By Tom Ayres , Senior Staff Writer
An online petition seeking the ouster of Mountain Views Supervisory Union (MVSU) Superintendent of Schools Sherry Sousa has garnered significant public support since it was first posted with just over 40 signatures last Thursday, Feb. 6.
The petition, drafted and distributed by three parents of students at one of six schools in the seven-town district that includes Woodstock Union Middle and High School (WUMS/HS), had garnered 107 signatures by 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 11. The widely circulated petition includes the signatures of parents and community members from all seven towns in the MVSU School District — Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock. It calls for Sousa’s “resignation or removal” for “misconduct and a pattern of poor District performance related to her repeated failure to take accountability and to proactively ensure a safe and inclusive environment” in MVSU schools.
The petition drive, spearheaded by MVSU School District parents Jess Kirby and Deirdre Black Rubin of Woodstock and Sarah Reiter of Pomfret, specifically cites Sousa’s alleged malfeasance in responding to repeated instances of racist bullying and harassment of a 13-year-old Black male student at WUMS during the 2021-22 school year. The effort to oust Sousa comes in the wake of a $175,000 judgment rendered against the MVSU by the Vermont Human Rights Commission (HRC) for what the petitioners contend was “MVSU’s utter failure to protect a Black child who suffered racism and abuse in the school system,” terming the district’s neglect, as documented in the May 2024 judgment of the five-member HRC “deeply troublesome and unacceptable.”
Kirby, Reiter, Black Rubin, and more than 100 other petitioners voiced particular disdain for the manner in which Sousa responded to the HRC ruling. The petition to terminate Sousa’s employment contends, “The MVSU Superintendent’s response to the settlement was simply to disagree with the Human Rights Commission’s findings (an unbiased third party which included legal experts), which in a unanimous vote found there were reasonable grounds to believe the school and supervisory union had discriminated against the student based on race, color, and national origin by failing to adequately intervene on the student’s behalf.” The petition adds, “The Superintendent went on to say she ‘decided to settle the dispute to avoid the time and expense of litigation.’ This is not only dismissive of the harm caused, but fails to accept any responsibility for the role the school district and leadership played in this matter.”
Of note among the signees of the anti-Sousa petition to date are two current members of the MVSU Board of Directors, to whom Sousa reports and by whom she is appointed and supervised. Ryan Townsend, one of two School Board representatives from Bridgewater, and Josh Linton, representing Plymouth, were both among early signers of the petition late last week. Two candidates for three positions on the MSVU board representing Woodstock who are up for election on Town Meeting Day on Tuesday, March 4 — Kelly Linton and Sarit Werner — have also inked the petition seeking Sousa’s dismissal.
Contacted by cell phone while traveling in California last Friday, MVSU Board Chair Keri Bristow acknowledged that school board members and district administrators were in receipt of the petition advocating Sousa’s dismissal. Bristow said she was contemplating convening a special meeting of the school board sometime this week to address the issues raised by the petition. She reiterated that statement in a text message on Monday, but as of 3 p.m. Tuesday, no special meeting had been announced. State statutes require 24 hours’ notice and public posting prior to any special meeting being convened. Bristow said that following public comment at any meeting that may be called, the MVSU Board will likely go into executive session to discuss the Sousa matter, as is permitted by state open meeting regulations when deliberations pertain to personnel matters.
Bristow — widely perceived among critics of Sousa as a strong supporter of the superintendent — said Friday that she thought, “It’s possible that we’ll call for a special meeting to discuss the situation,” adding, “We’ve been briefed on the different matters that are being cited as not being handled properly, and for the most part, I’d say the board is pretty much behind Sherry and the administration and the actions that they took.
“I think that I’ll be kind of watching the trajectory here and trying to gauge, you know, how much is really behind this,” Bristow added during the Friday phone conversation. “I mean, I know there’s a certain committed group of parents who haven’t really supported [Sherry] for quite some time for various reasons, but as you know, there’s many things and many other details that are never shared with the public because of confidentiality and out of respect to the people involved.”
Among the prominent signees of the petition seeking Sousa’s removal, MVSU School Board representative Josh Linton from Plymouth could not be reached for comment about the petition. MVSU Board candidate Werner of Woodstock said in an email on Monday that she did not want to comment on “any of it” at this time, referencing both her board candidacy and support for the petition drive related to Sousa’s alleged malfeasance. Werner’s fellow candidate for one of the three Woodstock seats open on the MVSU Board, Kelly Linton, did not respond to telephone inquiries about the petition drive. Kelly Linton was one of the late signers of the Sousa-related petition on Tuesday morning. The incumbent School Board member from Woodstock, Matt Stout, who is seeking reelection at Town Meeting, also did not respond to a telephone inquiry seeking his take on the calls for Sousa’s dismissal.
School Board member Ryan Townsend of Bridgewater, however, responded at length in a Monday evening phone conversation with the Standard, explaining why he chose to be an initial signer of the anti-Sousa petition when it was first distributed a week ago. The parent of three children currently attending Woodstock Elementary School, Townsend’s present term on the MVSU Board extends for two more years. He was reelected to the school district’s governing body in 2024, one year after he won a write-in campaign for the board on Town Meeting Day in 2023, a month after sounding off vociferously at a heated MVSU Board meeting where more than 100 parents and community members packed the Teagle Library at WUMS/MS and an online Zoom feed to voice concern about an alleged threat of violence on the part of a WES student against another pupil in January 2023. At the time, Townsend specifically addressed Sousa, WES Principal Maggie Mills, and the School Board not only about the alleged threat of violence the preceding month but also by speaking as the uncle of his then-10-year-old niece, who was the special-needs student at WES who was reportedly the target of the Jan. 25, 2023 threat by a fourth-grade boy. Townsend said that his niece had allegedly been subjected repeatedly to bullying by the same boy since the outset of the 2022-23 school year.
“I’d like to speak tonight more on the policies that have allowed this most recent incident of the threat to even exist in the first place,” Townsend told the MVSU Board that evening in February two years ago. “There’s lots of bullying, abuse, and violence happening in our school system. It seems more often than not to be just one particular school and one particular leader that keeps getting involved in silencing people,” the Bridgewater man avowed, without mentioning Sousa, Mills, or any specific school leader by name, albeit by inference. “I don’t understand — when we are in a world where we encourage everybody to see something, say something, and speak out — how our own school leaders could pull kids aside and silence them.”
Current MVSU School Board member Ryan Townsend was expressing significant concerns about bullying, harassment, and discrimination against students at schools in the unified school district before he joined the district governing body in March of 2023. Rick Russell Photo
Now heading into his third year of service on the MVSU School Board, Townsend professes deep frustration that incidents of bullying, harassment, and discrimination against BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and special needs students at MVSU schools are still being addressed inadequately and with what he sees as a lack of honesty and transparency on the part of administrators. The Bridgewater father of three also said that the current MVSU School Board is now rife with dissension that has begun to surface in the wake of the HRC ruling in the discrimination case a year ago and in reporting on the matter in the Vermont Standard and other media in recent weeks. On Monday evening, Townsend suggested that it’s telling of a larger problem with the MVSU School Board and Sousa that both he and his fellow school board member Linton from Plymouth signed last week’s petition for the superintendent’s removal.
“The biggest problem that I have — or that the community has, although there a lot of people that feel like the administration and school board are doing a good job — is that there’s also a fair amount of community members that have little to no trust in the administration or trust in the school board to represent them to the administration,” Townsend volunteered in Monday’s extended phone conversation. “This seems to be the same pattern I saw two years ago. I joined the board because we were ignored after going through the proper channels then, all the way up to the school board, and still not getting results. That’s why I said, ‘I’ve got to join the board,’” he continued. “Now I’m on the board, and I’m still questioning what we’re doing. I will gladly state that we are not holding the administration to any level of transparency that the community has been asking for but not getting. We basically just keep getting sweet talk from [Sherry] Sousa — and then we never do get to the bottom of things.”
Speaking directly to the most recent settlement of a discrimination complaint against the school district — the largest against a school entity in the history of the Vermont HRC — and to another settlement last year in a lawsuit stemming from four years of purported harassment against a male student at WES and WUMS that cost the school district an additional $97,500 to settle out of court, Townsend was blunt.
“We’re setting a horrible precedent with these lawsuits that come through when our response is typically, ‘Well, we disagree with the findings’” Townsend opined. “That’s just not good enough. We shouldn’t be scared of being transparent. It’s backward the way it has been going,” he added. “The community has elected us as the representatives to go to when they have concerns. We are supposed to be there for them — we’re supposed to have conversations with the community and Sherry Sousa and everyone else. I would assume and expect the superintendent’s office and the board would want to inform the community about exactly what we are doing to confront these issues and address the comments and ideas that people are bringing to us. And that’s just not happening.
“There’s a lot of uproar about these policies, and with the lawsuits totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past few years, while we’re having to argue now with each other on the school board about what programs we have to cut from the kids to make a budget, right? And yet, we’re not holding the administration to their responsibilities — and they don’t seem to give a damn about being transparent,” Townsend concluded.
In a late-breaking email on Tuesday afternoon, just as this article was being finalized, Sousa herself responded to the Standard’s request for comment.
“It was with a heavy heart that I read the petition requesting my removal as the MVSU Superintendent,” Sousa wrote. “I have felt honored to hold this role and to lead such a dedicated group of teachers. I acknowledge that addressing racism in a public school is work that is never complete and can always be done better. I would hope that my 30 years in this district, most of those as a middle and high school special educator, would provide our communities with the knowledge that I am committed to supporting students who have been marginalized. I know that our teachers and administration do all within their ability to address harmful events as they occur. None of us have the capacity to prevent these situations from happening, though we wish we could.”