Watershed work
Senior needs
Lewis Creek volunteers, staff wrap up for season
Age Well, craft school team up on classes
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September 7, 2023
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Weekly news coverage for Charlotte and Hinesburg
thecitizenvt.com
End of COVID-19 relief funds looms for school district
Pickleballers
$1.5 million in federal funds currently pays for 17 positions COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
PHOTO BY GREG SMITH
Charlotte’s pickleball group hit the courts on a sunny Saturday morning. See our story, page 12.
The future of more than 15 positions in the Champlain Valley School District may be at risk as federal COVID-19 relief funds run out. About $1.5 million in ESSER funds, or Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding, is set to expire in September 2024, presenting a challenge as the district begins work on its fiscal year 2025 budget in coming weeks. ESSER funds have supported approximately 17 additional
school counselors, social workers and interventionists throughout the district’s five schools, and have funded new assessment systems and other education software and expanded summer programs. How and if the district can absorb those positions into its general operating budget for the 2024-2025 school year is still unclear. “We know that’s going to be a driver of difficult decisions, tough discussions, and it’s going to leave a mark,” Gary Marckres, the See RELIEF FUNDS on page 16
Activists call for hounding ban as bear hunt talks resume AUBREY WEAVER COMMUNITY NEWS SERVICE
With bear season starting Sept. 1, and rising reports of bear encounters in Vermont’s more urban areas like South Burlington, the state is faced with new discussions on how best to manage its bear population, if at all. Somewhere around 5,000 black bears live in Vermont, according to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, and recent estimates suggest approximately 14 percent of the population is hunted and killed each year, with a 2020 high of about 20 percent. David Sausville, the department’s wildlife management
program manager, said the population “has actually grown over the last 50 years,” with state estimates bottoming out at around 2,000 bears in the early 1970s. Despite the population statistics, animal rights groups worry how humane some of the bear-hunting practices are. “I mean, they are just treated pretty horribly in Vermont,” Brenna Angelillo-Galdenzi, president and co-founder of the group Protect our Wildlife Vermont, said. To Angelillo-Galdenzi, taking a fifth of the bear population each year is “not a sustainable hunt.” Her organization is seeking changes in bear-hunting laws in Vermont, “specific to the hunting
of bears with hounds, (the) really long bear-hunting season and the fact that hunters can kill mother bears with cubs,” she said. One Vermont trail camera caught a hunter shooting a bear sow with cubs last fall, prompting a petition back in April to the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board, a rule-setting body. However, the board moved to table the petition until this fall, and hunting a sow with her cubs remains legal in Vermont. Douglass Devos, president of the Vermont Bearhound Association, said nobody he knows would hunt a sow with cubs. “What you are looking for is a mature male,” Devos said, though he said he’s
sure hunters sometimes kill mothers with their young. “There’s bad eggs in every group that can make the other guys look bad.” About the renewed discussion this fall, Angelillo-Galdenzi said, “We are not hopeful that they’re going to vote yes on the petition.” She believes board members are too sympathetic to hunting. In a call to action emailed to members July 28, the group’s leadership wrote that “it is clearer than ever that the VT Fish and Wildlife Board must be dismantled.” One particularly thorny point of debate between the activists, hunters and policymakers has been the practice of bearhounding
— setting dogs after bears during hunts. “They’re chased through the woods in the cornfields until the hounds either, you know, corner them on the ground or lead it up a tree,” Angelillo-Galdenzi said, referring to bears. “That’s when the hunter tracks his dogs on his GPS device and shows up and literally shoots the bear out of the tree.” But it’s a little different than shooting fish in a barrel, said Devos, the houndsman. If a hunter didn’t come up to the tree, they wouldn’t be able to tell the See HOUNDING on page 6