“Making friends at the high school wasn't really my priority because I felt like I had nothing in common with them at all.”
“I think the closer we got to graduation, the more it kind of came out.”
“Financial class absolutely affects everything beyond financial class in the classroom. Absolutely, it does.”
Those are some of the sentiments about class divisions recent graduates from Middlebury Union High School shared with us.
One of those grads was winning question-asker Ari Graham-Gurland from Middlebury. She said students at MUHS came from all sorts of backgrounds, from farming families to kids of college professors. And she asked the question at the heart of this story:
“How does socioeconomic diversity affect classroom dynamics in high school?”
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Josh Crane: From Vermont Public and the NPR Network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane. And today, we’re going back to a time I’ve long tried to forget about.
[Waterfall of people saying “high school”]
Josh Crane: High school. You remember: The freaks and geeks. The theater kids. The normies. The rebels and the loners. The jocks. I was sort of a classic high school wallflower — pretty shy, kept to myself.
This episode is about the social groups at one Vermont school: Middlebury Union High School — MUHS, for short — which pulls in students from all over Addison County. And it’s about how family backgrounds, family expectations and the messy concept of “class” can all shape students’ experiences there.
This all started with one of those students: our winning question-asker, Ari Graham-Gurland, who graduated from MUHS in 2023.
Ari Graham-Gurland: I'm 19 years old. I'm a second year at Dartmouth College.
Josh Crane: We met at a Brave Little State event last year in Middlebury. And she says in high school, she ended up spending a lot of time with classmates from similar backgrounds.
Ari Graham-Gurland: One of the things I'd always noticed is that there was this huge divide in, like, social grouping and connection between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Josh Crane: The student population at MUHS is, on average, whiter and wealthier than the rest of the state’s, based on data from the Vermont Agency of Education. And the differences between families there loom large.
And they go beyond race and money. The biggest employer in Addison County is Middlebury College, a prestigious liberal arts school. But there’s also a long legacy of farming in the area, especially in the small communities that surround the college town. And MUHS brings kids from all those different backgrounds, together.
Ari’s family falls in the Middlebury College camp — one of her parents is a psychology professor there.
Some of the differences she noticed have to do with what life’s like outside of the school day — like students who have to finish their barn chores before heading to school and those who don’t.
They also have to do with expectations around education — for instance, students who know they’re gonna pursue a four-year college degree, like our question-asker, Ari, or students who plan to go into a trade.
And there are plenty of students who have no idea what they’re going to do post-grad. As you’re about to hear, every student’s experience is unique in some way.
And that’s why we’re here. Because even now that Ari’s a few years into college, she hasn’t stopped thinking about all her former classmates, and all the paths they took through her high school. She never really got to know so many of them. And so, she’s wondering:
Ari Graham-Gurland: How does the family backgrounds of, like, where students come from, how does that affect their experience in school?
Josh Crane: We’ll be right back.
Josh Crane: Nearly all the people we spoke to for this episode, about class in the classroom, graduated from Middlebury Union High School two or three years ago, like our question-asker, Ari.
That’s not because the class divide Ari observed is new — it’s been apparent for a long time. My wife went to MUHS more than a decade before Ari did, and it’s something she’s talked about, too.
But we wanted to talk to people for whom high school isn’t too far in the rearview mirror. Who are still, in a sense, transitioning out of high school and into their new lives. People who come from all sorts of backgrounds.
And speaking of backgrounds, I should say that I attended Middlebury College — the four-year liberal arts school that’s one of the major employers in town. And so did Brave Little State reporter Sabine Poux.
Sabine Poux: Hi! Yes, that is true. But I’ll say, I’m not sure about you, Josh — I didn’t really know much about the high school when I was in college.
Josh Crane: Yeah I didn’t know either.
Sabine Poux: We’ll get into this later in the episode, but it really is a choose-your-own-adventure of a place. There are kids taking so many different paths there. And that’s part of that really specific and often divided social environment that a lot of the people we spoke to mentioned.
Josh Crane: Yeah, this has been so interesting to learn about. And Sabine, you’re gonna introduce us to the very brave folks who spoke to us for this episode.
Sabine Poux: That’s right.
Shae Terk: Thank you for meeting after work. I know it's like, crazy.
Sabine Poux: Oh, yeah.
Shae Terk: Yeah. Oni’s schedule is crazy. My schedule is crazy. So I'm glad that it kind of worked out.
Sabine Poux: We talk to a lot of really busy people in this episode. The first two are roommates.
Oni Krizo: I am Oni Krizo. And I am from Middlebury, Vermont, but living in Burlington, Vermont.
Shae Terk: I’m Shae Terk and I’m from Middlebury, Vermont, but also live up in Burlington with Oni.
Sabine Poux: Oni is a senior at the University of Vermont, studying to become a physical therapist. On the side, she also works at a high-end chocolate shop.
Shae’s a mechanic. She works at County Tire in Middlebury.
But before they were adults with jobs and college and crazy schedules, they were classmates.
Shae Terk: We, we’ve been through the Middlebury school system since kindergarten. Kindergarten to graduation.
Sabine Poux: Shae was into the music scene in high school, and played trombone in the jazz band. Oni describes herself as a sort of floater. They say they sat at a small table in the corner of the lunch room.
Which, by the way, was the place at MUHS where the different social groups were really visible.
Shae Terk: I think of the lunch room. And I don’t know if you think about it—
Oni Krizo: Yes.
Shae Terk: But I think of the lunch room. And who I sat with, and who, like, sat with who. You know, all the, like, farmer-y, logger-boot-wearing people all kind of sat together, and they all talked and hung out all the time.
And like, the— I don't know if it's, is “preppy” the right word? I don’t know, like, the people that, like, came off as very, like, put together and from a great home and everything.
Michael Plouffe: I mean, there's like, the nice kids that come in with slacks every day and, like, a button-up shirt and, like, expensive shoes I would never buy.
Sabine Poux: This is Michael Plouffe. He graduated from MUHS the same year Shae and Oni did.
Michael Plouffe: And then you have the rednecks with the loggers and the Carhartt pants. And then there's kids that really didn't care, like the ripped jeans and, like—
Sabine Poux: Michael says he’d show up to school in a sweatshirt and boots. He grew up on his family’s farm, in Bridport. The farm has been in his family for 12 generations, and he worked there throughout high school.
He said back then, he was sort of a loner.
Michael Plouffe: Making friends at the high school wasn't really my priority, because I felt like I had nothing in common with them all.
Sabine Poux: Michael was really focused at that time on farming. He still is. Since he graduated high school, he’s been working full-time at the family farm
Michael Plouffe: Yeah. I mean, farming is always going to be in my blood. Having animals is going to be always in my blood. But farming— like, me, I'm small. We milk 85 cows, and 85 cows does not pay the bills.
Sabine Poux: A year behind Shae, Oni and Michael at MUHS — were Narges and Amanda.
Narges Anzali: My name is Narges Anzali. I graduated from Middlebury Union High School in 2023. And right now I'm a student at Princeton University.
Amanda Gomes: My name is Amanda Gomes. I also graduated from Middlebury Union High School in 2023. And I'm now a student at Northeastern University.
Sabine Poux: Narges and Amanda are both currently in the throes of their fall semesters.
They probably took the most similar paths to Ari, our question asker. After high school, They left Vermont and are studying at prestigious four-year universities.
But their experiences in high school were different from Ari’s in some key ways.
Sabine Poux: How did you two become friends?
Amanda Gomes: Um, that’s a golden question.
Narges Anzali: Yeah. I don't actually remember becoming friends with Amanda. I think, like— I think when you're like, the only two, like, visibly brown or immigrant — or one of the only two kids in your grade, a lot of the time you end up just kind of being, being thrown together. (laughter)
Sabine Poux: Amanda’s parents emigrated from Brazil. Narges’s family came to the U.S. from Iran when she was a little kid.
Amanda Gomes: I feel like we always just had this, like, mutual knowledge of like, “I see you, you see me.” And like, kind of saw each other in a way that maybe other people couldn't.
Sabine Poux: Amanda says, at MUHS, her background as a dual citizen and a child of immigrants was always something that really set her apart.
Amanda Gomes: So, I feel like I was kind of always aware of that, of the fact that my parents didn't speak fluent English, of the fact that I was always calling my parents in a different language. I looked a bit different than the people in school. I had sort of a different familial background.
Narges Anzali: And I think also, in a large way, other people's perception of us were more formed by our obvious differences, and so that was also how we interacted with our classmates.
Like, a lot of your friendship drama or whatever, quote, unquote, you're supposed to have in high school, ends up being like, “Oh, this person said something like, really racist. I didn't like it, and I don't feel comfortable around that person.”
And so in a lot of ways, it kind of shapes a really specific worldview.
_
Sabine Poux: Amanda says she grew up in a family that emphasized going to college. That was her path.
Amanda Gomes: But I think it's because my parents didn't have that opportunity themselves. So I'm the first generation in my family to go to school, and I think that that was why higher education was so emphasized in my household.
Sabine Poux: Narges too always assumed college was in the cards.
Narges Anzali: I mean, my father is a professor, my mom also has a PhD, and so they're both, like, very, really highly educated people. And I think especially in college towns like Middlebury, that means a certain kind of thing when it comes to, like, expectations about your higher education.
Michael Plouffe: We didn't really have a set plan. So, I guess my mom and dad told every one of us kids to find a path that we like.
Sabine Poux: Michael Plouffe, who grew up farming in Bridport — he says his parents didn’t put pressure on him to go to college. But he was expected to work. And before school each day, while many of his classmates were still asleep, Michael was doing farm chores.
Michael Plouffe: I would get up around 5:30, head out to the barn for a quarter six.
Sabine Poux: He’d feed the calves in the morning.
Michael Plouffe: Then I would run inside. I would get in the shower, brush my teeth. And then get on the bus, and then go sit at school.
Sabine Poux: Seven hours of school. Then, bus ride home, quick snack and back to the barn.
Michael Plouffe: And then shower, ate, brushed my teeth and went to bed.
Sabine Poux: Woah That's a busy day.
Michael Plouffe: Yeah, I tried to do all my homework at school and study hall because there was no time to do it at home.
The other kids were, like, well-rested, and they had time to study, and then they did their homework at home, and they actually got it, you know? And where me— I would, all I would think about all day long, was, “Get back home, get back home,” because I did not like it at all. I did not like school at all.
I could just not sit there all day and look at a computer, study textbooks — I was more like a hands-on, outside person. That is, that’s the background that I came from. Get up, work hard and then repeat the next day.
Shae Terk: I worked in high school, you know, I had a car I had to pay for, and insurance and all that good stuff.
Sabine Poux: That’s Shae again, the car mechanic.
She says her parents didn’t put pressure on her to go to college. But from early on, she saw the adults in her life working really hard.
Shae Terk: I remember my mom getting up and going to work at like three in the morning, and then coming back and taking a little nap, and then going to her nine-to-five and doing it all again. My stepdad pulled, God, 12 hour days because he's also in the auto industry.
Sabine Poux: Oni, Shae’s roommate and the physical-therapist-in-training, says it was similar in her house. Her parents worked for the Addison County school district.
Oni: It was like we were able to get groceries, but we weren't, like, three-sport athletes with all the equipment we needed. Tons of hand-me-downs, tons of using the local support and hard work from my parents. Both of them have had side hustles and working the farmers market over the summer for as long as I can remember.
Sabine Poux: Shae says she could really see differences in what people had when they were all smushed together. She says in class, it was clear who had the time and resources to prioritize getting their work done and who didn’t.
Shae Terk: I hated working in groups, because they would, like, mix it up and everything. And it's like, everyone's like, “Oh, well, we can just, we can just go there and do this.” And it's like, I can't, how am I going to get there? Like, I can't just drop everything and do this. I understand this is, this is important, and I need to do a good grade on this. But, you know, it's not — it's, it's a priority for me, in a sense, but, you know, I'm thinking about more, the bigger picture here.
Sabine Poux: By all accounts, these differences in identity and family backgrounds and attitudes around education really separated students at Middlebury Union High School. Still, everyone took classes together and walked the halls together and sat in the same lunch room together.
But then, there reached a point in those four years when a lot of the distinctions between students became really concrete.
Tara Martin: So junior year is a big transitional year, and I call it like the buffet of options.
Sabine Poux: That’s after this.
Sabine Poux: Welcome back to Brave Little State.
We’ve been talking to recent graduates of Middlebury Union High School about how class showed up in their experiences there — in the lunchroom, in the classroom and after school.
And we’ll keep hearing from those alumni in a second. But first, we’ll turn to a group of people we haven’t heard from yet — but who know the school very, very well.
Tara Martin: I am in my 21st year here at the high school,
Al Calzini: And this is my 29th year.
Sabine Poux: Teachers.
Tara Martin: My name is Tara Martin, and I teach Individuals and Societies.
Al Calzini: My name is Al Calzini, and I am also in the Individuals and Societies department, which is also known as history or social studies.
Sabine Poux: Tara and Al meet up with me in a classroom at the high school, after a long school day.
They teach some of the ninth and tenth grade classes that everyone takes, altogether.
Al Calzini: You know, all different levels of abilities come in the classroom and different levels of social class. And so their experiences are incredibly different. And so we have to try to make it kind of a level playing field.
Sabine Poux: Different experiences, different abilities, same classrooms.
But then, in 11th grade, something totally shifts.
Tara Martin: So junior year is a big transitional year, and I call it, like, the buffet of options.
Sabine Poux: Buffet of options. Students really get to pick which paths they take.
And there are a lot of paths. You’ve got your traditional high school classes, across lots of different levels.
Then, you’ve got electives.
Tara Martin: So, for instance, when you get into junior year, you could take Psychology, or you could take Al Calzini’s Topics in Social Studies class. The big thing is choice. At the end of the day, 11th grade and 12th grade is all about choice.
Sabine Poux: Some students finish high school at a local community or state college. Others go to the Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center.
Tara Martin: Which is right down the hall from our building. We're literally attached to it.
Sabine Poux: The career center has technical training programs in fields like theater production, culinary arts, welding and manufacturing. So when students know they’re interested in a specific trade, they can go there and get more specific training.
Tara Martin: And I often say that if we have a student that's, like, floating on the line of at risk of dropping out, that if we can get them to the career center, that's, like, their ticket to getting to the graduation stage, because they, they just have, they found their passion, they found their avenue that they see themselves there post high school. So let’s get them there by their junior year so they can really immerse themselves in that program.
Sabine Poux: Shae Terk, the mechanic – she went to the Hannaford Career Center. So did Michael Plouffe. He studied sustainable agriculture there.
Michael Plouffe: It was like Disneyland, but full of classrooms.
Sabine Poux: Wait, why do you say it was like Disneyland?
Michael Plouffe: You actually had fun and you learned. I knew everyone by heart there, and I always made sure to say hello.
Sabine Poux: It was a total game changer.
Michael Plouffe: If it wasn't for the career center, I would have probably dropped out because I did not like school at all. I hated it with every bone in my body, because I just didn't like school. I didn't like sitting there for seven eight hours a day and learning about the same stuff everyday. Where you go to the career center, and we learned about something new everyday.
Sabine Poux: For Michael, this was also when he finally found his people. They were students who had similar backgrounds to him, and who were interested in some of the same things, like farming.
Michael Plouffe: So when I would go down to the career center, I made a lot of friends because we had actually had something in common, where we could talk to—
Sabine Poux: There was even one guy who was from a family that showed cattle, like Michael does.
Michael Plouffe: And then when he started talking and introduced himself, I was like, yeah, I know him. I'm gonna be his best friend. So, yeah.
Sabine Poux: It was, like, friend at first sight.
Michael Plouffe: Yes!
Sabine Poux: He says to this day, they’re still inseparable.
Another path in that buffet of options Tara talked about is the IB program, or International Baccalaureate program. That’s the most advanced academic track students could take.
Al Calzini, the other teacher, says those kids tend to stick together.
Al Calzini: You know, birds of a feather flock together. And they feel a strong connection to each other because they're going through this program together. But you definitely see them as a separate entity. Group within a group, almost.
Sabine Poux: When the IB program came up with the people we talked to, there were feelings.
Oni Krizo: Don't even get me started on the International Baccalaureate program. Because I think that brought segregation to a whole other level.
Shae Terk: Big time. Oh gosh, you remember all those testing.
The time that that we are clocking in and doing some minimum-wage job, you know, they're, they're studying. Their parents are buying them, them books and resources or tutors
Amanda Gomes: I think my perspective was limited by being in the IB program, because I didn't get to interact with a whole, like, group of my graduating class.
Amanda Gomes and Narges Anzali, the alumni who are now at Northeastern and Princeton, they were in the IB program in high school. It’s another reason they became friends.
Amanda Gomes: I would say we first had, like, classes together consistently, and we're seeing each other every single day during the IB program, because it was quite an intimate program. It was relatively new when we were going through it, as well.
Sabine Poux: They basically spent all their time with the same 15 or so students, and they were all headed to a similar place.
Amanda Gomes: I very rarely was in, like, a class with somebody who didn't end up going to college, because most people who wanted to go to college were in the IB program, and most people who were in the IB program wanted to go to college.
Narges Anzali: Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I would not say that I was friends with anyone who wasn't considering higher education, and I'm not saying there shouldn't be different educational options for different people. But I will say, like, it created an incredibly limited set of people that I interacted with, and that limited set was very often from people who had socioeconomic backgrounds that prioritized higher education.
Sabine Poux: Higher education. Which brings to that last fork in the road of high school: graduation and beyond.
Narges and Amanda said all the conversations about the future intensified the feelings of otherness they felt.
Amanda Gomes: I think everything got a lot worse during college admission season.
Narges Anzali: I completely agree about college admission season, I was going to bring that up.
Which is, again, like, somewhat of a privileged position to be in, right? Because, like, that was something that for my family, it was like, always like, “Okay, well, you're going.’ Right? So it's like, education was super important to us.
But I would also say that, like, it really intensified the amount of microaggressions that you were getting on a daily basis.
Sabine Poux: Narges says someone told her they wished they had the trauma she had so they could write a better college essay. Amanda says there was an implication that she was only getting into college because of her background.
And she says it kind of shut her down.
Amanda Gomes: I think I have lots of regrets about sort of the way I moved in high school. I got to college, and my college — I'm very fortunate to go to a college that is, like, a lot more, a lot more diverse than Middlebury Union High School, not that the bar is super high there.
But my college is a lot more diverse. And I was shocked to get here and realize, like, I am a good student, like I genuinely like talking in all of my classes. I like raising my hand. I have thoughts to share. And sometimes I'm wrong, but I like sharing them no matter what. I'm a yapper, I guess, as one might say.
In high school, I feel like I was very– a lot less present in the classroom. I think I raised my hand a lot less.
Shae Terk: I think the closer we got to graduation, the more it kind of came out.
Sabine Poux: This is Shae Terk again, who works at the auto repair shop in Middlebury. She says college admission season really highlighted the differences between her classmates.
Shae Terk: After we, like, started announcing where we're going to college, what we're actually going to do, like, when we were really getting down to it, there were some people, and I was like, really, like, that's interesting.
Sabine Poux: Shae’s roommate, Oni, she remembers talking to a classmate who was considering paying the deferment fee for the school she got into and taking a gap year instead.
Oni Krizo: And I was like, well, you're gonna pay to not go too? Like, I can't pay to go and to not go, kind of thing. And that was just, like, a, kind of, like, eye-widening, jaw-dropping moment where I was like—
Shae Terk: You can just choose to do that? Yeah. Like—
Sabine Poux: When you think about people having that much money in those options, like, what does that feel like, emotionally?
Shae Terk: Oh, I'm jealous. 100%, I'm jealous. Like, oh my God. I've always wanted to go out and see things, and, you know, I've barely left New England, you know, I'd love to go out and do all these things, you know. So jealousy is a big part of it. But also, like, one day, with how much we freaking work I’m sure we'll get there eventually. It's just a matter of, it's not at a drop of a hat, like some people were able to do.
_
Sabine Poux: All these alumni we talked to, they’re now a few years removed from high school. And, perhaps relatably, they’re all pretty stoked to not be in high school anymore.
Shae’s on the other side of vocational school and recently took a new position at County Tire, where she’s been working. Oni’s in her second to last semester at UVM, with plans to go to grad school. And Narges and Amanda are in their sophomore and junior years at school in New Jersey and Massachusetts.
And Michael, the guy who hated school, he actually opted for more — a two-year program in forestry at the technical state school in Randolph. Michael wrapped that up last year and is now trying to figure out what’s next.
Even though he still lives in Bridport, he doesn’t see so many classmates anymore.
Michael Plouffe: I mean, I'll run into one once in a while, and I'll say hi. Like, I mean, the reunions might bring people together. But we haven't had a reunion yet.
Sabine Poux: Are you gonna go to your reunion?
Michael Plouffe: I'm debating on it. I don't know yet.
Sabine Poux: What Michael said, about not really seeing his classmates around — it reminded me of something teacher Tara Martin brought up.
Tara used to teach a class at MUHS about class. And she says they started the unit looking through the lens of high school.
Tara Martin: And we used to watch this PBS documentary that does a spotlight on social class, and they, they focus on high school. And one thing that the documentarian said during that that has always stood out to me whenever I talk about socioeconomics or social class, is that high school, especially public high school, is really the last time in a person's life that they have the ability and the space to be connecting with people from all different walks of life.
And then beyond high school, you become, you know, much more self-selective. Self-selective from, you know, whether you go on to college or not, or whether you go into a trade or not, and really your, your kind of morals, your values and your socioeconomics kind of self-select further and further. And that has always struck me as I walk the halls of MUHS. This idea of, we start out very heterogeneous, and as we go through our high school years and then beyond, how much more self selective we've gotten.
Sabine Poux: I ask Oni and Shae — the roommates in Burlington — about this.
Is that what high school felt like?
Oni Krizo: People who, yeah, did have very similar experiences, bonded with those with similar experiences, and had a much harder time bonding with those that didn't. And I wish there was some better ways in high school to make, to make people connect.
Shae Terk: I think it's also part of, like– I think it'd be great if that could happen. I really do. But, you know, the way I see it — and maybe it's too harsh, I don't know — It's like, prepping you for, you're going to be spat out at the end of this, and it's going to be real life. And, you know, in real life, you know, you can't— we're not going to sit around in the sharing circle, you know, like kind of thing, and stuff. And not that there are bad people. I mean, I've worked in several different jobs, different places, different places, different garages and everyone's different. But, like, you go to the places you want to be in and where you fit in, you know?
So I think that's also kind of a mirror, maybe, or like a prep for real life, or anything like that.
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Credits
This episode was reported by Sabine Poux, with editing and production from the rest of the BLS team: Burgess Brown, Camila Van Order González and Josh Crane. Our executive producer is Angela Evancie. Theme music by Ty Gibbons; Other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Stephanie Sherman and Ariell Slater.
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