End of an era
Steel art
Philo Ridge Farm stops food, market operations
Hinesburg man crafts heirloom quality knives
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November 16, 2023
Child care reforms take shape
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Training day
Act 76 leads to higher wages, subsidies LIBERTY DARR STAFF WRITER
Advocates, lawmakers and child care providers are celebrating what they call a “quantum leap” with the Legislature’s passage of Act 76, a bill that invests $125 million annually into early childhood education. The new law seeks to lessen the gap between what it costs providers to deliver early education, with equitable wages for staff, while also creating access to affordable child care for families throughout Vermont. By October the state’s child care financial assistance program will be expanded to families up to 575 percent of the federal poverty level — $172,000 for a family of four — and facilities — both center- and home-based programs — will receive a 35 percent increase in state reimbursements for families utilizing financial aid. The expansion is expected to help nearly 7,500 more Vermont families, said Shelburne Rep. Jessica Brumsted, a member of the House Committee on Human Services. PHOTO BY LEE KROHN
See CHILD CARE on page 13
The Hinesburg Fire Department conducted a controlled burn training exercise last weekend on the corner of Route 116 and Hollow Road. See more photos, pages 4-5.
Conservative group complaint leads to investigation at school COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
The Champlain Valley School District was briefly investigated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights this spring after a complaint filed by a national conservative group targeted an opt-in racial affinity group at the Shelburne
Community School. In December 2022, the district announced it was looking to develop an affinity group program for students in grades three through eight at the Shelburne Community School who identified as Black or Indigenous and for other people of color. Parents were invited to sign their kids up by contacting the school’s Diversity,
Equity and Inclusion coach, Lashawn Sells. But the group never got off the ground. Parents Defending Education, a conservative nonprofit organization that says it “fights indoctrination in the classroom,” quickly filed a federal civil rights complaint with the office’s department of civil rights in January as a third-party organization “that opposes racial discrimina-
tion and political indoctrination in America’s schools.” Their complaint claimed that the group was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires that taxpayer money not be spent in ways that See INVESTIGATION on page 16