Op-ed: When leaders listen to their constituents

By Nicholas Boke
©2026 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Where are the leaders who listen?  The Educational Forum held in the Springfield High auditorium held on Monday, May 11, focused on Vermont’s current effort to reform statewide education. It involved state legislators, local educators and Vermont Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders.

The forum was “designed to provide clear, up-to-date information on the proposed education transformation bill currently under consideration in the Vermont Legislature.”

Lots of people showed up. And lots of those people were very disappointed.

State Sen. Joe Major facilitated and began by asking Secretary Saunders what her Gov. Phil Scott’s transformational proposals were intended to do. Her response was pretty familiar, entailing fairly abstract hypothetical ideas about consolidations and funding reforms that would create financial equity and shift local plans into regional and statewide ones. This generated more detailed responses from several legislators, who explained that the evidence available revealed that the current plans would not accomplish those goals.

There was lots of talk about concepts such as  scale, mergers, equitability and, of course, everybody’s favorite, a world class education. Quite a few participants and audience members wondered just how much of the Scott’s and Saunders’ plan grew out of conversations with teachers and principals and parents and students and voters, the people who would be directly affected by any decision.  The general sense was that attractive models from other states, unifying supervisory unions and getting rid of smaller schools and classrooms would be just the thing to fix Vermont’s schools.

There were some good questions (as well as some not-so-good) and answers, but there was no generally accepted, “clear, up-to-date information” about it all. No one I spoke to after the forum came away knowing more about how what, how and why the Governor and the Secretary had chosen this top-down, rather simplistic way to fix Vermont’s very complicated education problems.

We left as confused and disconcerted as we had arrived.

Meanwhile, the concerns of a number of voters in the Green Mountain Unified School District, which includes  Andover, Baltimore, Cavendish and Chester, were more basic.

After the March public vote on the $19 million school district budget lost by 37 votes out of almost 1,000 cast, the superintendent and some on the board discussed letting quite a few teachers go, as well as cutting other expenses. These actions, we were told, would get the Green Mountain district ahead of the curve as Scott and Saunders’ plans got under way.

A second board meeting was packed with parents, constituents, students and teachers who, like several new board members, thought that the previous decision was a bad one. After union leaders explained that the teachers and administration had agreed a few years ago to avoid these reductions in force, the board decided to re-run the same $19 million budget while spreading the word about the importance of voting yes.

A second budget vote took place on Tuesday the May 12, passing 427 to 279, with a margin 148 votes.

I’m not sure what will come of Scott and Saunders’ still-unclear but clearly polarized approach to fixing Vermont’s education problems. I am sure, however, that by listening to voters and those who actually do the work, the people in charge of things in Chester, Andover, Cavendish and Baltimore made a good decision.

It seems pretty clear that however attractive the maps and numbers and testing-plans floating around Vermont may be, state officials would do better if they step away from their bureaucracy and spend more time talking to Vermonters.

Nicholas Boke lives in Chester.