by Rebecca Tatistcheff, Ed. D., Principal, Cabot School
CABOT – Vermont has some of the most progressive education legislation in the country. Laurie Gagnon of the Aurora Institute recently wrote, “What’s especially important about Vermont’s approach is that it sets a vision for shifting the education system as a whole to a student-centered, proficiency-based approach.”
It has set and followed trends in best practice by supporting project-based learning, personalized learning plans, and proficiency-based assessment. Our state legislation encourages flexibility and adaptability — all well-established and important strategies for sustaining rural education.
In 2018, Cabot School redesigned their high school programming to align with the state’s vision for public education and meet the goals of our landmark legislation and State Board of Education Rule Series 2000 (the Education Quality Standards). The high school team designed a project-based program that allowed students to apply their learning through experiences beyond the bounds of the classroom.
Over the course of the next six years, the team worked to create coherence across the Prek-12 community; identifying and assessing transferable skills, encouraging curriculum that saw students become resources and change-makers in the community, and developing a coherent learning map that gives every student the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in creative ways while still developing the skills necessary to be successful learners beyond high school. Students demonstrate proficiency and content knowledge through the creation of short films, podcasts, long form journalism pieces, creative writing, and plays. They are resources and change-makers in their small, but vibrant and economically diverse community.
Over the past three years, 100 percent of our graduating seniors have applied to and been accepted to at least one two- or four-year institution. And, all graduates have completed a self-designed internship based on their unique interests. A student interested in emergency services became a certified CPR trainer and then trained 12 Cabot staff members. A student interested in skiing became an adaptive ski instructor, supporting individuals with disabilities to experience the joy of skiing as he does. In a conversation with school visitors, he emphasized the transformational nature of this experience. By the end of the year, he was advocating for Vermont Adaptive and planning to continue his work with them into college. Such opportunities for deeper learning improve long-term outcomes for students including, importantly, a commitment to civic engagement.
I am proud of the incredible work we have done as a PreK-12 community over the past several years. We have built a robust after-school program that enriches students’ learning and provides a work-based learning and leadership experience for our middle and high school students. We have coordinated and aligned our curriculum and thematic projects so our educators and students can focus on deeper learning and worry less about reinventing the wheel every year. We have shifted our literacy practices to better align with the science of reading while also ensuring students are engaged in work that is deep and meaningful. Every Cabot senior is engaged in Senior X internships that are driven by their passions: engineering, big engine repair and maintenance; social work, computer science, technical art and design to name a few. And when we engage students’ passions they persist in their learning, even when it gets hard. Our high school program is highlighted as a model for project-based learning, flexible pathways, and proficiency-based assessment. Visitors comment on the depth of student learning and the invaluable skills in collaboration, communication, creativity, problem solving, and life-long learning — all values the Vermont State Legislature and the State Board of Education have defined in law and rule.
For all the ways Cabot exemplifies the intent of the legislation to create opportunities for Vermont youth beyond the schoolhouse walls, we should be looking to Cabot School as a model for inspiration and learning. In 2021, Cabot was nominated by two institutions, including the Vermont Agency of Education, for inclusion in a catalog of innovative schools through The Canopy Project. Students’ graduation portfolios (illustrated through their Mastery Transcripts) are indicative of the rigorous quality of the work that they create. Cabot should be upheld as a model of what schools in Vermont strive to instill in their portrait of a graduate. We should be working to scale up these practices and to learn from Cabot’s story of school transformation.
Unfortunately, this winter, the Cabot school board and community are confronting whether they can sustain the PreK-12 model financially. The confluence of the looming funding cliff when local ESSER Funds, meant to be temporary bolsters to school communities in the wake of the pandemic, and ESSER-funded state initiatives like the Community Schools Act (Act 67 of 2021) end in September, alongside increasing inflation and legislatively mandated infrastructure repairs mean that the Act 127 funding formulas meant to create educational equity, may, in fact, not see the desired results.
Annually, according to the supervisory union, between 50 to 60 percent of Cabot school’s student population qualify for Free and Reduced lunch (FRL). Twenty to twenty-four (20-24) percent of the students we serve have documented disabilities, ranging from moderate learning disabilities to those that require one-on-one and out of district support. Both numbers exceed the State average in these student reporting categories. One might assume, then, that the per pupil expenditure is higher at Cabot than at other schools in the region with lower percentages of students living in poverty or in need of support services. It is not. Cabot’s per pupil expenditure in the 2023-2024 Fiscal Year was the lowest of the schools in the Caledonia Central Supervisory Union. Cabot is using its funds wisely and implementing the innovations called for by lawmakers. While Cabot may not be an affluent community it has always been rich in its commitment to community; it deserves a school that can deliver rigorous and innovative learning experiences to all of its students.
Cabot is not the only school district facing such dire financial challenges. Added to the tension between innovation and adequate funding is an aging infrastructure that continues to drain financial resources into emergency maintenance rather than forward thinking goals. Like other communities, Cabot needs help to navigate these challenging times. I call on you as local residents to reach out to your local legislators. Ask them to incentivize innovative models of education with adequate funding and infrastructure. Urge them to see innovation, funding, and infrastructure as intimately connected to the health of communities. Call on lawmakers across the state to learn from Cabot’s story, and the stories of other community schools, and to incentivize the innovation lawmakers clearly support without asking individual communities to make hard and destabilizing decisions at the expense of their young people.
[Rebecca Tatistcheff, Ed. D. is an educational leader who has worked locally and nationally to support innovative school design models rooted in project-based learning. She holds a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University in School Leadership and Change with a concentration on rural and place-based education. She is currently the principal of Cabot School, one of few remaining Pre-K to 12 schools in Vermont.]
