 We're having another episode of the Genesis of U32, the Union High School District Number 32, which serves seventh through 12th graders and opened in the fall of 1971. I'm Betty Keller. I entered as an eighth grader when the school opened, and I have with me here as a guest, Alice Blatchley. She is the parent of one of my friends at school, and is, of course, a taxpayer and citizen, as well as a voter and a mother, and she also served on the school board. She was not on the school board when it first opened, and I do want to pay tribute to the people who were on the board when it first opened. And the board of directors initially was Paul Andrews, Robert Wells, Claude Magnant, Rosendo Cuero, who went by Rosie, Houghton Kate, George Pittman, and O. Richard Clark. And I think he went by Dick. What's that? O. Richard Clark, I think he went by Dick. We went by Dick, yeah. And so we should stick a picture up this that you can all see more easily. But as my husband would say, looking at this picture, how did this group of middle-aged men in the middle of Vermont come up with this idea, this middle of rural Vermont come up with this idea of starting such a progressive school? Where did that come from? So I'm very glad to have Alice Flatchley with me here today, talking about the beginning of the school. We had a previous episode talking about the very beginning of the school board going out and visiting other schools, and had just gotten to where we were talking about Alice's actual time on the board and why she started serving. So Alice, thank you for being here today. And if we could just kind of pick up a little bit. So those were the original members of the board. And of course the school board members, they have one and two year terms and they get voted in and more people replace them. And so at the time that you were asked by community members to join the board, to run for board, I should say, at that time two women from Berlin had replaced a couple of the men on the board. And that was Mary Anderson and Ruth Town. So if you could pick up the story from there a little bit, that would be great. Yeah, well, Ruth, I was kind of warned. You know, you're gonna find Ruth Town difficult to work with probably. She's very, very termined and very concerned about, they really don't, she and Mary Anderson don't like the school as they want it changed. They really actually want the, well, Bill Grady actually had already resigned. So when I got on, Jim Dawson was, he had been the assistant principal, so he took over. So it really became a real fight. It was an embattled school, you might say. I mean, there were factions, there were two. There was the sort of liberal faction and the, and became more so until it got better simply by what? I'm sorry, could you actually, we skipped over that little bit of when Bill left. So on our previous episode, Bill Grady was the first principal, Jim Dawson was the vice principal of the time. Bill had been involved in the actual design of the school. We had a school architect, had laid out the plan and he had taken them off and visited some schools without walls and wanted to do some of the same. So tell me about Bill Grady's tenure there and why he chose to leave. Well, he chose to leave because he felt that the only way to save the school was for him to leave because he had become such a bone of contention. That's too, that's too mild a term. I mean, all of the anger and stuff just, he was at the cross currents of it and he just felt that as long as he was there, it was always going to center on his, school wouldn't, couldn't really function properly because so much attention was gonna have to be on just trying to defend himself in this school and. So can you tell us a little bit about James Dawson now? So then he did leave and some people very much regret that just didn't think maybe he wished that he hadn't because I think, I think he would, the school would have survived very well if he'd stayed but in any case, he was such a strong personality, was such and so articulate that he had certainly made an impression on Jim Dawson who came on as assistant principal but then endorsed Bill's ideas and learned a great deal. So Jim did his best to carry this on but unfortunately, all the anger that had been centered on Bill now centered on Jim Dawson and there were people who wanted him to resign as if somehow or other that would resolve all these issues and make everything all right. He did a really great job of holding on to his ideas and yet being very, you know, listening to everybody, caring about the kids. I mean, this was a huge job. I don't know how anybody does it and he did it very well, I thought. And he became a very good friend. I mean, I really, I had great respect for him. Well, so but the others on the board I was really, I mean, I think ultimately what happened was that the people who liked this school, who loved it, who thought it was doing wonderful things with their kids, outnumbered actually in the towns, the ones who were. Right, so just for history in case somebody isn't familiar with how we do our public schools in Vermont, the school board is voted, each town gets to vote in one, two or three people depending on their population. So the towns vote them in. The school board makes a decision about who to hire for the principal and the vice principal. So the fact that they chose the school board selected by the citizens chose to keep Jim Dawson knowing that he shared Bill Grady's philosophy and make him be the principal means that that was what the towns overall wanted but there were some people who were concerned that this style of school was not serving all of the children and those children who could benefit from more structure who had different learning styles and needed some of the kind of traditional supports that the parents were used to, at least that's what the parents' perception was, they were voting people on the board too. So you had to negotiate. That's right, we had to negotiate. We had to work this out and I'm not sure that the, actually once I was off the board and I didn't have children in the school, I've kind of lost touch with how they tried to resolve this issue of this children who were used to a lot more structure and were having trouble getting all of the program and doing something with it, being able to function. And I don't know whether there's still a problem there or whether they, through, I know they worked very hard at it so I believe they found a way for the meet both needs. You, there should be able to do it through, or maybe just time and the fact that the school, one thing that helped a lot was that the school started having very successful sports teams and that, you know, that's important. You started winning games and that was very, very good. So the first year was pretty interesting on that score. You took these kids, some of them had gone to Montpeliers, some had gone to Spalding, Hardwick, Plainfield, and then you put them in this school together. Essentially, none of your kids had really played, they may have played little league for baseball, for instance, but they weren't typically actually playing for those high schools because they couldn't stay after school because they didn't have a right home. Good point. And so all these kids come together and they might have some raw talent, but they have very little skill, a lot of them, and no training for like, what is teamwork? So the first year or two were pretty fun and funny. We didn't have a lot of wins, except actually gymnastics did very well, not the first year, but the second year and thereon because it was new all around the state. So all the teams were in that struggling area. And the girls teams might have tended to do a little bit better too because I think it was pretty new for Title IX, so the idea that if you had a field hockey team, there might not be that many field hockey teams with a ton of experience either. So I can't remember exactly which teams did better, but the boys' basketball and the boys' baseball teams took a little time and we had no football because it cost too much and those parents who wanted their sons to be football players, some of them were pretty angry. Okay, now see, I didn't even know about that. That's very good, yeah. Yeah, and so they do have a football team now. I'm not sure how long it took, but they put their money into soccer, which is so much cheaper, so they had more money for the academics. But that was... Okay, so you know, and that's really interesting. But after a few years, by the time you get into your fourth year, you're on the same boat as everybody else and that you all got in there at freshman year. So by the time, for instance, Tommy was graduating, then you could have more likely to have winning teams. Yeah, so I remember that I had changed my mind a bit too because I felt that it was disproportionate to be putting so much of the school's budget into sports which could only benefit a rather small number of them because not everybody was suitable certainly for the competing teams. But the argument had been, this is traditional really in American high schools for years. Well, but if you don't have these sports teams, there are kids who wouldn't even, they'd drop out of school if it weren't for sports. That's the thing that keeps them. So, all right, so you have to deal with that, yeah. That can be a motivator for a kid. I mean, to keep them... So at first I said, yeah, but you need dramatics. But I focused on dramatics because I thought that can be, there's something for everybody in drama and everybody can be in a play or do tech or something, the stage you were in. And I mean, the question is how educational is it? We actually discussed educational, the school board, which was great. You know, it wasn't just budget and administrative details. It was, well, what is the educational value of this particular activity? Right. And that was very good. I mean, we had to keep asking that because the tendency for school boards is to get bogged down and administrative stuff. Right. So, but in any case, I think I did come to see that, yes, sports is good. You know, as I say, you learn sportsmanship, you learn to... Setting goals, working toward them, sticking with them. That was good. But it shouldn't be, I mean, you should give equal opportunity for other things. And that worked out because I think most, I think, I remember having to write a letter to the editor of the Times-Argus about, because the school was in danger of practically just putting no money at all into dramatics and arts. They were gonna cut way down on that. And that would really surprise our listeners. I remember arguing something about how you don't lop off. I used a metaphor about trees. You don't attack a tree. If you want to prune a tree, you prune it, the branch is not at the roots. Well, somebody wrote me a letter and she said, I was good for you. You argued for that. Oh, wonderful. Somebody in Cali. But anyway, so, but we had to write that through, but I do see that. So they helped, I mean, I had to listen. It was Bill Sholdais who argued about that. So Bill Sholdais was another board member. But then, you know, I had to concede that. And that was good. But anyway, the school started having fabulous drama anyway. So that was great. The first thing they did to a musical, it was a funny thing happened all the way to the forum. Yes. They were really good. For one thing, the school, that's another thing. Bill Grady felt very strongly about drama. So he had a really beautiful theater there with all the latest in lighting and all these huge stage. He thought that was very important and very comfortable seating for the audience. That was smart because that sold a lot of people on the school. They saw these kids were doing these drama. And in doing it well. And one thing that the school was very interested in having, parents get involved. And my husband at that time wanted to do, put on a Shakespeare play. That was the first thing that, when my son entered there, he suggested that. And Bill Dawson enthusiastically, that's a great idea to do it. So he did it. Do you remember what the first one was? 12th night. And it was wonderful. Well, a lot of the kids that were kids that from the school that my son had been going to the new school. So they had been used to drama. I remember the Witherspoons were twins and they were in it. Yes, that's right, because that involved twins. Right, right. I was trying to remember which year they got there, but yes. 12th night was. So it'd be Kathy and Christie, right. Anyway, or was, oh well. It was very exciting. Well, Jim thought it was exciting. He said, this is our exciting play. And it was. And so that helped, but that wasn't, also it had very good drama people and that theater was very good to start with and it would have happened anyway. But I think that helped because the kids could see and hey, they can do Shakespeare. Right. And it's good. And I can understand it. It's not hard at all. And they didn't use the bridged versions. They used the real thing. Oh no. Right, so I was actually pretty active in theater. I did the sports too, but remember my sister was in, was there a darkness at noon or something? There was some really a dark classical kind of a thing that she was in. And then I was in Midsummer Night's Dream with Tommy. Oh, you were. I was to Tania. He was bottom. Oh, for goodness sakes, I've forgotten that. And then Thurber-Carnival, Thurber-Carnival. And the thing about Drama U32 is that it drew people, it included the jocks, and it included everybody. They worked out the schedule so that you could do both and they would do it between sports and stuff. And I remember Doug Singleton had one of the big parts in Thurber-Carnival and Doug Singleton is like this big, lovable, cuddly bearer of a guy, huge guy, you'd think he would be playing football and he's like, you went theater, you know? It was so cute. Yes. I guess that's what you do when there's no football team. Then the arts, remember, Phil Stimmel was the first musical director there. Oh, yes, Phil Stimmel, yeah. And then they recruited Carlton Doctor and he taught modern dance, which was our first dance class at school. Oh, who was that again? Carlton Doctor. Okay. He recruited the chorus and the camaraderie. He went to the hockey team to recruit male singers because they didn't have enough men. So see, that's so great. All of these things together. Right, and so you had groups of friends, but they were all interconnected. Nobody was excluded. Good. Yeah, I'm very glad to hear that. I mean, you're looking at a large enough group if somebody wanted to be isolated or felt too awkward of themselves to put themselves out then they might have not felt included, but pretty much people could find a niche somewhere and a lot of these niches were just really interconnected. Oh, that's very good to hear. It was pretty exciting that way. It was just something when you're watching movies about the mean girls or the huge cliques and stuff, it's like, yeah, yeah, we didn't have that. Very good, because that was a concern in the beginning is we didn't want that to happen. Right, right. Hope it would not happen. Yeah, it was pretty cool. I mean, that they would isolate themselves. No. That's good. Was there anything else you want to talk about on the arts while we're on the arts? Yeah, well, the idea, Bill Gray's idea was the arts should be central to the school and even visually, you know, they had, the arts were sort of, certainly, he had the, there was a beautiful little courtyard in the center of the school with big glass windows and wherever you want, you could see the changing of the seasons, the fruit trees in blue and that sort of thing. Another perspective on the courtyard is that I've seen this in other courtyards in Vermont too, is that how many months out of the year do we have snow? Well, it's true. And how hard is it to get in there with a lawn mower? So both places that I'm familiar with, both U32 and the Medical Center at the, you know, UVM Medical Center, filled in their courtyards, the buildings, the rooms, extending the library, whatever. But it's not that practical when the best part of the year in Vermont, you know, schools actually shut. I just remember, on Spring Arts Weekend, people were playing something, the gamelan, and then we were, the backdrop was these little petals falling. Yeah, the first year or two, it was more exciting. And then as time passed, it seems like if you cut maintenance schedule, then in one place it gets cut out of as mowing that place. That's true. And you had to figure out about seating, and, you know, it just, it didn't work out as practically as one might have dreamed. Well, as you know, they did have to make some modifications after a while. I was all sold on the idea, and so was the board on open classrooms and, you know, no walls and so on. They thought, as kids wondered about from one classroom, they might hear something that would be interesting and so on. But they did find, even the most progressive teacher, even the ones that were sold on it, ultimately they started putting up walls. Let's talk about the walls in just a minute, but while we're still talking about the arts, we've talked about drama, we've talked about theater. But I remember when you went in the building, it'd be the area that was over the cafeteria and a little bit closer to the parking lot. That area of the school was where they had the arts. And we had pottery, we had jewelry making, we had painting and drawing, we had art history. So remember that stepped room that, they had expository writing and they would show movies in that room, that's where Driver's Ed was taught so you could watch the movies of people killing each other. But that's also where they showed the art history class because you could show the slides of the history around the world of art history. But it was very easy to fit in a quarter of the year, just take a little quarter of pottery. So a lot of people could just dabble in just something. They'd never done it before, it was access. They had a little dark room. Yes, everybody. I remember once going on a tour of the place with some other people with Bill Grady and he stopped and he was discussing some mats that this girl was weaving for his family. And I thought, well, that's pretty good. This guy's the principal of the school. Right, we talked about the class in basket weaving, literally. Every child by name. I got, I'm pretty sure he would be, I think he knew the name of every single student in that school. Yeah, I think that adds so much. So when it was integrated, the idea that she's not just weaving them, she's weaving them out for his family to use. It's all so much more integrated. Homework too, it wasn't a homework, it was... Living arts. Living arts. Right, right. That had Jean Peterson, she was very, very fine teacher. And Claire Ladd, yep. And that's too, you don't make these artificial distinctions. Right, it's all part of life that all is... Right, so when the school first opened, I think that the ninth graders had something different going on, but the seventh and eighth graders had what they called tech education. And you had tech one, two, three, and four. So I don't remember which one was exactly which, but the general idea was that tech one might be a combination of geometry and pre-algebra and physics or something. And then tech two might be the living arts, the homec you know, and you might be sewing and do mathematics and do interactions because you're sewing seam allowances and whatever. And then they would have tech three would be the living arts with the cooking. And you'd be measuring. Why do we have metric versus the standard measurements? And so it was all integrated into the, instead of going to a homec class and going to physics class. And you were doing it for specific purposes. I remember in geometry building a stellar dihe, I saw Sahidran, I still remember the name of the thing. It was like cutting up straws and stringing threads through it so that you could build into a star structure. To make things, to be used more. And at one time they were building a, well they built a log cabin outside. It was, what was that? It was industrial arts. To be used, not just to build a log cabin. I think it had some function, wasn't it? Were they making maple serpents? I'm telling you, he was the, and he had that idea. Right, right. It was all different now. I mean, I wish I'd gone to school at a place like that. I mean, I could have learned at least some manual arts. You know, I mean, how to wire a lamp. And you know, just good, useful household things. I knew nothing about it. And in fact, I couldn't do anything because that was all for boys. So thank goodness all that's changed. I'll tell you, given there was only one, I forget if it was one quarter of the year or like for the whole year you did these four texts, but they changed all the time, these, you know, eighth graders had their little teams of four or five people, each building a structure that was about this wide and, you know, the length of a two by four, I guess, you know, seven feet or something. So you build this little house that had the electrical outlets and you're, yeah. Eighth grade girl, we were pretty bound up in our expectations of gender behaviors at that time. Like this is what my dad does. I have no idea what I'm doing. And yeah, I think that the, and typically you chose your own team. So you're like with four other girls and you're like, none of you knows what you're doing or maybe one does and you all lean on that one. So yeah, I would say I'm still not competent at wiring a lamp. I depend on my husband, but anyway. Yeah, but at least you, I mean, got some exposure. The idea was that it's not just for, you know, it's not artificially. But some girls may have found that they loved it and had the opportunity to become more skilled at it or at least be open to the idea. Right, right. Because something goes wrong and you learn how to fix it rather than, I mean, the whole, all of it, there's so many changes now and you can't, there's no reason why you have to expect it. There's always gonna be somebody around in your house who's gonna be able to do these things. Right. Right. And you had better, you have to learn these things and it's good too, because then you can rely on yourself. You feel more competent. I mean, that's good, isn't it? That is good, that is good. So thank you very much for joining us today. Well, I've had so much fun. Covered a little bit about the art, a little bit about the working on a school board and we didn't get actually too much to the classroom with Wallace, but we should do that with pictures on another day. There's so much to talk about about that school and about the, well, what's happening in education today and the schools. I do think Vermont school has very good schools. I do think it does and I think that we don't appreciate how good our schools are compared to a lot of parts of the country. Really? But we can talk about that on another show, but thank you very much for joining us. This was the conversation on the Genesis of U32 in the middle of Vermont with Betty Keller and Alice Blatchley. I had mentioned some of the school board members and I know that several of them have passed, but some of them we don't actually know about them. And if anybody has information they would like to share about the history of the school, including the whereabouts and health of some of the early board members or early teachers, you can reach out to U32HistoryProject at gmail.com That's U32HistoryProject at gmail.com. Thank you. This program is part of a public access television series to get the ball rolling for history project, an experiment in public education, a cooperative history of U32, a rural junior senior high school in Vermont. The co-producers are Betty Keller and Woden Teachout and they're recorded at Orca Studio with much appreciation to the Orca staff for their assistance. The hope is that people associated with U32 during its development and during its early years will record additional audio, video, or written materials to share their experience. If you wish to assist in this project, please send an email to U32HistoryProject at gmail.com. That's U32HistoryProject at gmail.com. Thank you.