Vermont has some big problems that desperately need fixing! Many of them are connected, in a variety of ways to a symptom rarely discussed. The population of Vermont is falling while the population of the United States is growing. Vermont has been losing people for the last few years. The reasons include deaths in Vermont outpace births; between 2023 and 2024 there were 1,700 more deaths than births. More people left the state than moved into Vermont. In another worrying sign the birthrate in the United States is down 25 percent since 2007 when the decline began. Another symptom may be that weekly take home pay in Vermont is about $400.00 less than the national average. Taken together these problems should set off alarms about our future.

S, it should not be a surprise that our schools throughout the state have a diminishing number of students while simultaneously school budgets are skyrocketing upward. Yes, it is costing us more to educate fewer students, and Vermonters are rarely wealthy. Maintaining quality schools is expensive. The average pay for public school teachers in the United States is $72,030. The average pay for a public-school teacher in Vermont is only $52,559. A nearly $20,000 gap is hardly an incentive to attract the best of the best. Good teachers are a precious commodity.

Gov. Phil Scott has demanded the Legislature do something about education costs in the Green Mountain State. Legislators have been spending much more time on this problem than any other facing the state. There have been various proposals, one of the latest is from Sen. Seth Bongartz of Manchester that would create a two year “ramp period” for school districts to merge voluntarily. Two years is a long time to wait when the problem is financially urgent. School mergers are inevitable in many areas which will mean the eventual closing of several small elementary schools. The closing in many cases means long bus rides for little kids.

One idea that has not been discussed is increasing, substantially, Vermont’s population over the next decade or so. We don’t have enough students to make financial sense for our small rural schools. We need more property-owning people whose taxes will help balance our cash-strapped education budgets. Why doesn’t the Legislature think about a campaign to entice people to move to the Green Mountain state?

In the 1960s Vermont’s economic development officials, under new Gov. Phil Hoff, launched a marketing campaign that was known as “Vermont the Beckoning Country.” The campaign was remarkably successful, bringing thousands of people to a place that at that time had largely skipped the Industrial Revolution. Vermont’s ski industry began growing by leaps and bounds then, bringing in large numbers of people new to the state. Entrepreneurs, many of them World War II veterans, began developing ski resorts in the Green Mountains. They attracted thousands of visitors and some of those visitors fell in love with Vermont. They stayed. These Flatlanders changed the state, making it more liberal, and more environmentally conscious. Gov. Hoff, the first Democrat elected governor since 1853, was followed by a wave of successful liberal politicians who turned Vermont from red to blue. People can differ about the whether the political transformation improved the state or destroyed it, but the state undoubtedly grew more prosperous.

Vermont has plenty of land that can be used to build new housing. New people can bring fresh ideas and the capital needed to create new businesses with good jobs. More families living in more houses means more property taxes going to schools. It should also lighten the load for the current financially stressed Vermonters.

A well-financed advertising campaign to entice new people to make Vermont their home will make us more prosperous. More taxpayers can be one of the many solutions needed to save our struggling education system.

Clear the cobwebs off the old slogan and invite a whole new crop of young, energetic families to Vermont the Beckoning Country!

Eric Peterson lives in Bennington. Opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media. 

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

It is a perennial question: Can artists still afford to live in New York? For Carrie Ahern, a choreographer and dancer who has lived and worked in the city for 30 years, the answer is yes — but it takes a couple of day jobs, a friendly landlord and a willingness sometimes to tell friends, “I can’t tonight, I’m too broke.”

Ms. Ahern moved to New York from Wisconsin in 1995, at age 19, with a dream to become a professional dancer. She had the drive and some contacts. But just as important, she had a nose for cheap real estate. She scored an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for $850 a month, split with a roommate. Supporting herself through a series of waitress jobs, she began pursuing her dream.

Now 50, Ms. Ahern runs her own nonprofit dance company, staging performances in private homes or unusual spaces, including a butcher shop, where she butchered a lamb as part of the show, then sold the meat at the end.

“I kept expanding that dream,” she said of her years in New York. The city, in turn, “continued to let me bring out some skills that I didn’t even know I had.”

Those skills include creativity, resourcefulness and agility — in finance as well as dance.

A Landlord to Cook and Garden With

The dance company pays Ms. Ahern a stipend of $4,800 a year, which she augments by teaching Pilates and movement therapy — sometimes in clients’ homes, sometimes in a rental studio, for which she pays $30 an hour.

A third income stream comes from a family company that manufactures industrial parts, which she has helped run since her father’s death in 2018. Her income from those three sources came to about $55,000 last year — about 10 percent higher than usual.

The key to making it work, she said, is her apartment, one floor of a townhouse in the Kensington section of Flatbush, Brooklyn. After 16 years there, her rent is $1,350 a month, about half the median asking price for the neighborhood, according to StreetEasy.

“It’s like a cooperative in a lot of ways,” she said. “My landlord and I are very close, and we help each other out. We cook for each other. Or she was really excited that I love to garden, because she wanted help out there. So she keeps my rent low because she likes that I’m here and that we help each other out.”

Special Expenses for a Dancer

Because Ms. Ahern’s apartment doubles as her office, she writes off part of the rent and utility bills as business expenses. She also deducts books, tickets to performances and any other expenses related to her work — including fitness and dance clothes, hair and makeup for performances, studio rentals and her Spotify subscription. It helps, she said, to have an accountant who works extensively with performing artists, and who had been one herself.

Those expenses bring Ms. Ahern’s income below $21,600, the threshold for Medicaid eligibility, which spares her from having to pay for health insurance. “It’s actually been the best insurance I’ve ever had,” she said. “You know, there’s no co-pay.”

She does, however, still have to pay for routine maintenance on her 50-year-old dancer’s body.

She pays $120 for weekly sessions with a personal trainer, plus $115 for monthly acupuncture treatments and another $160 for monthly massage therapy appointments. “Almost all these people slide their scale for me, because of my career,” she said.

Finding Deals on Apps and Online

Ms. Ahern gets free tickets to a lot of performances because she knows the people involved. Yet a free ticket can turn into an expensive night out if she isn’t careful. “Like, if someone says, ‘Oh, do you want to meet for dinner before?’” she said. “I feel like we’re good about being honest with each other, like, ‘I’m just really broke right now, and I can’t do it.’”

For meals at home, she uses the app Too Good to Go, where restaurants or stores offer deep discounts on food that would otherwise be thrown away — a new spin, she said, on dumpster diving. “This is a more refined version of that,” she said.

She does, however, find her way to occasional splurges. If she cannot afford to treat friends to dinner, she treats them to coffee. And she splurged recently on tickets to see LCD Soundsystem at Knockdown Center in Queens and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. For the latter, she waited until a few days before the concert, then looked on the ticket resale site StubHub for people trying to unload their passes. Bingo: $70 for a quality seat.

For all its financial challenges, she said, New York still offers artists chances to grow. A few years ago, for example, she needed a change, so she took a class in new way vogue, a dance style known for its sharp geometric lines and precision, and it introduced her to a different community with new energy.

“There’s all these little niches here,” she said. “So in another city, could I make the work that I make? Yeah, probably. But I don’t know if it would feed me in the same way.”

The Boston Terriers men’s basketball team advanced to the Patriot League finals on Sunday with a nail-biting victory over the Navy Midshipmen, 73-72.

And it couldn’t have come closer than what took place at the end of the second half.

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The Terriers came into the game as the No. 4 seed in the conference tournament. The Midshipmen had the best record in the conference and were the No. 1 seed. The game was tied at 70 apiece with Navy inbounding the ball from the other side of the court with about 8.4 seconds left in the game.

Navy’s Austin Benigni received the pass and took the ball coast-to-coast for the go-ahead layup.

Boston’s Chance Gladden received the ball quickly in a last-ditch effort to try to put the Terriers back up. He dribbled up the court, went behind his back as he crossed mid-court and threw up a prayer from well beyond the 3-point line. It went in.

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The Terriers improved to 17-16 on the season and still have hopes that they could punch their ticket to the dance with a win in the Patriot League Championship. Navy, with a record of 26-7, may be on the outside looking into the NCAA Tournament this season.

Gladden finished with 26 points on 8-of-12 from the field. He made three 3-pointers and had four assists to his credit. Michael McNair added 22 points.

Navy’s Aidan Kehoe had 26 points, 12 rebounds and five steals in the loss. Benigni added 17 points.

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Boston will play Lehigh in the Patriot League Championship on Wednesday.

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