 Hey, good evening and welcome to the pandemic version of Montpelier Civic Forum. Now what the pandemic version means is that you guys have absentee ballots and hopefully you're going to cast those or show up in person on Tuesday, March 2nd for Town Meeting Day. And we've got a whole series of these programs. We have Anne Watson talking about what the city of Montpelier looks like sitting in the mayor's seat, projects that have been pushed off, projects that are going on and projects that might not make it. We have Bill and Anne talking about the city budget. We have Jim Murphy talking about the proposed school budget. We have school board candidates. We have city council candidates. We even have a candidate for a five-year position on the Parks Commission. I have the pleasure tonight of speaking with Mia Moore, who is a sitting member of the Montpelier Roxbury School Board. I almost said the Montpelier School Board. Mia, how long have you been on the board? About three months. Four months maybe? I started in mid-November of last year. So you've never attended a board meeting that hasn't been Zoom? That is correct, yes. I was attending several of them last year as a community member, but even those were all via Zoom. When you said to the rest of your family, I want to be on the school board, what was the reaction in the family or didn't they know how much time would be devoted to the school board? The reaction was very positive. Because they didn't know how much time would be involved? No, we had a fairly good idea of that. But I think my husband saw how important it was to me to serve in this capacity, and he said we would figure out how to make it work. And you have figured out to some degree how to make it work? More or less, certainly. You have children in the district? We do. We have three kiddos. William is nine, and he's in third grade. Oliver is six, and he's in first grade. And Louisa is four, and she's in preschool. So you're all union? Our preschooler is at a daycare facility that is a part of the system. She'll start kindergarten, not this coming fall, but the next fall. Two boys, they are old enough to have gone to union before the pandemic. Yes, Oliver was in kindergarten last year, and that was really rough when the pandemic hit. It was just very sad for all of us because he so enjoyed his classroom, his teachers, his friends. And as you know, we thought that the closure was temporary at first. And I can remember the day that I learned that it wasn't, and it was very, very sad about that, him not being able to return to that environment. And it felt the same way for William, who was in second grade last year. Just both of them were really enriched in their environment. Particularly, they both had really spectacular teachers, and those teachers did the very best they could to transition to being online last spring. But it was certainly nowhere near what they were getting in their classrooms. And that's one of the reasons that I was and continue to be so incredibly grateful to the heroic effort that our teachers are putting in every single day. And the leadership of our administration that they showed over the course of this summer to put their eyes on the goal of having our kids back in school knowing just how critical that was for their education and their development and really making it happen. My gratitude is overwhelming. Now, I assume that either you or your husband was transitioning to a Zoom environment for your work. I already was in a fairly Zoom-heavy environment. I worked for myself as a coach and a consultant on organizational development and management issues through an equity lens. And so much of the work that I was doing with clients was already virtual and over Zoom or phone calls. But I had a fairly good amount of it where I got to meet up with people in real life. His work was much more in an office and with his team in person, three-dimensionally. So, yes, it was a big shift for our whole family for both of us to be primarily and almost 100% working from home. But ultimately, though, we are incredibly grateful for the ability to do it. Now, you said you were attending meetings, which means that you must have contact with other parents. Yes, yes. I talk with other parents all the time. Some of those parents, now we're going to flash forward to this school year, your children are at Union this year or are they at home doing the virtual? They're at Union. What is the experience like? And can you explain to the audience what a pod is? Sure. The experience is fantastic from our perspective. And that's one of the things that I... And that rests on, I really believe, the heroic effort that the teachers are doing every single day to be in classrooms with kids. Now, that's two teachers in an individual classroom. There are two teachers in an individual classroom and in some cases they also have an instructional assistant or another adult support person. So in Oliver's classroom, in fact, they actually have three teachers. And the way that it works is that there is very little, almost no, interaction with any other teacher or human being in the building for the kids and the teachers. Is there a journalism for the classroom a pod or is a pod different than a classroom? No, I think they're pretty much interchangeable. Yes, they are in a pod with the students and teachers who are in their classroom. As a parent, how do you take their temperature before school and write it down on a piece of paper and submit that? Yes, we have a list of items we need to go through each morning only for both of our kids to ensure that they are, as best we can tell, COVID-free before they go into school. And the school has called it the golden ticket. Every kiddo brings one of those in, signed by a parent, and it addresses the basic symptoms or activities that may make it seem like you might have the coronavirus. But, you know, if you check all those boxes, you're effectively saying to the best of my ability, I don't believe that we do. And so my child is free and clear to go to school today. Are your children within walking distance of union today, right? The school bus? Do you drive them? We drive them each day. We're a little over a mile from the school. So at their age, it's a little young for them to walk to and from school. And they were riding the bus last year, but we decided that in order to maintain the integrity of their classroom pod, and because we have the flexibility in our schedule, which I know not all parents do, we would be able to drive them to school instead of relying on the bus. Do parents feel comfortable on the bus having their kids on the bus? I have friends who have kids on the bus and they do feel comfortable, and they have instituted the same kind of regulations like social distancing and ventilation on the bus. Obviously, masks are worn, and so that has been working, certainly, all school years so far. Your friends who are not in school, whose children are not in school, what is their experience like? Have you spoken to people whose children are virtual? You know, I've only gotten a little tiny glimpse of it. One of the very big downfalls of this pandemic that we're in is that I feel like we are less and less connected to each other in general. And so those friends who have kids attending virtually and teachers who are friends of mine who are teaching virtually, I just see less of them and we talk less and connect less. So I don't have a full understanding of what their experience is. What I have seen, I can see that it's tough, and I really applaud them and know that our district is doing what we can to support them in making the most of being able to learn virtually. Now you were on the board after the decisions were made to have a discrete I am in the school or I am not in the school. Some districts, a lot of districts have chosen three days, two days, that sort of thing. Were you following that as a community member? Yes, a little bit. Certainly as an interested parent. I didn't follow it very closely, but as soon as I learned that there would be a real effort being made to make five-day in-person learning possible, I was incredibly grateful to hear that that effort was being made and of course that we've pulled it off. And I also think it is remarkable and generous and necessarily so that the district has been able to offer both in-person and virtual based on the needs of, and then families can make that decision based on their own needs. Now you've been on the board now for three months, so you have the opportunity to hear from parents who are uncertain about their path. A decision was made that it would be difficult for kids to say, hey, I'm not happy at home, I want to come in. Or kids, I'm not happy at school, I want to go back home as I had it last year. Are you hearing from parents on that choice? No, we're not. What are you hearing as a board member from parents on this? On the experience, yeah. We hear overwhelmingly that parents who are very happy to have been able to make the choice themselves and the parents that have chosen to have their kids in school are incredibly grateful and glad that it's working. Are you hearing anything from Roxbury parents? We have not received any official public comment or emails or no, so no, I haven't really heard from Roxbury parents. Now, the kids, academically, we're getting into equity now. We've had an achievement gap. For as long as I've done these shows and it's been many, many years, every year the school board members speak about the achievement gap and how they want to narrow the achievement gap. Now, I assume, and I think it's a reasonable assumption, that middle class, the children of the middle class last year had a little difficult but were able to negotiate and ride perhaps even better because the parents were so close to their academic that they weren't before when they were in school. But for low-income kids where you had just such stressors, including their parents being unemployed, perhaps on the pandemic pressure, you name the pressure. An inability of their work being flexible for them to even be home. Absolutely. Many people not being able to work from home. So you've got perhaps backsliding. What do we do? If we were here and had this gap, am I correct in assuming that the gap might have gone like this? Well, that's a hypothesis that we do need to test against. Right now what we're hearing is that the data that the teachers are drawing in is finding that we did not have much backsliding in general. The spring didn't have a terrible impact, certainly, while it was an incredible challenge for everyone who was involved in it. It didn't have a terrible impact on the learning of our students. Now, I think it is fair to question how did kids who have more obstacles in front of them, whether they be socioeconomic or racial or a language barrier. Or a disability. Or a disability. How did they fare in that time period and in comparison to where their peers did and how is that playing out right now? That's definitely a question to examine. And I think the best way to do is to dig into actual data to see how are they performing. What supports do they have? What supports did we put in place for them? And it is still fairly early to be able to answer all of that conclusively. But one thing that I know is that our administration and our teachers really are paying very close attention to it. Were we able to close the connectivity gap? I couldn't say for sure whether or not. I know that the district was working very hard on ensuring that the technology, that students maybe who didn't have their own computer or their own kind of actual technology at home, they ensured that everyone could have a piece of technology that could help them be connected. Now the district didn't really have much that we could do as far as the actual connectivity. And so I couldn't say conclusively whether or not every single student was able to connect online. That's an impossible question to ask. But as a parent, I remember my son living on that second floor of the Kellogg Hubbard Library. And I'm sure that a number of our children live around that library after school and on the weekends with the library closed. Is that a significant problem for parents? That's a great question. And I mourn the loss of the library as a gathering space myself. There were many times where I've driven past that beautiful building and just really longed to be able to go in. It was definitely a space that when my children were even younger, I treated as an outing to be able to get to that second floor and play with the toys and pick any book off the shelf that we wanted to. So yeah, that is a big, big, big hole right now. But you did mention that it's one of the gathering places for the community. That the entire community looks to the Kellogg Hubbard as a place of social gathering. And it's closed, not even closed, it's just scaled back so far. Especially from being a social gathering spot. Yeah, it's really unfortunate. I look forward to the day when they can open their doors wider. What is the board doing in the last couple of meetings? Now we're speaking in February. What was the board discussing in January? A really big topic was the budget. Because the board has three main duties. And the fiduciary responsibility of establishing a proposed budget to the town for voting on town meeting day is one of the big three. And the other two are hiring and evaluation of the superintendent and setting policy. A policy in one sense please. Well, literally writing policies that the district will then follow. So one example of a policy that we have on the books is the one that was established following some incredible leadership and advocacy by our high school students back in 2019, I want to say, we passed policy F-22, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Policy. And it's the board that writes and passes that policy. And then it's the administration and the staff and the teachers who are in charge of enacting the duties that go along with that policy. Back in 2019, what was the problem that Montpelier High School students were seeing that caused them to collectively, at least a group of them, gather together to try and advocate for change? I think to sum it up, they were saying the experiences that they were having at school were inequitable. Students were experiencing racism at school. They're experiencing being put in positions of needing to defend their own identities. And they wanted to see there being more support in place for essentially being able to find school to be a welcoming and accessible place. And they were, I think, incredibly courageous in coming forward and sharing their stories to say these are big problems that will not only serve us and help us, but will serve every single student when we begin to address them. This sounds reminiscent of when our son was in school, the Gay Straight Club, and the attempt to address that issue. That was years prior, but is this building off of that sort of awareness? I think social justice movements are deeply interconnected. And so people who are raising an awareness around one issue, you can definitely draw some pretty clear lines between harassment around gender identity or sexual orientation or race or other ethnicities and language barriers. And that's why I agree with the students when they say when we begin to really address these problems that we are facing and things that we are experiencing on a very personal level, it doesn't just make the situation better for me, it makes it better for all students. We're to the issue that we're speaking of on the city side when we're talking about defunding place. And we're talking about issues that transcend Montpelier, they transcend Vermont. They're national issues. Are you speaking basically about a national issue as it relates to the localization at Montpelier High School? I think it's really important to understand that Vermont is no exception to what is happening at the national scale. I'm guilty of this myself in a number of ways of saying well my experience right now is actually pretty darn good. My children and I find Union Elementary School to be incredibly welcoming. It feels cozy when you walk in the building and that doesn't mean that it's that way for every single person who enters the building. And that's repeated at the middle school, at Roxbury, at the high school. And so I think it's really important to understand that just because our perspective is one of abundance and welcoming and warmth and positivity doesn't mean that's the case for everyone else. And I think that's one of the traps that we fall into when we try and say well those are issues that are happening at the national level but here in Vermont we're special when the reality is we're not. Haven't children always, one group or another always been marginalized in high school to some degree? Isn't that a terrible thing? Right, I'm just asking, even in my day, long, long ago there were groups that were marginalized and that was not good then, it's not good now but is this something that has a rich tradition? Theologically, is this something that's prone to happen in social organisms? Well, I think that's a fair question and then it's worth examining how do we equip students and teachers and staff for working their way through those things? No one should... Through those things or beyond those things? I think through in order to get beyond and what I'm thinking about is how are we equipping students for life outside of school? Certainly, even if they're not being marginalized or picked on in high school they need to know how to resolve conflict in solution-oriented ways ways where they're standing up for themselves but still demonstrating respect for others and I think there's a lot that can be done to help prepare students for life after their education within our district around things like conflict resolution and being solution-oriented and doing that through a lens of when someone is of an identity that has been long oppressed in our country being taking great care at what their experience is and the historical challenges that they have faced because of it. Is that a pre-K through 12 curriculum? I know that the district is working on what sort of in education is termed social-emotional behavioral learning and it gets woven into from pre-K all the way through 12th grade. I think there's a long way that we have to go to ensure that there are standard set that are district-wide and we take a systems-wide approach to this. It's one of the things that I really appreciate about Libby Bonestiel, our superintendent, is that she has a big focus on ensuring that we have a systems-wide approach that it's not just like, you know, one teacher is amazing, let's help figure out how all teachers can be amazing and I think that that kind of approach can be and we are working toward having that in social-emotional behavioral learning as well as establishing standards for a systems-wide approach for ensuring that students graduate from our district with really strong social-emotional and behavioral skills. What's the metric on that? You can't standardize test that. You're not going to sit and ask four different questions and say, okay, which one is the most appropriate. That's something that I think we're still working on. Figuring out what does success look like and how do we measure against it. Will you ever be successful? Is it a standard that can never really be met? Well, one of the things that I really love about our district is that we are in our mission, actually, state that we are working on creating lifelong learners, lifelong lovers of learning. And I think this is one great example of how, no, no one's ever going to be perfect at conflict resolution, but what are some of the basic skills and tools that we can equip ourselves with to ensure that we can continue working on it and learning it when beyond our classroom walls. Do the students who, in 2019, they're still in Montpellier, some of them are still in high school. Are they seeing the progress? Are they recognizing it? Are they giving feedback that things appear to be moving in a direction that they feel is adequate? Probably not fast enough for them, or their kids. We have not heard direct feedback from students on progress, so that would be, that's a hard question for me to answer. Has there been any pushback on this? On what specifically? On conflict resolution for equity purposes. Has there been anyone saying, hey, this doesn't feel right, all people are important, that sort of argument? No, we really haven't gotten that. Did you anticipate getting that? I can't really say. How much of this is income-based? Is a sense of lower income versus moderate and higher income? How much of that dissonance is a clash of class? Well, I think that's very real. It would be very difficult for me to put a number to it. I do, that certainly is real. How do you deal with that? I think it's very similar to dealing with any difference. It's actually leaning in and celebrating differences and teaching kids to lean in and celebrate each other's differences and what makes us unique. And then as educators digging beneath the surface to really be, what's going on with this kiddo? What's leading to this challenge? And our educators are really doing an excellent job at that. You were on the board for the discussion of the school resource officer and what should happen with that position from your perspective, how did that go and what was the problem with having a school resource officer? What did the board see? Not yourself, but what did the board see and what was that? I was actually involved in that question before joining the board. That was the main reason for me that I chose to attend school board meetings over the course of the summer was to be part of the conversation about the school resource officer. I also had a chance, had the opportunity to serve on the school safety and police relations committee and still am serving on that committee. I think the main thing that it has come down to is that there were many positive things that our SRO brought to the role. At the end of the day, the very presence of an armed police officer in our schools was a barrier to education for some students and that we can't have that. Did you guys approach police chief Pete to get rid of the arm of the bulletproof vest? It was one of the questions that the committee asked and I do want to give a lot of kudos to this committee of community members, a city council member, representative from the police force, two school board members and a teacher and a guidance counselor, a couple of administrators from the schools and most importantly, three students from the school. There are, I think, 13 of us on this committee doing an incredible amount of work to really dig into this issue and see what are the different angles from which we can approach it, what are some of the solutions that we can find and in fact that was one specific question we asked chief Pete and the answer was no, the officer cannot be at school unarmed and that's fair. And that seemed like a bottom line Yeah. Do you feel that the district is prepared for the doomsday of a school shooter? I mean the school resource officer was the front face of that plan. Well the thing that's very interesting about that is that chief Pete himself said a doomsday scenario, the worst case scenario, our greatest fear is not a reason to have a school resource officer because there are three schools that the SRO was tasked with covering. The SRO actually doesn't cover the Roxbury village school because Roxbury uses and contracts with the state police but there are three schools it was a numbers game if the school resource officer would have been on the scene even if that were ever to occur and in fact one of the things that the committee did also was dig into studies that demonstrated school resource officers are not the solution to preventing school shootings or to preventing more death in school shootings. Your committee is still ongoing. Yes. What is it studying now? Right now we're working on so what does it look like? What does true justice and discipline and holistic safety so including social and emotional behavioral learning look like in our district through the lens of our diversity, equity and inclusion policy through the lens of what does safety look like what is our vision for safety so now we're getting a little bit just more specific about that. How do we show up with each other in ways that are truly supportive of safety and our real social, emotional and behavioral learning needs? Do you have a timeline as to when the next recommendations might come out? Yes. End of March, early April. So we have a lot of work to do in a short period of time. Mia, I want to thank you so very much for being with us. Thank you for having me, Richard. Equity is an interesting issue. I'm glad that we were able to probe it at some depth. Yes. Lots more to talk about but we'll have a conversation and the opportunity. And I want to thank you for watching the show tonight and urge you to watch the other ORCA shows including the two budget shows and presentation as mayor which is really interesting. The other candidates and make sure you get out and vote. It's so important whether you vote by absentee or actually go out there on Tuesday and get out to vote. Please do so and make sure your friends do as well. Thank you so very much.