 the genesis of U32. I'm happy here on this episode today to have a couple of my former teachers at Union High School District Number 32 as it was officially known before we voted on our name and chose U32. And today we'll be talking about the Social Studies Department and how that was taught there, but also about how did they choose to come to this school and their experience being in this high school at that time, opening in the fall of 1971. And Barry was there, Barry Kupetski, on my far left, was there at the very beginning of the school and Sandy Molman came the following year. Third year. Third year, OK. And very glad to have both of you here today. Was happy to see you at the reunion for the first 10 years earlier this summer. And very much looking forward to talking about this today. So Barry, since you were there at the very beginning, when did you first hear about this school in your job application process? I taught for a year in Iowa. And I knew I didn't want to stay there because it was home. That's where I was brought up. So of course, you have to go somewhere. And my wife and I had never been to New England. So we said, let's go to New England. So we applied to every single school district in Vermont, New Hampshire, Western Maine, Western Massachusetts. For our effort, we received one letter for an interview in Dover, New Hampshire. Turned out they had no opening. They were just doing it as a courtesy. So what do you do? You take to the road and you knock on doors. And we had an- Sorry, can you tell me when did you first put out all those applications? This would have been April and March of 1971. So just a few months before the school was opening? Yeah, yeah. Interviewed at Richmond with Ralph Barrows, the third, who was very proud that that school, I just liberalized its rules so that men could have mustaches and women could wear pantsuits. And I was glad there were no openings because I knew that would not be a school for me. I was not any crazy, wild-eyed radical, but I just didn't like that kind of confinement. The school I taught at in Iowa was like that. He said, but you know, there's this new school down the road. You might try them. And their office was then in the old Plainfield High School. And so we just knocked on the door and showed up. And Bill Grady greeted us in his way. And we had what we thought was an interview. And we never applied to the school, understand, because it was not in the Patterson's Index. The Patterson's Index? It was an index of all secondary schools in every state. So we never applied to U-32 or Washington Northeast, as it was known then. And after the interview, Grady said, well, you have a job. OK, that's great. So I went back home, told my principal, and my wife was just graduating then. And we got ready to move. And it came to be May. And I called us and said, do you have a contract? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And by late May, I remember coming back, I was fishing after school. And I got a call from Al Stevens, who was the senior staff member of Social Studies. And he said, well, we'd like to offer you a job. And I remember being, OK, I didn't say this, but I thought I already had a job. It turns out that was the real offer. Bill Grady made many job offers like mine. And one of the causes of animosity in the beginning was that people who were offered jobs by Bill Grady really weren't jobs. And they were a little sore about it. And some of those people were also people who had been teaching in Montpelier and in other schools in the area. And they gave up other jobs? Because they hired nobody from the local area, save one person, I think. The only one I can think of is the old McEvoy in math. No one else was a teacher in the local area. So the people from the local schools had applied? Yes. And they had been given offers, but then not actually followed through the contract? They may have been verbal offers, in some cases, like what Bill Grady did to us. So that was the real offer. So of course we accepted it. There was no plan to offer Russian in the curriculum. So your job offer was to teach social studies? Mime of social studies. For the full range, 7 through 12th grade? 7 through 12. And my wife was Russian. And her job offer, when she first applied, was to teach 7 through 12th Russian and French. So that was added just because she happened to be coming and knew it. Because she knew Russian, yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah, so Russian got added to the curriculum because, oh, this is an opportunity. That's kind of cool, yeah. My sister was thrilled to take Russian. I understand that philosophy. I agree with it to a certain extent. So we packed up our things and moved to Vermont. It was the only job offer we got. OK. So and Al Stevens had already been hired. Yes. Is he still in the area? He's in Washington. He's in Washington. Seattle. Seattle, OK, yeah. OK, so that would have been harder to arrange an interview. OK, and can you tell us about your decision, Sandy, of coming to U32? By this time, it had a reputation. Unbeknownst to me. Oh, OK. Unbeknownst to me. I'm somewhat similar to Barry's, but I had been teaching for two years in Glenview, Illinois. And when I married my wife, who was also a teacher in the same school, we honeymooned in Stowe. And we thought all of Vermont was like Stowe. So naturally, why would one not want to come to this state and there? And I was teaching tennis during the summers. And so we were living with my parents in Connecticut. And I made a number of job applications. And by that time, U32 was up on the registry. So I had applied and had one job offer at a school in Brattleboro, but it was only to teach journalism, which I had no expertise in and would not have paid anything virtually. But then I think it was Al Stevens gave me a call and said, we have an opening. And so I drove up from Connecticut and met Barry and Al and had the interview and then went before the board later and answered two very difficult questions, both of which I got wrong. Who would win between Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs? And I said, Bobby Riggs. And so fortunately, I was hired before they had played with me. And then was offered a job and came up and found a place to stay. Oh wait, what was the other question? Oh, the other question was, you know, I don't even remember the other question, because the first one floored me so much. I was all prepared to answer educational questions. And the other one was some obscure question, too, that had nothing really to do with education. Like maybe are you a good teacher? And I wanted to say no. I'm just trying to fool you all, but I didn't. And then no questions about educational philosophy, innovation, nothing. I had those in my interview. You did. I did put Bill Gray to you. OK. The board wanted, when I was there, to move on to more substantive debates with the faculty. So hiring was a side note for them. There were other issues they were more concerned with really getting on to. OK, should we talk about that right now or come back to it later? Up to you. And your experience with a board that was there originally, did you interact with them very much? No. OK. That's a simple answer. Simple question. OK, so Sandy, what was your impression about what was happening on the board? And, Dan, before you go, the board was swamped at that point. The school was way over budget. Opening was delayed because they were way behind on construction. They had far more imminent concerns. They could leave you to Al Stevens to worry about it. And the bigger issue that when I came in was the fact that there were contracts, but there was no salary schedule. So my first salary, quote, interview was with the then principal, Jim Dawson. And I went in and he offered me an amount of money. And I thought, well, based on where I'd been in Illinois, it's on a contract. So schedules. I said, well, great. Not very much, but I'll make do. And then I found out after I had gone out that another teacher who had less experience than me, I had had a master's at that time, got $2,000 more. And at that time, that was actually a chunk. That was a chunk. And so I think at that time they were negotiating with the board to start developing a contract in a salary schedule. So was this before teachers' unions? The U-32 did not have a union the first couple of years. Did other schools have unions at that point? Yes. OK, but U-32 did not yet. What caused U-32 to get a union was that they, the very first contract, quote, settlement, gave what were called team leaders a raise of something like 6% on like a $12,000 or $11,000 salary, and gave the teachers a salary of $11,000 or $12,000 for team leaders. For team leaders. So $2,000 is not kind of a settlement. My teaching contract, the first year, was $6,600. And I got a 3% raise on $6,600. And there were those of us who thought that 3% on $6,600 wasn't quite equitable compared to 6% of $12,000. Twice as much money, right? OK. What year was that that you would have formed a union? I believe it was the third year. Third year. Right about what you were giving in. I think you came right when all that was royal. And there was a one day strike, because the board had made attempts to negotiate with two of the team leaders on the side. They were novices, too. It was not, you can say it was pernicious, but let's just accept it as novice. OK, interesting. I'm interested in this line of talk. Let's not even worry about the Social Studies Department right now. Let's talk about the history of the school. So when you arrived on campus, Barry, when did you find out? When did they tell you kids are going to call you Barry or ask you whether you wanted kids to call you Barry or Mr. Kopetsky? Because my recollection is when I arrived in the school, I had two teachers that I called by Mr. Grundy and Mrs. McAvoy. And everybody else, if I recall, I mean people like Mr. Dawson and Mr. Grady went by their surnames with the title. And I'm thinking that we called Jackie Gighig and Jackie when she was a gym teacher. I don't know if that changed when she became a principal later. I don't know how that worked. I suspect that would have been the case, yeah. I think in most of our cases, it just kind of evolved in accordance with our natures and pre-elections. I had been called Mr. Kopetsky when I taught in Iowa. I remember thinking, well, this is a little odd, but he's 18. I'm 24. I'm fine. Call me Barry, I don't care. So he's 18. I'm 24. I can see that. But this kid is 13 or 14. How did that work for you for seventh graders, Colleen? Was that just fine and normal? Just fine. In that period, yeah. Just fine. OK. But you had to make a decision before the first day of school to know how you introduced yourself. So you kind of. I don't remember agonizing over that decision for more than a second. And there weren't a bunch of teachers having a conversation about it at all. They just all, OK. I think it was natural that the older ones, and there weren't many, would have stayed with what they were comfortable with. I mean, the older McEvoy was, by far, the oldest teacher on stage. Oh, definitely. And very highly regarded. Yes, he always was very good. When you say, oh, well, you'll feel closer to a teacher or this, or that, if you call them by their first name. I had a great deal of respect for Mrs. McEvoy. But I have to admit, she's not the first person I would have turned to with a problem, though. So there is that barrier. And I think the nature of the teacher-advisor system facilitated some of that ease of going into first names. Because my recollection in the first year that I was there, the third year of the school, students were only in class, what, 70% of them? 60%. 60% of the time. And so you had a lot of free time. And I remember doing a lot of meeting with kids individually and trying to get to know them and get to know their families and things like this. Now, was that specifically with kids in your TA? Or also kids from any class that you taught that happened to approach you? Both. Yeah, your classes, definitely. Your classes do, yeah. Yeah. It was called a 60-40 plan. So in a traditional setting, you might have class five days a week, say, for 55 minutes. Well, you still theoretically had that, but only three of those were scheduled times. The other two were unscheduled. It was independent study. Today, we would call it, I guess, part of your personal learning plan. I mean, PLPs, or whatever name they go by now, are a direct outgrowth, in my view, of what we were trying to do in the beginning. And we did not succeed that well. So I arrived in eighth grade. So I didn't really have a sense of how the high schooler's schedule was different from ours. The seventh and eighth graders had Tech 1, 2, 3, and 4, which was combining the sciences and math together. And social studies may have just plain been a year of course. Yeah. By itself. Yeah. I thought it was both seventh and eighth. Right. OK. And then the English, I think, already had quarters at the beginning. I think I remember having drama with Glinda Johnson for one quarter, and then different things with different people the other quarters, but I'm not positive on that for eighth graders. But because I was in eighth grade, they made it more of a point of having us schedule a little bit more tightly, a little less independent study time. Now, how soon do you recall it changing for the high school students? That they initially had the 60-40, and did that persist for a long time? I'm going to guesstimate that it didn't really happen until Jim Dawson left. That what didn't happen? Moving off of that full 60-40. OK. Because Bill Grady was for a year. Jim Dawson was for a few. I can't tell you how many anymore. Yeah. And then Lyman Amsdon came in. And I believe Lyman went to an 80-20, or even more than that. Yeah. Yeah. That's my recollection, too. OK. OK. Right. I remember having a lot of free time. Well, and there was free time that, quote, wasn't free time, because I had a number of students that elected not to attend any of my classes. And the first year I was there, I was a little amazed, because essentially, there was no consequence to that. If you didn't show, you'd talk to the TA. You'd sometimes talk to an administrator, maybe a guidance counselor. But fundamentally, there wasn't a test to take. And they didn't fail anything. Oh, they failed. Oh, they failed. But the philosophy often was, well, if a student is going to fail, that is his or her choice. And it would be up to the student, and you would try to cajole and talk and meet with parents. OK. And for a number of students, it was far more popular to go down to the smoking lounge, which was a very different thing, and hang out there. Right. And a 7th or 8th grader, if they had parent permission, could, I think, go down there, couldn't they? I don't remember about 7 or 8. I can't remember what was the lower end of that. Yeah. So in my memory is that, yes, class cutting was an issue. I don't remember it ever being that huge, being of a little more cynical nature. I still kind of remember the conclusion that, well, some of them, I mean, you always try to engage every kid to the best that you possibly can. But if they're forced to be in your class, I'm not sure how productive it is at certain times. So if they were there or not, the consequence, in terms of what they learn that particular day or week may not have been that great. I'm not excusing class cutting, because I became pretty hard nose about it myself later. Again, I understand in the beginning of the school, there were kids who did not want to be there, because they had been going to Northfield High School, or they were going to be juniors and seniors and Montpelier. And even though Montpelier was treating them very badly near the end, not to paraphrase or use somebody else's phrase, they did not really want to be part of U32. Their social scene was Montpelier. It was Northfield. And there were some angry kids, the older ones. The younger ones were far more excited, yeah, but the older ones, there were some bitter kids. I knew that there were some bitter kids. And I knew that some of them focused in on their music or something like that. And I know that there are some that never really wanted to engage socially within the school. And it was actually really wonderful that Montpelier invited them to come to their reunions, the class of 72. So they had been invited with that right along. So my recollection of the free time is that you had pretty wide options for hanging out in the library and playing cards, which was developing some social skills and developing relationships with people in other grades. I actually, I think that I had more friends in a wider range of grades than what a typical high school will allow if you were tied into class. And since we're all in rural areas, you couldn't make those connections so well after school either. So there were benefits to that. But you also had the freedom to go and make the appointment with the teacher either about the thing you didn't understand or the social issue that you were having or an issue with your parents if that was an issue for a child, those sorts of things. There was a lot of opportunity for relationship building with adults. So you had more healthy adults in your life if you didn't necessarily have it from other places. And I think that was also, and Barry correct me if you think I'm a little bit off on this, was one of the issues that divided in some ways members of the board, certain members of the board, with the faculty because they view that free time as sort of wasted time and were paying for it. And I'm not sure that there was as much of a concern for if students were having issues or problems as there would be today, rightly so. But then it was like you need to be in class, go to class. But I know for me the TA system, I thought was one of the strongest things because I developed very close relationships with kids, kept following them long after they had left school and still continue with them today. And I'm not sure because I haven't been back in several years how that is still continuing. My guess is that it's probably a little more difficult because class time now is far more scheduled, not as much free time to continue that close relationship. So for students that wanted to take advantage of that and for students that had a degree of motivation and interest in being in the school, I think it was a fantastic place because there was certainly a lot of talent there from a faculty standpoint. There was a lot of talent, right? For others, not so much, unfortunately. Barry, you have something to add? Yeah, I had a group approach me. Ricky Barney, that's one name that comes up. Rice, Norman Rice and somebody else and somebody else. He said, we want to read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. OK, sure, I'll do it. So he did it. I don't remember how long. So he read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Was that in a classroom or in the independent class? It was off the table. And you led some discussions or helped them? Sure. I don't remember specifically. We just, we want to do this, OK. Yeah, yeah. That's a positive side. And I think another one of those students might have been Frank Miller. He might have been there in that group, yes. I remember being in my US history class and wanting to draw all the time and thinking to myself, we'll never go anywhere. And he's laughing hysterically right now if he sees this. I think another piece to put in the mix is lunchtime. The fact that we did not have lunch shift. The lunch was just any other period of the day. And you could do lunch whenever you wanted to. So there wasn't this massive flux of humanity crashing the gates of the cafeteria line at the sound of some bell. It was easy in, easy out, sit wherever you want with whomever you want. Right, because you could spend an hour in there. There was no rush to get there as soon as that last class got out. You could go dawdle at your locker, stop by and chat with a teacher or a friend. There was no faculty lounge, faculty aid out there. I think one of the sadder things that happened was, I don't remember when it was. I'll say it was the 90s that they built a faculty lounge. That was sad. Yeah. Yeah, I think that the cafeteria was actually a really great place to have a lot of those interactions. Yeah. It was normal. Yeah. Yeah, because the faculty sat with students, too. That's what normal people do. Right, and you just sat there and had lunch. I mean, if it looked like the entire table was full of teachers, you wouldn't show up in case they were having some kind of department meeting or something, but if you saw one or two teachers sitting where you could go up and just sit with them. And even though there were 13-year-olds there, as Barry was saying, it was remarkable, because here we all were young folks. And there were also a large number, I think, at one point as many interns as there were teachers. And often I had a hard time discerning who was a faculty member, who was an intern, and who was a student. Yeah. Right, right. And that made for some very interesting things also, too. In that sense, it was a very exciting time to kind of be experiencing that and going through that. We had some great interns that came from the different programs. And we had some stinkers. So I remember having the general impression of people saying, oh, yeah, they got all these young teachers they recruited from New York City. They didn't know anything about rural Vermont. They're going to do these innovative, crazy ideas that aren't going to work, and nobody's going to learn anything. So that was a back story that some kids were hearing. But I was already a student there, and I was learning stuff. But that's the back story. So you came from where? I came from Illinois. Illinois, you came from Iowa. So not exactly New York City. But that impression did have some relevance. There were a lot of Boston area teachers and some New Yorkers, yeah. And Boston, again, is not New York City. But as far as where the interns were coming from, some were coming from Goddard. And where else were they coming from? Goddard University of New Hampshire set us up as a site. UVM in the beginning was kind of in and out and in and out. I think Johnson sent some early on. Do you think UVM was in and out because of the distance from Burlington compared to some of these other places or because of philosophical issues or administrative? I suspect it was. It might have been some days where a supervisor came and said, no, we're not putting any of our students there. You know, at all. Because again, to a certain, to a person who's coming in from the outside and, let's say, just wandered in to see something. Again, there were no interior partitions. And so I remember, and we were vagabonds because memory serves me right, we had no permanent home initially. But you had a desk. Well, the very first year we were up in math. OK. I think by the time you came, you know, Hennessy was free to give up territory. OK. But I can remember carrying a lot of my stuff around from place to place. And you would have these temporary barriers of bookcases mostly and some homemade built bulletin boards. And you rapidly developed the ability to speak over that if you wanted to be heard. Because Next Door might be a movie being shown. And you've got to be able to keep the students interested. And in some ways, that was a real challenging thing to do. Because if you were dull and there were some of the other distractions, you were going to lose it pretty rapidly. And so actually, I thought, for me, that helped me to become a better teacher, to really make sure that I had something that was engaging that hopefully would bring students in. Thank you. And some classes were actually part of a hallway. So there'd be three so-called class areas. And then the hallway along that. And kids were coming in and out of class every 20 minutes. Because we were in what was called a modular schedule. So some classes, your small groups would meet for two mods, 40 minutes. Your large group sessions, which we had in social studies, would meet for three mods. But every 20 minutes, there'd be kids getting out of classes somewhere and going somewhere. I had forgotten about that difference in the length of periods. We're going to close up for this episode now. We never got to talking about middle versus junior high and some other things. So let's have another episode. But thank you so much for your time today. And thank you for joining us on hearing more about the Genesis of U32. Thank you. Thank you.