Students For Change

Students from Middlebury College in Vermont are interviewing residents of Starksboro, a nearby town, trying to determine what they value most about the place. The town decided to gather this information before redesigning the town plan next year. The money came from two local non-profit organizations.

As the article in the New York Times points out, town planning meetings can be contentious. By having non-partisan outsiders come in beforehand and objectively documenting the things that are important to the townspeople, it’s possible they could do something of an end-around much of the fussing and fighting.  Starksboro has a population of 1,900, making it smaller than many towns in the hudson valley, and we have already seen much of the willy-nilly sprawl and development they are trying to plan, but there is certainly the possibility of scaling it up for towns in this area, whether through curriculum at one of the local colleges, or even as a high school social studies project.