To: Mr. Raj Bhakta
Re: Your Recent Purchase of Green Mountain College
My name is Kyle Callahan, and I am a homeowner in the village of Poultney.
I am also a 2006 alum and former writing adjunct with Green Mountain College. I met my wife on the campus, and after we graduated, she spent two years there as an AmeriCorps volunteer, helping the college connect with students and teachers in the local public schools.
Later, after we married under the tree where we met on campus, my wife took a position that allowed her to work with students in both our town’s public schools. I took a position at LiHigh School, the progressive independent-school about a quarter-mile east on Main Street from where you recently invested over $5 million.
We settled in Poultney not just because of the professional opportunities that opened up to us, but because we love this community. We love knowing the people who grow our food. We love the community engagement that gave rise to the Slate Valley Trails bike system, the local chapter of the Vermont Association of Snowmobile Trails, and the new REclaimED Maker Space. We love the community involvement on display at Chili Fest, Maple Fest, and our town-wide yard sales. We love the teachers and students we work with every day. We love sitting on our lawn chairs and watching our daughter run through our neighbors’ backyards with her friends.
This month marks our eighteenth year in Rutland County (fifteen of which were spent in Poultney) and our eighth year as homeowners in the village. My wife is now an English teacher in the middle school. Along with still teaching, I’m now the Operations Manager at LiHigh. Our young daughter is now a student in our public elementary school.
Vermont Public Radio reported that you “hope..to resurrect [on the GMC campus] a new kind of school that will benefit students and the local community.”
You’re quoted as saying, “It’ll probably be a work college.” The article continues, reporting that for you, “it can’t just be hands-on farm or tradecraft that’s taught[;] entrepreneurial skills [will be] equally crucial.”
According to the article, you admit your full vision for the campus is not quite clear: “the students of the college are part of the producing of the products that are growing from [Bhakta Farms], that we’re selling that they’re also learning how to sell. In turn…we’re…paying for their school.”
In other words, an apprenticeship type of school where the students graduate as skilled professionals without any debt.
The question, I guess, lies in what kinds of apprenticeships your new school will offer.
Clearly, you are a capitalist. Your vision seems to involve generating and selling agricultural products and using the profit to cover the cost of the free labor the students will provide in your agricultural fields and/or your sales and marketing division.
You’ll have to house the labor, educate and train the labor (ideally with skills that will carry over after they graduate), and cover the health and nutrition of the labor. But if the labor works as well as envisioned, your investment will pay off and each laborer will depart after however many years with the skills and credentials you promised, free at last, free at least, and ready to finally earn an income for their labor (assuming, of course, you don’t utilize financial incentives to increase the student’s output during their educational servitude).
As a graduate of Green Mountain College in the years of its environmental mission, my guiding economic theories lean more towards the democratic-socialism side of the spectrum, but I’ve worked for capitalists my entire life, and I can appreciate the need to make your nut and still have some money to enjoy the finer things in life. From the photographs on your Bhakta Farms website and your interviews on YouTube, you seem well acquainted with the finer things in life (your current “not even a double-wide” trailer/office not included).
A significant portion of Poultney residents, on the other hand, are not used to such things. According to the 2018-2019 Annual Statistical Report on Child Nutrition Programs from the Vermont Agency of Education (the latest year for which I could find data), over 46% of our elementary-school students and nearly 40% of our high-school students come from low-income families. Our median income, according to the U.S. Census, is $45,500 — which, for a family of four, qualifies them for reduced lunches at the school. This monthly income does not provide enough for food, rent/mortgage, electricity, oil, gas, auto repairs, medical bills, dental bills, clothing, Internet, etc., let alone a $250 bottle of fifty-year-old brandy.
Rutland County, as I’m sure you know, has also been devastated by the opioid epidemic, and we have reached that point in American history where the children of some of those addicts are in our school systems, not to mention the children of our county’s alcoholics, domestic abusers, and child abusers (emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual).
According to the 2017 Study Of Vermont State Funding For Special Education, the “increased demand and limited capacity for community-based mental health and social services has shifted responsibility for providing these services to schools. In the face of their own capacity limitations, schools have responded by either contracting with private providers or paying for students to attend special schools or programs outside the district.”
LiHigh, the school I labor for, is one of those special schools, so I have firsthand knowledge of how limited our community-based mental health and social services have become.
As you consider your vision for the former campus of Green Mountain College, I urge you to explore the “community school” model of education. Endorsed by the NEA and (therefore) a major element in Vice-President Biden’s education plan and (therefore, should V.P. Biden win the national election) a potential major recipient of future federal grant moneys, the model puts the campus at the center of the community. Academics, health and social services, community development, and community engagement all occur on campus.
A trade-school education results in a skilled profession, with graduates often becoming plumbers, electricians, carpenters, farmers, auto mechanics, etc., but a trade-school education can also result in graduates becoming childcare providers, family counselors, addiction counselors, nurses, elementary and secondary educators, and community artists and artisans. The very people most needed by the families in our community.
These professions are not traditionally considered “entrepreneurial,” but a talented entrepreneur such as yourself can teach students to navigate either the nonprofit system or Vermont’s benefit-corporation laws in such a way as to enjoy the finer things in life while also improving the community in which both our families have now invested so much.
Again, as you create what you called “a think tank of experts in education and in other fields,” I urge you to consider the community-school model for whatever you hope to build.
Thank you for your time, and best of luck with the still-developing vision that will, someday soon, dominate my town.