The Northern Roots Traditional Music Festival returns Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 26 and 27, with music, dance, and celebration.
Now a cornerstone of the traditional music calendar in New England, the festival, directed by Keith Murphy, continues to showcase a variety of northern musical traditions, including Irish, Scottish, English and French Canadian.
The festival begins with a full slate of daytime participation and performance activities at the Brattleboro Music Center, including workshops, panels, mini-concerts, a dance band class, and more.
On Saturday, a special “family track” includes a concert and a dance for all ages.
More than 20 lawmakers from Vermont's three major political parties gathered last week in Montpelier to unveil bills to postpone forced school mergers. Under Act 46, the state can force schools to merge into new districts. Under rules and policies that the Vermont State Board of Education developed after...
I would like to officially announce that I will not be standing for re-election to the position as Brattleboro Selectboard member. This has been a difficult and bittersweet decision. I want to express the genuine honor, pleasure, and gratitude I felt at having been selected by the citizens of...
Obituaries • Pam Ciampi, 74, of Putney. Died with dignity and grace on Jan. 9, 2019 from complications from kidney disease. She was a proud mother and grandmother, a gardener, a skilled teacher, a respected author, an avid reader, and a well-known astrologer. She loved cooking, watching football, traveling, and long conversations with her close friends. Pam was born in New York, grew up in Florida, and attended college in Alabama. She received her BA in Art History and Education...
In the last two months of 2018, the Windham Central Supervisory Union office received and approved all 17 applications for elementary school students whose parents/guardians requested that the students' “home school” be transferred from the town in which they reside to a school in another town, according to Windham Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Bill Anton. At the Jan. 14 meeting of the West River Modified Union Education District (WRMUED) at Leland & Gray Union Middle and High School, Anton said...
Beginning Feb. 4 and continuing to April 15, AARP Foundation is providing free individualized tax assistance and preparation for all low to moderate taxpayers especially those 50 and older. This is done through its Tax-Aide program. According to a news release, Tax-Aide is the nation's largest free tax assistance and preparation service. Since its inception, the program has served more than 50 million taxpayers. Volunteers are trained and IRS-certified each year to ensure they know about and understand any new...
On a recent Friday, the local soup kitchen where I attend, Loaves and Fishes, served 490 meals - a record high! Included in this reckoning was food for 40 children at an adjacent day-care center, plus meals for them and their families for the weekend. The rest was a larger-than-normal demand by walk-in clients plus their own take-outs, for this early part of the month. We also had to explain to those attending something not entirely made clear by the...
It may take a while - or it might not happen at all - but the Selectboard has brought the town one small step closer to self-governance. At the Jan. 8 Selectboard meeting, Town Manager Peter B. Elwell asked for the Board's official support for a proposal the Vermont League of Cities and Towns (VLCT) wants to introduce this legislative session: a limited self-governance pilot program for the state's municipalities. Currently, all Vermont cities, towns, and villages operate under Dillon's...
The next offering in All Souls Church's film series “Looking Inward at White Power and Privilege” will be BlacKkKlansman, the acclaimed 2018 film directed by Spike Lee and starring John David Washington and Adam Driver. The full-length, commercial feature will be shown for free at the church, at 29 South St., on Sunday, Jan. 27 starting at noon. A discussion will follow. Before the film, the church will provide a free lunch of chili and corn bread at 11:30 a.m.
Food pantry hours changed WARDSBORO - The Jamaica/Wardsboro Community Food Pantry will be open on the last Wednesday of every month, from 6:30 until 8 p.m., in the Vestry building of the Wardsboro Yoked Parish on Main Street. The second Wednesday distribution is discontinued until further notice. Clients are urged to mark their calendars and be sure to visit the Pantry at the end of the month. The Pantry serves those living in Jamaica, Wardsboro, Stratton, and the surrounding area...
Latchis Arts announces the addition of Bolshoi Ballet and National Theatre Live simulcasts to its schedule. The Bolshoi Ballet Only in Cinemas simulcast of La Sylphide begins this year's season on Sunday, Jan. 27 at 4 p.m., at the Latchis Theatre, 50 Main St. Choreographer Johan Kobborg and Director Isabelle Julien bring to life this romantic ballet set in Scotland to music by Herman Severin Løvenskiold. Anastasia Stashkevich dances the lead role of the Sylph, with Semyon Chudin as James,
The $12.8 million police-fire facilities project - a long and sometimes-contentious process - has officially come to a close. The Selectboard will move forward with a series of final projects and an urgent upgrade for the town's alarm system, which will require Representative Town Meeting approval. Although both police and fire departments have long since settled into their new facilities, work on the buildings and their infrastructure is not yet complete, but at the Jan. 8 special Selectboard meeting, the...
The town will add new convenience features to the parking system in response to a parking survey that revealed the public's wish for the town to accept credit and debit cards. The work to install 196 new meters and 15 new kiosks begins this week. The new equipment - a $275,000 investment approved by the Selectboard last summer - will allow the public to pay for parking using a credit/debit card, using an app on their smart phone. Coins can...
The Vermont Department of Public Service recently announced a final draft of a 10-year telecommunications plan for the state. A series of public hearings about the plan were held throughout the state. One more public hearing will take place in Montpelier on a date to be determined. The plan, which includes 5G LTE technology for both urban and rural areas in Vermont, does not address concerns with the ever-growing levels of electro-smog or the lack of safety testing for 5G...
Vermont is said to be unfriendly to business and jobs. Not Brattleboro. Saving the Long Falls Paperboard mill (formerly Neenah) demonstrates yet again Brattleboro's solving the puzzle of economic development, with at least 15 reported public and private partners. Look around Brattleboro. Do you see many empty storefronts? Do you see any empty factories falling down? Look around Vermont. What do you see? “The one and only Brattleboro” is the one and only sweet spot to do business in and...
The current dysfunction among politicians in Washington is perhaps the biggest and best reason for ordinary citizens to participate in local governance. I'm talking Town Meeting. It's coming right up. As I write, Selectboards around the county are finalizing municipal budgets for next year and drafting warnings for Town Meetings in March. Sadly, many are doing this work with little or no public input. This situation is hardly surprising, given how demoralizing it is to read the headlines about the...
The town of Brattleboro has $10,000 budgeted for an energy coordinator, but the position has not been filled since July 1. This is unacceptable. An energy coordinator could leverage the initial $10,000 to obtain grants and direct a big-picture approach that helps the town reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and grow the renewable-energy economy, all of which would save money while reducing carbon emissions. For example, the coordinator could: • connect Brattleboro residents with existing resources and incentives for...
Governor Phil Scott's administration is engaged in a self-described thought experiment, “Designing Our Future: A Blueprint for Vermont's Education System.” The document, released by the Department of Education on Jan. 11, is reported by administration officials to be a compilation of creative ideas and innovative thinking. Instead, the white paper reads like a public-education horror show. Here are some of the so-called creative ideas: • Consolidate all Vermont schools into a single district. • Dismantle the Vermont Board of Education.
Good day to you, residents of southeastern Vermont! After our advertised snowstorm that included a period of sleet before changing back to snow, we've got more active weather on the way. Wednesday afternoon will see a mix of snow, sleet and freezing rain transitioning to pockets of freezing rain and plain rain into Wednesday night. Rain, heavy at times, on Thursday may change back to snow before quitting. Very cold and fair weather arrives Friday and Saturday and may set...
Even though the Leland & Gray boys' basketball team has been struggling, they might have been feeling a little too good about themselves when they welcomed the Black River Presidents to their gym on Jan. 18. Black River entered the Marble Valley League contest with a 1-6 record, and the Rebels figured a victory was already in the bag. Instead, it took a strong effort in the second half for Leland & Gray to subdue the Presidents and roll to...
This week I skated on black ice on a lake near my home, as did so many in my small community. The rare chance to experience the natural effect of newly frozen water offers a doorway into the natural world. It is an invitation to take pause, to put aside the worries of the day, and to feel the cold air in our faces and the freedom of our bodies as we glide over smooth, translucent ice. It was while...
When Alan Steinberg convened his pottery and sculpture class at Brattleboro Clayworks on Jan. 9, he left his first half-century of teaching and entered his second. But Steinberg previously passed another 50-year teaching milestone, though “I guess it depends on what you're counting,” he said. The Clayworks co-founder started his teaching career not with clay, but by molding little minds. In 1967 and 1968, as Steinberg was attending Queens College to study education, he was teaching at a daycare and...
In the words of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., it was a service that was all about “the fierce urgency of now.” And former state Rep. Kiah Morris of Bennington made sure of that. Morris - the featured speaker at Brattleboro's annual King Day celebration on Jan. 21 at Centre Congregational Church - resigned her seat in the Vermont Legislature last fall after she and her family were the targets of numerous incidents of racial hate crimes for...
Wet snow pelts the windows of Susan McMahon's second-floor office at Scott Farm. The new executive director of the Landmark Trust USA extracts three shriveled rose hips - the color of raw sienna and the size of a ping-pong ball - from a cardboard box. Medlars, she calls them. “Here, you squish them like this,” she said. “It tastes like cinnamon apples.” The unglamorous heritage fruit is popular in Iran and Turkey, explained McMahon. The mushy (edible) flesh looks like...
Todd. Danny. Damien. Brianna. William. Ronnie. These were the names of people who experienced homelessness in and around Brattleboro - and died before they could be fully helped. Their last names were left unspoken, to respect their privacy. These people, and others unnamed who, in the words of the Rev. Lise Sparrow of the Guilford Community Church, were “lost to the mists of mental illness, of addiction, of poverty,” were remembered at the annual Homelessness Awareness Day and Memorial Vigil...
Next Stage Arts Project, 15 Kimball Hill, presents the Next Stage Juke Joint Blues & BBQ with 2018 Blues Blast Music Award nominee Sunny Lowdown and the Ice Cream Men at the Next Stage Café on Saturday, Jan. 26 at 7 p.m. As described in a news release, Sunny Lowdown - the stage name of Louis Erlanger of Brattleboro - “plays a raw, deep blues, drawing from the music of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and R.L. Burnside.” He was...