Welcome to VSARN
We are the Vermont Student Anti-Racism Network, and our mission is to work to promote anti-racism in Vermont public schools from preschool to higher education.
We endeavor to educate ourselves and others about race, power, privilege and oppression in order to foster a more inclusive and anti-racist community starting with our schools. We strive to disrupt the racial hierarchy of our society starting within our group.
Our Story
VSARN as a group started with three students on a Zoom call who were passionate about anti-racism in education.
We were angry that we weren’t learning about anti-racism in schools. We didn’t learn about an inclusive history, we didn’t learn about important statistics about inequity, and bottom line, we weren’t being taught the whole truth.
Meanwhile, we saw police brutality and mass incarceration of People of Color throughout America, microaggressions and blatant racism in our schools, a history of racism and colonialism, and a reckoning for racial justice happening before our eyes. Why wasn’t this reflected in our curriculum in schools?
So we decided to start with elementary school students. We used grant money to buy books for K-5 students, and created lesson plans that we taught through Zoom. This was our first project, our first chance at making a difference.
From here, we expanded. We expanded to the point that, two years later, we had 200+ students gathered at the statehouse for VSARN’s Day of Racial Equity. We had projects ranging from not just elementary school, but to high school to middle school to college. We worked on the school to prison pipeline, created curriculum, and educated ourselves on race in our state.
And it all started with a few kids and a passion.