2020: A year like no other

Something I’ve learned from my years reporting in the Green Mountain State is that Vermonters are resilient. In March, as the coronavirus pandemic snaked its way through the country, statehouses and schools closed, folks were told to stay home, people lost their jobs and couldn’t buy food, others were trapped in abusive homes.

I heard from Vermonters who were scared, angry, suspicious, mournful.

But I also heard that you were hopeful.

I heard from pastors who drove around delivering toilet paper and groceries to their parishioners. I heard from teachers who mailed postcards to their kindergarteners. I heard from college seniors who wore bathrobes and graduated in their living rooms. I heard from grandparents who met their newborn grandchildren via Zoom. I heard from people who let strangers wiggle a very long q-tip up their nose.

Despite all the darkness, you also generated light. And whether we like it or not, the sun will rise tomorrow, snow will fall, melt and fall again; rains will bring sprouts and mud and flowers; and the earth will keep turning.

Just as the coronavirus pandemic will forever shape our lives, it will forever shape my reporting. So, I’d like to say thank you for sharing your stories with me. I’m glad this year is nearly over. I wish you all a very happy and healthy new year.

Local News

2020: South Burlington Highlight Reel

• Avalon Styles-Ashley | Staff Writer

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Lenny Roberge, the “pie man” and the oldest living veteran in Vermont, turned 106 this June.

“People come up to me and say what’s the secret for growing old,” Roberge said, a few days before his momentous birthday. “I tell them to keep breathing.”

Roberge earned the moniker “Pie Man” among his friends and family after diving into pie-making while living in an independent living home.

“I continue to make pies, because I found it was kind of entertaining. It gives me the satisfaction of accomplishment to be able to make a pie,” he said.

Aside from baking pie and spending time with his family — which he hasn’t been able to do much because of COVID-19 this year — Roberge says laughter keeps him young.

“I find cracking jokes serves a double purpose, and that is to keep your mind active. The old adage is, ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it,’ so I continue to do that,” he said.

Pie man to applesauce boy

Applesauce is the star of 11-year-old Levi Duteau’s business — Apple in a Jar — and the vehicle he’s used to fight food insecurity in South Burlington.

After deciding to start a business this summer, Duteau found that helping others needed to be his driving force. With his mom’s homemade applesauce recipe — just apples, water and cinnamon — he sold 136 jars of applesauce and raised $1,368 in donations for the South Burlington Food Shelf, thanks to sales and donation matches from friends, family and local businesses.

According to a study by the University of Vermont, one in four Vermonters is experiencing food insecurity during the pandemic, with a 68 percent increase in food pantry use and 49 percent increase in the use of SNAP or 3Squares VT benefits.

“There are a lot of people in need, especially during COVID; people are losing their jobs, they’re getting evicted, they’re hungry,” said Duteau. “I think it’s important to do because we need to keep as many people alive during COVID right now as possible. We need our friends to help us through.”

Duteau decided to turn the business seasonal and will resume his applesauce magic in the spring.

A huge loss

Kathy Buley, a beloved South Burlington teacher and friend, mother and grandmother, lost her battle with pancreatic cancer in October this year. Her colleagues honored her memory by wearing purple ribbons and holding vigil in an outdoor, socially distanced gathering.

Buley taught at Orchard, Rick Marcotte Central and Gertrude E. Chamberlin schools for 41 years. And even after she left the district to take care of her health, Buley stayed in touch with her colleagues and her students.

“She would come up to visit. She would stop by the school, check in, her students were in fourth grade and she came back and they just all came up and hugged her,” Chamberlin School Principal Holly Rouelle recalled.

When Chamberlin School held a blood drive in her honor, Buley brought flowers and handwritten thank you notes for donors.

In November 2019, Buley told the Other Paper how supported she felt by the district’s blood drive. “I’ve gone through many generations of families, it’s just been such a wonderful and enriching experience,” Buley said. “I look back at it with a feeling I’ve just had such a blessed career.”

Local News

2020: Black and white and read all over in South Burlington

Helping deck the halls

Andrew Moffatt sold his first Christmas tree when he was 23 years old, in 1963. He remembers clearly, because that same year, he married his wife.

The flannel-clad octogenarian and owner of Moffatt’s Vermont Products is a fixture of South Burlington’s holiday season. Moffatt saw record turnout and Christmas tree sales this year, perhaps due to a shared feeling among Vermonters wanting to forget the coronavirus pandemic.

Moffatt admitted he does not put up a Christmas tree in his own house.

“We handle so many trees during the season, we don’t actually put up a tree because it wouldn’t be in time to enjoy it,” he said, chuckling. He has no plans to retire — yet.

South Burlington speaks up, fights for racial justice

In May, the nation seemed to catch fire following footage of a white police officer pinning a Black man to the ground, handcuffing him and holding a knee to his neck for nine minutes.

The death of George Floyd was not a new story, nor the first instance of police brutality in 2020. Yet crowds of masked people flooded the streets of nearly every major city in the country — including Burlington and Montpelier — roaring in protest of police violence against BIPOC, (an acronym meaning Black, Indigenous and people of color).

In the South Burlington school district, Students Organizing Against Racism, or SOAR, held peaceful protests in June and erected a sign supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Member Yorda Gebreselasie, 12, joined the June gathering. She wants justice and peace — nothing more.

“We’re not just protesting for George Floyd. We’re protesting our government from slavery, human rights, all the police brutality and all of the murders in the world that are involved from racism,” said Gebreselasie. “We just want to be safe going on a run, we want to be safe going to a store.”

The night after the students’ peaceful protest, the Black Lives Matter sign was torn down.

“When racists behave this way, what they expect you to do is run and hide,” said Gary Russell, co-leader of the group and teacher at Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School. So instead, student members responded with a “bigger, louder and stronger” gathering the following day, inviting members of the greater community to join them. According to Russell, so many people showed up — more than 250 — that the students ran out of signs.

Christine Nold, co-leader and fellow middle school teacher, said the hate crime reminded her of why anti-racist work is so important.

“I think that there is a mythos of Vermont exceptionalism and progressivism that exists,” she said. “It’s really important that folks are willing to be more honest about the fact that racism is endemic here in the same way as it is throughout this entire country.”

Police, Fire And Rescue

2020: South Burlington Police Department stats

Cops and schools... what’s the future?

After Floyd’s death, South Burlingtonians began conversations around defunding police and the role of School Resource Officers.

In the city budget passed in March, South Burlington allotted $5.1 million for police, nearly 20 percent of the city’s overall spending.

Some residents called to defund the police — eradicate the police force and reinvest that money into social services and community public safety — as one way to curb police brutality and break down systems that funnel people of color into prisons, further perpetuating white supremacy.

Matty Larkspur, of South Burlington, believed that by divesting funds from law enforcement to fund mental health care, affordable housing and social programs, society can uproot inequities that lead to crime.

“As you start moving money away from the police and putting it in other places, we find out that we can actually fix these problems, not to punish people who end up on the wrong side of the law,” she said.

Former South Burlington city councilor Paul Engels expressed support for defunding the police in a post on social media. “I thought it was something we should do when I was on the city council. There were around 45-50 police officers then. There are probably more now. We could do with a fraction of that many,” he wrote in June.

While police chief Shawn Burke values social services that police work with, like the Howard Center, he cannot see a scenario when police wouldn’t be necessary. “These are worthwhile ventures, but I don’t think you can construct a logical argument to say that it will eventually remediate the need for police,” said Burke.

Along the same lines, some in the community have questioned the role of police in schools — school resource officers — and whether they alleviate or further systemic racism. The officers instruct D.A.R.E., a national drug misuse and violence education course, among other duties.

Sgt. Dennis Ward, the high school resource officer, hopes students see him as an asset rather than a source of fear. “Our hope is they see us as a resource that they can count on and rely on if they have an issue that needs addressing,” he said.

Police in South Burlington schools dates to the mid-1980s, before the widespread existence of school resource officer programs, Ward said.

Cole Gilder, who identifies as a biracial Black man and graduated from South Burlington High School amid the pandemic, didn’t interact much with school resource officers during his high school career but feels differently in light of the recent national conversation.

“I can imagine that students of color might feel uncomfortable by the presence of all these officers in the school. For me, it’s uncomfortable to be in the same building with somebody who has a loaded firearm,” said Gilder.

According to research by Stephanie Seguino, a professor of economics at the University of Vermont and a former Burlington School Board member, students are three times more likely to be arrested in schools with resource officers; students of color and students on individualized education plans are disproportionately arrested in comparison to their peers.

In December, South Burlington High School students returned to the school board to request the Black Lives Matter flag be raised for the entire year, not just for Black History Month. In 2018, the school board approved a student petition to raise the flag for the month of February. The discussion boomed with student alum, teachers, current students and board members expressing their frustration with the glacial pace of anti-racist work in the school district.

Student councilor and a member of the Student Justice Union, Nyasha Rutanhira, told board members that beyond raising the flag, they should be hiring more teachers of color and providing a more diverse curriculum.

“The whole point of the BLM movement is to say that Black lives haven’t mattered in the past and we are trying to make them matter more to people. That’s really important to me, because they haven’t mattered,” she said.

The board plans to take action on the students’ proposal at a Jan. 5 meeting and to further discuss issues brought up at the December meeting regarding racism in the district.