VPR News

Lisa Senecal of Stowe has been elected chair of the Vermont Commission on Women. The Vermont Commission on Women is a non-partisan government board that works to advance rights for women within the state. Senecal takes over the position from Marcia Merrell, who is stepping down after serving as chair of the commission for the past decade.

Summer is the season for backyard barbecues and fixing big meals with friends and family. But how do you manage when it comes to preparing meals for hundreds of people? We're talking to people making meals for the masses, at summer camps and on college campuses, about cooking and baking for big crowds.

The legislative session came to an official close on June 20, when Gov. Scott signed the last five bills waiting for him to act on. VPR's statehouse reporter Peter Hirschfeld joins Vermont Edition to discuss the governor's rationale behind the vetoes and what the next steps are from lawmakers.

Amid nationwide debate over topics like abortion policy, curricula for sex education classes vary widely state by state. We're talking about what sex ed looks like here in Vermont, how health teachers think about that part of their job, and how new education requirements like proficiency-based learning intersect with teaching kids about sexual health.

Over time, broadcast television has lost some of its power. Except for the Super Bowl , we simply don't gather in front of our TV sets like we used to. But debates are still a big deal. In 2016, one of the Trump-Clinton debates was viewed by more than 80 million people – a new record.

Updated at 3:45 p.m. The 340 farmer-owners of the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery will soon decide whether to merge their century-old institution into Dairy Farmers of America, a much larger Kansas-based dairy marketing co-op.

The new commander of Vermont’s Civil Air Patrol, Col. Ann Brechbühl, says she wants to get more young people interested in aviation.

Lauren LaMorte’s family has owned its stone tool business, Trow and Holden Co., in downtown Barre for more than a hundred years. She’s witnessed this working class city try to claw its way back from years of poverty, crime and businesses closing, so when she heard that Central Vermont Medical Center was closing Barre’s only downtown clinic, she wasn’t happy.

Ceramic artist Averill McDowell first caught the pottery bug as a student at Peoples Academy, in Morrisville. "Pottery sort of just fell perfectly in my lap," she said. "I learned a little bit in high school how to work with pottery on the wheel. But there wasn’t, like, too much direct instruction. It was more like messing around."

We've known about climate change for some time now. Yet we still can't seem to address the issue effectively. Witness the group of young protestors who disrupted the Vermont House this spring, in an effort to spur our representatives to greater action. The young are restless, as well we should all be. Turns out these last twelve months in the U.S. were the wettest on record, with floods plaguing numerous areas of the country.

Since 2014, the Vermont Health Department has been giving out the overdose reversal drug Narcan for free to people at risk of overdose, and since 2016 an order has allowed pharmacies to sell Narcan to anyone without a prescription. Now, nurses at some Vermont schools are also stocking the drug.

Inspired by a lack of action on climate change in Washington, and by the deterioration of coral reefs she witnessed while out snorkeling, Norwich filmmaker Liz Canner set out to create an experience that would evoke a visceral reaction and inspire people to address these issues. We’re talking about Lost City of Mer , a virtual reality game that uses a fantastic underwater world to teach players about the importance of climate change action.

Ticks are not our friends. But they seem to like us. And these blood-sucking arachnids have taken to Vermont in great numbers this year. While they're not all carrying Lyme disease, anaplasmosis or Babesiosis, you want to avoid them as much as possible. We learn all about ticks on Vermont Edition .

Although a lot was packed into Hamilton about the life of the nation's first secretary of the treasury, some details were not told in the musical — including Alexander Hamilton's relationship with one of Vermont's founding fathers. But biographer Willard Sterne Randall will fill in some of those gaps when he discusses Hamilton's connections to Ethan Allen with a talk at the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum Sunday.

Last year, VPR investigated the three Vermont towns that issued the most speeding tickets in 2017: Plymouth, Bridgewater, and tiny Mount Tabor. We've crunched the numbers for 2018 and found ticketing went down statewide by about 10 percent. Ticketing also went down in Plymouth and Mount Tabor. The numbers did not go down in Bridgewater. They went up.