“My job has never been so exciting,” Anne Bordonaro, who leads the Vermont Agency of Education’s work on federal education programs, told lawmakers in the House and Senate Education Committees Thursday. 

Exciting, though, could easily be replaced with “chaotic.”

The fate of the U.S. Department of Education remains an open question. Just this week, the department’s new leader, one-time professional wrestling company CEO Linda McMahon, announced plans to cut the department’s staff in half. An onslaught of executive orders from President Donald Trump and his administration have destabilized public schools nationwide, and court cases challenging the president’s actions only add to the ever changing landscape.

“As you can imagine, just about anything you put on paper is obsolete about 30 minutes later,” Bordonaro told lawmakers. 

At the moment, the agency doesn’t expect “significant cuts” to “core education programs” as a result of federal funding reductions this school year or next, according to Bordonaro. But impacts in the 2026-27 school year are uncertain. 

Through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the state receives more than $68 million annually from the feds, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides another $37.5 million for Vermont’s schools, Bordonaro said, among other streams of federal dollars. 

But while the biggest potential changes may not be imminent, the turmoil in Washington is already trickling down to local classrooms. 

Brooke Olsen-Farrell, superintendent of the Slate Valley Unified School District, said in the joint hearing that her relatively low-income district relies on federal dollars to pay for all of its academic interventionists and school psychologists, among other staff. 

Slate Valley’s school board, worried about drastic actions in Washington, instructed Olsen-Farrell to add language to the contracts of about 20 staff making their positions contingent on federal grant funding. 

“So they all received contracts today with that in it and to say there was a lot of emotion is an understatement,” she told lawmakers. “I’m significantly worried about retention and stability.” 

— Ethan Weinstein

In the know

The Vermont Senate voted Thursday 22-8 to confirm Zoie Saunders as education secretary, ending a yearlong saga over her appointment. 

Last spring, the Senate voted 19-9 not to confirm her as the education secretary, a rare rejection of a cabinet appointment. Now, with education policy dominating conversations in Montpelier, Saunders has served as the face of Gov. Phil Scott’s “education transformation proposal,” which seeks school district consolidation and a new education funding formula. The goal, she’s said, is to expand educational opportunities while also reducing costs. 

“What she’s trying to do is provide the best opportunity she can for every kid in the state,” Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, chair of the Senate Education Committee said, explaining his support for Saunders on the Senate floor. 

Yet many senators who opposed Saunders’ appointment last year once again spoke out against her confirmation. Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor, told her colleagues she’d heard even more opposition to Saunders from constituents this year than last year. 

“I have to vote no,” White said. “We can resist school closures and consolidations.”

Read more about the confirmation debate here. 

Federal fallout

With tensions rising between the U.S. and Canada, Vermont businesses have been caught in the crossfire of a simmering trade war between the two countries. 

Already facing the prospect of price hikes and supply chain disruptions due to tariffs on Canadian goods that Trump has enacted and postponed multiple times, Vermont companies now have to contend with another knock-on effect of fraying tensions between the nations: Canadians are shunning Vermont goods.

Signature Vermont brands from Skida to Barr Hill are paying the price. Read the story here. 

— Habib Sabet

Funding aimed at making a struggling Williamstown farm more resilient has been paused. A program that distributes local, free food has been cancelled. The Department of Environmental Conservation is missing $10.7 million for clean water quality projects. 

In the last few months, the new Trump administration has pulled back federal funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, climate change and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed in 2022 by his predecessor Joe Biden. 

Around Vermont, those funding changes are affecting farmers and the organizations that support them, prompting alarm and confusion. Altogether, the federal government has paused or cancelled tens of millions of dollars in funding for agricultural programs across the state.

Read more about the federal funding cuts for farmers here.

— Emma Cotton

In January, I got a call from my college friend Greg: “Hey Karl, want to see Cooper Flagg in person?” he asked.

“Heck, yes,”  I said.

He could make that happen. He has a close friend at Duke who has season tickets to all the home hoop contests. I asked brazenly, “Can my son Peter come too?” and he charitably said, “Sure.”

So Peter and I had a basketball adventure.

Peter is a true basketball maven and savant. He played for MUHS and then just about every day in college at Middlebury, noon hoops and intramurals, and wrote about basketball for the Campus newspaper and an online publication “Nothing But NESCAC.” He lives in Burlington now, works at Winooski Elementary School, and plays pick-up at UVM three or four nights a week.

Peter was a godsend as it turned out. Not only was he good company but he knew how to get us home when all our flights were canceled on the Sunday after the game when Vermont and the East got dumped on with a foot or more of snow.

He just took a few minutes, tapped some of those numbers and letters on his phone and, voila, we were headed home to Burlington on Monday, though through Chicago, not Washington. Genius stuff.

Duke is ranked the #2 college basketball team in the country with a 26-3 record, heading into the NCAA Tournament (“March Madness”). Cooper Flagg is their best player, leads the team in points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks. It is likely he will be named College Basketball Player of the Year and be the first player selected in the NBA draft in June.

The Cooper Flagg story is well known by now, much written about. He’s from the small town of Newport, Maine (population about 3,500), located between Etna and Palmyra. He should be a senior in high school, like his twin brother Ace, who attends a prep powerhouse just down the road from Duke and will attend UMaine next year. Cooper turned 18 in December but skipped his senior year (he “reclassified”).

Oh yes, the game itself, Duke vs. Stanford. It wasn’t a competitive match (106-70) — Duke is much better than Stanford, but that didn’t really matter: we were there for the experience. To actually see a game in Duke’s hallowed hall of hoop, Cameron Indoor Stadium, after watching so many games on TV was compelling indeed.

There are no tickets to games for Duke students. They are admitted an hour and a half before tip-off, first come-first served. They wait in line for hours in Krzyzewskiville, named after Mike Krzyzewski (sh-SHEF-ski), Duke’s legendary coach who retired three years ago. They stay overnight in tents for big games.

From watching Duke games on TV, Peter and I didn’t realize that Cameron is small, just 9,314 seats, compared to other big time college arenas (the Dean Smith Center at the University of North Carolina, for example, just a half hour away, seats nearly 22,000). The Duke students, the “Cameron Crazies,” sit, or rather stand, bedecked in colorful garb, in a special courtside section and maintain a raucous din for the whole game.

All the interior spaces of Cameron, the concourses, have a museum feel, adorned as they are with photographs and displays that exhibit Duke’s extraordinary history of basketball success. Cameron was built in 1940 and all suggestions to expand or replace it have been resisted. The intimacy of the setting is vital to the excitement of the spectator experience.

Now, about Cooper Flagg: he is a complete player, remarkably talented for a player of any age. It really was a joy to see him in person and we had great seats (thank you, Greg and Doren).

The “experts” say he must improve his “handle” (ball handling: dribbling, passing). I didn’t see that. His game is remarkably complete. He shoots righthanded but seems equally adept with his right or left hand going to the basket. My favorite sequence was when he drove to the basket with his left hand and laid a soft 8- to 10-footer off the glass and in — then made the same move from the right side a couple of possessions later.

I think his job in the first half of games is to stay out of foul trouble and be available for crunch-time in the second half. He played on the baseline or the wing in the first half, a forward. In the second half he played in the back court, a 6’9” off guard, and was involved in nearly every play, often bringing the ball up himself. He ended up with 19 points, 5 rebounds, 6 assists, and two steals.

BEFORE THE DUKE-STANFORD basketball game on Feb. 15, the columnist and his wingman did not have to wait in line at Krzyzewskiville.
Photo courtesy of Karl Lindholm

He is an expressive player and seems to love playing for this team, which has three other first-years who might opt for the draft this June. Cooper has indicated that he has enjoyed his year at Duke which has raised hopes there that it might not be “One and Done,” and he would return to school for another year. At their final home game, the Crazies chanted hopefully “one more year!”

It’s an intriguing thought. In the chaotic state of big-time college sports, he makes a lot of money as a Duke student, NIL money, direct payments to athletes. He likes his classes. He already has a shoe contract with Boston-based New Balance (which has a factory in Skowhegan, Maine, only about a half hour from Newport). Stay or go, he’s in line to make a lot of money.

I think it would be great if he stayed at Duke and could be a college kid playing with his friends and contemporaries before entering the NBA and playing the rigors of an 82-game regular season schedule against men a decade older, some even twice his age, or more (Lebron).

At the end of the Duke-Stanford game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, Peter and I turned to one another and exchanged a familiar gesture that we do when we have witnessed something extraordinary in an athletic event, a beautiful game, say, or a striking sequence.

It’s a light fist bump — we say in gratitude and appreciation:

“Sports!”

—————

Karl Lindholm can be reached at [email protected].

MONTPELIER, Vt. (WCAX) – Vermont Governor Phil Scott Wednesday said he plans to veto the mid-year budget adjustment bill because of lawmakers’ efforts to extend an emergency housing program into the summer.

The House on Wednesday passed its mid-year budget adjustment, sending it to the governor for his signature. It includes more than $1 million to keep the current version of the General Assistance Emergency Housing program — also known as the motel-hotel program — running beyond the planned expiration date next month until the end of June.

“I feel it has been a failed system and we can do better,” Scott said Wednesday. “if you look pre-pandemic, it was just a shadow of what we created. It was just a monster after that.”

The governor has proposed setting aside $2 million to be distributed to communities across the state to be used for addressing homelessness in a way they feel is beneficial.

However, Democrats have come up with their own plan to replace the current system altogether in favor of a system that gives homeless Vermonters more predictability.

“They’re constantly having to pivot and don’t know what to expect. It’s really hard to move to a permanent path of stability when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep the next night,” said Rep. Jubilee McGill, D-Middlebury.

The governor says he’s hopeful to reach a compromise with lawmakers to get the must-pass funding bill over the finish line.

Copyright 2025 WCAX. All rights reserved.