Famed Vermont author Dorothy Canfield Fisher's name will stay on a children's book award — at least for now.

The Vermont Board of Libraries met Tuesday and heard two and a half hours of debate about a request to rename the award. Critics behind the effort say Fisher was associated with the Vermont Eugenics Survey, and that she stereotyped its targets — including French Canadians and French Indians — in her writing.

But after several speakers at the meeting mounted a fierce defense of Fisher, the board delayed making a recommendation on whether to rename the award until its next meeting on October 10. State Librarian Scott Murphy will have the final say.

"I'm not trying to kick the can down the road, I'm trying to figure out a way to deal with this," board chair Bruce Post told Seven Days after the meeting in Berlin.*

Hot off a surprisingly strong run for New York governor in which she knocked incumbent Democrat Andrew Cuomo for a loop — and won a place on the TV talk-show circuit — Zephyr Teachout will be back on her home turf to talk politics.

Teachout will discuss her book Corruption in America when she takes the stage Thursday at Vermont Law School. The free event is from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in Chase Community Center at the South Royalton school. (Her father, Peter, teaches constitutional law there; her mother, Mary, is a Vermont Superior Court judge.) She’ll also be signing her book at Barrister’s Book Shop from 3:30-4:30 p.m. that day.

The 43-year-old Teachout, who grew up down the road in Norwich and teaches law at Fordham University, went from relative obscurity to prominence as the bee in Cuomo’s political bonnet during last year’s New York gubernatorial primary.

Updated at 4:53 p.m.

Former U.S. senator Jim Jeffords, an iconic independent and veteran Vermont politician, died Monday at age 80.

Near the end of his 40-year career in public office, the Rutland Republican stunned the nation in May 2001 when he left his party to become an independent. The move handed control of a closely divided Senate to the Democratic Party for the next 18 months and earned Jeffords a place in political history.

But according to his longtime chief of staff, Susan Boardman Russ, Jeffords’ most important contribution was not his defection from the GOP, but his decades of work fighting for education, the environment, dairy farmers and the disabled.

“That’s his legacy. That’s what mattered to him,” Boardman Russ said. “The publicity he got for switching parties I sometimes wish hadn’t happened because all those incredible things he did over those years got lost.”

Jeffords died Monday morning at the Knollwood Military Retirement Residence in Washington, D.C., where he had lived since the death of his wife, Liz, in 2007, according to former spokeswoman Diane Derby. 

Authorities in Vermont and New York plan to take another look for a plane that went missing 43 years ago over Lake Champlain. The private jet had five people aboard when it disappeared in a 1971 snowstorm.

It was a January evening when the 10-passenger twin engine jet left Burlington bound for Providence, R.I. The Rockwell Jet Commander, owned by an Atlanta real estate company, was recorded on a single radar blip at 5,000 feet, and "then was gone on the very next sweep just seconds later," according to a news release from the Vermont Department of Public Safety. 

Early searching was fruitless and, within days, the lake had iced over. The following April, small parts of the plane floated ashore in Shelburne. The plane has never been found, despite searches with infrared, sonar and submarine technologies.

According to the press release, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which went missing in March, got people talking again about the Lake Champlain mystery. Individuals and state and volunteer agencies have formulated a plan to search the lake with more modern equipment, including side-scanning sonar, underwater vehicles and a submarine. Vermont and New York state police will be involved, along with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Some boating traffic may be restricted; the efforts are scheduled to begin this month.

"The goal," said New York State Police Captain John Tibbitts, "is to locate and recover the remains to finally bring closure to these families." The plane was carrying two crew members and three passengers when it went down. 

Seven stone relics unearthed in the 1980s from an ancient Missisquoi Abenaki burial ground in Swanton will be returned to tribal members, the Preservation Trust of Vermont announced Friday.  

The relics surfaced in early March when the people who used to own the land put them up for auction. Upon discovering that they were listed on Duane Merrill & Company's auction website, members of the Abenaki community — as well as state employees in the Division of Historic Preservation — scrambled to stop the sale scheduled for March 30.

Seven Days covered the story in this week's paper, but the artifacts' fate remained in limbo at the time it was published. Ethan Merrill, who co-owns the Williston-based auction company, had agreed to take the items off the auction block — in deference to the Abenakis' beliefs — and he said he was working to broker a compromise between the consignors, John and Anita Boucher, and tribal representatives. Another plan, in which a private benefactor would purchase the artifacts and donate them to UVM's Fleming Museum, fell through last week.  

The Preservation Trust, a nonprofit founded in 1980 "to help communities save and use historic places," announced that it had helped facilitate a deal that was agreeable to the Bouchers and Abenaki tribal members. 

Happy November, everyone. If you're cooped up inside bemoaning the chill in the air and the absence of sunlight, hey, more time for reading Seven Days. And more time for a couch tour, if you're a Phish-head — our own Paul Heintz took a break from politics this week to look back at the Vermont band's 30 years on the jam circuit. Once you're finished with that long read, here are this week's newsy stories:

• Burlington's Little Italy is gone but not forgotten. A new project revives the history of the demolished neighborhood (while urban planners wonder how to make Burlington a little more like it once was).
• Reducing Vermont's prison population? That's easier said than done. More local inmates are being shipped out of state.
• The feds are cutting aid, so Rutland's food shelf is stepping up to fill the gap for the hungry.
• In this month's Poli Psy column, Judith Levine takes a closer look at the rise of robots.
• This Vermont Health Connect mess is a something-burger, all right. In Fair Game, Paul Heintz says the health exchange's failure to launch is Gov. Peter Shumlin's biggest crisis yet.
• And lastly, a story for Veterans Day: How one Burlington woman takes unofficial care of Burlington's monument to military history.

Read it all in print, online or on the iOS app.

Grab your favorite pumpkin-flavored coffee drink — that little chill in the morning means fall is here, and the first Seven Days of the season hit the streets today. Here's what you'll find for news and politics this week:

• In Fair Game, Paul Heintz reports that a program to encourage charitable giving by state employees is funding two anti-gay organizations classified as "hate groups" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Plus, more staff changes at Vermont Public Radio, the Rutland Herald and here at Seven Days.
• A new methadone clinic to help treat drug addicts is now open in South Burlington, despite the ongoing opposition of some neighbors. Ken Picard talks to two patients.
• Vermont cops and docs are on the lookout for "molly," a powdered form of ecstasy. Kids these days.
• In archaeology news, the Abenaki may not have been the only early inhabitants of Vermont.

Pick up this week's issue in print, online or on the app.

This week's cover image by the late Stephen Huneck is courtesy of the Stephen Huneck Gallery. See this week's cover story about the future of Dog Mountain.

Happy Wednesday, people. Here are the news and politics stories you'll find in the latest edition of Seven Days:

• Vermont's new health care exchange goes live in less than two weeks! In this week's cover story, Ken Picard follows five households and professional "navigators" to untangle how it will work for average Vermonters.
• St. Michael's College fired two longtime custodians, and the campus isn't happy about it. Was it a case of union busting?
• A Vermont-born political strategist is playing a major role in one of the biggest races of the year in Virginia. Some observers think he may feature in the next presidential campaign.
• In looking to revitalize its downtown, is St. Albans turning its back on a piece of history?
• And in this week's Fair Game: After an ineffective 2013 session, Vermont's gun control advocates aren't going away — now they're even hiring a high-powered lobbying firm. Plus, why are F-35s okay for Vermont if missiles aren't?

If those links aren't your style, read these stories in print or on the Seven Days app.

Cover illustration by Michael Tonn

At least 50 Vermonters will be in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to take part in a mass march remembering and updating the historic protest held at the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago.

Richard Kemp, 80, won't be part of the throng converging on the nation's capital this weekend to demand racial justice. He's been there, done that.

Kemp participated in the August 28, 1963, March on Washington with his wife and their six young children. They journeyed to D.C. by bus from Peekskill, N.Y., where Kemp was working for IBM.

Still an activist, Kemp recalls feeling "elevated, uplifted" for being part of what a book reviewer in last Sunday's New York Times described as "the most famous mass gathering in American history."

Fifty years ago next week, a young University of Chicago student activist took a bus to the nation's capital to take part in the March on Washington.

Now a 71-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont, that same man is reminiscing about what he calls "one of the most memorable and important speeches in the modern history of the United States of America."

In a video produced by his Senate office, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) appears in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in August 1963. Gesticulating to the camera like a museum docent or a college professor, the senator recalls what he saw that day.

"I remember that very well, not by simply seeing it on TV or reading about it," Sanders says, pointing in the direction of the Washington Monument. "I was way, way back there — one of the several hundred thousand people who were here."

(Pictured above: Sanders leading a protest against discriminatory housing in 1962 at the University of Chicago.)