Sergeant cited
Access art
Police officer headed to court to answer for fatal Shelburne Road crash
Pierson Library exhibit provides exchange with other galleries
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Volume 54 Number 9
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February 27, 2025
Confused about the school budget? Ask these teens about it BRIANA BRADY STAFF WRITER
PHOTO BY BRIANA BRADY
Filtering tanks at the wastewater facility at Turtle Lane.
Shelburne to update wastewater treatment BRIANA BRADY STAFF WRITER
The Shelburne wastewater treatment system is getting a structural update. Last fall, voters approved a $38 million bond to pay for a $45 million project to consolidate the system from two treatment facilities to a single expanded treatment center, converting the second facility to a pump station. The plan has since gone through a review process with
the state to evaluate any potential negative impacts. According to Jason Booth from Aldrich and Elliott, PC, the engineering firm designing the updates, the state found no significant impact from the project. Booth and Shelburne wastewater superintendent Chris Robinson presented those findings and plans for the update to the public two weeks ago at a selectboard meeting. The project is now in a 30-day public comment period. The current wastewater treat-
ment facilities in Shelburne have not been updated for over two decades, which, according to Robinson, is about the average life expectancy of most wastewater equipment. Robinson said, by necessity of engineering, the capacity of wastewater treatment facilities must be scaled to the size of the input — you can’t account for too many years of population growth. See WASTEWATER on page 13
Many people, if you asked them, probably couldn’t give a detailed explanation of how their school district’s budget works. School funding in Vermont is complicated. There’s a multi-step journey between a local school board setting a funding target, a superintendent putting together a budget proposal, calculating state-level tax assessment and student weighting and then voting on all that. It’s difficult to even write a sentence about. Not for Zoe Epstein. A junior at Champlain Valley Union High School, Epstein has spearheaded an effort with six other students to learn the ins and outs of their district’s budget. After learning about it themselves, they’ve worked to explain it to their peers. Over the last month or so, the group has reached every member of the firstyear and senior classes as well as a few groups of sophomores and juniors. Their goal? Make sure their peers understand the budget and feel empowered to participate. Epstein, in her second year as a student representative to the school board, first had the idea in December after she sat through a
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budget presentation at a meeting. “I went home, and I was like, students need to be a part of this conversation,” Epstein said. When she thought about what form that would take, Epstein was inspired by a discussion format she’d participated in at school. For the last few years, CVU has been teaching its students through the Harkness Method, a style of classroom discussion that promotes student led discourse as the center point of learning. Brad Miller, the social studies teacher leading the effort to integrate the Harkness Method at the school, was the first person Epstein talked to about running information sessions for students. “What can we do to mimic a conversation about a book in an English class, but about the budget material? How can we have that same conversation about something that is not literature?” Epstein said she asked Miller. After Epstein met with Miller and school principal Katherine Riley, superintendent Adam Bunting went to the student council, asking if students might be interested in joining Epstein on a budget working group. Six students answered the call: senior Patterson Frazier, juniors Jack See BUDGET on page 12
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