The Week in Review

November 30, 2007

In Burlington, Vermont teachers and school administrators vented their frustration over the No Child Left Behind law that Congress is reconsidering. With home heating prices rising to record highs, Senator Bernie Sanders told a Brattleboro audience that he has won bipartisan backing for legislation to provide another $1 billion to help people pay their bills. After workers in St. Albans contacted the senator, Sanders sought a Labor Department probe into a Virginia company's plan to slash wages for employees working on a huge backlog in citizenship applications. On Capitol Hill, the Senate environment committee braced for a vote on climate change legislation.

No Child Left Behind Angry teachers and school administrators criticized the 5-year-old law's standardized testing mandates and urged Sanders to revise the law or wipe it off the books. Sanders "has a way of spotting issues that are ripe for a public pounding" and "he hit the mark again" The Burlington Free Press editorialized on Friday. Sanders is a member of the education committee that is considering reauthorizing the law. To read the article or watch video, click here or here. To read the editorial, click here.

Home Heating Assistance As soaring fuel prices stretch household budgets beyond the breaking point, Sanders said he will introduce legislation to provide $1 billion in emergency home heating assistance. Sanders called for the boost in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that provides critical help to 5.8 million senior citizens on fixed-incomes and low-income families with children, including some 20,000 households in Vermont. "This is an emergency," he said. "We ought to treat it like one." He told a gathering in Brattleboro that his bill already has bipartisan backing. To read more about Sanders' proposal, click here. To read the story in the Brattleboro Reformer, click here.

Immigration Jobs The Department of Labor is investigating whether a company that employs workers who process citizenship applications in Vermont and California violated federal regulations by cutting their pay when a new contract with Stanley Associates begins Monday. Two hundred employees in Vermont, half the workforce, will have their earnings slashed, Sanders said in a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao. He asked for the investigation into whether the Virginia-based contractor is violating a federal law guaranteeing that federal contract workers receive prevailing wages and benefits. Ironically, these are the same workers the federal government is counting on to alleviate huge application backlogs. "Not only is it wrong for the workers, it's wrong for what we're trying to do for homeland security," Sanders told WCAX-TV. To read more, click here.

Global Warming As the Senate environment committee made eleventh-hour changes in climate change legislation scheduled for a vote in the coming week, Sanders staked out his position in a column published by The Nation. "The truth rarely uttered in Washington is that with strong governmental leadership the crisis of global warming is not only solvable, it can be done while improving the standard of living of the people of this country and others around the world and it can be done with the knowledge and technology that we have today; future advances will only make the task easier," Sanders wrote. To read the column, click here.