Katy Chabot
Montpelier High School
Katy Chabot shares her scientific knowledge and quest for experimentation, at home with her family and at Montpelier High School with the students where she serves as a half-time science educator. She is living her dream. “I always wanted to live off the land,” she said. “My desire to do so came from reading and re-reading Laura Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books as a child, and imagining how I might do this one day.”
Chabot is extremely proud of her garden, a 30 x 80 foot plot next to her home. She plants and harvests a wide variety of vegetables, storing plenty to last throughout the winter. She and her family raise chickens for food, roasting one every week and they make sure to eat an onion every day. Chabot prepares home-made medicines such as goldenseal root, (which she grows in the surrounding woods) to fight infections and bottles of fire cider from apple cider vinegar, horseradish and other spices.
Last year, Chabot worked full-time at the high school. “I would spend all of Sunday preparing and cooking meals for the week,” she said. This year, when there was an opportunity to work a bit less and be at home more with her young children, ages 6 and 2, Chabot jumped at the chance. “Now my son and I prepare our dinner meal together early in the mornings,” she said.
Cathy Butterfield, a Montpelier High school colleague, admires Chabot’s decision to change her work schedule, with an eye on the future. “A number of educators worked closely with Katy last year on an initiative integrating the arts and the sciences. “She is organized and exudes optimism while at the same time, being mindful of inner peace.
Chabot’s new schedule also freed up time to traverse the town’s dirt roads more regularly. “On Tuesday and Friday mornings, I run at 6:15 a.m. anywhere from five to seven miles, often with a few neighbors,” she said. Occasionally she also competes in some half marathons. The Leaf-Peepers half-marathon in Waterbury is one of her favorites.
Throughout the winter, Chabot finds multiple ways to be on a set of boards, at the Morse Farm on cross country skis or on her tele mark skis at Mad River Glen. She has been a Mad River Glen shareholder, since age 18, when her father encouraged her to contribute financially toward the mountain that she loved. She has now also added Nordic skate skiing to her repertoire.
