Ashley Matson teaches English at Leland & Gray Union Middle and High School.
TOWNSHEND-When the Brattleboro Reformer reported that Leland & Gray Union Middle and High School and the Windham Central Supervisory Union had agreed to a $250,000 settlement over racial and sexual harassment, the framing was immediate and familiar: The school had failed.
The article emphasized what educators allegedly failed to do, quoted officials stressing the “essential role that Vermont law entrusts to educators” in stopping student-on-student harassment, and presented the settlement as a historic reckoning.
Shortly afterward, follow-up coverage intensified the message. An advocate was quoted as saying, bluntly, “You didn’t do the best you could.” School leaders were accused of hiding behind settlements.
The solution, all sources agreed, was more training — more workshops, more professional development, more responsibility placed squarely on educators.
I want to be clear: Two students endured racism and harassment that deserved a serious response. These facts must be named without defensiveness, qualification, or equivocation. We failed those students, and we cannot afford to fail the next.
But if we allow the story of this specific kind of failure to be told as if it begins and ends inside a school building, that only guarantees its repetition. Framing this as a failure of teachers misrepresents both the origins of the harm and who is empowered to stop it.
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There is a persistent fantasy in public discourse that teachers possess sweeping institutional power — that if harassment continues, it must be because educators failed to intervene or lacked the proper training.
In reality, teachers do not determine disciplinary outcomes, control record-keeping systems, decide on legal strategy, negotiate with insurers, or even know the full extent of the consequences imposed after a hazing, harassment, or bullying investigation.
What we control is what happens in front of us, in real time, inside classrooms that are increasingly vulnerable to the whims of the outside world.
We interrupt harm when we see it: separate students, create classroom procedures, document incidents, report concerns, follow policy, support victims, and repeatedly try to create safe spaces. And all of this happens in addition to the actual “teaching” part of the job.
And then we go home and read headlines declaring that we “did little or nothing.”
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After over a decade of teaching, going on 10 years at L&G, I’d like to ground the conversation about harm and failure in the reality of a school, rather than the abstraction that coverage of these events promoted.
Teachers aren’t putting racial slurs on vocabulary lists. We aren’t reminding kids when, where, or how to say something cruel, or teaching strategies on the best way to bully someone. These are lessons learned at home, and I know this because I interact with people from those homes as a crucial part of my job.
I have had countless interactions with parents who will defend and deny anything and everything on behalf of their children. I have been accused of “bullying” for sharing a detailed behavior log with a parent. I have been confronted by an enraged parent who stormed into my classroom during student arrival to accuse me of “losing” their child’s work, only to discover the incomplete assignment in the student’s backpack. One parent — an educator themselves — sent such aggressive and demeaning messages that they were ultimately barred from contacting me directly.
I am tasked with ensuring students aren’t harassed while being on the receiving end of harassing behavior from the very adults demanding that schools “fix” everything. And then we act shocked when behavior doesn’t change.
The uncomfortable truth at the center of all of this is that when students use racist language, mock civil rights, threaten peers over sexual orientation, or otherwise dehumanize their classmates, they are demonstrating behavior they internalized through family conversations, access to online spaces, peer reinforcement, political rhetoric, and from what adults excuse, defend, or remain silent about.
Children are not born racist. They are taught — explicitly or implicitly — what is acceptable.
I can teach empathy all day long; I can challenge stereotypes, facilitate restorative conversations, and intervene when harm occurs, but children will mirror what is modeled and defended at home and in their communities. No amount of professional development can override 18 hours a day of messaging outside of school.
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What makes the public conversation around this settlement especially frustrating is that it echoes a pattern Vermont has been stuck in for decades.
As early as 1999, state-level civil rights reporting identified racial harassment in Vermont’s public schools and emphasized teacher training as a corrective measure. Decades later, after anti-bullying laws, expanded diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and millions spent on professional development, the same headlines continue to appear.
At this point, it seems clear that repeatedly returning to “training” for educators cannot address the root of this problem.
Recent reporting acknowledges this tension between who is responsible and who is blamed when students aren’t protected from harassment. Coverage of the L&G settlement notes that harassment has surged statewide, that the Vermont Human Rights Commission is overwhelmed and underfunded, and that retaliation silences students across many systems, not just education.
Parents quoted in these articles concede that educators are not given enough support to manage the expectations placed upon us. This acknowledgement matters because it emphasizes what teachers and school leaders already know: Rather than being the failure of a single school or district, this is, in fact, a societal failure.
Indicting individual schools and districts while acknowledging a statewide crisis and demanding “more training” as the only possible solution — despite decades of such training producing little evidence of change — is deeply hypocritical.
When advocates say, “You didn’t do the best you could,” I wish I could ask them how they know that with certainty. Have they tracked every report, consequence, and follow-up? Do they know what teachers are allowed to do and what limitations we face?
Accountability matters, but without an honest accounting of constraints and causes, it seems a lot more like convenient scapegoating. As a teacher, I’m expected to solve racism, homophobia, misogyny, trauma, neglect, and online radicalization while being stripped of authority, resources, and societal trust. This isn’t accountability; it’s abandonment.
The national context only deepens this problem. At the same time as schools are being told to do more, the federal government is retreating from public education, weakening civil rights enforcement, and offloading responsibility down the pipeline — onto districts, schools, and ultimately individual teachers like me.
Oversight is shrinking and funding is uncertain, yet the broader forces shaping children’s beliefs remain largely untouched. We are divesting from the structures intended to protect students while demanding that educators compensate for every failure, from the top down.
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To be clear, I will keep teaching. I will keep intervening. I will continue to care deeply about the kids in my school and in my community. However, I cannot be expected to repair what is broken outside my classroom walls.
When parents and families refuse accountability, their children mirror this behavior, locking all of us — families, teachers, students, and community members — into a zero-sum game in which no one wins and everyone suffers.
We failed the two students at the center of L&G’s harassment lawsuit. And that “we” includes the families and communities absent from coverage of this and similar stories.
Let me be clear: I am not asking that the responsibility for protecting students from harassment and bullying be shifted from educators and schools. I am simply asking families and communities to shoulder their share.
Without this partnership, there is no settlement, no amount of professional training, no teacher-blaming article that will solve the problem.
If we want better kids, we must expect better from all of the adults in their lives.
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