GLOVER – Leanne Harple of Glover, mother, teacher and traveled Vermonter, became one of only two democrats elected to the Vermont House of Representatives from the Northeast Kingdom on November 5. She’ll take her seat representing Albany, Craftsbury, Glover and Greensboro for the Orleans-4 House District in January.
photo by Heather Gray
Harple says she will base her votes in Montpelier on the same values she brought to the Glover select board where she served as chair for a year in 2023-24: Inclusion, affordability, environmental protections and planning wisely for the future of small rural towns.
The mother of two children now lives a few miles down the same dirt road in Glover where she grew up on a small family farm.
She attended the Glover Community School, Lake Region High School and Johnson State College, where she earned her masters degree in education.
Now an English Language Arts teacher at Hazen Union School in Hardwick, where she’s been for more than a decade, Harple now serves as advisor to the student council and teachers union president. She’s working out the details of how she’ll continue her work at Hazen while she serves in the legislature, she says, but plans to continue working at the school.
Harple’s commitment to rural people, places and values is evidenced by her work and training with Dirtroad Organizing, building politics rooted in community and values, not partisanship. The organization’s work is about “respect, listening, inclusivity and fighting for each other with a commitment to 100% positive politics that can bring us together, not tear us apart,” says the organization’s website.
Her comments are peppered with references to Vermont’s beautiful natural resources she obviously loves and values highly.
With committee assignments to be worked out between now and January, Harple says she hopes she can put her experience in education to work on that committee. She says she’s been asked about serving on the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, to which she responded favorably because of the opportunity to positively affect the lives of rural children through programs that committee is responsible for.
Harple says, “I really enjoy research.” She plans to learn all she can about her new position in the legislature and the many subjects she’ll need to learn about. She cites her experience teaching students how to learn as great background for her own learning.
She says she’s anxious to get to work looking for ways to lower the cost of education while maintaining high-quality standards in Vermont schools, and exploring new funding models that are more equitable to low-income Vermonters and people in rural areas. She’s interested in exploring whether shifting some education funding from the property tax to the income tax might be more equitable to Vermont landowners.
Providing state aid for school construction and repairs is important to Harple. “Throughout Vermont, our schools are collectively in need of $6 billion worth of repairs. A task force for making recommendations in this area is already being considered for the next legislative season.” She says she will follow the discussion closely and “vote to stabilize the infrastructure of one of the most important components of our communities.”
In her legislative work, Harple hopes to “address the many systemic problems that prevent kids from being ready to learn when they come to school, including childhood poverty, hunger, and anxiety.” Noting, “In the last legislative session, Vermont invested another $1 million to extend our Community Schools pilot program, which tries to coordinate local resources and best practices to meet the needs of students and their families so that everyone can thrive in school.”
With all of that, she sees it as critically important to “recognize the Educator’s Bill of Rights to support schools in negotiating competitive salaries that will retain and recruit high-quality educators and establishing safe working conditions for all teachers and support staff so that they can provide the best educational outcomes possible in our small rural schools.”
The future of education seems to be consolidation, says Harple, who asks, “How can we protect local schools?” She believes it’s important to give small rural towns more autonomy over their schools.
Affordable housing is another important area to which Harple plans to give her attention. “Planned projects have to support the workforce,” she says. “Kids who grow up here need options,” she says. “Where will they live? How will they afford it?”
Harple sees an important role for organizations like Habitat for Humanity and RuralEdge, which she says the state must support. She wants to be looking for projects that don’t tear communities apart and imagines finding ways to repurpose the many abandoned rural properties that can be rehabilitated.
Her work will continue “support for Act 76, which ensures that Vermont families have access to affordable quality childcare;” work toward lowering the cost of prescription drugs for everyone, which . . .will make a huge difference for people on fixed incomes who have more healthcare needs;” improve access to telehealth and at-home healthcare services so that more Vermonters can grow old in their own homes” and “find more ways to reduce the cost of living for retired people on fixed incomes.”
Earlier this month, after winning the election, she wrote to constituents, “I’m very excited to go to Montpelier now to begin the hard work of making sure that our voice is heard and that the people of the NEK matter. . . It will be an honor to serve.”
Harple will soon be attending her legislative orientation and has already received her state email address. She plans to create a newsletter and asks that those interested in being added to the distribution contact her at [email protected]
ed. note: An earlier version of this article failed to indicate the 2 Democratic House members mentioned were from the Northeast Kingdom. Others were elected elsewhere in the state.
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
