashed away from a half-dome lattice of climbing bars, nearly tripping in the wood chips as she sidled up to Matt Daugherty.

“How are you doing?” he asked, his sunglasses and school ID badge hanging from the front of his blue polo.

“I did a front flip,” she replied matter-of-factly.

As Daugherty continued to stroll past, two more students raced up the sidewalk, a paraeducator hot on their heels. Daugherty’s red beard drew up in a grin as he called out, “They’re keeping you running today!” He repositioned the walkie-talkie clipped at his side and continued walking up the hill behind Ophir, past a fenced-off construction area and toward his office in a windowed corner of Lone Peak High School.

Midway through the 2022-23 school year, Daugherty joined the Big Sky district full-time as its inaugural school marshal. It’s a first-of-its-kind position in Montana, made possible by the 2021 Legislature’s passage of a law sponsored by then-Rep. Derek Skees, R-Kalispell. The post is so new, in fact, that when Big Sky’s board of trustees began considering its creation last fall, Superintendent Dustin Shipman had no peers with marshals to turn to for insight. Now Daugherty and the district are learning as they go, tending to a growing list of administrative responsibilities in the name of student safety.

In an era when the threat of violence in schools manifests in a near-constant drumbeat of national headlines, education officials across Montana have increasingly turned to infrastructure upgrades and new staff positions to prepare for a variety of gut-wrenching scenarios that no longer feel improbable. Camera systems, shatterproof glass, electronic door locks and local agreements with law enforcement agencies have become more common than not over the past decade, in districts large and small alike. 

In the past six months, threats delivered via phone, email and social media have put schools in Bozeman, Billings, Missoula and West Yellowstone on lockdown. As Bozeman Schools Superintendent Casey Bertram put it, “school violence doesn’t pick and choose communities.” Early in his 21-year career in public education, Bertram said, violence seemed more confined to rare events such as the 1999 shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, and schools nationwide would dramatically change their safety policies in the aftermath. Today, the specter of school violence feels different to him.

“Now it feels like they’re so close together that it feels like it could happen in your backyard, it could happen in your state, and that’s a daunting feeling,” Bertram said.

The position Skees’ bill authorized — the school marshal — was designed in large part to insert a trained defender between students and anyone who might do them harm. And that’s a position Daugherty has occupied before, first as a K-9 handler in the U.S. Air Force, then in a succession of law enforcement gigs with the Lewistown Police Department and the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office. He spent his final eight years with the latter serving as the regional sergeant in Big Sky, during which time the sheriff’s office created a school resource officer post in the district, one currently occupied by Daugherty’s former colleague, Deputy Travis Earl.

That history has marked Daugherty with the straight back and vigilant eyes of a seasoned lawman. But he is among the first to stress that his new station is far different, and far more nuanced, than any he’s held before. He and the district are still working to determine the contours of those nuances, and articulate them to a Big Sky community filled with questions and more than a few concerns. The marshal stands as one example of the strategies schools across Montana are implementing to meet what Superintendent Shipman considers one of public education’s top priorities.

“The safety of our students is front of mind for me, be it an icy road or an active shooter,” Shipman said. “That’s one of the biggest responsibilities we as school administrators and teachers have. It’s me, it’s the principals — everybody has that responsibility on the front of their mind every day.”

Fulfilling that responsibility is now Daugherty’s primary role. Square-shouldered and fit, with the affable demeanor of a dad whose own child belongs to the student body now in his charge, he greets the district’s children daily at the schools’ front doors. His goal in doing so, he said, is to be a positive, visible presence for them — and to build the trust and rapport necessary to spot any early signs of turbulence in their lives.

“Having a [finger on the] pulse and having eye contact with kids when they’re on their way into school, with parents when they’re on their way into school, you just get a feel of where things are at,” Daugherty said.

‘WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED’

On April 5, 2023, Caroline Lurgio yanked down the blinds in her Hellgate High School classroom, locked the door and, with help from a student, barricaded it with tables. With the room dark, her third-period English class grouped in a corner, and a heavy stick and can of wasp spray at the ready, Lurgio waited, poised to attack anyone who might try to force their way in.

Minutes ticked by, maybe 20. Time got weird. Lurgio knew nothing about what might be happening beyond her makeshift barricade. She knew only what she’d read in an email minutes after class started, the email Hellgate’s principal, via the PA system, had directed staff to read: Hellgate was in full lockdown — a response, Lurgio gradually learned, to a threat involving a gun posted to social media by a student.

Outside, Missoula police officers and other local law enforcement personnel began systematically sweeping the school grounds, searching for the responsible student. Authorities also shut down a two-block stretch of Higgins Avenue just south of the commercial Hip Strip corridor, having quickly determined that the student was not on Hellgate property. As the search continued, so did the lockdown. Lurgio kept checking in with her students, gauging their emotional states and gleaning information they’d learned about the situation from their own social media accounts. After a while, she broke out some colored pencils and passed them around.

“It’s amazing what colored pencils and a blank piece of paper can do,” Lurgio told Montana Free Press. “Just the calmness of drawing is something that was really helpful.”

That same day, state representatives 100 miles away in Helena cast one of their final votes on a Senate bill requiring annual reviews of school safety plans and addressing consistency concerns related to state-mandated threat assessment teams. Senate Bill 213 passed on a bipartisan 82-18 vote.

All told, Lurgio and her class sheltered in the dark for three hours before the principal announced a plan to safely dismiss students for the day. Across Missoula, 15 other public schools had been placed under so-called soft lock-ins as well, their buildings closed to outsiders but their normal routines continuing indoors. As Lurgio finally opened the blinds, afternoon sunlight poured into the room.

“I guess we hadn’t really realized how dark it had been for so long,” Lurgio said. “As soon as [the students] left, we sort of all cried a bit, a lot of letting down. At that point, you let your guard down, you recognize what happened, what could have happened.”

The following day — the same day SB 213 cleared its final House vote — a fuller picture of the goings-on at Hellgate emerged for public consumption. According to media reports, a threat of an active shooter posted to Snapchat was brought to the attention of Hellgate’s school resource officer, prompting the lockdown and an immediate response by local police, the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, Montana Highway Patrol and the FBI. There’d been no such shooter, but Missoula County Public Schools spokesperson Vinny Giammona acknowledged that even without actual violence, an incident involving SWAT team sweeps and closed roads and locked doors districtwide “tugs at all of us.” 

“The unique thing in that scenario is there wasn’t just a lockdown at Hellgate, but that lockdown eventually led to a lock-in of all of our other buildings in Missoula,” Giammona said. “That created another layer, because now you’re messaging essentially 17 buildings that they’re in some sort of safety lock-in, lockdown, which as you can imagine is going to be scary for the majority of our parents across the city.”

Like Bozeman Schools Superintendent Bertram, Giammona has noticed a distinct change in the atmosphere around school safety. After dedicating its attention during the COVID-19 pandemic to statewide shutdowns and hybrid attendance models, he said, MCPS has now turned its focus to crafting a consistent response to any kind of crisis. That means training staff, installing more cameras, developing crisis response teams for each building, and soliciting voter support for two school facilities levies last month to help pay for additional upgrades. Both passed.

As a result, the Missoula district is already doing much of what SB 213 will now require statewide. But the Hellgate incident was a stark reminder that there are always improvements to be made. For instance, Giammona said, the difference between Hellgate’s “lockdown” and the lock-ins at other schools — where facilities were secured, but daily activities continued indoors — was murky for some parents. MCPS is reexamining the language it uses as part of a broader refinement of its real-time communication strategy. As the nature of threats to schools evolves, so does the district’s responses.

“Social media has really changed the landscape,” Giammona said. “It’s changed access, it’s changed the ability to make a threat.”

For Billings Public Schools, that evolution led to the hiring this spring of former Billings police officer Jeremy House as the district’s new safety coordinator. Like Big Sky’s marshal, the position is a first in the state’s public education system. House will serve primarily as the administrative nerve center for safety coordination across Billings schools, reviewing emergency protocols and improving preparedness. And his installment in the post comes during a school year punctuated by a December lockdown at Billings West High School — part of a rash of simultaneous phone threats that also struck schools in Helena, Red Lodge and Forsyth. 

“Social media has really changed the landscape. It’s changed access, it’s changed the ability to make a threat.”

Missoula County Public Schools spokesperson Vinny Giammona

Law enforcement quickly determined the threat was false, and the lockdown was lifted within half an hour. But according to Billings Public Schools Superintendent Greg Upham, it wasn’t the only event last fall to drive home the need for a safety coordinator. That same week, a pair of threats scrawled on bathroom walls prompted many West High parents to pull their students from school for a day. Upham said investigators “couldn’t find the source of that threat,” and classes were held on the date mentioned in the threat with a heightened police presence and what Upham described as “very, very low” student attendance. A separate threat against Billings Senior High School posted to social media that same week resulted in the arrest of one student.

“It’s like a loss of innocence,” Upham said.

When Jeremy House came on board this spring, Upham made a point to introduce him to staff at every school in Billings to talk about not just his plans for the district, but what individual educators can do to protect and care for themselves. Upham — who’s retiring this summer — sees threats of shootings and resulting lockdowns as “one more added stressor” on the school community, layered on top of evolving pandemic protocols and the heated masking debates of recent years. While Upham said he hasn’t seen those stressors dampen teachers’ enthusiasm, he does see a need to respond with strength and unity, because “we can’t just keep being the victim.”

“I just refuse to be scared all the time, and I don’t want our people being scared all the time,” Upham said. “It’s a great profession. It takes care of kids. I’m passionate about this, but this is what concerns me about retiring. I feel like I’m leaving people on the battlefield.”

“I just refuse to be scared all the time, and I don’t want our people being scared all the time … I’m passionate about this, but this is what concerns me about retiring. I feel like I’m leaving people on the battlefield.”

Greg Upham, Superintendent, Billings Public Schools 

In Missoula, Lurgio’s memory of lockdown remains vivid, an experience she said will undoubtedly live in the collective culture of Hellgate for years to come. She’s thankful that her 18-year tenure as a Montana teacher has included active shooter training, which she said should be mandatory. When the lockdown started, Lurgio already had her classroom stocked with drinking water, and privacy blankets and a bucket for a makeshift bathroom, and she knew precisely what to do, making a quick pivot from a discussion about Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the hushed intensity of a survival situation. Her demeanor, she said, seemed to reassure her students, a current of confidence cutting through the tense atmosphere.

Still, Lurgio said, she feels a profound sadness about the event. Sadness for colleagues who didn’t have her level of training, for seniors whose high school years were bookended by the descent into a global pandemic and the sudden shock of a lockdown, and for a struggling student who’d put their school on high alert.

“It’s silly to think that now my classroom is more than just a place for learning,” Lurgio said. “It’s now an environment that needs to have all these extra resources, and I need to be prepared and think about these things. Those are definitely lasting effects.”

‘WILL YOU HELP WHEN BEARS COME ON CAMPUS?’

As he continued his rounds on the Big Sky campus in May, Matt Daugherty paused outside Lone Peak High School to gaze past the battered pavement of Highway 191 at the wooded slopes of the Custer Gallatin National Forest. Behind him, workers plugged away at a $23.5 million improvement project that includes a new athletic field (already finished) and facilities for welding and other career-based instruction (still under construction). Voters had recently rejected a $19 million bond to fund phase three of the project: a new gym capable of housing the larger sports crowds Big Sky anticipates as the growing student body bumps the high school from Class C status to Class B.

Daugherty pointed to the hills across the road to the northeast, at a patch of grass still scarred by the Porcupine Fire of November 2020. The blaze torched roughly 100 acres of lowlands just a few football field lengths from the only turnoff to the district’s campus. People heard gunshots in the hills prior to the wildfire, Daugherty said, and investigators eventually traced the source of the fire to a group of target shooters. Tests conducted by the U.S. Forest Service in 2013 revealed that fired bullet metal can be hot enough to ignite dry forest fuels, as can bullets that fragment after hitting rocks.

The proximity of the Porcupine Fire to Big Sky’s school campus speaks to a point easily obscured by the persistent shadow of national school tragedies like Sandy Hook and Uvalde: Active shooters aren’t the only threat Montana schools have to prepare for. Earthquakes, hazmat spills, propane explosions, fires on or off school property — much of the responsibility for anticipating and responding to such threats is now on Daugherty’s shoulders as he updates the district’s contingency plans for a variety of potential crises and works with local entities like the Big Sky Fire Department and Big Sky Medical Center to improve cross-agency communication. When he’s not walking the halls checking in with staff and students, or lending a hand in the lunchroom, Daugherty hunkers in his sparse office to pore over black binders stuffed with notes on how to improve the district’s approach to crisis or upgrade its facilities in the most secure, cost-effective ways possible.

It’s an administrative role never mentioned in Skees’ 2021 bill, and one that prompted some entertaining questions from Ophir Elementary students when Daugherty first toured classrooms to introduce himself.

“One that came up was, ‘Will you help when bears come on campus?’” Daugherty recalled. “Which is a realistic question for our area, right? And absolutely that’s part of it.”

Many potential risks were highlighted in a March 2022 hazard and vulnerability assessment compiled for the Big Sky school board by California-based security contractor Surefox. Natural disasters, cyber threats, utility losses and viral pandemics were all rated as high-risk threats for Ophir Elementary and Lone Peak High. So too were the risks of active assailants and weapons on school grounds, though the report noted that both threats are “rated high in all schools throughout the U.S.” Consultants added that the district’s preparedness for such events is at “a higher level than most schools,” citing the existing School Resource Office (SRO) program and the utilization of “Run-Lock-Fight” training for teachers and staff.

The Surefox assessment, paid for with a $15,000 donation from the Spanish Peaks Community Foundation, paved the way for the board’s decision last fall to hire a school marshal. According to Shipman, it will also serve as “the anchor” for Daugherty’s work.

“His job is much bigger in scope than just standing here and making sure nobody comes into the school unencumbered,” Shipman told MTFP. “His job is now all emergency preparedness.”

While Daugherty started the job last fall, board trustees didn’t fully nail down his job description until early this year. One specific detail generated mixed feelings in the Big Sky community: Should he carry a gun? The 2021 law focused heavily on that question, listing a concealed carry permit as the first of three eligibility requirements for school marshals (the other two being state certification as a peace officer and current or past experience in law enforcement). The law also exempted marshals from Montana’s prohibition on firearms in public school buildings, the only other exemptions being for active law enforcement or people with prior clearance from the school board.

In a letter to the board, Big Sky parent Jolene Romney expressed opposition to the proposal that Daugherty be armed while on duty, believing it would send the message to students that “we need to deal with the proliferation of guns by having more guns.” Four other community members articulated similar concerns to MTFP, echoing Romney’s hope that Daugherty’s job would focus on “deliverables” related to the myriad risks outlined in Surefox’s report. 

The same central debate — whether a “good guy with a gun” is an appropriate or effective school safety measure — has dogged parents, educators and communities across the nation. Last year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a law allowing public school teachers to carry firearms. Florida charted a similar course in the wake of the 2018 Parkland shooting. And lawmakers in Texas advanced a proposal this spring mandating armed security personnel in every school in the state, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in June.

“His job is much bigger in scope than just standing here and making sure nobody comes into the school unencumbered.His job is now all emergency preparedness.”

Big Sky School District Superintendent Dustin Shipman

In each case, the decision to arm school employees sparked backlash from an array of stakeholders. But public opinion underscored the power of personal experience in shaping those reactions. Law enforcement groups in Ohio opposed the state’s new law based on the low training threshold — a reduction from 700 hours to just 24 — required for educators to carry firearms. Meanwhile, the New York Times profiled an Ohio kindergarten teacher who embraced the opportunity to carry a gun at school to counteract a feeling of helplessness, even as state education associations balked at the proposal. A 2022 poll of 1,008 Americans found that while only 45% favored arming teachers, 80% supported armed police in schools. Who carries a gun, and how much training they have, are key details in a strategy that’s still evolving.

Montana’s school marshal law garnered the support in 2021 of education groups including the Montana School Boards Association and the Montana Federation of Public Employees, based in large part on work the organizations had done to guarantee that those marshals meet state peace officer qualifications. Supporters framed the role as an extension of the longstanding School Resource Officer approach, now deeply ingrained in larger Montana school districts, but still out of reach of smaller communities lacking municipal police departments and geographically isolated from sheriffs’ headquarters. In Missoula, Lurgio said, she’s seen SROs at Hellgate over the years dedicate themselves to building positive relationships with students, to being “an ally for them.” The fact that the school’s SRO is armed “doesn’t bother me,” she continued, though she said she’d feel differently if the gun were concealed.

“I feel safer knowing that there is one SRO with a weapon on campus than I would knowing — or not knowing — that there are multiple weapons on campus,” Lurgio said.

Under Montana’s school marshal law, marshals are allowed to act “only as necessary” to prevent actions that threaten “serious bodily injury or death of persons on public school property.” The law directs school boards to adopt policies governing how a marshal can carry and store a firearm, and specifying the type of gun and ammunition used. As with other potentially sensitive policies, school officials can elect to keep such details confidential if disclosing them might jeopardize the safety of staff and students. Montana School Boards Association Executive Director Lance Melton explained that that authority is part of a decade-old rewrite of state provisions governing the withholding of public information that, if released, could allow threats to sidestep elements of a school’s safety response and inflict even greater harm.

“The goal [of confidentiality] was to ensure that the intent of a safety plan, which is to protect kids, would be accomplished and wouldn’t be undermined by someone intent on inflicting school violence,” Melton said, adding that detailed knowledge of Columbine High School protocols was partly what allowed the two perpetrators of the 1999 shooting to map out a meticulous plan.

Shipman acknowledged that putting guns in schools, even in the hands of a trained professional, is a “sensitive” subject. But he and Daugherty are quick to point out that armed personnel have already been a presence in Big Sky schools through the SRO program. Daugherty asserted that the majority of staff and parents he’s talked to, in his daily routine and in a series of community meet-and-greets this year, felt “much more at ease” knowing that he’s armed. It’s not just his experience, he said. It’s that he’s made being “approachable” one of his top priorities. 

“The position really hinges on having the right person in it,” Daugherty said. “Whatever school ends up taking on a school marshal role, it’s extremely important to have that right personality in there for the kids and the staff and the families.”

Whether or not a marshal is armed isn’t the only detail that’s generated questions. Romney said she also wonders about the long-term sustainability of the position. Daugherty’s salary comes not from the district’s budget, but rather from a private donation through the Yellowstone Club Community Foundation — a fact Shipman confirmed, adding that the source of the funding, which is good for five years, was one of two key factors — the other being Daugherty’s professional qualifications — that convinced Big Sky to create the position in the first place. If the district is going to get the most out of that money, Romney said, Daugherty’s work on school safety should involve parents and community partners.

“This is a really big job, and could potentially use the help of a parent committee or a community committee — to do research, to bounce ideas off of, to provide perspective,” Romney said. “I feel like that would help give the community more of a voice in this process.”

According to Romney and school officials, that’s exactly what’s happening. In the months since Romney raised her concerns to the board, the district has convened roughly 18 volunteers to help advise and assist Daugherty in bolstering safety at Ophir Elementary and Lone Peak High. Members of that committee include school staff, representatives from local emergency service agencies, and interested parents — Romney among them. She said the committee, which has met twice to date, has discussed a wide range of potential improvements, including a shatterproof film for school windows and emergency medical training for staff. Romney added that she’s offered to help identify outside funding sources for such measures.

Daugherty agrees the group will be a valuable resource on a variety of projects, starting with updates to the district’s emergency response plan. He said he sees himself being “point on all of that,” fulfilling a supervisory role, he added, that doesn’t fall under the purview of an SRO or other existing positions in the schools.

‘THE WORST DAY THAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN IN MY LIFE’

Last October, a high-speed car chase involving a half-dozen law enforcement agencies came to a crashing halt in a ditch less than half a mile from Simms High School. The incident started more than 30 miles east in Great Falls and swept southwest along Interstate 15 through Cascade and Wolf Creek before doubling back toward Great Falls along Montana Highway 200. According to the Great Falls Tribune, the suspect carjacked a separate vehicle halfway through the chase, drove southbound on the interstate’s northbound lane for a time, and allegedly attempted to run over a Cascade County Sheriff’s deputy.

It’s not the first time in his 13 years with the district that Sun River Valley Superintendent David Marzolf has been reminded of the seemingly random — and potentially dangerous — situations that can develop within a stone’s throw of a school’s front doors.

“There was a time, four or five years ago, the principal and I had to go out to the parking lot. Some guy was outrunning law enforcement from Helena, took the cut-across road, and ended up in our parking lot,” Marzolf recalled in a conversation with MTFP. “We have to deal with that stuff all the time. Well, not all the time.”

Student safety is a consistent topic of conversation among leaders in the small outlying district, and Marzolf has tried to beef up security by putting teachers through active shooter drills focused on defensive strategies and purchasing cameras for the elementary, middle and high schools that can alert administrative staff to emerging threats. Every classroom is equipped with a can of Reflex Protect, a Mace-like spray with a pistol-style nozzle and trigger. Marzolf heard about the product from Helena School Superintendent Rex Weltz back when Weltz was leading the district in Polson.

Public reaction to one of Marzolf’s most recent investments generated a mixed bag of critique. As word spread that Sun River Valley had supplemented its video cameras with facial recognition software, people reacted with interest and concern alike. The latter, Marzolf said, came mostly from state lawmakers who claimed he was “infringing on students’ rights” by compiling and storing student information. “We don’t,” Marzolf clarified, noting that the software’s data cloud stores images for only 30 days and that he alone has access to the camera systems.

Marzolf argued the software is able to alert him when a person in local law enforcement’s database shows up on a school camera. Marzolf can also upload images of people the district has barred from school grounds due to criminal activity brought to their attention by parents or law enforcement. 

“Let’s say you have a warrant for your arrest and you’re not supposed to pick up your student at our building,” Marzolf told MTFP. “We could potentially get a picture of you and put it in our camera system. And when you come up to the door, it’ll alert us that you are on premises.”

The technology didn’t come cheap — roughly $30,000, Marzolf estimates, not counting the cameras. Back in 2019, then-Gov. Steve Bullock signed a law establishing a new type of tax levy specifically to fund school safety investments. Districts can now put the question directly to voters, and the law gives local education officials wide latitude in how they can spend those dollars. The Bozeman school district got voter approval last month for two such levies, one for its elementary schools and one for high schools. Executive Director of Business and Operations Mike Waterman told MTFP the funding will support the district’s school resource officer program and salaries for school counselors, and added that he’s fairly certain Bozeman is the first district in the state to pass such a levy.

“Let’s say you have a warrant for your arrest and you’re not supposed to pick up your student at our building. We could potentially get a picture of you and put it in our camera system. And when you come up to the door, it’ll alert us that you are on premises.”

Sun River Valley Superintendent David Marzolf

But for smaller districts in particular, the cost of even assessing security strengths and weaknesses can prove restrictive. Such assessments also happen to be one of the myriad services the University of Montana’s Safe Schools Center provides free of charge, in part courtesy of a $2 million, three-year federal grant. Center Director Emily Sallee said those assessments examine every detail of the school environment, from building layouts and traffic flows to cybersecurity considerations like how students access and use the internet. Sallee’s team then translates its findings into a report that presents a prioritized list of safety needs, some of which can be prohibitively expensive.

“Sometimes schools really need, like, architectural changes to increase school safety, and that funding probably isn’t there and it’s not going to happen,” Sallee said. “But there’s always pieces you can do at less cost or less investment that have a pretty high return.”

Assessments provide “a baseline” for district officials, she continued, and can identify such low-cost, often overlooked improvements as keeping exterior doors locked and checking staff ID badges at school entrances. But, she added, bigger-ticket school safety items may have to compete with pressing infrastructure issues like a leaky roof. And Montana’s focus on expanding career-based instruction and its dismal national ranking on teacher pay mean safety isn’t the only long-term investment demanding dollars in school budgets that already have little, if any, room to maneuver. With the passage of SB 213, Sallee is reaching out to school leaders to build awareness that the center offers a breadth of safety-centric services at no cost in the hopes of saving districts money.

Shawn Bubb agrees that the new law is likely to create quite a bit of work for safety consultants in the coming year, with districts now required to revisit their response plans annually and certify those reviews with the Office of Public Instruction. As director of the Montana School Boards Association’s insurance services arm, he’ll be part of that process. Bubb’s organization oversees property and liability coverage for 180 of Montana’s 826 public schools, coverage that includes discounted safety assessments provided by the Michigan-based firm Secure Education Consultants. That work, Bubb said, is aimed primarily at preventative measures — improved door locks, stricter protocols for how people enter a school — “before you even talk about arming somebody.”

He acknowledges that the potential for a school shooting in Montana is “pretty scary.” Personally, he said, “I’m just terrified of it.” When he rattles off a list of the speciality funds included in the insurance he oversees, it’s easy to see why: property damage, medical expenses, counseling services, post-incident security measures, funeral costs.

“That’s the worst day that’s going to happen in my life is when I get the call when one of our members is directly impacted by one of these bad events,” Bubb said. “I’m going to be glad that we’re going to have the resources there to help them, but it’s not a day I’m looking forward to.”

According to a database compiled by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, Montana has experienced nine incidents of gun-based school violence since 1970, including the fatal shooting in 1986 of a substitute teacher at Lewistown’s Fergus High School — the only Montana fatality listed in the center’s data. State-specific statistics from the national nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety show that guns are the second-leading cause of death among Montana children and teens; on average, 83% of those deaths are suicides, while fewer than 20% are homicides.

‘A TOUCHY, TOUCHY SUBJECT’

After checking in at his office, Matt Daugherty strolled up and down the halls of Lone Peak High, past students studying sprawled on tables or floors and classrooms bathed in the soft glow of projectors. He peeked inside the vacant gymnasium, crowing about how the boys basketball team — the Big Horns — cruised past district for the first time ever this season and into the Class C state tournament (they lost in the second round). Outside the school library, which pulls double duty as Big Sky’s public community library, Daugherty paused.

“Mind if I duck in there for a minute?” he asked. “My daughter’s studying and I haven’t said hey to her today.”

With every student and teacher he passed, Daugherty posed the same question first: “How’re you doing?” Usually he referred to them by their first name, an ability he said he’s dedicated a lot of time to developing this spring. While filling in for the secretary at the high school’s front desk, Daugherty encouraged a student signing out for the day — already a football player — to go out for the basketball team. The student shrugged and said he’d be “rusty.”

“Even if you’re rusty, you’ve got the athleticism,” Daugherty said.

That accessibility and engagement is partly a strategy. Daugherty said he recognizes that his best tactic for heading off potential threats is to build relationships with students, teachers and parents and be alert for any signs that a kid might be having a tough time. The approach stems from the widely researched and debated belief that school violence can often stem from students struggling with their mental or behavioral health and feeling isolated, lost, or adrift.

Sallee, who also serves as an assistant professor in UM’s Department of Counseling, said that in the case of school shootings, the perpetrator is often a student who’s been expelled. A Washington Post analysis of 380 school shootings since Columbine showed that the median age of school shooters is 16. And numerous studies conducted in the U.S. and abroad have explored correlations between exclusionary punishments and antisocial or violent behavior by and among students. Education systems throughout the country have responded to such findings by adjusting their disciplinary policies and further emphasizing the importance of school counselors and psychologists, particularly in the wake of a pandemic that isolated students from their social and academic worlds for a prolonged period of time. Just three months into the pandemic, a 2020 Gallup poll showed that 45% of parents said their childrens’ mental and emotional health was already suffering due to separation from teachers and classmates. In the years since, test scores tumbled nationally, classroom disruptions spiked, and more than 80% of U.S. schools reported negative impacts on social-emotional development.

Sallee said growing recognition of the interplay between emotional well-being and violence has also changed the landscape of threat assessment to be “much more supportive, much more holistic” than in past decades. 

And part of creating a safe environment, she said, is helping to ensure that educators monitor their own mental well-being so they don’t become “hypervigilant” and “burnt-out” at school, which is why her team at the Safe Schools Center offers workshops for educators focused specifically on resiliency and healing.

“We can do youth mental health first aid, we can do adult mental health first aid,” Sallee said of the center’s work. “It’s all wrapped into the same ball of safety, whether it’s actual or perceived.”

School officials see mental health supports as promising, both in averting incidents and in responding to them. In Billings, Superintendent Upham said the district is working with its new safety coordinator, Jeremy House, to develop a “debrief team” capable of addressing the aftershocks of an event among students and staff. Even if there turns out to be no shooter, Upham said, a lockdown can put “added stress” on a school population — stress that can migrate to other schools in the district and sap the very thing that makes education possible.

“At the end of the day, if you don’t have the energy yourself to motivate [students], it makes it extremely difficult to teach,” Upham said. “What worries me is that the level of fear and trepidation and anxiety that we are feeling, it robs people of energy and they can’t stay at a level of motivation that makes them as effective as they can be.”

Vinny Giammona said Missoula County Public Schools is planning to incorporate similar staff debrief practices in the development of a district-wide crisis response team next school year. That approach could also include post-incident surveys of teachers and staff, he said, as well as guaranteeing that the district addresses any ongoing needs in the months following an event.

Recent experience in his district has led Upham to speculate about the harm that even lockdowns can inflict. When his assistant superintendent entered his office last December to inform him of the incident unfolding at Billings West High School, he recalls, she was “visibly shaking.” The district is now actively discussing what role lockdowns might play moving forward and evaluating what it might do differently in response to reported threats. Until recently, Upham said, Billings simply hadn’t taken the time to have conversations about school safety measures, and his prime motivation at every turn has been to get the topic “out in the open,” to find a balance between what the district can do to ensure the safety of its students and what parents will accept.

“It’s a touchy, touchy subject,” he said.

In Big Sky, Shipman believes the district is already well positioned to meet the mental and behavioral health needs of its students. According to him, Big Sky’s schools have twice the number of counselors required by state regulations governing school quality, which mandate a ratio of at least one counselor for every 400 students. (Shipman’s district has two full-time counselor positions.) Elementary school students also receive a weekly counseling session as part of their class schedule, just like art or music.

“We’re [as] on top of it as we can be,” Shipman said, noting that not all school shootings in American communities have been perpetrated by students, or even by people suffering from mental health issues. “It is hard to be 100% in tune with all students all the time. That’s just not possible.”

Daugherty agreed with Shipman’s assessment that mental and behavioral health resources are “very well handled” in the district. He said he maintains an open line of communication with both of the district’s school counselors, one of whom — the wife of a former colleague at the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office — he’s known for 20 years. Daugherty may not be trained to offer such services himself, but he sees his position as more than a shield against potential violence. Like counselors, active shooter drills, emergency response plans and safety coordinators, he considers himself part of an extensive patchwork designed to protect against threats that may or may not involve a gun.

“The school ends up being the hub of our community, and there’s a lot of other things that are happening outside of school at night and on the weekends that can end up filtering back in,” Daugherty said. “It’s a matter of trying to be ahead of those things and being aware of things so you don’t get surprised.”

The post How Montana schools are preparing for worst-case scenarios appeared first on Montana Free Press.

If you want to see the latest way people are helping keep rural journalism healthy, look at Ohio.

When the media company Gannett closed the Oxford Press, the community paper in the town of Oxford, faculty at Miami University saw an opportunity to enlist their students in a hands-on learning experience providing local news.

They started the Oxford Observer, a weekly newspaper staffed by Miami students and professors. 

“It’s a community relationship, but it definitely benefits the students,” said Sacha DeVroomen Bellman, the Miami University journalism instructor who leads a class that acts as the paper’s newsroom. “This is a way they can get professional work.”

About 145 miles away, students at Ohio University are providing stories to the Athens County Independent, a digital start-up covering that county founded after its editor was unjustly fired from the area’s only daily paper. And faculty member Hans Meyer plans to keep ramping up stories from students.

To the north, at Kent State University, two faculty members lead the Ohio Newslab with a focus on providing stories to rural areas. The lab partners with four community news outlets that run stories from advanced reporting classes. The faculty have raised funds to pay students and an editor who works with the classes to shape up stories and mentor students. 

“We are covering some of the more sparsely populated sections of Ohio that don’t get much media attention,” said Susan Kirkman Zake, who coordinates the program with fellow faculty member Jacqueline Marino. “I really think that’s a good news niche for us to explore, both for students and the media landscape in Ohio, because media companies are really concentrated in cities.”  

And in the center of the state sits Denison University, which is revamping its journalism curriculum to empower student coverage of rural Licking County, Ohio. Those stories, published through The Reporting Project, are available for local media to pick up. When Intel announced the construction of a $20 billion chip plant in the city of New Albany, Denison’s project was the only media outlet to cover the project’s influence on its neighbors.

“We went and sat with Danny and Barbara Vanhoose, who have lived on Green Chapel Road for 50 years, right across the road from where Intel’s front door is going to be,” said Alan Miller, a Denison journalism professor who spent three decades at the Columbus Dispatch and covered the story with faculty member Jack Shuler and student Thu Nguyen.

“We just went and visited with them while they watched and got their reaction and had an outside-the-fence view, literally, of a very big news event that everybody else was covering from inside the fence,” he said.

Those four examples showcase a trend extending far beyond Ohio. Across the nation, student reporters and their colleges are stepping in as local news outlets disappear. At the Center for Community News, our team documents partnerships between local media and colleges, and in the last year we’ve found more than 120  — many focused on bolstering news in rural areas that have been neglected as big conglomerates eat up local dailies and whittle staffs to skeleton crews. 

The University of Vermont, where the center is housed, also runs a student reporting program that works with local media. In the last year, it has provided close to 300 stories for free to community papers and other local outlets. 

These programs are not internships in the traditional sense. Students of course can get great experiences interning directly with newsrooms, but many of those internships have disappeared, and beleaguered editors can’t be expected to dive deep with their rookies on each and every story. 

But colleges can. 

In university-led reporting programs, experienced former journalists vet and assign and edit student work and work with local news outlets to assign stories that otherwise would go uncovered. 

It’s a win-win. Papers get content and students get experience. 

---

Richard Watts is the director of the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, an organization that documents and brings together university-led reporting projects around the country. Justin Trombly is the editor of the Community News Service, the University of Vermont’s academic-media partnership.

The post Colleges and Students Are Stepping Up to Help Rural Newspapers appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

In rural Siskiyou County, where California meets Oregon, the local community college is hiding its LGBTQ+ center behind closed doors. Queer students are scared for their safety. 

“We are a very conservative county, and we have many students that are out at school but not at home,” said Ty Speck, who goes by “Mama Ty” among students and serves as the advisor to the LGBTQ+ club at the College of the Siskiyous. Instead, she said, the three students in the group wanted to meet in a rotating set of undisclosed locations.

All across California, but especially in rural areas and small cities scattered across the Central Coast, the Central Valley, and the Far North, community college leaders push back at the notion that California is an easy place to be queer. 

In a report from last year obtained by CalMatters, college administrators across the state expressed their support for LGBTQ+ students but said that setbacks persist. 

The report came as a follow up to a 2021 state grant of $10 million — the first of its kind geared specifically towards LGBTQ+ students in community colleges.  But colleges consistently said that the money, less than $100,000 per college on average over five years, was not enough to hire staff positions or to set up a LGBTQ+ center on campus, even in places where many students want it. 

Only 30 of California’s 115 brick-and-mortar community colleges had a designated LGBTQ+ space on campus at the time of the report. Eighteen colleges said they would use the state funds to help develop an LGBTQ+ center.  The remaining 67 schools, including the students and faculty at the College of the Siskiyous, chose to invest the state’s dollars in training for staff, special graduation ceremonies or mental health support for LGBTQ+ students, who are significantly more likely to commit suicide than their peers.

Culture wars put LGBTQ students on edge

Allie Harrison, 25, knows what it’s like to live on the margins. A self-described witch who grew up kissing girls and boys in rural Lassen County, more than two hours north of Lake Tahoe, she is now one of the three members of Lassen Community College’s LGBTQ+ student group. 

“Everybody assumes that it’s like the rest of California and it’s not,” she said. 

When Harrison attended Lassen High School a decade ago, she said the church would co-opt the school cafeteria after hours to run events. When that same church found out about her sexuality, the pastor told her mother that she was a “bad influence” and couldn’t attend the youth group anymore, Harrison says. 

Later, she says her mother kicked her out of the house in part because of her sexuality, and Harrison moved to San Jose with her dad, where she embraced the more open-minded culture at the high schools she attended. 

Now, back in Lassen for college, Harrison says the culture is more accepting than it was just 10 years ago. There’s a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ people in Lassen County that counted Harrison as its 100th member, and the group regularly meets at a local bar. 

But the culture wars that have swept the country have come to Lassen County. In April, residents came to a “showdown” over an effort to remove LGBTQ+ books from the children’s section of the public library. Weeks later, someone stole a pride flag from a local organization and spray-painted allegations about pedophilia on its walls.

The College of the Siskiyous took down its pride flag temporarily in 2019 after someone claimed it was illegal to fly it. The college’s new leadership has since purchased additional flag poles and made a point to fly the flag every May, when the school observes its annual pride month (most students are gone in June). 

On the coast, similar challenges pervade, according to the report issued by colleges last year. 

“Although California is known for its liberal acceptance and support of diverse communities, the small cities within the Central Coast of California are heavily conservative and do not host a large population of LGBTQ community members,” wrote an administrator at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, just south of Pismo Beach. 

In Watsonville, between Santa Cruz and Monterey, community college administrators reported that the pride flag has been stolen or defamed multiple times and that the “vibe” on campus is not welcoming to LGBTQ+ students.

Many LGBTQ+ students never make it to community college at all, wrote an administrator at Golden West College in Huntington Beach: “The most at-risk LGBTQ students often find themselves homeless during high school and struggle to make it to college.” 

Small in number, rural LGBTQ students see gains 

Outside of major cities, attendance and participation in LGBTQ+ groups can be sparse. 

“We are a small rural college and often do not have a large enough population of any one group to have a center specifically for that group,” administrators at Lassen Community College wrote to the chancellor’s office. 

With the state funds, the college initially proposed hosting a “dinner banquet” with a keynote speaker, but with just three students in the LGBTQ+ student group,  college director Jennifer Tupper decided to take them out to a nice dinner instead. Each student got a “very nice classic pen,” she said. The college also hosted a “Diversity Summit” that included representatives from various communities on campus.

While rural communities across the state have smaller queer populations, support in general has increased over the years. 

In Bakersfield, home to Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the LGBTQ+ community has grown and services have become increasingly available in recent years, said Bakersfield College student Cecil Dexter, who identifies as transgender.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dexter used to drive more than  two hours every month in order to meet with a doctor who could prescribe testosterone. Today, he can see medical providers in Bakersfield or in his hometown of Tehachapi, which has nearly  13,000 people.

The Bakersfield College campus lacks a physical space to meet, and the LGBTQ+ student group only began last fall. However, recent pop-up events such as the lavender prom — a dance for the LGBTQ+ community — attracted nearly  200 people, and even smaller events get “a pretty huge turnout,” Dexter said. 

Growing the coffers for LGBTQ centers

The 2021 state grant — $10 million spread across the community college system — was never supposed to fund LGBTQ+ centers, said Jacob Fraker, a consultant for the Legislative  LGBTQ+ caucus. Instead, the money was meant to help with small projects, such as hiring queer-friendly mental health professionals or supporting the events that Dexter hosts in Bakersfield. 

Setting up a safe space on every campus where LGBTQ+ students can gather is urgent, he said, especially in the case of rural community colleges and certain California State University  campuses that are known to be less welcoming. He pointed to the case of CSU Maritime, where female, transgender and nonbinary students reported “widespread sexual misconduct, racism, and hostility.“

But he said local community college districts, not the state, should be the ones to pay for it. 

This year, the proposed state budget from the Legislature includes another $10 million over three years for LGBTQ+ services to be divided among the state’s 115 community colleges. CalBright College, which is entirely online, did not receive funding. Fraker said the governor has signaled to the caucus that he’ll approve it.

In the first allotment of funding from 2021, the $10 million was divided up based on how many students each district had and what percentage of students were considered low-income. 

College of the Siskiyous got a little more than $10,000 a year, for five years, starting in 2021. It was not enough to even hire a part-time staff member or set up a center, the college wrote in its report. 

The state also made it so that no district could receive more than $500,000, which meant that large urban districts with multiple colleges received fewer dollars per student. 

This year, Los Angeles Community College District lobbied to get the state to raise the maximum to $900,000, according to the district’s spokesperson, Juliet Hidalgo. 

“SF, Los Angeles, San Diego — they eat up all that money and there’s never enough for the rural colleges. They (rural colleges) want to do stuff, but they don’t have the population,” said Fraker. He said the new funding will also include provisions that ensure rural schools get a fair share. 

Except the math doesn’t work. 

If Los Angeles and other large districts get more funding in this year’s budget, some smaller community college districts will inevitably see less. Neither Fraker nor the Community College Chancellor’s Office could identify who the losers might be. Determining final funding allocations for each college can take months, Fraker said. 

In an interview with CalMatters, administrators at the College of the Siskiyous were surprised to learn about the new grant in this year’s state budget: In the governor’s earlier proposal, there was a typo that said only Los Angeles would receive money for LGBTQ+ students. 

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

Lives are being transformed in the building trades space at Northwest Career & Technical Center in St. Albans where Ross Lavoie and Steve Allard spend two hours every day teaching carpentry and more to 90 students. 

“These students are learning with their hands and with their brains,” Lavoie said. 

“The more ways you learn something by touching it, doing it, seeing it, feeling it, that’s how you’re really going to drive those points home, as opposed to sitting in a traditional classroom,” he said.

The students mainly come from three high schools: St. Albans’ own public high school, Bellows Free Academy; Missisquoi Valley Union Middle/High School in Swanton; and Bellows Free Academy Fairfax. Students also come from Project Soar Elementary/High School, an alternative school in St. Albans Bay.

Lavoie and Allard both graduated from the program where they now teach. But Lavoie said today’s students face social and economic challenges he did not have to face in high school, such as substance abuse and poverty.

Lavoie said he teaches accountability to students who have never been asked to be accountable. “They have to tell us where they are, dress appropriate,” he said. He talks with them about the importance of driving sober. 

Lavoie also tried to teach his students to become better citizens by getting involved in their communities, and he takes his students into the community to do work for nonprofit organizations.

“Our goal is to work for people that can use our help and our free labor the most, and make their money go further,” he said.

So, his students have built housing, remodeled the local soup kitchen, worked on projects at Hard’ack, the local nonprofit ski hill, and worked on blighted homes in the city of St. Albans, he said. 

Steve Wunsch, who taught both Lavoie and Allard when they were in high school, has come out of retirement to help them teach today’s future carpenters. The Covid-19 pandemic made a lot of parents and students reevaluate college educations, he said.

Lavoie said his graduates are in great demand.

Juniors and seniors can sign up for a co-op work-based learning program that lets them work on job sites part time, or even nearly full time, during the school day, provided they have met their academic requirements. 

“They already have a career before they graduate, and they’ve been getting paid to do that,” Lavoie said.

Vermont’s most promising jobs

Students are drawn to the carpentry program because they realize there is good money to be made in the building trades, Lavoie said. 

Carpentry is one of Vermont’s most promising jobs, according to the McClure Foundation and the Vermont Department of Labor — defined by them as jobs that pay more than the median Vermont wage of $22.50 an hour and have the greatest number of openings. 

To draw attention to the opportunities, the organizations are spotlighting the four occupations with the greatest number of projected openings through 2030: bookkeepers, carpenters, nurses and teachers. 

VTDigger’s Promising Jobs series is taking up the torch to look more closely at how people are getting into those four careers. Today, we look at carpentry. Yesterday, we covered teaching. And coming up, we’ll dive into bookkeeping and nursing. 

“In Vermont, there is a career and education pathway for you,” said Tom Cheney, executive director of Advance Vermont, a nonprofit that aims to connect Vermonters with careers in the state. There are promising jobs that are trained for through apprenticeship. “It doesn’t just require college,” he said.

Advance Vermont posts Vermont’s most promising jobs on its website, where people can find out about 500 careers in Vermont and can see what training they need to land a job in one of those careers. 

Through 2030, Vermont can expect 4,460 openings for carpenters, the report estimates. Over the course of their careers, carpenters can expect to make a median wage of $23 an hour, more than $47,000 a year.

The carpentry profession is a good fit for people who like to work with “your hands or with machines to make, fix or build things,” according to a brochure from the McClure Foundation.

A limited supply of carpenters

High school career centers are one avenue for learning carpentry. 

Mary Ann Sheahan, who runs the Vermont Talent Pipeline for the Vermont Business Roundtable, worked with general contractors to identify a credential of value in the trades that is now being taught at every career technical education center in Vermont. It is called the National Center for Construction Education and Research core credential. 

“It’s the first skill set for anybody who works in construction,” Sheahan said. “It includes things like basic safety, construction math, hand tools, power tools, blueprint reading.”

At some career centers, even though the programs are much smaller than the one in St. Albans, there is still plenty of room for interested students. In Rutland and Springfield, for instance, there are still a few openings for next fall’s classes.

But other programs, such as those at the Center for Technology in Essex, are oversubscribed. At the Cold Hollow Career Center in Enosburg Falls, there’s plenty of student interest in carpentry classes, but for several weeks, Nate Demar, director of the center, struggled to find someone to teach them next fall.

“We lost our amazing Construction Teacher because he can make a lot more money in the private sector,” Demar wrote in an email. By last week, Demar reported that he had finally found someone to teach the six students who have applied to enroll next fall.

If a candidate has a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent and no teaching experience, the starting salary for a carpentry teacher at Cold Hollow  is $45,000 a year, and if a candidate is certified to teach the national curriculum and has 20 years in the field, it is $64,000, Demar said.

Lavoie said it is hard to draw carpenters to teaching because they make so much more 

working in construction. “We have some students, even some students almost right out of this program, making what we make in a year,” he said.

But money is not everything, said Lavoie, who appreciates the school hours and summer vacation, which allows him to be home with his young children. 

The shortage of carpentry teachers restricts the supply of carpenters in Vermont, to the point where Ryan Ahern has to bring them in from out of state.

“We can’t find commercial framers to build large projects,” said Ahern, director of field operations at ReArch Company, a contractor in South Burlington. “We’re bringing people up from Boston to do this work.”

Other paths to carpentry

Someone who graduates from a career technical education center with a core construction credential could get hired by a contractor, but would not have all the skills to work as a carpenter, Sheahan said. 

So Vermont Talent Pipeline approached contractors to ask how people coming into the field with this credential could get more skills so they could become independent carpenters. 

Together, they put together an 18-month apprenticeship program; Sheahan said that experience boosts the average wage by about 50%. 

And, apprenticeships are one way that employers can attract employees.

Ahern hosts apprentices at his business through a program that recruits and trains carpenters over 18 months. The program teams up incoming apprentices with foremen and skilled carpenters in the field with pay starting at $19 an hour. 

“They start with basic tool skills, like keeping all the fingers on their hands,” Ahern joked. “They’re learning plan-reading. They’re learning framing. They’re learning some finish carpentry.”

Associated Builders and Contractors sponsors the apprenticeship program, which is taught by ReSOURCE Vermont. Young people starting out in the trades get Wednesday afternoons off to go to class at ReSOURCE Vermont, and a mentor on the job checks that they can actually do what they are supposed to be learning. Over 18 months, the apprentice graduates from laborer to carpenter’s helper to carpenter.

Here’s the pitch, Sheahan said: “We’re going to hire you even if you have just basic skills and we’re going to teach you how to become a carpenter over the course of 18 months. It could be that you’re starting at $20 an hour and when you’re finished, you’re going to be $30 an hour.”

A quicker route is the Construction 101 class at ReSOURCE. The six-week construction program is designed to get students jobs when they finish. 

Students spend four weeks in the woodshop, gaining credentials for working with power and hand tools. Then there’s a job fair, and the last two weeks are spent working with employers who came to the job fair. 

“At the end of the sixth week, ideally, you’re talking contracts,” said Maggie Robinson, program coordinator at the ReSOURCE Burlington site, running construction and weatherization programs. 

Ry-An White, who lives in Shelburne, took the class. He is now building basement doors and hatches, putting up drywall and reframing damaged sections of homes for the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity weatherization program. 

He started at $18 an hour. Now, after less than a year on the job, he makes $21.75 an hour. 

Someday, he hopes to be able to build his own home. 

Advice to young people

Ahern, at ReArch, said demand is high for people who are interested in getting into carpentry. “If you’re ambitious and you’re looking to get into this business, it’s an awesome time,” he said.

He offers some advice for high school students considering carpentry.

“You gotta like the physical aspect of it,” Ahern said. “There’s a certain hardship (to) this business, especially in Vermont, with the cold, and you have to actually like physical work.”

Ahern advises students interested to start out with internships while they are still in high school.

“I’d advise against going to work with the uncle down the street,” he said. “If I was 18 years old, I would spend six months with two or three of the best (employers) around, and then take a pick.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Promising Jobs: Tech centers and apprenticeships teach carpentry skills and more.

Students of color at Peoples Academy and Peoples Academy Middle Level in Morristown have endured longstanding racist harassment and bullying, parents say. 

A group of families has been in touch with district officials in the past weeks over multiple incidents at the school, according to parents and administrators. But the allegations were made public at a Wednesday meeting of the Lamoille South Unified Union school board, where a parent said her children have experienced “profound systemic racism” at the schools. 

“Our BIPOC community of students are missing not days, not just weeks, but (sometimes) collectively over a month of school, due to anxiety, fear, and a feeling of (being) unsafe in the building,” said Cassie Baronette, the mother of three students of color at Peoples Academy and Peoples Academy Middle Level. 

Baronette declined to speak in detail about specific incidents, citing her children’s privacy, but said they had been targeted by “overt and horrifying racism.”

It’s not clear exactly how many families have experienced similar incidents. In correspondence shared with VTDigger, Lamoille South Superintendent Ryan Heraty mentioned meeting with at least six families to discuss concerns about racist incidents. 

Baronette declined to be interviewed on the record. VTDigger spoke with three other people who said their children or relatives have had similar experiences at the school, either during the current school year or in the past. 

“It’s been very bad,” said Carol Rogers, whose child attends sixth grade at Peoples Academy Middle Level. 

Her son has experienced verbal abuse, racial slurs, and even physical violence at the school and on the bus, Rogers said. He has missed months’ worth of academic material, Rogers said, because he often dreads going to class in the morning. 

“I’ve heard about it in other states, but I really never thought that it would be this bad in Vermont,” Rogers said. 

Amy Gates, whose daughter graduated from Peoples Academy four years ago, echoed those concerns. Her daughter also experienced racism at the school, she said, but she acknowledged she did not know the specific details.

“Four years later, she still can’t talk about some of the things that happened there,” Gates told school board members last week.  

At the board meeting, parents asked for more targeted district policies — and more robust enforcement — to prevent racist abuse at school. 

“Racial harm is being reinforced and perpetuated by our administration, because there is no clear separate policy for dealing with this specific type of abuse,” Baronette told school board members. “Your bullying, hazing and harassment policy does not adequately address this.”

Peoples Academy serves students in grades 9-12, and is physically connected to Peoples Academy Middle Level, which operates grades 5-8.

In an interview, Heraty, the Lamoille South superintendent, acknowledged “that there are situations that are happening in our district, specifically at that one school — Peoples Academy Middle Level — that aren’t OK, that we need to be talking about openly,” he said. 

The district has organized equity initiatives since 2020, when officials commissioned a report on the experiences of students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities.

That report, released in 2021, drove home the fact that some students in the district felt “a lack of safety, both social-emotional safety and physical safety.” Racist harassment often went unnoticed or was chalked up to “misunderstandings,” the report read, leaving students of color feeling they had little recourse to respond.

“It is increasingly clear that there is direct harm being caused to students with historically marginalized identities while attending schools in (the district),” the report said. 

In the wake of that report, the district formed an “equity subcommittee” that meets monthly. This year, Heraty said, the committee has focused on hazing, harassment and bullying in middle school. 

But changing the school’s policies is easier said than done, he said. In Vermont, school policies on harassment and bullying are usually, if not always, based closely on model policies released by the Vermont School Boards Association.

Those policies are “written by attorneys very carefully to adhere to the legislation that was approved by the state,” Heraty said. “So I think for us to change or revise those policies is very difficult.”

At the meeting Wednesday, the chair of the Lamoille South school board, David Bickford, thanked parents for bringing the concerns to the district. 

The board would discuss the district’s equity initiatives “to see if the kinds of safeguards that you’re asking about and asking for are incorporated in them,” he said. “And we will review them in light of this conversation.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: At Peoples Academy, allegations of ‘systemic’ racist bullying.

Commission Chair Brian Sirmans said the changes came at the request of the University System of Georgia and are intended to clarify language that had picked up unintended negative meanings over the years.

The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.

The Bedford County School Board voted Thursday to approve a policy preventing teachers from initiating discussions with students about sexual orientation or gender identity.

The policy, which was amended from a 2021 version, is the first of its kind in the state at the school board level, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. It’s also an example of a growing national debate about what teachers can discuss in their classrooms.

The board voted 5-1 to approve the policy update, titled “teaching about controversial issues.” The new language says that teachers may respond to questions from students about sexual orientation or gender, but can’t start those conversations outside of approved curriculum. 

One example that was frequently referenced in discussions about the proposed change had to do with questions that students might have about a teacher’s personal life after seeing a family photo in the classroom.

Under the initial language of the policy update, a teacher would not be able to engage in that conversation at all. Though the board members who wrote the policy said the update applies to curriculum discussions only, others had expressed concerns that the language was too vague and didn’t support students and faculty who identify as LGBTQ+.

The language was amended before the vote to say that the teacher can respond to student questions but should avoid being forthcoming about their life outside the classroom. 

The policy was last revised in fall 2021; prior to that it was last updated in 2012. 

The most recent version said that in teaching about “controversial topics,” instructors were expected to “provide instruction in an atmosphere that is free from bias, prejudice, or coercion,” and to keep related instruction to a level that’s appropriate for the students in question. It did not dictate how or whether teachers could discuss sexual orientation or gender.

School board members Marcus Hill and Christopher Daniels, who sit on the board’s intergovernmental affairs committee with the superintendent, proposed the updated policy for review at the board’s April meeting. 

Minutes from the March 2023 committee meeting, where a review of the policy was first discussed, are not included in monthly minutes archived in a Bedford County Public Schools Google Drive folder.

In a heated discussion about the language of the proposed policy at the board’s May meeting, Daniels stressed that parents should be the first to respond to their children’s questions about sexual orientation or gender, not teachers or counselors.

On Thursday, school board member Susan Mele cast the only vote against the policy change. In discussion before the vote, she raised concerns that the policy language may make it difficult to fairly determine whether classroom discussions are “reasonable” or “controversial.”

The ACLU sent a letter to the school board on June 6 warning against approving the policy change.

“By using incredibly broad terms to define its prohibitions, this provision invites discriminatory enforcement,” the letter says. “Anyone who discusses or acknowledges any aspect of LGBTQ+ identity will fear running afoul of the policy, while the myriad of daily explicit and implicit discussions of heterosexuality or cisgender identity will be assumed to be the default and thus permissible under this policy.” 

Hill City Pride, a nonprofit supporting the LGBTQIA+ community in the greater Lynchburg area, also issued a letter ahead of the vote. “Due to its subjective nature and a lack of clear guidelines, teachers will have no definitive way of knowing which conversations will be perceived as appropriate,” it wrote. “This will breed an environment of fear for educators, students and all who identify as LGBTQIA+, which will result in their silence and isolation.” 

School board chair Susan Kirby said she didn’t comment on the policy when it was first discussed earlier in the spring. “I do know there are a lot of homes in this county in which the teacher is the only one that a student feels safe going to talk to,” she said.

She added, “On the same token, I believe teachers should maintain professionalism and keep their personal life at home as much as possible.”

Some in the audience applauded the move after a public comment session that included mixed reactions from community members.

Amy Snead, a parent who identified herself as a member of the parental rights group Moms for Liberty, said during public comment, “If an issue arises such as gender identity or sexual orientation, the parents should always be the first conversation about this, regardless of anything else.” Critics of Moms for Liberty say it promotes conspiracy theories that children are being sexualized in school.

In his remarks following the vote, Superintendent Marc Bergin said that Bedford County Public Schools does not tolerate discrimination against staff or students “with regard to any of their personal characteristics” and that “school is and must always remain a safe space for everyone.”

The revised policy resembles a law passed in Florida last year to prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender in classrooms. Opponents of the legislation have termed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law; it is officially called the Parental Rights in Education law.

Pro-LGBT group Equality Virginia has called the Bedford County approval the state’s first “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” rule and has said it could lead to further limitations on classroom discussion. 

Some Virginia school systems have considered similar rule changes that reflect policies Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed since taking office last year. 

Youngkin, who has promoted the role of parents in education, has called for additional policies that would prevent educators from addressing students by a pronoun that doesn’t correspond with their enrollment documents and would require transgender students to use restrooms that correspond with their biological sex. The Virginia Department of Education is still reviewing public comment in response to those proposed policies.

Bedford County Public Schools has complied with a 2022 state law that mandates school systems have policies to notify parents about any curricular material that could be viewed as sexually explicit.

In Orange County, north of Charlottesville, the school board has tabled a discussion on whether to implement a policy requiring schools to notify parents if a student “self-identifies” their gender.

The post Bedford County School Board approves policy limiting discussion of sexual orientation and gender appeared first on Cardinal News.

One morning this winter at the Expeditionary School at Black River, tenth grader Zach Taylor was trying to solve a computer problem.

Ahead of an upcoming open house for parents at the Ludlow school, students in a physical science course were programming small beeping computers called Arduinos to perform simple functions. Taylor, a Mount Holly tenth grader, had instructed his Arduino to function as a thermometer. But the device had presented him with a challenge.

“What I’m trying to do right now is change it because right now it’s in Celsius,” Taylor said. “I’m trying to” — he paused as the device suddenly emitted a high screeching sound — “get it to Fahrenheit.”

That class — a group of roughly a dozen students engaged in creative, self-directed projects — embodies the hallmarks of the Expeditionary School, an unusual, grades 7-12 independent program in Ludlow.

The roughly 15-student school, which operates in the now-shuttered Black River High School building, offers a unique program: Each student creates a “Personalized Learning Map” and can choose to take courses such as electronic music production, yoga or computer science. Since opening in 2020, the school has prized hands-on, self-directed learning and works closely with students’ families; in some cases, students’ relatives volunteer at the school in lieu of tuition.

But the new institution is in a difficult spot.

The school has spent the better part of two years in a thus far unsuccessful bid for state approval. Without that approval, the school cannot accept public tuition money, cutting it off from a key funding source.

Now, the school is staring down a new hurdle: a moratorium on all new private school approvals, effective July 1, written into the state Legislature’s budget bill. 

Gov. Phil Scott vetoed that bill last month. But if lawmakers succeed in overriding that veto — or if a new budget contains the same language — the moratorium could force the school to close its doors.

“That’s a question that, as a board, we have to discuss,” said Gary Blodgett, the chair of the school’s board of trustees, in an interview.

‘Full local control’

Like much of rural Vermont, Ludlow, a resort town in the shadow of Okemo Mountain, has faced years of slow declines in school enrollment and rising educational costs.

Following the passage of Act 46 in 2015, the state of Vermont offered incentives — and penalties — to convince small rural school districts to merge with their neighbors. After Ludlow joined a new unified district with the neighboring town of Mount Holly, the public Black River High School shut its doors in 2020.

By that time, however, a group of community members had come up with a different plan: to open a private, or independent, school in the Black River High School building.

The idea was to create a school “whose independent status will allow full local control,” its board of trustees wrote to the Chester Telegraph in April 2020 — one “whose vision and mission arise directly from our community, from its character and needs,” where students would have “true freedom to learn based on their passions.”

The Expeditionary School opened in the fall of 2020 with 15 students and one full-time employee, the head of school. In July 2021, the school applied for state approval.

Administrators said they were told that the whole process — which includes a site visit, recommendation from the Agency of Education, review by a State Board of Education subcommittee and final decision from the state board itself — could take six to eight months.

Instead, agency staffers did not visit the school until March 2022, and a report summarizing that visit was not released until August, a delay education officials attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic.

That highly critical report outlined a series of problems: student documentation was missing, the school did not require “formal lesson plans,” staff did not coordinate with students’ home districts to provide special education, and the school lacked key policies around mandatory emergencies and school safety.

What’s more, according to the report, the school had not been audited, and administrators’ bid for a line of credit from a local bank had been rejected.

“The Independent School review team cannot recommend initial approval, at this time, for the Expeditionary School at Black River due to identified deficiencies in the school’s program,” the agency wrote. “The review team also questions whether ESBR has the financial capacity to remain viable.”

‘This approval system is flawed’

But, in a December response clearly laced with frustration, Expeditionary School leaders rebutted those claims. The school had corrected many of the deficiencies, but the Agency of Education was simply wrong about others, administrators said. State officials had not clearly communicated the approval requirements, were difficult to reach and often failed to reply to emails, Expeditionary School leaders said.

And the entire process — by that time, nearly a year and a half in — had dragged on much longer than the expected six to eight months.

“I believe this approval system is flawed,” Blodgett, the school’s board chair, wrote to the State Board of Education in December. “We are a beginning school, just in our third year, with lots to learn. Although we took issue with some of the visiting team’s findings, we did learn from the report, which finally reached our hands, and have made many adjustments.”

Ted Fisher, a spokesperson for the Agency of Education, said that Covid-19 had created a backlog in the independent school approval process.

“Both the Board and the Agency are working hard to address this backlog as quickly as possible and have made significant progress in recent months,” Fisher said. “The AOE is executing the State Board’s review process as it is articulated in state law and state board rule and working as expeditiously as possible to clear the backlog.”

But from one perspective, it’s clear why the situation would be frustrating. Amid the push to consolidate small school districts, pressure from the state’s education agency ultimately drove Ludlow to close its public school. Now, that same educational bureaucracy seems to be standing in the way of the town’s efforts to replace it with a sustainable private school.

In December, the state Board of Education ultimately voted to deny the Expeditionary School’s bid for approval. The school submitted a new application in April.

By that time, however, the Vermont Legislature was mulling strict new requirements on independent schools. One key provision was written into the state’s budget bill: a moratorium on all new independent school approvals, effective July 1.

If that language ultimately takes effect, it could leave the Expeditionary School with too little time to be approved.

A hard deadline

Expeditionary School administrators and parents say the school is an invaluable asset to its community and its students, many of whom have struggled in traditional education settings.

The Expeditionary School “saved our son, as a learner, but more so as a person,” Becky Wynne, the parent of Expeditionary School students, wrote to Board members last month.

“ESBR has been able to provide my daughter with the support she has needed to push past her anxieties, to be more present and engaged with her learning and to grow in her sense of community,” Christine Reid, another parent, wrote in a separate letter to the board. 

But the school’s approval still appears to be a long shot. It’s unclear whether the usual steps — a recommendation from Agency of Education staff, review by a subcommittee, and then a decision from the Board of Education — could happen in time.

“The Agency is still in the process of reviewing the application and gathering additional information from ESBR,” Fisher, the Agency of Education spokesperson, said in an email. “We hope to be able to provide a recommendation this month. It is premature to say if the Agency will recommend approval, and the decision to approve is ultimately the State Board’s.”

Even if the Agency does issue a recommendation in time, an approval would require 11th-hour action from the state Board of Education, which has ultimate authority over private school approvals.

“I just don’t see the requisite things that need to happen happening before July 1,” said Jennifer Samuelson, the chair of the state Board of Education, which has ultimate authority over private school approvals.

“I mean, I will consider anything that’s ready for the board to consider it,” she added. “But I haven’t seen anything.”

The last week

This past week was the Expeditionary School’s last week of class, and students and teachers were busy with final projects and an end-of-the-year play. One student was expected to graduate on Saturday, the school’s fourth ever.

Administrators said they did not know what would happen if the moratorium took effect before the Expeditionary School could be approved. Amid the uncertainty, the head of school recently accepted another position elsewhere.

Since its inception, the school has relied mostly on donations and fundraisers to operate. On Town Meeting Day, voters approved an unusual ballot article to give $75,000 in public “bridge funding” to the school. Ironically, trustees said, the school is receiving public money from the state of New Hampshire for a student’s tuition — even as it is ineligible for Vermont funds.

But it’s not clear if the school can sustain itself through fundraising for another year.

The board “just works and works and works to try to raise the money to do this,” Blodgett, the board chair, said. “And people have lives. They see the importance of this, but they have lives too.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In Ludlow, a new school faces an existential threat.

This story by Lisa Scagliotti first appeared in the Waterbury Roundabout on May 25.

A little over a year after learning that its school district was using restraint and seclusion with students at an alarming rate, the Harwood Unified Union School District School Board has adopted a new policy that officially bans most uses of the practices starting with the 2023-24 school year in the fall.  

The move means that the school district will now have stricter guidelines in place than state policy allows when it comes to employees and contracted staff who need to manage challenging student behaviors.

The issue has been a top priority this school year after the district’s use of the practices was found to be particularly high among schools in Vermont. Former board member and Brookside Primary School special education teacher Brian Dalla Mura brought the matter to the attention of the board and administration in spring 2022. Dalla Mura, who now works in another school district, pointed to statistics showing reported incidents at what was then Thatcher Brook Primary School in Waterbury in the 2017-18 school year. He found that 281 reports were made based on data collected by the federal Office of Civil Rights.

The 2017 figures are the most recent available and they show 11 Vermont schools with more than 50 restraints, only four of which had greater than 100. Fayston Elementary had 105 restraints and Thatcher Brook was the only one with more than 200, Dalla Mura found. The Harwood district’s total across all schools for that year was 451, he said.  

According to the state definitions, physical restraint means using physical force “to prevent an imminent and substantial risk of bodily harm to the student or others.” The Harwood district’s new policy applies to prone and supine restraints. Prone physical restraint means holding a student face down on their stomach using physical force in order to control the student’s movement. Supine restraint means holding a student on their back using physical force for the same purpose. The techniques can be dangerous and even lethal as they impact the child’s ability to breathe.

Seclusion refers to confining a student “alone in a room or area from which the student is prevented or reasonably believes he or she will be prevented from leaving,” according to the state definition. Doctors, psychologists and advocates say the experience can be traumatizing to a child. This does not include a “time-out” situation where a student is not left alone and is under adult supervision, according to the state rules.

The issue came to light as the district’s administration was in transition. Brigid Nease was in the final weeks of her tenure as superintendent and current Superintendent Mike Leichliter was preparing to start in his new role on July 1. Leichliter moved to Vermont from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a superintendent in a system that bans the practices entirely. Vermont is among a minority of states that still allows the tactics to be used with children as young as preschoolers. 

When the current school year opened last August, Harwood staff and contractors who work as support staff for special education were prohibited from using the restraining techniques and from using closed rooms for seclusion.

Administrators on May 24 shared statistics with the school board saying there have been 39 incidences of restraint — none using prone or supine methods — so far this year compared with 129 by this time last school year. Five restraints in the 2021-22 school year were prone restraints, Leichliter added. Also this year, there have been no seclusions compared with 30 last year, officials said.  

School administrators this year have worked on modifying district protocols, they’ve added in new trainings, and a school board committee began drafting a new policy to address the issue. 

A parallel process began in Montpelier this year led by Waterbury state Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, with the introduction of a bill that would look to ban prone and supine restraints and seclusion statewide. Although state lawmakers took testimony, the legislation did not advance and remains pending for the legislature to take up in 2024. 

An exception permits some seclusion  

In April, the school board committee completed drafting a policy that calls for the elimination of prone and supine restraints. It also would prohibit seclusion with one exception being “in situations where physical restraint is contraindicated for a particular student.” That exception would only be in place until June 30, 2024, according to the new policy. 

Leichliter and other administrators assured the board that they believed the exception is unlikely to be used and that those circumstances are rare and have not occurred this year or in recent memory. 

That exception led several board members to not vote for the new policy on Wednesday. While the measure received nine votes in favor, Fayston representatives Mike Bishop and Danielle Dukette both voted no; Duxbury member Life LeGeros abstained. The chair typically does not vote; Waterbury board member Marlena Tucker-Fishman was absent.

All three who were not in the “yes” column thanked the policy committee and the administrators for their work on the policy but said they would have liked to see a full ban on seclusion. 

“I don’t think it makes any sense to let it go for another year,” Bishop said.

Dukette agreed, calling the new policy “a substantial step forward” that falls short of the input the board heard from the community on the issue. “The input from the community was quite extensive and very passionate. There are strong feelings against the use of seclusion,” she said. “They are now working effectively without it … I had to vote in support for what the community has spoken so strongly about. That’s my job on this.” 

Leichliter said the point was discussed at length at the policy committee level with administrators. “While the belief is that the district wants no instances of seclusion, the committee felt that if a parent felt that for reasons like personal physical trauma that seclusion was preferred as opposed to restraint, there should be a very specific procedure written that would consider this as an option with medical documentation,” he said. 

The new policy also requires that school staff follow state guidelines in using seclusion. Procedures on how to implement seclusion under this new approach are needed for next school year, he noted. 

LeGeros acknowledged the challenge the committee had in crafting a policy that charts new ground. “It is such a tough issue because there was just a lot of harm done by our district and probably resulting trauma from that. It’s awkward because most of us weren’t necessarily here or at this table during that time,” he said. “But when there’s a process that’s creating harm — especially disproportional to people who are from marginalized communities — you gotta stop the harm. I appreciate the leadership from [Leichliter] for stopping that as far as restraints go. Ultimately, the fact that we allow seclusion to last another year, there’s no secret that I’m disappointed in that.” 

Reached on May 25 after the vote, Wood echoed disappointment that seclusion was not fully banned for another year but she said she was happy to see the district take the first step in moving away from the tactics that are considered harmful and dangerous. “The school district has made great progress in the last year, and I look forward to continuing that progress for the safety of students and staff. I am hopeful that the bill I have introduced banning seclusion and restraint, H.409, will be adopted during the next legislative session,” Wood said. “Although the state has a policy on the use of restraint and seclusion, obviously there is no enforcement and very little data tracking on this issue. The impact on students is undeniable and so this needs to change on a statewide level.”

Dalla Mura, whose experience witnessing restraint and seclusion at Brookside prompted him to research the issue and call for change, said last week that he was happy to see the new policy adopted for the coming school year. “I look forward to the 2024-2025 school year when seclusion will also be banned in HUUSD schools,” he said. “Although the new policy gives me hope that fewer students will be subjected to inappropriate and dangerous restraint practices moving forward, my heart goes out to the students and families that were impacted by past practices.”

Warren board member Jonathan Young reflected on the issue just before the vote was taken, saying he didn’t think the school board and administration could have made such a significant change so quickly just several years ago when he joined the board. “It’s amazing and refreshing and hopeful to me that we’ve come so far so quickly,” he said. “We made good decisions. It makes me proud to be part of this board.”

Board member Ashley Woods of Warren chaired the policy committee. “It was a huge learning experience for me — just the intensity of this issue and how important it is to this community,” Woods said, thanking a number of individuals involved in the process including the superintendent, Director of Student Services Jon Berliner, consultant Dyane Lewis Carrere who is an author and expert on childhood trauma and education, and Dalla Mura. “And all the people who have chimed in and made their feelings known … all the passionate parents who have struggles. We get it, this is a big deal. It’s a big policy change. Thanks to the whole board for riding this wave with us all.”

Board Vice Chair Kelley Hackett of Waterbury thanked the policy committee members, acknowledging the gravity of the subject matter. “I know that it was really, really just heart-wrenching at times … hearing things, and just going through the emotions,” she said. “I really appreciate the time and effort that you took.” 

A request to acknowledge past harm

At the start of last week’s meeting, Dalla Mura was the only individual to comment during the public comment period. He thanked those in the community who advocated for the revised restraint-seclusion policy and then asked the board to not move on without acknowledging the impacts of past actions under the old policy. 

“I hope that we’ll hear how the district plans to repair the harm and trauma that it’s inflicted on its students. I hope to hear a public apology to the victims of inappropriate restraint and seclusion, and I hope to hear the district take accountability,” he said. 

He pointed to inadequate oversight over the years from the state Agency of Education, Board of Education and Mental Health Department. “However, there’s no excuse for the harm that has been inflicted upon hundreds of individual students in the care of HUUSD over the past decade — thousands if you include witnesses,” he said. 

Dalla Mura said he believes restraint and student seclusion were implemented in an intentional way over the years in the school district. “Harwood chose to allow contracted service providers to hold young children face down on the floor. In fact, we paid millions of dollars to outside agencies to do this. Harwood also made a conscious decision to build and use a seclusion room to isolate students,” he noted. “These were conscious decisions, not accidents. Ignorance and good intentions are not an excuse for the harmful impacts.”

Banning prone restraints and seclusion is just the beginning of reversing harmful practices, Dalla Mura suggested. “Once you vote to approve this policy … the job of the board is not done,” he said, calling for the policy subcommittee to continue.

“We know that countless parents and staff were ignored and silenced when they raised concerns about how their students were being restrained and secluded. Please consider hearing testimony from additional experts about how you can prevent this from going undetected in the future. Please consider working on a complaint and investigation process,” he said. “This district desperately needs help with accountability. Don’t blame this on a statewide problem. We shouldn’t need a law to tell us what’s right. Harwood should do what’s right for the sake of doing what’s right.”

Looking ahead

The board as a group did not address the issue of the impacts of the past restraint and seclusion policy. Board members, however, did discuss the possible future role of the committee that drafted the new policy. Committee member Cindy Senning of Duxbury said she found the work the committee did in researching the issue valuable and suggested it would be beneficial for the group to follow through as the policy is implemented. She noted how the seclusion exception ends in a year and that the shift in protocols would impact the relationships the district has with the outside agencies who contract to provide behavioral support staff.

Others agreed. 

The superintendent noted that it’s the board’s prerogative whether to keep a committee active. “It’s up to the board to provide oversight,” he said.

Board Chair Kristen Rodgers of Moretown said that could be something the board discusses at a future meeting. “This could be part of a larger discussion in the fall,” Rodgers said. 

Leichliter and Berliner discussed steps ahead involving staff in all schools as the district looks for new strategies to put into practice with students. They said the shift will involve more training and learning for staff. 

Looking ahead to next year, staff training will continue in trauma-informed practices and social-emotional learning. Each school will have crisis teams, Leichliter noted, and one aim is to have school psychologists in the mix. One challenge is staffing, he added, noting that there currently are approximately six openings for special education staff in the district. A new districtwide position has been created for next year that will be filled by current Moretown Elementary Principal Mandy Couturier. 

Leichliter and Beliner said that they will continue to rely on experts in the field who they have come to know over the past year including Guy Stephens, founder of the nonprofit advocacy organization Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint, who has connected the district with resources. 

Educator and consultant Carrere was well-received on two visits this year, Leichliter said, once last fall for a districtwide training and again in January to work with staff at Brookside. “Teachers have asked for her again,” he said, noting that she will return in June. “We’re continuing that deeper dive with schoolwide strategies to help prevent situations that involve any type of restraint.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Harwood board adopts new policy to ban dangerous student restraints.