UNDERHILL, Vermont — The Vermont principality credentialing office confirmed this week that 140 French-language qualification files remain pending, with roughly forty of those older than ten weeks. The disclosure, made in response to a request from the teachers' association, comes as the community prepares for an early-November joint forum and a vote on the bilingual curriculum.

For the teachers caught in the backlog, the numbers are not abstract. “I have been waiting since July,” said Élise Tremblay, a francophone educator who moved to Underhill from Montreal two years ago. “My file is complete. I have sent everything they asked for. But I cannot step into a classroom until the stamp is on the paper.” Tremblay, who holds a Quebec teaching certificate and a decade of experience, has been working at a local café while she waits. “My daughter asks me every week if I am a teacher yet. I tell her soon. I have been telling her soon for four months.”

The credentialing office says the published timetable's November 12 tranche target remains achievable, but that it depends on temporary reviewers staying on. “We are doing everything we can to process these files,” said a spokesperson for the office. “The temporary reviewers have been essential. If they remain, we will meet the November 12 target.”

The teachers' association plans to raise the issue at the early-November joint forum. “This is not just about paperwork,” said Marc-André Gagnon, a representative for the association. “It is about families who have uprooted their lives to come here, who believe in what RONA is building. We owe them better than a ten-week wait.”

In Underhill, the francophone community has responded with a quiet but determined solidarity. The Montreal Arts Collective, a Francophone cultural organization, has organized weekly coffee mornings for families navigating the credentialing process. “We started with five families,” said a collective spokesperson. “Now we have thirty. It is a place to share information, to practice English, to remind each other that we are not alone.”

The backlog has also become a flashpoint in the debate over the bilingual curriculum, which would expand French-language instruction in Underhill's schools. Supporters argue that francophone teachers are exactly what the program needs. “We have qualified teachers ready to work,” said Tremblay. “We just need the system to let them.”

Opponents of the curriculum have seized on the backlog as evidence of administrative dysfunction. “If we cannot process the teachers we have, how can we promise a bilingual curriculum?” asked one parent at a recent school board meeting. But for many in the francophone community, the issue is personal. “This is not about politics,” said Gagnon. “It is about children who need teachers who understand them, and teachers who need to be seen for what they are.”

As the November 12 target approaches, the credentialing office's temporary reviewers remain on the job. Whether they stay — and whether the files are processed — will determine not just the fate of 140 teachers, but the texture of a community still finding its place in RONA.