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RECIPE INSIDE! FEBRUARY 17, 2022
WILLISTON’S NEWSPAPER SINCE 1985
State loosens mask guidance; town renews mandate
WWW.WILLISTONOBSERVER.COM
BY JASON STARR Observer staff
The universal mask recommendation for Vermont schools will expire Feb. 28, the Gov. Scott Administration announced Tuesday. Later that evening, the Williston Selectboard renewed the town’s indoor mask mandate for another 30 days. “We will all rejoice when we get to rescind this mask ordinance, but now is not the time,” selectboard member Jeff Fehrs said before the board unanimously extended the mandate for indoor public spaces through at least March 22. The Agency of Education expects the expiring mask recommendation for schools to be a step toward eventually fully removing school mask recommendations. It only applies to schools where the student vaccination rate is over 80 percent. The state had hoped to expire its school masking guidance in August, before new waves of Covid cases crested in the fall. “Our schools have had an incredibly difficult year, and this is an important step to getting them back to normal,” Secretary of Education Dan French said. The state’s recommendations for masking in schools are advisory. Individual school districts have been responsible for deciding whether to adopt the guidance. To date, according to state officials, only one school district in Vermont has not adopted the state’s recommendation. “We need our schools to be able to focus all of their energies on their customary work of meeting the educational needs of our students rather spending the better part of the school day attending to the implementation of public health measures,” French said. “No longer recommending masks in highly vaccinated schools is an important step toward shifting our focus on the needed recovery work in education.” After the announcement, Champlain Valley School Superintendent Rene Sanchez began meeting with other superintendents in the region to formulate a plan for how to react cohesively to the changed guidance, according to District Communications Director Bonnie Birdsall. She said the district will update families about its plans this week. She could not say Tuesday whether the district’s schools qualify as 80 percent vaccinated. The district goes on winter break at the end of this week, returning to school March 2. State Health Commissioner Mark Levine pointed to the widespread access to vaccines for students, the relatively low-risk Covid poses to school-aged children and overall improving hospitalization rates in expiring the school masking recommendation. “Over the past two years, parents, students and school staff have stepped up, integrating these requirements for protecting their kids’ and school staff health deep into their daily practices. That hard work has been an important part of our ability to move forward,” Levine said. “We know that vaccination is the most powerful and effective tool we have, and most of our school staff and students have heeded the call and are either up to date on their vaccines or are closing in. Because the Omicron variant leads to less severe outcomes, we can safely lift the masking recommendations in these highly vaccinated settings.”
Megan Nick, 25, is a 2014 graduate of CVU. She won an Olympic bronze medal Monday as part of the U.S. Women’s Freestyle Ski Team. PHOTO COURTESY OF USSA Nick, right, trains at the Green Mountain Training Center in Williston as a young gymnast.
An Olympic medal forged in Williston PHOTO COURTESY OF GREEN MOUNTAIN TRAINING CENTER
Megan Nick brings home bronze BY JASON STARR Observer staff
Megan Nick first learned to flip as a young gymnast at Williston’s Green Mountain Training Center. On Monday in Beijing, she executed two flips with three 360-degree spins — a fulldouble-full in freestyle skiing parlance — above the Olympic aerial course to secure a bronze medal as a first-time Olympian. A native of Shelburne, Nick, 25, won the first Olympic medal for the United States in women’s aerials since 1998. Her father Jeff Nick, one of Williston’s leading commercial land developers as the President of J.L. Davis Realty, watched the event live from home in the early morning hours Monday. Later that afternoon, he attended a watch party with Nick’s friends and supporters at the training center on Avenue D. “It was quite a thrill,” Jeff said Tuesday, still processing his daughter’s achievement. “We were watching interviews with her on NBC Sports and we were like, ‘wow, it’s crazy.’” During those interviews, the Champlain Valley Union High School graduate expressed relief, a sentiment she shared with her father when they
spoke on the phone after the event. “I was just trying to be extremely present and grateful that I was even there,” Nick told reporters after the event. “No expectations — only wanting to compete the way that I’ve been training.” “She was just relieved that it was over,” Jeff said, recalling their conver-
‘I think she surprised herself.’ Jeff Nick
sation a few hours after the competition. “There is so much pressure. I said ‘it didn’t look like you were that nervous. You looked focused and determined.’ She said ‘I was very nervous’ … She was the underdog. She knew she could do well, but she wasn’t expected to win a bronze that’s for sure. I think she surprised herself.” Nick placed third behind aerialists from China and Belarus, who did triple back flips with twists, as opposed to Nick’s double. “When I started the sport, I was really unfamiliar with this high level of competing,” Nick told reporters. “I was so focused on results, and it didn’t work. I realized that as long as I was having fun, and I was focusing on the
jumps that I was doing, it was working out better for me. So I tried to shift my perspective in the last three years, and it’s really helped me a lot.” Under normal (non-pandemic) circumstances, Jeff and his wife would have been watching the event in person in Beijing. Instead, they were home in front of the TV, watching Nick first qualify for the finals about 2 a.m., then land her medal-winning jump around 6 a.m. “The television coverage was awesome. You could see every angle and slow-motion replays. But it would have been much more fun being there, enjoying it with our daughter,” Jeff said. Nick learned to ski at Cochran’s ski area in Richmond before getting serious about gymnastics. She competed for CVU and for the Green Mountain Training Center team. As a junior in high school, she was recruited to an aerial training camp in Lake Placid and was chosen for the Olympic development team. She spent her senior year at the training center in Lake Placid. Entering the 2022-2023 World Cup season, Nick will no longer be an underdog. On top of competing, she is also working toward a master’s degree at the University of Denver. — Kevin O’Connor of VTDigger contributed to this report