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    Spread the word with friends, colleagues and local community members! Like + Share VRP's Facebook page. Let's link 200 VRP fans by February!  Curriculum Grants of up to $1,500 available to VRP Schools! VRP members! Your site is entitled to apply for a mini grant for the current school year. Grants may be up to $1,500. All teachers who document and publish their project on VRP's web site will receive a personal check for $250 upon publication. We have $5,000 in stipends available. more
 Our Curriculum Library contains teacher created examples from the classroom and community, along with many Vermont History units. more  Reflections contributed by VRP students, educators, and community members. more
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by Kate Elmer I am a recent graduate of Cabot High 5chool and I was involved with the Vermont Rural Partnership (“VRP”) for 3 of my 4 years there. Helen Beattie, VRP coordinator, contacted me because she believed that submitting a grant proposal for student leadership without a student voice would be hypocritical. The Rural Partnership is very student oriented. The students do most of the work and make the decisions. My experiences in VRP helped me to grow as a person and have facilitated positive change in my school and community. When I was a sophomore I was asked, along with a few of my friends, to attend a conference in Greensboro, VT. We didn’t really know what to expect. but we went along. Both adults and students attended the conference and one of the activities was to have all the students sit in a circle, with the adults spread out around them. The adults were asked to restrain from speaking and to simply listen to what we had to say. This was an incredible experience. They were giving us a voice, and discovering that we had a lot of good things to say. Since then I have presented at many education conferences around New England with others from VRP. Some audiences have been other teenagers, looking to us for advice in their new programs. Most were adult audiences, captivated and amazed by what we were able to accomplish. I blossomed in this environment. I made wonderful friends out of the other members. I discovered I was a good public speaker - a major change from the shy girl that dreaded being called on in class. I developed strong skills in leadership as our Cabot group implemented plans cooked up at our VRP meetings. I felt good about the changes we made and the example we were setting. Luckily, I have twin brothers to replace me now that I’ve graduated. There’s still a lot of work to be done. The school and community has benefited from work started at VRP meetings as well. The Vermont Rural Partnership wasn’t an action group, most of the plans originated in our monthly meetings and were then brought back to be continued in our smaller groups. The rural partnership group was a wonderful source for ideas. We were all very active in leadership within our schools and could share our successes and failures. Cabot’s community dialogue nights originated from a dialogue day successfully performed by Hazen Union a few years ago. These have gotten people talking about issues in our community and how we can work together to improve them. Discussions at VRP meetings on service learning led to Cabot’s Old Schoolhouse project in which History and Heritage classes are renovating a schoolhouse on Cabot Plains. As part of this project, elders from the community were brought on a tour of the building. Many wonderful things are happening in our community, and many originated from VRP meetings. In my opinion, the Vermont Rural Partnership is ahead of its time. Other states are just becoming aware of the idea of student leadership at this level, while we were able to speak to the Vermont Commissioner of Education himself! We generated a lot of good ideas, were excited about making the projects happen, and grew into strong leaders for the future in the process.
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