E.B. Flory’s voice broke several times on Friday describing how exceptional dedication in different parts of the dairy supply chain kept milk losses to a minimum this week.

Despite catastrophic flooding and road damage across the state, most of what Vermont’s farmers and their herds produced made it to a processing facility, the dairy section chief at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets said, even if it was not their usual one.

“Our cows, goats and sheep in the state, they don’t stop milking, and we have to get that milk, we have to get where it needs to be to be processed,” she said. “This has been a very stressful week, but we’ve had a lot of unexpected things come together that made things work in a successful way.”

The amount of milk that farmers and processors have had to dump was much less than everyone feared on Monday, agency Secretary Anson Tebbetts said during a press event on Friday. There also had been no reports of large-scale loss of livestock to flooding, he said.

Milk buyers within Vermont and in other states did not expect to see the volume of milk that arrived after news of the deluge and its aftermath had spread, Flory said. But from the farmers to the milk haulers to staff at processing plants and her own staff, many people worked around the clock to save the majority of the supply.

“We really only had a handful of instances where milk couldn’t get picked up because farms were inaccessible,” said Amber Sheridan, spokesperson for Cabot Creamery and the Agri-mark dairy cooperative. “It was really a small volume, given the magnitude of flooding.”

Flory and Sheridan gave milk hauling companies and their drivers a great deal of credit for that. 

With main state routes blocked, it took much longer for haulers to drive their regular routes, and more trucks and drivers had to be brought in quickly. Haulers and their dispatchers, who Flory compared to air traffic controllers, worked long hours and communicated frequently about which routes were creating the greatest difficulties. Flory said she was able to communicate those locations directly to the Agency of Transportation, which put them onto the priority list. 

For Agri-mark and Cabot, the biggest challenge was the closure of Route 2, which largely reopened Thursday afternoon, Sheridan said. When a truck could not reach the Cabot processing plant, the driver would be rerouted to Middlebury, or, when Interstate 89 closed on Monday, down to a plant in West Springfield, Massachusetts, so the milk cargo would not be wasted. 

In the background, there were the new larger, more energy-efficient bulk tanks that many farmers across the state were able to buy as part of a federal grant through the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center, based at the state agency. Farms that had upgraded were able to keep milk cool between pickups for three days, rather than two. 

“That was a really big deal,” Flory said. “They made a difference.”

An emergency waiver from the Food and Drug Administration allowed processors a bit more leeway in how long they could hold milk before dumping as well. Product testing still ensured consumer safety, she said.

Beyond that, it was all about the people. 

“It’s been all hands on deck with many different sectors trying to get this done,” Flory said. 

Haulers were incredibly dedicated, creatively trying to get to farms in whatever way possible, she said. “They had their own crises at home, you know. Their basements were flooded, and they were on the road getting the milk,” Flory said. 

And it wasn’t just drivers. In the Northeast Kingdom, agency milk inspector Eric Perkins decided he would help them, going ahead in his car to the next farm to scout the best route to avoid backups and turnarounds. That initiative was so successful that the state’s other inspectors adopted the practice in the other corners of the state. 

“He stepped up and did something really innovative that we’ve never done before, and it really worked,” Flory said. 

Evaluating flooded crops and fields

While damaged roads were the immediate crisis to overcome, they are becoming more passable by the day. Now farmers are turning to evaluating flooded crops, hayfields and stored bales to determine how much damage the rains caused to what their livestock needs to eat. 

“In our hilly state, some of our most fertile farmland lies in the river valleys,” Tebbetts said at the Friday morning event. Across Vermont, “countless fields of corn, hay, vegetables, fruit and pasture were swamped and buried,” he said.

Heather Darby, an agronomist with the University of Vermont Extension service, is visiting many of them. On Friday, she traveled from Swanton to Hardwick by car to lend her expert eye. She helped write two different informational sheets for farmers on flooded corn and flooded forage.

So far she has been pleased to see that most of the corn and soybean fields she has examined appear likely to recover. Unlike Tropical Storm Irene, which occurred in late summer, those crops are younger and should regrow and bounce back. 

“Corn does have the ability to sort of stand itself back up, so it’s really a watch-and-see game for a lot of the fields right now,” Darby said. 

Hayfields are another story. They are her biggest concern right now. 

Most farmers had been waiting to take the second or third cut of this year’s hay until after the latest bout of rain. Where a field was flooded, that entire cutting is lost. 

“They’ve got to chop it off and get it off the field so that those grasses can regrow,” Darby said. 

If farmers want to try to save it, the crop should be stored separately from non-flooded silage and tested repeatedly for bacteria and toxins produced by fungus or mold. 

At the farm she was headed to in Hardwick, flooded by the Lamoille River, even that may not be possible. 

“The fields have so much debris on them, and there is so much silt on the fields, so we are not sure if the grass will die,” she said. She is going to try to advise the owners on whether they need to replant entirely. 

For bales and other stored silage that got wet, the future is questionable. Some may be usable, but also need to be repeatedly tested. If hay was fully submerged for several days, it’s unlikely that it is safe for animals to eat, even if wrapped, Darby said. 

Jane Clifford, who runs an eighth-generation dairy farm in Starksboro with her husband, said her farm was spared, but she has close friends in the region who had hundreds of active acres underwater. 

While the losses are large, and dairy farming has unique challenges, farmers are aware they are just one of many small businesses who are reeling right now, she said. 

“It’s frustrating. It’s hard. But for those of us in the industry, it’s a business,” Clifford said. “I look at all the businesses in downtown Montpelier or Barre that were impacted. I look at it that we are all kind of in the same boat.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s dairy industry saved majority of milk supply during catastrophic storm.

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.