The Deeper Dig

While most of Vermont's schools have maintained in-person or hybrid models since the fall, a recent push to fully reopen classrooms this spring has renewed the debate over how much in-person education is safe — and how much more the state should ask of educators.

Guests: Bibba Kahn (Main Street Middle School), Lola Duffort (VTDigger)

In a new report, Vermont's director of racial equity discusses how people of color in Vermont, like in the rest of the country, face disproportionate health impacts from the Covid-19 pandemic. But the global crisis has also deepened what she describes as “out-of-state ‘xenophobia,’” a problematic notion of who is a “real Vermonter” that remains a key barrier to achieving equity.

After years of delays, how will one of Burlington’s most ambitious development projects move forward? And why did things go so wrong? It depends on who you ask.

Federal Covid relief funding has helped the state avoid a major budget crunch. In fact, it’s allowed Gov. Phil Scott to propose a spending plan that puts about $210 million dollars towards one-time investments. Now, key lawmakers are wondering whether the governor’s plan is too thrifty, considering there’s likely even more federal money on the way.

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Back in May 2020, we traveled to Fletcher, a Franklin County town that dodged the 1918 flu pandemic, to see if it held clues for keeping out Covid-19. This month, Vermont Public Radio's 'Brave Little State' podcast took a listener question about how the town is faring now, about ten months into the pandemic. They invited us on to talk about what we learned from our reporting — and found that the town hasn't exactly stayed Covid-free.

Here's the full episode from Brave Little State.

Martin Luther King Day marks one of the biggest ski weekends in Vermont in a typical year. But this is not a typical year. Travelers to Vermont are subject to universal quarantine requirements — and while there’s anxiety about how that will impact the tourism economy, resort communities are also worried about what happens when travelers break the rules.

Guests: Heather Hebert (Jacksonville General Store), Todd Wright (St. Michael's College), Tracy Dolan (Vermont Department of Health), Emma Cotton (VTDigger)

Vermont officials were unanimous in holding President Trump responsible for the violence in Washington this week. What should the storming of the U.S. Capitol mean for Vermonters — and how does our Republican governor fit in?

Guests: Kemi Fuentes-George (Middlebury College), Linda Fowler (Dartmouth College)

The Deeper Dig will be back next week. This week: a guest post from The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman, a twice-weekly VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and citizens who are making a difference. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify to hear more.

When Steve Goodman first appeared on the Vermont Conversation in March, he described the coronavirus as a tsunami about to overwhelm us. Steve Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD, is an associate dean at Stanford Medical School, where he is also a professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine. His words were prescient: nine months later, over 340,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and at least 20 million people have been infected. Vermont, once an outlier with few Covid deaths and infections, now has daily averages of over 80 new cases and two deaths.

Steve returns to the podcast this week to share his thoughts on this Year of the Pandemic: where we are, how we got here, and how it ends.

The Covid-19 vaccine is here: 5,850 doses of the Pfizer vaccine arrived in Vermont this week, and frontline health care workers have already begun receiving the shots. And while there are still unanswered questions about how the next phase of the rollout will go, medical workers are already hailing the vaccine as the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

Proposed cuts to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont have sparked a backlash from thousands of faculty members and students. But with the university facing a budget shortfall of almost $28 million over the next three years, administrators have signaled that they’re unlikely to change course before those cuts become final. What happens now?

Guests: Katherine Brennan (UVM religion major), Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst (UVM Humanities Center), Katya Schwenk (VTDigger)