 Good evening and welcome to Montpellier Civic Forum. We are on the road to town meeting day 2020 and This is a very special election. It's a different one because we have one district that has No incumbent and it has two candidates running basically with Ashley Hill Resigning we have one person for a one-year term and we have The other one contested for a two-year term So we have some good candidates and good races up in district three District two Connor Casey is running unopposed and in district one Donna Bade is running unopposed So what we did is we paired them together and we did a one-hour show, which is really good It's in two half-hour blocks and then we also have Anne Watson talking about her candidacy She's running unopposed as well, but she's going to explain why she should return We have Bill Fraser talking about the city budget. We have Libby talking about the school budget We have all of the school board candidates who are running all of which are going to sit on this school board and I have one tonight. I have Mara Iverson. Wow Mara What district do you live in? District one and district one and How long have you lived in Montpelier? I've lived in Montpelier for six years the same period of time that I've lived in Vermont Oh my goodness. You came and you came here from where? Texas. What part of Texas? College station. I was working at Texas A&M a little bit of culture shift Not only culture shift, but weather shift a little bit Now you are on the school board right now, but just on the school board like this, right? Yes Could you talk about how you came about to take Rebecca's seat? Start by why did you file papers a paper of intent? That's a great question because you know like school boards not everybody's cup of tea for how they want to contribute I went to a school board meeting last year It was they were doing a diversity statement they were kind of gonna do like an announcement of the fact that they were gonna put one in place and I was I'm in the Vermont coalition for ethnic studies and social equity and So we were going to go basically just to you know cheerlead like yay. Good job And as I was listening to them having conversations about other things that were going on I One thing that came up was something around like days off from school and who is allowed to have them and for What reasons what justifies and there was a topic all of a sudden that came up around You know students who who face socio-economic challenges and I grew up as a free lunch kid And so I was wrapped with attention all of a sudden and I realized as they were having these conversations But that that it seemed like there were a lot of folks that were Just hadn't come from that background and I just thought like wow I would really like to be able to be on the board and be able to speak from my leg I was a freed lunch kid and I'm an LGBT person and And you know just kind of wrap my mind around Youth who maybe don't get voice or seen the same way now You're another minority on that board along with Tina Muncie. Mm-hmm. And what would that be? Well, that's that's a good question now. I feel like I don't know you don't have a child in the school Oh, that's valid. Yes. That is very much a minority and I So my job 24 7 is Outright Vermont, which is a youth advocacy organization. So in a lot of ways, I feel like my kids are Vermont's kids So, I mean, I obviously don't have 89,000 children, but a lot of times I feel like The work that I do is responsible for like I have to care about them and think about them all the time and so that Was a really comfortable transition to thinking about Montpelier that like I live in this town and these kiddos are going to Contribute to the world that I live in and so it might be a cool way to Channel my energy and my interests to help out with school board Even though you don't have a child even though I don't have a child It's not a different perspective on the board Do you feel like that it not having a horse in the race or do you feel that that's different for you? That you can step back and look at it differently than people who have children in school I think so and I think it's really that like you would absolutely have to have a mix of all different sorts of things Like I think it would be brilliant to have folks who have had children But don't currently or who have maybe a brand new one And they are gonna be and maybe people who have none at all like me or kid people who have kiddos in the schools right now because they're all coming at The question of like what is public education and what is public education for our youth here in Montpelier with different Perspectives and so mine is very much a civic perspective. I'm coming at it from a lake these are our responsibility we're the grown-ups and What we decide what is important enough to teach the youth and we decide what is some degree We have a curriculum that the state is Right that we're working right and we don't have that right well we being the grown-ups okay the grown-ups collectively And so my little piece of the grown-up puzzle is in this particular school district There's a place for the board to sometimes be a sounding board for things that are going on or just like a gut check for much Right well and the the the actual board doesn't have a lot of official like I mean past the budget and Like superfights is super intended You're also setting policy. Yes, that's true. Which is important and I'm really excited about that. That's one of the reasons that I decided that it would be worthwhile at least to try for a period of time because policy is It's just the structure that we use to like exist on a daily basis and if you are a kid who is left out of that policy or who a policy negatively affects that means Every moment that you're at school. That's the fishbowl that you are swimming in and you can't escape it So really good policy is what holds the kids and makes them be okay in school and bad policy Can make kids uncomfortable and even unsafe at school Getting on that school board where everybody else has been working meshing peddling together for a while and You're dropped into the budget process. Nevertheless, the most complicated part of the year. That was a lot It was it was spectacular to hear the level of conversation. I Had not thought a whole lot about school budget in the past because I mostly just thought like Whatever they want you can't take enough of my money for education. Whatever you think you need to take it But as I was hearing the the rationale and as I was hearing the meticulous attention To well, what are taxpayer interests and then what is in the best interest of the youth? And then what's in the long-term sustainability of the school? I was like, wow, these people are taking such good care of this school district. They really really want Everybody to win to the extent that you know a budget ever really can I think everyone's always Got something they wanted or didn't get something they wanted As you were to learn in a budgeting process, most of the budget is fixed and established You're only working on the margin. Yeah a little bit at the side And then there's a great deal like your health care that you can't even control, right? But what we can control pretty much is frozen in City as Libby and Bill, you know said on their shows Ennibbling on the margins and those margins are established by policy from the board Mm-hmm, and that's exciting. It means that things that are on a lot of times What's on the margins is stuff that like it's on the margins because it's not part of the big core things and Often the youth that I'm interested in working with and the issues that I'm interested in and the kind of education that I'm interested in Are the things that end up out on those margins? So I'm always wondering what is the kind of education that you're interested in that would be on those margins That's such a good question I I love innovative education and new trying out new ideas and that's Inherently on the margin because it shifts and it changes and what the new idea at any given time what it's gonna be can can be different over time and There are also kind of like art art programs music programs things like that that are often Just at the edge of being Well, can we fund them as much as we want? Can we fund them at least part? Can we maybe not fund them at all right now in order to make everything fit and we don't Have those same conversations around like you know sports or whatever Well, I mean to the extent we do also have conversations about like what can we and can't we do in any given? Kind of extracurricular area, but those are often the areas that like keep kids in school They are often the things that make kids want to keep Trying and that's critical to a public school You touched on two issues in passing That have really become hot-button issues in a sense in our district One is closing the achievement gap between kids who are on subsidized lunches and food stamps and the rest And that is not an issue. That's a 2019 issue a 2020 issue that's an issue most likely were you in this town When you were growing up that would have been an issue for you, right? Right. I didn't grow up here. I grew up in Western, Pennsylvania, but it was the issue for my family. Yeah What can we do you can experience it directly you have family situations? Where there's stress? I mean not having enough to really make it is a stressful situation It is and what and it's it's it's not just stressful like some of the time I think sometimes folks who aren't used to having kind of marginalized identities aren't aware of So marginalized identities usually mean like the folks who don't have power if we're looking at a particular group So if we're looking at skin color, it's folks who are not white Those are people who have more of which is very few up here very few and so those people are experiencing tremendous stress and LGBT people as opposed to their straight and cisgender peers just just one more time. Yeah, we're gonna try it Would you define that? What what does the acronym stand for LGBT? Yeah, and then throw a cue on there That's such a good one So lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer and then you can add like a plus sign for the expanding realm of identities Is queer a pejorative if I were to sit and here's one kid call another queer is that a pejorative or is that? This is a gray issue One of the fascinating things about my job is that I get to actually talk to youth and What I have heard from the current youth is that a lot of them are happy to use the word queer for themselves as Their label if it makes sense for them, but they would not feel comfortable calling someone else Queer or calling the community queer unless a person specifically instructed them that that was their label So they're owning the pejorative in a sense. They've taken a pejorative and They're owning that negativity in a positive way Well, and that's been a story for decades at this point with the word queer kind of that reclaiming and interestingly the kids are actually starting to shift in a direction of Reclaiming was good But what if we still recognize that it is also pejorative and it does do harm to some people and it is still wielded like a weapon Sometimes so in those situations, it's good to be aware that we want to reclaim it And it's also been used for harm and neither of those things is going away This is showing my age and the age of some of these people who are going to be watching this tonight When our child who's in his mid 20s now was at the high school. They had the gay straight club Is that a pejorative? So there's lots of debate about those club names too. And so there's sort of some people have moved to queer straight alliance Some people have moved the GSA to gender and sexuality alliance to be more encompassing But they come up with all kinds of clever words to try and cover the fact that we're dealing with many more identities than we were talking about like say 20 30 years ago now we have Nonconforming students. Mm-hmm. Nonconforming in what sense if we're going through the like the nomenclature tonight, right? What is nonconforming? So gender nonconforming pretty much just means that we have some expectations around gender Not requirements, but things that don't surprise us. So an example would be like No one is surprised to find out that a girl has worn dresses in her life But people might be surprised to hear that up here. You might not It depends but like boys wearing dresses is still Categorically less common and enough that people would notice right or the people might go Oh, you're a boy who's wearing a dress and so youth who don't conform to the sort of expectation or their behaviors Are ones that would be enough for people to go. Oh, that's different for someone of your gender People who do that consistently and who that's part of their identity is breaking those Those norms we often use gender nonconforming for those kiddos My wife and I were walking the dogs back home on Loomis Street We saw a meeting one evening. It was well attended at Union Elementary School Dealing with transgender and nonconforming students in the elementary school. Were you part of that? I was gonna say was it back in the spring because No, I think it was later. I think it was like in the fall. Yeah, that's a good question I have done trainings on that topic at UBS. Okay. What would those trainings consist of? What would the parents be? Therefore, what would they hear would those be parents or parents with their children? Um, I I think I would say parents rather than parents with their children mostly just because it's like a two-hour training and that is That is not a kiddo Attention span that is a lot for small folks So usually what we do is we get the baseline stuff about understanding how gender works in our brains how gender works amongst each other How gender folds into who we're attracted to and so we pull apart those pieces first because a lot of folks are Still dealing with like a smattering of information that comes from 20 years of pull together So that baseline first and then from there a discussion of and we usually talk about the youth risk behavior survey data and How so youth risk behavior survey is this really fascinating tool that the Center for Disease Control operates and They it is available to all states and states are supposed to implement it We are actually pretty rare because all of our kids take it every two years We only have like 89,000 people in the state who are in our school district. That's fewer than Chicago public schools district so we get to do like a census of our youth and the risk behavior part of it is what are risks that they might be Experiencing like bullying or what are risks that they might be engaging in like vaping? And so it gets a picture of what those risk factors are and we get a chance to see County data break. I was just about to say in your position where you work you would be able to see the state of Vermont Yeah, community by community or county by county. How does that feel you're compared to the state of Vermont? We're pretty average or pretty dead center in almost everything the There's a reality that in some ways that and I would assume it's because it's a Heavily involved community and a really well-funded school that On average kids tend to do a little slightly better than the average or we tend toward on target in the middle As much as there can really be a target with risk behaviors. It's What would that risk behavior be in this case? Besides drug or promiscuity or things like that and promiscuity is not really so you'd be thinking about things like Bullying If a student reported that they didn't feel safe at school or on the way to or from school Some of the risk factors are actually things that people wouldn't even think of measuring all the time Like do you use suntan lotion? Do you wear your seatbelt? What is your physical activity like? What is your you know, and then there's all you know kind of mental health? Pieces and then there are also belonging pieces. There's a question on the survey about Do you feel that you matter to people in your community? And so some of it's really concrete like do you smoke marijuana and some of it is a lot more Broad like do you feel like you're valued in community? What are parents attending that meeting? Who don't have children who are non-conforming or questioning of their stereotypical gender? You know expectation. What are those parents there for I think that first of all There is no reason for anyone not to know that information. It's useful information about life, right? there are People who are boys and people who are girls and people who are a blend of those or neither of those things at all or Something that else that isn't even captured by those and all of those are way that ways that humans exist And just because it isn't my identity doesn't mean it isn't valuable for me to know how other people exist in the world So that's how I see it for community members who maybe don't have kids at school at all or For people who have kiddos who are you know straight and cisgender This is gender so cisgender usually means like the label that's on your birth certificate Like if it says F and you always felt like a girl you're a cisgender girl And if your birth certificate says M and you always felt like a boy cisgender boy Yeah, so straight and cisgender kiddos still need to know about all of the other ways that people exist How was our curriculum at Union shaped? for acceptance of this community I Am still not super familiar with all of the curricular pieces, but I do know that Ryan the principal did a really really concerted effort around trying to get people to have conversations I was part of some of the conversations last year around like well What is what's the climate at school like? What are what's the buzz that we're hearing? What are some small actions that we can take interventions we could use? And so the curriculum kind of is gonna the curriculum curriculum obviously comes down from the state Right, and it doesn't have anything in it about I was gonna ask that whether Vermont covers that yet No, not really and that's why the act one 2019 act one that creates the working group to create to suggest social and Ethnic and social equity standards. Where is that right now? It was last year. It was introduced. What's going on? Yes, so it's just I actually also sit on that Working group and so we have had our first couple of meetings and the next thing that happens is we submit our work plan So that's coming up next in the next couple months here is the actual Here's what we're going to do in the steps in the timeline and it's a long. It's a long process It's like a three year over the course of of time and the obviously the hope at the end of it Is that we come up with a list of Here are content not specific, you know, like You need to teach about claudic Colvin so much as claudic Colvin is Was Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks was Rosa Parks, okay? so not so much like individual people or situations but Competencies air things that people should be functional to know Just on the state level when we're talking about Act 1 and the like What happens to religious conservatives in this who feel that that their core values are under assault? That's a really good question and I think it's one that yeah like as a member of the Vermont coalition that kind of pushed For the legislation and kind of got it through and it's still supporting the people who are working on them Working group that that was constant part of conversation was being being mindful of cultures in general and religions are cultures And we actually were careful What we what we didn't want was to create a situation where people who already have a voice and who already have More power in the situation Could use the legislation to take more power away from other people so it's Even for people even for people who feel a little bit like well schools don't have the same values that I Want them to have or that they used to have Those are often still people whose overall value set is still more common or their overall Religion is still more common than say our youth in schools who are Muslim And so when you know when you're kind of looking at this group that's got very little power And is that the like mercy of everyone else? It really requires that you say you might have to be Uncomfortable with things in order for everyone to be safe Because sometimes what happens is the like the big group It's a give-and-take. Yeah. Yeah, it is I sometimes talk about LGBT kiddos and the bathroom concept There are people who are like well, I don't feel comfortable with my kid sharing the bathroom with those kids And I'm like, okay, but that kid is not your child is not unsafe in that situation Your discomfort doesn't necessarily mean that the bathroom itself and the way that they interact with it isn't safe but for an LGBT kids specifically trans kids for them to use the bathroom that isn't right for them and being transgender being The label that's on your birth certificate and the gender that you feel like are not a match My experience as a parent who had a child in the school was that for decades This school has been extremely sensitive. The kids have been extremely inclusive in terms of Acceptance of one another. It's a small community. You've seen that kid at the community. We don't have many new kids Is bullying a real problem on this issue? I think My answer to that would be that bullying is still a problem even in Montpelier school district It's not it's absolutely not the worst school district in the state We're kind of middling here on as on a lot of things but Bullying doesn't always look like we picture it in the movies like somebody shoving your head in the toilet or pushing you into a locker Sometimes bullying looks like someone comes up to you next to you in the cafeteria as you're trying to get your lunch and they say something like Nice dress or something like that in our district Yeah, well, I mean like the stuff that happens is often And I know that word will be jarring for some people just just aware that that is a hard word for some folks to hear But that stuff does still happen in the district doesn't happen more online than in been live It I don't I don't know that I could say it happens more online than live What I do know is that it does happen online and that makes it such a hard thing for parents and students and school folks alike to deal with Because when it's happening online, when is it is it is it the schools to deal with at all if the message Has been sent during the lunch hour while they were technically on school grounds But it was part of a conversation that started last night while everybody was at positive pie Where's the line who's responsible for what gets said and doesn't get said in those situations and there is definitely some when there's physical distance between people and it especially if there's Platforms where you can be anonymous it can still get really really ugly Yeah, but it does still happen in person too, and it's not always direct name calling either It's also sometimes just the being erased from stuff And I wouldn't call that bullying But I would say it contributes to a climate where people don't where it doesn't feel good to be in school So a great example is if you're a non-conforming kid and your teacher comes in in the morning and says good morning boys and girls You're not in that group. You're not a boy or a girl So do am I included in the good morning or am I not if we say line up boys over here and girls over here? Where am I supposed to go? See you talking about teacher training and appropriate? Yeah, all kinds of things and that stuff is Appropriate for students so that they can treat one another as peers differently. It's appropriate for teachers It's appropriate for community and family everybody could use a bone up on those skills Let's go back to the the question of the achievement gap because that's so important. What do you think we can do as a district? Intangible terms to close that gap for low-income kids in the elementary school Well, I'm personally really excited actually about the state-level legislation that's happening right now around the possibility of free lunch for universally for everyone who's attending Vermont schools Because it is a thing to take off of the radar one fewer thing to worry about one fewer thing to to Spend your mental energy on and your resource energy on And that feels really important to me basically just going back to my own remembering my own childhood Did you know like the worry that the wrong person was gonna find out that I was on free lunch and make fun of me But so let's let's put that aside for a second. Yeah You're you're a low-income family regardless of whether you've got free lunch or not Let's not even say that for people who are well below Average regardless of why? What can we how can we close that achievement gap and a largely middle-class and upper middle-class district? Hey, well, and I know I hate to redirect you, but that I don't hate to redirect you I'm clearly gonna do it. Anyway the things like the universal free lunch Are things that are intended they don't seem like they're closing an achievement gap But when we think about things like minority stress theory, which is the idea that people who are Who have marginalized identities as we talked about that they are under a non-stop 24-7? Mental pressure that doesn't exist for the people in the dominant categories Do a small thing like we're not worried about lunch anymore lunch just happens Means we are suddenly spending our time in math Potentially thinking about math instead of thinking about the kid who's gonna make fun of me for being in the free lunch line right, so there is a direct connection to Achievement when we talk about ways to make People who are having to experience stressors Be able to let go of some of those stressors they come off and all of a sudden the Barriers to achievement are less not non-existent but fewer Drugs in the high school. It's been a constant over over decades that Montpelier wink winks about drugs in the high school I Feel like that is That's a theme that I have heard actually from lots and lots of schools over lots and lots of time is that the school Doesn't really well not just Vermont like all over the place that schools don't really do enough to crack down on the Drugs or they subtly let it go on or like everybody knows you can go to the bathroom and blah blah blah those I think that youth will Always find a way to be testing boundaries and to be Getting whatever their need met is and for some of them that will be using a substance and sometimes that might be on school grounds, but my experience of Like talking to Montpelier youth is that they're The way that they talk about it and the way that they when they're discussing what they actually see your Experience are different so they sometimes have this perception that they're like well You know people are smoking all over the place all the time But if you break it down and really talk to them like okay, well, where did you see it? What did you see it turns out that they're like, okay? I'm I really just saw it the once but my friend said that they saw it and then it gets to be almost allure So that's been my experience. It's not that there's no problems ever at school over drug use at school It's just that the lore that the school doesn't try to make interventions or that it's subtly Passed off as unimportant does seem to be mostly lore Do you believe that our students feel safe at school? And that that's a national question that boils itself down to a very small town in Vermont Well, what do you mean by our students? Union elementary school students Do you believe that they feel that they're safe in that school safe from someone coming in and Doing horrible thing. That's a good question. So I asked that because I was like if you ask If you ask a child of color if they feel safe at school The answer is very likely going to be different than for a white kid So it's really interesting to talk about like do our kids feel safe at school because different kids Have different access to safety, but if we're talking about big things like Someone coming in with a gun, right exactly Um, I don't know a lot about elementary school But I do know a lot about the middle and high schoolers and they do feel upset and unsafe And it's not anything that we as a community can do to address that. I This is this is a Reality that I have heard from the students is there And not every student I don't talk to every student But many of the students that I talked to feel like if there were fewer guns in general That would feel better it wouldn't solve the problem But maybe it would feel better and I I don't know the answer to that but that is Absolutely something that's a perception of the kiddos is that it's just so it it's prevalent It happens and it doesn't happen here all the time But the fact that they wonder they just wonder is today going to be the day that But is that a societal American thing that's just working its way down to a ton of 7900. I mean To an extent I think yes to an extent. I think it's just kind of like a big thing But every community has got slightly different You know kind of dynamics going on Montpelier is a small community that has a lot of internal trust And that is tremendously valuable in terms of reducing the likelihood that there will be violent incidents But Vermont is also a place where gun ownership is less legislated than in other places and so if kids are kind of like How easy is it for someone to go and get access to a gun that's gonna be a different question So there's all those different pieces kind of coming together as one culture in Montpelier It's the culture of Montpelier High School too focused on getting into a better college We do the AP courses we do all is there too much pressure on that at Montpelier I I don't think so and that is Mainly coming from my experience of the flexible pathways programs Now what is the flexible pathways program? So the flexible my perception? This is just kind of how I think about it is We we decide what school entails right? What does it mean to be educated do? Do you have to take algebra to in order to have been in order to have received an education? And that is a question that we ask ourselves all the time What do we have what do students have to do by the time that they graduate? What could they do? What constitutes learning? What's valuable and? The beautiful thing about a flexible pathways program is it opens the field and says There's so much that can be learning and there's so much that can be valuable that can pick up the skills and the proficiency To get out absolutely and so sometimes it's not the content that matters as much is that you're learning things like time management Which is going to be across the board a critical thing for the rest of your life Where you're learning perseverance or you're learning how to fail and You know like be creative through failure all of those things are things that you can do in flexible pathways But you get to engage with Stuff that you're picking stuff that feels right for you and there's room even for some Experimentation for some testing the waters and going you know, I thought I wanted to do that I'm glad I spent a semester because I don't but isn't Matt McLean's community connect community-based learning That's sort of thing where you can just test. I'm interested in this I go out a shadow people Yeah, that is one element of the flexible pathways options And there are tons more like the tech center is to is one of the flexible pathways options And they're just even kind of self-directed study that where you touch base with a group or with a teacher But you do a lot of the learning like within yourself and on your own time Those things are also flexible pathways options, which we start middle school And I mean middle school is a time when we're doing more and more self Self-study. Mm-hmm. Mara. I want to thank you for coming as there's been an excellent session Congratulations on being on the board Congratulations on being re-elected since no one is running against you I hope that I do not lose to Mickey Mouse. No, you will not lose to me Mara, thank you and I want to thank all of you for watching this show I hope that you'll watch the other shows because they're really good and It's an interesting set of candidates this year and these are good shows But most important get out and vote on town meeting day I realize that there are a ton of races that are unchallenged But you don't have budgets that are unchallenged and basically the fundamental bedrock of democracy is Participation by people like you and people like me all of our neighbors. Thank you for watching this show