Lamoille North embraces community with harvest dinner

“School issues mirror community issues,” superintendent Catherine Gallagher said in her closing remarks.

Interpretations of what community is in each school were diverse, though revolved around core tenants of respect and understanding.

Hyde Park Elementary School students presented a somewhat complicated set of interwoven fantasy houses where various grades were sorted based on their positive attributes.

Johnson Elementary School principal David Manning displayed leaf plate crafts made by his students between their discussions of Aristotle’s forms of government.

Waterville students created a six-minute video of students describing what community meant to them amid the stunning views that act as a backdrop to their playground activities.

The Tatro family, who run the holistic opiate recovery organization Jenna’s Promise whose community center hosted the event, pitched their center as a place where everyone was welcome.

Lamoille County Sen. Rich Westman and Rep. Melanie Carpenter, D-Hyde Park, and Dan Noyes, D-Wolcott, were all on hand for the event.

In many ways, the event was notable for what it was not. It wasn’t an informational meeting or a budget vote. It was a public gathering for its own sake, an event that might not have been all that remarkable before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world in 2020, including schools, after which maskless, full-time, in-person learning only returned in 2022.

The district is still dealing with some of the effects of the pandemic. At Johnson, the school year began with a notable spate of some kindergartners, for differing reasons, attempting to leave their classrooms.

Gallagher speculated this behavior and difficulty adapting to the structure of the school may have had something to do with the more socially distanced world in which the children spent their formative years.

Manning said it’s likely not all pandemic related, and the behavior and the response from the school differs among individual students but starts with putting together a team to address the root of the behavior.

“We essentially identify how their taking off is meeting a need. They want to get away, but that’s maladaptive to success in school, so we try and teach them alternative ways to get that need met,” Manning said.

The harvest dinner was also an affirmation of community in the aftermath of another natural disaster — the Flood of 2023 — that hit some schools in the district far worse than others.

“We have had a collection of students who were directly impacted, lost their homes or had property damaged or possessions damaged,” Manning said. “We have some staff in the same boat, multiple staff who also were impacted directly. There are quite a few people who are close to someone who lost everything, and so there’s sort of a sense of community trauma, as well as not to mention there’s no grocery store in town, and some people lost their bank, and their post office and various things are gone.”

Manning reiterated that the response from the school and teachers to negative feelings students may be feeling is tailored to the individual, as the collective pain manifests itself differently in each student.

In Cambridge, some families were displaced and forced to move away, or lost their long-term housing. In many ways, Cambridge Elementary School principal Mary Anderson said, school provides an antidote of structure and safety after what may have been a disrupted summer for some.

Donations have helped the school help some families, like providing gift cards for families.

“I think our school provides structure and meals, love and care, so that’s been really fortunate for them,” she said. “The families are able to not worry about them when they’re with us as they deal with the stress in their lives in terms of recouping and rebuilding.”