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What’s Next For Marlboro
A message from the Marlboro College Board of Trustees
Dear Marlboro Community:
We are writing to announce that the Board of Trustees of Marlboro and Emerson Colleges have signed a final agreement to create the new Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. This brings closure to a multi-year process through which Marlboro leadership has systematically sought to keep Marlboro alive despite formidable demographic and financial challenges facing small colleges in Vermont and elsewhere in the United States. Marlboro chose to take a path that offered the best opportunities for the continuation of our liberal arts mission; this alliance with Emerson provides a sustainable future for the ideas born from our hill in Vermont.
Simultaneously, we would like to acknowledge the loss of Marlboro on Potash Hill. For nearly 75 years it furnished students, faculty, and staff with the unique experience of living and learning together as a small community, both within our shared governance model and surrounded by the astounding beauty of southern Vermont. We want to express our deepest respect and appreciation to our extended alumni community, as well as to members of the town of Marlboro; all of whom consistently challenged us to remember what is most important about a Marlboro education throughout this process. We know this is an especially sad moment for our community, but we sincerely hope you will find comfort knowing that Marlboro’s academic mission will continue on in Boston under the deliberate and thoughtful guidance of our faculty.
We are especially grateful for the hard work that so many have put into this process. The Marlboro faculty demonstrated the importance of shared leadership and designed an innovative way for Marlboro to continue its liberal arts mission as part of a larger institution. We are extraordinarily impressed by the collaboration between our faculty and their new Emerson colleagues; the curriculum they have drafted has strong roots in the work our students have always done on Potash Hill. Emerson’s respect and admiration for Marlboro’s academic model and self-directed student experience are manifest in their desire to retain these qualities in the curriculum of the Marlboro Institute. We are fortunate to have found such a dedicated partner in Emerson College.
We are immensely grateful to the students who have brought such passion and creativity to this process, from their work with faculty on the curriculum, to their work through Selectboard and Town Meeting. We know that these transition months have been difficult and that prioritizing their studies while also making decisions for their next steps took an incredible amount of fortitude. We also want to acknowledge the hard work of the Marlboro College staff who have never wavered in their support of students, faculty, and the broader community. They have always been essential to Marlboro, but ever more so during this time of transition.
We have completed the sale of the Marlboro campus to Democracy Builders, an education incubator best known for founding the network of Democracy Prep charter schools. The agreement was formalized months ago after the Campus Working Group (made up of trustees, faculty, students, alumni, and community members) reviewed all proposals for the sale of the campus. Democracy Builders’ Degrees of Freedom intends to offer a hybrid college program that will bring low-income and first generation students to the Marlboro campus. After the agreement was signed, a number of concerns about Democracy Prep and its educational and leadership practices were brought to the Board. To learn more about the Board’s response to those concerns, please see the What’s Next for Marlboro link on the Marlboro College website. The Board expects that the Degrees of Freedom leadership will work to address the concerns expressed by critics of Democracy Prep and that the greater Marlboro community will come together to support the creation of a new institution on Potash Hill.
The work of the past few years has been intensely challenging and all of us on the Board are extraordinarily grateful for the support of the wider Marlboro community and for the generosity of our steadfast donors. We mourn the loss of our Marlboro on Potash Hill, but we also believe in Marlboro’s ideals and have faith they will endure at Emerson. Please know that you were always in our thoughts throughout this journey. We hope your love for Marlboro will continue as we begin anew.
Sincerely,
The Marlboro Board of Trustees
From the Marlboro College Board of Trustees, to the greater Marlboro community, concerning the sale of the campus to Democracy Builders
Dear Marlboro Community:
The news of the sale of our beloved campus to Democracy Builders has engendered a great deal of controversy and considerable discussion among the Marlboro trustees.
Democracy Builders (DB) is an educational incubator, which intends to use the campus to create “Degrees of Freedom,” a hybrid late-high school, early-college experience for students who are low income and the first in their families to attend college. The Marlboro College Board was eager to sell the campus to an educational entity that would be innovative and attract and enhance diversity in Vermont. DB was recommended to the trustees by a Campus Working Group comprised of faculty, staff, representatives from the community, college alumni and members of the Board of Trustees. The working group had the opportunity to consider a number of proposals, and felt Democracy Builders provided the best opportunity to utilize the campus and at the same time prove beneficial to the community.
As an incubator, DB is responsible for the creation of Democracy Prep (DP), a network of urban charter schools aimed primarily at low-income children of color. After we signed a binding legal agreement to sell the campus to DB, we received a disturbing letter from a group called BlackNBrown at DP, comprised of anonymous alumni and former employees of DP. The group describes many instances of racist, abusive behavior at the schools and requested that we not sell the campus to DB. This information came to our attention well after the binding agreement was signed. We began to learn more about Democracy Prep’s educational model and hear concerns from many in the Marlboro community. A number of trustees are deeply uncomfortable with the “no excuses” charter school Democracy Prep represents, and believe it is in many ways antithetical to the educational pedagogy of Marlboro College.
Even though the purchase and sale agreement was in place, the events and issues elaborated in the BlackNBrown at DPpetition were of great concern to the Board, so we undertook an inquiry to better understand the totality of the situation. This was a difficult endeavor because many of the contributing voices to BlackNBrown at DP are promised anonymity. However, we were able to speak directly with J. LeShaé, a spokesperson of BlackNBrown at DP, and listen to testimonies given during multiple Marlboro Town Hall meetings. Given the troubling nature of the complaints, we are doing everything in our power to encourage a positive and constructive learning environment for all students who come to Degrees of Freedom.
The same working group of trustees and Board Chair who spoke with BlackNBrown at DPalso engaged in a discussion with Seth Andrew and three leaders of DB’s team: Chandell Stone, Jamie McCoy and Marcellina Blow-Cummings, all of whom are black women with direct experience with DP as a parent, a student, and as a member of the faculty. Seth also provided extensive reports and documentation of DP’s performance over the years.
To better understand this material we used a volunteer consultant with expertise in educational evaluation, who helped us discern ratings and outcomes. This included reviewing a number of reports written by independent, highly regarded evaluators, including people at Mathematica and Harvard, on the educational outcomes of DP students and impacts on other issues such as voting rates. We also reviewed survey results conducted annually by the NYC Department of Education with students, teachers and parents, which included questions related to satisfaction with the school environment. The reports and surveys told a largely positive story, and DP schools annually conduct lotteries because many more families apply than the schools can accommodate.
We have also recently learned that Seth Andrew will not be solely in charge of the Degrees of Freedom program; the leadership team will include the three women with whom we met. They will hire a President.
We are aware that many people in the Town of Marlboro and the greater Marlboro community have concerns not only about the accusations from BlackNBrown at DPand DP’s pedagogical practices, but also about how Degrees of Freedom will relate to the local community. For as long as Marlboro College operated on Potash Hill, there existed a symbiotic relationship with the local community, including access to resources like the extensive network of trails, lectures, the arts, WIFI, the library, and more. One key goal of the Campus Working Group was to identify a buyer that would provide “significant benefit to the Marlboro community.” This includes not only jobs, tax revenue and the like, but also continuance of the benefits of being a good neighbor. We appreciate DB’s commitment to keeping the campus accessible for use by the community, especially the trails and ecological preserve.
The DB team is now on campus, working on program design. We hope that they will be successful in creating a program on Potash Hill that treats all students, staff and faculty with dignity and respect in keeping with antiracist principles and practices.
We have arranged for a meeting between representatives of Democracy Builders’ team and residents of Marlboro, as well as present and past College personnel and alumni, to start an ongoing working relationship. We believe this will provide opportunity for fruitful dialogue about engaging in antiracist work as a community, use of the campus by its neighbors, and what is needed to produce a successful program on Potash Hill that will serve future first generation college students. We hope that the Democracy Builders’ team and the residents of Marlboro and Brattleboro will come to those conversations with an open mind and a willingness to engage in authentic and respectful dialogue with the intention of finding a way to work together so that it will be beneficial to everyone, including the future students of Degrees of Freedom.
We acknowledge and regret the anguish that the campus sale to Democracy Builders has caused to so many of Marlboro’s community, including many of our trustees. Our campus is loved not only for its quiet beauty but because for generations it has been a place where students’ learning and growth have been nurtured through their active contribution to the academic and campus life of the College, based on a fundamental belief that learning is best fostered through unleashing the inherent curiosity that lives within each of us. While we fully expect that a school focused on first generation college students will be different, we hope that Potash Hill will remain a place of servant leadership where all community members–students, faculty, staff, and neighbors–respect and honor each others’ full humanity and worth.
The Marlboro College Trustees
Update on Marlboro College Campus
The Marlboro College Board of Trustees has received materials shared by the “Black N Brown at DP” organization regarding the Democracy Prep schools. We take these matters seriously and are looking into them further.
Update on Marlboro College Campus
May 28, 2020
Dear Marlboro Community,
Thank you all for your perseverance and patience over this past year, a year unlike anything we wanted. As a community, we have been on a difficult and uncertain path since the College first announced the intention to find a strategic partner in the spring of 2019. We know that this journey has been hard for all of us, but today we are pleased to announce that we have reached two major milestones.
As expected, the Marlboro and Emerson College Boards both approved a provisional agreement to form the alliance we have worked so hard to develop over the last several months. This is a significant achievement, in spite of the loss of the unique experience provided by living and learning together as a small community on Potash Hill. We now enter a period of final due diligence that we expect will lead to closing on the final contract as planned by July 1st. Our faculty continue to prepare for this important transition, and we are very happy that many of our students will be following them to Boston. We want to especially acknowledge the work of the joint faculty working group whose work will help ensure that the essential elements of the Marlboro educational experience endure at the newly named Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.
We have all been concerned about the future of our campus and have hoped that another educational institution would build on the foundations that Marlboro College has so carefully laid. Today, we are pleased to announce that the College has signed a contract for the sale of the campus to Democracy Builders, a non-profit organization that will launch an innovative new model of higher education that will dramatically improve outcomes, especially for low-income and first generation college students. Once state regulatory and accreditors’ approval is received, Democracy Builders’ Degrees of Freedomprogram will offer a hybrid degree that will bring cohorts of students to the campus for multiple residencies. Democracy Builders was chosen above all other proposals by a Campus Working Group (CWG) comprising faculty, staff, students and a representative from the town of Marlboro, and including several Marlboro alumni. Our Board unanimously followed their recommendation.
Democracy Builders founded Democracy Prep, a network of 20+ high-performing public schools throughout the U.S. committed to educating citizen-scholars who are well-prepared for success in college and citizenship. Degrees of Freedomand the Freedom College model they hope to bring to the Marlboro campus are born out of work with 10,000 K-12 students and, pending state approval, will create a wholly integrated path to a degree for students from hundreds of similar schools across the nation. The Degrees of Freedommodel will also continue Marlboro’s self-governing tradition through bi-weekly town hall meetings similar to those already in place at Democracy Prep.
There were countless individuals who played a vital role in both forging the Emerson relationship and identifying Democracy Builders as the best future for our campus. In typical Marlboro fashion, this has been a community effort involving students, faculty, staff, alumni and trustees, as well as members of our extended community. We have also been greatly supported by our colleagues at Emerson who have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to continuing Marlboro’s mission, vision, and relevance on their campus, in spite of the enormous challenges to higher education during this COVID-19 pandemic.
We recognize that all of us would prefer that Marlboro College remain as is on our beautiful campus in the foothills of the Green Mountains. We are, however, very fortunate to have found a path that both continues our distinctive liberal arts mission at Emerson and offers an opportunity for something new to take root here on the Hill that will be respectful of our heritage and provide heretofore unavailable opportunities to a new generation of students.
We eagerly look forward to seeing how these two exciting new futures unfold.
With continuing gratitude and best wishes,
Sincerely,
Kevin F. F. Quigley and the Marlboro College Board of Trustees
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