Vermont students may have more protections when it comes to discrimination and harassment in schools as advocates are urging lawmakers to include them in a bill that right now only focuses on workplaces and places of public accommodations.

The bill, S.103, passed in the Senate late last month and is moving through the House. Its core goal is to get rid of the existing legal requirement that harassment or discrimination must be “severe or pervasive” to be considered unlawful.

Members of several civil rights and education groups in recent weeks have told legislators that the bill is an opportunity to free students from that legal standard too.

“Vermont recognizes that it's wildly inappropriate to hold students to a severe and pervasive standard,” said Elizabeth Tang, senior counsel for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, one of the people who testified. “And so, they currently have a severe or pervasive standard. What advocates are saying, and what I said in my testimony, is that severe or pervasive is still too stringent and difficult for victims to meet.”

The bill currently only aims to increase protections for those facing harassment or discrimination in the workplace or in public accommodations, such as rentals, but advocates believe this bill can be a chance to hold schools to the same standard as employers.

“Students within the schools should be held to the same standards as anybody else,” said Lynn Stanley, executive director of the Vermont Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. "I mean children are in schools to learn how to be functioning adults. And why wouldn't you have the same standards within the school as you do in the rest of the world? That's where you learn how to be nice to each other.”

According to the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey for Vermont, 45% of middle schoolers have ever been bullied at school, and the rates of students feeling hopeless and sad almost every day over at least two weeks within the last 12 months increased from 25% in 2017 to 31% in 2019.

“I hear from school social workers, in particular, that work with kids and adolescents … that are seeing an increase in kids with anxiety and depression, and oftentimes that comes out in behaviors in school,” said Stanley. “Schools get to decide how they're how they're going to handle things, but you can at least set the expectation that you don't need to wait until things get too severe or pervasive to do something about it.”

Some groups, including the Vermont School Boards Insurance Trust, have testified in committee that the addition of students would be “premature and inappropriate in the context of regulating minor student behaviors” — in the words of Jonathan Steiner, that trust’s president — but those who favor the addition heavily disagree.

“Iis true that the Title IX regulations are due to be changed. We are waiting for the Biden administration to finalize the Title IX regulations … However, the federal law is only going to be a floor, not a ceiling, and what I mean by that is it provides the bare minimum that schools must do.”

She also argued that Vermont could get ahead of the curve because changes to the federal regulations would require school officials to amend their policies anyway.

“So, if we pass S.103 now, then when we get the Title IX regulations this year, schools can just revise their policies one time in the summer before school starts in the fall. That would make the most sense.”