By Guy Page
A Milton parents group last Thursday night demanded the local school board withdraw its proposed equity policy. They submitted a petition signed by more than 1000 Milton residents.
“We are asking our elected School Board Trustees to vote to abandon the proposed Equity Policy at the next board meeting and terminate any further work toward an Equity Policy. If the School Board chooses to continue with this policy, we request our filed petition to be put up for a vote on Town Meeting Day,” Nichole DeLong of Vermont Parents Against Critical Theory (VPACT) told the school board.
VPACT stresses it’s not a fringe group of disaffected parents. The number of Milton signatures on the petition are more than half of the total number of voters at the last annual school meeting.
“Over the past few months, we have spent hundreds of hours engaging our community with an honest open dialogue about this policy, something this Board has not done,” VPACT member Brock Rouse said. “During this process, we presented a petition to residents of Milton urging the Board to vote no to the adoption of this recommended Equity Policy. We have over 1,000 signatures on this petition which includes parents, students, community members, teachers as well as current and former Board members. This is more than half of the total votes that were cast in the most recent School Board election.”
The true number of equity policy opponents is actually higher, VPACT claims. Some teachers said they, too, want the equity policy abandoned, but were afraid to sign out of “fear of repercussions by school leadership and co-workers, who support, and are the driving force behind this policy,” Rouse said.
School Supt. Amy Rex has been a key planner of the proposed equity policy since work on it began in 2020, VPACT said.
No formal action was taken by the school board on the VPACT proposal December 15. The school board is scheduled to hold an executive session-only meeting Tuesday, December 20 on student disciplinary matters. No agenda has been posted for January on the school district website.
Under Vermont state law, local school boards are not legally required to add petition requests to Town Meeting ballots. However, in general practice both school board and selectboards lean towards including petitions that have broad local support and address local issues. Concerned citizens also always have the option of running for school board and amending or dropping the policy.
At the December 15 meeting, VPACT outlined the history of the proposed equity statement it wishes the school board to reject or, failing that, put before voters in 2023. “In June of 2020, our Milton School Board and Milton Selectboard buckled like cheap lawn chairs” to pro-BLM sentiment in the aftermath of the 2020 killing of George Floyd, a VPACT statement said. It signed a joint resolution of ‘racial equity’ empowering Superintendent Amy Rex and equity coordinator Wilmer Chavarria to convert a half-page state recommended policy into “a 14-page Policy that would change the entire operations of our school.”
The proposed equity policy creates a new advisory/policy board accountable only to the Superintendent, takes a strong stand for transgender sports participation and against election ‘misinformation, defines “white” in cultural terms, and would change any curriculum and instructional planning as deemed necessary. For more details on the proposed equity policy, see Dec. 2 Vermont Daily Chronicle news story, “Milton parents petition against school equity policy.”
VPACT noted that the Milton school officials don’t deny the equity policy is based on Critical Race Theory, a Marxist academic theory that seeks to impose socialist values on matters of race.
During an April 28 meeting in which VPACT members were present, policy creator Wilmer Chavarria stated “I don’t want to get into this game that some districts have gotten into just because some people are upset about CRT the districts pretend that it’s not a thing. It is a thing. It is very present and it informs a lot of what we do.”