On October 9, lawyer Navi Pillay won the Nobel peace prize. Born in South Africa, she was the leader of a U.N. panel that ruled that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. In December 2023, about 600 people marched 25 miles from Springfield, Massachusetts to Northampton to protest Israel's genocide in Gaza.

In Brattleboro on March 2, 2024, about 150 people marched to protest the genocide. The march was organized by the group Southern Vermont for Palestine. In Amherst in May 2024, police arrested more than 100 people for protesting the genocide. In Washington, D.C., on November 5, 2023 about 300,000 people marched to protest the genocide. In London on November 27, 2023, more than 1 million people marched to protest the genocide. The resistance of people in and from Gaza was aided by these protests and succeeded in dramatically reducing the number of people Israel is killing in Gaza. To find out how to help stop the genocide, contact a group like Jewish Voice for Peace.

Published in April, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country” by Molly Crabapple is a New York Times bestseller. The Guardian said, “In 380 lush, high-tempo, strikingly poignant pages . . . Crabapple documents the Bund’s extraordinary rise and fall. The relevance of her material for our present moment is impossible to ignore.”

In a mass email, the group Southern Vermont for Palestine said there will be a rally for Palestine. The rally will be on October 10 at noon outside the downtown Brattleboro post office.

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On October 2, the Vermont Supreme court issued a ruling at:

www.vtcourts.gov/supreme-court/published-opinions-and-entry-orders

The court ruled that the Brattleboro school board was justified in firing the high school principal, Steve Perrin.

In January 2024, Brattleboro resident Diana Whitney gave the Valley Post permission to publish the following, which Whitney wrote:

I was disturbed by (the Brattleboro Reformer daily newspaper's) biased reporting on the termination of former Brattleboro high school principal Steve Perrin (“Former BUHS Principal Perrin Lawsuit in Discovery, Wrongful Termination Count Dismissed,” January 16).

(The Reformer reporter) quotes extensively from Mr. Perrin’s attorney, foregrounding the perspective of the alleged perpetrator, without giving equal weight to the victim’s experience. Even more harmful, (the reporter) refers to the student who allegedly endured sexual harassment and mistreatment by Perrin when she was a high school sophomore as a “woman.”

A 10th grader is a girl — a minor — not a woman. This mistake reveals the same misogynistic bias seen in the reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, when many media outlets, including the New York Times, referred to his victims as “underage women.”

As Megan Garber writes in her incisive piece in The Atlantic (“Jeffrey Epstein and the Myth of the ‘Underage Woman’”, August 15, 2019): “There is no such thing as an ‘underage woman.’”

Garber observes that this erroneous reporting “suggests an American culture that remains reluctant to equate the interests of powerful men and the interests of vulnerable girls.”
This culture is alive and well in Brattleboro, where the protection of self-described “child molester” and longtime BUHS English teacher Zeke Hecker continues. It is alive and well in the delayed investigation into decades of sexual abuse in our school district, whose results have not been shared with the community with any kind of transparency or accountability.

In future reporting, I ask The Reformer to clarify the facts for readers. Mr. Perrin is alleged, in his capacity as principal, to have inappropriately handled the rape of a student and to have sexually harassed her over a period of time. This student was 15 or 16 years old. Mr. Perrin was fired by the WSESD for these allegations, and for a third count related to a separate incident in 2020, of instructing at least one employee not to report harm to a different student, then age 14, as mandated by law.

When Mr. Perrin was provided with an appeals hearing as prescribed by statute, the board upheld its decision to fire him. His attempt to claim “wrongful termination” was dismissed by the court. As the public knows, Mr. Perrin received his annual salary of $120,000 for over six months while enjoying an extended leave in 2022. He is currently trying to get more money from the district through his lawsuit.

It is essential that The Reformer cover the issues of sexual violence and abuses of power with accuracy and journalistic integrity.

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BUHS is the public high school for Brattleboro and its surrounding Vermont towns. The school is part of the WSESD school district. The town of Dummerston, Vermont borders Brattleboro. Sarah Levine lived in Dummerston until she moved to North Carolina. On December 11, 2025, Levine gave the Valley Post permission to publish her letter that appeared in that day's Brattleboro Reformer daily newspaper. Here is Levine's letter:

On December 2, two articles about the WSESD lawsuit against former BUHS principal Steve Perrin were published; one in the Commons
(see www.commonsnews.org/issue/843/843perrin_appeal_fails )
and the other in the Reformer. Both articles included a statement from Perrin’s attorney, Ted Kramer, who disgustingly (though not shockingly) lambasted Jane Doe, the student who courageously came forward about the abuse that she had experienced — first from Perrin, and later from the school board.

The Commons article also included a statement from Jane Doe in response to the court’s upholding of the school board’s decision to fire Perrin; the Reformer article, upsettingly, did not include Doe’s statement. This is one of far too many examples of the ways in which the voices of survivors are tamped down, devalued, and disregarded.

This blatant disregard is also apparent in the fact that the school board continues to hide in the shadows by refusing to make a statement or release a report under the guise of “confidentiality” while the survivors involved – Doe included – have asked for transparency time and again. Doe’s voice, as well as the voices of many survivors, has been and continues to be silenced from multiple angles. This is plainly wrong.

We should be lifting up and listening to survivors, and learning from their bravery and perseverance. One way in which this can be done is for the Reformer to write another article that includes Doe’s voice; I am calling on them to do so. We need to listen, and we need to be accountable.