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OCTOBER 3, 2024
WILLISTON’S NEWSPAPER SINCE 1985
Securing our elections
‘There are things we can do to make this system a little more foolproof’ BY JASON STARR Observer staff
Vermont’s general election ballots were coming off the printer last month when it was discovered that one of the Republican candidates for state senate in Williston’s district was mistakenly
left off the ballot. Rohan St. Marthe did not participate in the Republican party primary election in August but was nominated as a general election candidate by the party’s Chittenden County committee. When the Secretary of State realized the omission, she halted the printing process, updated the list of Chittenden Southeast Senate District candidates, and reprinted the ballots.
“It was a bit of a scramble for our team because we needed to reproof all of those ballots,” Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said, “but in the end the candidate made it on the ballot. It amounted to a slight delay, but the ballots were printed and are probably already in people’s mailboxes.” Indeed, all Williston voters should receive their general election ballots in the mail this week.
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But the episode points to some imperfections in the universal mailin ballot process that was initiated in response to the pandemic in 2020. Under that process, which the Legislature made permanent in 2021, each registered voter receives a ballot in the mail roughly a month before Election Day and is able to vote by either mailing their completed ballot back to see ELECTIONS page 24
Sarah Copeland Hanzas
A berry good idea Revived ABS garden program starts to bear fruit BY JASON STARR Observer staff
Students work at the Allen Brook School berry patch as part of the school’s revived garden program. OBSERVER COURTESY PHOTO
School vegetable gardens are great, but Allen Brook parent Jackie Ward has come up with something better. With a $15,000 Farm-toSchool grant from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, Ward has led a revival of the Allen Brook School garden program and transformed it with berry bushes. The program had been largely dormant since the onset of the pandemic, when the school’s previous garden coordinator stepped away. Last spring, Ward led the establishment of a 40-by-40-foot berry patch outside the school, adding fencing and planting strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and kiwis, among other things. The bushes are still young, but the students did enjoy a small strawberry
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harvest this fall. Berries are not only more universally palatable to the kindergar ten-through-second-grade garden stewards than vegetables, they are also more sustainable, says Ward, an occasional substitute teacher who was recruited to take over the garden program last school year. “These fruit are going to be there regardless of someone tending to them and planting seed every year,” she said. “They are going to be giving fruit to these kids from here on out … They will just get bigger and full of more fruit and will be snacks for the whole school for a long time.” Ward envisions the school eventually bringing in a freeze-dryer or dehydrator to preserve the bounty. “It’s the kids’ garden ultimately,” she said. “It’s their space and their food.” see GARDEN page 5
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