Its been a while but I felt compelled to blog about the piece in Seven Days that came out yesterday regarding the relaxation of homeschooling requirements in Vermont – – ostensibly because the Agency of Education (AOE) doesn’t have the resources to monitor compliance. In my opinion, this reduction of oversight came as a particular

There’s been plenty of press coverage about the Burlington School Board’s Emergency Meeting that was held at 9:00 PM this past Sunday. Sunday also happened to be both Easter and April Fools’ Day. Vermont Digger’s headline characterized the meeting as delaying the release of an ongoing racial bias investigation, while the Burlington Free Press,

The purpose of this blog is not supposed to be political, its a forum to discuss ethics and government in Vermont. If you want politics, you can check out my political blog over at Sugaring Off. With that said, it’s important to discuss the ethical dilemmas (and the associated procedural and policy hurdles)

Democracy is messy. Democracy is hard. But Democracy is hardly messy enough to ask law enforcement to attend a public meeting except in the most extreme of circumstances. And those circumstances do exist from time to time, but from media reports, they didn’t seem to exist at the recent meeting held on Lake Carmi’s (pronounced

The Vermont Supreme Court just issued its long awaited opinion regarding public records in the 21st Century. As my 10th Grade history teacher was fond of saying, “Why do we go to the primary source? Because the primary source is primary.” (He also said “Why do we go to the map?…. The map tells us