It takes more than a village

Yesterday I visited the Smilie Memorial School in Bolton to plan our upcoming concert there…my first-ever playground dedication gig.

It was a delight as my meeting with principal Derek Howard and music teacher Heather Schoppmann morphed into a spur of the moment invitation to join that morning’s rehearsals to accompany the 1st-2nd and 3rd-4th grade choruses, whose performances on June 6 will tick the “local collaborator” box on the program. Here is one of Vermont’s many wonderful, precious, obviously beloved small local elementary schools, now under intense pressures to consolidate due to declining enrollments and mandates that did not exist decades ago to serve a more diverse range of learners. 

The visit occurred the same day the US House passed a budget that slashes spending for everything but the military, which will multiply the already almost unbearable stress on Vermont’s schools. It includes massive cuts to healthcare, where costs are spiraling out of control even faster in Vermont than elsewhere. That’s because we’re an old, aging, and rural state, the very same things that account for shrinking local school enrollments.

The Smilie School’s unusual history speaks to the issues of local sufficiency, private aid, and public support. 

Due to the narrow bottleneck valley of its central village, Bolton suffered proportionally more than any other town in the Great Flood of 1927. Among many losses of life and property, the Pinneo Flats schoolhouse, once abandoned but fully rebuilt just the year before the flood, was completely washed away. 

The school became both an example and a symbol of the larger devastation. A statewide collection was taken; children all over Vermont contributed their pennies, philanthropic organizations organized donations, and Bolton daughter Ellen Pinneo Smilie gave $1000. Donations came from beyond Vermont’ s borders even—from all over the country and as far as France.

A model new school was built on higher ground. The Burlington Free Press editorialized: “We are glad this Memorial School was not created by one beneficient giver. That would have robbed a host of boys and girls of the abiding joy that will ever be there as they visit or drive past the structure and realize they had a part in this fine memorial.”

But Vermont was the longstanding most Republican state in the nation, without a single Democratic governor or US representative or senator until 1958. The New Deal and what it represented—the widespread socialization of responsibility and resources—would turn out to be unpopular in Vermont, the only state that never went for FDR. In that spirit, according to Deborah Pickman Clifford and Nicholas Rowland: 

To perpetrate the myth that resilient Vermont could do without government help in the wake of the 1927 flood, no mention was made of the $300 the town contributed. Nor [of] the $1,000 given by Emilie Pinneo Smilie.

So is a society that supports a decent education system and other human services without “the government” a “myth”? 

We’re about to find out.