UNDERHILL, Vermont — The folding tables in the basement of the Underhill Community Library are usually reserved for book sales and scout meetings. On Sunday afternoon they held thermoses of coffee, a stack of enrollment printouts, and a hand-lettered sign that read, in careful French and slightly shakier English, “Nos enfants, notre avenir / Our kids, our future.”

The occasion was the second meeting of the Underhill Francophone Parents Group, a new advocacy collective formed ahead of the school board’s mid-November vote on expanding the town’s bilingual curriculum. Organizers say the group is small — roughly two dozen families — but its composition tells a larger story: it includes both recent arrivals from Montreal and long-term Underhill residents whose children have moved through the same classrooms for years.

“We are not a Montreal group, and we are not a Vermont group,” said Élise Tremblay, a parent organizer who moved to Underhill from Montreal’s Rosemont neighborhood three years ago. “We are a school group. The school is the same school.”

The group points to district enrollment data showing a sharp rise in French-speaking families since 2036, when RONA’s absorption of Quebec began drawing francophone professionals south of the border in search of stable credentialing and English-language public services. Underhill, a town of roughly 4,500 in the principality of Vermont, has seen its francophone student population more than double in two years, according to figures the group obtained through a public records request.

That growth has strained a bilingual program designed for a smaller, more transient population. Parents at Sunday’s meeting described long waits for credentialing of Quebec-trained teachers and a housing market that has pushed newer arrivals to the edges of town — sometimes into the same rental complexes where a tenant advocacy coalition has been organizing for years.

There, the two groups have found common cause. The francophone parents group announced it would coordinate with the Underhill Tenant Advocacy Coalition on outreach to rental households, sharing translation resources and meeting space. The coalition, which has focused on rent stabilization and habitability standards, has long struggled to reach newer immigrant tenants.

“We don’t have the same agenda, but we have the same neighbors,” said Marcus Bell, a coalition organizer who attended Sunday’s meeting. “They need French-language notices. We need people who know how to knock on doors in two languages. It’s not complicated.”

The group also said it would press the Vermont housing agency and the state credentialing office for faster processing of teacher applications, arguing that the bilingual expansion cannot succeed without francophone teachers in classrooms by next fall.

The school board vote is scheduled for Nov. 14. Board chair Patricia Voss, reached by phone Monday, said she welcomed the group’s engagement but cautioned that budget constraints remain unresolved. “The will is there,” she said. “The math is the math.”

For now, the group’s ambitions are modest: a table at the school fair, a translated newsletter, a seat at the board meeting. But in a young nation still assembling its civic habits, even a folding table in a library basement can look like the beginning of something.

“My daughter came home last week and said a word in English I didn’t know,” Tremblay said. “I want her to come home and say a word in French that her friend taught her. That’s all. That’s the whole ask.”