Rural Vermont is done being the state’s expendable class

This commentary is by Megan Durling, a teacher and an organizer for Rural Vermont Rising.

The laws coming out of the Statehouse are not written for rural Vermont. They are written to serve Burlington and Montpelier, ignoring how they will affect Brighton and Manchester. That exclusion is breaking us.

Rural Vermont Rising formed this spring in response not just to Act 181 but to the broad pattern of regulatory exclusion that it laid bare. Like so many of our laws, it was written without rural folks at the table, to benefit developers in larger towns while placing new economic burdens on rural communities. It was the last straw in a load that we’ve been bearing for too long.

The truth is: That pattern of exclusion isn’t limited to land-use regulation. It is pervasive, having shaped policies like education for years. Whether closing off public access to the independent schools we rely on or consolidating our small public schools, the outcome of tripartisan negotiations year after year is the same: reduced educational access for rural working families. Our children are the first on the chopping block. Every time.

It feels as if lawmakers are working to depopulate rural Vermont. We know what happens when rural schools close; many of us have lived through it, and abundant national data shows the inevitable outcome. Closing schools leads to depopulation.

For this reason, we cannot act as if education policy is a separate issue from sustaining our working lands. Without rural schools, there are no rural families, and without rural families, there is no rural Vermont.

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The fundamental problem is the core imbalance of industrial society: the concentration of wealth in cities that depend, for their sustenance, upon lower-paid rural workers harvesting resources from the countryside. This structural injustice produces further imbalance in education. Our cities want to upgrade their schools with their wealth when their rural counterparts cannot afford to do the same. And our state constitution demands equitable education for all children regardless of their circumstances. So, for over a century, Vermont has been trying to equalize education funding to provide more equitable education across the state.

And it’s in the interpretation of that word — “equitable” — that our lawmakers have again cut rural communities out of the equation. Their logic goes something like this: To provide an equitable education for rural areas, we must have modernized schools like those in Burlington. But those cost more. So people will have to be satisfied with fewer of them. In other words, the cities set the standard: If rural communities can’t do education like Burlington, then we can’t do it at all. In mistaking uniformity for equity, our lawmakers deprive rural children of local schools while telling them it is for their own good.

And so, as we who live in the sticks so often see, the high ideals of a boardroom end up producing their opposite aim in application: What begins as a pursuit of equity becomes yet another practice of exclusion. As one local representative put it, shuttering rural schools and busing children for hours each day is not equity; it is exile.

The modernization our lawmakers speak of is nothing more than a marketing term for industrialization, the very process that has severed humans from the land and funneled so many of us into cities. Rural Vermont doesn’t need industrial-scale schools with the latest in flashy tech at the end of a long bus ride. We don’t need modernization; we need humanization, which, properly understood, is grounded in local place. And it doesn’t need to come at an exorbitant cost.

The late Wendell Berry warned that modernized schools don’t encourage children “to return home and be of use to the place and community,” but to leave for a career-driven future that is “theoretical, speculative, and mercenary” necessarily unrelated to their roots at home. Berry added that teaching children to abandon their authentic local culture leaves rural communities and lands “open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the center.”

In short, the industrial habits and priorities of a modernized educational model exacerbate our modern social and ecological crises.

We need a radically different understanding of what educational equity looks like for rural people; our communities have been sacrificed at an urban-mandated altar for too long. The gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills, and as it turns out, the equity that serves Chittenden County is not the equity that serves the Northeast Kingdom. We do not need schools that look like Burlington’s; we need schools that teach our children the value of remaining connected. We need schools that teach our children the truth in valuing place and people where we live.

We will no longer tolerate the sacrifices demanded of our communities for the appearance of equity or cost savings. We are done being Vermont’s expendable class, and we’re not waiting for one party or another to save us. We are rising to save ourselves, and we welcome all Vermonters who love the land and who love their neighbors who care for it to join us.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rural Vermont is done being the state’s expendable class.